February is nearly over if you bored of 2016 already or ready for summer. Don’t forget Easter is not far around the corner. Here I will discuss how we can escape reality in the chocolate heaven season like a pro. Okay so if you’re truly hardcore and still manage to stick to your new years resolution giving up chocolate, don’t fret it’s not all about the chocolate. Or is it….? :o No, seriously it…
“So when it comes to developing internal self-awareness, I like to use a simple tool that I call What Not Why.Why questions can draw us to our limitations;what questions help us see our potential.Whyquestions stir up negative emotions;what questions keep us curious.Why questions trap us in our past;whatquestions help us create a better future. In addition to helping us gain insight, askingwhatinstead ofwhy can be used to help us better understand and manage our emotions.”
[Letter to a devout, practicing Jew mother on how to raise her son who “believes in science”]
Of course in a free country, within limits, you can raise your children how you please, on whatever belief system you choose. For this reason, most people in the world who are religious, practice the religion of their parents. For example, the chances of Christians raising a child who later becomes Muslim, or a Muslim family raising a child who later becomes Jewish are extremely rare. The children will be more likely to grow up believing in no Gods than in the Gods of other religions.
So the urge to raise your son as a devout, practicing Jew, being one yourself, is entirely normal and natural. But of course you have, at most, only 18 years of direct influence on him. Your son will spend more than eighty percent of his life under a different roof than you.
From what I have seen and encountered, Judaism manifests across a huge range of practices - from emboldened Jews who enthusiastically eat bacon to the various sects of Orthodox Jews who, among other practices, maintain separate kitchen utensils for dairy and for meat. As a scientist, I have much more experience with atheist Jews. They do not view the Torah as the word of God. They see it as a book of stories - not to be judged for their truth or falsehood, but as a repository of insights from which wisdom for living one’s life can be derived.
Think about it - when we read fairy tales, we are not judging them for whether they are true or not. Instead, we fold lessons derived from them into our world views. Not only this, atheist Jews will commonly celebrate the high holidays with no less ritual than practicing Jews, right on down to leaving an open seat the Seder table for Elijah, and making sure the front door is unlocked, so he can just walk right in if he happens to show up.
Why would an atheist Jew do this? The answer is not hard. Rituals and traditions account for some of the strongest binding forces among peoples of the world. Attending Mass on Sundays for Catholics. Prayer five times per day for Muslims. Ancestor worship for the Animist religions. One can participate without judging whether the events that established the ritual have any literal truth at all. The participation creates a sense of community. which has almost always contributed value to civilization. It disrupts civilization only when people require that others share their particular rituals, with threat of force to achieve it.
Being on the spectrum and liking science as he does, your best bet might be to not enforce the literalism of anything religious, but to keep him plugged into the beautiful traditions of the religion, and emphasize the value of ritual as a seed and taproot of community. Often that alone represents the greatest challenge when raising autistic children - getting them to embrace the value of love and compassion for people and for relationships.
Rest assured that you can raise a wholesome, intelligent, law-abiding child without requiring he believe that Moses turned a staff into a snake, or that manna fell from heaven.
Good luck. In my experience, it takes some of that too.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson in ‘Letters from an Astrophysicist’
InSight:A few sol 26 photos; I like to think the top one is the probe raising a victory claw after the first deployment went so smoothly. In the remaining ones, they’re checking out the seismometer cable, which is supposed to lie flat on the ground to try to dampen any remaining vibrations coming from the probe.
InSight:Sol 25 images are here, and it turns out that letting go of seismometers is an important governmental function, not to be delayed by politics here on Earth. And while NASA’s media folks are furloughed & going unpaid over the holidays, the French seismometer team isn’t affected by the shutdown & they continue to post Twitter updates as deployment proceeds.
InSight:Sol 24’s small batch of Mars photos. And now that the US government has gone into yet another shutdown, we may be stuck with a half-deployed seismometer until further notice. I’m not 100% sure about that; the letter from NASA’s Chief Financial Officer (which is a job that exists) is kind of vague and loaded with governmental lingo, but the general rule is that if it can wait, it waits, all because of a stupid wall. Sigh.
InSight:Sol 23 images are here, nothing dramatically new today, but the 4th photo shows just how shiny the seismometer can be when the sun hits it just right, while photos 1 & 3 show that while InSight didn’t get a cute sundial, you could probably tell time on Mars by watching the shadows of instruments’ ribbon cables.
InSight:Sol 22 was seismometer deployment day, and it looks like round 1 of the robo-claw game went as planned. Once they’re sure the seismometer’s in a good location, they’ll put the wind shield over it (it’s the white curved thing behind the seismometer in a few of the photos), and after that it’ll be time to deploy the heat probe and let it start digging.
Teachers should let kids eat and drink in class, I have no idea why high school teachers act like tiny dictators of their pathetic kingdoms. Like, let them go to the bathroom, if they are hungry let them eat, if they are thirsty let them drink.
It shouldn’t really be so difficult.
Anyway, children are people, so maybe stop adding onto this post trying to justify why it is ok to treat them and train like animals in a 1920’s zoo.
My english teacher taught us about this. There’s a specific reason public schools are the way they are. From not letting us eat/drink in class, to how we address our teachers as Mr./Ms./etc, to even the schedules. Basically, the whole purpose of school is to teach us to be workers. That’s why we’re given specific tasks at specific times being monitored by superiors. We can’t eat at specific times to mimic what they want us to end up in, a factory or the like.
In private schools, it’s a lot more relaxed and free. They aren’t given as much supervision or control because they’re being raised to be owners/bosses. In a lot of private schools, you call your teachers by their first names and it’s less lecture and more discussion.
This all boils down to Marxist theory and social class reproduction. We are raised from a extremely young age to be placed in a certain sector that we belong in depending on what our family does. That’s why cycles of poverty are so prevelant in families and why rich families stay rich.
The way our schools are structured are to reproduce distinct classes and to make us believe that severe class inequity is okay or even fake.
You are not damaged. You are not socially handicapped. You are young and you are learning how to live. Write that down. I AM VERY YOUNG AND I AM LEARNING HOW TO LIVE. Tape it to the wall by your bed and read it every morning.
You are very, very young. You are learning how to live.
Okay someone asked me earlier “Hey CT, you study the occult for a living, off the top of your head, what’s the most popular form of the occult in today’s world?”
Pseudo-nutrition. Bar none. A massive amount of the fad dieting world goes beyond simple misinformation and ignorance and full on into a systemized non-scientific theory of anatomy and nutrition that 100% qualifies as magic. If you replace the term “toxins” with “evil ghosts” half of these blogs would sound like sumerian curse tablets.
We shall never return to social sanity til we begin at the beginning. We must start where all history starts, with a man and a woman, and a child.
As it is, we begin where history ends, or, rather, where disjointed journalism ends. We stop suddenly with the accidental truncation of today’s news; and judge everything by the particular muddle of the moment. Ours is a sociology of snapshots; and snapshots always fix human figures in postures not only silly but stiff.
- G.K. Chesterton, May 3, 1919, Illustrated London News
During the merry month of May, wildflowers are blooming all over the place. Why not take advantage of what’s available, weave flowers into a crown, and use it for inspiration when your creative juices are feeling blocked? Find a field where you can collect wildflowers undisturbed, and do this spell on a bright, sunny afternoon.
Gather up as many wildflowers as you can, and find a quiet place just sit. We’ve the flowers together into a circle, much like the Daisy chains you made as a child, until you have enough to sit comfortably on your head. As you are connecting the flowers, let your mind wander a bit, opening up to the issue at hand - in which aspects of your life do you need to unlock your creativity? Add the ribbons for a finishing look, and place the crown on your head, saying “Inspiration come to me, vision and creativity, ideas and insight flowing free, as I will, so it shall be.”
Relax in the field, enjoying the fresh air and sunshine, until you’re ready to go home. Thank floral crown over your workspace to help inspire you.
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“Daily Spellbook for the Good Witch: Quick, Simple, and Practical Magic for Every Day of the Year,” by Patti Wigington
I have always believed that your leadership style is defined by your readership. We must go beyond just reading, to thinking and practical implementation.
Reading polishes character, enhances poise and attitude and causes a man to act without groping.
How colorful your future will be is dependent on how much you invest in the right books. Buy books, read them, think on them, and act on insights gleaned from them.
Productive leadership in any form, whether as a parent, husband, mother, spouse, elder brother, pastor, head of department, politically and economically is hinged on investments made secretly in books.
Make no acquittance with a man or woman who has little or no regard for knowledge. Do not keep company with those who despise books, they will bring you ruin through their distracting attitude.
Books are not stingy, they withhold nothing from us. Books are not greedy, they want nothing from us than to be read. Read well today and lead well with Insight tomorrow. -Paul Bamikole
