Coucoumellisms

(Un travail que j'ai rédigé pour un cours de rédaction l'automne dernier.) L’euthanasie est légale au Canada depuis 2015, mais est-ce qu’elle est un bien moral pour la société? Il ne suffit pas d’être légal pour qu’une chose soit morale. L’euthanasie n’est pas un soin, elle est une fuite. La personne qui veut mourir fuit la souffrance et une société qui voit la personne comme un fardeau fuit la responsabilité. Ce qui commence par le « droit » de mourir peut très bien devenir le « devoir » de mourir. La souffrance insupportable, qu’elle soit physique ou psychologique, doit être adressée de manière convenable. La douleur physique incontrôlable est rare avec les avancées considérables des dernières années et est souvent due à un manque de formation. Il faut comprendre les facteurs qui peuvent influencer la douleur. « Heureusement, le système nerveux peut changer et devenir moins sensible et réactif […], mais cela prend du temps, des répétitions fréquentes ...

  Thanks to Martin Luther and his 95 theses, Christians were freed (among other things) from the troublesome necessity of doing good works (or paying for indulgences) to gain salvation. By Shakespeare’s time, many texts no longer have Christianity as a central theme; instead, Christianity is moved to the back burner in secular texts and rarely mentioned. In older medieval texts, even epic Pagan stories of kings and thanes like Beowulf have Christian themes running through them and allusions to a Christian God. In Twelfth Night, upon a gentleman’s arrival at the gate, Sir Toby declares, “Let him be the devil an he will, I care not. Give me faith, say I . ” (Shakespeare 1.5.125-126) In other words, leave him alone; release him of any expectations. Leave him free to be what he wants. What manner of person he is, what station in life he has, his rank or class do not matter; they are of little consequence. He could be the devil, Satan himself if he wanted to be, and it would not matter...

 Born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman is a controversial figure in American Poetry, considered by some to be “America’s Poet” and by others a self-centred windbag. Contrary to poets like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman does not look for meta-narratives to find meaning in the world. Instead, he finds meaning in what is in front of him. All the mundane things we see and do give just as much meaning to life as the mystical epiphanies we experience. The physical is just as important as the spiritual. Walt Whitman challenges the polarization of both Gnostic religious ideas in a society still influenced by puritanism and the idea of democracy as uniformity of thought and expression within the context of a young republic.  Whitman was born towards the end of the Industrial Revolution, only 36 years after the end of the American Revolution. At 13, he learned to set type in a printer’s officer. At 16, he was spending summers along the coast of...

(An essay I have to write for an English Composition class - I need to chop off almost half of it, reduce it to 600 words, but I wanted to post it here before I do.) Interpreting the signs of the times is just as important as reading history if society desires to avoid repeating the same errors. On the eve of 1984, in response to George Orwell’s Dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949), Isaac Asimov wrote Asimov’s New World (Toronto Star) which looks 35 years ahead to 2019.   Looking ahead once again to 2055, three themes that have the power to influence the world for good or for evil need to be taken into consideration: technology, ideological  polarization and a desire for human perfection. The kind  of  technology that is being developed and put into our devices and homes gives us the both the potential to learn and to control things around us. Alexa and Siri will turn l ights on, help us find resources for homework and lock the front door. S...

I read through this document called Catholic Social Teaching and Racism. I want to comment on the following bits of it. The Many Faces of Racism: "Catholic teaching “emphasizes not only the individual conscience, but also the political, legal and economic structures...”[6] Racism is about people and about group behaviors and societal organization. Individual racism includes conscious acts, spontaneous attitudes, “the tendency to stereotype and marginalize,”[7] indifference, and “the triumph of private concern over public responsibility…” [8] "Laws such as U.S. segregation or South Africa’s apartheid [9] represent blatant systemic racism. More subtle racism treats groups as “second-class citizens with regard, for instance, to higher education, to housing, to employment and especially to public… services...”[10] Even more subtle racism is now masked in appeals to equality that guarantee that past inequalities are perpetuated by blocking corrective efforts. “At times protestati...

I don't know if any of this might also pertain to African Americans in the States, but I grew up in Northern Canada, among Cree people. Many of them had problems with alcohol, broken homes, depression, etc. No one talked about "intergenerational trauma" back in the '70s and '80s or the effects of residential schools. I've only started to hear about that in the last 10-15 years or so. But it makes sense to me. Generations of children were taken from their parents and brought up in institutions designed to strip their language and culture from them, turn them in to "Europeanized", good, Christian "Indians" whereupon they were returned to their communities - where they were lost because they did not know how to live out on the land, did not know the ways of their people anymore, did not have the proper means to support themselves because a European education was worthless in a community that didn't have European style jobs. Their people we...

Since the beginning of the coronavirus shutdown, eating was never banned, only eating out in restaurants. Talking and writing were never banned, only restricted to the bare essentials in public places. Praying was never banned, only praying in groups in public places. Listening to music was never banned, only going to public concerts. Drinking alcohol was never banned, only drinking at public bars. And get this: masses were never banned, only public masses.  As Catholics, we believe that the Holy Mass is the most important prayer. Jesus's sacrifice on the cross is what saved the world and Holy Mass is the continuation of that sacrifice. The continuation, not the repetition, as protestants think, (there is a difference) of that sacrifice. On the night that he instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist, Jesus said: "Do this in memory of me." That's a direct order, and it's in the Bible. God made himself man and came to earth to save us from sin, but He doesn't ju...

You’ll need to read one or both of the following articles in order to understand this post. Cast Off - How knitters Turned Nasty and Knitting's Infinity War Part III - Showdown at Yarningham Talk about #i deologicallypossessed as Jordan Peterson calls it: “Ideology is a much-abused word. Many who bandy about this term are under the mistaken notion that ideology is synonymous with strongly holding to philosophical or theological truths. On the contrary, ideology is, instead, an intellectual system of ideas or rigid abstract formulas mixed with scientific jargon and some empirical facts that claims knowledge about reaching perfection in the temporal order. ” - George Marlin, “Catholicism: Not Ideology”. Ideologies tend to use one group of people as the scapegoats. In Nazi Germany, it was the Jews, in the Soviet Union, it was the Bourgeoisie. Ideologies also turn people on the same side against each other. In the Soviet Union, people were sent to the Gulag for the silliest ...

(Originally posted on thinkspot)              I'm going to try to put some perspective on the Wet'suwet'en situation here, to the best of my knowledge, (which isn't perfect and this may need to be tweaked later - if anyone sees anything that is not exact - let me know).              To begin with, you should understand that First Nations people (or Indigenous peoples) are separated into different cultural groups (similar language and social structure. ) For instance, you have the Iroquois , who are not a nation, but a group of nations including Cayuga, Cherokee, Huron, Mohawk, etc. You also have the Algonquians , another group of nations which include Cree, Ojibway, Algonquin, etc.               Within these groups or families, you sometimes have smaller families. And within these smaller groups, you have the different nations (or tribes,) and within those nations, you h...