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.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
September 28, 2009 - 6:13 p.m.
This is the Yom Kippur edition of Wise Madness. I am violating Jewish law by simply writing it. That doesn't bother me in the least. Last night I had my traditional Yom Kippur dinner, a ham steak. OK, I don't have that specifically and I don't always do it but I eat tref more often than not.
Yom Kippur is the holiest day in the Jewish calendar but it is one that never held any meaning to me. It is too tied up in the parts of Judaism I totally reject, god. Sure I don't believe in the story of the Exodus but at least it's about an alleged historic event. It's about the Jewish people. Chanukah is based on event, some of which actually happened. I can celebrate them. Yom Kippur is about something I don't believe in judging based on laws I don't accept. Any atoning I need to do is to people, not god. Blame Pete Townsend. I always think of him this time of year.
I don't need to fight,I'm not trying to offend anyone and I'm not really making a statement. I'm certainly not trying to change the minds of my religious friends. That is never going to work. What I do hope for though is to make my agnostic and atheists friends feel less guilty if they don't follow the Yom Kippur proscriptions. They can think, "well at least I'm not like Gordon eating ham." I do have friends who have started working on the high holy days and stopped fasting. Oh, did I mention that I taught today? I'm a bad Jew but a very devout atheist.
To prove I'm right.
I don't need to be forgiven.
Speaking of school I had my first banging my head against the wall day. Over the weekend I assigned my afternoon class their first word problem homework. This is always the most difficult thing for the students to learn. It takes a lot of practice to learn it. They know they have trouble with it. So what happened? The vast majority of the students didn't even attempt the homework. The semester just started three weeks ago and they are already slacking off. I did what I told them I'd do. I collected the home work and I'm counting it as a quiz. I combine all the quizzes into one test. I will count this as getting four questions wrong. Anyone who made an effort will get four questions right.
The reason I'm updating now instead of during my break is that I was busy getting my final attendance ready. Yes I said, final attendance. My school has an odd notion of final. Because I had so many roster changes I couldn't just see who was missing each day and put them in my spread sheet. I had to enter each students attendance or not individually. It took well over an hour.
Now I’m home and I'll have chicken for dinner. I can't have ham every day. Oh speaking of the ham. I tried something new last night. I added mustard to the glaze. That was good. Next time I'm going to replace the honey with maple syrup. That sounds interesting.
Now for something completely different and very neuro. Lena is flying back the US and out of nowhere El Al is asking $1640 one way. That's far more than she's paid before. She is very picky about her airlines and was trying to figure out another way to get here I played around on Expedia and found a way for her to fly here, using only El Al, for $854, a savings of almost 50%. How? First she flies from Tel Aviv to Athens one way. She spends a night in Athens Then she flies from Athens to New York, via Tel Aviv. Yes she gets on the very same flight that would cost $1640 if she wasn't transferring from a plane from Athens. El Al works in mysterious ways.
A Tale Told by an Idiot - October 03, 2009
EZ-Pass - October 02, 2009
Bridge but not the Throg's Neck - October 01, 2009
A Lovell Playing Field - September 30, 2009
I see the Throgs Neck Bridge - September 29, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile September 28, 2009
