"What is Truth?" On an Earth where in our self-importance we can't remember that we are specks on a speck and our primary sense toward Others (i.e., Neighbor, Samaritan) is hatred, hostility, violence, my personal sense is of having lived into the Twilight Zone. Governments actually speaking of preparing for nuclear war, are we crazy? yes, we are, it's not arguable.  And what's the problem? It's Certainty, religion, religious Certainty, tribal Certainty. We are insane. The Inquisition. The Crusades. Christian Anti-semitism. Radical Islam against all others. How have Earthlings come to this point? In Earth Time, it's been developing for eons and here we are.  Go online and read the news source JOE with its startling presentations of True Facts. There are True Facts and False Facts and preposterous exaggerations. Government: lies, delusions and self-delusions perceived and told as True Fact, and sycophants afraid for their jobs of offering difference. If you...

So, maybe a journal entry instead of a Facebook post. What do we know-nothing ants, or fleas, need to say? Nothing: everything has been said, and is being said, and will be said that needs to be said and that isn't worth saying. War again, and stirs my memory when I was twenty-seven years old, of hearing my professor of American government say that the role of the congressional minority in warTime is to criticize and second-guess the administration. So, I expect that and sure enough there's nothing else the minority can do. In fact, with an authoritarian executive branch there's nothing the legislative can do anyway except go along or get ignored. I don't need to add to the screaming and shouting. But from me, for self-expression, maybe that people don't learn much or take much from history or experience - - what would the present be like if someone had killed Adolf Hitler in the nineteen-thirties or earlier or later? I have heard Germans who were there say Hitler d...

Out here in my forty day lenten wilderness contemplating // Jesus' forty days in the wilderness resisting temptation // Moses' forty years in the wilderness with thousands of maddeningly whining escaped slaves.  Contemplating a favorite Bible scholar and theologian (don't know that he calls himself a theologian), Bart Ehrman, recently retired longTime professor teaching Bible subjects at UNC Chapel Hill, NC. Dr Ehrman's personal religious history took him on quite a wilderness journey. Starting as a fundamentalist Christian, he evolved as he explored questions and acquired doubts. For a while Dr Ehrman was in the Episcopal Church, until his conscience and integrity triumphed over saying the Nicene Creed and facing the theodicy question, "If God is all powerful and all loving, why is there suffering and pain in the world?" Dr Ehrman chose to be a nonbeliever, atheist, agnostic (not sure what he calls himself). He is a scholar and thinker. Dr Ehrman's doubts...

An email that arrives by free subscription in my in-box is titled "Big Think newsletter" (a pricey membership is also available with more to read and think about, but I'm a cheapie who prefers free stuff - - in fact, I've cancelled automatic paid subscription renewals on everything that comes to me except NYT and we'll see how that goes).  Anyway, I'm a religion contemplator, and, besides bringing me fascinating writing to read even if I weren't such, this email newsletter helps me in my SEEK THE TRUTH, COME WHENCE IT MAY, COST WHAT IT WILL quest for religious Truth in a constantly changing life, Earth, galaxy, universe, Time & distance apparent reality, where I'm wandering and wondering whether Truth itself is also constantly changing, something to observe relatively rather than something to know objectively and be done with it.  My mental personally staggering religious foundation of "You Are Here" - - as a speck person on a speck plane...

  Summer 1963 we moved into a small house in an area of Yokohama called Bayview. Military housing, sitting on a hilltop, it was on a cul-de-sac but a bit off to itself, with a high stone wall on the west side, and looking south over Tokyo Bay. Immediately below us, down a steep hill of rocks and grass, was a small Japanese temple with monks who cared for the cemetery that was on the other side of the high stone wall, and a typical Japanese neighborhood of wood and paper houses and shops, cobblestone streets.  It was a Time before everything was air conditioned, and our house was not, so we slept with open windows. Mornings very early, in the darkness just before dawn as things were waking up, we would hear, coming up from the neighborhood down the hill below, the wail of a flute-sounding instrument along with the sound of geta,  those traditional Japanese wooden shoes' clop clop clop on the stone streets. It was the noodle man, announcing as he pulled his cart throug...