posted September 05, 2006 02:36 AM              

I do not see his death as a result of any chaos though. Nor do I believe that because the media calls it a "freak accident" that is what it was just because there have been no stingray attacks in Australia in many, many years.

Steve Irwin knew animals well and he knew that at best they can be unpredictable. Especially when you are on their territory. He took his chances because he loved animals. He made his choice to be in the water with the stingray filming them. He knew well the risk he was taking.

For the choices we make in life we either reap the rewards or we pay the consequences. Sometimes it just happens that the choice we make can be fatal. It's the risk he took doing what he loved to do.

Full-fifthhouse-loulou, I liked your words and agree with them.

quote:

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Incidentally I believe completely in free will. God is within us. God is our conscience. Our guide. He guides but does not order or instruct. I do believe we are on a path in life but we may falter from it by free will. We were born indecisive, swayed by emotion, by events, environment, by conscience so it may feel we don't have free will, that we are merely pushed and pulled, but ultimately I feel we do. We can choose to take our path. Or not.

---

posted September 05, 2006 02:36 AM            

quote:

---

Oh Life, I'm not saddened with you, but frustrated.
With your innocent questions I'm troubled.

Didn't think of living 'cause didn't wanted to endure pain.
If I'm smiling, I will have to pay the loan someday.
If I do manage to smile for a moment,
my smile appears as if my lips are burdened with a loan.

---

posted September 05, 2006 02:39 AM              

And very true ones too.

Edited to add that at best life is a risk.

We can choose to avoid the risks for whatever reason we have but in doing that we aren't fully living life.

posted September 05, 2006 02:46 AM            

Another song that touches my soul.
Its a translation. I hope I didn't mistranslate.

quote:

---

Lord, let no one enter my life.
If they do come, then please do not take them away
If tears are to follow me,
then let no one make me laugh in the first place

---

posted September 05, 2006 02:56 AM            

quote:

---

I always want to sleep watching you.
I always want to see your face when I get up.
I want to spend my life with you.
My life exists within you.
This heart beats boom boom..boom boom
....
....

---

posted September 05, 2006 11:23 AM              

Freak Accident...

posted September 06, 2006 10:24 AM              

and 1 could very well be Zero,
which would bring us around full circle again.

posted September 06, 2006 01:18 PM            

quote:

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NEW YORK: ``If I'm going to die,'' the late ``Crocodile Hunter'' Steve Irwin said in a 2002 interview, ``at least I want it filmed.''

He spoke with his usual humor, and clearly had no idea what would happen four years later. But the fact is, a tape does exist of Irwin's fatal encounter with a stingray while filming a TV show. And so the question arises: In the age of instant Web videos, might it get out? And in the broader sense, is making footage of a death public ever justified?

For its part, Discovery Communications, the network where Irwin became a star, said there was absolutely no truth to rumors that the footage, now in possession of police in Queensland, Australia, might be released.

But that does not mean there are not concerns that someone could attempt to get their hands on it and publicize it for lurid means --or just to show they had it. That, said media analyst Martin Kaplan, would be tantamount to a snuff film.

``The only remote justification for publicizing this would be accident prevention,'' said Kaplan, of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. ``But that argument is a stretch.''

Experts say deaths from a stingray encounter are exceedingly rare. Irwin died Monday at age 44 after being stabbed in the chest by the stingray's poisonous spine while filming on the Great Barrier Reef.

He was popular in the United States, becoming a star as the ``Crocodile Hunter'' on Discovery's Animal Planet channel. In an interview with Associated Press Radio in 2002, he discussed his passion for grappling with crocodiles: ``That's what my hand and my brains are designed to do,'' he said with his trademark enthusiasm.

``That's what I have to give to the world.'' In the same interview, he noted: ``If I'm going to die, at least I want it filmed ... If we blew a million dollars worth of cameras, at least we could have gone to MGM and gone, 'Hey, look at this tape.'''

Irwin's manager and close friend, John Stainton, had the painful experience of watching the videotape where Irwin pulls the stingray barb from his chest. He called it ``shocking.'' ``It's a very hard thing to watch, because you are actually witnessing somebody die, and it's terrible,'' he told reporters.

Stainton later said on CNN's ``Larry King Live'' that he would never want the tape shown publicly. ``I mean, it should be destroyed,'' Stainton told King on Tuesday evening. Noting the tape now is evidence in a coroner's inquest, Stainton said, ``When that is finally released, it will never see the light of day. Ever. Ever. I actually saw it, but I don't want to see it again.''

The fact that a tape exists recalls the death of Timothy Treadwell, a bear enthusiast who lived among bears for a dozen years in Alaska before being fatally mauled in 2003. A video camera with the lens cap on captured the audio of that attack. It is in possession of a friend and has never emerged in public -- though in his acclaimed documentary ``Grizzly Man,'' director Werner Herzog was seen listening to it with headphones on.

Samuel G. Freedman, who teaches a media ethics class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, says the issue is ``whether there is any compelling public interest'' in the release of something so shocking as footage of a death. Here, he says, there clearly isn't.

``The lay person is not going into the water trying to have encounters with stingrays,'' Freedman said. ``It would be purely titillation and necrophilia if anyone were to show this.''

There are dramatically different cases, Freedman believes, where there is a compelling public interest in having the option -- as in the voluntary click of a mouse -- to see the reality of a grisly death. To learn the harsh lessons of war, for example, or to witness the brutality of the beheadings by Islamic militants in Iraq --videos that were posted on Web sites used by the militants. (Others have argued that the existence of the militant videos is apalling.)

---

posted September 06, 2006 02:26 PM            

Q: "Why do people die?"

A: "To make life more important."

I would argue that there is indeed
a very ethical reason for making
footage of another human being's last moments
available for public viewing.

This incessant taboo we place around death
hides the reality of it from our consciousness,
and it remains something utterly remote,
until the time when someone close to us dies,
or when we ourselves are on the verge of death,
at which point, it seems like something almost entirely unreal to us.

All through life, the vast majority of people
frequently see enactments of death in movies,
or hear about it on the news,
but never glimpse the stark reality of it.

We manage to put it out of our minds,
and live our lives as if we were never going to die;
as if we would always see our loved ones again,
and always have time to do all the things we want to do.
We think death will occur someday
when we are old and grey and ready for it,
and precisely when we call upon it to come and take us away -
no sooner, and no later.

I think it would help us to see our waking lives
in a more realistic and meaningful perspective
if we were to reflect upon the reality
of death from time to time.
One of the best ways to do that,
is to actually see hard evidence of it
for ourselves.
Sometimes thats the only way to make it real for us.

Sure, people would flock to watch a tape like this
out of a tast for mere sensationalism,
but, most likely,
what they would get is a taste of
their own mortality.
And that ain't all bad.

- hsc

posted September 06, 2006 02:40 PM            

From the writings of the Christian Mystic, Simone Weil:

"In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle… To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. …

… Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed."

posted September 06, 2006 03:28 PM            

"If you do not fight it -
if you look,
just look,
steadily,
upon it,

there comes a moment
when you cannot do it,
if it is evil;

if good,
a moment
when you cannot not."

Weil was a Christian, but she identified with the philosophy of the Pagans (esp. the Neo-Platonists), which was, after all, far closer to the teachings of Christ, than anything which now commonly goes by the name of "Christian".

In antiquity there were two sides of the issue commonly taken. There were those who believed in the supremacy of "gnosis" (knowledge) and "nous" (mind), and those who believed in the supremacy of the human will. The ancient Greek, Roman, and Eastern Philosophers were generally known for their insistence upon consciousness, knowledge, philosophy, and the intellect. They believed that, to truly understand why something is good, is to be incapable of willing its opposite. They were very tolerant and compassionate, on the whole. They sought to learn about goodness themselves, and to teach it to those who lacked a proper understanding/relationship to it.

Opposed to these were the so-called Christian Philosophers (who, in fact, perverted the teachings of Christ - who had an open mind, and desired to teach, and not to persecute his fellows on account of what they lacked), who argued that the will is the primary motivating factor, even behind thought, and not merely an agent of the mind's resolution to act. They were far more interested in expecting people to "know better" automatically, and in punishing them when they did not do what it was assumed they already knew they ought to do. The Christians decided for themselves what was "good", refused to examine their views critically (even deemed it an offense worthy of eternal torment to do so), and proceeded to punish and persecute those who did anything other than what the Christians themselves prescribed as "good". When the Christians did not do that which they felt they should already know to do, they called themselves "evil" and punished themselves, or else perverted their teachings, in order to affirm that no higher level of development that the one at which they found themselves was very much to be desired. The vast majority of them ultimately concluded that, provided one superficially accepts the truth of this or that "Christian" doctrine, one has no need to seek to conform ones mind to the understanding of Christ, or to emulate his example in any way.

The Pagan philosophers clearly had a respect for people's differences, and for the various levels and speeds of development from which different individuals opperated. They did not grow complacent with their present gifts and attainments, or look down upon those who had less. They saw themselves as superior to animals and some men, in some respects, and inferior to the gods, whom they ultimately wished to become like. They understood that some people are smarter than others, that some have stronger nervous systems, that some had stronger affinities with the gods (perhaps on account of their noble blood, or experience and wisdom gathered over many successive past lives), and that everyone could only be expected to live according to the unique forms and amounts of grace which the gods had accorded to them.

Free will is that idea which holds our differences to be inconsequential. It suggests, by analogy, that a weak man can lift as much as a strong man, that a foolish man can reason as clearly as a wise man, and that a bitter and irrascible man can love as easily and as openly as a sweet-tempered man. It holds everyone up to a single, one-size fits all standard, and heaps ridicule, derision, scorn, and punishments on anyone who does not fit the ideal mold. It is patently absurd. People are different, and these very differences determine our ability to understand and live in a way which is compassionate and righteous. What can be more obvious than this? How can we fail to perceive this self-evident fact, unless our judgment had been perverted by the lie of free will at an early and impressionable age?

posted September 06, 2006 07:10 PM            

quote:

---

Free will is that idea which holds our differences to be inconsequential. It suggests, by analogy, that a weak man can lift as much as a strong man, that a foolish man can reason as clearly as a wise man, and that a bitter and irrascible man can love as easily and as openly as a sweet-tempered man. It holds everyone up to a single, one-size fits all standard, and heaps ridicule, derision, scorn, and punishments on anyone who does not fit the ideal mold. It is patently absurd. People are different, and these very differences determine our ability to understand and live in a way which is compassionate and righteous. What can be more obvious than this? How can we fail to perceive this self-evident fact, unless our judgment had been perverted by the lie of free will at an early and impressionable age?

---

I don't think this is true.

What is the ultimate excuse? "It was destined to happen." If everyone believed in Divine Plan, then everyone could do exactly as they pleased in any situation safe in the knowledge that, "it was meant to happen."
_____________________________________________
"Oh, did I accidentally kick you in the shins? God ordained it. Talk to him... As you know it's all been pre-destined."
______________________________________________
Dear Creditor,

I'm sorry to inform you that I won't be paying my debt. My divinely-inspired feelings are that my money is better spent on a new car. God apparently wants me to look good while driving around fulfilling his destiny for my life. You understand that we as humans lack free will, and I am therefore powerless to help you pursue my money. Thanks for understanding.

Sincerely,
Joe
______________________________________________

"Listen son, I don't want you to get too concerned about other people's expectations. You really don't have no control over who you are, or what you become in life, so there ain't no point in working real hard at anything. If you's meant to have it, you'll have it, and if you ain't, you ain't. You just gotta accept things as they is, and wait to see what happens."
_____________________________________________

Destiny is the ultimate excuse for complacency, and would lead to anarchy if everyone wholeheartedly believed in it.

posted September 06, 2006 08:10 PM              

In the beginning everything was in chaos and God brought order out of the chaos. He set the heavens and all in it in order. Precise mathematical order in fact according all the scientists who have stated after years and years of studying the earth and the universe.

I believe that God still does that. God is constantly working to bring good out of evil. And God will always succeed in doing that because God is, after all, God. The being who is really in charge of everything.

quote:

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Only a true warrior can watch 1000 deaths and still cry at the death of 1000 + 1

---

Great words of wisdom for just having made them up, Mannu.

posted September 06, 2006 09:09 PM            

Question: Do we all agree that man can control his/her own destiny?
If so, then the next question is how does humankind control their own destiny?

That is backwards.

We cannot answer the question,
"Who or What controls man's destiny
(or the destiny of mankind, for that matter)?,"
unless we already know how it is controlled.

The "how" is an illustration
in which we see the do-er;
whether it be a man,
or some other force which transcends him.

The illustration, or explanation,
of the way in which destiny is controlled,
is the only possible justification, or reasoning,
for the conclusion, "It is controlled by man,".

Until we have this picture of the "how",
we cannot identify the man as the do-er.
We cannot conclude that it is done by him
unless we understand how he does it.

Otherwise, It would be like saying,
"This guy committed the crime,"
and then asking how he did it.

If we dont know how he did it,
HOW do we even know he did it?

We cannot close the case,
and then ask for the evidence.

We can only say,
"Man appears to control his own destiny,"
for it is still just an appearance,
if we have not yet inquired below the surface,
to learn how it came to appear this way.

The "how" is the reasoning for the conclusion.

So, the real question is,
"How can you conclude that man controls his own destiny,
if you dont know how he controls it?"

posted September 06, 2006 10:17 PM            

The extent of control that any individual has can probably be endlessly debated, because most spiritual ideas have been intuited in some way, and therefore in themselves hold more value to those who've intuited them than to those who've intuited something altogether different. There could be nothing out there but ether. Our witnessing of spiritual things could merely be our inherently superstitious nature desiring something greater. That propensity toward religious constructs has been well documented throughout our history, so that in itself is as plausible a theory as any.

posted September 06, 2006 10:29 PM              

I believe it is very important..to amke the right choices..for the good of ALL..in LOve and Light..Peace on Earth. ...

It truly is our Choice..
The Miracle is up to US..each and everyone of US..

as simple as 1 2 3
and A B C

baby you and me
for you are me and I am you...

each pair make a whole soul
A Master is a whole soul