“I should have said …” can be very, very productive if it aimed at doing a similar job better in the future. It is the essence of BUGS’ experience.

A LESSON is one thing. REGRET is the absolute opposite.

Like all real BUGS lessons, this one, once stated, is simple, obvious, and almost impossible to discipline oneself to use in practice.

Regrets are very much like Wordism. There are a billion Only True Faiths and there are a billion Might Have Beens.

In our arguments, I know very well how it feels to have missed a line which might have made a big difference. You think, “Yes, not regretting it is a good theory, but who can just shove it aside and concentrate on the lesson and not the regret.”

I want to remind you, AGAIN, that the BASIS of BUGS is DISCIPLINE.

Discipline MEANS that you train yourself to do things automatically which, to say the least, do not come naturally.

I spent my best years wasting most of my mental energy on regret.

Regret is insane.

Here on Planet Earth you can no more change what you did thirty seconds ago than you can change the fate of the Ottoman Empire.

For your brain, learning to recognize and dismiss Regret is not only a tall order, it is higher than the Tower of Babel would have been.

On the other hand, your whole approach to debate has changed so completely becoming a BUGSER that you wouldn’t have imagined it a few years ago.

I was a drug recovery sponsor and, as SPLC pointed out, a drug abuser myself.

If you think “Learn, Don’t Regret” sounds trite to YOU, try to imagine how hard it was drumming this discipline into people who did what alkies and junkies had done!

Cripple half a family but stay clean and sober and learn to drive carefully.

It sounds inane but it is the ONLY key to sanity. The discipline you will need is huge, but it is quite doable. Take that from one who has dealt with so much worse.

Regret, from the word Go, is insane. Learning the lesson is what life is all about.

These are meanderings where I put things that may be of little use to our cause but that fascinate me.

It has been over half a century since I instructed Political Science classes — yes, I started when I was 19 — so my case law is not up to date.

But back then it was perfectly legal for a man to have two legally wedded wives, and vice versa, both marriages officially recognized by the United States Government. A Supreme Court in the 1940s declared that North Carolina was under no obligation to recognize the quick and easy Nevada divorces, so a person who was legally divorced in Nevada and in all the states that recognized Nevada divorces was still legally married in states that sided with North Carolina divorcees.

In the east some of the states that took a North Carolina view were actually right in between states that recognized Nevada divorces. Only a handful of lawyers would knew which way their particular state law went.

The result was some pretty interesting legal and detective work, as well as adventure trying to catch a divorcee down in the right state at the right time to get the spouse’s rights.

As I say, this situation lasted for decades and may have been cleared up now that the Bible Belt is not quite so rigid on divorce.

South Carolina was the last state to allow divorce under ANY circumstances. SC’s first divorce law was passed in 1948.

Stuff like this fascinates me, so I ought to have a place to write it down even if it bores you.

CS Lewis said he would give everything he had if the doctrine of Hell were taken out of Christianity. But, as he admitted, the Doctrine of Hell is there. Jesus himself said, in the Parable of the Wedding Guest, that most people would go to Hell, and not for any serious sin.

Most people end up in Hell, according to that Parable, because they were invited to Heaven, in the Parable a wedding, and they have worn the wrong clothes, which could only mean the wrong doctrine.

Lewis HATED that.

But the very term “Salvation” means Hell. You seek salvation FROM, not TO.

So why love God?

St. Augustine and Calvinists who believe in Predestination are wildly thankful to God for choosing THEM for Salvation from the Eternal Fire. Their point is that while God is viciously unforgiving to most, he chooses not to damn EVERYBODY.

This makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.

In fact, when a terrorist who holds people captive shows the tiniest bit of mercy, the captive tends to fall in love with him. Like God, he has no reason whatsoever not to torture you anymore, so your gratitude is for his showing any mercy at all when his whole reason for being there is to do all the harm he can.

This reaction to terrorists and torturers was discovered a generation ago.

CS Lewis recognized it and HATED it.

It is called The Stockholm Syndrome.

Outside of theology, that is.

I say that because that greeting is sort of semi-politically incorrect.

Happy Holiday is inclusive, Merry Christmas is exclusive. So those who use the latter are excluded.

It is generally known that the Emperor Constantine who legalized Christianity and called the Council of Nicaea was a Mithraian. It is assumed he was baptized on his death bed.

It is generally known that Saturday was well known to be the Sabbath. But under Constantine Christians adopted Sunday as the Sabbath.

Sunday was the Holy Day of Mithras.

Christmas was the birthday of Mithras!

These two facts have always been mentioned and instantly avoided.

If Constantine had originally been a Moslem, and made the Sabbath a Friday you would instantly have some questions about that. But I have never heard anybody discuss WHY the Church adopted Mithras’ holy day and Mithras’ birthday.

Mithraism came from Zoroastrianism. In the Gospel, the Magi, then well known as the priests of the largest religion known by Romans, accept Christ as the Savior at his birth, whereas the Jews certainly did not.

I am fascinated by this precisely because my specialty is not theology, but politics.

There were a huge number of Mithraians at the time of the Council of Nice. They were concentrated in the military forces.

No one goes to pieces when one mentions that Christianity replaced each god with a saint to pray to. A god for each purpose was smoothly replaced by a saint for each purpose. It was simply a matter of what Paul said, “All things to all men.”

But Pauline politics in spreading Christianity did not start or end with saints replacing gods.

I cannot understand why other people who are fascinated by history and politics do not have the same itch to know the process in detail by which these compromises were made. Given the loud and sometimes bloody fights over the Divinity of Jesus was God and other doctrines, I kind of doubt somebody just walked in and said, “Hey, gang, I have an idea!”

“Let’s change all the Holy Days and invite the Mithraians to join us!”

It is hard to believe that people who claim to be historians or political scientists just leave such questions unasked.

Christmas is a Public Secret.

I  have repeatedly made the point that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are looking  for a picture  of a  starving child or a violation of Political Correctness with all the desperation Americans used to reserve for finding gold  ore.   This  is of enormous, immediate,and practical importance.

In the 1950s when my brother was an intern it was well known that clinics for the poor got better drugs than the rich people did.   The reason  for this was well-known, one of  those  Public Secrets I talk about.   Poor  clinics could use new drugs, whereas drugs used in regular hospitals had to go through the whole many-years-long end of clearance process with the FDA.

Please note that what was universally known was that poor patients were getting BETTER drugs.   If you needed a drug that was still going through the  final stages of FDA approval, you got them if you were poor, you couldn’t get them for love nor money in a regular clinic or hospital.

Needless to say, even back then,  organizations saw  a gold mine.  A major campaign exposed the outrageous fact that drugs that were not ready for prime time were OK  to be used on poor people.    Lots of people made lots of money pushing this cause.

So  by the 1960s the poor people were only getting  drugs which had gone through the WHOLE clearance process.   So they got the same outdated stuff the rich did.

Even today it is well known that “all new drugs are nonaddictive.”   Valium was approved by the FDA as nonaddictive.  So was just about every other addictive drug now on Schedule 2 (Schedule 1 drugs are illegal, like heroine.  There is Schedules 3 and 4, going down the count to over the counter).

My point is that even the endless regulatory process used  by the FDA does not really make drugs safer.   In fact, until equality raised  its ugly head, it was well known that, on average, early   approval for the poor made their drugs famously more modern and  better.

The regulation is not to  make things safer.  Regulation depends on how much money  can be raised on an issue.

If you had looked at the facts, this was a clear conclusion sixty years ago with the Public Secret that poor folks got better drugs than the rich did.

But no one  looks at the basics.

There’s gold in them thar hills!   There is MONEY in a Conspiracy Theory where the Rich and Powerful (says the left) or the Establishment (says the right},  secretly plot Evil.

There is not a dime to be made by explaining reality as I just have.

“Denial” has become part of the common jargon.

Like most common jargon, it is bullshit.

Now that alcohol and drug recovery has become a industry, any person who gets drunk or high has to admit he has a disease called addiction or alcoholism is “in denial.”

To repeat, now that drug and alcohol recovery has become an industry, everybody, at least everybody who has medical insurance, needs “treatment.”

The Big Book, which is as close to an official statement as AA or NA has, states a heresy to the recovery industry:

“Most people who have a drinking problem are not alcoholics.”

But, as the saying goes, “If you want to hide something in AA, put it in the Big Book.”

In most magazines there’s always a place

For people with talent for filling up space.

That’s why they pay me a nickle a syllable

For filling up spaces that still remain fillable.

Some folk complain that I earn my pence

By writing some drivel that doesn’t make sense.

But that is quite absurd.

What I need is not logic, but words and words and words and words and words and words and words.

I have been reading “The God Delusion,” a best-seller by Richard Dawkins written about 2006.

It turns out that Dawkins founded the biggest and most successful Christian revivalist organization in Australia some years back.

Reading between the lines, he seems to have had a change of heart.

My own sympathy with Dawkins is that he is not just an atheist, he is anti-religion.

You will probably understand that that is related to my own decision to become Catholic, though almost nobody besides a BUGSER would see the connection.

My decision to leave the Methodist Church was because my grandfather was a circuit rider. The sermons he wrote down are full of “The Devil” and “Hell.”

Like our first ancestor in America, my grandfather was a RELIGIOUS preacher. God or Heaven or Hell or NOTHING.
No respectable upper class Episcopal compromises.

Religion is absolutely right or it is RIDICULOUS.

The closest Biblical quote to my attitude would be, “They were lukewarm, and he spit them out.”

Catholicism is a CHURCH. Mainline Protestantism is not.

By the same token religion is either true or it is a horror.

I like the fact that Dawkins, having become an atheist, CONDEMNS religion.

Except maybe one, which he doesn’t see he might be promoting.

But in his book, Dawkins advoctes the Zeitgeist, the “spirit of the times.” He would never suspect it, but he is attacking the Old Religion by speaking very suspiciously in the terms of the new religion.

If you are used to German, it is ironic that “Zetigeist” is suspiciously close to “die Heilige Geist,” which means “The Holy Spirit.”

A suspicious mind will always pick up a suspicious similarity where denouncing the Old Religion uses language that is so close to new one.