I was out at a city park today to play some racquetball. While taking a break, I noticed four guys playing handball nearby. They were playing a hard-fought game. But wait a minute! What is that tobacco-y smell? Why, it's tobacco! Two of the handball players were smoking cigarettes (the coffin nails were actually in…
One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a
Cheshire cat in a tree.
‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then,’ said the cat,’ it doesn’t matter.’
Lewis Carrol: Alice in Wonderland
One thing fundamentalists have that many of us lack is a well-practiced response to why they exist and what life is all about. Their response goes something like this: “I am here to serve Jesus Christ so that I can join Him in heaven. How do I serve him? I follow these Ten Commandments.”
Pretty slick, eh? The entire purpose of a human life boiled down to ten seconds.
What about the rest of us? What would we say if someone asked us for our “purpose”? Would we even claim to have “a purpose.” If forced to answer, many of us might say that we’re “trying to get by” or that we’re simply “doing the best we can” or that we try to follow the golden rule. But most of us don’t have anything resembling the simplistic formula of fundamentalists. At first glance, that fundamentalist formula makes fundamentalists look decisive, strong and admirable. This succinct certitude probably gains lots of converts among the many people who join up. In reality, though, such a simple statement of purpose serves only as a mere placeholder that raises (or should raise) hundreds of questions among honest and thoughtful people.
I haven’t worked out any succinct statement regarding …
The mainstream media missed another big story recently: The President has been screwing around with our Constitution and the nation's largest association of lawyers has called him on it. On August 8, 2006, American Bar Association, a national association of 410,000 lawyers, condemned President Bush's widespread practice of writing exceptions to…
OK, so ten years ago I had this idea of writing a short story about a high school attended by praying mantises. The prom was coming up and many of the boy mantises were nervous. Actually all of them except for a reticent bespectacled boy mantis named George who had…
About 20 years ago, I became frustrated that, because of long hours spent at the office, I was not able to read as much as I would like. After all, there were thousands of good books out there that I had never read. To add insult to injury, my memory recall was poor regarding many of the classic books I had previously read. For instance, I had read The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye, but could I intelligently describe the plots and characters of these books? Not without rereading them.
It occurred to me that I was reading books at the rate of only about one book every three months. If I lived 50 more years, reading four books per year, I would be dead after reading only 200 more books. That seemed to be an exceedingly gloomy prospect given that the culture I inhabit is continually bursting with new and interesting information.
No, I wasn’t under the delusion that I would ever be able to know everything. I realized that it would be impossible for any one person (probably for any group of 1000 people) to to have detailed knowledge rivaling that contained in any large library. Rather, I was seeking a basic working knowledge of many of the basic fields of study taught in most universities. I didn’t want to embarass myself in a group that started discussing well-known literature and basic principles from scientific fields such as biology, physics and anthropology. I felt …