Posted on 12/19/2006 9:50:31 AM PST by Alex Murphy
WASHINGTON – A growing number of religious groups are taking a stand against the bottling of water, stating the practice is immoral because water is a God-given resource that should not be packaged and sold, the Chicago Tribune reported recently in an article analyzing the trend.
Cassandra Carmichael, director of eco-justice programs for the National Council of Churches, said in the story that privatization takes away water from those who cannot afford it and added that water "should be free for all."
In October, the National Coalition of American Nuns, a group representing 1,200 Roman Catholic nuns in the US, adopted a resolution asking members to refrain from purchasing bottled water unless necessary, the report noted.
Meanwhile, Presbyterians for Restoring Creation, a grassroots coalition within the US Presbyterian Church, launched a campaign last spring urging individuals to sign a pledge against drinking bottled water and to take the message to their churches, according to the article.
Stephen Kay, spokesman for the International Bottled Water Association, said bottled water is a minimal user of groundwater compared to the hundreds of other products that draw water, adding that campaigns against bottled water will not lead to long-term solutions in impoverished areas, according to the article.
To read the full article, click here.
I say we let these loony leftists pretending to be Christians practice what they preach - in some place like Turkey. Let them drink the tap water there for a few days - if they end up with cases of dysentery similar to what I saw in Navy shipmates who refused to follow advice and drank the local water, they'd never drink anything that didn't come out of a bottle again.
Oh, you can trust the nuns alright ...
If their order once wore a traditional dress/veil type habit, and now just wears frumpy 'civilian' clothes, you can trust them to be barely Christian leftist new-age lunatics.
If the still wear their traditional habit (which doesn't always include a veil, particularly in orders that were formed in Latin America), you can pretty much trust them to be Catholic.
Check out the NCAN website ... it's all frumpy dresses.
Thanks for the tip. Although my mother's beloved old Catholic girls' high school (now for younger kids, co-ed) was run by nuns who now don't don the habit (well, there're only a few of them too). And they're still a great school.
You shouldn't avoid bottled water because of that.
You should avoid it because it is a waste of money. It's usually nothing more than tap water costing 1000% more than if you turn on your faucet.
But if someone wants to blow their money on nasty, stale, plastic-tasting water to promote an image, that's THEIR business.
There are exceptions, of course ... I propose that only as a general rule.
OMG!
"The Board of the National Coalition of American Nuns commends the Daughters of Charity of the Emmitsburg Province on their stance to bar the use of commercially bottled water in their community and within the health care institutions under their stewardship"
EMMITSBURG? In my own state? (Well, not THAT shocking since we're so damned liberal.)
This is the home of the 1st American Saint, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, and the home of a religious shrine for Mary.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Bingo.
Let the plastic bottles sit unused very long and you'll have plastic outgassing into your water. It's nasty.
"Evian" spelled backwards is still ...
[beep] silly thing to worry about.
I can't vouch for the truth of the following claim, but I have heard that if the money spent on bottled water in the US were instead spent on improving public water works, the quality of water from the tap would exceed the quality of any bottled water with the exception of distilled bottled water.
If that is true, there's an economic argument to be made based on the efficient allocation of resources and that argument is completely independent of any claim about the moral justice or injustice of the over-all affordability or unaffordability of bottled water.
They could logically extend this to work as well. After all, God gives us our strength and talents and when we sell our skills or expertise to the highest bidder, aren't we depriving those who may have need of them but can afford to pay us nothing?
"Well I'm just caught between Scylla & Charybdis here. If I drink bottled water, I'm on the team with elitist gym rats. If I don't drink bottled water, I'm on the team with these nutbergers. Bartender? Could I get a Bud light please? Draft not bottle, I'm doing my part to save the planet."
Do what I do, fill up the bottle with tap water. My opposition to bottled water: it's a waste of money, especially when you have perfectly good tasting tap water. My wife drinks the stuff, however, and then I recycle the bottles with tap water for when I'm out working in the yard.
Our priest leaves a bottle on the alter next to him in case his throat gets dry during mass.
I did do that for a while. Where I live, the tap water is fine, but I work in DC and the city tap water is seriously vile-tasting, and in fact the city has advised people not to drink it at times. Once was enough for me, and I started "smuggling" it in in used bottles from Virginia. Where I work now, we have filtered water so I'm okay.
"You should avoid it because it is a waste of money. It's usually nothing more than tap water costing 1000% more than if you turn on your faucet."
That depends. There's no legal restriction on what counts as "Spring Water" -- it could be from a spring that's used to dump pig dung or a spring on land owned by a lead mining company, and hence there's no consistency in the content of bottled "Spring Water" and no minimal gaurantee regarding its purity.
But one can't sell something as "distilled water" unless it is in fact water collected from a distillation process. And distilled water is both uniformly pure -- no two bottles of distilled water differ in their contents, and as pure as water gets. Distilled water far surpasses the quality of tap water as measured both by levels of organic and inorganic compounds as well as by clarity and taste.
It's also usually the cheapest kind of bottled water you can find, perhaps because it's usually sold in bulk -- from 2.5 gallon or 10 liter containers on up, or perhaps because from a marketing point of view "Distilled Water" sounds generic and common, and far less sexy and chick than the competition, or perhaps because people don't understand what distilled water is -- even though it's the kind of thing that's usually covered in HS science courses.
Peace.
Good thing we have such brave men and women out there fighting to protect us from those evil, unscrupulous Dihydrogen Monoxide marketers. What greater threat to human liberty currently exists on the planet?
"This is the United, not Diverse, States of America."
There's no contradiction between being united and being diverse. There's always _some_ kind of diversity in any group, but lots of groups manage to be united nonetheless.
The word "United" as it appears in the phrase "United States of America" is used in contrast to "Separate" or "Independent" as antonyms and in contrast to "Associated" or "Aligned" as weaker adjectives.
To get a contrast with "diverse" this would have to be the "Uniform States of America" or the "Homogenous States of America or something along those lines. And to contrast with ethnic, racial or religious diversity this would have to be the "WASP States of America" or the "Christian States of America" or something like that. But of course, that isn't who we are and it isn't something we'll ever so much as pretend we want to be.
Sigs are often emotive, not descriptive. But if you're going to use your sig to state a claim you might reconsider and pick a true claim in place of the one you're using now.
Peace.
Sorry. The Left encourages "diversity" because they know full well it pits groups against one another, fomenting a situation they can exploit for votes and dollars.
"Diversity" has always been a scam.
"A growing number of religious groups are taking a stand against the bottling of water, stating the practice is immoral because water is a God-given resource that should not be packaged and sold"
I agree with the rest of you that this is a bad argument -- embarrassingly bad. But there can be bad arguments for true conclusions, so don't dismiss the issue just because someone is making a silly argument.
There are economic arguments to the effect that money spent on bottled water is an inefficient use of resources. It's not a moral argument. Sure, the premise might be false, but it's the kind of thing that's hard to know without looking a little deeper at the facts -- deeper than I have the time or inclination to go right now, in which the only reasonable thing I can do is keep an open mind.
YMMV but I hope not.
Peace.
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