I have heard the story that a young boy met an old Christian Scientist lady. The lady asked the boy, “I have not seen your father for many days. Is he not coming to the meetings of our group?”

The boy said, “He’s sick, he’s in his bed.”

The old woman said, “Nonsense, this is just mind. You just tell your father that he is only thinking he is sick: ‘Just think you are healthy. Think positively that you are healthy. Get out of your bed, be positive. Don’t fall into negativity, this is our whole philosophy: positive thinking.’”

After three or four days, the boy meets the old woman again in the market and the old woman says, “What happened? Did you manage to convey the message to your father?”

He said, “Now my father thinks he’s dead. And not only my father; everybody thinks he is no more in the house, he is in his grave!”

The misery in Ethiopia is real, objectively real, and these sympathies are not going to help. They are simply keeping people starving, dying. And it is better to die instantly rather than to wait and suffer all kinds of torture that this hungry man is bound to suffer.

This is a thing to be understood, that a normally healthy man can live without food for ninety days, then he will die. Now, making these people suffer for ninety days does not seem to be compassionate. To me it is more compassionate that they are given injections so they go into eternal sleep. And anyway, the soul does not die, so what is the problem? All these religions believe that the soul does not die, so what is the problem?

Communists believe that when you die, everything dies. Then, too, there is no problem. I don’t see a problem from any side. And if Ethiopia is not there, who bothers? What has Ethiopia contributed to the world?

Do I understand you correctly; that you say nobody should do anything about Ethiopia?

I am saying either do: that means stop piling nuclear weapons, that is my first alternative. If you are really sympathetic toward dying people, then why are you creating weapons for death? That is simple hypocrisy – stop! If you are really concerned with dying people, then whatsoever is happening in Ethiopia is nothing to what has happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In those few moments, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have suffered as much as one can suffer in the Christian hell. You have now seven hundred times more nuclear weapons than there were available at the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they go on piling up.