The Israeli / Palestinian scapegoat
Posted: January 19, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 CommentIt seems to me that we’ve done a disservice to a large number of people in what is right now known as the land of Israel. Think about whether or not this is a good idea: There is an extended family living in a fairly large house. This family has plenty of room and they’ve lived in the house for a long time. Now suddenly there is a terrible tornado that destroys the home of a family down the street. So let’s go in and put the homeless family into the same house that we mentioned before. But, just for fun, let’s not divide the house evenly. Let’s not divide the house in a way where one family gets the north section and the other family gets the south section. Let’s come up with a complex arrangement where each family gets an alternating room throughout the house so that no family really has any rooms that are next to each other. Then, let’s separate the only living room so that each family gets half of the room and there is only a single television. Surely there is no problem with this arrangement and the two large families can get along and there won’t be any issues.
Of course, the original family now fails to recognize the new family’s claim to their home. They come to us but we tell them that they just need to figure out how to get along. There are some nasty fights, but we just let them settle things on their own. Sometimes we help the new family, but we pretty rarely help the original family. Now, it may seem that I’m making the new family out to be the bad guy, but that’s not true. The new family just wants to live there peacefully, but the old family wants them gone. The old family is very stubborn and refuses to accept that the new family should be living there, and refuses to accept the new family. The old family does bad things to the new family, but we sorta understand why. Certainly the new family retaliates and probably does some bad things to the old family, likely after getting fed-up with the way the old family is behaving.
Fast forward a year and both families are really just sick of each other, but they still have to live in the same house. Both sides have started to become stubborn in their ways and the new family has decided that now that they’ve been there a year, they have just as much claim to the house as the old family.
Ok, we could go on, but that’s pretty much my point. We’re expecting two different people to share land in what appears to be a ridiculously divided way. When I look at the original division map, I can’t understand what anyone was thinking, other than that everyone was setting this up for lots and lots of conflict. I know the idea was for these two peoples to live together peacefully, but obviously that’s not what has happened. Sure, it’s easy for me to ridicule the plan after the fact, I suppose. But, it seems that the whole idea sometimes, is to have something to entertain us when there is a slow news day. Oh, the Palestinians are launching rockets at Israel again. Ho Ho HO! Drama! Oh there is something going on in our own country that the government doesn’t want us to pay attention to? What? I can’t hear you over these crazy negotiations happening in the middle east. I think there’s going to be a war over there!
Or it’s just all in my head. You decide.
The dying dream
Posted: November 2, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: afterlife, death Leave a commentI recently read an article on yahoo about a doctor who claims to have proof of an afterlife. I normally dismiss these as just mumbo jumbo, but part of it struck a chord of similarity with something I had recently experienced. The doctor explains that what he experienced was like being a consciousness in a specific location which is exactly what I had experienced at around the time of my reading the article in a dream.
Disclaimer: I’m not saying there is an afterlife. I’m not offering this as proof. I’m simply commenting on a dream that I had that doesn’t make much sense to me. Here it is:
At the start of the dream, it was completely dark. This later struck me as weird, as I expect the afterlife to be full of light, not pitch black. I would have thought that a normal dream about the afterlife would involve lots of light, but here, it was totally dark.
I instantly was aware that I wasn’t alive in this dream. And I experienced what can only be described as a very vivid realization that in this place, I was simply a consciousness at a specific location. I could look around. I could move my consciousness around. However, as weird as it might sounds, it was immediately clear that MOVE was the wrong word. I didn’t have the ability to move. Moving seemed to imply something physical. There was no physical movement. The word that seemed most correct was travel. I could travel between locations.
I started travelling down and lights became visible. I had the impression that it was a city, but the dream ended shortly after so I can’t really be sure. It wasn’t like city lights I’m accustomed to. The light started off purple and became more expansive as I neared. I seem to remember it changes colors also. Shimmering. It’s difficult to explain. Also, it seems odd that I knew which way ‘down’ was given that it was totally dark. I think it was simply down from my current perspective, but it might have been up. Who knows.
And that was it. Really short, but really vivid dream. Very strange!
Moses, Jesus, And Muhammad
Posted: October 5, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentEach of the major monotheistic religions has a central character that intercedes between Man and God. In Judaism, that person is Moses. Not necessarily because only Moses was able to do so, but because the other hebrews were too terrified of G-d to come near him:
All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance. “You speak to us,” they said to Moses, “and we will obey; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.”
Paraphrasing now, but G-d then says that they were well to have said this. Not, I believe, because only Moses was worthy (even though that’s probably true), but because it demonstrated the proper fear and respect.
Flash forward to Jesus. Jesus, as cited later, took a different approach and said that the ONLY way to come to G-d, was through him. The difference here is obvious. Now we’re being told that only by using an intermediary, can we approach G-d. This would be all well-and-good on its own, but it’s counter to what Torah teaches. Now, it’s of course stated that Jesus never really said these things, but the entire Christian religion was made up by Paul, who never even knew Jesus, whereas the apostles even wrote Paul letters telling him that what he was doing was contrary to Jesus’ teachings.
Flash forward again, and we come to Muhammad. And..what? I don’t know honestly. I don’t know much about Muhammad. I watched a video once that he was from a not well-to-do family of traders. That he wasn’t educated but eventually started speaking beautiful versus from G-d. Eventually someone else wrote down all the things that he couldn’t stop saying. It is said that he thought he was going mad. Eventually, this became the Quran. It isn’t my intent to belittle the Muslim faith, but one thing struck me as odd recently. It seems sometimes, that Muhammad is held in even higher regard than G-d himself. I hope this to not be the case, but recently there have been a number of riots and innocent people killed over the still unconfirmed to even exist movie, “The Innocence Of Muslims”. Not over G-d or blasphemy of G-d, but over the prophet (as Muslims believe) Muhammad. In fact, I’m not sure that a negative movie about G-d would inspire the same response from Muslims. So I hope I’m incorrect in saying that Muslims for some reason have elevated a human being above G-d.
Moses was a great prophet. Jesus the Christians believe to be a god. But that still leaves the question, what was Muhammad, and why have the Muslims elevated him to such a status? This has sparked my interest in the Muslim faith, and I will be researching more. To my 2 followers (you know who you are!) feel free to provide more insight and information.
Plausible Deniability
Posted: September 28, 2012 Filed under: Religion, Uncategorized | Tags: Faith, god Leave a commentI’ve pondered this question before:
“Why doesn’t G-d just let us all know that he exists? Why the big mystery?”
I’ve come to various conclusions each time I’ve come back upon this after a period of time. Hopefully, I have it finally resolved now. The answer? Plausible Deniability. Consider this. Adam and Eve knew G-d directly, but their human nature eventually resulted in their removal from the garden. The Israelites knew G-d directly, but after a period of time, human nature simply took over again and they became fat and lazy and indulgent in their own ways:
“When I bring them into the land flowing with milk and honey that I promised on oath to their fathers, and they eat their fill and grow fat and turn to other gods and serve them, spurning Me and breaking My covenant, and the many evils and troubles befall them–then..”
Basically, anytime G-d has made himself known to us we have turned away, and as a result G-d has had to deal harshly with his people. Instead, if G-d writes down what he wants from us in a scroll and then expects us to follow it thousands of years later, at the very least, we have plausible deniability. We have some recompense here. We can say that we tried and really wanted to do the right thing, but we weren’t really even sure if it all served a purpose. For all we knew, all of our history and the stories were just that. Stories. I mean, sure we believe that they’re true, but there’s no way to KNOW that they’re true, and that’s the difference. So long as we don’t have direct knowledge, G-d can be more generous and lenient with us when we go astray.
At least, for now, that’s my two cents on the matter. What do you think?
armageddon and you
Posted: September 13, 2012 Filed under: Religion, Science, Uncategorized | Tags: apocolypse, armageddon, jew, preparation Leave a commentThis isn’t really a jewish concept, armageddon that is, but the likelihood of such an even seems almost unavoidable. Given the current rate of population growth, we were already scheduled to surpass our food supply quite some time ago. The threshold where we no longer produce enough food for the number of humans on the planet. We have scientific breakthroughs to thank for raising that threshold due to genetic engineering raising crop yields by 300%, but that isn’t going to last forever. There is a finite amount of space to grow food on, and a finite amount of space for us humans to live in. It’s simple supply and demand economics. We’re eventually headed toward a catastrophic event that will likely wipe out a large portion of the world’s population. I’m not saying that the almighty one will come back at that time and rule the earth, as predicted in the Christian bible, but simply that an event of that nature seems likely.
So rather than run in fear, I would suggest everyone begin to make preparations. I’m not preaching that the apocalypse is nigh, but rather a few generations off. You should begin preparing for your descendants, not for yourselves. That’s not to say that such an event cannot happen at any time. It’s not difficult to see the effects of over-crowding. Unusual stories of murders and crazy psychopaths eating someone’s face are becoming more and more common. It’s easy to think that perhaps these things always happened this frequently, but that’s simply not true. The rate of these occurrences has risen drastically in recent years and I believe it is a simple side-effect of overpopulation.
What can we do? The optimal solution feels like we should create an island refuge somewhere remote to weather out the storm and then come back when it’s all over. Hiding? Yes, definately. That aside, there are lots of remote locations, even here in the United States that would be a perfect location to lay-low. Alaska for example. Not quite an island paradise, but better than New York City for your shelter location.
Learning some basic survival skills might also be a good idea. Be able to determine what kinds of plants are edible and which are poisonous. Know how to create basic traps. The more civilized we become, the farther away we distance ourselves from these basic concepts. We can program our iPhone, but we cannot put together a simple snare trap to capture food.
Hopefully I’m wrong and this day will never come. This is something I wouldn’t mind being wrong about. Either way, good luck to you all.
A response to Bill Nye
Posted: September 2, 2012 Filed under: Religion, Science, Uncategorized | Tags: Bill Nye, Creationism, Earth Age, evolution Leave a commentI often think there aren’t enough things for me to blog about, but it turns out that there is no shortage of stupidity on this planet. Here is the popular quote:
“And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can – we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.
“It’s just really a hard thing, it’s really a hard thing. You know, in another couple of centuries that world view, I’m sure, will be, it just won’t exist. There’s no evidence for it.”
On the surface, it’s easy to think that Mr. Nye is asking us not to teach our children our religious view, and if you stopped at just reading quotes in the media, that’s what you probably do believe. I’m glad to have watched the video , titled “Creationism is not appropriate for children”, as that isn’t exactly the message, but really it’s pretty close. The very title of the video is just about enough on it’s own, but I would urge everyone to watch it before forming an opinion, because then all you’re really forming an opinion on, is other peoples’ opinions of the video, not the video itself.
So what’s it all about? Really, his core message is to not use taxpayer dollars to teach Creationism as a legitimate theory in schools. I’m actually okay with this. Why? Because separation of Religion and State is a good thing. I don’t want my children learning about other religions in school, unless they’re taking a religious studies class that goes over other world religions, and then, it would have to be with my approval. So we cannot have it both ways, having only our religious viewpoints expressed in schools. It’s a bad thing.
Now, watching the video, you cannot help but notice the subtle overtone that Mr. Nye clearly things that Creationism is quite ridiculous and he actually says that the theory of evolution is core to everything in Life Science (Biology). As if Biology cannot stand on its own without evolution as a base. This is in no way true. The evolution theory is actually fairly unnecessary in almost every way to anything, other than perhaps genetics and DNA research. It’s really not that useful of a theory honestly, although perhaps someday in the future, scientists will make more breakthroughs and finally make it actually worthwhile. Right now, it’s not worthwhile. It has added zero benefit to the scientific community other than to confuse everyone into thinking that it’s a proven, valuable thing, when it is not. Now, if actual evidence and data someday supports evolution, I’ll be fine changing my viewpoints on it, but right now, no such supporting data exists.
However, Mr. Nye did mention the age of the universe and paralleled that evolution fits in better with the billions of years model of space than creationism. That’s because evolution requires billions of years to work, and really the main support for the statement. So if we think the earth is billions of years old, then this has some credence. Here we really start touching more on religious viewpoints that scientific viewpoints though. It’s kinda funny that it all hangs on the seven days of creation. If it weren’t for that, things would really be different. So either you think everything happened in seven physical days, and thus have a problem, or you believe that it’s just an overview of what G-d did, and you have no real problem. I’ve offered another Creationism theory, so I had to consider how this affects that theory.
I thought the pic was a cool timeline based on the flood. I haven’t evaluated it in anyway, just enjoy that someone put some effort into it!
To me, there are only a few key things to comment on, without any real definite resolution (because I haven’t lived for billions of years). First, on the one hand, you would think if man was created early in the life of the planet (sixth day) and given a planet that is several billions of years old, we would expect that the population of the earth would be much higher than it is now. The population of the planet doesn’t well support that humans have been around for billions of years. This however, supports neither side as it really doesn’t help evolutionists much either. Another point to consider, is that we haven’t uncovered any civilizations that far in the past. It doesn’t seem from our archaeological finds, that humans have existed for billions of years. Once again, doesn’t help either side really.
So what evidence actually supports an Earth age of several billion years? Really the only thing that does is fossils. Fossil ages for me are a mystery. I can’t make myself believe that there are reliable methods for dating them. The most used is, and just going from memory so the element is probably wrong, but Uranium based dating. So it determines the age by the decay rate of an element. To me, this idea is faulty because it expects the decay rate to remain constant for billions of years and never change. I find this hard to believe, since a billion years is just a long time and it feels possible that the decay rate could change at some point (speed up, slow down, be affected by environmental factors). I know ‘feels like’ isn’t very scientific, but I think some common-sense is sometimes useful (this isn’t always true though!). Also, I believe that fossils many times are taken from earth layers that aren’t likely to have been billions of years old, but the fossil is dated as billions of years old because it falls inline with the evolutionary scientist digging it up, so they discard the age of the earth layer in favor of the age of the fossil. This post goes over it in more detail, and while not presented in the most professional and scientific format, it sums up things better than I have time for here. It states that in most cases, scientists discard rock ages that they don’t like and keep the ones that fit what they want to believe, and I in-fact believe this is often true.
This ran a bit long, so for now, happy thinking!
Taste buds by design?
Posted: August 5, 2012 Filed under: Religion, Science, Uncategorized | Tags: religion, science, taste buds Leave a comment
I’m constantly fascinated by the sheer number of simple things that I take for granted everyday. Things like tasting my food! We’ve eaten so much food over so many years, that we don’t really think about it any longer, but it is pretty fascinating! I couldn’t help but wonder recently, why do we enjoy the taste of food? It’s not really necessary for us to. My growling stomach and that feeling of hunger is plenty of motivation to cause me to eat, but then I get the wonderful sensation of taste to top it all off!
But then, the question is raised, is our sense of taste NECESSARY? If it isn’t necessary, then why do we have it?
Let’s start with a world that has no taste. It seems, at first, that without taste, we wouldn’t know that we’re eating something bad! You’d just dig in and munch away on some rancid tasting food. Right? Wrong! You don’t need a lab-coated scientist for this one. First, if you expect that a food might not be good, you inspect it. Is it visibly bad? Then what do you do? SMELL! Pretty much you’re at about a 90% bad food detection rate at this point. It’s pretty rare to actually do a taste-test if the food is bad. Usually, if you’re sampling the food, you’re more than reasonably convinced that it is still good.
Aha! Poisons! You taste foods to make sure they’re not poison! Wait…what?
Well that doesn’t sound right. In nature, things that are poisonous are very commonly very brightly colored. So we’re back to our step 1, vision. I’m not sure that step 2 (smell) comes into play very much with this one as I don’t really go around smelling poisonous foods all day, so cannot really comment there. I also really have no idea what poisonous foods taste like and unforunately a google search didn’t turn up much. Not a lot of people guzzling poisons on a regular basis I guess.
Lastly, I’ve read a few posts that suggest our sense of taste is meant to direct us to eat things that we’re deficient in, or in need of, like our well-known sweet tooth. This indicates that the following foods are meant to suggest the following needs:
- Sweet – carbohydrate.
- Salty – electrolytes.
- Sour – acids.
- Bitter – toxins.
- Umami – glutamate and nucleotides.
A wiki on taste slightly supports this, but the problem I have here is the fact that it feels easy to draw a false assumption here. The truth is, we do in fact have taste buds, and the general consensus is that there are a few basic tastes, like bitter, sweet, salty, etc. Also, these tastes are typically based on how far away we are from a very specific marker, for example, in the case of salty, how far away the item tastes from sodium. The wiki explains it better, check it out. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have taste buds so that we’ll want a specific kind of food that we’re deficient in. If I were going to make an argument in favor of evolution for taste buds, it would make much more sense to say that our taste buds evolved over a period of time as a result of the types of foods that we were already eating on a regular basis that our bodies found useful. Oh look, this food gives me energy, think I’ll develop some cool new taste, sensor, thing, for that!
Honestly though, the concept of developing taste buds via evolution is just too much in the realm of fantasy for me.
The idea that our bodies evolve via random mutations just hits some kind of common-sense mental barrier that I have. I just cannot get past it. I think it’s because I’m a software engineer, that I tend to believe things need a lot more design work in order to function properly, so I may be too biased in that direction. I just cannot buy into the idea that a system can move from simple to complex without some design work. In my experience it doesn’t happen that way. If you have a complex system and introduce random variables into it, let me tell you, in my world, the stuff is gonna hit the fan. I’ll leave it at that, as this is already becoming too long of a post. Now…
Back on point, we need to make the distinction here between taste and craving. The article is really saying that we crave foods we’re deficient in, but this is only tangentially related to taste. Your taste buds are not causing the craving, or causing you to desire certain types of foods. They simply transmit yummy or yucky signals to your brain.
Now, it would be fairly easy for me to merely say that our all-powerful creator blessed us with a sense of taste and that evolution has nothing to do with it. However, I try to learn as much as I can about evolution rather than simply discount the theory. I’m not entirely on the g-d created evolution too! wagon, but I’m not against the idea either. I know, I know, Torah says g-d created the world in seven days. But the thing is, Torah isn’t an all encompassing history of the planet. It’s just not that thick of a book. It’s called Torah, not The Unabridged History of the Planet, Math, Science, Physics, and Everything In-Between! It’s a lot shorter to write, “Yeah, so I said exist and stuff existed” than a detailed description of *how exactly* stuff was brought into existence.
So, to summarize, I cannot think of many reasons why taste buds would exist given any of the prevailing theories on the topic, other than that G-d was being nice to us when he thought the idea up.
Converting, 9th of Av, and Bad Luck in general
Posted: July 28, 2012 Filed under: Religion, Uncategorized | Tags: 9th of Av, bad luck 7 CommentsI can’t help but wonder if it was a terrible idea to convert on the 8th of Av. It didn’t occur to me, this, until just now, that in less than an hour it is the ninth of Av, and we converted this morning. Certainly, it wouldn’t have been possible to do a conversion, not only because of Shabbat, but even had it not been, it still wouldn’t have happened on the 9th. Perhaps I’m just being superstitious here. Being superstitious is really something that a scientist shouldn’t be, but I’ve never felt the need to be un-superstitious. There’s no reason to invite calamity to fall on you if you can help it. I’m not saying that I go out of my way to prevent a black cat from crossing my path, but I simply acknowledge that at times, certain things seem to have a very ominous presence to them.
black cat
My wife is baking a cake right now. The cake will have started baking on the 8th, but will not be completed until the 9th. This strikes me as peculiar. If you are superstitious, is the cake only half cursed, since it was partially completed on the 8th, or is it fully cursed, having been completed on the 9th? I suppose the superstitious answer is to complete the cake on the 8th at all costs. I’ll wait for some responses from my large following of zero readers before providing my answer to this.
Also, what exactly constitutes a bad omen? A black cat crossing your path, already mentioned. Breaking a mirror. Why breaking a mirror? It seems that early belief was that since the mirror contains your reflection, it basically contains a part of your soul or essence. So once you have gazed into a mirror, breaking it will cause you some level of bad luck. And what of spilled salt? This one is harder to explain. The basic answer seems to be that Judas spilled salt at the last supper, and as such, it is now considered bad luck to do so. This one, without any further explanation, seems to be easily dismissive, as any bad luck which may have befell Judas, are explained as having been caused by his own actions and not some form of bad luck.
Spilled salt
I use to not believe in luck or fate, but lately, it seems to be ever present around me. I cannot happen but wonder if certain things do in fact happen for a reason. Small coincidences in my life, easily dismissable separately, start to add up to form a larger picture when you put them all together. For now, all I can do is continue to observe and write down the things happening around me that I find unusual and out of place. These things seem to be occurring with greater frequency as of late. Simple example. My wife and I are looking for a house right now. We randomly selected a christian realtor. The experience was less than professional and we are finally almost rid of this realtor who caused us an unusual amount of trouble. Now, I suddenly remember a realtor appearing at my door late last winter. He was going door to door, which I found unusual, but dismissed it as not impossible, since the housing market was in such bad shape. However, he even more unusually mentioned during our conversation that he was also Jewish (it was during channukah and we had our menora going). At the time, I thought perhaps he was just making it up, trying to make a connection with me and was acting a little peculiar. In retrospect, it’s likely that he might have been Jewish, but was simply overly uncomfortable having to go door-to-door in an apartment complex.
Either way, I was suddenly reminded of this during our realtor tribulations and it made me wonder what the odds were that a Jewish realtor would have knocked on my door and stuck in my memory for that long. My memory is terrible. I mention ‘the odds’ because when you mention ‘the odds’ it seems really scientific. Like there are complex calculations going on somewhere to explain the likelihood of an event. The odds here are almost part of an Interview 2.0 problem. How many realtors are there in the Indianapolis area, and of these, how many are Jewish, and of those, how many are likely to knock on your door and ask if you’d like to buy a home?
Roughly 82,000 people live in my city. Of those, let us estimate that since there are 934 listed real estate agencies. With an average of 6 per group, lets say 6000 realtors, roughly. Of those, we’ll use a high estimate of 0.04% being jews, taking us down to 281 realtors total. Feels high, but we’ll go with it. Of these, I can’t imagine more than 10% going door-to-door. The reason for this is a combination of factors, but the highest factors I believe are initiative and money. It takes time and money to do the door-to-door thing in realty as you MUST give every door you knock on SOMETHING. These people need a way to remember you, and preferably contact you. Pens, fridge magnets, etc. These things cost money. Now, we are down to 28 realtors. I think we could whittle this down, but let’s just go ahead and use this, which already leaves us at (using a very simple calculation) less than a 1% chance that this would have occured. This falls in line with the fact that less than 0.04% of the Indiana population is Jewish (quick math common sense check). In fact, given this, the total number of realtors is almost irrelevant, as given the jewish population percentage, the numbers will be similar given any number N of realtors. As a sidenote, I decided against converted this into the 1 in a million, type version, as thinking about it, I really don’t think it is clear what that really means. I get that it is a small chance, but let’s say you have a 1/400 chance for something to occur. How likely is that event really? A topic for another discussion perhaps.
oddly odd odds
Sorry for this going so long for no reason. Thanks for continuing to not read this. Good Shabbos!
Reasons To Believe In God
Posted: April 24, 2012 Filed under: Religion, Uncategorized | Tags: belief, god, religion Leave a commentI would like to be one of the few to admit that I constantly struggle with the concept of God. I have spent countless hours debating whether there even is a God. I’m not really here to try and convince anyone that God exists, or try to make you believe that I have information that I simply do not have. While on some level, I am jealous of all the religious people out there that seem to have no doubts whatsoever, on other levels, I tend to feel that they are probably misleading themselves.
As stated before, my belief in God is based solely on observation of the world around me. I simply cannot shake the idea that the planet, and our own bodies seem to me, to have been designed. I just cannot buy the idea that everything ‘just happened’ to work out this way. To me, personally, that takes more faith to believe in than the idea of a God creating everything.
Now, recently I have spent some time pondering the nature of God. Specifically, this question, “If God really exists, why doesn’t he just let us know? Why not just tell us what it is that he wants?” Can we really be held responsible for not following God’s will, if it’s not clear what God wants from us? Are we really suppose to believe in one of several books written thousands of years ago by people who may or may not have communicated with God?
Well, as I lay in bed tonight, this popped into my mind, so try to imagine this if you will:
Imagine, that you are moments away from a fatal heart attack. How do you feel right now. Any chest pains? Feeling uncomfortable at all? How is your health? Are you aware of the possibility that you could, in fact, die at any moment. Someone, reading this right now, is probably going to die soon. Now, I’m not trying to scare you into religion, I just want your mindset to be the same as mine. I was lying in bed, when I started having pains. And I thought to myself..what if I were to die right now? It scared me a little bit. But more importantly, it made me realize something. It made me realize, that I’m just not the kind of person that likes to be unprepared. I OVER prepare for EVERYTHING. That’s the kind of person I am. And here I was, realizing, that I’m very unprepared to die.
So, the bottom line for me is this. When it’s my time, I don’t want to have any regrets or worries. I want to know that I put forth the time and effort to live a good life, and that I at least attempted to draw nearer to God. When I’m moments away from dying, I don’t want to be worried about what’s going to happen on the other side. I simply want to know that I’m prepared. That if there is no God and that’s just it, then fine. But, if there is a God, that I am prepared.
Thank you all, and I hope someone perhaps found this helpful.
My first Sukkot,with Pics
Posted: October 14, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentSo we purchased PVC pipe and constructed a sukkah. The first meal in it..pretty nice! Said kiddush and hamatzi. We couldn’t afford lots of the other things, like we don’t have an etrog or any of the other requirements. I figured just getting a sukkah up was pretty good, given that I JUST started my new job and haven’t gotten paid there yet.
This year the sukkah we constructed is fairly small. It’s not really big enough to seat the kids yet, so just my wife and I eat in it. The kids eat off to the side. Next year, I’d definately like to make it a little larger.
There’s lots of pine trees and such in our apartment complex, so I was easily able to acquire some branches for the covering. For the most part, many of these trees were in need of a good pruning anyhow, so I think we really did someone a favor here.
Now, for anyone unfamiliar with Jewish Holidays (like me), the interesting thing about Sukkot is that it’s such a BIG holiday that happens IMMEDIATELY after another big holiday. We literally just finished off Yom Kippur like last week and went straight into SUkkot. Pretty crazy. I’ve ready that there should be a procession around our synogogue at one of the services coming up, so I’m really hoping not to miss that. Honestly, one of my favorite parts about a service is the torah procession..so..I can’t help but wonder if we’ll be doing a giant torah procession around the building (probably not) !!
Anyway, here’s our cheap little, thrown together sukkah…
Happy Holidays and Shalom!
Jewish Thinking 