Fear of God

A stomp above me just now as I was rereading the previous entries confirmed that fish or surrogate fish is observing the proceedings. To bring you up to date in the gas-harrass department, both have been at a minimum recently. I am convinced that this blog is doing its duty.

If you missed last Friday night's posts, don't fret: I deleted the entire thing due to heavy hacking and boring subject matter. You wouldn't have liked it anyway. Friday night is fun night, so no fish talk. I have a few notes:
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War of Civilizations
God-fearing folks
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More than enough stuff to keep me occupied for the duration. I will address the last first.

As I was sitting here this week playing Civilization III I kept one ear tuned to the Republican Convention proceedings on TV. At times I could hardly believe my ears. Sometimes it seemed to be a church meeting instead of a convention. At other times it seemed to be a Jingo Festival. As I listened to the rhetoric I began to admire the sheer harmony - bizarre as it seemed - of it. There was not one discordant note as the proceedings charged on. Eventually I abandoned C-III in favor of my two tv sets. I watched on both, preferring MSNBC on the primary, and switching between CNN and FOX on the other. It was remote heaven, folks, as my two hands obeyed more or less correctly my CNS signals, which were in turn obeyed by the remotes and then the tv sets themselves. As I watch the convention it seemed to me that all those folks were ruled by fear. Fear begins with fear of God.

You already know that I do not respect people who fear God. I understand their fear, of course, and I think that the 'fear of God' is a sociologically useful phenomenon. The FOG (if you will excuse this contraction) produces much socially acceptable behavior and therefore promotes the progress of Civilization. But the FOG has a downside. The downside of the FOG enters the equation when powerful leaders also suffer from the FOG. In such cases the population is at risk due to the possibility that the powerful leader will listen to the VOG (surely you know what THAT means) and does the WOG, in which case AHBL.

Which brings us to The War of Civilizations, a fun thing on your computer but not otherwise.