All Life Is Sacred

Fanatical rightwingers, even murderers, are so very proud, and selfrighteous, about the fact that they love to call themselves "pro-life." This is consciously designed to imply that anyone who disagrees with them, even in fine detail, is "anti-life."

Since there is no "anti-life" movement, it is just plain unrealistic, unfair, and inaccurate, to call these people "pro-life." And to call them "anti-abortion" also implies falsely that others are "pro-abortion."

This too is scandalously inaccurate. For no one in the world is actually "pro-abortion." No one celebrates abortion, and no one is thrilled with joy when this medical procedure must be performed. Even professionals often perform abortions through tears-- their own, and those of the mother.

The fairest, and most accurate, way of designating the two sides might be "pro-choice" and "anti-choice." This is perhaps the least offensive, and judgmental, of designations.

The anti-choice people claim that they alone value life as sacred. But are they at all consistent in this "formal" or "official" position? No, for they do not value human life enough to refrain from murder. Several members of the pro-choice community have been murdered by the anti-choice people during the last thirty years. Extremely rarely, if ever, has it worked the other way-- with a pro-choice person murdering an anti-choice person. The ghastly case of Dr. Tiller is but one example of a nightmarish trend among these Jehovist killlers.

The situation gets even worse: Most of the people who supported the extremely bloody war in Iraq, which killed altogether about a million people, were "anti-choice" religious zealots-- often described accurately as "fanatics."

In other ways, too, these people do not defend or support life. Most of them are voracious carnivores, killing truly sentient beings for food. In fact, they go much further, laughing at and mocking vegetarians.

A fact which they almost never realize is that this present life is not the whole, the totality, of life. For life survives death. And this is a matrixteaching of Christianity, as well as of Buddhism, and several other faiths.

Anti-choice people react as if the physical life of the physical fetus is the one and only one, or the only one that counts. They ignore the teaching of Jesus and all other enlightened people: For the masters, saints, sages, and general mystics of all history hold that death is a survivable experience. Thus, while life on earth is extremely sacred, holy, and inviolable, it is never "all that there is." (These same extremists seem terrified to have any faith in God, and for the same or similar reasons, they reject euthanasia.)

If the anti-choice people did not interfere, the Souls which did not incarnate in a physical body would simply return to their Home-- the lovely Homeworld.

We who are profound believers do not use this fine and beautiful teaching as an "excuse" to murder, or to be indifferent about physical life. Most of us hold all physical life to be so sacred that some refuse to take the lives of even animals, who are also beloved.

If nature herself is allowed to take the natural course, without interference, nature itself will destroy many, many fetuses in "miscarriage." Do the anti-choice advocates go so far as to blame God, or nature, for this? (It is something about which they simply do not want to think!)

So, the anti-choice position is untenable, because it must be inconsistent. For no one can save a life and make it last forever. If you do save a life, which can be a very good deed indeed, you can only postpone death. For, in a few moments, hours, days, or years, the person whom you saved must leave this earth anyway.

The solution is not to try to "save every physical body." The solution, offered by Jesus and others (and Jesus never said a word about abortion) is, instead, to awaken to the fact that earthly life, however much we might deeply, tenderly, and lovingly care for it, is a temporary phenomenon. It is but an eye-blink in eternity. We must become aware that our real and true lives are forever; for, although the physical brain turns to dust after death, the non-physical Soulmind existed before birth and will continue to exist long after "death."
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Do We Respect and Love Animals?

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Most spiritual people would answer this inquiry with a clear affirmative!

Yet, we must ask ourselves, and try to be honest in this interior inventory, "Do I really love (and respect) animals?"

The answer might surprise you.

We all hate, and are repelled and revolted, by animaltorture, of course.
But we have all had this issue thrust in our faces due to the notorious, infamous abuse of cows practiced by a slaughterhouse in California. In that hell of a place, cows-- those too sick to move, or to walk-- were impaled by the tongs of forklift trucks; some were drowned by having water from hoses shot into their mouths and noses; others were beaten to death; others were electrocuted, or tortured by electrical prods; others were beaten senseless.

We can imagine our response if we heard of such atrocities occurring to our beloved dogs, or cats. But a cow is also a sentient being, with feelings. If you put a number of them in a field, they will congregate together, for they are quite gregarious. And they also have a kind of "Love" for each other, and especially for their young.

From the view of pure anatomy, the brain/nervousystem of this mammal is fairly high in the ranks of evolution. Compared to lower forms, this mammal has a wide spectrum of emotive responses.

So, she deserves a little respect. We need not go so far as some forms of Hindu tradition, which worship the form of this mammal, but we, as spiritual people, do owe respect to all "sentient" (selfaware) creatures.

We do respect some. We would not tolerate the widespread slaughter, for example, of horses. "That is ridiculous!" one might object. "They're just cows, for Godsake! You are just being silly when you suggest 'respect' for them!"

This is, in fact, the common attitude that dominates our backwards and primitive society. It actually makes the average person laugh, scornfully, to suggest such a "radical" thing as "respect" for cows! On the surface, due to our shared social programming, it does seem absurd!

But it is precisely this attitude-- that living things are not sacred, but are to be regarded, like blocks of wood, as "things," to be used and abused for human convenience, that led the workers at the slaughterhouse to practice animaltorture.

Animaltorture, almost all psychologists agree, is a form of insanity.
Indeed, the practice is regarded as a strong indicator of later sociopathy (absence of a conscience).

By stunning contrast, we, the people of Love, are the people of conscience. We can rely and depend upon our conscience to guide us, telling us the difference between right and wrong. Spiritual adult people do not depend upon holy books to form and direct their lives, but upon a Love-trained conscience.

The truth is, the sociopaths that practiced animaltorture were only a different degree, not a different kind, than the average person.

For the average person is a carnivore. And cows are killed, by the hundreds of thousands, every day, often in nightmarish,hellish ways, to provide the burgers and steaks of carnivores. Some slaughterhouses place electrical prods up the rectums of cows to electrocute them, for it is cheaper than any other way. ("Anything to save a buck.")

But do we not have the "right," as "superior" beings, to kill whatever creatures we want, in order to feed ourselves? Perhaps, if there were no proteinsources outside of meat, if we needed it to survive, this would be a justification.

But to make the situation clear, let us hypothesize that we encountered an alien race from space. Let us further suppose that they were way ahead of us in their evolution. Let us say that they were as far above human beings as we are above cows. And then, let us suppose that they wanted to create "human farms" where human beings could be reared to provide them with meat!

We would hit the roof! Would we not consider this incredibly hideous?
Would we not revolt? At that time, vegetarianism, for the higher life-forms, would no longer be an abstract or academic discussion, but would be a practical-- very highly practical-- issue of survival itself!

Well, I submit to you that it should never be reduced to an academic, abstract idea. The highest compassion should move us all to exercise the compassion on "lower" creatures that we would demand from higher beings!
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