Sure fire INSOMNIA CURE

Taking a break from the usual carping about religion or politics to post part of a reply to a friend about a method of dealing with insomnia.

I've had many nocturnal ceiling study opportunities. Usually it's some kind of worry, but too often it's just plain speed. I discovered the audiobook trick after falling asleep listening to audiobooks I'm actually interested in. When that happens it's difficult to find my place again. Since it's so reliable I realized it would work with books where it doesn't matter where I leave off - just as long as I leave. I've got two books on my iPod now that qualify: "The Second Declaration" and "The Slan Hunter." The former is a stiff translation from the Chinese original where the author spouts off all kinds of futuristic expectations. This would be interesting to me but the writing style and some of the content is abysmal. The reader also has a boring voice and appears to not understand what little is coherent in the text. so it has just enough interest to suck me in now and then and all the sleep-inducing qualities of audiobooks. The one problem is that sometimes I get riled up about the incompetence and get back to square one. The other sleeper is "Slan Hunter," a science fiction book written in the 50's that is very poorly written, with a lame and predictable plot. It reminds you of a story. Again, the critic/editor in me sometimes gets too aroused and threatens to keep me awake. But boredom usually wins the night.

Brainwashing children

I will have more to say later about Barbara Bradley Hagerty's new book, "Fingerprints of God." When I have more time, I will take up some of the issues raised in this well-written book. Suffice it for now that her book confirms for me the fact that those raised in a religion find it very difficult to depart from it even when reason and solid, testable facts intrude. I believe this is especially true for people raised in Christian Science. Where other kids may recoil from stern fundamentalism - and thus be ripe for apostasy - most CS kids are raised in such an atmosphere of pleasantness and self control that they come to associate the metaphysical claims with goodness. So even when their theology is refuted by facts, they still cling to the notion that there MUST be something to the concepts they were raised with. Hagerty's book confirms this. Even after interviewing articulate atheists and scientists, she still, in the end, relaxes into the belief system that gave her comfort and hope.

I am not such a person I was raised as a Catholic, and though I was assiduous in my practice I eventually left the religion, though I clung to the idea of some kind of God for many years afterward. Now that I am free of all that I notice the stickiness of religious education, and recoil against it. I see great wisdom in Dan Dennett's proposal that all kids be required to learn about all religions. Only in this way can the relentless drumming of one orthodoxy be prevented from establishing tyrannical control of a person's mind.