Cancer Society Cancer Society ADVERTISING Sending the wrong nutritional message It is time for the American Cancer Society to walk the talk at the Relay For Life. I attended the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life event in Waimea this
Cancer Society
Sending the wrong nutritional message
It is time for the American Cancer Society to walk the talk at the Relay For Life.
I attended the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life event in Waimea this weekend and was again overwhelmed by the number of unhealthy foods that were for sale to raise money for ACS. The logo for the event is “celebrate, remember and fight back.” WHT had an excellent article on Saturday describing studies that show the benefit of a healthy lifestyle, including diet and exercise, on cancer survival. Let’s encourage the event organizers to use the opportunity to walk the talk and give guidelines to teams on what can be sold at the event and to award points to those teams selling the healthiest foods. It is a very simple way to put into practice the message that is supposed to be conveyed. Selling unhealthy food to support cancer prevention and treatment is a contradiction. We need to shift the paradigm from just talking about behavior change to leading the way by example. Obesity is now the second leading cause of death in America and the association between obesity and cancer is very strong. Let’s fight back by doing the right thing at every opportunity.
Vivienne Aronowitz
Waimea
Electric cars
A cost comparison
I hope the county is happy with its purchase of the Chevy Volt. According to TrueCar.com, the Chevy Volt takes 27 years for payback versus the gas engine equivalent of the Chevy Cruze.
Armand Wohl
Kailua-Kona
Response
Secular humanism is not a religion
In a letter to the editor dated April 25, C. Moore, reacting to someone else’s letter, mentioned the phrase, secular humanism. The writer referred to secular humanism as a religion. Although the word religion can be used to describe almost any activity, it does not apply to secular humanism.
Secular means outside of the institutional church or temple or mosque or whatever. That person does not attend church. Humanism, a description of an ethic, came to the fore in the 14th and 15th centuries. Scholars of that time “discovered” the classical writings of Greece and Rome, which writings reflected a humane approach to life.
Humanists put themselves above the mundane in life, certainly, the violence that was daily fare. As was written of Erasmus of Rotterdam, perhaps the greatest humanist of them all, “He put his faith in education, enlightened discussion, and gradual moral improvement. Mildness, reasonableness, tolerance, restraint, scholarly understanding, a love of peace, a critical and reforming zeal which hating nobody, worked through trying to make people think, a subdued and controlled tone from which shouting or bad temper were always excluded — such were the Erasmian virtues.” Erasmus was a Christian humanist, not a secular humanist.
Secular humanists, though “unchurched,” probably are law-abiding citizens who are cautious about the extremists in our country, who respond to the needs of their neighbor and who are good, moral people. They are generous in giving for the needs of victims in times of natural disasters. They are partially, if not totally, Erasmian. Anti-God? Some may be, but I would guess the vast majority are ripe to think beyond themselves. That’s where we Christians have to be missionaries.
Rev. David P. Coon
Waimea
