I used to have a lot of books like that but I gave them to Oxfam. I do wonder who bought them sometimes, and whether it had any effect.
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I’ve winnowed my collection down to Red Pine’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, Charlotte Beck’s Everyday Zen, The Teachings of Linji, Bring Me the Rhinoceros, Mindfulness in Plain English, and Training in Compassion.
True to yours and Linji’s point, I haven’t learned nearly as much from them as I have from sitting on my ass doing nothing, fifteen minutes a day, twice a day, every day.
Well, that and psilocybin but it’s been a long time since I last visited that terrain.
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By the time someone makes it to university they have been exposed to so many anti-logic forces that their ability to decide has been severely stunted and perhaps permanently compromised.
Children should be grounded in logic and have an understanding on the concept of hypocrisy before being exposed to any system of thinking that corrupts that. And their first exposure should be dispassionate and academic. “This is what we believe, and these are examples of how we enact those beliefs.”
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Let our motto be "Without dogma or catma " .
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I despise our archaic drug laws here.
Alcohol causes tons of death and suffering and isn’t really useful for much of anything, and we perscribe narcotic painkillers like candy.
Meanwhile, psilocybin is genuinely useful and is on the most restrictive schedule that exists. And it joins LSD there, which is VERY useful and not even fractionally as harmful as alcohol.
If Einstein, Leary, and Feynman got to drop acid together we’d have had a Grand Unified Theory ages ago.
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I LOVE this!!!
You rock!
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You can expand it to “Without dogma or catma, karma or truckma.”
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I can understand this reading of the SCOTUS’s decision, but in fact, because of the decision as a whole, courts have universally understood it to allow Jesus Club. The Good News Club has never pretended to be nonreligious; that would be a bit hard with its obviously evangelical name. It is a deceptive organization, though: its promotional materials make it look low-key generic Christian. It’s not. It’s pretty hard core, and parents don’t always know the kind of indoctrination their kids are getting.
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Sign me up!!
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needs more fish. hey @japhroaig, can you help us here?
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Oops, did my karma run over your dogma?
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If you haven’t heard its respective album, Like Clockwork, you are (as XKCD would say) one of ‘today’s lucky ten-thousand’. Seriously, I envy you. It’s a-freaking-mazing. It’s also an intensely existential album. Like vultures in the desert, the music and lyrics circle around the whole impending-death-as-a-speck-of-life reality as the rotting albatross it is. So you’ll hear lyrics like this:
Fallen leaves realize they are no friend of autumn
The view from Hell is blue sky
So ominously blue
Daydream until all the blue is gone
—‘Keep Your Eyes Peeled’
I don’t know what time it was
I don’t wear a watch
So good to be an ant who crawls
Atop a spinning rock
—‘My God Is the Sun’
Shock me awake
Tear me apart
Pinned like a note in a hospital gown
Prison of sleep
Deepened now
A rabbit hole never to be found
Again
—‘I Appear Missing’, which is pulled directly from Josh Homme’s near-brush with death after going into ventricular defibrillation during heart surgery and probably accounts for the scope of the album as a whole
Most of what you see my dear is purely for show
Because not everything that goes around, comes back around you know
—‘Like Clockwork’
It is a beast of an album and ‘I Appear Missing’ turned me into a puddle, which is just goddamned crazy given that this is the same band that penned the self-consciously vacuous ‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer’.
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Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Ether
Ether who?
Ether bunny!
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Anne
Anne who?
Anne other Ether bunny!
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
S’more
S’more who?
S’more Ether bunnies!
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Cargo
Cargo who?
Cargo beep beep, run over all the Ether bunnies!
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Boo
Boo who?
Don’t cry, Ether bunny’ll be back next year!
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And I was kind of looking for some new tunes!
You’ve done me more than one good deed today! I owe you! 
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You’re in! Just be mellow and groovy…err, and help us plot!
I like!
I like the ‘Church of the Gleeful Agnostic’ as a name, but I wonder if there’s something even better we can do? We definitely want to stay in the ‘Church’ field, because that’s the competition, and we definitely want to have something that implies ‘gleefully awesomely uncertain’ in some way, shape, or form. I think that attitude/vibe is kind of crucial.
Any better ideas? Groovy is an underused word that kind of fits the bill, but might be a bit mellower than what we’re looking for.
We’ll also need a set of mottos! I like the no ‘dogma/catma/carma/etc’ concept, that’s awesome. I also think we need a ‘Puppies and kittens are delightful’ and ‘meanness sucks’ in some manner. And of course the ‘we have no clue and that’s okay!’. Let’s ride the happy/fun/goofy vibe, that’s SO underutilized! And imagine a church of happy, shiny people that isn’t actually a church, but gobbles up people who were raised to think that’s important and exploits all their laws (damn…earworm)
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We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
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What does this remind me of? It’s VERY Douglas Adams!
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…because it is Adams?
Majikthise and Vroomfondel objecting to Deep Thought.
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That might be it! (I’m a dork)
It was some guards or something, wasn’t it?
I’m old and things kind of blur after a while! I’m still worried I’ll learn something new and forget how to drive. 
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