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I guess I wasn't careful enough and I suppose it was inevitable. Sooner or later someone would connect my call name here with another email address I used elsewhere and ouila! we have active defamation. Apparently, a lady friend from the neighborhood told me that someone showed her the things I wrote and she should 'watch out'. This third party is supposedly someone I don't even know personally yet this individual felt it is was his(her?) prerogative to disseminate my ideas with a negative light. Who deputized him God's policeman? "Stop, in the name of the Lord," he shouts as he attempts to bind me with succah chain-link decorations and gag me with an esrog.Gossip. It is ubiquitous and exists in every culture in every generation. No matter that it be vilified, it thrives on people's obsessive, uncontrollable desire to not only know other people's business but to actively perpetuate the tale. I return once again to Pascal Boyer who describes this phenomenon as an obvious outgrowth of who we are as humans. Human society is dependent upon information and cooperation. Much of the information we process regards OTHER people’s mental states (thoughts, actions, beliefs, desires, etc.) and we keep mental files about everyone we know. Gossip is information about others (usually that they prefer not be known). It centers on adaptive values like sex, resources, status and conformity. Gossip is our quest to acquire strategic information and we in turn spread gossip to advertise that WE are trustworthy with information and thus cooperative within a social context! Contemptuous as it may be, it's a fact of life and there is no escaping unless you detach yourself from society, which is a fate far worse for social creatures than being maligned. Sooner or later the conversation shifts to someone else.
The Chafetz Chaim has written extensively about guarding one's language precisely because the problem of gossip is so pervasive. So I sit back for a moment and reflect upon this 'religious' person who felt it his/her place to degrade me in the eyes of another for things that I wrote. How easy it is to see the shortcomings of others and be blind to one's own spiritual maladies. It is interesting that the last post I wrote was about how science is actually making me revitalize my level of devotion to God. So it's ironic that older info comes back to haunt me. What is more distressing is that there is someone out there who thinks it's his/her job to be motzei shem ra (giving another a bad rep).
To me this blog has been a diary of sorts, a work in progress, evolution of ideas that I consider and hopefully get some intelligent feedback. I'm not the same guy I was 2 years ago and definitely not the same as 10 years ago but to take something I wrote anonymously (HA!) and say that represents me now may or may not be the case. I could have kept my thoughts to myself and kept up my appearances for public consumption but I thought I had some interesting topics, some well off the beaten path and I wanted to share. But now I have to cast an incantation and make things conform.