I thas been a while since my last post, but it also took me a while to write an entire book, which by the way, I plan on revising in the future. I might get around to editing old Minute Logic posts and fixing typos. Anyways, let's get to it!
Some are More
I think in the golden age where everybody gets a trophy for trying, too much emphasis is being placed on making people feel better about themselves. If one can get a ribbon in a contest for not even following the rules, isn't that A) Misleading and B) causing people to be complacent? It's very easy for me to get lost in my own thinking and think of myself as quite intelligent. In fact, the intelligent people are in MIT, studying god-knows-what. They don't have time to blog about their thoughts. Not only are the intelligent, they show amazing persistence. On the other hand, I'm quite undisciplined. Sad face. Some people are literally 'more'. Their life is worth more, their thoughts are generally superior, and their entire existence is of a greater magnitude than some other. People like swallowing this idea, that each person has 'inner beauty' or some other hooey. I think that's false, and the tendency to follow that statement up with 'therefore, each person is priceless' is dangerous. It's complete bullshit. Some people contribute more to society and are in a better position to fix problems and strengthen humanity. They will know more than we ever will. To huamnity at-large and as it should be for us, these people are better.
Yes, human life is worth something, but we play a numbers game with lives all the time. As I type this, some few children would have died in misery and suffering that could have most likely been preventable. We take this kind of stuff into account every time we design vehicles and anything safety related; sure, it has a chance of saving lives, but we don't want to spend all that money. We weight the cost of the implementation to the cost of the lives saved. I could give away all my money to those who need it more than me, those that would die if I didn't. But I don't. We are all selfish; it is in our nature to not be completely selfless, because you would be the idiot that died more than a hundred-thousand years ago. We cling onto family because it provided a plus to our survivability. We hate incest because it denies gene diversity. So as I've probably stated in an ealier blog post: After evolution and culture, how much left of yourself is truly yourself? The answer is much less than you'd think. No, I do not think we are all zombies of our nature and enviroment, but it has a much larger role than many of us give credit for. When chemicals rush into our brains right before sexual intercourse, we act just like the animals we actually are, as many other organisms in this world do.
Simplification
In major issues, people sometimes like to try to simplify it into one line. Every 'atheism destroyed in 60 seconds video' I see, I lose an eye. (Not literally, or I'd be blind.) Why? This subject is too ocmplex to address in 60 seconds. This reverse also applies; 'religion destroyed in 60 seconds' is pretty dumb, but not as dumb. 'Guns don't people, people kill people.' That's stupid. The most it does is verify your stance on gun control. It's not an actual argument. By that logic, all countries, North Korea included, should be allowed to have a handful of atomic weapons... heck, give random people some too. When the rule of allowing people to bear arms was written, people had muskets. We now have assault weapons with extended magazines to kill more before reloading- a critical factor in killing more people.I'm a bit neutral on the topic of gun control. More people are killed by many causes compared to guns, but the fact that the many victims in gun shootings would have been alive if it were not for guns is unmistakable. I mean, seriously. No, you can't arm teachers. Even trained police officers have a hard time shooting, and they are trained; they hit, accoridng to Time magazine, about 1/5 shots in the heat of combat. Speaking of which, I have a friend that thinks he's all fancy with his purple belt and can beat people up. Riiiight. Come a real fight, you'll turn to putty. The psychological factor is HUGE.
Love at First Sight
I'm a bit cynical on this stuff. But I no longer believe in this kind of stuff. How does one 'love' somebody for who they are before they know them? it's a bit of a non-sequitur. Instead, and as Dean Lyson pointed out, all we are doing is loving the person we've constructed in our minds, of who we assume they are. It is essentially falling in love with a constructed image of a person, a random guess at who they are. We want to believe the world is a nice place despite and because the world is such a cruel place. We want to believe the world has a god watching over us and we will survive if we die. We want to believe we can tell or destinies through our stars. We also want to believe there is that somebody that is utterly perfect for us. The idea of 'soul mates' is complete gargbage. It's based on assumptions for which there is no evidence. While there could potentially, through a sliver of chance, be only one person I will be extremely happy with, chances are there are many people in the world that I would be just as happy with if I had met them... but the world is huge, and I won't meet them. So when you see a 'soul mate', consider how this is faith-based proposition and had you lived somewhere else, you would most likely have found another 'soul mate'.
Settling is Condescending
I'm not the ultimate lady's man, and I openly admit it. I don't want to go into detail online, especially with my face and name attached to it, but I'm not crying over it. But one temptation others may have in my situation is to 'settle for somebody'. That is unfair to the girl. Imagine if you were married, and you found out your partner really only picked you because he or she couldn't find anybody better that liked him or her back. How would you feel? I think even to myself, settling for myself would be condescending to myself. I deserve and should find somebody I feel i am fully compatible with, who thinks I'm amazing. To settle is to judge myself unworthy.
The Truth
If I live under a dogma, the dogma would be that of telling the truth. I don't always tell the truth, but I do it to my friends often when it would annoy them. But in all cases I feel if I were perfectly moral by my own standards, I'd tell the truth. I feel the truth is always preferable to the non-truth. I don't want to live in a fantasy world, removed from reality. To complain when asked an opininon and I told the truth is to be angry somebody took your whiskey away after your obvious addiction. Ask me if you look fat in the jeans, ideally I'd reply, yes. But you know what? I'd notify you of the problem before you embarrass yourself in public, AND I'll help you find a pair that makes you look sexy. So looked at in this light, is it really that bad I try to tell the truth?
Aging: A disease?
One different spin on something that has been around us ever since our sentience: death and aging. Putting aside the psychological and philosophical aspects of this right now, isn't aging a disease? Is dying of 'natural' causes not so natural? Consider aging as a deterioration of our bodies, and our body unable to keep up. As we grow when we were little, we repair faster than the rate which we deterioate, but as time passes, things change. Errors in our DNA occur, and general misinformation along with clutter and garbage appear everywhere.
One argument may be that it is due to our evolution that we die too quickly (on the scale of the universe and even compared to some other animals on this planet, we die in the blink of an eye). If evolution could talk, it would literally look at us and say 'thr trouble of making you alive any longer is too much'. But if we consider that natural, isn't dying to many other diseases also natural?
Sigmund Freud said it was obvious religions were made because we were scared of death. Perhaps the media casts living longer in a negative light. Imagine if Newton and Einstein were alive today. Amazing. The world would be a different place. Would living longer only mean we live in a statement of sickness for a longer period of time? One person on TedTalks responded that his goal is to make people healthy, then make them healthier for a longer period of time, and perhaps one day make them always healthy.
Morality: The Lion
Isn't it more immoral for a lion to kill tons of animals than for a human to scam another person? Morality is a subjective topic because even if we condense morality into what brings the most pleasure (even that is debatable), who is to say what makes more happiness in the end? Anyways, a lion that kills somebody has no choice. The lion does not have the mental capacity we do, and will starve. Us, on the other hand, are given a better mind, and knowledge is power, and with great power comes great responsibility.
My Book
One last note, and this time about my book. I plan on revising it. Try proofreading an entire book that you wrote. When proofreading, often e read what we think we wrote, not what we actually wrote. It's challenging. I want to fix all typos that exist in this version, and beef up the book with even more good content. Perhaps as Hitchens said, I will be writing this book my entire life.
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