Culture

A Niche in the Long Tail

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Last week I was walking past the Salvation Army store on my corner, when I noticed that someone had abandoned a box of books in front of the deposit bin. I assume that things left there are for perusal, so I perused, and found a book I’d always been curious about: Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”. Andersen writes about how things change when scarcity of access is no longer a factor in what we purchase. He looks at books and music in particular, and at the changes that have occurred in our consumption of those media, now that we have unlimited choices of what to read or listen to. A half century ago, my reading source was my school or town library, and what they had was the limits of what I might read next.

Culture

Angry Birds

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Some of my readers may have celebrated New Year’s under the balmy twenty-four hour sunlight of Antarctica, which would explain why they haven’t heard of “Angry Birds”. The rest of you don’t have an excuse for being so sadly out of the loop, but your being so does provide a fine reason for me to fill you in. Wikipedia, most useful as an elaborator on all topical phenomena, succinctly offers this summary: Angry Birds is a puzzle video game developed by Finland-based Rovio Mobile, in which players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs stationed on or within various structures, with the intent of destroying all the pigs on the playfield…. Players may re-attempt levels as many times as they wish, and may also replay completed levels in an attempt to boost their score. It has been a very long time since I’ve encountered a game as addictive as this one, which certainly makes the question “why?”

Culture

The Wikileaks Infowar

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“There is a war between the ones
who say there is a war
And the ones who say there isn’t.” (Leonard Cohen)
“Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.” (Hillary Clinton, 1/21/10)
Wikileaks has raised a range of fascinating and related issues, starting with the extraordinary information that has been revealed. But should that information have been revealed? Is Julian Assange a hero, a rapist, both, or neither?

Culture

Reddit: Being Touched by My Home Base

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A person reveals a lot by the website they choose for their home page. Some people want to have their own blog; others have Google news. There have been times when I’ve had both of those, but for the past four years I’ve been firmly linked to Reddit. Reddit is a community forum on which people post, either their own comments or links to sites, news, pictures, whatever. Users can comment on these posts, and discussions, sometimes heated ones, follow.

General News

Scanning the Scanners

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One month ago I drank some extremely noxious laxatives, and went into a small room where a man stuck a camera up my rectum and took a series of photos. It was an invasive and unpleasant procedure, one which I repeat every five years, thanks to advice from my doctor and two friends who have survived colon cancer. I’d rather have a colonoscopy than colon cancer. Whether I want to go through a similar procedure every time I take an airplane is a related question, one we may face in our immediate future. The path that leads to that hypothetical question starts with a media scan of the new TSA (Transportation Security Association) scanners and the policy that comes with them..

Culture

On Evolution, Vaccination, and Global Warming: The Cost of Magical Thinking

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When I was a teenager I believed that science was the route to all the best answers to the most important questions. I would have applauded Sir Ernest Rutherford’s dictum: “There is physics and there is stamp-collecting.” It took the sixties to loosen up my views, to help me recognize that there were things not measurable by science, but true none the less. Love and literature were two early examples; the power of spirituality came later. Today my views are closer to what Stephen Jay Gould called Nonoverlapping Magisteria , the perspective that there are areas of expertise over which science holds sway, and other areas over which it does not, and that wisdom can best be reached through exploring both.

Culture

Portrait of the Polymath as an Old Man

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In my childhood, I wanted to know everything about everything, which I called “being a polymath”, because polymath was such an impressive word. I read omnivorously, and remembered almost all of what I had read. I was the star of my high school’s Reach For the Top team (short version: a Canadian high school Jeopardy). I knew all the songs on the top 30, every week, and could identify them from the first notes, to the amazement of my parents to whom all rock and roll sounded pretty much the same. Two long-remembered dreams from my childhood encapsulate this obsession.

Culture

The Use and Misuse of Names

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I intuitively feel that these experiences, mystical but also sensual and embodied, are the core of spirituality and the foundation that religions build their vast tottering edifices upon: these experiences that work for us, that we then work hard to name and explicate in full logical or fantastically elaborated detail. Naming is not only important but unavoidable … but once the naming develops into major exclusionary truth claims, … and once these get identified with the worldly power involved in religious organization then all the power of the experience gets harnessed to the groupthink and the powerplays (exclusions, repressions and crusades) and we have the worst of religion. Dave Belden in response to How I Became a Pagan

Reading Dave’s comment, I was reminded of Deepak Chopra’s saying “God gave humans the truth, and the devil came and he said, ‘Let’s give it a name and call it religion.'” There is an inescapable tension between experience and the words we use to describe that experience, which cannot help but remove us from the experience itself.

Earth-based Religions

How I Became a Pagan

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Paganism. The name itself has a certain wild and crazy sound to it, a sense of scribbling wildly outside the lines of the establishment. Much as I’d like to claim that aspect of the word, that sense of neo-medievalists dancing naked in the spring moonlight before they copulate in the furrows so that the crops will come again this year, that isn’t me, and it isn’t my paganism. I’m an urban middle-aged man, ex-school teacher, born and raised Jewish. What has brought me to a spiritual place where I can assert my religion is pagan, (or primal, to use Huston Smith’s more encompassing term) ?

Culture

Tikkunista

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Dear TDB readers,
I wondered if this description of my online magazine, Tikkunista, was inappropriately self-serving for a post on Tikkun Daily so I asked Dave if he thought it was worth posting. He asked that I share his answer, which follows. I think this post would help a lot of people understand the appeal to the writer of online writing and blogging. We are looking for more people like you who want to do this on Tikkun Daily. We especially want people, whether they are generalists or not, who are able to take a “beat” that fits with our spiritual progressive mission.