LANDMINES OF THE MIND

1500 ASSERTIONS, SURMISES, QUESTIONS 1 In a single male ejaculation, there are some 100 million sperm cells. Since each cell carries a slightly different genetic makeup and would result in a different person, every human being who ever lived won the lottery of life at odds of 100 million to one. And yet people often complain of having bad luck. *** 2 As far as the Christian ecumenical movement is concerned, God is most definitely not in the details. *** 3 Assumptions are second-hand, cheaply bought certitudes; they are unearned truths. *** 4 The trouble with Christianity is that it made the Bible even longer. *** 5 “Give me liberty or give me death!” said Patrick Henry, who owned slaves. The operative word here is “me.” *** 6 To generalize is to take leave of one’s senses. *** 7 Love is, at first, not seeing some things and, later, overlooking some things. *** 8 So many religions out there! Religious affiliation is a lottery ticket. The winning ticket, if there is one, will be announced in the hereafter, if it exists. *** 9 Modern science has shed much light on the physical realm, even as it has secularized the Western world. We have consequently found our bearings and lost our destination. *** 10 If young people should be seen and not heard, old people should be heard and not seen. *** 11 It is strange that no Protestant, Jew, Mohammedan, atheist or agnostic has ever had a vision of the Virgin Mary, especially as these unbelievers need her graceful intercession much more than do the faithful children of her Church. *** 12 Statements like “You are beautiful!” and “I really love you!” are entrance fees. *** 13 Since we do not know the cause-and-effect relationships in almost all circumstances, ideology, hating an intellectual vacuum, presumes to rush in with a factitious answer. *** 14 The manner in which most people park their cars in driveways and parking lots—head first in—reveals Freud’s “pleasure principle” in action, the favoring of “now” over “later.” *** 15 An optimist must be either naïve or callous—oblivious of others’ suffering or indifferent to it. *** 16 Blessed are the fortunate, for they have inherited the earth. *** 17 The soul, which is alleged by many to look eagerly to the hereafter, would actually be quite content to spend eternity in this world, were it not dragged by the body to the exit door and urged by religion to go through cheerfully. *** 18 The essence of the Postmodernist vision is the extended, systematic application of one line of Shakespeare’s: “The wish is father to the thought.” *** 19 Yes, God did become man, but then we took him hostage and made him do our bidding. *** 20 Laissez faire economists maintain that, left alone, the market corrects itself, rather as water finds its own level. But we continually tamper with the water level when we build canal locks, water towers, and dams in order to have a better life. *** 21 Who says that we are never as alone as when we die? Thanks to modern medicine, we are accompanied out by a panel of doctors who will not let us die before they have administered various exit examinations. *** 22 “Realists” say that all individuals and nations act only out of self interest. The “realists” are wrong because they do not take account of the difficulty people have in ascertaining their self interest and, even more, in acting in accord with what they ascertain. *** 23 Because we are not flowers or jaguars or birds of paradise, we have to change our appearance every day. *** 24 Progress is not what it used to be. *** 25 By giving the Israelites a past, story-telling gave them a future. *** 26 Humankind does not deserve itself. *** 27 Literature offers the Platonic Ideas of human beings—Oedipus, Falstaff, Anna Karenina, etc. *** 28 Torah, Gospel, Koran—rumors about Eternity. *** 29 “Free Will” is a concept invoked when a person is lectured to about overcoming his obsession by someone who happens never to have had the obsession. *** 30 The First Amendment trumps the First Commandment. *** 31 The smoke detector is one of the very few inventions in history that has no drawbacks. *** 32 Don Quixote, King Lear, Sherlock Holmes: Men who never existed involved in actions that never took place are treated as objects of veneration. Why may not the same be true of God and his agents? *** 33 The future is indecipherable because it does not exist. The past at least existed. *** 34 There would be no drive for social justice without personal ambition as fuel. *** 35 Man, said Aristotle, by nature desires to know; meaning, to generalize. *** 36 Religion is for most people like reaching the Home Path in Parcheesi. *** 37 The paranoid anti-Semites are correct: There is an international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. It is called Christianity. *** 38 If women were not necessary for reproduction—if men did not have mothers, sisters, wives, daughters—their status would be somewhere between slaves and domestic animals. *** 39 Modernity accumulates. *** 40 God is necessary for an explanation of the design of the universe and the meaning of life; Satan is necessary to account for the disruption of design and meaning (aka the problem of evil). God is the sacred cow and Satan is the scapegoat. *** 41 Somewhere someone constructed a calendar into which we step effortlessly every morning just the way many of us effortlessly put our feet into a well-fitting pair of trousers which someone somewhere constructed. *** 42 What conservatives cannot understand—or will not accept—is that the Welfare State, to which they object, is like the insurance industry, to which they do not object: Those who are lucky transfer a little money they really do not need to those who are unlucky and really need it. *** 43 Christianity absconded with the Hebrew Bible and reinterpreted it in an un-Judaic way. How ironic that Islam in turn did the same to the Christian Bible. Or is it rather that God changed his mind once again? *** 44 Words govern people, and by words people govern. *** 45 Curious how, according to Christianity in its first 1500 years, people who never heard of Jesus are damned anyway for not accepting him as their redeemer. Unbaptized Christian infants too. *** 46 Free will has never been scientifically established; it is invisible and unfathomable; even the Bible is ambiguous on it. Yet without it, people would be mere puppets, divine justice would vanish, human justice collapse. *** 47 Why is everyone one step to the right of me reactionary or fanatic and one step to the left of me radical or heretic? *** 48 Jews have been the subject of opprobrium because, first, through Moses and Jesus, they inflicted ethical monotheism on an unwilling public, and then, just as the public became used to puritanical religion, they, through Marx and Freud, took it away. *** 49 The Ptolemaic Hypothesis—that all heavenly bodies revolve around the earth—is a beautiful metaphor for human self-centeredness. *** 50 People blithely speak of “The Bible,” as in “The Bible says” or “The Bible prohibits.” But there is no “Bible”! There are only interpretations of the “Bible”—the Judaic interpretation, the Catholic one, the Protestant, the Islamic.