Our friend Jim Wilson sent this to me and I am sharing it with you. jg

On Hell

A while back I was conversing with a Christian friend who was outraged that Evangelist Rob Bell declared, in his most recent book, Love Wins:

“It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief (in hell as conscious, eternal torment) is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.”

He was outraged because for him hell is very much a real place, and by implying that it is not, my friend feels that Bell is really undermining an important and biblically supported piece of Christian Doctrine.

As a response, I stated that I agree with him that the bible, does support the concept of a hell, but it is for this reason (and many others) I find the bible to be morally and logically absurd and repugnant.   Additionally, I said that the fact that Mr. Bell is inclined to reject this is a reflection of how divisive religions are and how much they tend to fragment. Also it is a reflection of the fact that Christianity as a whole is under pressure to adapt the norms and morals of our post-enlightenment era, just as it has had to adapt to a heliocentric solar system, evolution, the germ theory of disease ect.  I have heard it said, and agree that “Christianity has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th/21st century.” and I’m glad it no longer burns witches or tortures heretics.  For a religion that is still in need of dragging see Islam and certain sects of Mormonism.

At this point my friend pointed out that it is his belief that the eternal punishment of people in Hell “is necessary for people who reject  Christ’s atonement for their sin.”

My question for Christians, then is Why should that even be necessary?:   If this God is truly the all -powerful, all-knowing all-benevolent being of love he is claimed to be, he should be able to forgive everyone with out a brutal blood sacrifice. After all, nothing is too much for a God that is all powerful, all-knowing, and all-benevolent. The messed up thing about this theology is that this God created us such that in his eyes we are worthy of nothing but eternal torment in a place worse than anything the Nazis ever created. That’s important. If we are all wretched sinners it is because either:

A. He created us as such (& punishes us for it)

Or

B. He created us with the full knowledge and intention that we would become such (and punishes us for it, which is just as bad as A).

Either way hell is simply God’s way of punishing us for being the way he created us (which is insanely immoral). But it gets more messed up, the God of Christian theology has decided that to prevent himself from punishing some subset of people this way, he would have come down in human form, and in a disturbing piece of theater allow humans to brutally murder him.  This way HE could act as the blood sacrifice HE demands in exchange for His own forgiveness.  That is of course forgiveness for being the way HE created us.  The catch of course, is that the only way you can obtain this forgiveness is by setting aside your ability to think critically and be willing to accept that such a wild, bloody, immoral and nonsensical story is true.

That’s the scary thing.  This God’s decide who gets sent to this eternal torment he created not on the basis of the quality of our character but on what we happen to believe at the time we die (which is a rather trivial thing to judge someone on).  Christians can argue that God has a right to judge us however he likes, and they’ve got a bit of a point.  If he exists I can stop him from judging me, but that doesn’t make it in anyway just. It certainly doesn’t justify sending me to a torture chamber forever. If an earthly dictator did this he would rightfully be declared a tyrant and a monster.  Why then is it something praiseworthy that a God would do it?

The following was shared with me yesterday and I thought it was worth passing along to you. Apparently, our neighbors to the north have a somewhat critical view of U.S. What caught my attention is the similarity between the Canadian perspective and us liberals.

(Oh, Jason, I do hope to continue our Lessons of History discussion but can’t for the next several days.) jg

Thanks for sharing this with your network.
I’ve said many times that Canada’s health care system is not perfect (and never will be) but is is very good, very responsive to the widest population…and it is critical to how Canadians define themselves. A a national health care system, what Canada offers is far better than the ‘system’ in the US.

Canada’s health care system is based on the notion that health care is an important test of a ‘caring society’ (in the US they use the term ‘socialism’ for this but these US folks are simply ignorant) and, therefore, a critical set of health care services should be provided to all… irrespective of social status and income levels. Looking at it another way, Canada offers a ‘capitalist economy’ but is smart enough to realize that in a capitalist economy not everyone will be wealthy…an obvious situation given how capitalists love to exploit the exploitable. Canada also understands that effective capitalist must be balanced by an effective social safety net and health care is likely the most critical element of this social safety net.

Of course, the folks in the US decry the Canadian health system for the primary reason that the Canadian system ‘shows up’ the shortcomings of the US system. It continues to surprise me that even though a large portion of the US population are (i) either not yet covered by effective health care or (ii) are covered based on extortionately high premiums or (iii) live on the priviledged edge because their employers cover their premiums….that these folks continue to vote against their self interest by voting against any kind of effective health care system. So, Americans get what they vote for and the rest of the world looks on stupified. Talk about voting against your self interest or being ignorantly doctrinaire.  You also get Canadians calling you stupid. Remember, the Canadian health care is also much cheaper to deliver than that in the US.

Of course, there are many in the US who are terribly upset that Canada continues to deliver a national government-coordinated health care system and these folk are doing everything they can to undermine it. Some of these are ‘big money corporations’ that would make MORE money on sick people in Canada ‘if only Canada would get with it and disavow its socialist health care program’. These people cannot see the problems, or even the evil, of the US system. They criticize Canada’s system using silly and anti-intellectual slogans such as ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ and try to justify their case by pointing to a few Canadians with money who head to the US to get the immediate and coddled care the US system gladly provides to the wealthy. All this while turning a blind eye to the greater number of Americans who enter Canada to get quality, considerate and ‘income-blind’ medical care. I call these US critics of Canada’s system selfish, mean and even evil because they see nothing good about the role of government in providing healthcare for those unable to pay their way. Many of these selfish folks, by the way, live off government bailouts and other subsidized government services (read police, emergency services, etc.).

In this note, I’ve said all I should. I do not want to spend any more time trying to educate folks in the US since I’ve come to the view that evidence does not matter in current US discourse. The US is a society that exhalts ignorance. Yesterday, I had to turn off CNN because it opted to carry Sarah Palin’s speech live. Can you believe that? All you need in the US are more ‘intellectuals’ stumping the country with the argument that you have a debt problem and the way to solve it is to (i) refuse to increase taxes on the wealthy (ii)  surreptitiously tax the poor and middle income people with ‘user fees’, (iii) erode the social safety net, (iv) reduce sensible regulation of the business community, (v) elect more republicans, and (vi) trust in the Lord (whatever this means). By the way, add to this list the exacerbation of the racial and religious divides.

I no longer care what the electorate in the US does…even though US decisions affect the quality of my life in Canada. It is too painful, even stressfull, to witness US arrogance and stupidity. Let the US voters line up to shop at the cheapest store stocked with Chinese-made products in the belief this will improve US economic performance. Let the voters vote to return to power those who screwed the US economy by giving big business an unregulated hand…and let the voters punish leaders who fail to immediately repair the problem. Let the voters elect those who believe it is brilliant economic stewardship to chop, reduce and slash and still expect households to have money to spend and reinflate the economy. Let the voters act to reduce expenditures on health care and education and then stand back and see what kind of society emerges. Let the voters continue to buy into the notion that the wealthy should not have some of their income redistributed. Let the voters continue to build more jails and see what kind of security this provides. Let the voters continue to take pride in brandishing the latests firearms in the expectation that this leads to a secure society.

For it is the voters who are ultimately responsible for the political leaders that are elected. Stupid voters beget stupid politicians beget a sad country. Pity….

TM

Ya’ll know that I have accused the Republicans in general and the Tea Party in particular of failing Americans because they are ideologically blinded to the lessons of history. And now, Jason and I are engaged in an epoch discussion of the causes of recession (depression) and recovery.

I favor massive government spending while Jason says it’s all about monetary policy. I too think it’s about monetary policy, just not ALL about monetary policy. Let me explain.

A vibrant economy, one that is sustainable and benefits the poor and middle class at least as much as the rich, cannot happen until there is a lot of money in circulation. A lot of money in circulation requires someone to spend a lot.

I admit that this analogy is an oversimplification, but it serves to get our minds around the central issue. Our economy is like a three-legged stool. If one leg is removed, the stool collapses. We have three main economic engines: (1) government, (2) business, and (3) consumers. If one engine stops spending, the economy stalls. If two engines stop spending, the economy declines into recession. If all three stop spending, we experience the Great Depression all over again, with 25% of the U.S. workforce unable to find any employment and another 25% unable to find full-time employment.

The root cause of the Great Depression was similar to the cause of the Great Recession of 2007-2008. In 1929, the Stock Market bubble burst. In 2007, the Housing Market bubble burst. Too much personal debt. Too much unregulated financial manipulation on Wall Street.

When Franklin Roosevelt came to power in 1933, the nation’s economic situation was dire. He set the government on a spending spree, enacting public policies that put the unemployed to work, just as Obama could do now if even a few Republican congressmen could see the light.

By spring of 1937, business production and profits were back to their 1929 levels. So were wages. And unemployment had been cut in half. At this critical point, conservatives talked FDR into cutting these productive programs in order to balance the budget and reduce the national debt. Sound familiar?

To make matters even worse, the Federal Reserve, fearing inflation, tightened the money supply in 1936. By mid-1937, the American economy was in freefall. Consumer confidence, which had been improving, fell to new lows. No one, not the government, not business, and certainly not the average American, was spending on anything they didn’t absolutely need for survival. Unemployment jumped from 5 million to 12 million almost overnight.

To his credit, FDR understood that massive federal government borrowing and spending was the only way out. And yes, the national debt rose dramatically, to the chagrin of conservative Republicans. Sound familiar?

What got the U.S. out of the Great Depression? Massive government borrowing and spending starting in 1939. In the years just prior, businesses didn’t have customers because consumers were afraid to spend. Suddenly, in 1939 (and through 1945), businesses lucked out and discovered one gigantic consumer: Uncle Sam, who was beginning to transition America to a war economy.

Given this dramatic lesson of history, I fail to understand why Jason doesn’t see that, once again, massive government spending, (this time on modernizing infrastructure and making the U.S. energy efficient and independent) along with sound monetary policy is the path to general prosperity. jg

As we all know, Rush Limbaugh is a right-wing windbag who won’t acknowledge simple truths even when they are respectfully offered with supporting evidence. His followers, including my idiot brother, are as adverse to critical thinking as any religious nut. To wit:

Listen to this from El Rushbo’s radio show.

jg

As most of you know, I suggested to Jason that he read The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. For one thing, I thought it would give him some insight into why I disagree with his free market libertarianism. But this little book has many useful lessons and is worthwhile for many reasons. The following is the beginning of the discussion about the value of history between Jason and me. Feel free to comment. jg

Jason to Jim. Chapter 1: “Hesitations”

The authors start out with a citation of the problems of the

historian, mostly that our knowledge of history must always be

incomplete and imperfect. This is true, and they are to be admired for

citing it. However, they omit citing an even greater danger in the

study of history. That danger is in believing that the past, if it

were perfectly known, can adequately predict the future. The word some

use for this danger is “historicism”, which I regard as jargon and

will therefore avoid using further.

 

To illustrate my point: There was nothing in the thousands of years of

the history of human civilization in the year 1750, even if it were

completely and perfectly known, that would have suggested that by the

year 1900 chattel slavery would be almost completely, and apparently

permanently, eradicated from the face of the Earth. People owning

other people as property had been a very well documented feature of

human civilization for thousands of years of recorded history to that

point, and there was no reason to suspect that would ever change. But

it did change, because our ideas changed.

 

Our future will be determined by our ideas, not by our past – whether

our past be known or unknown.

 

That said, it has also been noted that while history does not exactly

repeat itself, it often rhymes. There are patterns we can learn from

and thereby improve upon, which is presumably the purpose of this

book. That is a purpose I can agree with. The authors state it more or

less explicitly in the “Growth and Decay” chapter. To learn from these

patterns requires not only an understanding of the facts of history

but good explanations for them as well. For example, in regard to

economics the authors note that in settled societies even initially

equal wealth begins to concentrate – a fact. One explanation for this

fact is that it is God’s will. Another explanation, which the authors

give, is that human productive ability is not evenly distributed, thus

some can produce (and accumulate) more than others. I think you’ll

agree that the second explanation is better than the first. The key

thing to understand is that the stated facts themselves do not “prove”

either explanation.

 

An explanation may only be refuted by facts to the extent that it

makes predictions which are counterfactual. This is one reason why “it

is God’s will” is a bad explanation – it makes no predictions which

facts could refute. “It is human nature” and “it has always been so”

are nearly equally bad explanations. Not that the Durants rely on such

explanations to a great extent, but when they do I will be looking for

a better one.

 

Jim to Jason. I think the Durants do well to warn us against the over-reliance on history to predict the future. This is NOT to say history has no value. Henry Ford once famously said, “History is bunk.” I think we ignore the lessons of history at our peril. But we also are imperiled if we take all written histories at face value.

 

Historians, like everyone else, have their agendas. The first biographies of Abraham Lincoln following his assassination painted a portrait of the president as a deeply religious man, a Christian who prayed to Jesus for strength. Years later, Lincoln’s best friend and former law partner set the record straight in a biography that sold poorly. Few people wanted the truth.

 

Similarly, Christian historians have forever exaggerated, manipulated, omitted, stretched, hidden, misinterpreted, and outright falsified what few facts we have about the life of Jesus. All Christian historians, including the gospel authors, had an agenda, and objective truth was not a high priority. They were lobbyists for Jesus and wrote their histories as if they were Christ’s personal public relations firm.

 

Today, we know that no one can know what Jesus said or did. The historical truth has been lost in the fog of antiquity. But Christians would rather believe the lies.

 

Much history is written to influence the future. For example, most histories of the United States prior to 1960 were the histories of white men in general and Anglo Protestants in particular. If these early U.S histories mentioned African-Americans, Native Americans, or Roman Catholics at all, it was usually in a derogatory manner. This historical selectivity kept African-Americans and Native Americans ignorant of their own histories and perpetuated and reinforced white, Protestant power.

 

The histories of wars are written by the victors, who are anything but unbiased. German accounts of the Second World War are considerably different than Russian accounts. Accounts of the Vietnam War differ vary greatly depending on whether you read the Vietnamese version or the American version.

 

Different political groups periodically attempt to re-write their country’s history for political gain. The Tea Party embraces pseudo-historian David Barton who claims that America’s Founding Fathers were devout Christians who founded a Christian nation. This fake history serves to buttress the conservative’s claim that the Constitutional Principle of Separation of Church & State is a liberal lie intended to keep the conservative’s God out of laws and public policies.

 

None of this is to say we cannot learn from history in an effort to avoid the mistakes of the past. For example, regarding our current economic difficulties, the Republican Party has decided that the way out of recession and high-unemployment is austerity. Anyone who understands the lessons of the Great Depression knows that cutting back on government spending during such times will result in deeper and longer recession, higher unemployment, declining stock and housing prices, higher government deficits, and greater misery all around.

 

As the Durants point out, if history repeats itself, it’s because human nature doesn’t change. It seems to be in our nature to ignore the most objective lessons of history and continue to make the mistakes of the past. jg

A week ago or so, I mentioned that I had started reading Dr. J. Anderson Thomson’s new book Why We Believe In God(s). This little book is written in layman language and offers powerful scientific explanations for why most people are religious. Belief is a by-product of other evolutionary adaptations.

Back in the old days when anon 2 and other Christian apologists were posting comments here, they claimed that while atheists could be good without god, without faith it is too easy to abandon one’s moral principles. In other words, faith is necessary to maintain one’s morality in the face of great stress or temptation.

In his book, Dr. Thomson offers many examples of how our brain evolved in ways to make religious belief almost inevitable. As to morality, he writes:

[The accidental discovery of mirror neurons] is one of the most important recent findings in neuroscience. These neurons fire both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action done by another animal. These neurons “mirror” the behavior of the other, as if the observer were performing the same action. So it really is true that “monkey see, monkey do.”

(Thomson then offers several examples. Here are two.) If you watch someone suck on a lemon wedge, you will “taste” the bitter lemon and your mouth will water, just as if you were doing it yourself. Or try not to yawn when someone else does.

Fundraisers understand this at some level. They can recite all the statistics about child hunger in the world without much effect on the typical person, but if they show that person a picture of one starving child, he or she will be much more likely to donate. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti released a massive outpouring from around the world due to the horrific images and stories flashed across the media. We all could feel the pain of loss and hopelessness, and our heartstrings would not allow us to sit by and do nothing.

We often hear that if it weren’t for religion, we would be  immoral and unethical. Mirror neurons resoundingly refute this. We literally feel other’s pain, and that induces in us empathy,  distress, and the urge to help. Our brains are ethical by design.

On a somewhat related subject, Jason let us know that he had complete another little book I had recommended; The Lessons of History. And I asked him to begin the discussion. Jason, if you posted on this since August 29th, I cannot find it to respond. jg

I was on my way to an appointment this morning and happened across the Rush Limbaugh Show on Fox Radio. He was “interviewing” former Vice-President Dick Chaney, who was hyping his new book In My Time.

After listing to El Rushbo lob softball questions to Chaney, all I could think of is why would anyone, even a staunch Republican, listen to anything this self-promoting, power-abusing, lying bastard has to say? I mean, prior to the 2003 launch of America’s utterly unnecessary war of aggression and occupation in Iraq, Chaney repeatedly told the American people that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was about to hand them over to his friends in Al Qaeda, so they could attack other American cities. And we now know with absolute certainty that Chaney knew this was not true.

When I got home and checked my email, neighbor Mike (the emergency room doc) had sent me a link to the new article in The Atlantic documenting for all time the war crimes of America’s most reviled living politician, just in case some of you forgot what he did and why he should be shipped to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for trial. jg

“Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decisionmaking, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.”

This morning, Diane shared with me the following speech by Steve Jobs. Turns out he’s not just smart. There is wisdom here. So I now share it with you.

Steve Jobs, who stepped down as CEO of Apple Wednesday after having been on medical leave, reflected on his life, career and mortality in a well-known commencement address at Stanford University in 2005.
Here, read the text of of that address:

 

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

A few weeks ago, I suggested to Jason that, given his libertarian views, he might find interesting a little book I read a long time ago. The title is: The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant.

I have taught my children and grandchildren the value of understanding history so they don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. I recommend this book to all of us. You can download a pdf.

Anyway, Jason read it and sent me this note.

Jim,

I’ve completed my first read & notes on “The Lessons of History”.

There’s lots I agree with, some I don’t, tons of possible discussion topics.

Would you like to go through it completely, in blog-sized chunks and
cover it all, or just focus on how it specifically relates to
libertarianism?

–Jason

Jason, I think the readers of this blog will get something useful out of our public discussion, so why don’t you initiate it in blog-size chunks. I will be most interested in your thoughts and others can chime in. jg

The following are two excerpts from the On Faith section of the Washington Post written by evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins. Most Americans believe Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is just another crackpot idea by some no-account atheist. And Americans are electing public officials with this particular mindset in record numbers. May God Save America! jg

There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.

 

Click Here to read the whole damning article.