moider moider!
I’ve been thinking. I’ve been doing lots of things, mostly in front of unforgiving blinking screens, but in between the flat-screen sensory assault i got some thinking in. I’m afraid I must lay the blame squarely at the feet of my guardian angel, who saw fit to disguise himself as a Christian, materialise on my left hand side at a friendly (if strangely competitive) curry night, and accuse me of killing my unborn child. I don’t have an unborn child, and I’d like to think I’d know if I ever have, but that didn’t seem to be his concern. I’m not entirely certain what his concern was beyond seeing if it was physically possible for me to explode with rage, but he was extremely concerned about something or other. In expressing this opinion he came out with this particularly choice morsel to add to the tired old debate on whether victims of rape should be forced to have their trauma personified:
It’s only 9 months
Yeah. And the rest. If one’s moral objection was to medicine as a whole, would one be able to say to GBH victims to whom one is denying treatment “It’s only a horrific fleshwound”, without looking like a sadistic ass? And this, I believe, leads us messily to the heart of my recent thoughts. Everyone has some kind of internal moral code, even if many people acquire theirs wholesale from outside sources without feeling the need for proofreading. And many people feel their personal moral code is a very important thing, and they’d be right. It is pretty important to know whether YOU believe what YOU are doing is the right thing to do. Not always possible, but it’s generally worth a shot. And it can become a lot easier if you join a large group of people who feel that for one reason or another (the intervention of a higher being, admiration for the pope’s hat) everything would be better if they tried to follow the same moral code. But there are an alarming number of people in the world who seem to feel that, either through their boundless persausiveness or the inherent corruptability of the democratic process, their moral code can be impressed on the rest of us. Now however strongly your shepherd impresses upon you that expansion of the flock will bring greener grass all round, a simple look at historical examples will prove that not only is it impossible, it often leads to a convenient setting-aside of personal principles to facilitate the impressing of those principles on a larger majority. See the spanish inquisition, pro-lifers murdering doctors, and less directly, the outlawing of prostitution consistently and needlessly putting women at risk of harm. Just google “ripper” if you disagree with my use of ‘consistently’. So to those who would tell me how i should feel about what my girlfriend should do with her body, the first step to improving the world would be to not bother. Then maybe take some time out from praying to investigate the causal relationships between what you do and what the hell is going on around you.
