Hating the Dead

I think that the propaganderist in no less complicit than, say, the colonel in committing an atrocity, as the former creates the emotional and intellectual climate in which the latter can occur, oft times. However, at the end of the day, I also think we must disassociate what has actually transpired in time and place to predicating words or beliefs. For example, in terms of whom my kids associate with, I don't care a wit to professed beliefs. They have Mormon, Catholic, Shinto, and atheist friends. What I do care about and watch very carefully is behavior.

Someone expressed the opinion that the product that Flynt put out was more benign product than the product that Falwell put out. Having little experience with the former, I'm in no place to make such a value judgment. I just don't know.

A good way to test a proposition such as I propose-- resolved: one must not hate or mock the dead-- is to invoke extreme examples. I think of the most vile atheists that have died in my life time, and I ask myself whether or not my POV would change.

They include Mao (10-20 million dead) and Pol Pot (2-4 million dead) and in this country Timothy McVeigh (technically a self-described agnostic http://www.tektonics.org/guest/mcveigh.htm) and Jim Jones, who, although he began his career as an ordained minister ended his life and the lives of almost 1,000 others as a militant atheist. (Refer you to tapes Q595, Q597, and Q757 for example, in which he articulates his anti-Christianism and pro-atheistic views in many places. cf. http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/Tapes/Tapes/TapeTranscripts/transcripts.html) I want to be clear that I make no claim that the atheistic views necesserily informed their actions in each of these cases. I'm simply invoking extreme cases to test for myself whether my principle still obtains.

I once read a column by Patrick Buchanen that defended the antics of those when a serial killer was given his injection-- I think it was Bundy. He said their glee was actually a moral statement-- a claim of recognition that society has its moral limits. I don't deny that the execution of Adolph Eichman and McVeigh were in some sense a moral victory. However, nevertheless, perhaps perversely I still cling to my view that one steps over a boundry that should not be crossed when one rejoices in the death of another, no matter who they are or what they did, including all those in this post. That doesn't mitigate their crimes either of action or thought, but speaking for myself, it puts me in a place where I prefer not to be.

I'm not unsympathetic to the hate unleashed on Falwell. I suspect that history won't be kind to him or to the media that faciliated him giving millions of people the impression that this-- his extremist and sometimes idiotic rhetoric-- was the face of Christianity, a face that I simply don't recognize at all.