Million Voices

The [Bull Moose](http://www.bullmooseblog.com) blog asks if bloggers can [stop the genocide](http://www.bullmooseblog.com/2005/03/blog-for-life.html) in Darfur. I think that it’s worth a try! We need to raise awareness-no we need to scream from the top of a mountain about what is going on.

Wyclef Jean’s theme song for *Hotel Rwanda* is called “Million Voices”:

>They say a man is judged according to his works, so tell me Africa what you’re worth.

A million voices were silenced in Rwanda by genocide. Can a million voices stop a genocide?

Write the president and your congressmen [here](http://www.savedarfur.org). [This](http://www.rocketblog.net/?p=9) is the letter that I wrote.

Unimaginable

The situation in Zimbabwe is unimaginably bad. Just as I can’t understand how the world lets situations like Darfur get and stay as bad as they are, I can’t understand how the United States and South Africa turn a blind eye to the evil that is occurring in Zimbabwe. [This article](http://www.techcentralstation.com/033005C.html) paints a bleak picture.

>Twenty years ago, life expectancy in Zimbabwe was 58; in 2002 it was 33 and dropping. The official HIV/AIDS rate in 2002 was about 25 percent (the highest in the world for any sizeable country), but the real rate is probably much higher. With no hope for treatment, and little for long term survival, behavior rapidly worsens. According to one survey, over a third of Zimbabwean men who are aware they are HIV positive do not tell their partners they have the disease. And astonishingly 79% of women surveyed said they would not tell their partner if they had HIV. As one put it to me – “life is too short here to worry about HIV.”

>Dr. Mark Dixon from Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo says that 70 percent of the patients he treats for any reason carry the HIV virus. A possible explanation for this extraordinary number is the high incidence of unprotected sex (usually rape) in Mugabe’s youth camps, where sexual power is used to suppress dissent against the ruling party.

The lack of almost all public health services in Zimbabwe is starting to spill over into neighboring countries such as Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique, and South Africa. Refugees from Zimbabwe are carrying HIV, and the lack of malaria control there is leading to rises across the region. This reminds me of the type of people in your neighborhood that don’t take care of their yard at all. You might have a perfect lawn, but if they guy’s lawn next door is full of dandelions and crab grass, your yard will be soon.

Unfortunately, again we are talking about people here, not weeds. And these people are suffering immensely. Robert Mugabe is starting to make Saddam look good. If one of our reasons for deposing Saddam was human rights violations, why don’t we go after Mugabe as well? Oh yeah, I forgot, it’s just Africa.

The Importance of Play

My wife works at a preschool that has a ‘play-based’ philosophy. Basically they don’t worry so much that the 3 and 4 year old children learn math, but rather the focus is on getting the kids to learn how to interact appropriately, and how to investigate the world around them. This is more important than many people think. The are a lot of children squashed into a mold by their parents, and not allowed to be kids.

I read [this](http://www.inventionatplay.org/matter_trans_playfuture.html) today. It’s a list of quotes from famous/influential people on how important play is.

My favorite is from Frank Wilson, M.D., Stanford University Medical Center:

>We’re really wrecking the whole notion of play. We’re killing it with too much organization.

I love how that captures so much about modern society. I see it in Legos, even. When I was a kid, I loved Legos because they were a bunch of colored bricks you could build anything out of. Of course, each kit came with directions so you could build something they had designed, but it was all out of generic non-specialized pieces. Now it seems like every Lego kit you see at a toy store is some specially-crafted thing with 50% custom pieces pre-molded to be a dinosaur head or something. When did we kill off imagination?

Good Writing Advice

My Ph.D. advisor, [George Springer](http://structure.stanford.edu/People/faculty/gspringer/gspringer.html) is an excellent writer and presenter. Probably the most important part of his writing style is prolific revising. [This essay](http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html) expresses almost exactly the same philosophy. Some truths seem to be timeless!

Genocide in Darfur

I [recently](http://www.rocketblog.net/?p=9) wrote a letter to the President about the [conflict in Darfur](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/africa/2004/sudan/default.stm). This is a tragedy on so many levels. Most importantly, it is a human tragedy of great scale. But it is also a tragedy of inaction-inaction on the part of a world that is sitting on its hands while people are killed.

[Here](http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/11237522.htm) is a report by an American former Marine who was a U.S. military observer with the small African Union force in the region. He writes, among other things:

>Every day we surveyed evidence of killings: men castrated and left to bleed to death, huts set on fire with people locked inside, children with their faces smashed in, men with their ears cut off and eyes plucked out, and the corpses of people who had been killed with gunshots to the head.

>We spoke with thousands of witnesses — women who had been gang-raped and families that had lost fathers, people who plainly and soberly gave us their accounts of the slaughter.

He has also [testified](http://www.sudantribune.com/article.php3?id_article=8609) in front of Congress, and has presented strong proof that this is not just random killing (as terrible as that is) but rather is a coordinated effort by the Arab Sudanese government and the Arab Janjaweed militias to exterminate the african inhabitants of Darfur. This is shockingly similar to the genocide in Rwanda. In some ways it is worse, because it does not have the weak excuse of mass chaos to hide behind. This is a targeted exercise by a homicidal regime.

There are some actions coming down the pipe, but it remains to be seen if they will do more good or harm. The Washington Post today has an [editorial](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3896-2005Mar26.html) discussing an upcoming United Nations vote. We as Americans and Christian Americans need to get educated about this issue, and need to push our leaders for action.

Why should we care? Because these people are fellow humans whom Jesus loves as much as he loves you or I. Why should we as a nation act? Because it’s the right thing to do. “What is it to a man if he gains the world but loses his soul…” I fear that we have yet to learn that as a people.

Letter to the President

I just sent this letter to President Bush:

>Dear President Bush:

>I am writing to express my fear that the policies of the United States regarding the Darfur region in Sudan are repeating the shameful history of our non-action in Rwanda. I read that you recently met with Paul Rusesabagina after seeing Hotel Rwanda. I can’t imagine what he went through, and I am just appalled that we seem to be letting this happen again.

>As I read about the horrors of the Holocaust and the response of Americans to that, I’ve often wondered why we didn’t do more, sooner. I have wondered the same about Rwanda, and I tremble inside when I think that we are doing it again.

>With great power come great responsibility, and there is no greater power in the world than the United States, and there is also no greater responsibility than protecting innocents. There are far too many innocents in the world who are being killed, while we wrangle over procedural items. We must not sit on our hands, we must act.

>I want to encourage you to do whatever it takes to end the violence in Darfur, and protect the innocent people there. I realize that there are complicated issues of international politics at work, but that should not impede us doing what is right. If stopping the violence means partially giving in to the French on the International Criminal Court, then please do it, if it will save lives in Darfur. Please consider the Paul Rusesabaginas in Darfur in whatever decisions make. Could you look him, or any like him, in the face and explain what you are doing without seeing contempt in his eyes? That should be the standard you use.

>A rabbi once said that God told us the story of Adam so that we would understand that all of humanity came from one man, and that if you kill one person, it is as if you have killed all of humanity, and if you save the life of one person, it’s as if you have saved all of humanity.

>A strong standard indeed, but one to which I think we are called.

I sent it by snail mail, but I also used an automated form on [savedarfur.org](http://www.savedarfur.org). I encourage anyone reading this to do the same.

The Body and the Soul

[Donald Sensing](http://www.donaldsensing.com) has an interesting post on the body and the soul. He discusses the issue in the context of Terri Schiavo, but I found the post just generally interesting. I especially was interested in how he contrasted a Hebraic way of looking at the body and soul with the Greek Platonic/Aristotelian way. It reminded me of a passage in Marvin Wilson’s book [Our Father Abraham](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0802804233/qid=1111875482/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/002-8001424-7164825?v=glance&s=books&n=507846).

> In Hebraic though, “soul” or “sprit” refers to the whole person or individual as a living being. It refers to the person himself.

This same sentiment is what Sensing describes as the Hebraic viewpoint on the soul/body question. He discusses the biblical concept of death and wraps up his discussion by noting the differences in technology between now and the biblical times.

> One of the theological difficulties inherent in applying biblical guidance to modern medicine is that, by standards of biblical days, even a feeding tube is high technology. The ancient peoples almost without exception believed that death occurred when the heart stopped beating (Islamic law still says so). That’s still true today, of course – or is it? We can, after all, keep someone’s heart beating by technology even when there are no other significant signs of life. So we moderns have generally decided that the death of the brain is the death of the person.

I agree with his analysis in general, but I don’t think he pushes it quite far enough. Building on what he says, I think we can further apply modern medicine to a biblical concept of death. The idea that death is the “destruction of his/her totality of existence,” and that at death we fall asleep only to wake up into the reality of the resurrected state, jives nicely with our modern medical concept of ‘brain death.’ Death, then, is when we cease to be conscious until the resurrection. We don’t have to worry about our soul hanging on in some limbo state, as [Neil Boortz](http://www.townhall.com/columnists/nealboortz/nb20050324.shtml) kind of implies. There is no ‘releasing’ of the soul that happens when the body dies fully. When our consciousness is destroyed, we are dead until God, out of his great love, brings us back.

In this description of death, I think that ‘high brain death’ fits nicely as well (for more discussion see my [previous post](http://www.rocketblog.net/?p=5). If the part of our brain that houses consciousness is destroyed, then the totality of our existence in some real sense is destroyed. Because the person who we are can never come back. If science advances to the point where we could seed a destroyed cerebral cortex with stem cells, and induce it to grow back, I would bet that the person that would form would be wholly different than the person that had existed previously.

I think this also leads to an interesting union of the Hebraic and Greek concepts of soul and body. If our consciousness is really who we are, it is both a non-physical thing, and a very physical thing. Our self-image is surely tied to our bodies in many real ways, but our consciousness is not something that you can put your finger on. It does reside, physically, in the brain, though, and when the brain is destroyed, consciousness is destroyed-the “totality of existence,” as far as we know. So we see that the Hebraic body-soul union concept is correct, but the Greek idea that the soul is something non-physical seems also to have some truth in it.

So my conclusion is that people who have experienced brain death, or higher brain death, are dead in a biblical sense. They have fallen asleep in this world, and they will only awaken in the resurrection.

More on Hotel Rwanda

A rabbi once said that God told us the story of Adam so that we would understand that all of humanity came from one man, and that if you kill one person, it is as if you have killed all of humanity, and if you save the life of one person, it’s as if you have saved all of humanity.

I think that *Hotel Rwanda* is simply one of the most incredible movies that I have ever seen. People who know me know how I hate ‘realistic’ (meaning sad, typically) movies. I like the escapism/fantasy side of cinema (*Incredibles*-style) as opposed to the real-life-pain type of movies. That being said, seeing *Hotel Rwanda* was an incredible experience. I found myself moving from awe at the beauty of the African landscape to tears rolling down my face to a feeling of shame/fury/I’m not sure what at my country, my culture, western society in general.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet, go see it. And make sure you see it in the theater, don’t wait until it comes out on video. The experience is just not the same (unless you are like my brother-in-law with a 72-inch HD projection system in your basement). If you thought that *The Passion of the Christ* was essential for Christians to see, please, please see *Hotel Rwanda*. If the *The Passion* was essential, *Hotel Rwanda* is even more so. This movie shows, only 10 years removed from the actual event, the result of our complacency and apathy here in the west.

Here’s a brief synopsis. The story is of a man named Paul Rusesabagina who was the manager of a posh European-catering hotel in the capital of Rwanda, Kigali. He is an extremely smart man who had been very successful in making a good life for himself and his family by navigating the system of bribes and corruption he lived in. The story is of how he sheltered 1,268 adults and children in his hotel during the genocide that happened in 1994. When upwards of 900,000 people were slaughtered with machetes and the all the western world did was pull out its nationals and pretend like it wasn’t happening. Our government wasn’t even willing to call it genocide. Disgusting. If you want to know more of the details, there’s a ton of information out there. I just ordered the book [*We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families*](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312243359/ref=pd_sim_b_1/002-8001424-7164825?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance) by Philip Gourevitch.

The most important part of this movie to me is how it relates to 1) my faith, and 2) my politics. As someone who claims to follow Jesus, I tremble, as my friend [James](http://stayingdusty.blogspot.com/2005/03/million-voices.html) put it, at the thought of the apathy of the American Church in the face of this atrocity. Where was our outrage? Where were the people holding vigils and risking arrest to demand our intervention?

My mind is just blown away looking at the way that many of us in the church have contorted ourselves into a knot over the Terri Schiavo case. I understand that some people feel strongly about this but even if that’s valid, HOW MUCH MORE strongly should we feel over genocide? Real genocide?

Now the politics part. Incredibly, this is going on right now in the Darfur region of the Sudan. It’s not quite at the same ferocity as what happened in Rwanda, but 180,000 people have been killed in the past 2 years there. Where is our outrage? Where is the voice of the American Church and the folks who champion the ‘culture of life’? We’ve been dickering around for months at the UN trying to get a resolution passed to send in peacekeepers. If this is what it takes, then we need to re-think our whole system entirely. Maybe the U.S., South Africa, and some of the other more stable African countries need to set up a large nation-building force ([Thomas Barnett](http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com) System Administration-style). The African countries could supply a good number of the people, and we could equip and train them. Or maybe that’s crazy and would never work. The point is that we need to figure out something to stop this holocaust from continuing (and that’s exactly what it is-upwards of 4-5 million Africans have been killed in the last 10-15 years). We must do something. We can’t continue to sit on our collective hands.

If you save the life of one person, it’s as if you have saved all of humanity. That’s an incredible statement, but it’s one that we need to take much more seriously, as a western society, and as a church community.

Hotel Rwanda

I just got back from seeing [Hotel Rwanda](http://www.mgm.com/ua/hotelrwanda/intro.html). I haven’t cried like that in a long time. More tomorrow. In the meantime, see another review that I agree with wholeheartedly [here](http://www.techcentralstation.com/022505X.html).

More on the Culture of Life and the definition of Death

[Professor Bainbridge](http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/03/terry_sciavo_co.html) has an interesting post on the clash between the culture of life and rule of law in the Schiavo case. I want to comment on the ‘culture of life’ aspect. My basic contention is that the Schiavo case is more about the definition of death than it is about the ‘culture of life’. After doing some searching, it seems that I’m not the first to think of this, though it hasn’t been talked about widely in the MSM during the Schiavo affair.

The whole question of when death occurs first came up in the 1960’s when organ transplant became possible, and mechanical means of keeping people alive were invented. This led to the concept of “brain death” or “whole brain death” that essentially said that at some point before actual, physical death, a person can enter a new moral category where it’s ok to end their life by harvesting their organs. See a discussion by Robert Vreach [here](http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kennedy_institute_of_ethics_journal/v014/14.3veatch.html). Now we have the technological ability to examine more carefully the functioning of a person’s brain, and so some, such as Vreach, are suggesting we further examine how we define death. He wrote about this in a Hastings Center [report](http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&an=9412087753) (or [here](http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc0.asp?docid=1G1:13255287&refid=hbr_flinks1)). [Here's](http://www.lahey.org/NewsPubs/Publications/Ethics/JournalFall1998/Journal_Fall1998_Feature.asp) a counter-argument.

Professor Bainbridge sites the Catholic [Doctrine of Life](http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae_en.html) and the Pope’s [statement](http://www.cathnews.com/news/403/122.php) on removing feeding tubes. Essentially, the Catholic church has taken a position on the definition of death, and it is one of “whole brain death”.

Not surprisingly, this is not a universally held opinion. There are interesting [arguments](http://www.bethel.edu/~rakrob/files/PVS.html) from a Christian perspective that a person in a PVS is “biblically dead”. Of course there are [counter-arguments](http://www.xenos.org/ministries/crossroads/donal/pvs.htm). Most of the counter-arguments, though, are based around the idea that we don’t really know if a person in a PVS is really unconscious. And certain high profile cases such as Gary Dockery have led to more uncertainty in this regard.

I can’t find any references to people coming out of a PVS when the cerebral cortex is actually destroyed. This makes sense to me, because there’s nothing to work with. Dockery seems to be a case more of “lock-in” where he had mid-brain death, not high-brain death, and then he just lost interest in trying to communicate. I would be curious to see if there is a counter-example. Because if there’s not, I think it speaks well to the concept of death being a high-brain affair.