Ice cream and ego

Maybe I've been a bit slow latching on to this, but it seems that Ben & Jerry's ice cream are weighing in to support the gay marriage cause in the UK.  The company have decided that their "Oh! My! Apple Pie!" flavour will be known as "Apple-y Ever After" in the UK and that the tub will display a pic of a wedding cake adorned with rainbow stripes and topped with two groom figures.

This is just part of a whole lobbying campaign in support of the redefinition of marriage, which includes placing contact information and a pro forma letter for contacting your MP on the Ben & Jerry website.  They have even launched a facebook app in partnership with Stonewall which enables you to "marry" someone of the same sex.  You can find out more over at Sisters of the Gospel of Life (thank you Sisters), who also point out that Ben & Jerry's have previously been involved in a gay marriage campaign in Vermont and are supporters of Planned Parenthood.

Oh well, another thing off the treat list.  I just hope Haagen-Daaz don't follow suit!

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On another note, I came across the following in my current spiritual reading and it struck me as a pretty good description of how we human beings see ourselves these days when it comes to deciding on the value and meaning of human life...

"ON THE HUMAN 'I'.

"God alone has the right properly to say 'I', and to look at everything as it regards Himself, to be Himself the rule, the measure, and the centre of all things; because God alone exists of Himself, and everything else exists only by His will, and for Him, has no value whatever but the value He gives it, and considered by itself, is nothing, is worth nothing, and deserves nothing."

Except, we're not God...

The author is Fr Jean Nicolas Grou and he is writing in the 18th century, the period of the so-called "Enlightenment" when we began to focus on the "real/true" as being the empirically or logically provable.  We started to see ourselves as self-determining; biological entities with rational minds, the rational part having supremacy over the biological and the latter being seen as mere "matter" with no inherent moral status or meaning, to be "used" as best fits our purposes.  Fr Grou could not have foreseen exactly how far we would take that attitude using 21st century technology, but he does write,

"If we could once annihilate the human 'I', all crimes would disappear from the face of the earth, all men would live with each other like brothers, sharing their possessions without envy, helping each other in all their necessities, and each one of them looking upon his neighbour as a second self."

Amen!