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11
Oct
2017
Here are three words you will never hear anyone say: “I am lying.”
The whole point of lying is to make your hearers believe that they are hearing the truth. Why, then, would you tell them that what they’re hearing is not the truth?
In murder mystery novels and TV shows, witnesses always break down at some point and admit that their previous testimony was less than accurate. “But you have to believe me,” they always say. “I’m telling the truth now.”
Really?
Why should I believe you this time?
Earlier this year, National Geographic magazine did a cover story on lying. According to them, lying may correlate with higher intelligence. Liars have to use their brains harder to keep track of multiple stories – both what’s true and what they have claimed is true.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Lying, honesty, truth
9
Have Canadian socialists lost their collective mind? (I know, I know, hard-core capitalists would claim they never had a mind to lose.) Last weekend, the New Democratic Party elected as its national leader a non-white who wears a turban and carries a symbolic dagger!
Jagmeet Singh, a 38-year-old brown-skinned man with abundant energy and charisma, won a 53 per cent majority on the first ballot. Yes, on the first ballot! By contrast, the Conservative Party required 13 rounds of voting for Andrew Scheer to reach 51 per cent.
The news media immediately began speculating about how Singh would fare in Quebec, where Bill 62 bans people from wearing religious garb while receiving or providing public services -- even riding on municipal buses.
I think focussing on Quebec avoids the real issue. How will “white” Canada react to him?
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Muslim, Islam, Jagmeet Singh, Sikhism, Bahai, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, turban
4
“Hi! How are you?”
“Just fine. And you?”
The routine exchange of pleasantries is one of the social graces that grease the axles of human interaction. We say the words to acknowledge the other’s presence -- to till the ground, as it were, for our real reason for getting together with that other person. Which, often, is not personal at all.
Unfortunately, we rarely take the words of the ritual seriously.
I had a lawyer friend in Toronto who loathed idle chit-chat. If you greeted him, “How are you?” he commonly barked, “Don’t ask unless you mean it!”
So I almost always asked him how he was anyway, just to see what would happen.
And he, to his credit, answered as if I really did mean it.
Tags:
27
Sep
Does God lie awake at night, worrying about things?
Yes, I know -- that image immediately pictures God as a person. A person who sleeps, in a rumpled bed, tossing and turning. In other words, someone just like one of us, only more so. Psychologists call it “anthropomorphization”-- seeing others in our own image.
It’s the kind of misplaced identity that led Marc Gellman to title one of his books, “Does God Have a Big Toe?”
But basic question is not whether God lies awake at night, but whether God -- whatever God may or may not be -- worries.
Tags: God, Nashville Statement, biblical sex, worry, worship
25
A friend required surgery recently for a lump in her breast. She got into the operating room within a week. Someone else got bumped. The surgeon shrugged: “In these circumstances, a facelift doesn’t take priority.”
My friend benefitted from a process called “triage.” Basically, it’s a system for making difficult choices. And it applies to many situations beyond medical. Even to the future of the United Nations.
In its original battlefield context, triage meant dividing injured victims into three groups:
· Those likely to recover, regardless of medical attention
· Those for whom immediate care will make a positive difference
· Those unlikely to live, regardless of what doctors can do; devoting energy to them might mean denying care to someone else who could benefit more.
Tags: Trump, triage, United Nations, NAFTA, eye for an eye