through the foolishness of the message

"Word Wars" was an entertaining look at the professional Scrabble circuit. One of the protagonists in that movie was GI Joel Sherman. In a recent interview he says the following:

Did you know that you are listed alongside Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax on this website of Jewish American sports figures? How does it feel?

I must admit I did not know that. It would be bragging to say I'm alongside those great athletes when I'm clearly listed in a separate category among a handful of others *most* people still have *not* heard of. Several other North American Scrabble® Champs have been Jewish and they're not listed, presumably because the Wikipedia contributor who compiled that list found my Jewishness mentioned in "Word Freak" and the same info is not readily available about them. I won't "out" them because I don't know how they would feel to share that listing as well.

My own feeling is ambivalent: it's nice to be noted, but I'd rather my born religion was not the criterion for my inclusion, as I have been an atheist since even before my Bar Mitzvah, and have militant aversions to all religion/hypocrisy/mind control.

Nice job comparing religion to hypocrisy and mind control. Get this straight, though. Hypocrisy is not inherent to religion, but to man. Religion in and of itself is not the issue, but rather man's corruption of it. As for mind control, this from a person who spends more than half a day playing with tiles, memorizing obscure words, and chasing after a dream of a living through a board game. There is an illusion there of your mind being in control, but it is not truth.

It is a mental talent to pluck words from the ether and make them score. But just another example of how mental prowess does not equate to intelligence in the least.