Food For Thought: Are Canadians So Far Removed ?

"You need to ask why is it that we're so surprised when the alleged BTK killer [in Wichita] ends up being someone who lives among us and works in our church and is a Cub Scout leader," says Daryl Koehn, an ethicist at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and author of a new book, "The Nature of Evil." "We want evil to be monstrous," she says, "because if evil is monstrous, then by definition it doesn't look like us." -"Calling Evil by Name" from the Christian Science Monitor (3/10/05) While Jefferson penned the words, "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" in our Declaration of Independence, the notion actually evolved from Locke's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of estate" and Adam Smith's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property." Smith's version even found its way into The Declaration of Colonial Rights, crafted by the First Continental Congress in 1774. We in the United States act monstrously because in spite of Jefferson's re-wording, we did not divorce ourselves from Locke's and Smith's notions. We perceive an inextricable link between our happiness and the degree of material success we achieve. Forged within the context of capitalism, which has become savage beyond comprehension as it rages against its inevitable self-destruction, our relentless devotion to our "inalienable right" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" focuses primarily upon enhancing our own lives (others be damned), filling our heavily-mortgaged homes to the rafters with as much "stuff" as we can acquire, and satiating every hedonistic desire the law will allow, and then some. We rarely pursue the spiritual form of happiness to which Jefferson was probably alluding. In a nation where "I" rarely defers to "we" and property rights trump humanity, we US Americans tend to be all about "me" and hell-bent on dying a winner by possessing the "most toys." "About 24,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger-related causes. Three-quarters of the deaths are children under the age of 5." --The Hunger Project, United Nations; Fall 2003 "You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars." -Charles Kuralt More at: http://www.rense.com/general77/evil.htm [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on July 9, 2007]

Note: http://www.rense.com/ge...