So I have this old friend who I secretly really don't like... He's the posessor of qualities that I despise: he's stubborn, arrogant, unkind, chauvanistic, with delusions of grandeur, and the mind of an ant...
And his dad just died... Another friend told me this morning. Now everyone's exagerating how awesome this "friend" is; How he's always been there for us, and how he's such a great guy, and on and on...
So I guess I'll just keep my mouth shut about it. I'm not going to entertain the dishonesty. This guy is a complete dick, and though everyone deserves a little compassion in times like this, I'm not going to pretend that this guy is someone he's not...
I'll go to the wake and funeral and give him a hug and all, but afterwards it's back to avoiding his annoying ass...
Monday, March 29, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Jesus blippin Christ
It really boggles my mind, this progressive Christianity thing, and I'm trying to understand it.
The apologetics has reached a point of such refinement that it becomes very tiresome and painful to engage in debate with anyone who practices it. They'll have a soundbyte comeback for every flair of doubt you scoff up, concede on the more blatant of biblical errors, and rationalize every damn verse...
This begs several questions, but let me try to just come up with just one: Is this what one has to do to be taken seriously as a Christian nowadays? To devote ones entire life, upsurped in mental acrobatics, clinging to whatever intellectual foothold you can muster up, just to be secure in your faith?
Okay, so maybe some spite got through on those last couple of lines, but I'm driving at something here... I'm a non-religious person for the most part. I have some spiritual inclinations from a haphazard spiritual phase I went though a couple years back, but when it comes to the major cliams of truth asserted in the old books, I am sincerely unconvinced. If I had to give an ad hoc probability I'd say that there is a 98.9 % chance that there is no such thing as an egoic God, there is no such thing as heaven or hell as described in the bible, mary wasn't no virgin (double negative), and snakes certainly cannot talk...
However, I know the specific breed of Christians I'm referring to here (well mostly the ones I see are Christians, but you can probably find these intellectual theists in all faiths) have ways around this kind of thing. I'd like to pick their brains a bit, and learn more, and hopefully not get frustrated in the process... In my opinion, religion as most people know it is a house built on sand that's already 3 quarters of the way sunk. And the progressive christians are those in some kind of complex transitional stage that humanity has to go through before we can be memetically perfected as a species...
Or something along those lines.
The apologetics has reached a point of such refinement that it becomes very tiresome and painful to engage in debate with anyone who practices it. They'll have a soundbyte comeback for every flair of doubt you scoff up, concede on the more blatant of biblical errors, and rationalize every damn verse...
This begs several questions, but let me try to just come up with just one: Is this what one has to do to be taken seriously as a Christian nowadays? To devote ones entire life, upsurped in mental acrobatics, clinging to whatever intellectual foothold you can muster up, just to be secure in your faith?
Okay, so maybe some spite got through on those last couple of lines, but I'm driving at something here... I'm a non-religious person for the most part. I have some spiritual inclinations from a haphazard spiritual phase I went though a couple years back, but when it comes to the major cliams of truth asserted in the old books, I am sincerely unconvinced. If I had to give an ad hoc probability I'd say that there is a 98.9 % chance that there is no such thing as an egoic God, there is no such thing as heaven or hell as described in the bible, mary wasn't no virgin (double negative), and snakes certainly cannot talk...
However, I know the specific breed of Christians I'm referring to here (well mostly the ones I see are Christians, but you can probably find these intellectual theists in all faiths) have ways around this kind of thing. I'd like to pick their brains a bit, and learn more, and hopefully not get frustrated in the process... In my opinion, religion as most people know it is a house built on sand that's already 3 quarters of the way sunk. And the progressive christians are those in some kind of complex transitional stage that humanity has to go through before we can be memetically perfected as a species...
Or something along those lines.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Meanderings
I always have what seems to me the most amazing ideas, and I write them down in my trusty notepad, and think about how awesome it will be to make a post about it... And when it comes to the time of writing there's always the wall of reluctance. A kind of mental stagnation and pain that comes from developing ones thoughts on the 'writing for an audience' level. I'm extremely hyper-graphic, finishing a journal a month. However, no one sees those journals, and if someone did I'd probably have a nervous breakdown... The reluctance comes when having to write for an audience, when you know your ideas can be judged.. But whatever, I'm just gonna write whatever...
-Right now I'm in the middle of writing a paper for a friend, on:
"The Scientific Revolution altered the world view of Science and challenged the religious beliefs and ideas of Christianity"
Easy Schmeezzy...I barely have to try to write this essay. A guaranteed 'A' for my friend... So let's try and think of some interesting angle to look at the scientific revolution...
The scientific revolution is generally thought to reflect a significant paradigm shift: a fundamental change in an individual or a society's view of how things work in the world.- This is what's most interesting about the scientific revolution. I start to think about memetics, and the evolution of ideas and knowledge. Mass changes in how we view the world... I can spend hours thinking about this stuff, writing in my journal profusely; trying to understand the complexity of human ranking systems, or why we feel the urge to urinate when hiding in a game of hide and seek, or how about contemplating the reason why I like boobs so much (because they resemble a beautiful ripe rump, ready for fertilization)... This is the kind of stuff that that amateur philosophers like me live for: the ecstasy of a brilliant ideas...
Then, comes the fine tuning; the scientific method, experimentation, validation, etc. When all the initial glamor subsides and skepticism takes over. Here it's either prove it or lose it. It's one thing to just gawk over the unconfirmed profundity of these ideas; and another to really be able to accept something as truth. The ideas need to be clarified.--Evolutionary psychology is still a very young discipline, where there is still much diversity of opinion within. Naturally there will some controversy and contentions. Some dismiss any notion of the human mind having adapted by natural selection and mutation, while others, like Steven Pinker, can't stop pointing out how much our genes determine our behavior.
The next step usually results in some kind of compromise between then two; you'll often hear phrases like: "everybody knows it's both nature and nurture"... This perspective is appropriate only as a simple statement of general clarification. One needs to go deeper than that...
Kudos to Pinker for giving nurture its due where deserved, as well as his refusal to shrug off the evidence pointing to the biological bases... I find the the stock arguments presented in evolutionary psychology (innate language, color, shape, recognition, art, etc) to be both incredibly interesting, and speculative. On the one hand, I love learning about evolution, I accept wholeheartedly the ideas neodarwinism, and embrace the science of it all with passion and respect. It's really the best we've got in understanding why and how we are the way we are... However, the gears do change a little when you start thinking about the evolution of the mind. For me, it's not a question of whether or not the mind evolved. Of course it did. The question for me is how. For this I can offer no secure resolution... Yet...
-So trying to understand my own mind in terms of evolution is, in my opinion, one of the funnest things to think about. It's almost like the snake eating it's own tail thing: trying to understand why you're trying to understand things. It's like I can just get high off my own thoughts, i.e. eating myself... It's difficult to say what exactly I find so enthralling about it. I know that I can't really be completely certain of anything. Yet, I liberally hand myself over to probability. If I can surmise that the mind being adapted by natural selection/mutation has an 85% chance of being true, I can just bask in that 85 %, and be happy...
That's all for now.
-Right now I'm in the middle of writing a paper for a friend, on:
"The Scientific Revolution altered the world view of Science and challenged the religious beliefs and ideas of Christianity"
Easy Schmeezzy...I barely have to try to write this essay. A guaranteed 'A' for my friend... So let's try and think of some interesting angle to look at the scientific revolution...
The scientific revolution is generally thought to reflect a significant paradigm shift: a fundamental change in an individual or a society's view of how things work in the world.- This is what's most interesting about the scientific revolution. I start to think about memetics, and the evolution of ideas and knowledge. Mass changes in how we view the world... I can spend hours thinking about this stuff, writing in my journal profusely; trying to understand the complexity of human ranking systems, or why we feel the urge to urinate when hiding in a game of hide and seek, or how about contemplating the reason why I like boobs so much (because they resemble a beautiful ripe rump, ready for fertilization)... This is the kind of stuff that that amateur philosophers like me live for: the ecstasy of a brilliant ideas...
Then, comes the fine tuning; the scientific method, experimentation, validation, etc. When all the initial glamor subsides and skepticism takes over. Here it's either prove it or lose it. It's one thing to just gawk over the unconfirmed profundity of these ideas; and another to really be able to accept something as truth. The ideas need to be clarified.--Evolutionary psychology is still a very young discipline, where there is still much diversity of opinion within. Naturally there will some controversy and contentions. Some dismiss any notion of the human mind having adapted by natural selection and mutation, while others, like Steven Pinker, can't stop pointing out how much our genes determine our behavior.
The next step usually results in some kind of compromise between then two; you'll often hear phrases like: "everybody knows it's both nature and nurture"... This perspective is appropriate only as a simple statement of general clarification. One needs to go deeper than that...
Kudos to Pinker for giving nurture its due where deserved, as well as his refusal to shrug off the evidence pointing to the biological bases... I find the the stock arguments presented in evolutionary psychology (innate language, color, shape, recognition, art, etc) to be both incredibly interesting, and speculative. On the one hand, I love learning about evolution, I accept wholeheartedly the ideas neodarwinism, and embrace the science of it all with passion and respect. It's really the best we've got in understanding why and how we are the way we are... However, the gears do change a little when you start thinking about the evolution of the mind. For me, it's not a question of whether or not the mind evolved. Of course it did. The question for me is how. For this I can offer no secure resolution... Yet...
-So trying to understand my own mind in terms of evolution is, in my opinion, one of the funnest things to think about. It's almost like the snake eating it's own tail thing: trying to understand why you're trying to understand things. It's like I can just get high off my own thoughts, i.e. eating myself... It's difficult to say what exactly I find so enthralling about it. I know that I can't really be completely certain of anything. Yet, I liberally hand myself over to probability. If I can surmise that the mind being adapted by natural selection/mutation has an 85% chance of being true, I can just bask in that 85 %, and be happy...
That's all for now.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Journal Entry #1
________________________________________________________________
Let’s write for a lilttle bit. Typing, I have to get used to typing and not looking at the keyboard. I think I could easily-- I mean, right now I’m not looking but right now is different that other times. So I must take advantage of my confident revery. I think it is a good time to instill in me that muscle memory so that when I’m in other brain states it will come back to me easier. At other times the instinctual muscle memory is unable to be tapped, so basically I have to learn to familiarize with this….
--Enough on that… I'm watching a very good movie, “The Dead Poets Society”. Amazing movie.. And it’s getting good and tense. I must divert some more attention to it… I’m also a little afraid of the janitors and cops here at school, it is getting late and I most liekly am being heard by someone here. But whatever. What’s the worst that could happen? I could talk my way out of most likely. I really hope no one comes thoug, I really don’t want to leave. I would even try to tlak my way into staying. I would say, “look I lost track of time, I’m not in good shape, my dads in the hospital. That sort of thing. And then hopefully find some comon ground.
Great movie. – A young Wilson;. What a charming reality.
I met with gary today, and my judgement has definitley changed for the better regarding his confrontation with dissent and mutuality. Last time we hung out I disagreed with something he said and he seemed to get frustrated. But tonight there was none of that, and we talked about a great many things...He’s really a decent guy, and not just in a fuzzy emotive type way. I mean ethicically he’s a real decent guy. … So it went realy well, and I’m surprisingly open with him, as he is with me. It’s easier to admit things when someone else is also admitting things. He started talking about his bipolar diagnoses first. Which just automatically made me comfortable enough to talk about my psyche issues/medication, etc.- We smoked up, and I'm still high from it now. I know I probably shouldn’t be doing it, but it felt right. However, I know I need to learn how to say no. Here’s a good thought to counter the temptation; We probably even had a better time, well at the least not any different, from whence we smoked. The convorsation was immensly great before we even smoked weed. With much positive feelings based soely on the interaction of ideas, and solidarity. I didn’t need any weed.. There was one point where I felt it strong in the nerves. An elation, a deep appreciation. That’s good enough for me. I don’t need drugs when I have access to that.
Next thought. Relax...
There’s something about the way weed affects your thinking. Ideas become more expansive, unifeid and more easily navigitable. With a greater demensionality to it. A greater depth/feeling in the nervous system. It would be difficult to say what exactly weed does as a baseline commonality for everybody. Maybe biochemically, but not so sure about the subjective phenomenal experience of emotion, and memory, etc.-
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