Life After Death

C. P. Blacker and Julian Huxley. "Abortion is integral to the current dominant population control ideology, and IPPF remains one of the four main agencies providing aid for abortion ... IPPF's 'safe motherhood' policy includes the ever wider availability of what it calls 'safe and legal abortion' for all, including adolescents. It lobbies aggressively for abortion law reform from Ireland to Poland, from Latin America to the Philippines. It seeks universal acceptance of the planned parenthood ideology on the pretext of meeting what are called 'unmet family planning needs'. Everywhere throughout the world where IPPF has been at work the results are the same: more contraception, more sterilisation and more chemical and surgical abortion." Rev. Dr John Berry The American Experience In 1995, on arriving for his fourth pastoral visit to the United States, Pope John Paul II once again laid down the markers for Christian-liberal engagement - and ran into predictably heavy criticism. His message was one of personal responsibility. He urged Americans not to turn their backs on the rest of the world and to fulfil what he described as its "heavy responsibilities" to be a "model of a democratic society at an advanced stage of development". This, he insisted, would not happen if America became "less sensitive, less caring towards the poor, the weak, the strange and the needy". In reality, contemporary American society is a grossly disordered and violent society. USA Today, at the end of 1995, conducted a telephone survey of 1,000 11-17 year-olds and personal interviews with 120 seven to ten year-olds. They found that over two-thirds of them worried about getting shot or stabbed. 40% of 14-17 year-old girls claimed to know someone in their age group who had been hit or beaten by a boyfriend. Of 11 and 12 year-olds, at least one in five knew someone their age in a gang; 10% knew someone who had a gun; and 12% knew someone who had been the victim of physical abuse by an adult. The Director of America's Children Now, Lois Salisbury, commented on the findings: "My fear was nuclear war ... but that bomb never went off. These kids fear violence and harm. And those bombs are going off all around them." In his book America (1988), Jean Beaudrillard says that the real purpose of Disneyland is to obscure the fact that all of America is the "true" Disneyland. Indeed, the unreality, the illusion and the violence so characteristic of American television and film culture has become the essence of Western popular culture. Civic society is radically affected by it.

Reality and Fantasy Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis argue in The Unreality Industry (1989) that the deliberate creation of unreality is one of the most important forces shaping contemporary culture. Things unreal, people unreal, and behaviour unreal, have become a standard point of reference. As the flickering box has replaced the hearth as the centre of our family and individual lives, it has shaped opinion and outlook.

Mitroff and Bennis say of America :"We have empowered TV to become one of