A 4 hour afternoon nap, uneventful rock climbing session, 50 pages of The Joke, couple of milk M&Ms, and about 2 shots worth of Bombay Sapphire after, and to the sound of Jazz Fusion...

...we don't think in grammatical sentences...some things are just hard to put down in words...maybe the feeling CAN be 100% explained through words and sentences, and maybe I just don't know how at times. That's when we quote. And even then, I might take a quote and interpret it the way I want it to be, and then cite that quote as some idol. It's amazing how we can link two things together - almost any two things that we want to believe have a connection. There is a power in delusion. Is delusion wrong? That's another question. But I am open to accepting delusion as a way of life. Without an absolute such as God, nihilism or my variant of it at least seems acceptable. In such, any approach to anything seems fine because they are all as bad as the other.
...we don't think in words...or do we? Our language decides how we think because it gives a name and an easy recollection of an emotion or a thought, a revelation, and it puts it nearer and more accessible for us to dig out from our very loaded brains. And even the grammar can affect the way we think. I will be finding more from my Language Acquisition of semantics and pragmatics class.

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It all started with that poster. And in my memory that poster, which I can barely remember if it was in the form of a hard paper of A4 size or of something larger, or on some crappy colored such as yellow or maybe plain white paper with black wordings, seems like something I can recollect and reference. But as just described, I really don't remember the poster, if it should even be classified as a poster should I see it again. That poster, on was it the 4th or 5th floor, of the Theology building, by the Philosophy department. And what were the words? I don't recall. It was a notice, yes notice would be a more reliable word, of an upcoming talk of a sort. The topic involved two matters and a relationship between them. Isn't that the subject of so many intellectual talks these days? It must have been something like "XYZ and saving the environment", though it could more than well have been "beliefs of the ABC people and Christianity" or "Artifacts of XXX and modern religious beliefs". Whatever the case, it was another talk on how one thing agrees with another. Not so much causality but correlation. A relation. And there it struck me, what, another talk linking one thing to another. Just like how one could link carbon dioxide levels to rising global temperatures, or agreements between Eastern ancient thought and growing worldviews in the modern world, and it became absurb and obvious to me that it should not surprise us if we encounter a proposal on relations between two intuitively unrelated subjects such as methodology of distilling today's popular alcoholic drinks and success in the competitive business markets. And examples of casual correlation abound, though not lodged in my memory in concise and coherent sentences, maybe not in words or grammatical phrases, but images, though images nonetheless hardly reliable just as I could not recollect the image of the notice which I called a poster, but perhaps just the essence remains in my mind. And what is the essence? Just the gaps that I have no other word for at the moment. And if essence had to be more specifically defined, then maybe my memories did not keep any essence but something else. See, casual correlation can be found in the church. But let us not jump ahead into arguments for or against God. I am referring to the church and the sermons or teachings heard in church activities such as sermons from men or women from the pulpit or in a more classroom like setting. And we will not go into whether the teachings were divinely inspired. It was however words from a mortal person, who as Christianity teaches us, is no better or worse than us. The preacher is not a higher being; if he should claim to be lower, it is similarly absurd and contradictory. A human being creates links between events through some mechanism we have developed over our evolution be it from apes or from our ancestors. It is a biological trait, I believe though not originally conceived by me, that is advantageous to us over not having the ability or tendency to generalize, stereotype, or otherwise invent causalities and correlations between two subjects which may in reality, however defined, have or have no real relevant relationship.

A pearl is so beautiful and prized. Ladies, how many of you walk past the jewelry shops and marvel and those wondrous pearls? Gentlemen, how many of you have gotten these smooth and brightly charactered orbs for your wives and girlfriends? Do you know how a pearl is formed? From dust in the clam, over a long period of time, polished, until at last you have a beautiful pearl. And that's how it's like with us. We have our troubles et cetera and through being tested and polished, like in the clam, we will ultimately emerge as beautiful as pearls.

Sure I've heard something like that before in a sermon. Whether or not pearls actually come from dust or secretions against irritants is not important to me here. Whether the facts are all clearly scientifically justified and agreed upon is another matter. The point is that we see similarities in different things. But really, if you don't have a worldview or religious view that suffering is a form of polishing, this analogy would not fit. This would not function as a good parable. We might get smitten by it from its poetry or from the images of pearls, or maybe from the great storytelling, which I am not mocking but merely establishing that the above paragraph is what I consider a told story, but whether or not the sermon means anything is another matter altogether, one that must be decided by dogma and doctrine of the church if it falls under a bigger denomination, and if not than one that must acceptable and receivable by the audience, caused by their level of education, social codes, moral codes, or any other matter, and one that is decided or conceived by the preacher or by his source.

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Tomorrow, another article will be published linking one thing to another. Another dissertation must be written for graduation requirements. Another book will be published to be read and to have its author's ideas, however useful to anyone other than himself, heard. A whole wealth of knowledge is still growing. And not only do we need to know how to filter junk from treasure, but we might want to wonder if everything is junk, or perhaps if everything is treasure. Probably, the intuitive decision is that it depends. Are ideas accepted and popularized after the thinker's, artist's, or musician's death, what we may glorify as genius ahead of its time, worthy of glorification? I don't know enough of either categories to analyze sufficiently.

What I like however, are Milan Kundera's works. Personally, it lets me experience first-hand how good works are actually good, or at least they could possibly be popular due to work that appeals to people rather than become elevated to greatness simply because of advertisement. I chanced upon Kundera's work while doing my own research for topics I myself was interested in. And though it may have helped that his name appeared in earlier Google results out of his popularity, I found his work interesting without knowing of his apparent fame until I had completed one of his novels. Likewise, I had known Neitzsche by name from earlier references. I had however never read his works or read a summary of his ideas. I have however, come to find him as a necessary read because his ideas are relating to what I have been pondering over. No doubt, I will be blinded and lose connection with my own personal thoughts by reading his work, no doubt that I will fall into the human tendency of seeing what may not actually apply to me as really applicable to me, nonetheless in a nihilistic view, there is no harm.

The question of God is one thing. The question of which God is another. And beyond that lies many other questions, such as how one can get to God, what happens after death, is there only one way, how should we live, et cetera. Anyone who has read the Bible must have noticed the inconsistencies. I treated it as the holy book divinely received from heaven in the past. I had tried to read it from the beginning. In Genesis and Exodus, as I recall, I was already confused by irregularities. I pondered these irregularies and decided that must be a reason, probably also decided to find out more about this, but did not question the authority of the Bible. Today, though do not take it as a representative of anything other, I do not believe in the Bible having been divinely, as written in modern version, and apart from language translations, received directly from the heavens and from God. What I am afraid of is of those who notice the irregulaities and purposefully blind themselves to thinking that the Bible is divinely dropped from heaven and who create seemingly self-deceiving justifications. Now, let me explain a little. It could have dropped from heaven. I merely do not think so. The justifications, though some may consider self-deceiving in order to preserve a prior belief, may actually turn out to be true. I am not passing judgement. I am however more aware that, if I am right n my observations, there are many people who do not take a step into evaluting if they really believe what they believe. And yes, if nihilism is fine, then self-deception is alright. As I link this psychology to my current thoughts, as linking though I find excessive in modern intellectual affairs is not a crime though mine might very well be, then I would have to add this confession, though I feel inadequately dwelt upon, that I am inventing or finding justification (and these actions are not criminal either, except in intolerantly athetist thought perhaps) to as yet still deny that God does not exist. That is why I want to know what is neccesary for having the right faith, defined by me as doing the neccesary actions to find myself on the right side of things after mortal death, if there is any thing after.

Strangely, this seeming losing of my religion has made me aware that, if I have lost it, then I have not really had a religion. Let me explain. In my troubles and fears, I still call on God. I had done so prior, and I still do so. This does not mean that God does not exist and that it is all made up out of a need to call on something which I then relegate as God. This means that I was no more religious than I am now. Those many things change in my thoughts and worries in my evaluation of my religion, I have found that many things have not changed. As this is still an ongoing ordeal, I find it hard to elaborate further. It may perhaps be a lost in faith in the organized religion of Christianity, though there are many aspects and some I had rejected long ago without committing heresy, and the finding of a personal religion, which though sounds heretical, may be or may not be. I'll leave it at this for now.

Did Nietzsche mention that the 'death' of God, the loss of belief in God, may lead to nihilism? Whoever came up with that idea, if it were revolutionary, probably is only as smart as me, though I would suspect a lot of people can individually come to this conclusion on their own. It is true, in my life, that when I started to question the existence of God, more specifically a God that requires a moral code for our mortal lives, that nihilism seems acceptable, in fact natural. Whether superman is the solution is another matter I find slightly absurb at the moment.

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And now I must decide if my blog post must be titled, be named that is, or if it need not, maybe must not. A word changes everything or at least something. It would put my post in the shadow of the title which must then be very well and appropriately chosen to avoid creating an artificial barrier to understanding my post. What if the title were written at the end of the post? Then the title would be seen in the shadow of the post, though a title might not be neccesary then other than if for dramatic effect or summarization, which surely is a bane, for to summarize all thoughts into an existing word silently destroys the expansion of ideas and negates everything said prior, though all those writings may deserve to be trashed for being more junk in the wealth of junk already available and mostly useless. A title is after all there to add organization in the overall blog and ineffective (or not?), by being at the bottom. Its purpose was after all to be enlarged in font and to claim attention. But so I must see that nobody cares for what I write. It is not an evil. It is just hard to care about other minds. To apologize for sounding judgemental, I myself don't care about other minds often. A title therefore grows a purpose. And a title, though maybe not neccesary, IS neccesary in a different (maybe it is the same after all, and after all assigning such variants to one thing is just an abstraction that is as much genius as stupidity) semantic value of the word.