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.
August 23, 2009 - 2:19 a.m.
Surprise, I'm writing a second entry today. Technically it is not the same day but it is less than 12 hours since I updated. Why am I doing that? I'm going out tomorrow morning and probably tomorrow night so my other choice was waiting 36 hours.
I've been busy for seven days in a row.
Saturday – Lisa's Wedding
Sunday – Met game
Monday – Anthony da Costa
Tuesday – Amy Speace
Wednesday – Mets vs Braves
Thursday – Friction Farm then Sometymes Why
Friday – Piñataland with Deni Bonet
Tonight I'll write about what I've been thinking, not what I did.
The other day I started talking about how without controlled experiments and real statistics we can't judge by our gut feelings, we are all too biased and this affects the health care debate.
We all hear about the nuts talking about death panels and coming to the town meetings packing heat. The real danger though is people, especially seniors are afraid that they aren't going to get every procedure that they want. The thing is they shouldn't. None of us should. Every procedure has a cost, not just economic but to our health. They entail risks. When you get a mammogram, you expose yourself to x-rays. Drugs have side effects. Surgery has bigger side effects. Sometimes it is worth the risk, other times it isn't. The decision whether or not to undergo a procedure should be based on facts, on how it affects the prognosis. That means measuring its efficacy. That should be the test. Mammograms are questionable, especially in younger women. Colonoscopy is a proven life saver. People don't feel comfortable with that. They don't internalize empirical evidence. They feel better knowing that they are doing something. That's the problem. The families of doctors are healthier than the general population even when socio-economic factors are taken into account. That fits our preconceptions. What doesn't is that they get less medical attention than the rest of us. Doctors know that things get better by themselves and doing less is often better than doing more. Patients don't want to hear that. The other factor is that doctors get paid for doing things, not for not doing things. Changing how doctors are compensated would go a long way to making us healthier for less money. Doctors don't have to be paid less, they have to be paid for keeping us healthy, not for doing procedures. I heard a doctor on NPR explaining how in a day she saw eight patients. Seven with chronic problems like diabetes and asthma. She examined them and gave them advice. The eighth had an ingrown toenail that she cut out. She spent the same time with each patient but made more money off the toenail than the other seven combined. That's counter-productive. I loved the way she put it. Doctors should be paid to think, not just to do things.
Are you willing to not be able to get an MRI even when it isn't likely to help if that's the price of everyone getting vital health care? I am, I wish everyone was. Get every child vaccinated and every mother pre-natal care. That's the first place the money should go.
Now on to something completely different. If I started a religion what would the moral code look like. Let's start with the Ten Commandments and see which ones would pass muster. I'm going to use the Jewish version because, well I'm a Jewish atheist and that's the version I'm used to.
- I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
- Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
- Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.
- Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
- Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long.
- Thou shalt not kill.
- Thou shalt not commit adultery.
- Thou shalt not steal.
- Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
- Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.
1-4 gotta go. They are all about god saying "Look at me! I'm the best! Pay attention to me!" It's unbecoming.
5. A good start but I have issues with it. It's been used to often by parents to dominate children. It's too asymmetric. How about.
Care for your children when they are young, your parents when they are old, and your family when they need you.
That works better for me.
6. I'm all against murder and that's actually a better translation. I'll keep it.
7. I'm against adultery too but I'm not so sure I want to elevate it to the foundation of all morality.
8. Let's keep the rule against stealing.
9, Perjury is another strange one to make the top sin list. It's wrong, but how many people actually do it? I'll keep it for now.
10. Coveting is a thought. Actions need to be policed not thoughts. We really can't help what we covet so it goes.
How do I fill in the gaps? Who says the number of commandments should equal the number of fingers on our hands? Having ten should not be a priority. I'm not going to worry about it.
I'm also not going to work out a whole moral structure in one entry. I'm just going to put in one important element; respect. I’m not saying it is the most important thing. I'm not saying it is the key to everything. I'm saying it goes a long way to making the world a better place. We should treat each other with respect. The hard part is it means treating people we don't think deserve respect, with respect. When you run into some idiot making trouble it doesn't do any good to say, "you're a troublemaking idiot." I'm not saying we shouldn’t stop them. I'm saying that we should do it while treating them with the maximum amount of dignity that doesn’t interfere with stopping them. When having a disagreement with someone that you feel is totally unreasonable, then don't try and reason with them but don't become unreasonable yourself.
So that's my moral lesson for the day. This is one of those entries that ran a lot better in my head. Oh well. I think you get the idea, that's what matters.
Lockout! - August 28, 2009
Playing God (How about James Earl Jones in the role?) - August 27, 2009
Pensees - August 26, 2009
Jews and Canadian Health Care - August 25, 2009
The True Story - August 24, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile August 23, 2009
