Month: March 2012

Bill Maher does a bit called “Dispatches from the Bubble” in which he criticizes the republicans for fostering an insulated, delusional mental culture based around willful ignorance and groupthink. I recently went on a vacation and ran into my own bubble of sorts, amongst those who are oblivious to basic concepts of health and nutrition and are unaware of the simple fact that they are killing themselves.

I thought I would write on my experiences in the form of perceived major missteps in nutrition and the development of well being. I come from a somewhat privileged perspective: I became unhealthy and obese due to a metabolic sensitivity to carbohydrate and not gluttony, ignorance to science or basic tenets of health. When I discovered I was sensitive to carbohydrate I changed my diet (For good) and have been rapidly losing weight since. The mistakes I have encountered in my travels and lodging with family are not of this sort, that is to say: they are not medical in a clinical sense. Rather these mistakes represent a lack of wisdom, reason and knowledge regarding the most basic principles of health.

Awhile ago I made a post about the virtues of religious friends and my experience with mainstream atheists. Today I have an urge to talk about the role that religion plays, and must play, in the social order. What is true is that truth and self-awareness are not factors here. Clearly the Christians do not live in way authentic to canon; they apologize and make invention upon aspects of their law book which are in agreement with right reason and ignore other commandments which are clearly horrific artifacts from a racist, warmongering and paranoid Bronze Age tribe. No Christian would in his right mind sell his daughter into sexual slavery to settle a debt, or condone the smashing of babies against rocks, the summary execution of a man who stayed in the company of an ovulating woman, or the genocide of a sovereign people, to name a few crimes of thousands condoned in the textual sources. So let us make no pretensions about the fact that the religious, and by religious I refer primarily to those who practice Abrahamic religion, are aware of any moral truths by their own religious practice. If a religious man is truly virtuous it is by accident or by reason, not an actualization of his canonical creed.

That being said religion is not merely an interpretation of the textual sources; it is not a self-contained philosophy. Religion is accompanied by a world of tradition, custom and ritual which instructs a stable social bedrock. The church in bygone times served as the nucleus of wholesome, structured, ordered social activity of a non-religious but nevertheless essential sort. Holidays instruct days in which we are led to pause and consider certain virtues, history and past events. The world of ritual and tradition rightfully sacralizes the relationship between man and the cosmos, and creates a sort of narrative that the society at large can share in. These accompaniments of religion are essential to a healthy, flourishing society, a society without such a bedrock is aimless, depraved and lost.