I recently heard a preacher describing what heaven will be like. He said, enticingly, that heaven will be a place where there will be no sin: no envy, no lust, no anger, no pride, no scorn, no competition, etc. It got me thinking: exactly what is left of a human…
Here's how it went. Worth a look and a laugh.
Last night, my local PBS station aired a 'Frontline' program, called "The Lost Year in Iraq," about the Bush Administration's handling of the Iraq occupation. Among other things, it confirms that Americans who sought civilian jobs to help rebuild Iraq were asked questions such as whether or not they had…
Paul Rieckhoff hits the mark again with this comment on Huffpo:
As a veteran of this war in Iraq, I am sickened by the consistently flip nature of the President in the face of deadly serious issues. His ridiculous banter reflects poorly upon all Americans . . .
[W]ith nukes in North Korea, perverts in Congress and 140,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniform bound to serve another four years in Iraq, I’d rather have a statesman than a frat boy.
Rieckhoff is the Founder and Executive Director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). He is also the author of a book I’ve struggled to read for the past two months: Chasing Ghosts (2006). Would you like to know what it would be like to be a soldier during the early months of the Iraq occupation? Rieckhoff’s book is the place to start.
Rieckhoff is not your typical soldier. After graduating from an Ivy League college, he signed up for the Army reserves in 1998. While serving in the reserves, he took a high-paying job on Wall Street. After the attacks of 9/11, he volunteered for active duty and he volunteered for the invasion of Iraq, to the dismay of his father. “I wanted to fight the good fight. I wanted to be a hero.”
Rieckhoff had heard Dick Cheney assure everyone that we would be “greeted as liberators.” Cheney told the country “all we had to do was take out Saddam and his regime …
It is a much mentioned, but little understood concept. Any individual in the world is likely to have strong conceptions of “evil,” but very few could define it, or ascribe a cause to it. Dictionary.com defines “evil” as “morally bad or wrong,” and also “causing ruin, injury or pain.” While the word “immoral” is more commonly used to connote the first definition (“morally bad or wrong”), colloquially, the word “evil” is most often used to convey the sense of the second definition (“causing ruin, injury or pain”). Realizing that the phrase “evil” is subjective and has many implications, in this essay I will use the word “evil” to convey the sense of the second definition.
From time immemorial, some humans have been perceived to have the tendency to cause harm to others for no apparent or rational reason. These humans, we assume, like to take pleasure in the pain of others. Thus, what appears to be an alien sensibility to us, one which is characterized by an inexplicable perniciousness, is termed as evil. Why “evil” humans are different from the rest of us is not understood by most people. Evil, they assume, is just an inborn quality. And because it is inherent to the individuals who possess it, people believe that the only way to stop them is to their exterminate them, or at the very least incarcerate them, so that they remain away from a society that they could destroy if given free rein.
But is evil indeed an …