I had to take my 2003 Toyota Corolla CE into the local dealer to have a head gasket repair.  Being as it is a dealership, they do a lot to make service customers comfortable.  There was fresh Folger's in both regular and decaffeinated carafes and the waiting room had comfortable chairs and a 50-inch + flat screen TV monitor for those of us with cataracts.  Also, they have an SUV shuttle service that eventually showed up to take me to my office.  About the only thing lacking was reading…

From a first viewing of Alastair Sim as Scrooge in the best movie adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, I was hooked.  The story employs the use of symbolic characters and moves the narrative as if we had the controls to a time machine.  A wealthy man who won't aid charities and wonders why there aren't more poor houses and prisons meets his old partner, the dead as a doornail Marley, and is warned of visitation by three ghosts.  The second turns out to be this…

Isla Mujeres (Island of Women) is a five mile long Caribbean island off the Yucatan coast at the top of the Cancun-Mayan Riviera tourist and backpack route leading eventually to places like Tulum to the southwest and the laid back island of Holbox out on the Gulf of Mexico spillover.  You get to Isla…

Almost all religions place a high priority on charity as a means to the end of a good quality of life in the hereafter.  I am told that early Christians took this tenet so seriously they organized communes and forbade ownership of property, real or personal.  The "good book" recites that the prophet used the metaphor of a camel passing trough the eye of a needle to represent the difficulty in going to Heaven if you act like you can take it with you.  Yet here we have a movement in…

Poor George Orwell, the inventor of "Newspeak" as an element of civilization in 1984, heralding the arrival of "Big Brother," which the Republicans identify with D.C. government while the Dems view as a Romney-type front man for the 1% with all the wealth and the lowest taxes. Had he REALLY been…

Each believer will insist

that his or her God is the only God

and if you believe in some other God

you are "not saved."

Whoa!  The only thing I want

to be saved from is myths and superstitions…

Nietzsche by Edvard Munch

Believe it or not, I once was pope of a Gnostic church.  I know that sounds like a mad person making an absolutely ludicrous statement, but unfortunately (and yet, as shall hopefully be show) fortunately, too, the statement is true (insofar as I am capable of…

            I had never until very recently known the word for what might be called a “reverse anachronism”: the selective grafting of mores as indicated in ancient writings onto today’s standards of conduct.  I am now aware that the practice I mention is known as “presentism,” and I extend an apology to all who read this with a smile at having learned this term before I glimpsed it at one website or another, possibly Religious Dispatches, possibly one of the links at Crooks and Liars, my…

Atheist Movies pores over the Net to bring us YouTube and other clips depicting topics of interest to non-believers, with a decided emphasis on evolutionary science.  In their latest email link, they take us to evolutionary biologist Lewis Wolfert's new work, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, which I hope to get to when I finish things like Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt.  I say "things like" because I set works aside to read…

I always felt a kinship with Hitchens because we shared infection with the big "C"; his, esophageal; mine, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL.  Cancers are tricky little bastards: they can take someone out in a month or two, or let him live with the disease as best he may for years and years.  I am not bragging, but I am over a decade into my inconveniences and humiliations.  If I ask, why did Hitchens go so fast but I am yet alive, I waste both his time and yours.  I am not comparing…

I was on my to the check-out at Circuit City (now defunct) when I glanced at "Blackstone," a fellow attorney I knew only by reputation, and then only that he practiced in one of my own fields of concentration, consumer law.  It is not a particularly lucrative field but it's a satisfying one, striking back at people who violate our state's consumer protection and deceptive trade practices act.  Most clients come in with a lemon auto on their hands, often a used vehicle, or a fly-by-night…

Baptism

You might say I have had a close personal relationship with Jebus.  Yes, this is what I call him.  And you will note that I do not capitalize personal pronouns when referencing Crust.  If one does not believe in him there is no point at all in capitalizing references to him, e.g. Him.  I also have taken to putting "God" in quotes, though I do capitalize the "G" since the quotation marks indicate I am…

on Tuesday, and the measure has already passed the lower chamber. Now

there are 10 days for dissenters to challenge the measure, which is

considered unlikely. Several Muslim women have vowed to continue wearing

the face-covering veils, despite the…

Back in my film student days someone gave me a copy of a novel called “Moon Child” and told me to read it and let them know if it had any potential for a script and would I like to write one based on it. I said I would but did not. I was not “into Crowley.”

Many years later, I happened upon a reference to something called “Baphomet”

in a book about the Knights Templar and began a lengthy attempt to learn…

One of the very few joys of chemotherapy, I’ve learned, is the opportunity it offers for catching up on one’s long-overdue reading. I usually take to the cancer ward as I call the infusion room at my clinic, a couple of “readers’” magazines, and until the antihistamine kicks in (added to the saline solution to ward off such complications of Treanda as flush and flashes of heat in the head, even difficulty…