I don't want anyone to hack my phone. Every day, at the Preliminary page, I mention that I don't want people to hack my phone; I actually ask law enforcement to arrest anyone who's doing that.
That being said; I was raised mostly to be Jewish. Judaism has a lot of rules about everything in life and my family wasn't observant of a lot of them, so I didn't feel like I knew the religion, although I never identified as being of another religion. I feel Jewish when I think about religion.
A rule that they told us about in Hebrew school was not to write the word for G-d's name. I think the reasoning for it was that G-d is infinite and good, so it's disrespectful to write that name somewhere that it could be torn or thrown away. Every religion has its own rules for things; I felt like that rule wasn't demanding, so that's how I write that name.
One of the things that's the most difficult for me about my situation is that I am so much in conflict about moral issues with powerful people that a byproduct of that is my having to think about my behavior a lot. I think that's the logical response to someone who objects to other people's behavior on the basis of morality every day for years; what they're going to say is either "Stop talking," or "Nobody cares," or "These are all the things that we're going to say about you year after year to ridicule you so that you don't seem like a good person and that will make us seem not so bad," or "What do you think a person's behavior should be and are you practicing what you preach?"
I never feel like crying so much as when I feel the pressure of how I might be specifically affecting another person's life. Even though I lose my temper and sometimes behave as if I don't care how other people feel because of it, later I feel bad if I've been inconsiderate or unfair.
G-d is helpful. It's a funny way to think about it, but that sentence is always true; G-d is helpful. I talk a lot about my hospitalizations, and because people read or listen to my blogs sometimes and not other times, there will be things that I have said before and I'll say again. Being in the hospital at such a young age, almost 18, was so terrible, and it's good when people can get perspective about painful things that happen to them. One thing that it did was take from me that feeling of invulnerability that most healthy people have at that age. It made me too scared at the time, but after a while what it helped me to know was that I didn't need to do a lot of dangerous risk-taking. A lot of young adults don't think that anything bad could happen to them, so they take dangerous risks. Two decades after getting the message from life that you never need to borrow trouble, I have good physical health. I've never even broken anything. I hadn't taken a lot of risks before I was in the hospital; what happened when I was there was that I interacted with older patients and I realized from what they said about their lives that taking a lot of health risks can easily make you sorry for the rest of your life. That's also a reason that I never did drugs and never felt like getting drunk. My knowledge of people who did drugs and who drank a lot was not from parties where everyone was young and healthy; it was from getting to know psychiatric patients twenty years after they had started doing drugs and drinking too much. Mental hospitals are full of people who are not only in bad physical and mental condition because of those habits, they are so sad about what their lives were like because they realize that they could have had good lives if they hadn't had addictions and they hate themselves for not realizing it sooner.
It's also often difficult for nonreligious people who are healthy and who have never felt like they have lacked for anything to feel like they need to depend on G-d. It's a standard parable about G-d that pain and a situation that feels totally past your ability to deal with it can bring you to G-d because you have nowhere else to be and nobody else to ask for help. What's difficult to deal with, even after being brought to G-d that way and getting some peace from it, is that G-d does not guarantee that you will live to a certain age, never get sick, never be poor, never get hurt, win all the time. That is one of the most difficult things to accept, and it is one of the things that people who talk and write about G-d have talked and written about for centuries. Conversations about G-d can be really interesting, probably because G-d is so many things, including the source of our lives. I like talking to people who think and talk about G-d a lot, people who have studied religion or whose professions are religious. There's always something to talk about, although people who are naive have to be careful not to forget that not every person who says that he or she is religious, or who even is religious, is a healthy, safe person to be around.
I think that one of the things that trying to read and think about G-d, and to practice good behavior every day, what all of that helps people to do, is to be the people whom they want to be no matter what is happening to them. People who are in a lot of pain for a long time have a difficult task not lashing out at other people; life really is difficult for people are suffering, and a lot of people are in pain all their lives. To be a good person in the midst of what you can't do anything about is something that G-d is helpful for.
I try not to talk about G-d all the time; I'm not a professional and it's not as if anyone's asking what I think about religion.
I'm not happy about my impending fame. It's upsetting. Since you mentioned G-d at one of your posts this week, I decided that I felt like writing about it.
Copyright L. Kochman, July 2, 2016 @ 12:17 a.m.