gerg, the gay supporter

i just signed a petition to the prime minister supporting the repeal of the infamous statute 377A. did i turn gay? whoa... of course not! in fact, sad to say, i still consider myself to be somewhat of a homophobe... i'm cautious around gays, inclined side with homophobic language, and highly uncomfortable with discussing gay sexuality (talking about lesbians is fine tho).

of course, the main issue here is:
how can i support the repeal of an anti-homosexual act law as a Catholic?

that's the point worth discussing in this post. i shall start by mentioning what i consider the proper stand a Catholic should take on the issue of homosexuality:

• identifying oneself as gay; i.e. that a male is sexually attracted to other males, is not in itself sinful - just as a sex maniac is not sinning until he acts. this does not exclude lustful thoughts, of course! thus, a gay man who lusts after a man is as sinful as a heterosexual man lusting after a woman.
  
  
• the act of anal penetration (or to use an archaic term, sodomy) is, however, condemned by the Catholic church as a "transgression of nature". God Himself is demonstrated as offended by such acts (the word 'sodomy' stems from Sodom and Gomorrah, cities said to commit such acts in mass orgies), thus it is a safe bet for Catholics to steer clear of such sex acts (even if it is heterosexual). here, i would like to compare the much more 'acceptable' act of masturbation: the two are probably equally detestable in God's eyes.
  
  
• "Love thy neighbour as thyself." (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 5:43. 19:19. 22:39, Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27, Romans 13:9, Galatians 5:14, 1John 4:7. 11, James 2:8) is the one law which sums up one's faithfulness to God. John the Evangelist says it the best: "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." these words of God clearly tell us how we ought poise ourselves for our homosexual brethren - the same way we treat any other sinner, with love and acceptance.
  

now that the stand is clarified, the next question comes:
how does repealing 377A support that stand in any way?

here, i shall simply paste the comments i added to my petition... do read on:

I am a practicing Catholic and I continue to believe that homosexual acts are against the natural order and offends God. However, God did give us the freedom to make our own choices, whether to commit sins or not. Among the many sinful choices which the Law punishes, I would consider 377A to be excessive - the Law does not punish people who masturbate, does it?

Decriminalisation, however liberal it may seem, however it may imply homosexuality as acceptable, remains the only fair way forward, as particularly poignantly laid out in Para 5. I do not think conservatives wanting to keep an old law simply because it seems "too progressive" can be considered reasonable; neither can Catholics be considered good Catholics if they choose to support such an oppressive law as their preferred method of serving our homosexual brothers.

further to those comments, i believe that leaning on the power of a secular court to deal with homosexual acts usually only leads to either, i) over-punishment, ostracism and stigmatisation, or ii) apathy due to non-prosecution. the latter is what seems the trend today - and while it makes a mockery of the legal system, it also insulates Catholics: non-visible homosexuality = no need to care about them or talk to them. for us practicing Catholics, s377A only either torments our lost brothers, or keeps us in an impenetrable "comfort zone" of ignorance and inaction.

an additional point to note is this: our more fundamentalist Christian brothers may be far more intolerant and oppressive in their gay ministries, employing peer pressure and guilt rather than Christ's way of gentle compassion - inviting conversion as a response to love. the result is their disillusionment with the church and often outright rejection of Christ himself. if us Catholics remain entrenched in our "comfort zones", Christ's ministry suffers! (this is not meant to diss Protestant efforts to reach out to gays: at least they try.)

the way to approach gays, for us as Catholics, must be the same approach we endorse with all other sinners (genocidal murderers, incestuous paedophiles, corrupt politicians, money-worshipping idolators; your brothers and sisters): the way Christ moved the world by becoming the Lamb led to the slaughter. we must put our lives on the line to listen to our brothers and be a channel of God's grace for them instead of merely relying on punitive laws. that is why i signed the petition - as a commitment to loving my gay brothers.

i shall end off sharing this hymn - note the irony!

God Is Love
Love it was that made us and it was love that saved us.
Love was God's plan. When he made man; God's divine nature is love.
Born of God's love we must love Him, that's why He made us to love Him;
But only when we love all men can we partake of God's love.
But only when we love all men can we partake of God's love.

Love is a wonderful thing, joy in our hearts it will bring.
Where there's true love there is God and where there's God there is love.

Christ said: "Love must be the sign by which men will know you from Mine.
A new commandment I give: each other love as I did."

singapore, o quaint, lovely, orwellian city

haven't been bothered with local news for quite a long while now... been more concerned with everybody's spiritual growth most times. it brings nostalgia paralleling independent news reporters for my quaint city's news!

the latest intrigue comes from cops responding to Ultraman and friends. apparently some anime lovers were protesting with their toys (what an idea! skirt the laws!) at *Scape (i think it's that grafitti place in orchard) and that managed to attract 4 police buses.

ROFLMAO!!~

what the biang, activate police bus free one or what? action figures also can activate! what if some real crime was happening elsewhere... oh right, what was i thinking? this lovely city never has crime to deal with anyway.

as mrbrown points out, the local media maintains radio silence on such quirky (and i believe, newsworthy) events - but Reuters has no govt muzzle (well at least it's not muzzled here la) so check out their article!

boy, i miss all this online jounalism man... it so makes me feel like i'm making a dent on the ideological superstructure without laying my arse on the line... har har har.

singaporean myths

so... are we apathetic or not?

will the govt really fire opposition voters?

is the secrecy of our vote truly compromised?

are there myriad isa agents eavesdropping on our every phone conversation?

will our swat team snipe us from range if we suan lky?

is sph filled with pro-pap journalists?

does temasek holdings make good economic sense?

will we really get back our cpf one day?

is the opposition bad for singapore?

is pap good for singapore?

talk about conspiracy theories... is it even possible to know any truth about such issues? perhaps we've all been duped! perhaps we are not trying hard enough to search for clues. perhaps we are not being critical enough. perhaps we have succumbed so long to mental imprisonment that subsequent freedom would be so shocking that we end up choosing to remain incarcerated.

we are the myth, and we are unravelling before our very eyes - but are we aware of it?

opposing for the sake of opposing

i'd like to spend a few minutes ruminating on this strangest of singaporean inventions - opposing for the sake of opposing. we do many such similar actions: believing for the sake of believing, breathing for the sake of breathing, and living for the sake of living. but what makes opposing for the sake of opposing so worthy of disapproval? isn't the gahmen ruling for the sake of ruling also?

philosophically, this is probably a special case of the utilitarian proposition - the ends justifies the means - where the means and the ends are the same, i.e. it is recursive or reciprocal, hence illogical and absurd. in such a reading, members of the opposition are chastised when they use the means of opposing to achieve nothing but the ends of simply having opposed. this allegation strongly discredits the opposition's various objections against gahmen policies - how can an illogical argument hold any water? another implicit allegation within this label is that the opposition is serving no useful purpose other than to oppose.

however, this assertion has some implicit flaws as well. when the opposition "opposes" any policy, it does not simply "oppose"; it has to raise a movement during parliament and follow some procedures, or seek agreement within its party members to include such an objection within its manifesto if parliamentary objection fails. this would be the means to achieve the ends of opposing - albeit just a technical definition. those who believe opposing is a straightforward urge which immature children are likely to indulge in, well, opposing as a member of the opposition is definitely not something like that.

secondly, the opposing does not merely lead to more opposing - the gahmen is sorely mistaken if the opposition opposes various motions for no good reason. even the silliest of opposition measures (think dr chee's asking goh chok tong "where's the money") are directed at representing singaporeans. granted, not all singaporeans may feel so personally "represented" by some of their actions, yet the effort of our opposition politicians cannot be discounted: dr chee risked fines and jail for it. a slight reversal would look like this - why does the gahmen react so strongly to actions which merely amount to "opposing for the sake of opposing"?

this insight also extends to myself, strangely. today i ranted in objection about voting singaporeans who "don't know anything about singapore politics". my recommendation was a disdainful "don't know don't vote lah!" but! this would amount to a form of "opposing for the sake of opposing", attempting to bully some citizens into relinquishing their inalienable right to vote. especially so because i am easily incensed at pro-pappers who are simply so bought over by pap's condemnations and have lost all ability to respect the opposition. therefore to exemplify a legitimate form of opposition, i should be trying earnestly to show my fellow citizens what they might have missed; positive rather than negative action.

so here i would like to offer my sincerest apologies to fellow singaporeans whom i have taunted recently out of anti-pap exasperation. i would like to affirm that no matter how little you know about the gross fact-distortion which pap has committed against the opposition, you are entitled the right to vote even based on that lack of information. i am NOT (personally) accepting such a pap-advantage as legitimate electoral procedure, but to claim that these citizens do not "know enough" about singapore politics to vote is definitely out of line.

but all the same, i would invite fellow voters to visit the opposition's websites before unfairly judging them:
Workers' Party
Singapore Democratic Alliance
Singapore Democratic Party
Singapore Elections - a useful voters' repository
Check Your Poll Location - gahmen site

for those who suggest i am flouting the law against political blogging, i would like to emphasise that this is NOT party politics, but simply defending the opposition from the "opposing for the sake of opposing" fallacy. that's the main grouse i have against pap.

NKF hasn't died down!

in the spirit of catholic ascetism, i have decided to show you what happens when you simply ignore where the money goes. Sg_Review leads the way yet again, with the (presumably real) email below sent to the various relevant organisations:

----------
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:40:07 -0800 (PST)
From: Jeffrey Ho
Subject: Televised Charity Show in July 2005 - Donation to NKF Cancer Fund

To: Feedback Unit - MCYS

cc. MDA/News Corp/BBC/WSJ/NYT/IHT/Sydney Morning Herald/Sg_Review


I refer to the various media reports:

1. Channel News Asia (19 Nov 2005) - MediaCorp produced NKF charity show at discounted rates
LINK - http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/179492/1/.html
2. Today (18 Nov 2005) - "Set the reocrd straight"
LINK - http://www.todayonline.com/articles/85080.asp
3. Electric New Paper (18 Nov 2005) - "Were costs too high?"
LINK - http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4136,97515-1132329540,00.html?

I am outraged that at the end of the day, out of every dollar I (and many more Singaporeans, many of whom may be out of job or amongst the 250,000 or so "New Poor" earning less than S$1,000 per month) donated to the Cancer Fund during its televised charity show in July 2005, only 25% have so far been channelled to the Fund.

What is more outrageous is the reports that the only 2 media companies in Singapore controlled by the Singapore government, MediaCorp and SPH, received almost $4.5m of the $11 million raised (some 40%), with MediaCorp (the host of the televised charity show) pocketing some $2.5 million and the rest in advertising and promotion cost.

First of all, like many SIngaporeans, I had expected that every dollar of my donation should go to the "true" beneficiaries, the pitiful cancer patients the show highlighted. Had I known that only 25% of every dollar I would donate would go to these patients, I might have acted differently. It is bad enough that the government is not subsidizing sufficiently the medical care and costs (of certain cancer drugs highlighted in a recent Straits Times article by Chua Mui Hoong) of these cancer patients, but to have some of these hard-earned donations from the generous contributions of compassionate (and maybe even "gullible", in the words of Lee Wei Ling) Singaporeans go into its coffers (through its ownership of MediaCorp and SPH) is not acceptable.

Would you be kind enough to answer the following questions uppermost on my mind:

1. MediaCorp said the shows were produced at a discount - not at cost. What was their profit margin?

2. What about the Advertising and Promotion cost (of approx $2 million) "donated" to MediaCorp, SPH and Today newspapers - did they profit from it or were they "charged" at cost?

3. Presumably, MediaCorp and SPH account for these "fees" as revenue in their Income Statement (since MediaCopr admitted as much that the donations from Singaporeans would be treated as a "commercial" deal), so this income will form part of their profit distributable to shareholders and staff. Am I right?

4. So far, only about $7.5 million have been accounted ($4.5 m to MediaCorp/SPH and $3 m to the Cancer Fund). What about the remaining $3.5 million? ($11m was reportedly raised with $2m pledged but not collected yet)

5. In the New Paper report, it said that, "The NKF is expecting another $2 million or so from pledges made but not yet collected". If this amount is not collected, would MediaCorp and SPH still pocket their $4.5 million, resulting in MediaCorp and SPH pocketing some 50% of the donation?

I wonder if other reputable media companies (like the BBC, News Corp, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, etc - to whom I've copied here) would ever do such acts in the name of charity?

Rgds
Jeff Ho
An outraged and "gullible" Singaporean

a question of constitution

does anyone know any girl by the name of Sue? if she's Canadian, she's likely to be less corrupted than if she's Singaporean. read on to find out why...

'Corrupt' ruling appealed
Ont. energy firm challenges $5.4M judgment
Richard Foot, CanWest News Service, Wednesday, November 16, 2005

A Canadian company wants an Ontario court to dismiss a multimillion dollar judgment reached against it in Singapore on the grounds Singapore's justice system is corrupt and unlawful.

The landmark case has wide implications for Canadians doing business overseas. Never before, say lawyers for both sides, has a commercial case dealt with the question of whether a foreign judgment can be enforced in Canada because the courts that issued it may be inherently unfair.

Lawyers for EnerNorth Industries Inc., a Toronto-based energy services company, will make that argument before the Ontario Court of Appeal in April, in a bid to avoid paying a $5.4-million US judgment awarded to Oakwell Engineering Ltd., a Singapore firm.

One of EnerNorth's lawyers, David Wingfield, said if the Singapore decision is upheld in Canada, a precedent will be set which would turn the Canadian courts into "little more than a glorified sheriff's department for all foreign legal systems -- no matter how odious or compromised they are by reason of government influence or monetary bribery."

Oakwell's lawyer, Ed Babin, said Canadian courts enforce judgments from other countries all the time and that refusing to do so in this case would carve out "a dramatic change" in the law.

In 1997, EnerNorth embarked on a project with Oakwell to finance, build and operate two power plants in India. In 2002, after the project ran into problems, Oakwell sued EnerNorth in the Singapore courts -- where each company had previously agreed they would settle any disputes.

The trial and appeal courts in Singapore allowed Oakwell's claim, awarding it damages against EnerNorth. Because EnerNorth's assets arein Canada, Oakwell asked a Canadian court to enforce the decision.

Last August, Ontario Superior Court Justice Gerald Day agreed with Oakwell's request, dismissing arguments by EnerNorth that the Singapore judgment is tainted by that country's allegedly corrupt and biased legal system.

"If this court were to accept the argument of general bias in this case, it would mean that no judgments from Singapore courts would be enforceable in Ontario," wrote Day in his decision,

But in documents filed with the Ontario Court of Appeal, EnerNorth's lawyers say Day failed to apply the proper legal test required of Canadian courts when enforcing foreign judgments.

In 2003 -- in a case involving a decision from a U.S. court -- the Supreme Court of Canada said Canadian courts can only recognize a foreign judgment if the foreign legal system meets Canadian constitutional standards.

The Singapore decision is the first foreign judgment, issued in a country other than Britain or the U.S., to be tested under this principle, said Wingfield. EnerNorth says Singapore's justice system fails to meet Canadian standards by almost every measure.

"Singapore is ruled by a small oligarchy who control all facets of the Singapore state including the judiciary, which is utterly politicized," the company's court documents say. "The judiciary bends over backwards to support the government's and ruling elite's interests."

The documents also say Oakwell is a subsidiary of a Singapore conglomerate whose owners have close ties with Singapore's government and ruling party and that the judges who presided over the case in Singapore also have close ties with Singapore's leaders.

Day said he could find "no cogent evidence" that there was specific bias toward Oakwell by the Singapore courts. However, EnerNorth says evidence of general bias, or systemic corruption, is enough to reject the judgment in Canada.

"EnerNorth is faced with having its assets seized under Canadian law to pay a judgment that was granted by a corrupt legal system before biased judges in a jurisdiction that operates outside the rule of law," the company's documents say.

© The Edmonton Journal 2005

source:
The Edmonton Journal

For related discussions see:
1) Mellanie Hewlitt; Lifting The Veil On Singapore Politics
2) Carl Kapeland: Legitimized Corruption Understood

yup... Sue's just a bad pun on the local kangaroo courts. but it also protects me from getting Sue-d because i'm not talking law at all! heh heh. anyway, all the above were plagiarised from Sg_Review la, in case you thought i'm so free.

Nguyen Tuong Van

although the language was less than satisfactory, but that's because he's an aussie. that aside, his opinions are quite exemplary - i definitely concur with his sense of indignance. his passion for Tuong Van is definitely more than just aussie.

Singapore's deadly sling (excerpt from The Age)
By Mark Baker
October 25, 2005

AT DAWN on a Friday soon a young Australian will be taken from his death-row cell in the grey colonial pile of Singapore's Changi Prison, fitted with a hood and noose and dropped to oblivion through a gallows trapdoor. A few hours later his broken body will be handed back to his family.

In the island metropolis to our north, a place that admires itself through a polished veneer of modernity and sophistication, the city-state's brand of justice will be delivered with all the subtlety and compassion of the Middle Ages.

Yet few beyond his family, friends and dogged legal team are likely to mourn the passing of Nguyen Tuong Van, convicted heroin trafficker. As one of his Melbourne lawyers, Julian McMahon, observed despairingly at the weekend, Nguyen is not the kind of pretty young Anglo-Saxon damsel whose distress ignites national indignation.

But there are good reasons Australians should be alarmed and angered by the impending execution of the 25-year-old former Melbourne salesman — and why they should be demanding a much more vigorous response from the Federal Government to the final rejection of his plea for clemency than the limp resignation we are now witnessing from John Howard and Alexander Downer.

In short, Nguyen is to be hanged on a pretext that flouts the principles, if not the letter, of international law, after a flawed trial and after a comprehensive diplomatic snub that makes a mockery of the supposedly close political, defence and business friendship between Singapore and Australia.

Nguyen was arrested at Changi Airport in December 2002 after a routine security check revealed 396 grams of heroin strapped to his body and hidden in his hand luggage. Under Singapore law — the harshest in Asia — anyone found with more than 15 grams of heroin is deemed a trafficker and the mandatory sentence is death.

But the verdict that Nguyen was trafficking into Singapore is a nonsense. He was arrested in the airport transit lounge while preparing to board a plane for the second leg of a journey from Cambodia to Australia. He had not passed through Singapore immigration and he had no intention of entering Singapore. Even neighbouring Malaysia — which has hanged three Australians for drug trafficking since the 1980s — acknowledges a legal distinction between people who formally enter a country and those who are merely in transit (those found with drugs in transit face a relatively modest jail sentence).

Nguyen's lawyers did not pursue this obvious defence because the Singapore courts — which adopt the airs and trappings of their British colonial ancestry but are in practice a deeply politicised law unto themselves — have flatly refused such arguments in the past.

The trial itself and the subsequent failed appeal were also flawed. The judges ignored evidence that might well have brought an acquittal in the Australian courts, or other properly independent jurisdictions.

The Singapore judges ignored evidence that the arresting and investigating police had themselves broken the law by denying Nguyen Australian consular support before he was interrogated, and had failed to secure the evidentiary drugs that showed significant and unexplained variations when weighed at different times. No action was taken against a senior police officer who gave contradictory testimony.

The trial judge also brushed aside a compelling defence argument that mandatory death sentences — which have helped create a world's-worst-practice of 400 people executed in Singapore since the early 1990s — are a violation of international human rights standards.

Singapore's mandatory sentencing regime also meant no consideration could be given to mitigating circumstances or the character of the defendant. And there was plenty that should have been heard.

Born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised by a struggling single mother in Melbourne, Nguyen was not a drug addict, a drug trader or even an avaricious "mule" for a drug syndicate. Naive and desperate, he was pressured into making the trip to Cambodia to repay substantial debts owed by his twin brother to loan sharks. Nguyen and his family were threatened before he left Australia.

In the end, Singapore's uncompromising policy on mandatory sentencing made a conviction virtually inevitable, but last week's failure of the petition for a presidential pardon — Nguyen's last lifeline — has raised more disturbing issues.

While the Federal Government gave strenuous support to the application for a pardon, including a personal plea by Howard to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong during a visit to Singapore earlier this year, Canberra's increasing ambivalence about capital punishment surely undermined the credibility of its argument.

What is left of principle when one day Australia's Government cheers the death penalty for Bali bombers, on another its police assist in sending accused drug runners to face the death penalty abroad and the next it tries to argue against a hanging on humanitarian grounds?

The refusal of a pardon to Nguyen, dictated by the Singapore cabinet, now stands as a stinging diplomatic rebuff to Howard personally and Australia as a whole. And this from a nation that is supposed to be our best friend in South-East Asia and the neighbour with which we have the strongest strategic, commercial and personal links.

The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister now solemnly shake their heads and lament there is nothing more that can be done. But there is plenty that can be done by Australians who believe state-sanctioned killing — however odious the crime — has no place in a civilised society.

They can boycott Singapore-owned companies such as Optus and Singapore Airlines, they can take their shopping holidays elsewhere, they can protest against the thousands of Singapore military who train on Australian soil and they can start flying to Europe via Bangkok — not a bad idea when a visit to the transit lounge at Changi Airport can finish in a cell at Changi prison.

Mark Baker is opinion editor. He was Asia editor, based in Singapore, from 2001 to 2004 and reported the arrest and trial of Nguyen Tuong Van.

(Lifted wholesale and unedited from The Age without express permission. If you are from The Age and would like me to remove this article, please write me. All credit should go to The Age.)

what's the hype all about?

hmm. apparently the martyn see documentary abt CSJ isn't very good in the documentary-sense. but oh well, it's only 105mb.

Singapore Rebel Download

in other news, candle has an Exco Exposé now!

"If i should ever walk in the valley of essays, no mindblock would I fear, You are there to get my As."

losing touch?

do you feel like reality is somewhere there, just beyond your fingertips, a slight hairline away from your grasp? do you feel like somewhere outside of your knowledge, something is moving ahead in an unknown direction while leaving you behind, stuck in a strangely abject loneliness that you don't even understand? does it sometimes seem like you exist only because you believe so, and that your significance hinges on that leap of faith?

well, you're not really alone la.

you just need to get re-introduced to your Ruling Elite.

but of course, you can also get introduced to your Average Cock-Talker.

life's a peachy peach: as long as you don't realise it's just a prune.

it seems i may have been mistaken...

have Singaporeans really been apathetic?
Big-O [justin's recommendation!] says it slightly differently...

WHY SO QUIET $INGAPORE?

maybe we havn't been apathetic, but silenced.
maybe we havn't been politically inactive, but neutered.
maybe we havn't been opinionless, but disenchanted.
maybe it isn't what we are, but what they did.

of course, it could also be that most of the happy robots around me are simply brought up to be PAP sycophants, but that's probably just me and my overactive imagination la.

WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN [oh, really.]

yep, my new fave. mwahaha. even talks raunchy on the main page too!

bye Dr. Chee, bye!

pardon the rather crude pun, but if even TalkingCock.com wouldn't dare rub shoulders with the Singapore Rebel, how is the deluded population ever going to know what he truly stands for?

if i have a link to the trailer of the banned political film Singapore Rebel, would you take a look? it's only 6MB - plus i'm risking the ISD's wrath here! ISA rules, you know.

and for those of you out there who still don't know who Dr. Chee Soon Juan is, read up. he may be the next fallen hero along the likes of Joshua Benjamin 'JBJ' Jeyaretnam [more here] or Chia 'Exiled to Sentosa' Thye Poh [more here], so don't wave him off by pointing to your pockets when he asks where is the money, but see him as who he is: a Singaporean.

also, see what LHL has been up to at LHL Watch.

"Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
John 8:32

read more la.

"Cruel Irony Defined: A PAP Minister who takes home SGD100,000-SGD175,000 PER MONTH in tax dollars telling a worker (who earns SGD2,000 a month) to be "less choosy" and to work harder."

where is social activism in singapore?
Singapore Review (Yahoo! Group)

it's not non-existent. you just need to look for it.

on another note, perhaps you'd like to try out my survey! haha...
Readership of Alternative News Media

for others, here's a little something from God:
A Lamp Unto My Feet

rush of thought

floating around in my thoughts makes the passing of time seem so tranquil... and yet i need to anchor myself for the sake of pragmatism.

on the dear pope's death - a number of questions:

1. why didn't he retire? yes, his predecessors have never done it before; yes, he's a stubborn conservative. but he also knew that his health was deteriorating rapidly (cue Parkinson's), that he had the authority to resign even if it would be unprecedented, and that had he retired (and allowed himself to be nurtured back to health) his utter talent in doctrinal studies could continue to be used for the benefit of his congregation worldwide. yet he chose to die in office 'as Peter did.'
2. does this constitute excessive zeal? in a sense, he had committed karochi - working oneself to death. worse... could he have been somewhat an egoist, attempting to follow tradition for the sake of his reputation? (i must stay in office until i die, if not i might be branded a 'bad' pope.) was it not for the pride of his position that he chose to remain pope till he choked?
3. what function does this tradition of 'working to death' serve? is a pope only considered 'great' when he exhibits the 'extraordinary courage' to serve his office till his last breath? is this not a (rather pointlessly) romanticised notion, possibly serving no function? are not those who wish to watch their leader serve, even in ill health, till they die, guilty of promulgating a needlessly cruel tradition? is this not a form of sadism-masochism?
4. one named function of this tradition is, ironically, the global unity in praying for the papal crisis, and the worldwide mourning for his funeral. sensationalism of his ill health and death had the effect of committing thousands of catholics from every nation to unite in prayer. this can't be bad, can it? assuming the pope knew of this phenomenon, could it be said that he wanted a sensational death? is adhering to this oddest of odd traditions for such a result morally acceptable (especially by the church's standards)?
5. given this train of thought, could anyone really say "God has called his servant back to his fold" when, i) the pope was confirmed to be suffering from Parkinson's 4 years ago, back in 2001; ii) various groups did call for the pope's voluntary retirement and/or setting a term limit for popes; and iii) Parkinson's could be treated (although not cured, and is certainly not abated by constant travelling) to some extent, and his life (along with his great contributions) could be extended? are not his various health scares prior to the 2001 diagnosis of Parkinson's also interpretable as "God telling his servant to take it easy?"
6. or perhaps... dying in office is better than prolonging a sickly life? after all, he did go without too much of a fuss, and the Vatican repeatedly assured us that "he was peaceful." indeed, our dear pope may already have heard the news of his death during his prayer... and was already prepared to work up to it. after all, who among us is to say when death will arrive but God? how dare i question the pope's God-inspired choice? this, i fear, will only lead to the next question - which part of this decision was made by a) the pope, b) God, and c) society/media/church?

what is the meaning of one such death? how should we interpret this?

on another note, we definitely should not let his death obscure this great man's achievements over his 26-year reign in Vatican. not to be cheesy or anything, but do take a look at a summary of his life's work at wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. the (lengthy) official list of accomplishments on the Vatican home page is another great tribute to his inspiring life.

he is truly a man to be honored. few could boast of a life more fully lived than his. thank you, holy father, for sharing your life with us. may you rest in peace and continue praying for all mankind in the company of the angels.