In the aftermath I have experienced a cascade of cyber-problems. I am not technologically smart enough to know for sure, but I suspect that even my IP address may now be tagged as a suspicious site, which makes anything I attempt to do from home contribute to complicating the problem more than finding a resolution. I have yet to receive a single message from any of the security contacts I have attempted to reach from a living person. Google, Facebook and Typepad so far have shut me out. I feel as though a Web-based equivalent of a flesh-eating infection is wrecking five years of blogging and wiping out all efforts to make corrections.

Feel free to delete that quote from me in the sidebar since the link no longer leads to an active site. It gives me some satisfaction to know that my blog so far remains intact, but like that ship in Longfellow’s poem is unable to sail, stillborn in a cyber-ocean without wind. Even so, last I looked (Oddly I can still get the Sitemeter stats. Go figure.) it was still getting about a hundred hits a day, mostly from Google searches.

Symbolic, I suppose, that the post was about Hell. I don’t want to trivialize that discussion, but in some way my situation is a metaphor. But when I recall all the real tragedies about which I have blogged — tsunami, Katrina, wars, issues of life and death — what is happening to me is far, far less important than those.

1) We choose heaven and hell, and God knows how we will choose, as he knows everything.

2) God chooses whether we will go to heaven or hell.

Consists of a distinction looking for a difference. I’m not sure I can change anything about me or my belief system or my behavior based on choosing 1 or 2.

On a more secular note:

A long time ago a book was published called “The Bell Curve”. In it, the authors talk about all the ways that American (and presumably European) society has been changed over the years in order to cause smart people to succeed and dumb people (low IQ) to fail. Some of these changes have been natural, but much of it has been artificially induced through government.

They point out that one way in which society has changed a lot over the years has been in the idea of morality. It used to be (more or less) that morality was “good and bad” or “right and wrong”. Over the years morality changed to a consequential system. You might not want to do ‘A’ because it may lead to consequences of ‘B’. You should do ‘C’, because that will cause ‘D’ which will be good for you.

One of the societal affects of this change was that high IQ people now had an advantage when it came to morality. “Right and Wrong” are understandable by the dimmest bulb in the room, maybe understood better than the smart ones. Consequences – especially long term consequences – are better understood by high IQ people.

In their statistical analysis, they discovered that social pathologies were tightly correlated with IQ. These included unwed children, drug abuse and prison. In effect, the low IQ kids couldn’t handle the new morality (designed by the smart people in power of course), and it destroyed their lives.

It seems like all of that has something to do with Hell, but I can’t remember what it would be.

James