Thoughts Before The Alarm Sounds

This is the time of the year when Sunday evening's TV programming is dependent upon how long it takes the golfers to come up with a winner. It doesn't matter how long a period the network allows in the schedule – it is going to take an extra half hour or so to complete the rounds. I have been asked so often why I do not play golf, that I finally decided to write the true story of my brief career in the game. T here is a saying that only a thin line separates comedy from tragedy. The way I played golf could be classified as either one depending upon your point of view. Be that as it may, I believe the way my golfing career ended is a good example of the close relationship between the two. About 1960, at the urging of some of my fellow employees, I decided to try my hand at golf, so I bought a cheap set of clubs and went out each Saturday to develop my game. At first I thought my terrible playing was simply because I was a beginner, but as time went on and I showed little...

     I realize that the matter of Obama and the Catholic Bishops has been overworked lately, but I can't help weighing in with some thoughts on the subject.      In the first place, I can see both sides of the argument: freedom of religion vs. insurance-paid family planning.      But some columnists have been throwing around assumptions that appear to me to be a misuse of the English language. Recently I have read several columns in which the government, President Obama in particular, was accused of requiring the church to go against its “conscience.”      I do not believe that the Catholic Church or a corporation or a high school class or any other organized set of people can have a conscience, Organizations are groups of human beings; each member of the group has a unique conscience. There may be an average of individual consciences of the members, but such an average is as different from a true conscie...

      T he discussion of determinism vs. free will has been going on since the days of the Greek philosophers, and will probably never be settled. Is it possible that both views are correct? How could that be true? Before I get into the various arguments, I want to set up the following assumptions: (a) There is a one-to-one correspondence between the state of the brain and the subjective experience occurring at any given time (b) Since the brain is not an isolated system, it must be part of a larger system – the body, sense organs, the body’s immediate surroundings, etc. - which obeys certain deterministic laws. According to determinists, every move we make is dictated by our previous experiences, situations, conditions, etc. – everything which has gone before. The feeling that we select courses of action in response to immediate circumstances is an illusion. The subject can no more change the decision than a planet can change its orbit. If all our deci...

     One of the oldest truisms(?) about old age is, “Old age is the time when your broad mind and narrow waist change places.” While it may be true in some cases, for me it's more like, “Old age is the time when your broad mind and narrow waist get closer together.” My problem is that the older I get, the more I can see both sides of many controversies; as a result, I have trouble deciding which side I agree with.      Two examples from this past week come to mind. The first is the Healthcare Act's requirement that all employers who offer health care insurance to their employees must include contraception costs for those who request it. At first reading this sounds OK to me; not surprisingly, the Catholic church disagrees, to the extent that many Catholic organizations are planning to discontinue coverage rather than comply.      Because the Catholic church is not a government organization, it seems to me that Catholic instit...