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(via 0rangep33l)

Are We Lonely

I was watching a call in talk show about twenty years ago. A psychiatrist who claimed to be an expert in terrorism was the shows’ guest.  A caller asked the psychiatrist if terrorists were crazy and the psychiatrist responded, “Not if there are more than two of them”. I wondered if the shrink was trying to be humorous but no, he elaborated, “that crazy is a function of being alone”.

I have thought about that statement often in the years that followed and I believe it to be true. We people are not on this Earth to live alone, anymore than we can live without air, water, food or sleep. Necessities of any life include friends, companionship, someone to love and someone with whom to share. Otherwise, one has no reason to live. And I would think that those poor wretches who are in this life, who are alone while surrounded by others who have friends and love, live at a level of profound, unbelievable and incalculable misery and weariness. These emotionally isolated and alone are the people that walk in theaters and commit mass murder. They see no good in people, no good in own their life so how could they see bad, when bad is all they have.

However, I do not believe that you have to feel completely isolated from all other people to be crazy. At one time, I had a roommate who believed that he was being followed by Warlocks. He even claimed the Warlocks followed him into McDonald’s once. It was time to sleep one evening and I just wanted to sleep, but my roommate would not stop talking about the warlocks who were after him. I had a great idea. I figured it would calm him down if I explained to him that his Warlocks could not get in. My roommate became so agitated the proverbial guys in the white coats came in and before my eyes, put my roommate in a straight jacket and took him away.

What the religious believe can be an elaborate nonsense, for which they will fight and kill if you try to explain their beliefs away. Reason threatens the believer with being alone and helpless, without friends and strength in unity. They anoint their aggregation with irrefutable rightness. But they simply hide in a crowd of people with whom they really share nothing but a fantasy and manage little more than to be crazy and alone and murderous. - mikeo56

A Muslim, Abdol-Hossein Sardari saved the lives of thousands of Iranian Jews in wartime Paris, risking all to help compatriots escape the Nazis, a new book claims.

Abdol-Hossein Sardari, a junior Iranian diplomat, found himself almost by accident in charge of Iran’s mission in Paris in 1940 and went on to help up to 2,000 Iranian Jews flee France, according to In the Lion’s Shadow.

But by cultivating his contacts with German and Vichy officials, Mr Sardari somehow managed to win exemptions from Nazi race laws for at least 2,000 Iranian Jews by arguing that they did not have blood ties to European Jewry.

His task became even more dangerous when Britain and Russia invaded Iran in September 1941, when he was ordered by Tehran to return home as soon as possible after it signed a treaty with the Allies. But he stayed on regardless, using instead inheritance money to keep his office going after being stripped of his diplomatic immunity and pay.

By December 1942, Adolf Eichmann, the senior Nazi in charge of Jewish affairs, pronounced his argument “the usual Jewish tricks and attempts at camouflage”, in a letter published in Mr Mokhtari’s book.

But Mr Sardari soldiered on, helping families escape from Paris just as tens of thousands of Jews were being deported from France to death camps.

Eliane Senahi Cohanim was seven when she fled France with her family.

Mr Sardari provided them with the passports and travel documents they needed for safe-passage out of Europe, which took a month.

“I think he was like Schindler, at that time, helping the Jews in Paris,” the 78-year old told the BBC from her home in California.

Mr Sardari neither sought nor received much recognition for his efforts in his lifetime and died lonely in a bedsit in Croydon, south London, in 1981.

“Here you have a Muslim Iranian who goes out of his way, risks his life, certainly risks his career and property and everything else, to save fellow Iranians,” he says.

“There is no distinction ‘I am Muslim, he is Jew’ or whatever.”

(via livealifethatscompletelyfree)

Baptist Minister Protests Lack of Marriage Equality

   A lesbian minister in North Carolina has joined the ranks of those willing to officiate marriage ceremonies but not sign licenses until gay couples’ marriages have the same legal recognition as heterosexual ones.

   It’s one of the most significant pieces of prehistoric art ever found in North America — a carving of a mammoth or mastodon on a piece of fossilized bone dating back to the Ice Age. An amateur fossil hunter found it several years ago in Vero Beach, Florida. Now, after three years of study, a team of researchers say they believe it’s authentic.

Mammoths and mastodons were abundant in Florida until about 13,000 years ago — when they became extinct.

  Incredible: a “photograph” by a human being over thirteen thousand years ago, of an extinct species. Proof that naturalists have been studying evolution long before any gods existed. The artist had a good hand, notice the slope of the mammoths back. Mind blowing, absolutely mind blowing.

(via heidiponge)