This isn't an original. My friend Marlene Goodman sent it. It's too good not to share! Don't know who wrote it:

A journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Western Wall (of the ancient temple in Jerusalem) to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long time. So she went to check it out, and there he was, walking slowly up to the holy site.

She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, using a cane and moving very slowly, she approached him. "Pardon me, sir, I'm Rebecca Smith from CNN. What's your name?"

"Morris Feinberg," he replied.

"Sir, how long have you been coming to pray at the Western Wall?"

"For about 60 years."

"Sixty years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?"

"I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews, and the Muslims.

"I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop.

"I pray for our children to grow up safely as responsible adults and to love their fellow man.

"I pray that politicians tell us the truth and put the interests of the people ahead of their own interests."

He stopped talking. She looked into his wistful face a moment, then asked: "How do you feel after doing this twice a day for 60 years?"

"Like I'm talking to a wall."

This isn't a blog promoting pornography, and if you believe that nudity is always pornographic, well, I pity you. This is about a courageous young Egyptian woman who posted nude pictures of herself, although in a predominantly Moslem society, even wearing a pair of modest shorts in public can get a woman arrested, beaten, even killed.

This is one salvo in Eliaa Elmahdy's war against the official gynophobia and other suppression of individual rights in her culture. Of course it's shocking. That's the idea.

So was the public burning of American flags during the Vietnam war. I didn't do it, but understood the message, which many politicians and pundits didn't. The vast majority of flag burners had no interest in destroying the United States. Their actions told society worldwide that many American citizens disapproved the actions of our government and detested the ongoing slaughter of innocents being perpetrated in our name. (If this ingrigues you at all, you might want to read my earlier post about a battery from Vietnam.)

Take a look for yourself: http://arebelsdiary.blogspot.com/?zx=438f964c204f2676

Frankly, I've seen women who looked a lot better in the nude than she does. But I've never seen one I admired more.

Jesus never said it. In fact, it doesn't come from anywhere in the Bible. The closest quote is from King Solomon, who said "He who spares the rod hates his son." And who knows what he meant by that. The "rod" a shepherd carried was to protect his sheep from wolves, not to beat the crap out of them.

And if you assume that Solomon really was advocating beating your kids because that's what some crackpot preacher told you, then I believe you should consider that dear old Shlomo (doesn't sound so great in Hebrew, does it?) came from one of the most dysfunctional families in history.

First, let's get one thing straight. There's no such thing as female circumcision. Excising the clitoris and labia of human females is genital mutilation, whose only purpose is to prevent enjoyment of sex. It is not an Islamic practice; it is a barbaric, gynophobic practice.

Male circumcision, on the other hand, is a requirement of two major religions, Judaism and Islam, and in the U.S. it is routinely performed on infants whose parents are neither Jewish nor Moslem. While many describe it as genital mutilation, and point to some risks, research shows that it also has some benefits. Continue...

(This is a re-run from about a year ago. Spring is here, but there are other reasons I want to share my thoughts on this again. Here in the United States of America many of us are pessimistic about the future. There’s an almost universal feeling that we’re headed down the wrong road. Worse, we’re angrily divided over which wrong road it is that we’re following. It’s a good time to remember that, however strange we may be in however many ways, we Americans are a resilient lot. Whatever mess we dig ourselves into, we survive, hopefully a little stronger, if rarely much wiser. We need spring, in the weather, of course, but also in our hearts and our national conscience!

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, a demand for freedom has burst through the walls of repression. At long last the masses are being heard, and directing their anger at their oppressive dictators, rather than against the traditional American and Israeli scapegoats. Sadly, many lives will be lost in the process, but like the first flowers of spring, democracy is putting forth its tender shoots.)

Yes, Passover and Easter have deep religious meaning for Jews and Christians respectively, but each has additional meaning for everyone. In older cultures outside of Judeo-Christian influence, spring itself had religious significance.  Continue...

Easlier today I posted a message at CaringBridge.org to the family of a man who died of pancreatic family last summer. I'll spare you an accounting of my own philosophical and religious peregrinations. Just accept, please, that I did not easily come to believe as I do now. This is what I wrote:

His time on earth was too short, but there's no doubt he left many wonderful memories for those who knew and loved him.

It takes more than living cells, flesh and blood and bones, neurotransmitters and brain synapses, to make a human being, and according to an astrophysicist I met but whose name escapes me, quantum physics is making it increasingly undeniable that our universe is made up of more than atoms. There's something incredibly powerful, he said, that we can't see or explain, that holds it all together.

Although exposed to many religions, I am no theologian, and hopes of an afterlife are not in vogue in my denomination of my religion. My own thinking and reading and contemplating, however, leads me to the belief that a consciousness, a person, a soul, like Jim, does not perish.

That Incredibly Powerful Something (IPS) could Continue...

School was 9:00 to 4:00, and there were four grades taught in each room. That was only because the district had "consolidated." When I transferred there for the last few weeks of the fifth grade, all eight grades were in one room, one grade for each row of desks, so for slightly more than four years I had the same teacher.

That was the late 40s. The good years, with the war over, new cars available again, the economy booming as never before in spite of a top marginal income tax rate of 90%. But also the bad old days in many ways. Cruel and blatant discrimination for one. When our old warhorse of a teacher, Mrs. Brackman, told of having taught where there were "two little Catholic kids" in her class, it was as though she were speaking of a different species.

I caught hell (she'd have slapped me for saying "hell") for using the word "belly" in front of some girls on the playground. It didn't matter that our agriculture textbooks used the word frequently. Agriculture was a core subject starting in the sixth grade; the curriculum was built on the assumption that a majority of students would stop school after the eighth grade and pursue life on farms. Three miles away, in an actual city, grade school students instead were systematically prepared for high school. Those agriculture textbooks referred to breeding, and even artificial insemination, and calving...real "facts of life" stuff, except that it didn't refer to humans. Mrs. Brackman was incredibly naive if she didn't realize that most of her students had put two and two together by the time they learned to read. We speculated that she'd have a heart attack if she knew what her students were learning in haylofts, Continue...

Gold is only a metal, but we see it as much more. The gold medal. Good as gold. The gold standard. For thousands of years, it was the reliable currency of commerce, although it had little practical value until recently. Now it's handy for a few things like dental fillings and electronic connections, but by far the main reason we can get emotional about gold is that it's pretty and doesn't rust.

In fact, many of us get emotional enough to pay a ridiculous price for a commemorative coin that's "clad in 14 milligrams of 99.9999% pure gold," the value of which may soar to $3,000 an ounce in the near future, we're told. It's a first-class swindle, in my opinion, but Continue...

We'd like to think so. In Iran, a woman faces death by stoning for the crime of adultery. She was already flogged for her actions - you know what that means: Lashed with a whip that leaves your flesh draped in pieces from your back. The good news is that she may not be stoned. She may just be hanged. Gee, thanks.

In Pakistan, a Christian woman faces death for supposedly blaspheming the name of Mohammed. All over a catty argument about drinking water. It's the law, you see, and although officials of Pakistan's central government, including the president, have said it appears the charges were unwarranted, and although leaders around the world, including the pope, have spoken on her behalf, the forces of hatred are determined to have her head, literally. In fact, one Pakistini religious leader has said that he will give $5,800, a small fortune in that country, to anyone who severs her neck should she be released. And Christians make up only two percent of the Pakistini population, so those who think their God is too much of a wimp to defend himself don't have much to fear from those who have different ideas of God.

OK, time for fanatics who call themselves patriots to wave the flag and strike up the band, and blather about America being the greatest land on earth, because we know that kind of thing just can't happen here. Continue...

India had its untouchables. Europe had the Jews. Groups of people who were blatantly denied the rights enjoyed by most citizens of their native countries. And we Americans, who just know that we're as close to perfect as humans can get, had our n-word people.

You know the word. I hate it, and it digusts me when some black people throw it around for shock value, or for God-knows-what. Rhymes with "bigger." Continue...