Posted on 05/03/2007 8:31:02 AM PDT by varyouga
It’s a rehash of the same story that’s been floating around the net for five or six years. It’s an urban legend.
lol well you can eat bear....
I was just about to post this, too, from snopes.com.
I certainly hope it is only a horrible urban legend.
— JoeRepublic
http://www.ciu.edu/library/document/booklist.pdf
In six pages of elegant, deadpan prose, the master of 18th century satire sets forth an ingenious solution to alleviate the Irish famine: poor people should dismember and eat their babies. “A young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.” Swift’s intention, of course, is to shock his readers out of their moral turpitude: by pushing the ethics of utilitarianism to an absurd but logical extreme, he shows how civilized people may become barbarians when they divorce reason from God’s moral law. In the prism of this masterful satire we can see the ruthless rationale proposed by Nazi leaders for a “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem. We may also gain a better understanding of the long-term implications of our own society’s pragmatic justification for abortion-on-demand and deadly harvesting of human embryos for their “spare parts.” The terrible irony is that in cannibalizing its young to satisfy short-term gratification, a civilization effectively commits suicide. Sadly, today we must acknowledge that Swift was a prophet.
I meant Johnathan Swift - sorry
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