And in Southern California in those days, to follow your dream and find the truth of things was very much in the air.

Someone noted that the path of the Mir yeshiva (New York) was not exactly the path I was raised on {Beverly Hills High School}.
My basic excuse for leaving the path of secularism was mainly I think because I found something profoundly empty and meaningless about secular society.
And in Southern California in those days, to follow your dream and find the truth of things  was very much in the air. For me to find a path that made me happy and in which I found meaning was certainly not against my parents wishes.

I eventually did leave the Mir to go to Israel and eventually left the straight and narrow path. But I would have to admit I was no time as close to my essence as much as during the time I was at the Mir.

[I am not saying there should not be doctors and physicists but in terms of finding my inner essence I definitely have to say that that I found at the Mir. However the modification in my own schedule I would make today  would be to allot  some part of the day to learning Physics as per the Rambam.]

Islam

Howard Bloom has a small section on Islam in his book The Lucifer Principle which seems to fit his basic approach about the power of the super-organism. Going with Howard Bloom seems much better that trying to attribute things to the power of mind control of cults.

This is basically as the Rambam held that free will does not work when one is part of a group.He or she is automatically drawn after the "meme" unit of social information and opinions of the group.
Thus all one can do is to make sure he is part of good group.

Football

I do not like it when I see or hear people disparaging the USA. I guess this shows I am not alone.

Insulting the American Flag definitely gets under my skin.

The Left and mass murder.

To get back to Kant and Hegel. That is the common ground everyone can agree upon. It is true that the Left uses Hegelian ideas, but because of that they can be shown the error of their ways. The errors seems mainly to be  from the labor theory of value which is not from Hegel. But once they accept the Labor Theory of Value they then use Hegel.


Even Kelley Ross admits that people that go with Hegel are believing in objective morality.



From my own personal personal perspective, when the Rambam says to learn Metaphysics and Physics that includes Kant and Hegel even though he was referring openly to the Metaphysics and Physics of Aristotle. I tend to take the Rambam in that he meant the basic subject matter, NOT just just the specific writings of Aristotle.

Man kills 2 with knife at French station, yells 'Allahu akbar'--http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-french-train-station-knife-attack-20171001-story.html

The Chicago Tribune is putting that at the very head of its article. It is not hiding the fact that it is another incident of Islamic Terrorism.

But the NY Times as usual hides the truth:"
The Paris prosecutor’s office, which handles terrorism cases nationwide, said on Sunday that it had opened a terrorism investigation, but the authorities said the assailant’s motives were not entirely clear.
“This act could be of a terrorist nature, but at this hour we cannot affirm it,” said Gérard Collomb, the French Interior minister, who is in charge of domestic security."


[It was that kind of coverage of Islamic Terrorism that got me frustrated over the years.]


The issue of evil came up recently in a conversation. I basically took the approach of Dr Kelley Ross about a continuum of values on the side of holiness and by implication the exact opposite also. That is that Evil is a real presence. That is most clear in Islam because of the devious demon they worship. But the problem exists even in the larger religious world where evil hides in more subtle disguises. 

Yom Kippur

My feeling about repentance is that the best time to repent is after Yom Kippur when we are aware of the issue. And the main issue of course is that it is not at all clear about what we need to repent on. So we have not even come up to the preparatory stage of being open and willing to repent.

This was mentioned by the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter as being one major reason for learning Musar [Ethics]--in that it at least signifies a person;s willingness to learn and to be open to changing his ways for the better.

And I do not think that it is particularly young people that are more open to repent than older people. I think repentance is a mainly a matter of software. That is deleting the old bad programs, and inserting in their place good programs. And is simple how to do so. Learning Musar. That is to make a conscious effort to gain an idea of what objective morality is.

The simple way to do this is to get the basic set of Musar which is divided into the classical books from the Middle Ages,  and the basic set of books from the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter.


It seems to me that I got sidetracked from Musar --and probably because of that lost my way and direction. And even today, I find it hard to get back on track, or to figure out exactly how where and what to repent on.
For some reason, I got involved too much with the mystic side of things, and that started because of the very good Musar book, the Mesilat Yesharim. But in the printed Mesilat Yesharim, they added another small book by the same author [the Ramchal ] that recommends learning mysticism. That got me off track. Considerably off track. -Not the fault of the Ramchal, but rather the way I understood him.]

American Nationalism

I am fairly impressed with American Nationalism because it is not a blank approval of all kinds of nationalism, but rather sees something special about the principles upon which the USA was founded: Natural Law and Natural Rights. These are things that Hegel himself would have greatly approved of even though his system was hijacked by the Left.