As a therapeutic exercise, I attempted to rewrite the list of possible EX-JW Dysfunctional Beliefs from Mindful Construct in terms of my own perspective. I meant this to be simple, but it didn’t work out that way. Some of it is rewritten, some of it is explanatory, some of it is questioning – but I’ll honor where this took me and not go back and make the form of the responses consistent. Jehovah’s Witnesses are the only ones who know…
The figure of the “evil other” is a pre-ethical fixation for the religiously-minded paranoid. Everything that one most dislikes or finds threatening can be projected upon others and (usually symbolically) murdered in the age-old tradition of the scapegoat. Such projection engenders – and feeds upon – symbolic (and real) violence. Predatory on the people who cannot bear to examine themselves, leaders of such movements play on fears of contagion, defilement and stain from without – from the evil others –…
125,830 People I’m so sick and tired of being sick and tired. I’ve spiked a fever at 105 degrees, and hovered around 100-101 most of the rest of the time. Vertigo and light-headedness. Fatigue and balance problems. Coughing. Sneezing. Aching, but I can’t rest (and I won’t take that medicine). Crossing my fingers that it doesn’t go into bacterial pneumonia like in many other cases. It’s been a week now, and I’ve racked up five sick days at work. That’s…
Sorry that I’ve not written anything in a while. I’m concentrating on sailing through choppy waters in most of the aspects of my daily existence. I’ve lost a dear mentor and friend from University of Massachusetts, and I’m not ready to write about it yet. I’m also still thinking about other deaths… My mom has just moved from intensive care to a rehab hospital after breaking ribs and puncturing her lung. I’m grieved about the escalation of hatred from some…
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” – William James Recently, I participated in an online discussion in the comments of an article written by a prominent friend/adviser to the late Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson & Jehovah’s Witnesses, by Firpo Carr The Michael Jackson case and the issue of child abuse are both important to me, but I didn’t really know who Firpo Carr was when I made my first comment. I’d…
I was re-reading a dissertation exam question, and I was somewhat surprised to discover that there has been no real transformation in my views on evil in more than a decade. Question: Compare the language of cause, analysis, description, and solution to evil in Augustine, Nietzsche, Schüssler-Fiorenza and one author of your choice (Buber). Identify juxtapositions, similarities, opposition, etc., amongst the authors, and situate your own view. The text of Augustine’s Confessions constructs an aesthetic metaphysics from within a post-Manichaean…