week twelve_law and emotion

Laws, to most people are equal to justice, but it may also become an obstacle on the way to the justice that the public commonly admit: sometimes the human emotion is against the settled law as can be proved in many cases.

From my understanding of the lecture given this week, laws are created to simply give an answer as well as solution to those actions of offenses, meanwhile no one can make sure if the solution provided by laws is always the best one. Further more, laws are the production of human thinking and consultation, so it is not strange to see people in different countries, or even various areas of the same country hold very different attitude towards the same law-breaking case, and law setting can differ a lot within a country.

In the perspectives of some people, the sword in Lady Justice's hand can be even more horrifying than the bony hand of the Reaper, especially when it comes to situations relative to someone' life, for the force of law is not allowed to be stained, thus it may seem to be quite impersonal. But after all, laws can be improved, and with the effort made by the whole society, definitely the public will trust the force of laws better and better.

Below is a picture I drew inspired by the idea given in this lecture.

Lady Justice and the Reaper

week eleven_about euthanasia

Euthanasia, in Chinese it is translated into 安樂死,means getting dead in peace. This translation may give the public an impression that euthanasia is something positive or at least not so unacceptable as what it really is. However whether to make euthanasia legal is still a rather difficult problem to governments throughout the world, for this is a critical topic concerning life and death and also the limitation of human being, in the perspective of population with some religious belief.

Even in some developed countries, the legalization of euthanasia is still at a very beginning stage. Netherlands is the first country that made positive euthanasia legal, and most countries are still holding a hesitating attitude towards this issue or just making passive euthanasia legal: perhaps out of the reason that passive euthanasia is closer to natural death, and either the hospital or relatives of the one receive euthanasia may feel less guilty of allowing patients to make this decision.

In my opinion, patients with no possibility of being rescue-able should be given the right to decide their life and death, this also fits the situation where people regard their life has been broken due to either diseases or accident. But making decision of euthanasia casually, though not too much influence would happen on the one decide to do so in voluntary cases, trauma may happen on relatives or even medical professionals. Still, to societies without an open enough attitude towards the turning from alive to dead, let alone services like Euthanasia take-away, the legalization of even passive euthanasia should be considered really carefully. Without a solid base of understanding the meaning of death, euthanasia may be modified or even lost its original humanized meaning.

make up post_human and nature

Here are two pictures drawn by me during the Easter holiday. The first can be seen as an extension of my doodle posted before, and the second is a make-up post for week nine, using the connection between human and nature as its theme.

week ten_the changing attitude

In the lecture today, professor mentioned about the so called taboo in Chinese culture that when someone is severely ill, his or her family members usually see breaking the bad news to the patient is a bad thing. Despite the fact that according to the statistic, most people want the truth about their own health instead white lies given by their family out of good wish.

Time has changed, the topic of death is no longer something unspeakable. But  social culture seems still admit the traditional value that death is something bad that can never be broke especially in front of the person him or herself experiencing the process of death. In fact, this taboo is not necessary at all. Just like what we have experienced in the former two interviews, talking about death is not as tabooed as we what may think. Traditional believes also tell us that good people would deserve a good life condition after their death (so to be positive and to consider less, as long as we keep being good persons, we needn't be afraid of death :D). Open attitude towards death like this also act as the same role in terms of this problem in modern society.

Come to the perspective of patients themselves, they should be given fully right to know the health condition of themselves, and only in this way can they then decide how to react and then what to do. Making decision for other people somehow equals to exploiting the basic rights of other people. Now that society and reality have both been open to diseases and death, then why we still want to put it aside from normal life, especially in these vital cases?

week eight_body, spirit and soul

It is interesting to see the idea on lecture held this Monday that human body is consisted by three components: the body, the soul and the spirit. Sure to most people they generally believe in the idea that a person is consisted with both visible as well as invisible parts, but to me it was in fact the first time (maybe it is because of the religious factors) to see the idea of considering a man as a trinity consisted by these three parts.

According to the Scriptures, the word "soul" can be used to referred either a single person or the mind of someone, while the word "spirit" conveys the meaning of the air breathed, non-physical being as well as the same meaning of the word "soul". So there is some overlap of meaning between these two words, but the one raised the idea of dividing the non-physical part of human being into soul and spirit might probably want to express something else.

Why bother differentiating soul and spirit? Maybe people always have the will to divide their mind into rational and instinctive ones. The evil part of mind is soul, and the rationally kind part is spirit, such division can be also seen in Freud's theory, like id and super-ego.

References:

https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/526-soul-and-spirit-whats-the-difference

http://bible.org/seriespage/man-trinity-spirit-soul-body

week seven_to keep or to dump

It is natural that people want to keep the body or even ash of their gone family members or friends, for the reason everyone can understand easily: we want to stay in the time spent with the loved person, leaving the body behind seems as cruel as dumping the family member or even worse,because the one dead won't make any resistance to show his or her anger or sadness, which may probably makes people done so feel terrible about what is done. To most people, knowing the fact that each gone family member / friend is resting in peace in some graveyard or cinerarium is much more relieving than have totally have no idea that where he or she finally belongs to.

But let's think from another perspective, since the very beginning of human history death has kept a close companion with it. People born and died, nobody knows where the remain of our earliest ancestors' bodies are now, and nobody cares. Just let it be, for nobody cares about it, that is the opinion we hold to death happened long time ago. But we are treating death much closer to ourselves in a quite different way: we hold ceremonies and try to make the dead one feel better without even understanding the original meaning of these ceremonies; we buy some place to store the ash of them as long as possible. Just like the ship mentioned in today's lecture, this ship is designed to carry the ash of dead people to release the active demand of cinerarium in Hong Kong. But why not just simply spread the ash to sea area nearby as many local families have done? Why still bother figuring out a way to keep ash as long as possible? Is this insistance of intergrality of body really unbreakable?

news photo taken in a sea burial

week seven_so called taboo

[drawn / shot by poster]

It is actually right here, and there is nothing to afraid about.