| To the editor:
Regarding the death of singer Amy Winehouse
Amy Winehouse's public decent into the primitive abyss of promiscuous sex, profanity and drugs is a reflection of a society that, as her last album title betrays, has gone "Back to Black". This is due largely to the one-sidedness of the Enlightenment and a certain hedonism that has given rise to autonomy and anti-authoritarianism. Today's world view takes a very dogmatic posture that excludes interventions of God in the world. People feel a need for spirituality but are unwilling to sacrifice anything for it. As a result religion has become for the masses something that exists in the subjective sphere where objective dogmatic contents do not bind us. Spirituality is little more than the individual affirming himself.
But living according to one's own claims and criterion is a false recipe for life. The refusal of suffering and creatureliness, and a lack of being held to a standard are ultimately the refusal of love itself, and that ruins man. It is precisely in allowing himself to be pruned that man is enabled to mature and bear good fruit.
In this new "dark age", the intimate link between freedom and truth has been obscured in the minds and hearts of some, and eclipsed in those of others. We all need to set out on the mountainous path to the good where we will discover more and more the beauty that lies in the efforts demanded by truth.
Paul Kokoski, Hamilton, Ont., CA
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