אני תלמידה

This post is rated PG. Reader discretion is advised. 

Nitrous Oxide is an amazing thing. I had to have a chipped tooth repaired today, and while I was lying there under the influence of the gas, I remember contemplating states of consciousness and consciousness itself, and coming to some bizarre conclusion that all levels of consciousness were meaningless and each instant was an eternity in the sense of its own existence.  Those were the most coherent bits anyway. I had moments of panic that I would never return to my normal state of consciousness - that I was forever trapped on some alternate plane where my thoughts raced at the speed of light, but every sensation I experienced seemed to be experienced sooooooo slowly.

After about an hour of a really, really, really good buzz, they decided that I needed some oxygen, That was probably a good thing for them to think.

They turned the 02 back up, and my thoughts drifted more toward Earth.

Wow - this guy's a dentist? He's kind of good-looking. Dentistry is such an un-sexy profession. But what is a sexy profession anyway? Everyone thinks firefighters are sexy. I've known some firefighter/EMT's, and those fat, balding, middle-aged guys were not hot. Not to mention that most of them weren't wrapped too tight. What about doctors? People think doctors are sexy. Doctors are NOT sexy. First of all, they spend all day handling germy sick people, and anyone who has ever worked with a doctor knows that most of them are a little off too. Something about the medical professions seems to tetch people in the head. Dentistry is medicine. Sort of. But nobody seems to think dentists are sexy. You never see the dentists of the year calendar hanging on anyone's wall. Well - there's probably an S&M subculture or something...

I imagine that the guy examining my chipped tooth had no idea that these were the thoughts going through the oxygen-deprived brain of the very frum-looking woman he was working on.

So I wondered how exactly one would talk dirty to a dentist. Turns out, it's not that hard to think up something filthy for this particular profession. For example:

Yeah baby, I want your instrument in my mouth right now. I want you to drill me and fill me until I can't stop screaming. I'm going to be a bad little patient baby - you're going to have to hold me down and give me a shot right in my face. Just remember to save your energy baby - I've got several cavities that need filling, and I want it done by a professional.

I wonder if there are other traditionally un-sexy professions whose lexicons are ripe with terms waiting to be used as puns in a very naughty context. I have a dare for the more feisty readers of this blog. Think of a thoroughly un-sexy profession, and describe how you would talk dirty to someone working in that field, specifically in a way that references their line of work.  Let me know what you come up with. This could be good for the lulz.

I'm not voting for McCain. That much I know. From his support for the marriage amendment in his own state to his support for ongoing war, I simply don't agree with most of his platform. Nothing against the guy personally - he actually seems like kind of a cool person. But I don't vote on the basis of who seems "cool."

On Obama, I remain ambivalent.

I want to like the guy. The marriage amendment is a huge issue for me for several reasons - and he opposes it for most of the same reasons I do. Neither of us wants to see the country governed that way. Neither of us wants to see something like this written into the US Constitution. Neither of us believes that same-sex marriage is Biblically sanctioned, but neither of us believes that that belief should decide the civil rights of other human beings. It's not just that I like his position on this issue - I like the way he thinks about it. This is a decidedly moderate stance. I can get with that.

And if Obama were a bit more moderate on a lot of issues, this would be a no-brainer for me. But he's not. The thing that I don't like about Obama is that he seems to me like the left's version of G.W. Bush. He is an idealogue who injects religion into politics. Whether you're on the left or the right, I still maintain that that is a dangerous combination.

I don't think I want a president who tries to "mobilize the religious left" any more than this one who has mobilized the religious right. Granted, there is a part of me that would love to see the religious right and its "culture warriors" eat a heaping tablespoon full of their own medicine, but the trouble with that attitude is that the rest of us have to live with those policies as well. I am not comfortable with federal funding for agencies with discriminatory hiring practices. I am wary of the increase in government intrusion into private lives that always seems to occur when politics and religion are mixed.

Now this isn't an advocation for government imposed secularism. That doesn't exactly have a lovely track record either. It's also not a declaration that polticians should be closeted about their religious beliefs or that they should attempt to "turn off" that part of their humanity while in office.

It's a message of caution and pragmatism - of the golden rule as applied to both politics and religion: if you wouldn't want someone of another faith doing it to you, don't do it to us. Think about it: what if Barack really were a Muslim? Would your attitude about some of his policies change? Would you trust funding for faith-based initiatives from a Muslim with these views on religion and politics? Would you not wonder which religious groups would get most of the funding, and which would be turned down? Would the injection of religious ideas into policy decisions be such a good thing if the president were a Wahabi? If it would bother you to see Ahmadinejad saying it from his office, then maybe it should bother you to see American politicians saying it from theirs.

And this is why Mr. Obama can't count on my vote just yet either.

In Washington Post's section On Faith, columnist Susan Jacoby responds to data from the Pew Forum that indicates that 21% of Americans who identify as atheists say that they believe in a God.

Wait... what?

Susan responds with a complaint about the shoddiness of the American vocabulary - that collectively we often don't know what some important words mean. This is clearly the case of someone who says "I'm an atheist, but I believe in God." The term "atheist" does not have a flexible meaning.

My first inclination is to want to see this data. I don't remember reading this in the report, but I could be overlooking it. Frankly, however, I don't have a hard time believing it. If I hear one more freaking person tell me that I believe in an invisible man in the sky, I'm going to start slapping people with slabs of bacon! The stunning  American ignorance about religion - I hate to break it to some of you - is not confined to the religious.

If Stephen Hawking could facepalm....

*snerk* I'm just beginning to imagine some of the fascinating mail that Dawkins and Hitchens must get. Gawd, no wonder Hitch is always boozing.

Sorry to some of my (genuinely) secular neighbors if it seems like I'm giving you a bit of ribbing. This isn't directed at you. But... for crying out loud! How can anyone know enough to use the term "atheist" and yet have no idea what it actually means? Is the lack of belief in a deity really that hard to comprehend?

I'm trying to imagine a conversation with one of these 21 percenters: "Well, yeah, I'm an atheist, but I'm not crazy or anything. I still believe in God."

What?

Okay, this is one of those mushy religious posts that will bore my secular friends to tears. Sorry guys - I promise not to make a habit of it.

Prayer is something that I have yet to really master. Yes, I know some of the words to some of the major prayers, but I can tell that there is something to the practice that I haven't quite yet got. I know that the experience of the daveners at my shul is very different from my own. I know that at least part of it is my difficulty with concentration - mustering that quality known as kavanah. That will take a lot of practice.

Some people would no doubt find the ritual prayers of Judaism - the verses from the siddurim - to be stifling. I don't. I always had trouble with the idea of setting aside a time and place to commune with the Divine, then having to come up with a speech. I say my own words when I have them, but I have no problem using the words of the psalmist either.

At the same time though, there are moments - sometimes when I am alone or when I am walking - when I feel almost overcome by a particular prayer. It is as if something inside of me is praying. Even though I hesitate to say the words aloud, it is difficult to contain them. It is something that longs to burst forth from the very center of my being - it is as if my very essence is shouting the words - whether they be "mi chamocha?" or "yitgadal v'yitgadash" - everything in my being is saying them. 

I don't say them out loud. I can't be walking down the street mumbling the Shema to myself. I don't want to be that person, and besides - there is a time and a place for those prayers.

This is not like OCD - or like getting a song stuck in your head. Those of you who have experienced it will know what I'm talking about - those who have not will think I'm strange. You're both right.

As for me, I attribute it to spirigual longing: comparable it to the babbling of an infant who wants to speak, but does not yet understand language.

No. No, it can't.

This is the kind of thing that drives me up the freaking wall!

Essentially, the editor here is taking a scene from The Elegant Universe - a very entertaining documentary by physicist (and string theorist) Brian Greene - and is tossing some scriptures from the Christian Bible on top of it. The scene from the documentary is talking about branes and the extra dimensions specified in string theory - interesting stuff. Greene imagines realities beyond our own. It's not a concept that I find to be particularly abhorrent - but it's NOT. FRAKKING. TALKING. ABOUT. GOD! He's talking about additional dimensions of physical reality! See "flatland" for a better idea. 

Basically what the video's editor is implying is that - "oh, there are these extra realities we don't know about? God must be in those - so God must be real."

What? That's a bit of a leap, dontcha think? This says absolutely nothing about God,

But it's not the insult to the science in the documentary here that bugs me so much - it's the insult to God. God as the "mystery" - God as the "cosmic stunt artist"[1]  who only resides in those parts of nature that we don't understand or can't explain - does this sound familiar to anyone? God of the gaps - ring a bell? It is quite possibly the worst argument in all of theology!

We could look at the "God of the gaps" as an appeal to ignorance, but it's actually something much, much worse. While the argument here is "God can only exist in those things that we don't understand - so if we don't understand it, God must be there" - the result is more disturbing. If God can only exist in what we don't understand, then God Itself is ignorance. If that's how you're going to define God, then sure - that God is real: but is that what you want to worship?

[1] I'm quoting Polkinghorne here, but this implies neither agreement nor disagreement with the rest of his lecture.

Has anyone seen this particular YouTube phenom?

I'm not quite sure what to make of her, and judging from the comments, the Muslim community shares my confusion. Some people admire her, others insult her, and all are surprised by her.

I can see where she's coming from. There is beauty in modesty, and hijabs are lovely. If they did not have their religious significance, I think there would be a lot of non-Muslim women who wore them. I'll admit that I wouldn't complain about having my hair out of my face all the time. (Although the pins would make me nervous!)

But the thing is - the hijab does have religious significance. In essence, she is dressing up as a Muslim. I'm not sure how I'd react to a non-Jew wearing kippah. I might respond negatively, but then, there's a different context there. Jews have missionaries trying to hijack Judaism - nobody is pretending to be Muslim in order to convert Muslims. I might still be irritated that someone was behaving in a way that would pass as Jewish for them. But then again, I might be glad that they saw beauty in Judaism. I guess first and foremost, I'd want to know their motives.

I think that this woman will eventually either become a Muslim (quite possible - I've read stories of other women trying on hijab before converting) or abandon the hijab and look at it as some phase she went through in college. Hey - she could do both.

I tried this recipe last night, and brought some to work for lunch today with egg salad in pita bread. It turned out pretty well. It has the somewhat unusual addition of worsterchire sauce, but it's enjoyable.

I had been advised in advance that it is very difficult to screw up gazpacho, and that advice seems to be correct. I'm pretty sure I forgot to add the parsley, and since I didn't have red wine vinegar, I substituted a mixture of balsamic and red cooking wine. I also took about half the vegetables and put them in a blender, then put the rest in the soup. The result was a nicely textured soup with a good strong flavor.

Tonight's experiment is a challah bread pudding with cinnamon and dates. Unfortunately, I didn't have whole milk, but I'm hoping that the richness of the bread and other ingredients makes up for it a bit.

What is God, exactly?

Those who do not profess any belief in God - and even some of those who do - would respond with an anthromorphic image. This can be quite literally the man on the throne (although I think very few people actually believe in that anymore) to something like a human consciousness that encompasses the entire universe. The degree to which this God interacts with humanity would vary depending on the person giving the description, from the utterly impersonal deity of deism to the micromanager of life on earth - the one guiding the growth of each petal of each flower.

The trouble with God is that "God" means so many different things to so many different people. Indeed, there are those by whose standards I am no less an atheist than Dawkins and Hitchens - although Dawkins and Hitchens would certainly disagree with that point.

So the appropriate question becomes, when discussing God-belief (or even, disbelief), what is your God?

I've actually had to do some considerable study to find language to articulate my own concept, but after a period of time, I've found one I'm comfortable with. Given the religious focus of this blog, it seems appropriate to explicitly articulate (or at least, to attempt to) my own answer to the above question.

My God is quite similar to the God of Einstein actually. Einstein's God was a sort of conglamorate of all of the laws of physics. I think, however, that this definition is a bit limited. My God is the fabric of existence. My God is real because reality is real - my God is reality, from the subatomic realm to the infinity of the universe. There's nothing supernatural to that aspect.

But I add in an additional hypothesis - that what we know of reality is actually only a fraction of what actually exists. (This is not an argument for some alternate realms called "Heaven" and "Hell" - but I do find the string theorists' idea of more than 4 dimensions intriguing. I will concede that they and I could be absolutely wrong on this part, however, which is why I only call it a hypothesis.) This is or is not supernatural, depending on how you conceive "supernatural."  So in that sense, my God would be the Einsteinian God of today's cosmology.

In more poetic terms, I describe "God" as the "heartbeat of the universe" or the "consciousness of existence."  This God is neither personal nor impersonal in the traditional senses. Of course God is involved in the affairs of the world, because God is in everything. But can I pray to this God to give me a million dollars? Sure, but I am no more likely to get that million than if I said nothing at all.

There are those who say "you can't pray to a force" - to which I respond, "why not?" Why can one not interact with the fabric of reality - why can one not call out to the universe? If I exist, and I am conscious of that existence, why can I not speak to the fabric of all existence? Why can this conversation with existence not be a force for personal improvement? Through that improvement, I impact the world, and thus, I impact God. Imprecatory prayer to this force would be generally ineffective - but that is also something which seems to be generally confirmed by human experience. (Do you really believe the Sudanese don't pray?)

So why use God-language here? Why not say "reality" or "the universe"? Simply put, this God transcends the universe, and what I know of reality. "God" is the most appropriate term. While I can interact with God, I cannot do so on the level of person-to-person, because God is too grand for that, but I speak as if I would speak to a person, because that is the only language that I have. My God is beyond visible and invisible - you reach this level when you deal with the fabric of all realities.  The greatest weakness one can encounter when appraoching this God is describing attributes of It, as nothing in human language quite does the trick.

I've spoken before of having a transformative religious experience - a personal revalation of sorts. Most people who hear this imagine something like that which happened to the Christian St. Paul - a bright light and a voice from Heaven. In reality, my "revalation" was more awareness - a moment of consciousness of this God - Its grandeur and beauty. I "felt" the "heartbeat of the universe" - I felt my own place in existence, and the harmony of all existence. Yes, it was beautiful and powerful - but there was no sensory experience, and it can't be described in the language of emotion. The psychological level on which I experienced this awareness, I describe as the "spirit" - it's another one of those somewhat vague terms for which nothing else quite suffices.

So that's it. That's what I'm talking about when I mention God and the spirit. "Faith" is described in the previous post, as the sort of irrational optimism that most of us have when dealing with the world - the one that enables us to get up each day - something like what Erikson called "basic trust."

I've never particularly thought of faith as a good thing. What value could irrational belief possibly have, after all? How is this any better than any other delusion?

In class last week, we were discussing one of the psalms. I can't remember precisely which one, but the gist was that God comes in to squash the bad guys and save the good guys in the end.

I was utterly repelled, and made that fact known. What a horrible thing to say - that the world is full of hollywood endings. We know from experience that a lot of times, the bad guys win. A lot of innocent people have suffered and died without ever being saved from their tormentors. What utter hogwash! This psalmist must have been mad!

I went on further to state how this kind of lollipop theology provides an excuse to not be responsible for resolving the injustices in the world - and it also opens the gates to extremism. What religious fanatic does not believe that God is on his side? This, I concluded, was a moral evil.

Having had a few days to think about it, however, I am beginning to change my mind. Yes, it is true that this idea can contribute to laziness and extremism - but so can so many others. But perhaps there is a value to this belief, however factually incorrect it may be. Perhaps it is beneficial to the human psyche to believe that ultimately, the universe unfolds as it should.

What is the alternative? If you look at the absolute truth - that the universe is random and often cruel and unjust - then you become like me: always worried and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Perhaps there are certain delusions that are medicinal. Perhaps this belief that ultimately things work out for the best is what many people call "faith" - and what Erikson called "basic trust." It's irrational - it's wrong - but in small doses, it's adaptive.

Now this does not mean that living entirely by "faith" is a good thing - we do have to take responsibility for our own lives, and to realize that sometimes things don't work out. But maybe the cold hard truth is overrated - and maybe just a little bit of medicinal delusion keeps most people sane. And it is possible that it does even more than that. Consider the lives of people who have changed history for the better. They didn't get up in the morning thinking they were going to lose - otherwise, they would have had no strength to continue their efforts. The pacifists, the civil rights leaders, the great people of history have all taken on seemingly insurmountable odds, under the belief that in the end, good would triumph.

The truth is - I don't think I could do it. I don't think I can ever get myself to believe that I am Divinely protected, and things will ultimately work out. But I'm starting to gain an appreciation for those who can. Maybe the psalmist was on to something after all.

Analytical Thinker

Analytical Thinkers are reserved, quiet persons. They like to get to the bottom of things - curiosity is one of their strongest motives. They want to know what holds the world together deep down inside. They do not really need much more to be happy because they are modest persons. Many mathematicians, philosophers and scientists belong to this type. Analytical Thinkers loathe contradictions and illogicalness; with their sharp intellect, they quickly and comprehensively grasp patterns, principles and structures. They are particularly interested in the fundamental nature of things and theoretical findings; for them, it is not necessarily a question of translating these into practical acts or in sharing their considerations with others. Analytical Thinkers like to work alone; their ability to concentrate is more marked than that of all other personality types. They are open for and interested in new information.

Analytical Thinkers have little interest in everyday concerns - they are always a little like an “absent-minded professor” whose home and workplace are chaotic and who only concerns himself with banalities such as bodily needs when it becomes absolutely unavoidable. The acknowledgement of their work by others does not play a great role for them; in general,they are quite independent of social relationships and very self-reliant. Analytical Thinkers therefore often give others the impression that they are arrogant or snobby - especially because they do not hesitate to speak their mind with their often harsh (even if justified) criticism and their imperturbable self-confidence. Incompetent contemporaries do not have it easy with them. But whoever succeeds in winning their respect and interest has a witty and very intelligent person to talk to. A partner who amazes one with his excellent powers of observation and his very dry humour.

It takes some time before Analytical Thinkers make friends, but then they are mostly friends for life. They only need very few people around them. Their most important ability is to be a match for them and thus give them inspiration. Constant social obligations quickly get on their nerves; they need a lot of time alone and often withdraw from others. Their partner must respect this and understand that this is not due to the lack of affection. Once they have decided in favour of a person, Analytical Thinkers are loyal and reliable partners. However, one cannot expect romance and effusive expressions of feelings from them and they will definitely forget their wedding anniversary. But they are always up to a night spent with stimulating discussions and a good glass of wine!

Adjectives which describe your type
introverted, theoretical, logical, spontaneous, rational, analytical, intellectual, sceptical, pensive, critical, quiet, precise, independent, creative, inventive, abstract, eccentric, curious, reserved, self-involved, imaginative, unsociable, determined, modest, careful, incommunicative, witty

These subjects could interest you
literature, science fiction, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, Internet, drawing/painting, astrology, spiritual things, meditation, music, writing, strategy games, politics