man, i wish you didn’t post those links. i so wish you didn’t. but yeah, made me look.

I love that last line you wrote. I dunno how to describe it. I just love it.

And its true, if a person wants to be a leader they’ve got to choose their words carefully. It would have been better if he said “this is animal civilization”. And maybe make a point about how we need to transcend the materialistic propensity of identifying with the body and having unwanted children etc. etc.

Also, I dont think its correct for a spiritual leader to show a blatant political persuasion. Whether he was talking about McCain, Obama, Bush, Cthulhu… I think to a devotee, unless that person is Prahalad Maharaj or someone else from SB, every candidate for presidency totally sucks.

Word.

The letter to Bush is just so funny. Is that actually a hing article?
I can just imagine Bush (if he actually read things like that) saying, “Hey, this Hare Krishna guy seems pretty cool. I’d like to meet him and hear more of his ideas.”

He writes:

“When the foolish people of a nation choose leaders who support the killing of innocent children within the womb, it is a bleak day indeed for that nation.”

But at the same time apparently has so much admiration for a cow killer. Hypocrisy anyone?

for that matter what about all the adult humans bush has allowed to kill and be killed in iraq and afghanistan? bush doesn’t seem terribly concerned with the sanctity of life, and a guru should realize that.

also a spiritual person isn’t concerned with the new madonna album but does know the lyrics to ‘lucky star’

Well said. Nice to see some sanity on an issue as inflammatory as this. And actually, infanticide was and is an important part of human culture. There are cultures extant today, like the Saniyo-Hiyowe of Papua New Guinea, who engage in infanticide to help the whole of the population survive. Although many of these women report regret, they believe it is necessary, and when you think of the hazards of survival, how can one argue with that logic? (See: Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective by Ann McElroy and Pat Townsend)

Does it make a Western woman (or family) any different because she seeks out a sanitized, surgical process before the child is even born? Does it not achieve the same end? In tribal culture, women who engage in infanticide usually do so because they have other young children who have not yet been weaned. Ending the life of the newborn means the continued survival of the older, more established child. This is not religion or dogma. This is nature. Human nature is cultural so, doesn’t it make sense that infanticide as our cultural norm manifests as what we call abortion?

In whichever God we believe, we pray for a world in which all children are viable and embraced with love. Arguing about this in such a divisive and uninformed way is counter-intuitive, yo.