Posted on 10/12/2004 1:23:54 AM PDT by PatriotEdition
“There is good in all people”.
That used to be the belief I grew up with as a young boy. When I would get into a fight at school, and tell my mother what had happened, and how much I detested the other kids I fought with. I remember her saying “There is good in all people. You have to take the best and leave the rest”. It made sense, and for a long time, it continued to make sense.
Even after 9/11, I still believed that there is good in all people. Some just allow evil to creep into their souls and suppress that good so much that it becomes virtually non-existent.
I believed there was good in all people right up until a couple of days ago. Until a just a couple of days ago, I still thought that there was always a shred of good in even the most evil of humankind. Because for a couple of weeks, I prayed and I hoped that Ken Bigley’s captors would act on whatever shred of goodness they might have had in them. I should have known better. I, along with the rest of the aware and civilized, was pulling for Bigley. Everyday, about 3 to 5 times a day, I would go to Google News and just type in ‘Bigley’ and hope for something good. Nothing ever generated from it but bits and pieces of false hope. I got so caught up in the Bigley drama that when I finally logged on the other morning to see that he has been executed, I sat at my pc sobbing.
Those bastards did it again. Again. There is no good in them. They are evil to the core!
The Americans, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, their brutal and torturous ends, as horrible as they were – were in a way merciful compared to what they did to Bigley. They took a man and dangled him before our eyes – teasing the world with his innocent life – forcing him into this diplomat from the dark side internet freak show. Giving us all tantalizing hope that he might be allowed to go home to his family. Keeping him alive for weeks only to do to him the same evil they did to Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Hensley.
This evil can not go on any longer. I see these videos and these masked men dancing and shouting “God is Great” in Arabic. And they are free. This is bullshit. We need to get our military units out of these towns and do a Hiroshima. I am so serious. It’s Hiroshima time. It is time to give the America-bashers something to bash us about.
I downloaded a song tonight. I know it’s a little early, but it was a song I never heard before. Johnny Cash and Neil Young doing a duet singing “Little Drummer Boy”. This is the most beautiful version of this song I have ever heard. As it played on my pc, I went surfing and came across another article about Ken Bigley. On the side of the article was a photo of a smiling Kenneth in happier times.
“The ox and lamb kept time, ba rup ba ba bum...”
I imagined what it must be like for his family, and how empty their Christmas will be. Then I thought about the families of Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong. And Paul Johnson. And Nicholas Berg. And all who have been slaughtered needlessly and mercilessly. And all the families of the brave men and women who have died in this war to help keep the likes of Zarqawi out of our backyards. These men and women are dying while all the peacenicks can do is moan and groan and bash Bush and America.
Yes. In a way, we can indeed save many of our own from dying in this war. We can pull them out, bring them home, and turn the cities of Iraq into piles of rubble.
The photo of a smiling Kenneth Bigley is etched into my mind tonight – coupled with the song “Little Drummer Boy” and my thoughts on all these many families who will spend their Christmas without their loved ones. All thanks to a bunch of Islama-fascist pigs with a sick desire to chop off heads.
For God sake, Mr. President, drop the bomb already!
Ma in her Jersey City accent: Deres good and bad in awll.
There is no good in people like Zarqawi. No good at all. If there ever was any, it was killed off by polluting himself with the beliefs of radical Islam. There is no good in people who chop off heads of innocent human beings who have begged to live.
"you have a naive faith in the goodness of human nature"
not anymore. there are some people - particulary of islamic faith - in which no shred of good exists.
"you aint seen nothing yet"
I hope we drop the big one on them. I really do.
This article describes the entire debate about the death penalty in general. Alot of people are adamantly opposed to the death penalty, insisting that the wrongdoers made a mistake; are innocent; are not anywheres near as bad as others; still have some good to offer; etc; etc; etc.
I cn't help but applaud these folks for at least having a kind of merciful sense and faith, maybe a belief in a higher good; or at least a plea to some small mustard seed of good in all humans. Kind of an adolescent utopian view.
But when a rabid dog runs into your neighborhood and heads for the schoolhouse, that is not the time for higher morals and philosophical dreams about ethics.
That's the time to empty the gun.
Send them to the pearly gates, and let the saints sort them out.
"Trust, but verify" -- Ronald Wilson Reagan.
He was talking about the Soviet Union within the context of the Cold War, but it works for human nature as well.
--AJC
ris7 wrote:
From where I sit, you have a naive faith in the goodness of human nature. Still. You ain't seen nothin', yet.
Organ donors?
There will always be the killers out there who kill just because they can do so, and it gives them a thrill. Some of these people gain control of countries which gives them the opportunity to slaughter millions instead of single digit murders.
The people who don't think murdering large groups of people for the hell of it is a good idea must remain alert for the small percentage of people who do think it's a good idea. And we must continue to try to educate our benighted liberal brethren that not all disturbed people can be reasoned with. Some disturbed people actually have to be killed. Which is why we fight terrorists.
In considering the death penalty and the issue of evil and what should be done about it, think of why God ordered the Hebrews in the OT to completely destroy the towns of the Amalekites, Cananites, and some others and to kill every human being in those
towns as well. Now first off, God didn't order the immediate death of those people. He gave them time to not only change their ways, but time in which the decent among them could leave. By the end of the time limit, all that was left in those towns were the hard-core types.......in todays' terms they would be the Zarqawis, but also the Hitlers, Stalins, and their henchmen. It was these that were destroyed in their entirety along with their towns because God considered that the very essence of those towns......their temples, their type of governance, their worldview, etc., was also completely corrupted.
RD: You went nearly 50 years without religion in your life. What made you recently join the Unitarian Church?
Reeve: It gives me a moral compass. I often refer to Abe Lincoln, who said, "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that is my religion." I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don't know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do. The Unitarian believes that God is good, and believes that God believes that man is good. Inherently. The Unitarian God is not a God of vengeance. And that is something I can appreciate.
This isn't to bag on poor Christopher Reeve but the inherent good in man part struck me especially since I am a fan of Dennis Prager and he talks about this all the time. Following this post, I'm going to post an article by him on this very subject.
I was sort of like you thinking that the world was mostly filled with good people. After 9/11, I started to change my tune.
I remember seeing or reading of a stewardess just after 9/11. The interviewer asked her if she was doing or acting any differently since the attack. She said that she was smiling more to the passengers--that maybe a hijacker would have second thoughts if she was extra nice. She was still suffering under the misguided notion that all people have good in them.
9/11 started it and then seeing the atrocities committed by Muslims since then just kept confirming it time after time. Holding up the inards of Jews, beating Jewish soldiers bodies and heads until they were unrecognizable, killing a pregnant Jewish mother and her 4 daughters, slaughtering the hostages in Iraq. The Korean begging for his life. Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, Jack Hensley, Eugene Armstrong, Ken Bigley and two more just yesterday.
I looked on a site last night after reading a very good article on FreeRepublic by the creator of that site, a former Muslim. He was telling us why George Bush must win. It was a very good article and I can find the link if you are interested.
Here are his views on Islam from his website:
Any effort to humanize Islam is a waste of time. The obstacle to any reform is Quran. The enemy is Islam and that is the target of my attacks. I do that, despite knowing that I have become the magnet of the hatred of fanatical Muslims and my own life could be in danger. Yet I know that by eradicating Islam we can save the world from the dangers of a catastrophe that otherwise is looming over our heads and could cause more disaster than the 1st and 2nd World Wars combined. Eradication of Islam means restoring peace among humanity and civility, democracy and prosperity in the Muslim world.
I don't agree with everything he says in this but it's interesting coming from a former Muslim. Now I don't believe that Muslims are the only ones capable of great evil but they are definitely the main perpetuators of it at this time. Here is the man's site if you haven't seen it before: http://www.faithfreedom.org/
If you believe that people are basically good?
WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Tuesday, December 31, 2002 | Dennis Prager
Posted on 12/31/2002 12:02:27 AM MST by JohnHuang2
No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.
In 20 years as a radio talk-show host, I have dialogued with thousands of people, of both sexes and from virtually every religious, ethnic and national background. Very early on, I realized that perhaps the major reason for political and other disagreements I had with callers was that they believed people are basically good, and I did not. I believe that we are born with tendencies toward both good and evil. Yes, babies are born innocent, but not good.
Why is this issue so important?
First, if you believe people are born good, you will attribute evil to forces outside the individual. That is why, for example, our secular humanistic culture so often attributes evil to poverty. Washington Sen. Patty Murray, former President Jimmy Carter and millions of other Westerners believe that the cause of Islamic terror is poverty. They really believe that people who strap bombs to their bodies to blow up families in pizzerias in Israel, plant bombs at a nightclub in Bali, slit stewardesses' throats and ram airplanes filled with innocent Americans into office buildings do so because they lack sufficient incomes.
Something in these people cannot accept the fact that many people have evil values and choose evil for reasons having nothing to do with their economic situation. The Carters and Murrays of the West – representatives of that huge group of naive Westerners identified by the once proud title "liberal" – do not understand that no amount of money will dissuade those who believe that God wants them to rule the world and murder all those they deem infidels.
Second, if you believe people are born good, you will not stress character development when you raise children. You will have schools teach young people how to use condoms, how to avoid first and secondhand tobacco smoke, how to recycle and how to prevent rainforests from disappearing. You will teach them how to struggle against the evils of society – its sexism, its racism, its classism and its homophobia. But you will not teach them that the primary struggle they have to wage to make a better world is against their own nature.
I attended Jewish religious schools (yeshivas) until the age of 18, and aside from being taught that moral rules come from God rather than from personal or world opinion, this was the greatest difference between my education and those who attended public and private secular schools. They learned that their greatest struggles were with society, and I learned that the greatest struggle was with me, and my natural inclinations to laziness, insatiable appetites and self-centeredness.
Third, if you believe that people are basically good, God and religion are morally unnecessary, even harmful. Why would basically good people need a God or religion to provide moral standards? Therefore, the crowd that believes in innate human goodness tends to either be secular or to reduce God and religion to social workers, providers of compassion rather than of moral standards and moral judgments.
Fourth, if you believe people are basically good, you, of course, believe that you are good – and therefore those who disagree with you must be bad, not merely wrong. You also believe that the more power that you and those you agree with have, the better the society will be. That is why such people are so committed to powerful government and to powerful judges. On the other hand, those of us who believe that people are not basically good do not want power concentrated in any one group, and are therefore profoundly suspicious of big government, big labor, big corporations and even big religious institutions. As Lord Acton said long ago, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton did not believe people are basically good.
No great body of wisdom, East or West, ever posited that people were basically good. This naive and dangerous notion originated in modern secular Western thought, probably with Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Frenchman who gave us the notion of pre-modern man as a noble savage.
He was half right. Savage, yes, noble, no.
If the West does not soon reject Rousseau and humanism and begin to recognize evil, judge it and confront it, it will find itself incapable of fighting savages who are not noble.
http://www.dennisprager.com/forgiveness.html
Reprinted in Reader's Digest, March 1998, from The Wall Street Journal
When Forgiveness Is a Sin By Dennis Prager
The bodies of the three teen-age girls shot dead last December by a fellow student at Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., were not yet cold before some of their schoolmates hung a sign announcing, "We forgive you, Mike!" They were referring to Michael Carneal, 14, the killer.
This immediate and automatic forgiveness is not surprising. Over the past generation, many Christians have adopted the idea that they should forgive everyone who commits evil against anyone, no matter how great and cruel and whether or not the evildoer repents.
The number of examples is almost as large as the number of heinous crimes. Last August, for instance, the preacher at a Martha's Vineyard church service attended by the vacationing President Clinton announced that the duty of all Christians was to forgive Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who murdered 168 Americans. "Can each of you look at a picture of Timothy McVeigh and forgive him?" the Rev. John Miller asked. "I have, and I invite you to do the same."
Though I am a Jew, I believe that a vibrant Christianity is essential if America's moral decline is to be reversed. And despite theological differences, Christianity and Judaism have served as the bedrock of American civilization. And I am appalled and frightened by this feel-good doctrine of automatic forgiveness.
This doctrine advances the amoral notion that no matter how much you hurt others, millions of your fellow citizens will forgive you. It destroys Christianity's central moral tenets about forgiveness. Even by God, forgiveness is contingent on the sinner repenting, and it can be given only by the one sinned against.
" And if your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him," reads Luke 17:3-4. "And if seven times of the day he sins against you, and seven times of the day turns to you saying, I repent, you shall forgive him."
These days one often hears that "It is the Christian's duty to forgive, just as Jesus forgave those who crucified him." Of course, Jesus asked God to forgive those who crucified him. But Jesus never asked God to forgive those who had crucified thousands of other innocent people. Presumably he recognized that no one has the moral right to forgive evil done to others.
You and I have no right, religiously or morally, to forgive Timothy McVeigh or Michael Carneal; only those they sinned against have that right, If we are automatically forgiven no matter what we do, why repent? In fact, if we forgive everybody for all the evil they do, God and his forgiveness are unnecessary. We have substituted ourselves for God.
I host a talk-radio show, and when confronted with such arguments, some callers offered another defense: "The students were not forgiving Carneal for murdering the three students. They were forgiving him for the pain he caused them." Such self centered thinking masquerading as a religious ideal is a good example of the moral disarray in much of religious life.
Some people have a more sophisticated defense of the forgive-every-one-everything doctrine: doing so is psychologically healthy. It brings "closure." This is therapy masquerading as idealism: "I forgive you because I want to feel better."
ntil West Paducah, I believed that Christians will lead America's moral renaissance. Though I still believe that, the day those students, with the support of their school administration, hung out that sign I became less sanguine. If young Christians have inherited more values from the '60s culture than from their religion, where can we look for help?
PLENTY OF TRUTH in this sad post.
unfortunatley, I think many of us have realized there is not good in all people... Many of us hope and pray for the ones that are caught, and sometimes when it doesn't work out we are heartbroken and lost... When it happens close to home whether or not you know the person, it destroyes you... We have a guy in the area by the name of matt maupin... they would show him on television... we hoped we prayed, and we still don't know the real out come or where he is... They showed a video, but the government determined it inconclusive... It showed a man getting shot in the back... So we are still left hoping and praying... The video was too grainy, so all we can do is hope for the best... Everyone needs to say a prayer for all the men and women that are over there, and every where else in the world... God bless
BTTT
Actually I see this article advocating the indiscriminant slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents.
What does "Do a Hiroshima" mean to you?
Seems like this guy is off is rocker.
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