Dubious wrote: ↑Mon Jul 01, 2019 10:12 pm
Dachshund wrote: ↑Mon Jul 01, 2019 8:27 pm
Dubious wrote: ↑Mon Jul 01, 2019 4:55 am
[
Your entire premise regarding abortion is based solely on the ridiculous and demeaning assumption that human life is sacred...note, ONLY human life. What a truly disgusting idea that is. By what holy magic did it become sacred?
Abortion ?
"Ask not for whom the bell tolls", Dubious.
Dachshund
Wow! That took a lot of effort. Any more pathetic attempts to make the incomprehensible look profound?
Dear Dubious,
I am surprised that you do not recognise the quote: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls", I think that most adults in the Western world are familiar with it. It was written in 1623 by the famous, English metaphysical poet, John Donne (1572-1631), in a passage of prose called "Meditation XVII". "Meditation XVII" was, in turn, included in a book that Donne wrote entitled: "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions." Over the years the 6th paragraph of "Meditation XVII" has acquired the status of being a short poem in its own right that is typically called: "No Man is an Island."
Before I explain anything else, you will need to read this "poem" for yourself to get a rough feel of what it is about...
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
No man is an island entire of itself, every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well in any manor of thy friend's or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in all mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
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NB:
(1)
promontory; a promontory is a point of high land like a cliff, for example, that juts out over the sea.
(2)
clod; a clod is a lump of dirt/earth.
(3)
manor; a manor is a large, privately-owned country house or mansion.
************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Here is how the poem is usually interpreted...( if you want to get a better idea of the themes, below, you really should read the whole of John Donne's "Meditation XVII"; remember the "poem", "No Man is an Island", is just one paragraph of the later. "Meditation XVII" is not that lengthy, BTW, so its worth taking a little bit of time out to read it, especially if you are interested in philosophy which obviously you are).
When John Donne says "No man is an island" he means that no human being/person can decide to extricate and isolate himself ( I will use himself, he and man in what follows for convenience; i.e; so that I do not need to be repeatedly writing: he/she, himself/herself, man/woman, etc.) from the rest of the living, breathing cosmic continuum and pretend to be complete of his own identity/positionality - of the integrity of his stance. t is ridiculous to imagine that one man can grow and thrive in society without the love and affection of other human beings/person such as those in his family and those who are his friends and ,more broadly speaking, his fellow citizens. Right from the outset John Done destroys the myth of individualistic self-sufficiency which has long been propagated for Western man as a master of nature as well as of the self.
But John Donne goes further than this. When he says "
I am involved in ALL mankind" he means it very literally. He has discovered his relationship with ALL people, and insists that the individual is just a component of the larger mass of humanity. The last word of the poem, "thee", for instance, is intended to refer to that
collective "thee" which is the entire, unified race of mankind, across all divisions and prescriptions of race/ethnicity, class, gender, age and so on. No man can be an insular, disconnected, solitary island not
merely because we NEED one other as human beings/persons, and we cannot thrive and flourish if we are isolated from each other. That would be the simplistic, literal interpretaton of what the poet is saying and would likely insult him. What John Donne is proposing is that his involvement with mankind is a politically-charged commitment to ALL of humanity. The person is, if you like, political, and the political is , likewise personal, and boundaries can only be sustained for so long. Because essentially, there are no boundaries between you and I - they do not really exist.
In the winter of 1623 the bubonic plague was sweeping through England with terrifying force and speed, (eventually it led to the death of 40,000 persons in London alone), and John Donne became gravely ill. The practice of tolling a bell (e.g. a cathedral or church bell) to announce a death was customary in England until the late 18th century, and as Donne lay on his sickbed he could hear the sound of bells tolling repeatedly to announce the deaths of his neighbours and fellow parishioners. In the poem, the bell which tolls in silent remembrance of the deceased is there to remind us that it is OUR loss. The tolling bell sends a ripple out into the world, and signifies not just the dead of another individual, but a collective death, because ALL human suffering impacts and affects each one of us - every member of the entire human family. When I was younger I worked as a pharmacist, and I am reminded here of a chemical substance called hexamethyl paraosaniline or"Crystal Violet" for short, because it naturally occurs as shiny, little crystals that have a very deep, dark purple colour. I'll see if I can use it (Crystal Violet) to provide an analogy for what John Donne says about the bell that tolls to announce the death of an individual person. If you imagine a swimming pool full of perfectly clear water, taking a tiny pinch of Crystal Violet,- literally between thumb and forefinger-, and dropping it into that swimming pool will very quickly turn ALL of the clear water, purple-coloured. In other words, the tiniest amount of Crystal Violet can discolour/taint a comparatively massive volume of colourless water, just as John Donne tells us that the death of one individual person can reverberate grief throughout the entire, "continent" of all humanity/mankind.
Abortion does not just concern the death (murder) of a pre-born child, it concerns every one of us. As John Donne says...
"Any man's (human being's/human person's) death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee (i.e; all humanity).
We cannot diminish the value of any category of human life (e.g. the pre-born or the infant) without diminishing the value of ALL human life. The social acceptance, in the United States, of abortion-on-demand over the whole 9 months of pregnancy is a defiance of the long-held Western ethic of intrinsic and equal value being being recognised for every single human life regardless of its stage of development, condition or status. The right to life vouchsafed in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution would - said its drafter Congressman John A. Bingham - apply to "any human being."
Either human life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some cases the other.
In the 46 years since the US Supreme Court legalised abortion-on-demand throughout the whole 9 months of pregnancy, some 50 million pre-born children and infants have had their lives snuffed out. When the sanctity of life ethic is rejected by a nation - whenever any society can be misled into defining individuals as being less than human beings/persons and therefore devoid of value and respect, the cultural environment for a human holocaust is present. This happened during World War 2 and resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis. And it has been happening in America since 1973 with the murder (to date) of around 50 million pre-born children and infants. The later has been a silent holocaust; no bells have ever tolled to announce and honour the deaths of any of these innocent little human being/persons. No one was sent to ask for whom (metaphorically speaking) the bells tolled because no bells ever rang out for any one of the countless dead who were thrown out with the trash. The sheer enormity of this tragedy is inconceivable...ineffable...incommunicable.
America cannot survive as a free nation when some men are permitted to decide that that other persons are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. If the US is to be preserved as a free land, there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than the affirmation of the transcendent right to life of all human beings/persons, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.
Kindest Regards
Dachshund
