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.
2002-09-07 - 6:08 p.m.
I’ve been reading more lately. I almost wrote that I’ve been forcing myself to read more but that’s not true. Reading isn’t a chore. I’m not reading because it will make me a better person. I’m reading because it’s fun. I just needed to stop being lazy. Right now I’m reading The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould. It is a collection of his essays originally published in Natural History magazine. It is one of the three finest series of science essays it has ever been my pleasure to read. The others were Asimov’s series in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games in Scientific American. I read all three in both the magazine and in the collections. I never got a chance to ask him but I think that Asimov’s style influenced Gould’s. Both would never start out writing on the topic of the essay. They would begin with some sort of personal anecdote or observation then segue into the main topic. You might have noticed that I tend to do the same thing. This wasn’t a conscious decision on my part; I picked it up by osmosis. The book I just finished was Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven. It led to this line of thought.
I feel cheated! The day after my twelfth birthday the first men landed on the moon. Over the next few years there were more trips to the moon. Then that was it. It was over. By now I expected us to have a permanent colony on the moon and to have reached Mars. I was sure that I’d go to the moon some day. I figured if I didn’t it would just be a matter of expense, the reason that I haven’t been to Europe. We were promised that. Children’s books told us that You Will Go To The Moon. What happened? Where did the spirit of exploration go?
I find it hard to write a defense of space exploration. In all honesty I don’t have rational reasons for wanting a space program. I don’t feel the need for one. It is good in and of itself. Going to the moon made me happy. It made lots of people happy. I can’t really think of anything since then that had a similar effect. Everyone was united not over some tragedy but over a triumph. We had fulfilled one of mans most enduring dreams.
I’m sure in the future we’ll get back to the business of exploring space. It is a basic part of human nature. That is why man has spread from Africa to every continent. It is why people could settle the Pacific Islands in canoes. Somewhere deep inside us we know that there is nothing as desirable as what lies over that next hill.
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 2002-09-07
