Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Apologists for Islam like to say that Islam allows for diversity of faith.
Yet in Saudi Arabia — home of two of the most holy sites for Islam — it is illegal for non-Muslims to gather in worship.
I guess the aforementioned apologists had some other kind of plurality in mind…
“It’s called the ‘American Dream’ because…”
Apologies about the language for those with sensitive ears, but there’s more truth in these four minutes than I’ve heard from the traditional media in years.
It’s old news, I know, but for some reason, I began thinking about Jeremiah Wright’s claim that AIDS was created by the United States government as a means of genocide. It struck me as a particularly racist thing to say — not “reverse racist” but good old fashioned black-hating/stereotyping racism.
Consider: AIDS, for the most part, is spread by voluntary actions. It is easily preventable, and it’s possible to live a life 99.999% free of any risk of infection. This makes AIDS an awfully ineffective way to wipe out a race. It depends on free will and choice, and that’s often fairly unpredictable in large groups of people.
If, however, you could predict someone’s actions, then you might have a decent chance at creating the genocidal epidemic you’re looking for. If you know that John Doe comes home every day and mixes a martini, you can poison the olives and be fairly certain about Doe’s fate.
So such a conspiracy depends on accurately predicting the actions of black Americans as a group.
And what is one stereotype of all targets of xenophobia? That they breed like rabbits. Indeed, one deragotory term for black Americans is involves just that.
That is how Wright’s remark is an insult to all black Americans. It assumes that they will, by their very nature, be promiscuous without any form of protection and use drugs.
Sounds like something a KKK Grand Whatever would say…
David Heinmann, a pastoral associate of Chicago’s St. Ignatius parish church, took a trip around the world in 365 days, each day celebrating Mass in a different location. An intriguing idea, but as I read it, I kept thinking, “What a waste of resources.” It sounds like nothing more than a glorified field trip. Toward the end of the article, though, Heinmann is quoted as saying,
America doesn’t do pilgrimage because we think we’ve already arrived[ ... .] We Think this is the Holy Land. In doing so we’ve lost that sense that there’s another journey that we must make, one to the center that lives in the heart of every human being.
I believe that says more about American Christianity than anything I’ve read in a long time.
I have no idea how many of my students are on medication, but the number is certainly significant. We live in a medicated society, yet we’ve never heard the stories of those who grew up taking medications.
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”
At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.
But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity. (Coming of Age on Antidepressants)
During my brief stint in graduate school, I had a brief discussion with my adviser about the metaphysical connotations of such medications. These substances change the very core of what we think of as the soul, I said, adding that it brings up once again that old chestnut of the mind-body problem: what exactly is the connection between the “I” that I think of as G. Scott and the brain/body? How can something physical change something we tend to think of as non-physical. If we throw out the idea of a soul, it’s an easy question to answer; if we want to cling to that idea, it’s somewhat more difficult.
Our discussion continued along these lines, moving to a discussion of how these medications tend to change things we used to think were personality traits. “How many Kierkegaards have we destroyed with Prozac?”
Indeed — think of all the creative geniuses in history and it’s almost shocking how many of them displayed characteristics that would now be labeled bipolar, for instance: Mahler, Van Gogh, and Kierkegaard all come to mind.
The possibility of changing personality through medication seems more likely when we think of people taking medication from age fourteen, before a solid “I” has formed. Who would these people have been without medication? In many cases, the answers is no one — they would have ended up as suicide statistics. But tweak the question a bit: who would they been if they had begun medication a few years later?
We’ll never know.
Nor will they.
I certainly don’t agree with it all, and I don’t like the vitriol at the end, but nonetheless, some things worth pondering.
