L’Shana Tova, first of all.  That’s the traditional greeting for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which is today.  It’s interesting that it comes right after the Autumnal Equinox, but it changes from year to year, since the Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar, not a solar one.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that, until yesterday during the work day, I didn’t even realize that today was going to be Rosh Hashanah.  Then again, it’s not as though I have any event or get-together to attend for the holiday, nor am I in any form of dialogue with the local Jewish community‒nor with any other community, actually.

I really ought not to be going to work today, but it’s not as though I’ve been observant in any way, so I feel it would be hypocritical to use the holiday as an excuse to take the day off.  I suppose it wouldn’t be too horrible in the scheme of things.  After all, how many nominal Christians who celebrate Christmas and Easter and the like are otherwise observant folk who regularly go to church and whatnot?

How many of even the seemingly devout Christians in the US who claim the identity like a badge of superiority and special privilege are actually aware of, let alone observant of, the ideals presented in their Bible, especially the “gospels”?

Certainly the so-called Christian Nationalists have no apparent familiarity with the ideas and ideals behind Christianity or the United States Constitution.  They seem merely to be a collection of deeply insecure, terrified, woefully and willfully undereducated troglodytes.  This is not my presumption; this is my provisional conclusion based upon the ones I see and hear in the news and on “social” media.  They really are pathetic and pitiable.

But because of their very insecurity and fear and ignorance, they are dangerous, like underage and untrained pre-teens who have somehow stolen an armed and armored military vehicle and are taking it on a joy ride.  Ideally, one should try to stop the vehicle and them and get them out of it and give them a stern lecture to try to educate them.  But above all, it’s important to try to keep them from doing too much damage to the numerous innocent people through whose lives they are driving their foolishly commandeered vehicle.

The preceding was a fairly ham-handed metaphor I know.  But the ham-handedness doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

I won’t get too far into the apparent claim by someone somewhere that today was going to be the day of  the “rapture”.  That’s frankly just the latest in a string of such absurd claims that goes back probably through most of the last two millennia.  It would be amusing if it were not so very sad.

There’s so much real wonder available, so much about the actual, verifiable world that is remarkable and astonishing and inspiring, yet so many waste their time with fairy tales so uninspired and unoriginal that, if someone presented them as ideas for children’s books to a publisher, the publisher would quickly see them to the door.

I suppose the charitable thing to do would be to shrug sadly and say that one should let people believe what they will, as long as they are uninterested in trying to test and improve their beliefs and their understanding.  Indeed, that is my inclination.  Unfortunately, many such people wish to impose their beliefs upon others, and not just by persuasion but by force.

It can sometimes be positively motivated*; if one believes, for whatever reason, that one’s ideology is the only way to guarantee the long-term wellbeing of everyone, both in life and after death, and that the alternative is potentially eternal suffering, then I can understand (in principle) someone trying to spread their faith out of a true sense of beneficence.

However, when one observes the behavior and personalities and choices of such people, they do not come across as ones who are doing what they do out of a sense of kindness and benevolence.  They seem, rather, to be grasping, vindictive, petulant, and defensive–terribly insecure and easily made to feel unsafe.  They seem so fragile and yet so spiteful.

I strongly suspect that there are forces quite different from a true desire to rescue and protect innocent and endangered souls behind almost every action taken by such people.  I suspect most of that stuff is just excuses and pretexts, not any honest beatitude.

I could be wrong, of course.  But such are my provisional conclusions.

How did I get on that unpleasant subject?  I’m not sure.  Still, most subjects and experiences are unpleasant for me anymore, so I guess it doesn’t much matter.  I guess the fact of yet another day that’s supposed to be one of celebration arouses a bit of reactive spite in me, since I don’t exactly have much to celebrate on any kind of sensible basis, nor anyone with whom to do the celebrating (nor the ability to find such a person or people).

To be fair, I never said that I wasn’t pathetic and pitiable and driven by darker thoughts and feelings.  I also don’t claim to have any moral superiority or to be the bringer of any kind of important moral message.

In closing, I’ll say:  it’s worth it to avoid being dominated by people who claim to have some superior insight.  Paternalism is never a safe notion, because‒unfortunately‒all the people who would put themselves in the paternalistic positions are just flesh and blood, ordinary humans like all the people they desire to control, with no greater wisdom, no greater insight, and certainly no greater ability than anyone else.

Beware the sheep that would be a shepherd.  It may well have developed a proclivity for cannibalism.

Happy New Year.

*Though we know where the road paved with good intentions leads.  Good intentions are just the beginning of doing good, and they are barely even that.