Letters to the Editor
hermesloin
Published Letters: 53 Editor's Choice: 18
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Zeus is God, Read the Iliad
[Read the article: The joys of life without God]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The other day I saw a bumper sticker that said "Zeus is God, Read the Iliad." It was the smartest, funniest bumper sticker I've ever read. It's a play on the popular bumper stick "Jesus is God, read the Bible." Shermer touches on this when he says that thousands of years ago people believed in Zeus as vehemently as they would believe in Jesus today. I loved the point he made that if you were born in India a thousand years ago, you wouldn't be a Christian. I've always felt that a person's religion is very arbitrary in the sense that it has more to do with their family of origin, time and place of birth. My aunt is a hardcore Christian and her children are too, but if it weren't for her, they wouldn't be. They'd be whatever she wanted them to be because she's a controlling mother, not because her kids find her arguments for Christianity so compelling. And yet the rest of us have to suffer their intolerance for a woman's right to choose and gay marriage b/c they have a crazy mom! But to say that Deepak Chopra is crazier than right wing fundamentalists is simply not true. You may not believe in the new agey side of belief any more than the reactionary, fundamentalist side, but in terms of harm reduction and live-and-let-live, Chopra is nowhere near the insanity of right-wing born-again Christians.
I recently read that physicists are now saying that each of us is the center of the universe. If we were each a single point on a balloon that someone was blowing up, with the boundaries of the balloon getting bigger and bigger, at that single point it would appear that the rest of the balloon is expanding around you as its center. The trick is that any point on the balloon would look like the center. And each of us is a different point on the balloon. So we all have the perspective of being the center of the universe. So Shermer with his beliefs is just as biased and crazy as the person next to him with all of their beliefs and what not. But Shermer likes to think that he's more evolved because he doesn't need proof of God's existence. And that's great, but then why does he need the rest of us not to have proof? I think on some level he'd like to think he's better than the rest of us, but he's not. He's trapped in this same mortal coil that we all are, and he's just another point on the ever expanding balloon. Hate to burst his bubble...
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Out to yourself VS. Out to the world
[Read the article: Scapegoating gay Republicans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]People are talking about the negative impact of outing someone, but there are levels of outing with varying degrees of emotional impact. If you out someone when they themselves don't know they're gay or are still in the process of realizing it, then that could be very damaging to that person psychologically. For example, in college I was eating at a late night campus hangout where people stopped off after drinking. A flamboyant, mean-spirited gay guy was there, who happened to be pretty drunk. He spotted a shy guy sitting at table with some friends and started yelling, "You're so gay!" over and over. The shy guy turned a brighter shade of red and just sank down further in his seat. He was humiliated and that will probably stay with him for a long time. But if someone is already out to themselves, but they live in the closet when they go to work everyday to work for people trying to pass homophobic legislation, I don't feel bad if someone outs you. So just keep in mind that not all outings are created equal.
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no sympathy for Michael Moore left?
[Read the article: Sullivan's travels]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sullivan's comment that he still has no sympathy for the Michael Moore left is alarmingly out of sync with the rest of his interview, (and he thinks that Cheney would rather lose a war than concede a point!) I don't know what exactly defines the so-called "Michael Moore left" but if it means the levelheaded people of America who knew that starting a war in Iraq was not the correct response to 9/11, then what is so different between those people then and the Andrew Sullivans of the world now?