Category: Aphorisms and Observations

Are Any Christians in the Middle East Safe?

Yes, the ones in Israel.

…………………………..

UPDATE 4/15:  J. S. writes:

I happen to live in Beirut and feel safe enough in the Christian area, which is the eastern quarter of the city along with big chunks of Mt. Lebanon and the coastal area as far north asTripoli, which is a Sunni hotbed.

I've asked a lot of Lebanese Christians if they feel safe. They worry more about Sunnis than Shia, and they are especially worried about the de facto resettlement here of a million Syrian refugees, who are mostly Sunnis. There's no love lost between the Christians and Hizbollah, which is Shia, but there is an unspoken toleration of it as long as Hizbollah helps keep Lebanon a ISIS-free zone. The security at Beirut airport, for example, is almost certainly penetrated by Hizbullah partisans. Most Lebanese see that as a line of defense against ISIS bomb-smugglers.

Safety is a relative concept.  I wish my reader the best.  Twenty years ago I spent a year in Turkey in Ankara, the capital.  We travelled all over.  I wouldn't risk living in Turkey nowadays or travelling all over.  I would only feel safe now with a quick in and out to Antalya or Bodrum or one of the other seaside resort towns.

The magnificent Graeco-Roman, Christian,  and other antiquities in Turkey!  I am glad I got to see them at Hierapolis, Ephesus, Cappadocia, and so many places.  It is sickening to think of them being destroyed by jihadi savages.  Remember what they did to the Buddhist statuary?  Recently. the destruction in Palmyra.  Have the archeologists spoken out?

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In chess, the object of the game is clear, the rules are fixed and indisputable, and there is always a definite outcome (win, lose, or draw) about which no controversy can arise.  In philosophy, the object and the rules are themselves part of what is in play, and there is never an incontrovertible result. 

So I need both of these gifts of the gods.  Chess to recuperate from the uncertainty of philosophy, and philosophy to recuperate from the sterility of chess.

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Magnificent but Miserable

As magnificent a subject as philosophy is, grappling as it does with the ultimate concerns of human existence, and thus surpassing in nobility all other human pursuits, it is also miserable in that nothing goes uncontested, and nothing ever gets established to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  The magnificence and misery of philosophy reflect the magnificence and misery of its author man, who, neither animal nor angel, is the tension between the two and a question mark to himself.

Magnificent in aspiration, philosophy is yet miserable in execution.

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On ‘Making It’

One reason to try to 'make it' is to come to appreciate, by succeeding, that worldly success cannot  be a final goal of legitimate human striving. 'Making it' frees one psychologically and allows one to turn one's attention to worthier matters.  He who fails is dogged by a sense of failure whereas he who succeeds is in a position to appreciate the ultimate insignificance of both success and failure, not that most of the successful ever do.  Their success traps them.  Hence the sad spectacle of the old coot, a good flight of stairs away from a major coronary event, scheming and angling for more loot and land when in the end a man needs only — six feet.