Philosophically speaking:

As one ancient philosopher, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, once opined, (I take broad license to paraphrase here; who reads literal Greek anymore?)

 "Life is like a giant Ferris wheel. As you progress through your life you will experience times of great peace, joy, and well-being analogous to being at the top of a Ferris wheel. At other times in life you will feel great despair, depression, or a sickness in your soul and body representing the bottom of life on the Ferris wheel. In order to appreciate and truly understand those moments of peace and beauty we must be able to contrast them with moments of turmoil and grief.

Boethius

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other people of the same name, see Boethius (disambiguation).

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius

Influenced by[show]

Influenced[show]

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius,^[1][2][3] commonly called Boethius(ca. 480–524 or 525 AD), was a philosopher of the early 6th century. He was born in Rome to an ancient and prominent family which included emperors Petronius Maximus and Olybrius  and many consuls.^[3] His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, was consul in 487 after Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor. Boethius, of the noble Anicia family, entered public life at a young age and was already a senator by the age of 25.^[4] Boethius himself was consul in 510 in the kingdom of the Ostrogoths. In 522 he saw his two sons become consuls.^[5] Boethius was imprisoned and eventually executed by King Theodoric the Great,^[6] who suspected him of conspiring with the Eastern Roman Empire. While jailed, Boethius composed his Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical treatise on fortune, death, and other issues. The Consolation became one of the most popular and influential works of the Middle Ages. A link between Boethius and a mathematical board game Rithmomachia has been made.

As long as we are alive we all experience the highs and lows of a Ferris wheel ride given to everyone living, without the hand of God involved. Such is life. Life comes in cycles, or waves if you prefer, creating the ups and downs our lives are filled with. The trick in life is to keep your head above water at all times. What we get from life boils down to a brief ride through the cosmos on our spaceship Earth. We don't get to board the ship with anything but a blank slate of a mind waiting to be written upon. We don't get to leave life with anything either. Life is a zero sum game; no one wins, no one loses, we live until we die and we hope to pass our DNA along to the next generation. That is our only reward for living our life on earth.

So where does heaven fit into this scheme of life? Some say heaven is paradise. However, all who have experienced love, peace, and contentment on earth, and those who have seen and recognized great beauty for what it is here on earth have all had a taste of paradise on earth. So what better does heaven offer? Some say you get to sit next to God. Humm?? Billions of souls sitting at the hand of God, assuming they all get past the pearly gates and are qualified to stay, whose reward it is to spend an eternity in praise of the Lord. Even the most devout humans would probably agree that after a millennia or two of constant worship life could become pretty dull. Clearly heaven and paradise are not the same thing. So I ask again, what is heaven?

Before we get to heaven we still have a choice to make here on earth. We can choose which ride we want to get on. We can play it safe and stay on the kiddie rides, never going very high or very fast. Or we can get on the cyclone and get the thrill of a lifetime; maybe get more than we bargained for or can handle. Those wheels on my ride that keep my boat afloat are these; 1) hope, 2) passion, 3) understanding, and 4) acceptance.

If any of the above wheels goes flat on me along my travels my energy flags, and I lose focus; then I spin out! What do you do?

Since most people living today have been able to put personal danger in the rearview mirror, most of us seem to busy ourselves with what are less critical areas of life than survival. We begin to fine-tune our environment now that the lions and tigers are in their cages, and we can begin to concentrate on eradicating the less threatening, but still clear threats to our society. Suggestions for fertile areas of potential deviant behavior suitable for investigation and eradication abound. We send men off to war to die on a regular basis but that, for some inexplicable reason, doesn't impress Americans much anymore. War has been a major player in our economy since WWII and will continue to be as long as there are third world countries left to blow up, and tax payers willing to foot the bill. Unfortunately the peasants on the receiving end of our smart bombs and drone missiles don't have much to say about the role they play in their eradication. We see love and marriage and divorce and heartbreak on videos 24/7/365; we seem to have an insatiable appetite for this type of entertainment. Affairs of the heart we seem to be able to take in stride, no problem. However,when it comes to sex in this country, we fall completely apart. Our false modesty is showing everywhere. We put on a pious face while bending over and lifting our skirts and lowering our pants. Consider how insane our national policy on sex is. We are free, even encouraged by friends and family, to play for sex, (heck, its a national pastime) but the minute we offer to pay for sex out come the handcuffs. Anyone visiting this country through the lens of the media would conclude that our country is obsessed with sex. While the love part seems to be pretty spin free in our lives, beyond the movies and sitcoms, we are terribly conflicted about the place sex plays in our lives. We spend a fortune on sex. Below is a quick look at a few eye openers but for the whole story follow this link: http://www.familysafemedia.com/pornography_statistics.html Here are a few highlights: (These stats are 6 yrs old) Every second - $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography Every second - 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography Every second - 372 Internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines Every 39 minutes: a new pornographic video is being created in the United States 2006 Worldwide Pornography Revenues Country Revenue (Billions) Per Capita Notes China $27.40 $27.41 1 South Korea $25.73 $526.76 Japan $19.98 $156.75 US $13.33 $44.67 Australia $2.00 $98.70 UK $1.97 $31.84 Italy $1.40 $24.08 Canada $1.00 $30.21 Philippines $1.00 $11.18 Taiwan $1.00 $43.41 1 Germany $.64 $7.77 1 Finland $.60 $114.70 1 Czech Republic $.46 $44.94 1 Russia $.25 $1.76 1 Netherlands $.20 $12.13 Brazil $.10 $53.17 1 Other 212 Unavailable 2 $97.06 Billion Notes 1=Incomplete, 2=Unavailable data Statistics abound but aren’t very recent. Nevertheless, you can believe this; sex sites enjoy the largest slice of Internet visitors online. More money is spent on pornography, just one segment of the sex market, than the entire combined sales of the top 10 tech companies in America. Add up the sales of IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, etc. and you haven't yet made a dent on the money spent on sex. So what you say, the money spent on porn or sex is not money out of my pocket. Guess again. More people are in jail for sex crimes than any other segment of prison population except pot crimes. Who do you think supports these prisoners while they are in jail? Whether someone in your family is paying for a prostitute or buying porn online or not, and a ridiculously high percentage of both men and women are, you are paying to support your fellow citizens while they are in jail, to the tune of about $1000 a week per inmate. To be blunt about it, when someone gets busted for engaging in sex for money, you help pay the bill to prosecute them. When you take into consideration the number of people currently sitting in the cue on your first dime, you will be amazed at your total contribution in dollars annually when you add in the cost of housing, feeding, and entertaining them later. (Talk about getting no bang for your buck!) Folks, 5 out of 6 people you support through your taxes are in jail for victimless crimes like consensual sex and pot possession. Consider this. If I walked up to you on the street and asked you directly to give me $100 to help prosecute the hooker or the dime bag salesman I saw working the other side of the street, you would tell me to get lost, and you should. If you don't have at least 1000 better ways of spending $100 you should be ashamed of yourself. Speaking for myself, I am tired of paying for someone else to be denied the right to have consensual sex. I have a million better things to do with my money than paying to prosecute people who chose to pay for sex. However, the government takes far more from the average taxpayer to provide this service for you; you just don't make the connection. People in more advanced countries like those in Europe (it pains me to remember America used to resemble that remark; we are now about 25th from the top and falling rapidly) realized that they were supporting a fruitless persecution of harmless individuals, similar to the Salem witch trials in our country, and turned their attention and their money to better purposes. We are still in our infancy here in America. Our society is barely 350 years old and our democracy just a few decades past 200 years of age. We are still drooling over salient gossip like teenagers, relishing every detail of the numerous sex scandals grabbing the headlines daily. Isn't it time we started showing a little maturity? Isn't it time to recognize that wasting $2 billion weekly on pot and sex-related offenses is just plain stupid? Can't we citizens find some better way to spend the $500 average cost per taxpayer to house these nonviolent offenders? Wouldn't an extra $500 help you and your family? Couldn't we spend the money more responsibly on education, healthcare, and our country's infrastructure? While it's said democratic nations, theoretically, always end up getting the government they want, I don't believe the citizens in this country have the first clue about the government they got. We haven't made any real social progress since Martin Luther King forced us to open our eyes and see blacks as people. The next great step in our society will be to recognize that, low and behold, we are all sexual creatures, and we should look at each other without feeling the need to censure each other's behavior. A simple change in attitude from sticking our noses into everybody else's business to leaving each other alone would save us 2 billion bucks a week. How smart does that sound?