Hopewit

  Indonesia has revised its criminal code so that sex outside of marriage will be prosecutable and subject to one year of imprisonment. Same sex marriages do not exist. Do the math. In Iran, protests continue since the death while under arrest of a woman who didn’t wear her head covering properly. CBC’s The Fifth Estate recently interviewed an Iranian-born, anti-regime activist who said that she first became aware of her imprisonment to convention as a girl when she saw how her brother was free to swim in the river and she wasn’t. We can view humanity and our place in it through Ten Commandments eyes, or through the lens of The Sermon on the Mount, through Sharia Law or through the benefits of democracy, or however you understand what Jesus said in Matthew 5 about selfless love fulfilling, and exceeding by far, the moral requirements of compulsive obedience to law. 43  “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  44  But I say to you, 

  Poinsetta The death and destruction spawned by World War Two   doesn’t need to be reiterated for those of us alive during that unbelievable debacle and its aftermath. For “baby boomers” and others born after the blood had all seeped into the earth and the rubble had been cleared, a need for education about the facts of the war, the psychology and sociology making it possible can’t be overstressed. Two relevant allegories coming out of that war could be helpful, but only if reading skills are up to appreciating deep truths illuminated by story, like Jesus’ parables, for instance. The first— Animal Farm , by George Orwell—has been taught in schools as an exposure of the folly of Communism. Published in 1945, it’s “story” may indeed have been inspired by the descent into brutality of the Communist Revolution in Russia, but it much more importantly exposes the basic human tendency to sink into self-serving, into embracing doctrinaire ideologies that serve individuals over collectives,