Off a Cliff: We're reaching key tipping points

Truth Serum: A short-short story

A Boring Town: A short-short story

Beware of Dancing: A short-short story

A Confession: a short-short story

A World Without Religion: a thought experiment

Depressed: A short-short story

Should You Child Be Bnai-Mitzvahed: The case for the tradition's reinvention

As Jews become ever less religious, more assimilated, and except for the Orthodox, have a low birthrate, more parents are wondering whether there might be a better use of the 13-year old's time than memorizing the haftorah (a portion of the Bible in Hebrew) as well as the cost of a glitzy party.

 My Psychology Today article today makes the case for the bar/bat-mitzvah's reinvention.

A Case Against the Ten Commandments...indeed against all rules

A rabbi, Yisroel Cotlar (pictured right,) asked me if I agreed with him that the world is better if we live by absolute rights and wrongs: for example, the Ten Commandments. Here was my response.

I believe that living by absolute rights and wrongs will cause the masses to lead better lives, creating more net good within their sphere of influence. They, like the Simple Child of the Passover Four Questions, require rules to follow with minimal reasoning let alone discretion.

But in my view, absolutism will be dismissed as reductionistic by most of the intelligentsia, who so prize unrestricted analytic thinking. Such people believe, as I do, that absolutes impede wise decision-making.

For example, a core biblical absolute is "Thou shalt not kill." But, for example, at the point it became clear that Hitler was planning to exterminate millions of people, if a person thereby chose to assassinate Hitler, could one legitimately, unequivocally, as an absolute, insist that is bad or a sin?

"Thou shalt not steal" is another of the Bible's core absolutes. But if your wife desperately needs a drug but you cannot afford it, might it arguably be right for you to steal the drug? Insisting that people operate based on absolutes would, net, lead to greater injustice.

I believe the greatest good would accrue by having a continuum of "religion:" On one end, a deity-based, ritual-filled, absolutist approach, and on the other end, a situational-ethics-based "secular religion," no belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent deity required.

Our Experts Aren't Expert

The world's leading experts can't figure out how to stop the economic decline, when just a year or two ago, the world economy was growing.

In the 1970s, the experts were predicting global cooling. Then they insisted it's warming; they even gave Al Gore a Nobel Prize for publicizing that theory. Yet, for the last decade, the earth's average temperature has dropped,  and now scientists are telling us to not expect warming for at least another decade. 

We've given billions to experts on curing cancer. Yet we still treat it with medieval crudeness: Cut out the cancer you can see and poison the body, hoping you kill the cancer without killing the patient. Often, it doesn't work.

U.S. News & World Report called me "Career coach extraordinaire" and the San Francisco Bay Guardian called me "The Bay Area's best career coach. " Yet often, I'm not sure how to help a client. Procrastinators particularly challenge me despite my having often been published on the subject.

The experts told us an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Then they told us not to eat apples because of something called alar. Then they went back to "an apple a day."

The experts told us to switch from butter to margarine...until they decided to tell us to switch back to butter.

The experts told us to control our dietary cholesterol. Now they tell us it doesn't matter much.

For decades, education experts insisted that teaching newcomers to the U.S. in their own language would ultimately improve their skills both in English and their native language. Until they decided they were wrong.

Since 9/11, the experts told us we will likely soon have another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. It's been eight years and a terrorist hasn't broken a twig here.

Experts insisted that phonics was the best way to teach reading...until they decided that whole language was...until they decided phonics was. Meanwhile the reading achievement gap between society's haves and have-nots is as wide as ever.

To navigate our complicated world, we all seek a guide. Religious people turn to a deity while we atheists smugly prefer science. Yet at this still primitive stage in science's development, even an inveterate atheist like me must acknowledge that my science-based guide isn't as superior as I'd like to think it is. At least the theists' Gods don't keep changing their mind.