Blog
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
This is how it played out: At around midday on November 22, a passenger sitting in the train pulled out his phone to film an incident occurring in front of him. The footage (which immediately went viral) reveals a man reading passages from the Bible out loud to a young boy wearing a yarmulke, sitting beside him.
TOLERANCE
I was, however, “open-minded.” Cue the air quotes, please. There is a difference between open-minded and “open-minded.” When one is simply and honestly open-minded, it indicates a willingness to try new things, to hear other viewpoints, in short, to learn something new and be OK with that.
MEDIA & ETHICS
I actually saw this question in an online forum the other day: “If I wanted to start my own cult, how would I do it?” Now to begin with, the word “cult” is simply a pejorative word for some group the person using it doesn't like.
TOLERANCE
Humankind at its finest sees a tree not as a green blob, but a Maple, its leaves individually defined, each one a bit different from the others—in all their variety and beauty, part of a larger and complex unity.
RELIGIOUS LITERACY
No one’s religion was cause for offense. No difference in color, social standing, job or education impacted the way we interacted.
SCIENTOLOGY RELIGION
The thing that Scientologists take issue with is the lack of science behind so much of the psychiatric community’s categorizations and diagnoses of these obvious behavioral issues. And even more important, what possible good comes from merely naming a condition when there’s no hard science to prove it, and no cure? All that happens is people are turned into life-long “patients” who come to define themselves and their human experience through the distorted lens of a “condition” they have been told they have.
TOLERANCE
Many years ago, at the dawn of the personal computer era, I had a nerdy friend who always seemed to be happy. One day I asked him what his secret was. He said, “Easy. Every morning when I get up, I say to myself, ‘Reset. Start.’” Reset: To return something to its initial state; to set to zero.
SCIENTOLOGY RELIGION
Sometimes the bar isn’t set very high, like the year my son said that his primary objective for the next 12 months was to “take more warm baths.”
TOLERANCE
I have a friend on social media who is a practicing Baptist minister. He’s an old friend from high school. He has the usual family/nature/”funny stuff” posts, but his favorite subject matter seems to be politics.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
Last week I had an unusual phone conversation with a client I’m doing some screenplay rewrite work for. He was somewhere between amazed and aghast to learn I was a Scientologist! When I asked him, why the surprise, he said it was because I was smart and not weird… at least as far as he could tell.
