George Carlin, Comic Who Chafed at Society and Its Constraints, Dies at 71

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o

   Normally, when well known people die, I do not care. It is not a lack of sympathy, but rather a lack of celebrity worship. I have seen so many people get upset over a variety of well known people dying...newscasters, actors, singers, etc. I have always wondered why they cared that much. Sentimentality is not a position I am prone to. I have now had a moment of grief for a well known person. It is a strange sensation.

    However, I can explain some of it.

    Frequently, there are thoughts and ideas that I have that are lonely and I am not as quick witted of tongue or am I particularly fast at typing as some and so therefore I am less likely to connect to people about that. This is not to say that I am dull-witted or cannot formulate ideas that derive from a collection of thoughts that produce something that was not learned, or even that I am unable to write these down. I am simply too slow at doing so for my own patience, more so for an others sense of patience. I could probably write a post about that issue alone. All that is to say that when there is a voice that generally promotes similar ideas on a broad sweeping scope and does so well, there is a sense of identification and connection that, loathe as I am to say,  is felt and from that, protrudes a continuity and affection that is pleasurable.

    This is such a rare phenomenon for me. So, now that he is dead, I feel grief and I wonder at it. I am embarrassed by it and confused by the alien feeling. I normally associate sentimentality with trite and hollow people trying to fill up the emptiness with a vapid feeling for something they do not really have to connect to and can have big, meaningless, grandiose and sweeping gestures wherein their feet never actually touch the dirt.

    I am not that person, nor do I really understand it. Yet, I feel some tiny tingle of sorrow about the loss as if it were personal.

I am writing this as a sort of response and extended thought regarding a post I read recently by hecticmuse

    My brother and I were fairly exposed to different religions and philosophies...not because our parents were directly open, but because they used to be not so religious, we lived in a major navy megalopolis area that was way more progressive than here and they were just not paying close enough attention. At any rate, when I was 13 I had already been to a few Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Mormon, and Catholic churches as well as a synagogue. I had already tested the waters on what I tend to think of as flaky Paga-Wicca oiuja board playing pseudo-science beliefs, and I was moderately familiar with Buddhist and Taoist ideas. I had read and loved about Greek/Roman, Norse, Egypt mythology and Fairy tales from several countries. I may not be thinking of a couple of things.
    Somewhere between 13 and 14, I decided that I was an Atheist and then later agnostic..though years later I would circle back to Atheism. Also when I was 13/14 I moved to the Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood area and began attending a Catholic school. Oh Joy!!! This was a startling change from public school in Virginia to a private school in Florida. Previous to this, private school was an extraordinarily foreign idea, a setting that was reserved for movies or books. My mother and her sisters had attended private christian schools in South Carolina. However, I had no concrete conception of this. In addition, my mother and father and their families were combinations of Methodist and Baptist and my father was the person that I went to live with in Florida. Even though my father would generally be considered a reasonable, logical person, he can get entangled in narrow ideas of how something should be. One of his greatest one was as follows: my brother and myself should go to Catholic private school because our stepbrother and stepsister did...and it was only fair. (?!?) Fair to whom, I am not certain...even now.
    I hated most of it, not as much because it was Catholic, but because the education was miserably, tragically pathetic. This was especially funny because people are always on about how private schools are better, the education is better. Yeah, right. Let me give a funny example of how much better the education is at a private school. When I was in 8th grade in Virginia, I took Latin, Physics, Adv. Algebra and English, chorus and elite chorus to name a few. When I moved to Florida that year and began attending the Catholic school, they did not offer Latin(ha!). The math, science and English were pathetic grammar school versions. There were not electives, no choices. There were music, art and library/computer lessons that everybody went to. The language that you learned aside from English was Spanish and for only 30 minutes on Monday. If it is possible, there are two things that make this worse. Spelling was a subject(grammar school anybody??) and of course religion was a subject. Why do they even bother to call it that? Why not call it 'Our Religion' or ' Catholicism'. It seems a bit misleading, as if that were the only religion...because it is the only one they talk about.

Well, I have run out of typing fingers. I will have to add to this later.

Rambling and Shambling...

     Someone once left me a message on the guestbook that I failed to notice for some time. When I looked at it, I was pleased at the style of writing. Though I disagreed with the person, they were extremely pleasant and put their ideas forth gently. However, one of the questions that bothered me went something like "...going back to the big bang, who created the 'elements' ..something does not come out of nothing." Naturally, I have heard this particular argument (?) quite a few other times. The person went on to say that they had never known anyone to reply to this, even 'scientists' in a successful way or to have much of a response. I know that my immediate, practically knee-jerk response would be, "who or what created 'god'?"

I am not sure who this person was talking to...or perhaps they desired the response to somehow prove an oppositional stance. This question assumes and implies two things. The first is the implication that there is a deity that is the initiator and that it somehow resolves that issue (which it so clearly does not). The second is that if one believes that one cannot understand concepts outside of human perception (concepts that apparently belong to whatever deity) or that the human mind belonging to a creature that can barely conceptualize four dimensional shapes cannot conceive of a space without time (being such linear creatures) why presume that there has to be a 'before' or 'after'.

-DJMopp

Oh, yeah....check this out

Fuck You Period!!!