…that while you’re in a coma, the doctors are busy planning to take your organs…..
This is the number one reason I will not donate my organs. Doctors are a little too eager.
And then there’s the black market in organ trade…
And then there’s Dick Cheney and Steve Jobs…poor people such as myself donating (or selling) organs so that the privileged can live just turns my stomach.
Creation Assistance has a post up on Water Harvesting towers in Ethiopia. They had me until I read that the material is made from polythylene textile. I read a couple of websites on polythylene, and they claim that it is not toxic although it is made from petroleum. I don’t buy it. How many times have they claimed that there are certain plastics that are safe….only to be told many years or decades later that they were, in fact, toxic? Meanwhile, we poison ourselves and our kids…
So. although I think it’s a great idea, there has to be a natural material that can be used to collect the water…perhaps hemp fabric woven with bamboo?
(This post is on spirituality, so if it’s not your thing….)
Eli Glasman has a heartfelt post up on his struggles with losing faith in God.
The sense of loss he feels is apparent. It’s hard to believe in a Supreme Being when you’ve been taught a certain way and that way conflicts with how you feel inside. It must have been so hard for him to feel that he had to choose between religion and how he felt intrinsically.
As I said in my comment, I understand his sentiments. I went through a period of not believing, but that actually made my faith stronger. Our paths lead us in directions that don’t always make sense at the time, but as we move along, we see how things are connected and how struggle helps us to grow, as in the butterfly that struggles out of the cocoon.
I had to learn to stand up for myself and not let others define who I am. Not letting others define who I am also means not letting others define my connection to God. Spirituality is as personal as it gets. We are unique individuals with our own paths to follow and no one has a right to impose their beliefs upon another.
I don’t think being an atheist automatically means condemnation. If one follows “Do unto others….” –I see that as spiritual, whether the person claims it or not. I think we will be judged more on how we treat others and conduct ourselves here on Earth, rather than if we went to Church every Sunday.
Carol A. Hand has written a piece on the soul robbing experience of Federal schools for Native American children.
And yes, it was designed to rob them of their culture, identity, heritage….
Warrior Publications has this up on the Onondaga men marching against domestic violence and child abuse. A great way to publicly show support…but then the hard work comes to put it into action. Honoring women, respecting women, and treating them as equals all takes a conscious effort to go against a culture of violence and rape. It means going against other men, when men are taught to stick together no matter what. It means courage and compassion.
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial has a good blog up on…leftovers. There. I said it. It sounds so much better the way it’s written in the blog..without actually saying the word. Leftovers have been given such a bad name…but Celia does such an excellent job of the kitchen version of reduce, reuse, recycle. 🙂
They don’t have a cause, yet of how a Ukrainian church caught fire in the early morning.
Diane Ravitch has a post up on the repubs and DFERs (Democrats in favor of charter schools).
She notes that in 1988, advocates were saying that charters would cost less because of less bureaucracy. Remember that, folks, when they say “less government meddling”…the actual results speak volumes…
Samantha Power is set to mark the 20th Anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda.
It doesn’t seem as though there has been a healing solution–that it could happen again if the conditions were right.
Hotel Rwanda is a graphic film about the genocide…that was ignored by Bill Clinton, even though he knew of the “final solution”. It’s sad to read the Catholic Church’s connection to the advancement of Tutsi…at the expense of the Hutu. Glad that they changed their thinking later, however, to help the Hutu.
Note how the Eugenics ideas are behind the Tutsi being put into power. And the acts of privatization caused poverty and slave labor.
They used identity cards to identify Hutu and Tutsi….the purpose can only be to keep Hutu in their “place”. Gah, it is so much like Nazi Germany…a holocaust not for religion, but for ancestry!
The use of rape as a war tool is highlighted in the piece. It’s often ignored as part of the war casualties numbers, as a woman’s issue, so its inclusion is hopefully a sign of measuring the true numbers of casualties of war. As I read this, I think about the resulting pregnancies…and it just seems so contradictory to their goals of eliminating the other–they ironically reproduce, mixing blood and genes and all they claim to find disgusting.
Yesterday, the UN Refugee Agency reported that the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon had passed the one million mark. A visualization of the news:
Keating comments on the sad milestone:
Lebanon already has significant populations of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, and agencies were warning as far back as 2012 that the country’s capacity to absorb more people from Syria, most of whom fled with little money or means to support themselves, was waning. The country has for some time now had the highest per capita refugee population in the world.
Unlike its neighbors, Lebanon has refused to build refugee camps—the camps built for Palestinians have essentially become permanent settlements—but informal tent communities have sprung up. The influx of Syrians may also alter the country’s delicate sectarian balance—currently roughly evenly divided among Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians.
Eagle 
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