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.
2002-01-10 - 1:25 a.m.
I better start with this or I'll forget it again. I'm deputizing you, my loyal readers, as my dieting buddies. I don't pay too much attention to specific diets but I do pay attention to the psychology of dieting and of motivation in general. One thing that helps when you are dieting is to weigh yourself every day. I've started to do that. Another thing that motivates people to do anything that takes determination is to make a public declaration that they are going to do it. I'm going to combine these two and every day post my weight.
Today I weighed 173 lbs. I would like my weight down to at most 165 lbs, maybe 160. This won't be exciting to watch. I know from experience that I'll probably lose one or two pounds a week. That doesn't seem like much but I managed to go from 240 lbs down to 160 at that rate once. I don't want to have to go through that again though so I'm trying to nip this weight gain in the bud.
When checking my sitemeter today I found I had three hits from the Savant Society, a message board. It seems that people there were discussing my poem about traffic that I had included in one of my diary entries. Someone on the board had received it in an email. I'm wondering how that whole chain got started. Speaking of sitemeter; yesterday I wrote one of my most vacuous entries and I had my best ratings of the week. Go figure.
I wasn't sure if I was going to mention this but I will. I have a date tomorrow. It is someone I met at a dating website. I am nervous about it. I haven't had a date in a long time. Wish me luck. I'm actually more worried about whether I'll like her than if she'll like me. I always think of myself as being rejected, which I am, but there are really very few women that I could be seriously interested in.
I had another boring day today where my only outside activity was seeing my father. He really needs the visits when he is in dialysis to help him pass the time.
I haven't ranted in a while and I have a couple that I want to talk about. The first is political and I'll keep it short. There is an investigation starting now about the Enron Corporation. A short time ago they were the seventh largest corporation in the country, now they are bankrupt. The 401K plans of the employees are wiped out; they were invested in the company's stock. What happened to the people who ran the company? They made billions. They sold off the stock right before it came out that the company was worthless. This stinks to high heaven. To make things really interesting, Enron was one of the biggest backers of President Bush. The Whitehouse is now filled with former Enron executives. How did Enron get away with this? They had special laws passed so they wouldn't have to go through the scrutiny most public stocks go through. The Republicans considered them the model company, the one that all others should copy. It shows how little they know about economics and how powerful the influence of money is in politics. I wish the story would get more attention. This is a scandal that involved Billions of dollars and yet it doesn't receive a tenth of the attention of Whitewater. The conservatives complain about a liberal media but in reality it tilts far to the right.
The other rant is subtler. There are no villains. In Ann Landers this morning there was a reprint of a column written by the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, former president of the University of Notre Dame. It was updated by David Gaus of the Tulane University Medical School. The piece is titled An Answer to an Anti-Semite. It said that to be consistent and Anti-Semite should refuse all medical treatments discovered by Jews, and it listed a great many of them. As an aside, one caught my attention, I never knew that Dr Crohn, the discoverer of Crohn's disease which as you know I suffer from was Jewish. I always thought it a curious name, now I wonder if it is a corruption of Cohn.
So what is there for me to complain about? I'm certainly not for Anti-Semitism. The problem is that people in an ethnic group shouldn't be judged by others in the group, they are individuals. We shouldn't get credit or blame for what people who happen to share an ethnic heritage with did. What if someone made a list of evil Jews, are we supposed to then weight the relative merits of the two lists and judge all Jews accordingly? That would be absurd. It is what I have always had against the ethnic pride movements. Your background is not something to be proud or ashamed of. I'm not saying that it doesn't affect who you are. I'm an atheist who goes out of his way to break religious traditions but I know so much of my behavior has been influenced by my being Jewish. It's not just liking Halvah and going to the movies on Christmas. It influenced the way I talk, my sense of humor, and yes, the way I think. What it doesn't do is make me good or bad though. It doesn't make me the same as everyone else who is Jewish. If you think I'm a good person great. If you think I'm a creep, that's your right. It has nothing to do with my being Jewish though.
If we want to fight Racism, Anti-Semitism, xenophobia, in all its guises we need to fight the mindset of judging people by their ethnicity regardless of whether the prejudices are positive or negative.
I know I've gone off on similar themes before but it was really on my mind today.
Now I'm off to bed and I have to get up and get ready for my date in the morning. It's at 11 AM. I think it's best if I keep my rants to a minimum on the date. I should be OK as long as she doesn't defend something really outrageous like the designated hitter.
I almost forgot my LOTR update. I'm up to The Uruk-Hai in book III. This has always been one of my favorite exchanges; I think it was close to Tolkien's heart.
'Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?'
'A man may do both,' said Aragorn. 'For not we but those who come after us will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!"
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 2002-01-10
