Death by Firing Squad

I was expressing scepticism about Clairvoyants the other day and was told that I could only think it was rubbish because I had never had a "Reading" done. If I did get a "Reading", I was warned, my opinion would change. Now this of course is where the huge mistake is so often made - not just about Clairvoyants but about everything - thinking that ones personal subjective experience is somehow a good guide to the Truth. In fact its about the worst possible trap. The trouble is that our own personal experience is more real to us than just about anything, and so feels very persuasive and powerful. A simple proof of how unreliable our own feelings are about something is the Divorce Rate. Marriage is one of the Biggest decisions a person ever has to make in life, its rarely made lightly and in our society who we marry is very much determined by how we feel about that special someone, that person we just know is so right for us - but how often does it prove to be a mistake, sometimes a huge mistake?

There were two things that started me thinking about this problem of the way our personal experience can't be relied on - the first was the huge Mass conducted by the Pope at Randwick racecourse today. The atmosphere generated among all those hundereds of thousands of people singing and dancing and celebrating together will have been a very powerful subjective experience for all of them I am sure, and most will eventually go home feeling their Religion has once again been validated. But it would have been the same if they were all Hindus or Mormons or Shiites. Agree? But they couldnt all have been right - unless you want to say that the objective reality of their religion is not important, only the experience of it - though of course the actual mormons or Catholics or Hindus would have said their experience validated the actual reality of their Faith.

The other thing I was thinking about was that the Bali Bombers were supposed to have been executed by Firing Squad in the last few days. The father of one of the people killed in Bali was quoted as saying he would be happy to pull the trigger if they would give him a rifle, a viewpoint which is easy to understand, given his personal experience of what happened.I've often thought that if somone precious to me, especially one of my children was brutally murdered I would want to avange their death and track down and murder the killer myself. I would feel that I had that right.

But I would be wrong and I would have allowed my own personal experience to lead me astray, as that mans has, into thinking that killing criminals is somehow right.

The truth that seems evident to me is that Life is precious and has to be protected at all costs. And one of the costs is that vicious killers have to be taken out of society and prevented from doing harm again, but not by killing them. Killing them keeps making it possible for all of us to believe that sometimes its excusable to kill, and once that is established all that remains is for someone to think up an excuse.

If killing and murder and war is ever going to end, the first thing we have to agree on is that theres never an excuse.