Judgement

According to some, today all those people who have been judged worthy will be swept up into the clouds to have a meet-and-greet with Jesus. The Rapture.

I remain skeptical, as usual. More importantly, I remain.

Amazing

Grasp the top of your head with both hands. Beneath that thin sheath of scalp and brittle shell of cranium is your cerebrum. That part of your brain where thoughts reside. Smaller than a basketball. More complex than a supercomputer. That is you. Or, at least, the part of you that is processing the information contained in this sentence. That little pinpoint of self-awareness that realizes that this is about YOU, and not your hamster, is swimming around within that semi-spherical object beneath your fingers.

Amazing, isn't it?

The organ of thought is not perfect, and anything so incredibly complicated is prone to malfunction on occasion. But, honestly, how can you tell? Sure, you have made mistakes in the past. Who hasn't? But right now, this very second, you are in complete control and are fully rational. Really? How do you know? If the very instrument you use to judge your rationality is, itself, irrational, how do you judge how rational you are? You can't. It is impossible.

But, having said that, you know how easy it is to tell when other people are being irrational. Have you ever tried to tell someone they are behaving irrationally? If so, have they ever believed you? That would require a huge amount of trust on their part, or a great deal of credibility on your part. I can tell you that any time I have ever said, “You are behaving irrationally,” to anyone, regardless of how intoxicated or insane that person was, they denied it, and became very insulted that I would even suggest such a thing.

So, if you were insane, how would you know? I'm not talking about the legal definition of insanity, but, let's say, a slightly biased and incomplete understanding of reality.

We are, at best, the centers of our own unique universes. Think about that for a minute. A universe inside that jelly-like mass of neurons inside your skull. At least a model of a universe. An imperfect model of as much of a universe as you can think of or imagine. Still, that is amazing.

Every child that is born is the creation of a new universe. A new viewpoint, perspective and personality. One that has never been seen before, nor will be duplicated any time thereafter.

For every person that dies, a universe falls. Not just the accumulation of knowledge, experience and wisdom that is unique to each one of us, but that individual viewpoint, perspective and personality. Gone forever.

Are we any less significant because there are about seven billion of us? Seven billion unique individuals. Seven billion universes. Boggles the mind, doesn't it?

Maybe we are all crazy to some degree. Some days I'm amazed that we can all manage to get through the day without wandering into traffic or bouncing off each other on the sidewalk. We manage, somehow, most of the time, to get things done. Sometimes we do really well. Every once in a while we do something terrific. When that happens, every one of us benefits.

We are amazing, indeed.

Death of a Terrorist

On Monday, May 2nd, 2011, a joint operation of the CIA and Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden.

The politicians and media personalities will shout and point and brag and accuse the other side of hypocrisy and everyone will lie about what this all means.

There is no doubt that he will be replaced as a leader of al-Qaida, and he was most certainly not the only dangerous terrorist with a hate-on for America. Revenge, I suppose, is the only reason to feel good about his death. A bit of closure for those who lost loved ones on 9/11.

That's good enough for me.