With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
2003-01-06 - 10:16 p.m.
I was thinking about something that Gella said to me years ago. We had had an argument and she said that she expected me to be the adult in the situation, she was still a teenager at the time. I was even then older than dirt. The thing is she was right, not about what we were arguing over but about me being the adult. It doesn’t even have to do with our relative ages. I should always try to act like an adult when there is friction with somebody. I try to but I don’t always succeed. I do better than I would if I didn’t make the conscious effort though. My natural reaction is to rant or pout till I get my way. That really doesn’t accomplish very much though.
Some time ago I was around some people who really needed to learn that lesson. They are a couple and neither one of them would take the role of the adult in the relationship. Ideally they both would, I mean they are both adults. When neither one does that spells trouble. It becomes about winning and getting people on your side not about resolving the conflict. As I’ve often said, there are things you just have to learn to put with in order to deal with people. There are things that they have to learn to put up with to deal with you.
You can take this too far though. There was one friend I had that I put up with far too much. She took advantage of my need for closeness. I don’t do it consciously but I think that somewhere inside of me is a karma-meter. Usually it just swings this way and that and balances out in the end. With her it got so out of whack that I couldn’t take it anymore. When it finally happened I ended up resented her for costing me a friendship as much as anything else.
I’ve heard people say that they can’t understand how people stay in abusive relationships. I can. It’s about being the fear of not being in the relationship. It becomes something of inherent value no matter how it had soured.
I can’t believe I covered so much that was on my mind in so short a place. I think this is one of those cases that it only makes sense to me because I know exactly what I’m talking about.
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile 2003-01-06
