medical charity; intentional religion

9:07 AM 5/1/11

When I woke up this morning they were asking me about medical charity.

I still have 'brain burn' from uploading my videos on the wi-fi the other day, and it's just like last time - the feeling lasts for several days. It's an uncomfortable feeling in my head and I can't think very well when I feel that way. So using the netbook on wi-fi will probably not be happening very often after I get disconnected from the net at home.

So, I wasn't able to think very deeply about medical charity. But my religion has a concept about death. There are situations like this: someone chronically ill, on hemodialysis, breathing from an oxygen tank because they have emphysema, or whatever, and their health care is extremely expensive, but they have no hope of getting better.

My concept for this situation is:

1. Atheism: No afterlife. When people die, they are dead. However, there is 'afterlife' in the sense that the remaining people on earth will carry on the tasks of keeping the world alive after you are gone. There is life after death in the sense that everybody else is still alive. I actually find the idea of personality types to be helpful here, because it makes me feel less unique, and I know that somebody else will be born with a temperament similar to my own, someone capable of learning the same things, feeling the same things, and caring about the same things I cared about.

2. Failure: You feel like you failed as a person. For whatever reason, you couldn't get done the job you wanted to get done on earth. It seems like you are dying too young, too early. It seems like a series of unfortunate events led to your illness, which was unfair, like it never should have happened to you. In order to choose death, you must feel that the remaining people will accept your failure and not judge you badly for that.

I'm sure there are a lot more things I would need to address. Those are just the two things I happened to think of this morning.

So the idea that we were talking about this morning was that there would be no point in getting charity from this religion if the religion did things that were exactly the same as mainstream medicine and the government. The hypothetical idea was that we would try to unplug people from chronic medical care and allow them to die, but I don't mean in ALL situations. I would have to learn more to have an opinion. I mean the situations where there is clearly no hope of getting better, or at least mainstream doctors think not.

There are other religions where you are allowed to get some kind of charity if you join the religion. That sounds like something I would offer. It would be offered to the family member who was the caretaker, the person who would still be alive. Obviously, they are capable of saying no.

About giving monetary support: Yes, this is something that I want to be able to do in specific circumstances, but, as I can barely think at all this morning, I'm not sure where to begin.

The idea of the religion is that it provides support for the lifestyle, rather than just making a list of rules and requiring you to follow them without any help, and the most important set of rules is the dietary rules, similar to the Jewish kosher food rules. An unsupported person trying to eat a healthy diet has a much harder time than someone who can go eat food that was made by the community group. If we had stores that were selling only 'our' food, that would also be helpful. I just don't want to make rules saying you have to follow this diet, without even caring about how hard or how easy it is to do, or whether they know how to do it, or whether they can afford it.

So people would join because they had something to gain by joining. They would receive physical, material support, such as community food. (And as I said, 'community meals' are only one of the possible ideas, and not THE ONE AND ONLY WAY of doing things.)

Something like this would apply to the people who asked for medical charity. One goal of the religion is to prevent medical problems from ever happening again, so it gives people hope. People who unplugged a terminally ill family member from medical care would want to feel that there was hope and that there was something useful they could do in the world to make sure this doesn't happen again.

For instance, preventing diabetes is something that the religion would be trying to do. Diabetes is strongly connected with feeding babies something other than human breast milk. The connection to that is very strong, but there might be some exceptions where people developed diabetes even though they were breastfed, and I don't have enough information about that. However, strictly requiring breastfeeding would very greatly reduce the number of people who became diabetic.

As always, the religion is a voluntary one, and people are allowed to leave it. People are not disconnected from 'other' friends and family and they are not prevented from talking to them. They will indeed look strange to their friends and family as they change their lifestyles.

This is something that I say sadly and reluctantly, but it is something 'we' were talking about this morning. If I find people's physical appearance to be intolerable, if I can't stand the sight of them, I feel less of a desire to give them charity or to even imagine that they exist. I feel like I am surrounded by huge numbers of extremely ugly people who I can't bear the sight of. That is why the religion has the grooming rules so that people will be tolerable for me to look at. If only people grow their hair the way I want them to, then I can enjoy looking at them, even if they are fat, or have ugly faces, or whatever. If only they have hair, I can stand the sight of them. But the things they do to their hair make them absolutely unbearable to look at. So the grooming rules make it so that I can stand the thought that these people exist. It's not easy to 'fix' a person who is overweight, it's not easy to lose weight, and I've come to believe that you shouldn't try to 'lose weight' as a goal, but instead, change to a healthy diet, and then become whatever weight you become. So anyway to 'fix' someone's physical appearance I would only ask them to groom their hair the way that I would like to see it, and I am not asking anyone to 'lose weight' as a way of changing their physical appearance. I wrote about obesity in the last blog.

It was a particular kind of person I was thinking of this morning. They look like this: they are poor, fat, middle-aged, and sick in some way. They have bad clothing (I'm a nudist, so that solves that problem) and extremely bad hair and makeup if they are female. (I've considered making clothing rules, like the Amish have, which would vary from region to region; however, I hesitate to do that. I would want to put more emphasis on nudism.) They have moderate to severe Weston Price face, skull, and neck deformities, such as a weak chin. They are also ignorant, uneducated, and stupid, forgive me for using that word. They have very bad diets and they do the worst possible things you can do to raise your children - bottle feeding them and so on. I've seen a lot of these people in West Virginia, and haven't seen them as much in the area of State College, PA. But they exist.

Those are the people who exist, and I don't want to think about them. There are lots and lots and lots of them.

My first reaction to that is based on something Diana Leafe Christian wrote in her intentional community books. She said that in the beginning of an intentional community, it's almost always joined by highly educated people who were formerly wealthy and they know that money doesn't bring happiness. You might WANT to somehow help the poor and ignorant and unhealthy people, but in the beginning, those people will probably not be joining you. There was something similar on the intentional community website where an article said: even if you sincerely want to have nonwhite races joining your community, it's not easy to get them to join, and they described a lot of reasons why; and they said you might just have to tolerate having an all-white intentional community in the beginning, at least until the community gets bigger and stronger and more diverse. So again, this is something that appeals to highly educated, intelligent, healthy, formerly wealthy white people, and those will likely be the first people to join.

I've been able to make peace with that. When a community or religion has only one member (like my religion, where I myself am the one and only member as of right now), and is growing, they're not strong enough to give their energy and their time and their money to help people who are sick, even though they sincerely want to help those people. It's in the community books from DLC. She said that communities get stronger after they've been around for a while, and eventually they do get a wider variety of members.

The vision is that this small number of healthy people are building the religion but not expecting miracles from it in the beginning and not being able to do much more than simply helping themselves.

I'm going to just post this for now - apparently I have other things to do (this is a sudden urge to leave).

I know that my blog is almost unbearable for people to read. I wish that I were healthier and happier so that my quality of writing would be more pleasant. Most of the time it's just a blog about misery and suffering.

'The guy with the Indian accent' was the one who wrote this.