Word: sin
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...right, maybe camels were smaller then and needles a lot more wide eyed. But the message is reiterated in passage after passage, and not only in the politically suspect New Testament, where socialists have always found solace. Ezekiel explains that the Sodomites' sin was that they had "pride, fullness of bread and abundance of idleness" but did not "strengthen the hand of the poor and needy" -- quite apart from any "abomination" (16: 49-50). Amos addresses the rich people of Bashan, who "oppress the poor, which crush the needy," thundering that "the days shall come upon you, that he will...
...states. And what remains in the mind from this book is an unsparing depiction of the moral and emotional nightmares of Vietnam, made more unsparing by O'Brien's rigorous refusal to write them off as the craziness of the moment. "This was not madness, Sorcerer understood. This was sin." Lake looks head-on at those unfashionable old friends, morality and evil...
...intelligence collected worth the moral cost of dealing with murderers? In Haiti it is difficult to tell. The story begins in 1986, after the fall of Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier, when the CIA set up SIN, a Haitian intelligence agency, and poured the first of several millions into it. It was supposed to keep tabs on the narcotics trade but never produced much antidrug intelligence. (No wonder, since the CIA was relying largely on drug users; Constant, for example, is widely believed to be a cocaine addict.) The real aim, however, was to use SIN to recruit agents...
Precisely when and how Constant came into the picture is unclear. He is said to have lectured on "liberation theology" -- Aristide's philosophy -- at a SIN school and might well have come to the agency's attention then. Most accounts agree, however, that he was one of the supporters of the military regime that the CIA turned to for information after the coup against Aristide. That he stayed on the payroll after helping organize FRAPH is more difficult to justify. Though Constant represented FRAPH to U.S. reporters as a kind of Salvation Army doing work among the poor...
American Catholics -- and millions elsewhere -- understand that the church is simply out to lunch on the subject of birth control. If abortion is clearly wrong -- and it is -- the way to begin preventing abortions is to encourage contraception. Contraception sinlessly heads off the unwelcome pregnancy that might occasion the sin of abortion, that is, the destruction of rudimentary life. Only abstracted celibates and moral neurotics (I think) insist that a pill or condom contravenes the divine design for sex. On the contrary, contraception is an act of moral responsibility perfectly consistent with marital virtue and family cohesion...