Watching the World
Personal Visits—Outdated?
Why did American-style television evangelism never develop in Japan? Mr. Kenji Ishii of the Agency for Cultural Affairs told Awake! that Japan’s broadcasters don’t allow programs that solicit funds or propagate unscientific teachings on the air. However, religious organizations have found ways to outwit such restrictions. Many depend on videos, communications satellites, computer networks, and fax machines to propagate their faith. For some, such a technological ministry has eclipsed the personal visits that preachers used in Bible times and that Jehovah’s Witnesses use with great success in Japan today. “We have realized that making personal visits, our traditional missionary style, has become quite out of fashion,” said the publicity officer of a six-million-member lay Buddhist organization. “This is commercialization of religion,” said Mr. Ishii on the use of fax machines to offer prayers. “Religious groups are just cashing in on the trend of the time.”
Abortion Trips
Laws are often no more successful than religion at stemming the grim tide of abortion. In 1989 a law was passed in the Republic of Ireland that restricted the publishing of information on how and where to get an abortion; magazines, for instance, had to drop advertisements for abortion clinics. Nonetheless, more and more Irish women travel to England and Wales for abortions. According to the Irish Times of Dublin, 981 women made such trips in the first three months of 1989. For the same period in 1990, the number rose to 1,027. In British-controlled Northern Ireland, the 1967 law that permits abortions in England does not apply, so the Ulster Pregnancy Association refers over a thousand women a year to British abortion clinics.
Swords Into Plowshares—How?
“The problem is, how do you destroy a piece of equipment specifically designed to resist destruction?” asks The Wall Street Journal. In line with an arms-control treaty, the Soviet Union faces the task of getting rid of some 40,000 tanks. Suggested solutions to disable the tanks have included detonating explosives placed within them, dropping them from a height to disable them, and dumping them—minus their oil, paint, and hydraulic fluid—in the ocean. Even considered was an idea to convert them to such civilian uses as heavy tractors and fire engines, but such a “slow-moving, gas-guzzling behemoth” was determined to be impractical. Highly favored is a plan to build furnaces that could melt down the tanks and make use of the scrap metal. Since the technology has yet to be developed, long trainloads of tanks were shipped “eastward over the Urals into depots beyond the reach of the treaty’s timetables and its requirement that tanks be cut and exploded.”
Wool Glut
Australia’s sheep ranchers, who provide 70 percent of the wool used in the world’s clothing, have suddenly found themselves with too many sheep. About 20 million too many, reports the Sunday Correspondent of London, England. With the price of sheep plunging to as low as five cents per head, ranchers are spending more on the bullets to slaughter sheep than the sheep are worth. Why the plummeting demand for wool? The Correspondent gives three reasons: The crisis in the Persian Gulf has halted trade with Arab nations; world demilitarization has reduced the need for military uniforms, which are commonly made of wool; and global warming has reduced the need for warm wool clothing.
Gay Parents
Early in 1991, Newsweek magazine reported that there are seven million children in the United States who live with a homosexual parent and the parent’s lover of the same sex. According to some studies, most of these parents are Lesbians, many of whom choose to have a child by artificial insemination. Some experts even feel that the United States is experiencing a ‘Lesbian baby boom.’ One publishing house has targeted such audiences for children’s books. A new book for children from two to six years of age is about a boy who sometimes lives with his father and his father’s male lover. A book for those from three to eight years of age is about a girl with “two mommies.” The books are designed to convince children that such families are normal and that homosexuality is “just one more kind of love.”
India’s Plastic Boom
Large credit-card companies are beginning to wear down the reluctance to borrow money that has long marked India’s middle class. Asiaweek magazine reports that although only 400,000 credit cards are in use in India, more and more members of the economic middle class, which numbers some 150 million, are “yielding to the idea of living for today and letting tomorrow take care of itself.” Thus, some Indian bankers are optimistic about the future. As one told Asiaweek: “If the expansion and growth proceeds as planned, India will become the world’s No. 2 credit-card market by the end of the century—second only to the U.S.”
French Youths and Suicide
Suicide is now second only to auto accidents as a cause of death among French youths. The Paris newspaper Le Figaro reports that within the last two decades, France has seen a 130-percent increase in suicides among young men from 15 to 25 years of age and a 35-percent increase among women in the same age group. Only 3 percent of these suicides are attributed to some kind of serious mental illness. In the great majority of youthful suicide attempts, there is no sincere desire for death but, rather, a desperate, sometimes fatal, longing for help. Experts attribute the growing despair among today’s youths to family breakdown, materialism, and the daily degradation of social and spiritual values.
Early Motherhood
“One of every seven children born in the Americas is the child of an adolescent mother, a total of 2.5 million babies each year,” according to a North American study commented on in O Estado de S. Paulo, a Brazilian newspaper. Brazil is in first place with 601,023 babies born to teenage mothers, Mexico is second with 498,277, and the United States is third with 430,389. The high figures surprised the authors of the study, who had expected that the social and economic changes over the last 25 years would have reduced teenage pregnancies. What about solutions? The study recommended giving youths incentives to stay in school longer, improving the status of women, and promoting virginity until marriage.
Married Priests
Recently, Pope John Paul II authorized the ordination of two married Brazilian priests. “The new priests signed documents in which they promised not to maintain sexual relations with their wives,” reports the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. According to the newspaper, Aloísio Lorscheider, cardinal of Fortaleza, considers “the ordination of married men a solution to the lack of priests.” The cardinal also lashed out against the church’s celibacy requirement. “According to Dom Aloísio, celibacy is an ‘anachronistic’ institution that has no Biblical basis,” says Veja magazine. “Celibacy was not created by the Holy Scriptures and, therefore, is not something that cannot be rejected.” The Vatican, however, continues to prefer celibate priests.
Restitution?
According to the National Catholic Reporter, the government of Newfoundland has promised to make financial restitution to the victims of childhood sexual abuse at the Mount Cashel orphanage. In 1975 the police first investigated charges that some of the “Christian Brothers” who operated the orphanage were physically and sexually abusing the boys there. The investigation was dropped, and no arrests were made after two of those accused agreed to leave Newfoundland and three others left the orphanage. In 1989, however, the investigation was reopened; eight “Christian Brothers” now stand accused of child abuse. (See Awake! of November 8, 1990, page 31.) Attorney General Paul Dicks declared that the government failed in its duty to protect the abused orphans and will make restitution where appropriate. He insisted, though, that the primary responsibility to make amends lies with the “Christian Brothers” and their employers.
Spending on Children
In Latin America, of the 30 million abandoned children from 6 to 15 years of age, some 2,000 die every day from malnutrition or violence, reports Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. But according to UNICEF president James Grant, the money the world spends on fighting children’s diseases and hunger worldwide is “equivalent to the amount spent each year on [advertising] by United States cigarette companies.” UNICEF projects that $2,500,000,000 must be spent this decade to educate the public about children’s problems. Grant notes that the world spends more than that each day on arms and that North American consumers spend more than that each year to feed their pets.