Pardon the triple entendres, but those who know about these things say we triple Geminis are like that, chewing up and spitting out words the way others eat chips and dips. While the rest of you are slicing and dicing cucumbers with your HSN miracle chopper, we toss and mix metaphors into alphabet soups and salads that are sometimes hard to digest. I myself know little of astrological apocrypha, except that the Thai system and the European system are essentially the same, except with dates offset about three weeks. This would seem to undermine the credibility of the whole system since dates are supposedly the crucial determinant of the astrologically inherited traits. This is not to be confused with the Buddhist Triple Gem/Three Jewels of sangha (religious community), dharma, and Buddha, which I know a little bit about but again not much. Jainism, the other religion evolved in India from the native Hinduism, also has Three Jewels, but they’re different, right knowledge, right faith, and right action. I know that because I researched some Jainism after I picked up an interesting book in the Atlanta airport a few days ago called ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’ by Sam Harris, whose qualifications I’m not certain of. I literally picked it up, at no cost, off the seat, where someone had left it, probably a Christian expecting further vindication of his faith. He didn’t get it. In it Mr. Harris does exactly what he accuses “Christians like yourself” of doing, “cherry-picking the Bible… to justify every impulse...”.
In the book, which I doubt I’ll finish, he proceeds to excoriate the three-thousand-year-old Old Testament for not being modern and politically correct, specifically in its defense of slavery. Should it have also correctly predicted the rise and fall of cigarette smoking and the increased tolerance of homosexuality? But those are still controversial issues, aren’t they? He makes no mention of the fact that the Jews themselves were long enslaved, hence opinion-worthy, nor that classical Athens was the original slave society, dyed in the wool, lofty notions of freedom and democracy developed in the leisure time allowed by double-digit slavery. Rome was founded on the same principles, only gradually supplanted by the slightly more modern notion of colonialism. I don’t mean to shift the blame, either to Greece or Harris, only to make the point that slavery really wasn’t such a big deal back then, more like the answer to the question, “So now what do we do with the prisoners?” The system only became morally repugnant when slaving became an end in itself and better options became available. In Asia not that long ago people sold themselves into slavery to pay off their debts. Variations on this theme still exist. Are Judeo-Christian motives suspect because they didn’t correctly predict the tides of history? But he goes even further, labeling America, and America alone, a ‘lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant.’ However true that may be, I hope he doesn’t exempt himself from the criticism. He probably does, since the whole treatise is directed ‘in-your-face’ style at ‘you Christians,’ only slightly mitigated by the fact that the occasional reference equally castigates Muslims, while allowing that we should know better since we’re a developed nation. Maybe we should and maybe we shouldn’t.
While laughing in Christians’ faces for wanting to believe in ‘intelligent design’, he makes no mention of the fact that all the most prominent physicists of our era not only believe(d) in God but anxiously scour the heavens looking for radio signals that would be proof of what? Intelligent what? A good Darwinist wouldn’t, nor would I frankly. The chances are about one in… how many planets are there out there? There may not be creationism in Evolution, but there may very well be some creativity. Can you really explain the difference between humans and chimps with only a two percent difference of some thirty thousand genes? I was taught that a good theory could be used for prediction. Tautologies like ‘survival of the fittest to survive’ may explain much of history beautifully, but predict little or nothing. Genetic drift and generalized neoteny may predict much, however incrementally, but that’s not Darwinism. He further attempts to diminish Christianity by comparing it to the superior doctrine of Jainism, a minor if articulate Hindu reform movement that today numbers some four million. That’s like comparing Buddhism to Sufism, or Islam to Unitarianism. Harris allows no feathering of edges- if Jesus was not divine, then Christianity is bunk. Is this enlightening? If someone can read the Sermon on the Mount and feel nothing resembling inspiration at some of the finest words and ideas ever written or spoken, as original as they are universal, as valid today as they were two thousand years ago, then I truly feel sorry for that person.
‘Conspiracy people’ go much farther than Harris in their indictment of America, but their arguments tend to more circular and un-provable. That’s the beauty of it. While indicting George and Prescott Bush and the entire Bush Brothers Band and every bird in every Bush going back to the Crusades for every evil from the hypothetical but invisible New World Order to the price of gas in Flagstaff, then they proclaimed in 2004 without the slightest trace of self-consciousness that, “we need four more years of Bush.” You need it, bro’; you need it more than me. I sense rising unemployment in conspiracy circles with a Democratic victory. So the whole world hates us and now we even hate ourselves. America is sick, very sick, mentally ill, to be exact. The fact that others may also be is little or no consolation. The fact that there seems to be no concern about it is even less so. Where is the clamor and outrage at the copy-cat mass murders of college students by college students? When Charles Whitman climbed the tower at UT Austin and proceeded with his slaughter some decades ago (immortalized in Kinky Friedman’s ‘Rumor of a Tumor’) it was a big deal. It should be a big deal! Mass murder is not normal! Ignoring high gas prices is one thing. Mass murder is another. Remember the first time gas prices jumped up over fifty cents a gallon in 1973 and laws were passed reducing speed limits to 55mph? Those laws persisted into the 90’s if I remember correctly. Nobody talks about that now with gas over three bucks a gallon, and it’s more than twice that in Europe. It’s the same with gun laws. Gun control used to at least be discussed, for God’s sake! But that was back when ‘liberal’ was not a dirty word, even though the same word used to apply to those same name-calling Republicans back when the freedom in question was free enterprise.
When those planes hit those towers, they must’ve been aiming straight for our psyche. Starting before that but given new impetus, we have truly lost our way as a nation. America is being ripped apart at the seams, not the divisions between states or regions, races or genders, but the divisions within each and every one of us. America’s future is uncertain. That’s not uncommon for a teenager in the throes and throws of growing pains, used to being the bully on the playing field, now reduced to threatening to take its ball and go home, and hearing the other kids cheer. The only defense of our militarism is that we’re naively trying to make things better in Iraq and Afghanistan, however misguided. It’s only a coincidence that we most frequently stick our big noses in where oil is at stake. So we lose ourselves in music and movies, bored with our lives and our wives, dreaming of fame and wilder sex. Hip-hop artists are among the richest entertainers in the world, while singing about their life on the streets. Our precious freedoms and way of life are reduced to the freedom to pursue wealth and conspicuous consumption. We have the finest health care system that money can buy and a level of obesity that would make a fry-bread-eater blush. There are no easy answers in a consumer society, because it’s not likely to be found in a box or a capsule. It’s more likely to be found in a book or a long walk or a long talk with your spouse, or maybe even a little religion, either ol’ time or New Age will do. You gotta’ believe in something, something else.
