Tebow Cries, Manning Flies Demonstrating Lack of Emotional Strength

This article was published by Technorati on 8 February 2010. The dream continues . . .

First, Tim Tebow crys after Florida's loss to Alabama in the SEC Championship back in December. Now Indianapolis Colts QB Peyton Manning is too ticked about loosing the Super Bowl to shake hands with his MVP counterpart, QB Drew Brees of the victorious New Orleans Saints.

Is this a demonstration of emotional strength or weakness?

Yahoo! Sports blogger Chris Chase would vote in favor of the former. Chase writes of Manning, "If I care so much, why shouldn't the players?"

First, caring that much as a fan may be misguided (see Over-Identifying with Your Team).

Second, isn't it karma that the Colts should lose, after handing the New York Jets (7-7) and the Buffalo Bills (5-10) unopposed wins in the final two games of the season, opting to rest their starters? The Colts had already secured home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Two additional wins would buy them nothing for their efforts . . .

Nothing except glory!

Chase writes,"The desire to win is what sustains greatness," and then he checks off several well-known names--Jordan, DiMaggio, Bird, Williams, Jabbar-- who supposedly cared too much about winning to shake hands after a game.

The Trouble with Televangelists

Ever wonder why Plato wrote his Dialogues the way he did? They're narratives; they read like stories, generally about dialogues that took place between Socrates and philosophers or students in and around Athens. They are timeless, as good a-reading today, if you are interested in the subject, as they ever were.

Compare them with Aristotle's Metaphysics and the vast majority of written matter on the subject of philosophy, which is completely cerebral and dry as the dust that coats them in libraries. No one reads them except academics, a condemnation not shared by Plato.

Apart for abounding good taste, why did Plato write like this? The answer may be found in one of his Dialogues called "Phaedrus." In it, Socrates has traveled to the countryside outside the walls of Athens, where he engages in his familiar verbal jousting (called "dialectic") with his young friend Phaedrus.

The storyline is generally about the benefits of rhetoric versus philosophy. But one of the lines of questioning concerns the benefit of writing. Socrates tells Phaedrus a myth about an Egyptian god, Theuth, who, according to the myth, was the inventor of writing.

Theuth brought his invention to King Thamus, hoping that all the Egyptians might make use of it, claiming, "This . . . will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories."

King Thamus told Theuth that he was mistaken. Writing would not benefit memory at all. Rather, it would weaken it.