Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Oh, come on: Terri Schiavo is not Jesus Christ
This whole Schiavo thing is enough to give [cough] Christians a bad name:
Well, no. Here's the condition Schiavo is in, according to Wikipedia:
It's immoral to turn a living corpse, which is what Schiavo is, into a political football, which is what the [cough] Christians have done.
It's even worse theology to compare Schiavo to Christ. I'm no longer a believing Christian—stumbled on the problem of evil, don't you know, a problem that every day under the Bush heel makes more acute—but one thing I do know: Christ knew what he has doing when he sacrificed himself for us. He was entirely aware of what was going to happen to him, and he went ahead and did it anyhow, on our behalf. There is no indication whatever that this is what Schiavo did or had in mind to do. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. We will all die, some of us badly. That makes us human, not Christ-like. Suffering, pace Gibson's The Passion, is not in itself Christ-like. The suffering has to be sacrificial, consciously chosen with eyes open.
Or are the [cough] Christians suggesting that Christ didn't know what he was doing? Are they suggesting that when he hung on the cross, Christ's cortex had been replaced by cerebrospinal fluid?
What a sick farce. I have to give 'em credit, though—the cups of water are a terrific propaganda ploy. So why don't they shut the fuck up and get busy saving Social Security, as part of honoring their fathers and mothers, and letting them live out their lives, and then die with the kind of dignity they are so anxious to deny Schiavo? Of course, that wouldn't get them on TV....
NOTE The truly alert readers will have noticed that when mentioning Christ in the third person, I did not capitalize the "h" in "He." That is because Corrente house style is to capitalize third person references to Bush, seeing as how He's so Godly, and I didn't want to confuse the two usages. Please consider not classing Christ with Bush as a mark of profound respect to Christ.
'And during this week, as we look to Good Friday, He [Jesus] was condemned by unjust courts the same way Terri Schiavo is being condemned to die by court order,'' O'Donnell said. ``We pray that this modern-day crucifixion will not happen.''
(via San Jose Mercury News)
Well, no. Here's the condition Schiavo is in, according to Wikipedia:
Most of Schiavo's cerebral cortex has been completely destroyed, replaced by cerebrospinal fluid; Dr. Ron Cranford, a neurologist at the University of Minnesota assessed Schiavo's brain function in 2001 as part of a court-ordered assessment. He was quoted in Florida Today as saying "[Schiavo] has no electrical activity in her cerebral cortex on an EEG (electroencephalogram), and a CT (computerized tomography) scan showed massive atrophy in that region." [10] (http://abstractappeal.com/schiavo/infopage.html) [11]
It's immoral to turn a living corpse, which is what Schiavo is, into a political football, which is what the [cough] Christians have done.
It's even worse theology to compare Schiavo to Christ. I'm no longer a believing Christian—stumbled on the problem of evil, don't you know, a problem that every day under the Bush heel makes more acute—but one thing I do know: Christ knew what he has doing when he sacrificed himself for us. He was entirely aware of what was going to happen to him, and he went ahead and did it anyhow, on our behalf. There is no indication whatever that this is what Schiavo did or had in mind to do. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. We will all die, some of us badly. That makes us human, not Christ-like. Suffering, pace Gibson's The Passion, is not in itself Christ-like. The suffering has to be sacrificial, consciously chosen with eyes open.
Or are the [cough] Christians suggesting that Christ didn't know what he was doing? Are they suggesting that when he hung on the cross, Christ's cortex had been replaced by cerebrospinal fluid?
What a sick farce. I have to give 'em credit, though—the cups of water are a terrific propaganda ploy. So why don't they shut the fuck up and get busy saving Social Security, as part of honoring their fathers and mothers, and letting them live out their lives, and then die with the kind of dignity they are so anxious to deny Schiavo? Of course, that wouldn't get them on TV....
NOTE The truly alert readers will have noticed that when mentioning Christ in the third person, I did not capitalize the "h" in "He." That is because Corrente house style is to capitalize third person references to Bush, seeing as how He's so Godly, and I didn't want to confuse the two usages. Please consider not classing Christ with Bush as a mark of profound respect to Christ.
