A certain famous soap opera opened every day by intoning “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” It’s a clever enough notion and even made for a funny moment in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” when it’s uttered by Socrates, but it often seems to me like there’s better […]
Have you ever tried to imagine a world without evil? One of the things that gets in the way is that you first have to define just what evil is, and that is a very slippery thing indeed.
Does evil require intention? One of the things I was taught as a young Catholic was […]
The winter Olympics are going and I’m not watching. Not for any reason having to do with the Olympics, I’m just not set up to watch TV in my house and I’m not interested enough to find alternate means. But the Olympics have gotten me to thinking about competitions in general, and so […]
A good friend of mine read what God and I discussed last time about how we find ways to mark out special birthdays in our lives and wondered about the way we mark out special days during the year. I decided that was an interesting enough area that I took some time out to […]
Any ritual that’s been around since before we were born seems like it’s always been and will always be, yet they come and go, they change without us ever really seeing it. Birthdays can be a good occasion to see this in action. Birthdays lend themselves to rituals, both big and small. […]
In the movie “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying” Robert Morse sings about how we are all part of the great big brotherhood of man, and ignoring the inherent sexism of that lyric, he’s right. This is why God got thoroughly upset with me this week when I happened to mention the […]
God and I got into one of those rambling conversations today. The kind that seems to wander from subject to subject following a vein but attaching anything and everything to that vein in an attempt to just keep things moving and to score rhetorical points along the way. It’s the kind of conversation […]
Language is very important to me. At its most basic this is because I want to be understood when I speak or write; at its more specific this is because I’m a writer and therefore language is my tool of choice and it’s always good to master the tools you use a lot. […]
How low can a man go? Well in North America it appears to be 282 feet below sea level. That’s the elevation of Badwater Basin in Death Valley, California.
I mention this because I went there this week. I’ve lived my whole life within a few hundred miles of this famous location and […]
It’s a new year, but it’s also just another day. Time is a continuum. Our lives are not neatly divided into discrete segments, be they the years of the calendar, the acts of a drama, or the moments that make up a dull day.
But we like measurable units. We like to take […]
So here it is, Christmas Day. We’ve made it past Hanukah, rounded the curve of the solstice and are gearing up for New Year’s. Happy holidays indeed.
For those that celebrate.
And that should be you. Not because some mythical messiah needed to have a birthday party that isn’t actually on the day he […]
Well, it’s a week to Christmas. It’s past time for me to complain about how early some stores put up their decorations or start playing the music of the season. It’s even past time to gripe about yet another version of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol.
But it is time to talk about nostalgia. […]
I don’t have any of the specific statistics in front of me right now, but over the last few years I’ve read some reports about the various things in which people believe. One of the things that’s stuck with me is that there is a definite tendency to believe more in things that we […]
It’s gift-giving season. That’s mostly due to Christmas and Hanukah, but there’s certainly other holidays and birthdays and such, so if you don’t want to seem religious but do want to get in on the gift giving and getting, well, you can probably find some excuse.
One of the things that some people (people with […]
Well, in my last posting I talked and talked and went on and on about minority characters in the movies. And yet with all I wrote and with all the talking that I did with God before writing it, there was a big point that I wanted to say and never got around to.
One […]
I’ve been reading, of late, a bit of the online ramblings of Steve Barnes. Steve is a talented Science Fiction writer who often talks about how the world looks from a black perspective. There’s things that are wrong about the world that are unique to each particular minority’s perspective and there’s things about […]
Spending a lot of time with God, the temptation is to ask a lot of questions. Especially questions that don’t lend themselves to easy answers. Of course, we’ve all been told how God feels about people that give in to temptation.
It is somewhat interesting though, to think about the different classes of questions […]
Another political defeat this week. The citizens of Maine essentially vetoed their legislature’s decision to allow gay couples to marry. Bigots all over the country have been celebrating this temporary rollback of inalienable rights.
You’d think a state that gets so much of its money from the sale of shellfish would be able to […]
It’s nearly Halloween. Just one more day. God and I were talking about some of the traditions and we quickly moved on from trick or treating to other things. One thing that God said to me in particular was that humans like to be scared.
Let me clarify that a bit, because the […]
One of the big aims of Christianity is to try and convince us that there is life after death and that if we live our pre-deaths well that our post-deaths will be good. To put that in their terminology: if we live lives substantially without sin, and then seek forgiveness for what sins we […]
One of the big tenets of Western religion is monotheism. There is only one god. Now the pagans that the Christians were trying to convert were into many gods. They had a god of the trees and a god of the lake and a god of the mountain and on and on. […]
God told me today I shouldn’t be be angry at the political conservatives, I should feel sorry for them. I mean, sure they’re doing their best to fight against the very-Christian idea of universal health care, and sure they’re doing their best to make sure that myself and other homosexuals not only won’t be […]
I’ve often wondered what a religion would be if it did not involve God. Religions clearly fill some sort of need in the human psyche or else they wouldn’t be so pervasive. So if their were no God, and we didn’t invent God, what would take the place of religion?
Well, here’s the thing, […]
I had lunch this week at Panda Express. While eating I noticed a plaque on the wall that proclaimed their mission statement. Their mission is to “Deliver exceptional Asian dining experiences by building an organization where people are inspired to better their lives.”
Leaving aside the notion of fortune cookies as a means to […]
I try to be funny. I suppose the funny thing is how often I’m merely trying. I’ve discussed before how most humor is based on distress or pain. I tried to demonstrate this to God today with this poor rendition of an old joke about the difference between tragedy and comedy. […]
The furor this week is all about healthcare. President Obama had the temerity to make his case before a joint session of congress which certainly served to fan the flames of a debate that was settling down to just embers. Of course, having no one better to talk this over with than God, […]
I talked last December about how Disney, at Disneyland, had managed to carve out a space where people felt okay wearing silly hats. Sure the hats are almost universally ones sold there in the park, a kind of approved niche of silly that makes it okay, but still, it’s a start.
Well this is one […]
I gained a certain new respect for the Disney Imagineers on my recent trip to London. It was a simple thing and one that I probably would have gotten a lot sooner if I had grown up someplace else. See, I’m from Los Angeles, which is itself in a semi-arid zone and which […]
Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglorious Basterds opens today. At the risk of spoiling it, at least to some extent, I’ll mention that it’s somewhat of an “alternate history” film. That is, that while it is based on events that actually, historically, happened, it does deviate from pure history in at least one rather notable […]
Larry Niven likes to say that people talk in first draft. It’s a way of pointing out that we make mistakes, we stop and start, we change our minds mid-sentence, and ultimately don’t express ourselves as eloquently as we could. It’s a good point, suggesting that live communication is a work in progress […]
We all fall into routines. We can’t help it, we’re wired for it. The big thing that starts it all going is the need to eat. If we push it we can get by with eating only once a day; I’m not saying that it’s good for us but just pointing it […]