PASTOR’S COLUMN. Novelist and journalist Amos Oz says in How to Cure a Fanatic: “I think I have invented the remedy for fanaticism. A sense of humor is a great cure. I have never once in my life seen a person with a sense of humor become a fanatic, unless he or she has lost that sense of humor… Humor contains the ability to laugh at ourselves. Humor is relativism, humor is the ability to see yourself as others may see you, humor is the capacity to realize that no matter how righteous you are and how terribly wronged you have been, there is a certain side of life that is always a bit funny. The more right you are, the funnier you become…
“The antidote can also be found at home, virtually at your fingertips. No man is an island, said John Donne, but I humbly dare to add: No man and no woman is an island, but everyone of us is a peninsula, half attached to the mainland, half facing the ocean – one half connected to family and friends and culture and tradition… and the other half wanting to be left alone to face the ocean. I think we ought to be allowed to remain peninsulas. Every social and political system that turns each of us into an island and the rest of humankind into an enemy or rival is a monster. But at the same time every social and political and ideological system that wants to turn each of us into no more than a molecule of the mainland is also a monstrosity.”
-DJ
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