Yearly Archives: 2006

Giving Weight to Childhood Baggage

Families Weight Comments May Harm Girls for Years is the title of the article. This may seem obvious, but I sure wish someone had pointed that out to my parents. You know, diet programs at age eleven are 1) never a very good idea and 2) really hard on one’s self esteem, not to mention waistline. I have heard that kids will self-regulate their eating quite unselfconsciously. Thus, if one presents healthy options — both for eating and excercise — that should be all the “commentary” necessary.

A renegade jew

Three hundred and fifty years ago, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from his Portugese Jewish community. As the author of this op-ed piece, entitled “Reasonable Doubt,” writes:

[Baruch] Spinoza’s reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology.

Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us — whether Jew or Christian or Muslim — a privileged position in the narrative of the world’s unfolding.

Still seems somehow apropos, eh?