Archive for October 20th, 2005
In Bob’s Blog, Comments are Riches
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 10/20/2005
In Bob’s Blog, we have to take it for granted that Bob knows what he is doing.
So when Joe talks about justices and the law, I can tell he has been thinking about what I said.
But I will not approve it if someone decides to dump his sermon in this blog.
And I’m pretty good at knowing the difference.
This is much more professional than the average person can easily understand. The point here is to
stimulate thought on YOUR part.
“But,” someone could say, “How can you presume to judge whether a person’s independent statements are the thoughts you want to stimulate? Isn’t that totalitarianism?”
I think “someone” is an idiot.
And, before anyone gets paranoid, I made up someone to have a straw man.
Bob can tell better than other people whether someone is giving me a thought I helped stimulate or making a speech he would have made if I had never been born.
Bob can also appreciate the people who jump in here and say what I make them think of.
You who do that are my pay. Who else can make good minds move?
OK, enough of reading all this treacle.
Get off your asses and MOVE!
And don’t be nervous about it.
Just remember that if you don’t do it right I’ll GET you!
The Righteous, the Hypocrites, and Me
In alcohol and drug recovery, each convention is filled with vast amounts of literature. People in the Twelve Step Recovery program write books about how how, following The Program, they learned the way to make money, the way to be successful in life, the way to be happy, the way to have good “relationships” with the opposite sex.
There are gay recovery groups and I am sure they have books on how to have good relations with the same sex, though I’ve never seen one.
Meanwhile my whole picture of The Program is embodied in times when I had to knock a guy out cold on the way to the emergency room, when I had to take a gun away from a woman who was threatening to shoot herself or anybody else, when a guy was naked and jabbing himself with a needle in his genitals in a bathroom filled with blood screaming, “I can’t find a vein, I can’t find a vein!” , and a number of times when I had to clean the vomit out of my car after taking somebody to detox.
Back to books on “How the Program Made me Healthy, Wealthy and Wise.”
When the average person reads advice of the kind I give he generally expects three subjects: 1) how to healthy, wealthy and wise, 2) how to be moral, and 3) how to think straight.
My advice is only on 3) because 3) is all I really know about.
So let me repeat why my writings are not the sort of thing great columns or best-selling advice books are made of.
A successful advice columnist tells his audience three things:
1) How to be successful;
2) How he should conduct himself personally;
And
3) How to think straight.
You may find some advice on 1) and 2) SOMEWHERE in the archives of Whitakeronline, Bob’s Blog, my articles or the books I have written.
But you shouldn’t. If I ever told you how you should act personally to be moral paragon, those were the silly writings all us mere humans stoop to.
But I don’t think you will find a word of this preaching about personal behavior in all I have said.
My advice is on how to THINK straight.
Sainthood I leave to saints. I have not achieved sainthood and I never will.
This is not like The Confessions of Saint Augustine where he is talking about the sins he committed BEFORE he saw the light: He kept praying, “Lord make me chaste, but not yet.”
Even when I discuss stupid thinking, I am not talking about things I have overcome. I am talking about things I am still doing.
Some of the people writing the books about that show up on the stands at AA conventions, the ones about to be happy and successful and how to do sex right, are probably also carrying unconscious overdosers into the emergency room.
God bless them if they are. They combine perfect theory with perfect behavior.
But I never checked to see if they practice what they preached. I had my own work to do.
And even if such a perfect peson existed, he couldnot perform one role a sinner like me was perfect for.
Very few people in a Twelve Step Program want to do their fifth step with a saint.
I wrote about the fifth step before. It is where you tell one human being ALL about yourself, I mean ALL, including the sexual stuff, and learn that that person can like you despite the things you are most ashamed of.
The huge number of people who asked to their Fifth Step with me came to me precisely because I am NOT a moral paragon and never claimed to be. If I have one proof that I nonjudgmental it is the number of people who decided, or were even urged by their sponsors, to do their fifth step with me.
You do NOT go to a judgmental person for that one.
BUT, there is always a BUT, I am not good because I am nonjudgmental.
There is a lot to be said for judgement.
All those big name rock stars who tell how they overcame drugs sound great. But they give people, and not just young people, the idea that drugs are OK because you can do them and become a success and then overcome them.
No way. Look at the list of rock stars who died using drugs.
St. Augustine and the Emperor Constantine delayed their baptism because baptism was believed to wash away all sins. So Augustine got baptised after he had done his sinning.
This may be good theology, but it is an AWFUL example.
I have led an AWFUL life. I am now a lonely old man. Nietzsche said that one leads the same life over and over. That is my worse nightmare.
I have a lot to offer. I can tell you how to argue, how to get things done.
Which is all I talk about.
But very often people assume that because what I say is good, I am good.
I have left a trail of very disappointed people behind me all my life. And I’m sick of it, because I don’t deserve that extra burden.
I am one of those who give warnings I do not heed.
I am the one who cleans the vomit out of his car. I am the one people come to to spill their guts out in the fifth step. I am the one who was out there on six continents fighting the fight no one else wanted to dirty their hands with.
I stood up to the enemies of my race while all the people who beat their chests about how Moral they were deserted me the moment the word “racist” was mentioned.
I am sure there were moral paragons in there side-by-side with me the whole time.
I just didn’t see them.
Maybe I was drunk.
Chess and Dice
The Romans were absolutely nuts about playing dice.
We wonder why on earth somebody could be so fascinated with a game which involved no skill at all, but was just a matter of random chance?
The answer is that the Romans had no idea that dice was a matter of random chance. The Romans didn’t know there was such a thing as random probability and a bell curve. The took it for granted that dice was a game of SKILL.
The key to understanding history is realizing that other people in other societies and in other times lived in different WORLD from ours. If you follow the Politically Correct dictum that “all people are basically the same,” you cannot begin to understand different peoples.
In Roman times, one only sailed on auspicious dates. A bird crossing overhead was an omen, as were endless numbers of other things. Astrology was a SCIENCE. The oracles were SCIENCE.
Like our modern social siences, the one thing other societies, past and present, never studied was RESULTS.
If you never check the results, astrology is science. If you never check the results, liberal intellectuals are intellectuals.
In Roman times, a person who talked to the dice was literally talking to the dice.
As with every other pagan god, JHWH dwelt on every word a person said. If you will read the context of the Lord’s Prayer, you will see Jesus considered all this absurd: “Let your answer be ‘yes” or “no,” “those who would attain salvation by much saying.”
Every other people lived on a world which was “the firmament” and where the stars were spread above us.
Look at Genesis.
That is not the world we live in.
In ancient times women were born with one less tooth than men because Aistotle said so.
In ancient times dice was a game of skill. They didn’t know there WAS such a thing as random chance.
Now tell me you are not blind in history if you believe that all people think more or less the same.
Elizabeth is in Denial
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 10/20/2005
I recently stated that Elizabeth and all Catholic females are Catholic because the Pope is a bachelor.
Elizabeth denies this.
We professionals in social science deal with this problem all the time.
Anyone who drinks is an alcoholic, but many keep denying this fact.
Anyone who criticizes homosexuality is a latent homosexual.
How can they deny it? By definition, “latent” means you don’t know it. So how can anybody deny they are latent?
But they keep doing it.
No, Elizabeth, if you refuse to accept the fact that you lust after the College of Cardinals you deny the validity of today’s social sciences.
And you wouldn’t want to do that.
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