the covert mission of adjectives

first mover advantage.

2011-01-21T22:30:00.000-08:00

you don't get that in scissors paper stone; and elsewhere, you don't get to learn from mistakes. Of course, maybe learning just means more information, interpreted and maybe a contributor to your downfall. So, that's tricky. But first movers don't always win. In fact, 2nd movers are often in excellent positions. Sure, the 1st mover will force you into limited options and your favourite move - a move that you're very good at and have a 90% chance of winning - may not be available. But then it's not available for good reason...it won't win this time. So by going 2nd, you avoid that. Great. Simple enough.

2010-07-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

new word of tonight:

solfège [sɔl.fɛʒ] where ɛ is like "air" w/o the r-sound.

a teaching method of applying a certain syllable to a certain musical note on a scale.
That is to say, teaching someone to do the "do re mi fa so la ti do!!!" (well in most modern western contexts anyway)

2010-05-26T21:12:00.001-07:00

maybe read?

lord of the flies.
1984.
the golden compass.
dead souls.

2010-05-07T23:47:00.000-07:00

Some interesting new findings...

Canaan was part of Egypt around 1500-1200 BC, supposedly the time the Exodus and Joshua leading the Israelites into the promised land. (Exodus 480 years before Solomon's Temple (1 Kings 6:1) and estimated about 1447BC)

Red Sea is a mistranslation from the Hebrew word "Yum Suph" which should have been translated as the "sea of reeds", possibly a lake but not necessarily the big Red Sea.

Egyptian population at time of Exodus is about 3-6 million. If 600,000 Israelite men were in the Exodus, then a reasonable population of the Exodus might be 2 million? (maybe more since mortality rates should be high and there should be a lot more children than adults). That takes a large chunk out of Egypt. Apparently no Egyptian records of incidents like the plagues preceding the Exodus, and no record of any mass exodus out of any people.

J-E-D-P Documentary Hypothesis. Lots of variants of it now too.

Should learn how to read stuff and figure out the date. One technique is see what they get correct up until. For example, the gospel of Mark is dated around 70AD because it seems to know about imineint trouble but doesn't know specifics, whereas the gospel of Luke knows more specifics. And that is based on the belief that Mark preceded Luke (and that Luke is derived in part from Mark).

2010-04-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

Glossolalia.

observed properties

intonation seems same as speaker's native language.

most common vowels - [i] and [a]

common consonant? - [sh]

much smaller phoneme inventory than most (and native) languages.

lots of repetition.

use of "exotic sounds" that are known (consciously or not) to speaker - eg. changing bunched [r] to tap [r].

xenoglossa?

apparently no concrete evidence. testimonials are available, but they are often by people likely with a bias.

of god/of the devil?

glossolalia not limited to christianity. present in voodoo and other parts of the world. sounds are similar?

Nicodemus

2010-03-24T19:34:00.000-07:00

Nicodemus (John, chapter 3)

On Pg 154-155 of Jesus Interrupted, Bart Ehrman discusses how the story of Nicodemus in John chapter 3 is likely to be untrue because it doesn't fit the context. In the English translation that we are familiar with, Jesus says that no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born again, where upon my NIV version has a footnote saying it Or born from above. Ignoring the footnote, the continuation of the story is simple. Nicodemus doesn't understand how one can be born again and Jesus gives a reply about bring born of water and the Spirit. In our common Protestant interpretation, this refers to baptism - of water and of the Holy Spirit. Under a charismatic Christian belief, I'd suspect this means both a water baptism and a baptism of the Holy Spirit in the speaking of tongues sense are necessary. Under other interpretations, perhaps just one baptism is enough, for example whereby a water baptism also brings the Spirit upon you, or where a baptism of the Holy Spirit negates the need for less abstract and probably more superficial baptism by water.

Either way, Nicodemus doesn't seem to understand. Jesus doesn't clarify his statements but seems to go on with further abstractions. This is not uncommon in Gospel texts and as a reader, I would typically have ignored this since such incidents of listeners not understand Jesus and Jesus not putting it in simpler terms is all over the place.

Let's look at the footnote. Why is born again footnoted to also be born from above? Apparently, again and from above have the same Greek word. This makes sense therefore if the manuscript of John was written in Greek. Approaching it from a less speculative angle, we can just do research into the gospel of John and find out if it, or at least the piece(s) used to construct the story of Nicodemus was in Greek. RESEARCH POINT. Now, say this account was written in Greek, why then is the interpretation of again chosen over from above? Simple, because the response of Nicodemus (verse 4) is "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!".

Ehrman provides a different interpretation of the story: Jesus spoke in Greek and meant to say from above. Nicodemus misinterprets the word as again leading to his questions about how someone can be born when old. Jesus then clarifies that he meant from above, in my opinion it being telling from verse 6 flesh gives birth to flesh, but the spirit gives birth to spirit. Ehrman says this is how the story was meant to be read, and claims that the story is likely untrue because Jesus was likely to have been speaking Aramaic, not Greek, thus making this conversation impossible.

Before we jump the gun and accuse Ehrman of cyclic argumentation (though this interpretation is probably not original to Ehrman, RESEARCH POINT), let's have a brief review. The text we derive this story from is written in Greek. What implications does this have? Seemingly irrelevant, this may point to the text not being written by the disciple John. John is supposed to be uneducated and only the elite were literate during the time. Did John learn Greek later and compose this gospel? I remember reading that this is unlikely because the Gospels actually seem to have literary structure and concepts such as recurring themes. John is arguably not going to be concerned with learning Greek but more concerned with spreading Christianity. Perhaps he learned Greek nonetheless in order to compose a written account. Once again, RESEARCH POINT.

Let's review something else. Say this event did take place and likely in Aramaic. Then so far things make sense with the ambiguity only arising when the author of the text recorded the story in Greek. The ambiguity is unimportant as the story makes original sense when again is taken instead of from above. But, before we get ahead of ourselves, what does Jesus' response in verse 5-9 mean? Is it, as I typically had read it, just an unrelated abstract response from Jesus to Nicodemus' failure to comprehend? Instead of hastily discrediting Ehrman's interpretation, this response seems to make sense if Jesus had said from above earlier rather than again. Try reading verses 5-9 as if Jesus had said from above, and try reading it as if Jesus had said again. Also, the words at the end of verse 7 would take either from above or again respectively. Too easy? Seems like again is slightly better because we can interpret "...born of water and the Spirit" as referring to baptism. But, let's take another step back and review. How do we know Jesus meant baptism? Was baptism in water ever mentioned as being "born of water" prior? Was baptism of the Holy Spirit ever mentioned before?

So in this mess of different potential interpretations, the decision to choose again or from above is crucial. If I choose the interpretation of again, then verses 5-9 are just another regular oddity in Jesus' way of conversing. If I choose from above, then either Jesus did not speak it in Greek which makes no sense of verse 6, or Jesus did speak it in Greek which makes the story probably not a real incident.

I have to conclude that Ehrman needs to give more evidence for his interpretation in order to tilt the tables in his favor. On the other hand, I must remain aware that I am making coherent sense of the story by interpreting verses 5-9 in light of modern church teachings and theologies which I am only assuming were valid modes of thought during the time of the story. In other words, yet another RESEARCH POINT.

2010-02-15T20:20:00.000-08:00

some side effects of a world without god:

Endless science possibilities (?)
If you are a Christian, you can probably rely on time travel never actually being possible...or stem cell research that makes eternal life...or invincibility. Or, for that matter, on sudden global nuclear annihilation...or a worldwide lack of resources and food, well this could be assumed too.

Endless science!?!??!!
Scary! Imagine if suddenly you don't know how the universe is going to end. Crap.

2010-02-15T13:55:00.000-08:00

Catch-22

2010-01-27T19:26:00.000-08:00

Fantastic book.

The author's vocabulary is amazing. When I started reading the novel, it was a tough read because sentences were long, occasionally complex, and contained lots of words that I didn't know. But gradually, it gets easier and the book is so enjoyable that these things don't bother much. I just read quickly to get the story and although I may be missing out on the descriptive richness, I am not stripping it down to bones.

It's also very very funny. It is intelligently funny too. Puns would be too easy. The book has many conversations that just keep hitting you with unexpected humor in the way sentences are interpreted and they just keep coming. A two page conversation can contain so much fun and absurdity, which really however makes sense, that a climatic statement at its end will just make you roar with laughter. It isn't stupid though.

And the insights are very real and deep, though portrayed in a easy-to-read manner and though comical events. Toward the end of the novel, the layers of comedy start to come apart and you get a glimpse into the reality of war, bureaucracy, greed in capitalism and more. The structure of the novel is so perfect. For example, things are tied up at the end without disappointment.

This is a book everybody has got to read!

new testament

2010-01-08T15:15:00.000-08:00

matthew

fulfilment of certain old testament / jewish words.
does not say old jewish laws should be done away with. what about for gentiles? well, are gentiles even mentioned?

mark

constant theme of jesus not wanting people to tell others that he is god or doing miracles. (note: but they tell anyway)
jesus declares all food clean. (but the parallel story in Matthew does not say this, and Mark is a source from which Matthew and Luke is written)

luke/acts

good jewish people do good jewish things
starting (verse 5+) parallels abraham and sarah.
end times: inserts "time of the gentiles" which is not in Mark.
a lot of parallels to old testament. mary's prayer and hannah's in 1 Samuel.
idea is that luke/acts seems to be written to emulate the old testament.
a lot of emphasis on the gentiles. (anti-jew sentiment)
theme: "prophet is rejected by his own people". gospel to be rejected by jews. then for the gentiles. see ending of Acts.
tradition, if true, says that Paul was beheaded in Rome by the Romans. But luke/acts did not include it, why? because the theme is supposed to be rejection by jews and going to (hence acceptance by?) gentiles.
also, stephen. rejected by jews. martyred. theme: prophets get martyred.
jews still have to keep their laws. gentiles don't have to keep the jewish laws. acts 15.
has no mention of jesus' death being a ransom or sins. more like a martyred prophet.

john/letters of john (1st, 2nd, 3rd)
not necessarily written by the same person, but seems to be by the same kind of persons, according to scholars.
the only gospel that has Jesus in Jerusalem more than just before his death. 3 Passovers are mentioned in John and not the other gospels. How do we derive that Jesus started ministry at 30 and died at 33? the 3 years is from John's writing of 3 passovers. the 30 comes from Luke i think, where exactly?
in john, there is no Eucharist (last supper with bread, wine, and "do this in remembrance of me"), although there is jesus dipping the bread and talking to judas. also, there is foot-washing.
crucified before Passover (the time when lambs for the Passover were being slaughtered). other gospels say on the day of Passover. Literary parallel because John also refers to Jesus as the "lamb of God" (1:29) and writes of Jesus dying when lambs for the Passover were being killed.
lots of themes of "see" and "know".
and then chapter 9, a blind man made to see, but in verse 12, he says "i don't know"
symbolic meaning? or just a literal description of an event?
verse 22 is anachronic according to scholars who claim that at the time of jesus, there was no movement like that described in "...already the Jews had decided that anone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ would be put out of the synagogue". such a movement may have been established later (when John was written), but not during the event being told.
Chapter 5 verse 19+ talks about the Father and Son. prior verse 18 says "the Jews tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he...but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God." But, since when was being the son the same as being the father, or being the son of God equal to being God? was that already a Jewish notion? was that a commonly accepted religious idea? It seems that the author of John added these details because this was what he believed, not necessarily what the Jews were thinking.
chapter 3, verse 3. the only (practically only maybe?) place with the "born again" notion. however, the Greek word used can be also translated to "from above". likewise in verse 7. (Note: the text was in Greek, and although Jesus spoke Aramaic, this conversation might not have ever happened at all. The Greek is all we have). if "from above" was the original intention, then from where does modern "born again" movements derive meaning? but verse 4 has the reply as if verse 3 meant "born again". So that seems settled. Also, in the following verses, there is "Spirit" and "wind", but the Greek word used is the same (pneuma). So, what do we do? Is it meant to be a pun, or was one meaning intended?
Jesus doesn't seem to give straight direct answers in John. Always speaking in riddles. Chapter 8 verse 31. Jews who believe in him are with Jesus, and Jesus "argues" with them. He accuses them of wanting to kill him and of belonging to the devil (v44). Finally, he claims to be God (v58) with "...I am" probably in reference to God's (YHWH) talking to Moses at the burning bush.
lens to view John through: sectarian christology. (believing only they are the correct ones and the rest are all wrong and is unacceptable, or will be damned.)

1 John. Love God, love brothers/one another (c4,v7,v21), do not love the world (c1,v15). Also, John 3:16 "God so loved the world that..." has the same Greek verb for "love" and same Greek noun for "world". so is there a contradiction in loving the world (cosmos?) and one another? one interpretation is that one another refers to within the sect, and the world outside.
seeing from a sectarian perspective, chapter 2 verse 18+ makes new sense. chapter 4 verse 2+. chapter 5 v 8. so this sect believes in jesus being God, not just a holy man, and not just promoted to divine. argues against other christologies, such as Docetism (jesus' body not really flesh...*seemed* only to be a body and *seemed* to die at crucifixion) in 2 John verse 7+.
see relationship between 2John and 3John, noticing "Diotrephes" in verse 9. Possible that the letter in 2John did not work and so 3John needed to be written. Also, argued that 2John is metaphorically written to a lady and children, but that it means a/the church. Previous splits in christologies due to doctrinal differences, but is one in 3John coming up due to politics?

lingo
Christology(-ies): any doctrine of Jesus, divine or human.

Mark: Jesus is the son of God (not necessarily God; such a relationship might not have been established then). Messiah who has to suffer to ransom sinners.

Mathew: quite similar to Mark. Jesus is son of God, the Messiah, and the "ransom". Also important that Jesus is a teacher and lawgiver, somewhat like a new Moses. The emphasis of Jesus as son of God is weaker.

Luke: "Ransom" idea is not included. Notions of martyred prophet.

Thomas: Jesus comes across as the revealer of hidden knowledge. He always acted like he was God or something. Included are episodes of him using his power to strike people when he was a child...etc.

John: eventually gives rise to Orthodox sect which includes the Nicean creed. And this Nicean creed believes that Jesus was always divine, not a good person who was promoted to divine status.

2010-01-06T22:48:00.000-08:00

de omnibus dubitandum

doubt everything

:)
Latin i suppose.

2010-01-02T19:56:00.000-08:00

kafka on the shore, haruki murakami

interesting and easy read. somehow, it doesn't take much effort to go through the pages and i find myself able to somewhat speed-read, skim-read, or whatever you think of it. sometimes i feel the layout of the words, line spacing, font, paragraphing, word spacing and even length and width of the book affects reading speed.

there are little gems within the book, which is what makes books good reads. however, as a collective whole, the novel seems promising all the way until you reach the end. it's not simply a classic case of bad ending or too much anticipation with the author having built a setup beyond his league to satisfy. i feel like murakami could probably tie things up in a way that gives the major incidents in the novel definite meaning. he simply doesn't as part of his intention. and it's almost expected, given the surreal like events in the novel.

it's just turns out to be a mambo of metaphors and under individual interpretation, they can amount to anything, and classicly hence to nothing. I get some of it, but i don't get a lot more. and trying to connect them isn't all i want. i want to connect them the way the author intends; at least until i come up with another favorite interpretation. who wants to watch "waiting for godot" and end up not knowing a damn thing about its meaning, to ponder over it and come up with 5 different interpretations, each having to make different assumptions and disqualify certain events, later to find out the author meant nothing at all. like a trick. but "waiting for godot" has a author unintended favorite to many including myself, and that seems to be what makes it successful - the interpretation of godot being god. perhaps this vagueness coupled with luck yields success once in a while. but that's not what i would have wanted out of "kafka on the shore". it's a pity if i have to conclude that the build up leads to nothing but the author's playing around with, not too deeply, with concepts like self and the oedipus complex. ultimately then, this novel is more literary than philosophical. more english (or japanese) than literature. more surface form than underlying meaning. that would be sad.

perhaps the best way to appreciate it without judging too much is to not ask for too much and view each incident as independent on its own. like a dream, where the second scene feels connected to the first, but doesn't have to be, and is probably not. some things remain, for example, you, being in the dream. and maybe 2 people next to you. but one moment they could be your parents, and the next 2 schoolmates who don't even know each other, but with the physical form of a stranger you remember on the bus last night.

the intriguing aspects are all not finished on in the novel - the losing consciousness incidents, nakata and all his special situations, also hoshino and his; the connection between reality and dream is too blurred, and that's why the novel makes sense as a dream and hardly anything beyond that. still, indefinite unconnected and perhaps inherently meaningless dreams can be a pleasurable experience and precious memory and this novel is worth a read for that.

2009-12-28T12:25:00.000-08:00

"...The hands of the clock buried inside her soul ground to a halt then. Time outside, of course, flows on as always, but she isn't affected by it. For her, what we consider normal time is essentially meaningless."

"Meaningless?"

"Like it doesn't exist...in everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive."

quote from kafka on the shore

How depressing. And yet, I feel like it's true. True for me at least. Isn't that even more so depressing? I'd think there are many people for whom this doesn't hold. Maybe, I can reject this feeling before it becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy of sorts. After all, time on the outside flows on as always.

2009-12-05T09:20:00.001-08:00

if only there was a god to turn to, how nice that would be.
but to believe that there is no such god, takes away all my objective purpose in life.
i make new meanings, and as long as they are meaningful, i live a purposeful life,
once they lose their meanings to me, i'm empty, and i have no default direction to turn to,
no god no hope no purpose.
but whether god is real or not is not what matters,
it is whether I think god is real.
so can i think that god is real, and find some consolation from him
while also believing it to be a myth
why not sacrifice the belief that it is a myth?

2009-11-22T19:18:00.000-08:00

Would you know my name
If I saw you in heaven
Will it be the same
If I saw you in heaven
I must be strong, and carry on
Cause I know I don't belong
Here in heaven

Would you hold my hand
If I saw you in heaven
Would you help me stand
If I saw you in heaven
I'll find my way, through night and day
Cause I know I just can't stay
Here in heaven

Time can bring you down
Time can bend your knee
Time can break your heart
Have you begging please
Begging please

Beyond the door
There's peace I'm sure.
And I know there'll be no more...
Tears in heaven

Would you know my name
If I saw you in heaven
Will it be the same
If I saw you in heaven
I must be strong, and carry on
Cause I know I don't belong
Here in heaven

Cause I know I don't belong
Here in heaven

What's sadder is if there's no heaven.
No place to see you again, no place for hope.

2009-11-17T18:29:00.001-08:00

is this deal sealed?
same shit different day.

from steppenwolf

2009-11-16T19:59:00.000-08:00

Now with our Steppenwolf it was so that in his conscious life he lived now as a wolf, now as a man, as indeed the case is with all mixed feelings.

But, when he was a wolf, the man in him lay in ambush, ever on the watch to intefere and condemn, while at those times that he was a man the wolf did just the same.

For example, if he, as man, had a beautiful thought, felt a fine and noble emotion, or performed a so-called good act, [walking past a beggar feeling compassion and an impulse to help?], then the wolf bared his teeth at him and laughed and showed him with bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime was in the eyes of a beast, of a wolf who knew well enough in his heart what suited him, namely, to trot alone over the Steppes and now and then to gorge himself with blood or pursue a female wolf. Then, wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain.

But it was exactly the same when he felt and behaved as a wolf and showed others his teeth and felt hatred and enmity against all human and their lying and degenerate manners and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and watched the wolf, and spoiled and embittered for him all pleasure in his simple an healthy and wild wolf's being.

Of course, he's not really a wolf. But what is a man? A animal that invents and alters his lifestyle through society and culture, a phenomenon of influence comparable to the evolutionary baggage accumulated over the millions of years if true, but achieved and changing in a relative blinking of eyes. And what is man; is he just an ape? No. Maybe relatives, maybe divine. But even if a relative of monkeys and chimpanzees, measuring ourselves according to them isn't necessary, no more than it is to compare ourselves to cabbage. And so in attempting to understand who we are, we redefine ourselves, and do we get confused? Perhaps it is this confusion, this potential misfitting and nagging consciousness that differentiates man from animal.
Anyhow, I'm confused. Is there really this dual nature in man?

Well, if you feel it, then you have it. And it may not be dual. It may be a singular. Or maybe it is a million things, maybe nothing. Holy cows. Too confusing...

My personal god.

2009-11-15T20:23:00.000-08:00

My personal god.

Every week, I felt guilty when I stood in the congregation. I never sang, because I was self-conscious. Some of the songs were so good. But I'd never lift up my hands. I'd never do all that. It wasn't because I thought it was nonsense. I wanted to. I secretly whispered to God, "I'm not stretching forth my hands, and I'm not singing out loud, but God you know my heart." I wanted that gift of tongues. I was just too afraid to go up. I wanted all of that. I wanted to be a part of Christianity. But I always hid it inside of me. And my silent prayers never went anywhere. Because they were silent.

Why wouldn't you answer my prayers? When I had gone up to the front after the sermon to be prayed for, you never came for me. I never felt the way others do. I did not utter in tongues, nor did I feel any inner energy. I don't know. I was just inert. You never bothered with me. I was unworthy. I was not holy enough. I wasn't truly seeking you. You know my heart.

My time in FCBC was when I started actually singing and lifting my hands. I spent time in army reading "the purpose driven life". I thought, maybe there was a reason why I was wherever I was. My problems. My needs. How long did I need to ask?

My personal god was never there for me. It had always been my sheltered life and now me alone. I'd seen friends suddenly turning to you and they seemed to find relief. I know, I felt relief too. That is something you were here for. But the relief was too brief. It was like a painkiller. Perhaps it was my fault. I need to take action.

But forgive me that I no longer believe. Because you have not answered my deepest needs. You have ignored my desires for the gifts of the spirit that I envied, that I thought would bring me one step closer to you. And most of all, you kept me waiting. You led me on, and you wasted my time. You gave me false hope, for you were never planning anything, were you? You were never drawing toward me. You wanted me to draw toward you. I was promised that if I take a step toward you, you'd be running toward me with open arms. But you ran to others, not to me. You selfish, silent, veiled god. My personal savior.

The tears I cried for myself. The tears I cried in your presence. Genuine tears, no priest in the confession box. To think I had thanked you for the food. Did you really bless them? Do you really take care of the birds and pay attention to us? You're a fake. You are the wedge in my soul. How can I face my family? What do I do now? A leech, that's what you are. In our house, stealing my family, stealing authority, love, and attention. Now you're the beloved, and I have to stay quiet. I have to play along. Because of you.

I would punch you. But you make me angrier. You don't even let me vent it out on you. Because you disappear. Behind smokes and mirrors. Behind the rocks, darting like shadows. You terrorist. You formless nothingness. What can I be mad with? But only to deflect it back to myself. You wretched thing. Guilt is your weapon of choice, and you use it so well.

Where are you? O' my personal god? I beseech you to come back to me. To tell me this is all a lie, to bring me to my senses. Cover me within your mighty hand. Hide me now under your wing. I will be still and know you are god. Would you? Fill the hole in my heart.

Cruel world that knocks Don Quixote back to reality. What crime is it to play-act, and to believe? That my once dear savior would save me?

Who would have known
that my closest friend
would in a twist so typically epic
become my greatest foe

No! Worse than that
like a tragic reality
the curse of forgetting
does not leave us exempt

unbearable, the lightness of being
the triviality of our past
you have become nothing
a memory i'd like to stamp and glorify

but cannot, instead
you are another once favorite song
that lost appeal and flavor in an unnoticed moment
a pity i can only have mixed emotions about

What crucifixion was that
that brought us redemption
has sneaked in the payment demand
of sorrows and suffering

how many have died
because of your legendary sacrifice
who has not been condescendingly or violently judged
because of your moment of glory

Which perverse dream of man was it
for now by the thousands
they fantasize of death and suffering
of an end of the times

and ho! they call it
theology of hope
hope! they say,
redemption is near!

And when you come down from the heavens
angels praising your holy name
worlds shattering and lightning flashing
there will be trembling and there will be conceited vindication

but we will say
unbelievable!
he dares to be real,
what cursed buffoonery is this

after all the trouble you've left
as the grand inquisitor so knows
we are not attempting to be a cult of the inquisitor
but you angel of death

you brewed this madness
and tossed us in like green onions
our hearts will be hardened
they will say, "as it is written"

but there is no redemption
absurdity it would have to be
to shed all that we'd got
at your slightest convenience

death will be our punishment
what protest can we possibly have
but throw our hands up in exasperation and say
madness madness it is all madness

why give me two ears
if you will not speak
and give me two eyes
when you don't let me see

why give me a prophet
then make him a fool
or give me a choice
if you're so merciful

no, you troublemaker
reveal yourself! make it clear!
don't play games with me
when i've got an impossible handicap

save me if you can
leave me if you will
but more so, save me save me!
until then, I will not wait

enough of the silent treatment
the playing of hard to get
if you will not feed me, then
at least don't hinder me from doing it myself

except you haven't
again the guilt the blame i know it fully now
what crime is it to play-act, to believe
that my dear savior would save me?

2009-11-11T16:46:00.000-08:00

So it occurred to me tonight...

Say an atheist dies and while at a pub in heaven waiting for his ship to hell, he bumps into god.

Atheist: Dude, i'm so high now. You know, I thought you didn't really exist!

God: WTF? You read the bible didn't you? And I got all those apologists arguing for me? Where you been bro?

Atheist: Yeah. No enough evidence man. And I heard this one...the cosmological argument...it just wasn't fair making you the only unmoved mover. I know I know...by definition you are this and that...but it was just too cheap man.

God: Oh, heh , i'm not really an unmoved mover ya know? See, I was created from this little tree which I now keep in my backyard. That cosmological argument, screw that. You just gotta have faith yo? You know what i'm talking about, yeah?

Atheist: Wh-wait...what? Holy, you are telling me that one major philosophical argument for your existence is wrong? Now that's just bad taste...

God: Well, it's a pretty decent argument. But c'mon bro, I never said I was the first cause, don't go putting words in my mouth. And don't ya go quote-mining from the bible, ha!

[God to Bartender: "One more round please!"]

Atheist: Son of a...! Hmm, so then, are you some kind of, you know, omnipotent and omnipresent being?

God: That I am, yes sir! ha ha...i'm also blue in color as you see. Wonder why no apologetic of mine figured that out. But unmoved mover...me? Gawd...

Atheist: So wait a sec. The arguments for your existence can be wrong and yet you still exist?

[Hot little angel waitress comes with 2 beers]

God: You can't really prove I don't exist, can you? You couldn't even conclusively prove that tooth fairies don't exist! Cheers!

*Beer glasses clink*

Atheist: We never really bothered with that actually. But you're right. You're such an ass. You're freakin' unfalsifiable!

God: Ha! I know it's not really fair to make you use reason to figure me out. The arguments really...they have to assume things. Something they get it right like me being a Trinity, sometimes they don't, as you just saw for yourself. I mean, that pope, he had the crazies. He counted some old genealogy and figured the world was 6000 years old! Oh my lord...

Atheist: Oh yeah dude, those were radical times baby...

God: I mean, come on! You think I spent all that time guiding evolution, only to see some fellas say the fossils came from a massive flood? Why'd I even give you brains! You think I set the world starting with light from imaginary stars already headed to you, and you think I set the atoms already halfway through their half-lives? I'd got better things to do....

Atheist: Well, it's a good thing not all your followers believed that, just those old young earth creationists.

God: Thank Jesus! Well, as for you my friend, you should have just had some faith in me man.

[God lights a pipe]

Atheist: Oh don't get me started. Your bible was incoherent. Your fellas were trying to prevent evolution from being taught. Don't forget you even killed some dude for masturbating! And now you're telling me some of your best apologists got it all wrong?

God: Not all, just some. No big deal. You can't judge a book from its cover you know?

Atheist: So, just faith then? Even then, Christians don't fully agree on your nature. Speaking in tongues or not...whether Mary is divine...you know how those protestants broke off from the real church...who was I suppose to follow and have faith in?

God: Oh, so now it's my fault huh? You know what, all night you're just pinning the blame on me. You shoulda prayed or something. How'd you know I wouldn't give you some kind of vision? I do that you know? Sometimes I tell them to swim to Myanmar and talk to a political prisoner under house arrest. Sometimes I show them seven-headed dragons. But noooo, you just did your criticism from your little science-y mind of yours didn't ya?

Atheist: Still, you know...come on!

[Silence]

Atheist: Say, you think if the guys still on earth found out the cosmological argument wasn't really an argument for your existence, they'd lose a little bit of faith in you?

God: Hmm, possibly. But, they shouldn't.

Atheist: Right, because it isn't even-

God: That's right, it ain't even true.

Atheist: And until then, they'd use it to argue for your existence.

God: Means to an end, my friend. Means to an end.

Atheist: Anyway, where's that ship to hell? It's taking awfully long. I'm gonna whoop that devil's ass for all his bullshit. Bottoms up?

*Clink of glasses followed by noisy gulping of the remaining beer*

God: Ahh...what were you saying? Oh...hell? what hell? Hell no! Ha ha...you're not going to hell. It doesn't even exist! What you talking about? You high bro!

*Atheist spits beer over the table*

Atheist: Fuc-...no hell? Then what's that sign outside? Says "Ship to hell for unbelievers, bon voyage!"

God: Oh no no no. That's just a little joke between me and the Holy Spirit. Ha! I see it got you! I mean, seriously, I never said hell was real. If I ever did mention anything close to it, it was just metaphorical. Plus those damn scribes must have been messing up my words.

Atheist: Your preachers...they said...

God: Yeah what do they know? Come on, I'm god!

Atheist: Woa...sweet! So where am I going now? Am I gonna live in heaven forever and sing praise to your holy name?

God: HA! You're funny. But, yes. More or less. Yours is at 5:45pm Tuesday Thursdays and Saturdays. Don't go working on Sunday remember! And...try to be punctual. Hate it when we get interrupted.

Atheist: Hey, well, thanks for mercy man!

God: Hey hey, mercy's my middle name, ya know what i mean? Well, drinks on you, I'll get next time. Gonna hit the dance floor, *OWW* ! Later bro!

Atheist: Alright dude, later!

2009-11-02T06:56:00.001-08:00

why do i analyze religion?
because religion was the lenses through which i saw the world before, and i think it has been a waste of time. and though no one can be blamed but myself, or in fact everything can be blamed, it now interests me both as an interesting and powerful phenomenon, as something that is hyped up these days, and perhaps because it still holds a menacing place in me.

but why?

Tom might be a "believer" though in his heart he doesn't really reconcile the facts, because he doesn't want to. And why should he be obliged to? So he believes the world is millions of years old with dinosaurs in the past, while also believing that the world is 6000 years old. He believes God created Adam and Eve, though it's fine if it's literal or metaphorical, and also believes in the gist of evolution that man came from common ancestors of monkeys. He knows the bible has inconsistencies and wouldn't really bet much that the bible, metaphorically, dropped from the skyl. But he doesn't want to pursue this. Why, and why not? Maybe he doesn't want to complicate things? That's not a bad thing, not a good thing either. It is good or bad only when you consider it so.

So why do atheists try to break down what they consider a myth?

I think the good reasons are that religion has become dangerous is many respects. They determine the way you live. They can make you radicals who will willingly blow up the world, or let it happen, to bring about the end. They also tell you how to live and act as an intolerance in society, or a divider. A divider is not necessarily a bad thing. But an intolerance force, maybe. It tells you that you can't be gay, you shouldn't watch this movie, you are guilty, you must never lie, it tells you that lying in a certain context is alright, you should not hang out with certain people, you must not masturbate, they will burn in hell unless you make them believe what you do, and much more. For these reasons, religion should be brought into a light.

There will be collateral damage. There are those who have lived their life by a religion and destroying their religion destroys their way of life. Indeed religion is often the center of a culture and tearing down a society's way of life may not be what is intended. Besides, if there is no absolute truth, why is wrong with living according to a religion even if it is a myth? And tell me, what's wrong with living it without knowing it is a myth? Why are atheists taking the holy crusaders' path? The crusaders believed Christianity was right; do atheists believe rationality, knowledge, and freedom from myths are on some scale a movement towards "rightness"? Is self-awareness that important?

What truth?
Only our truth, as decided by us.
Are truths not allowed to conflict?

Apologetic Arguments Analyzed.

2009-10-31T11:39:00.000-07:00

Apologetic Arguments Analyzed.

I have noted that most debates revolved about philosophical apologetic arguments. I think this is a good thing because philosophy and logic is a common ground with premises agreed upon by almost all people. When one pulls logic out of it, if someone argues along the lines of logic and then makes the claim that god (or science) is outside of logic, then the common ground shatters. But imagine that the claim that god (or a field of science) can be logically shown upon agreed premises to be outside of logic. That would be a different story. In the case of god, I think the only way this has been attempted or could ever be is through a definition of god as simply being outside logic. Unfortunately, this is never going to work because no unbeliever will agree to the premise of the existence of a god and moreover one that is outside of logic. That would make the unbeliever a believer [of god] in the first place. In the case of science, logical derivations are not what concludes the validity of science. Science is worked upon from observations and hypotheses that work and the test of that working is the correct and accurate predictions of results. Theories that would most come to mind if one needs to think of a science that is close to illogical would be quantum theory and perhaps theories of the multiverse and such. While I don't know about the multiverse or whether it is even claimed a theory in the sense evolutionary and gravitational theory are held (rather than the school textbook's often definition of the word theory as something still needing to be proved before becoming a law), quantum mechanics are far as I know uses mathematics which is very much logical. The predictions of quantum theory have been tested and proven. I don't know if the theory of 10 dimensions share that status. And god? Can he also be proven without explicitly logic but through observations and predictions? Perhaps we would like to give a new set of rules by which we explain god rather than adopt the scientific method? Yes. We may. And there we have the apologetic arguments outside the realm of philosophy, though like science often still relying inherently on logic. And a new set of rules? Well, only if non-believers accept that new set of rules. It would be too much to ask for by saying, "We don't believe god should be proven through the narrowness of science. We propose a new way. We will pray for rain and if it rains, we have working evidence for god." Unreasonable? I think so, since we know that rain could have still happened even if you didn't pray or if you prayed to a bottle of beer. Miracles? Sure, only if they are indeed miracles beyond a doubt. To be fair, I would say this is a difficult basis for argument for god because, as mentioned in an earlier post "Does God Exist? : Turek vs Hitchens" in small blue font, science is always fallible. So what may seem a miracle will always be doubted by skeptics who believe we have an incomplete understanding of the universe.

Let's take a look at non-philosophical apologetic arguments as listed in...of course, Wikipedia. For now I'll assume what it writes is accurate until I have time to research more on these non-philosophical arguments in apologetic sites. I hope you will agree this is not a biased approach.

4 types are listed:

Historical and Legal Evidentialism
Defense of Miracles
Prophetic Fulfillment
Biblical Apologetics

Now, we can shelf prophetic fulfillment first because it relies on the accuracy of the events in the bible. This means accuracy of the bible because in overwhelming cases, the bible is the only source of the events. Disagree? Then we'll have to first discuss biblical apologetics and historical and legal evidentialism. That is why I shelf prophetic fulfillment temporarily. It must be preceded with the two other apologetic arguments mentioned above.

Defense of Miracles argues that miracles are possible. I don't know the arguments yet, but it would likely be a direct clashing against science. Can't say much on this now.

Biblical apologetics and historical and legal evidentialism are arguing the truth of the bible. Ah! This is the heart of the problem. This is the VERY heart of the problem. I once had 2 good friends who recommended reading Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ". That night, I found 5 connecting videos on it. My issue with it was this. Strobel spends the early section proving the validity and truth of the bible. The remaining 80% are arguments based on that validity. But, the proving was really not adequate proof. In other words, the biblical apologetics and historical and legal evidentialism evidence was not convincing and advancing any arguments based on them was impossible. This exposes the very necessity of the truth of the bible in apologetics. If one believes the bible, then really, there is NO argument. The bible says Jesus is our Saviour. Then He is. The bible talks about the end times. Then there will be such end times. Again, as I mention in an earlier post "Does God Exist? : Turek vs Hitchens" under point (1), apologetics should remember that their opponents do not believe in the bible the way believers do. The contents of the bible should not be used as a source of evidence in arguments until their opponents believe in the bible, after which I think there's really no battle anyway.

So why then do people not believe the bible? It doesn't take heresy or the selling of one's soul to find the bible difficult to hold as undisputable truth. Any theology, religion, or bible school student should know the problems with the bible.
The inconsistencies.
Who wrote the bible? Latin version, Greek version, rushed version, apocrypha.
Were there personal agendas? Status of women. Contempt for jews.
Were there accidents or translation issue. Was it a virgin or a young woman?
Why is there no historical evidence that Jews were in Eygpt.
Who wrote about Moses? He himself writing about his death?
What did the women see when they entered Jesus' tomb? What did they do after?
Why is Jesus traced through Joseph who isn't even the biological father?
Many more.
Recently, Bart Ehrman has become a popular source for people to read up on this and having read one of his books, "Misquoting Jesus", I highly recommend his works. They are easy to understand and he merely states facts that agreed upon by all scholars. It is Bible 101. Worried that Ehrman is lying and distorting facts? Well, it's always good to be skeptical and do research rather than trust one source. My input to this is that I took an Introduction to the Bible course in a Christian college in the states that is directly tied to the "Church of God" denomination, although technically they are non-denominational. I was new to all this back then and I struggled to make sense of the bible. I became an apologetic, I might say a very good one, without even reading apologetic material. I created my arguments, I looked at them as achievements, I made countless assumptions, I lost my faith without knowing it while thinking I was striving for the truth, I was mother teresa feeling no presence of god and believing it was a test, then I suddenly was no longer orthodox, to many I was speaking heresy, and then like Kafka's character in The Trial, I could choose to fight but never win, to concede, or to put the trial on infinite hold. Subconsciously, I put it on infinite hold and just as Kafka writes, there will be moments when you are forced again to make the decision. One day, I stopped putting it on hold. What this Intro to the Bible class taught me, the beginning of truth, is very simple and no different from what Ehrman writes about. Don't take my word for it. Find out more about biblical textual criticism.

After all...

Education is not about filling the bucket. It's about lighting the fire.
Fire's burning my bucket and giving me new vision.

So there we go. The non-philosophical apologetic arguments.

The philosophical arguments are more fun, though they are actually arguments for the existence of God, a generic one, rather than a specific one.

Cosmological argument.
First cause...unmoved mover...etc. Once again, I discussed this in some length in "Does God Exist? : Turek vs Hitchens" under point (2MORE).

Teleological argument.
The fine-tuning argument. This is really an appeal to your imagination or lack thereof.

Say I grab 100 stack of cards and I shuffle them. The resulting order of the 5200 cards is very unlikely to occur considering the millions of other possible ordering. But, it WAS random. Now that the cards are in that order, the probability of it being that way is of course 1. I didn't actually order them in any way on purpose.

Say we imagine that there are billions of worlds (within a single universe). Billions of galaxies and freaking a lot of stars and such. Is it hard to imagine that somewhere the conditions are fine tuned for life? Even this can be misleading. It only needed to be fine-tuned for the way we developed, for amino acids to form and for us as humans to survive. But let's not forget that we are also fine-tuned for the world. we may be how we are because the world where the building blocks of our life started adapted for this world. And we don't know if other types of life (non-carbon based...etc) are impossible. Where did life start from? Well, this isn't really the teleological argument, but it might interest you to research the Miller-Urey experiment and similar topics. The very fact that we exist, that the probability of our existence is now set to 1 simply because we DO exist, is why the universe is observed to be fine tuned for our existence. I believe this is the gist of the anthropic principle.

Say we stumble across a watch in the gobi desert. What on earth...this could not have just happened? This must have been designed! Hence the argument for intelligent design. What about our anthropic principle? Since the watch does exist, it...could have come by chance out of unlikely odds right? Ugh...this doesn't sound convincing even though it's not impossible. But, we have a better explanation. It was designed! Fortunately for us, we now understand natural selection and evolution. A watch is now a bad analogy because, well, it WAS designed - we know that. The probability of it having come together by chance is irrelevant because we know it wasn't come together by chance. Let's look at a human being. Surely very complex. Designed? Understanding evolution, we now don't have to think so. Millions of years could have evolved us to be this complex being. It also better explains why sometimes we're born with 6 fingers, no skin, 3 boobs, stuck together, and always with vestiges like tailbones and appendixes. Irreducible complexity? That would pose a problem. I believe biologists, like Darwin, think that irreducible complexity would indeed challenge evolution severely. But there just hasn't been any thing of that nature yet. The eye, immune system, and bacteria flagellum have been shown to not be of irreducible complexity. The bombardier beetle too.

Ontological argument.
The concept of god means that god exist. Very much like [one of] Socrates' argument for the soul.

Imagine that you are walking around Paris. Now, you're seeing yourself from 3rd person point of view right? Hmm...what is this..."consciousness" that is watching "me" move about Paris?
Imagine that you're asleep, and your soul or some inner essence of you gets up and looks at your body. Wait, now what's watching this soul? Hmm...more thoughts.
Imagine instead, that you get up from your bed. You stand up and look at your bed, and you see yourself, sleeping. You look down and see nothing, you ain't got no hands or legs. You walk/move to the corridors and into the bathroom. You stand in front of your sink and look into the mirror. What do you see? Nothing. But you're looking.

Here, we have the concept for a soul. We also have the concept of consciousness although whether consciousness can be independent of the soul (or the body) is another question. Now, since we have a concept of the soul, souls must exist. Otherwise, we can't imagine it. Aristotle defines nothing as "that which rocks dream of". But we can picture our soul can't we?

Well, I can have a concept of a unicorn. Do unicorns exist? I think not.
Hey, wait a second...you're being tricky here aren't you. The reason why you have a concept of a unicorn is because you saw a picture of a unicorn, so it DOES exist to some extent, as a picture!
Okay...but wait, I've never seen a unicorn animated to drink Guinness stout, but I can imagine it.
Ho ho!! wait there! More treachery! You have a concept of drinking stout and a concept of a unicorn. You're just mixing them. It's like saying you've never heard the sentence "I eat gravity" but you can utter it, meaning the sentence can exist, because you've got the nouns, verbs, and linguistic tools to form the sentence.
Wait, i'm confused. are we running in circles? You see, I said I have a concept of unicorns but that unicorns don't exist. Later, you said it does but what you meant was my previous sighting of unicorn pictures. It still doesn't mean that real unicorns exist!

Exactly.

Likewise, souls don't have to exist. Take the contrapositive: Atlas, the man carrying the world, doesn't exist. Therefore, you can't have a concept of him. Certainly not true (unless we go into metaphysics and say oh that's not REALLY a concept...etc but i'm not skilled in excessive metaphysics).
Applying this from souls to god, we don't have an argument for the existence of god. No, not at all.

Moral argument.
If there are morals, they must be derived from an absolute. Like Plato's perfect forms.

Why must they be derived from an absolute? Even if so, why God? I disagree with the premises of the argument.

When we draw a circle, it's not really a circle. It's kind of imperfect. It's a reflection of a true form. A true circle. Imagine you're watching a screen, and there is a fire behind some rocks. And all you can see are the shadows, the representations of the rocks on the screen. But that is not the screen itself. That's more or less Plato's discussion of perfect abstract forms.

While the abstract idea can exist, the form need not. And applying this to a slippery thing like "moral" makes it much less simple. Yet, this argument is in my opinion a very interesting one because even if you don't believe in a god or an absolute, this question will prick you unceasingly: on what basis is morality? is all permissible? (this is one of the great explorations of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov) Why should I not just go out and steal and kill? In fact, I notice I still DON'T do it. Why? Is there some absolute morality still in me? Some remaining god?

When people quote Dostoevsky to illustrate how this is a great problem with taking God out of the equation, remember that Dostoevsky was a believer. I won't spoil the novel by talking about it here on this topic, but keep in mind that Dostoevsky was an author (a very good one) but not an absolute divine authority on existentialism, nihilism, morality, meaning...etc. Be cautious.

Some convincing notions against a necessity for God for morality is what everyone now calls the zeitgeist. The "spirit of the age". We are not moral because of religion. Christianity was used to understand the acceptability of slavery. Sexism can be justified in the bible. Martin Luther King Jr. may have be a Christian, but by no means can we say that it was nothing but the book that inspired his struggle. The moral environment of our time is pushing our standards of morality, not the holy books. Search up videos or works of Dawkins discussing this.

Another thing is that morality increased survivability. In fact, religion seems to have been important for us to become what we are today. The principle of cooperation was worked out by showing that when individuals worked together, they tended to succeed as a group over individuals who worked for themselves. Of course cooperation came at prices to the individual. But lest we think that concern purely for the self is the natural state of affairs outside of morality, we should note that in biology many creatures work for the good of the group and it is argued that this the for the survival of not only their phenotype but their extended phenotype.

Morality is not that elusive.

Transcendental argument.
Our ability to think and reason require a god.

Presuppositional argument.
Basic beliefs in theists and non-theist require a god as a pre-condition.

Alvin Plantina's argument that belief in God is properly basic.

Pascal's wager.
If even an argument at all. But this is often used almost as a last line of defense. As an argument for a specific god, it fails because wagering on Jesus is not wagering on Allah (presumably you can't wager on too many especially since we're living in monotheistic times). You're also not wagering on Buddha, the Dalai Lama even, or obsolete gods like Zeus, or mother earth, although one could argue that you don't really suffer a penalty for not believing in Zeus or Baal (well, maybe you won't be fertile or have rain, but you don't go to Hell). And even if we bend it such that the wagering of your soul (if any) on God X has 99% chance of a good post-death result, there is no evidence for God X. We're still talking pony unicorns and space meatballs.

Does God Exist? : Turek vs Hitchens

2009-10-29T13:37:00.000-07:00

Another great debate. The apologetic side is strong and articulate. One problem is Hitchens seems to fall into self-complacency and arrogance once the informal section of the debate starts. he avoids the question of the source of morality...or what might be called "why morality is moral"...which Turek claims derives its properties from God. There are many arguments for morality without religion as a necessary reference. Although none of them are fully comprehensive as yet, I think Hitchens should have not let it appear as if there is a massive black hole in non-religious explanations for morality.

Start the video from the 5:00 point of the first of the 15 videos for the debate.

If you are new to religion vs atheism sort of debates, I think a few things to think about, come to your conclusions and opinions on, and keep in consideration as you enjoy the video are:
(the video is below all this)

1) Remember that atheists do not believe in the inerrant bible, nor that it is the albeit man-handled word of God. Well, they don't even believe in god in the first place. Imagine a theist arguing, as Turek does, that
"Yes religious people make up a lot of the evil people in the world now. But that's exactly what the bible says. The Pharisees and..."
Sounds like a good comeback. But what are we really trying to achieve here? Whether the bible says that or not, and whether it was a true historical record of what a holy man said - what does this do? It does not mean that the bible is true or that god exists, or that christianity is the true religion. The actual consequence is nothing. I liken it to what LSAT takers call a shell-game.
Imagine a perhaps more likely and damning argument you might hear:
"The bible says that people will turn away and they think they are wise, but are fools. They rely on their own wisdom but it is he wisdom of man which is bound to fail against the wisdom of god..."
So the atheists were anticipated. Haha! We knew you were coming, atheists. We knew you would be like this. And our bible predicts it just as you are. Stop your futile attempts!
But really, nothing is proved. If the bible was the inspired word of god as it stands, then there you have an argument. But remember, crucially, that the atheist does not believe that in the first place. This argument against them is as much as saying that people in the future will turn away from technology because of irrational fears that technology will turn them into cheese. If 200 years from now, people really turn away from technology, and even if they really do so because of the fear of turning to cheese, it does NOT prove that the fear that technology will turn them into cheese is indeed irrational. substitute "turn them into cheese" to "lead to the demise of their civilization" and the argument is exactly the same - an empty one.

2) The Aquinas "proof" and its many modernized versions. Everything needs a cause and there must have been a first cause. The unmoved mover as Aristotle says. The big bang needed something to bring it about. Can't be natural because "natural" doesn't exist until the big bang brings forth the laws of physics and all these natural science properties of the universe. So, it has to be supernatural.
That first cause...
That unmoved mover...
That supernatural thing...
...is GOD

The problem is this. Are those arguments leading to a compatible proof of God as already defined? Or, are these statements defining "God"?
It is the latter, and because of that, it is circular logic. It is assuming what it sets out to prove. It is saying:
"I'm so full. To be full I must have eaten something. Let's call that something food. So we proved that I ate food".
"Food" was defined and then proved. Meaningless.

Apply that analogy to the first of the 2 questions: is the argument leading to a compatible proof of God as already defined? No. It does not. It is equivocating on the semantics of the word "God"; or it is not compatible.
Equivocating? Yes. It is like the food analogy. We define the something that I ate as food. Then we say we proved I ate food, but this second one is unmentioned but defined as something like "organic material that is edible and digestible by the human". It is not the same definition as "the something that I ate" which could have been a toilet roll.

So they are not compatible in my analogy. But the argument was about God, not food. Are they incompatible? As far as the claims go, maybe not incompatible so I shouldn't say that, but there is no proof that the two instances of the word "God" (or food) refer to the same thing. The first was
God: The first cause. Unmoved mover. That supernatural force.
The second would be something like:
God: The Judeo-Christian God that listens to my prayers, that has some kind of Trinity relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Is Jesus and is the god of Moses and Abraham. Died on the Cross and saved me from my sins.
or it could have been "Allah", or "the flying spaghetti monster"...etc

Where is the connection between God 1 and God 2 ?
That is something the argument fails to follow up on, and no connection seems to be made by modern times apologetics who use this argument.

2[more]) But let's roll back a little and also ask the question: Why should the first cause/unmoved mover/supernatural thing be God? Say someone proposes "an inert onion" to be the first cause. Why not? Because we don't think an inert onion can be a cause-er or move-er. Say we propose it was a kind of energy, a wind that we call "the great wind". Why not? Because we immediately think a wind needs a medium to exist in, is in fact an abstract manifestation of the properties of the medium itself, and also should have needed a cause of its own. Who blew the wind from an initially non-moving position?

This reveals more problems being the "first cause" argument for God. A medium? Well, wouldn't God too need a medium? No it will be argued. God is outside of all these logic and ways we know the universe. He is beyond our understanding. But a wind...it needs mediums. It's the way we know winds. It is a manifestation of differences in pressure in the medium. Well well...to this I say, we have not disproved "the great wind" (nor proved it). We merely have a unfitting analogy between God and wind. We generously attributed the "unknowable" properties to god when we can't explain things, but not to wind. We give the term "god" the benefit of the doubt....whenever there is any doubt. That is why the analogy doesn't work. God needs no movement from an initial position. Wind does. Well, Turek makes this a little confusing in the video by talking about a "choice" that god had to make at first to become a living thing or to come into being. So, chicken or egg? choice or god first? confusing, but unnecessarily so. The problem is the question. Unlike the chicken and egg, we don't know that a choice was made even if we assume that we somehow know that god does. It is the benefit of the doubt given into the definition of the word "god" as used by proponents of god being the first cause that makes sense of why the first cause could not have by itself been the inert onion, the great wind, or more practically...the big bang itself.

BUT, hold on one second again! Why did there have to be an initially non-moving position in the case of wind? If Turek is right about the choice made by god to come into being, he would have to assume that god was first (we furthermore would need to assume time) a sort of non-being. Why these assumptions? The infinite regression arguments of cause and moving led to the "conclusion" that there was a first point of some sort. But this is not tight. As Aquinas argues that something is caused by something, and this latter something itself was caused by something, so on and so forth, so there must have been a first cause. Well, what's he's done is extrapolate through the pattern of one cause itself needing a cause and gone backwards infinitely. Note: the extrapolation is not absolutely logical because we may observe only white swans for as long as we had known swans and yet it is possible (as it did) to find a black swan. However, in reality we accept such extrapolation because often it has practical results. A consequence of this is that science is almost always fallible. Maybe in the future there will be an object with mass but that is immune to the effects of gravity. Maybe natural selection, the very mechanism behind evolutionary theory, will be conclusively disproved. Maybe the next time I sing the vibrations will spark chemical fusion of sound waves and the result teleports itself both back in time and into the future, then back behind me as 3 iodine molecules which alone form together and create a nuclear explosion that wipes out everything on the planet except any strand of hair that has the length of a pi to the power of any prime number according to the 1 millimeter units. Science doesn't actually claim 100% proof (it is said only mathematics can do that), but its models are often accurate for its time and are improving. A man's vision of god, or my studied opinion of an interviewee's personality, surely cannot claim the 100% guarantee that god, the vision, my opinion..etc is true, unless the claim turns out to be correct. In other words, gravitational theory as we know it can be 100% correct if it is indeed correct. Circular? Exactly. But, Aquinas ends his regression unfairly. He only extrapolated until he got sick of extrapolating, biased perhaps to think that there must be a linear pattern with a start rather than a form of circular or abstract infinite regression with no start point. The reason why the First Cause needs no cause of its own is different from why the second cause needed a first cause for apparently no real good reason at all. Say "God" is the First Cause. We have no good reason to say that "God" needed no cause of its own. It's all problems in the definitions. So unlike the previous paragraph, i'm not arguing that the big bang is just as good a First Cause as god. Here, i'm arguing that they are just both as bad! Not because there is a problem with god or the big bang, but because there is a flaw in the presupposition that there must be a First Cause. There is a flaw right away in the infinite regression argument for a finite beginning, with Aquina's proof, Aristotle's argument, and the many variants of it.

and...back to the video:

The End of Faith, Sam Harris

2009-10-23T14:59:00.000-07:00

the first chapter was very promising. but it seems like the level of engagement was not going to last throughout the book.

Sam harris talks about how religion is crazy and how things are getting dangerous with modern technology. his main problem is with islam which he identifies as a kind of death-cult. why? because of the bountiful phrases in the koran which he cites that talk about killing non-believers and taking over the world. islam as peaceful? no, he says. there is little in it toward peace but phrases or verses can always be found (just like in the bible) to justify a certain point of view. Harris claims that Islam is definitely much more inclined toward war if one follows the koran. assumedly, more verses in one direction would mean that the religion is more inclined in that direction. he disagrees with liberals that claim the problem in the middle east is not religious but political and the likes. this is one of his original points in the book as he argues against chomsky and like-minded views. this may be a little premature. Harris believes that the literal interpretation of the koran (and he shows some relevant verses that can hardly be taken metaphorically) calls for deeds like conversion of the world and the victory of islam over non-believers, killing non-believers, and because of this literal interpretation, a strong muslim state or world will be still be violent. unfortunately, what he doesn't realize is that the interpretation of these "holy books" are often subjective according to the environment. If the middle east was the great super-power of the world, religion may not need to be leaned upon for identity or security, or as an reaction toward the outside. As it is, nationalism and religion often arises as a response to threats from outside or are used (and possibly with the users honestly believing in it as an ends and not a means) to resist these outside forces. Saudi arabia is rich and powerful and they are secular.

Harris' worries are not to be taken lightly however. George bush had prayer meetings in his white house and had many advisers who based their worldview on christianity. belief, as harris takes an entire chapter to illustrate, perhaps excessively, affects the decisions we make. these major monotheistic religions have a strong focus on the "end times" and especially in christianity, the end is enthusiastically looked forward to. A war in the middle east is seen by the fundamentalists as bringing the return of Christ and the end of the world closer - a good thing to them. America did not fall to a fundamentalist theocracy under Christianity, at least not completely and not yet. However, if a strong country like Saudi Arabia develop nuclear weapons while secular, and then fall into the government of a fanatical Islamic group that genuinely believe in doing the will of Allah by killing unbelievers and such, then a real danger arises. People of the major monotheistic religions think that everything is working according to the way their religion predicts the end and they make sense of everything in that light. but take a step away from religion and one sees a world bringing itself to destruction, of civilization being undone with no afterlife as a consolation.

Is Islam basically the problem? I think we should not try to answer the question in hypothetical worlds. The current situation is deadly and what is the problem. Surely not religion alone. Religion may have been the tool used and it may be a tool that never stops, leading to the destruction of the world. But Harris attempts to tackle the international situation too trivially. Definitely there are other causes. Definitely nonetheless, should religion be removed from society because it is such a deadly tool when used in this manner. Now, of courses believers will resist the destruction of their truth. But non-believers don't see any truth and any heresy or inherent satanic crime in destroying the religion. It is a danger to be gotten rid of. Of course there is the "utility" argument of religion - religion is useful, it gives people hope, lets society get along, has probably played positive roles in the advancement of civilization...etc. But utility is not truth and religion claims truth, not utility. Not just truth, but absolute truth. Religion has become dangerous and outlived its usefulness, or it should and a better substitute, if necessary, should be found and used.

Yes, religion demands absolute truth. Religion is not tolerant, not by nature. It is very much intolerant. The seeming tolerance comes from religious moderates which Harris calls a very immoral position. He says moderates are why religion is not being razed down in society. Moderates make concessions and really cannot be said to be "true believers". True believers unfortunately are the dangerous manifestations of religion and without moderates, religion would be seen in its full glory and deadly claws, and civilization would fight for its survival and tear it apart. Moderates interpret their religion to fit the zeitgeist, which is the argument for morality rather than religion, and distort the dangers of religion. Ok, not all religions are dangerous. Harris talks about Janism. But the discussion is largely limited to the 3 major monotheistic religions of our time.

The overall message is that religion is dangerous madness. I would edit that to say the current manifestations of major and influential religions is madness and has potential for more danger. It must be destroyed. Harris writes pessimistically about the future of our existence without immediate attention to this, and I do not think he is being overly dramatic. The truth is as he writes it. Fanatics with weapons of mass destruction for the concoction of self-destruction. As Hitchens touched upon, religion is at the core of many conflicts. Shia and Sunni? News forgot to talk about the Catholics. Hinduism and Islam in Asia. As long as respective conflicting religious views are adhered to, conflicts are bound to exist and it only takes a moment and a few decisions of a few men to herald the demise of hopefully only a portion of our global civilization. Harris also believes in science opening new doors in the near future with regards to how we think and what constitutes morality. This is important and is also discussed by Dennett.

While dawkins is concerned with education and religion's impediment of it, and hitchens is restless blazing brit blasting away at the evil deeds of religions, harris is the most concerned about the future. The truth is simple. Wake up. See the world outside eyes of religion. Where are we headed? The end of the world? This is NOT a good thing. Remember Pascal's wager? Well, what is religion is wrong? What if there IS NO afterlife? What if this is all we have got? And we are going to blast ourselves out of qualification into the Drake equation. Will the only message an alien civilization pick up from our solar system be an enormous smoldering collapse of a planet, its civilization and its millions of variants of life?

"god is not Great", Christopher Hitchens

2009-10-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

The book rants about the evils of religion. In cases where the topic is something I have read about or know somewhat a bit of from elsewhere, I agree with him.

In The "Case" Against Secularism, he discusses the religion supporters', what he calls "last ditch" (page reference needed here), arguments against secularism. My readings have been overlapped with other material such as the works of Dawkins and interpret it to refer to the extremely common case where people say secularism or atheism has brought about great evils. I do not think it is always necessary to extend this to the, unfortunately thanks to dawkin, easily destructible argument that Hitler and Stalin were atheists who brought about the worst atrocities in the 20th century. Nonetheless, these are often the claims. As Dawkins would explain, Hitler was not a atheist. He was a Roman Catholic. Stalin on the other hand is clearly an atheist. However, before we get excited, Dawkins makes it clear that it does not even matter whether they were religious or were atheists. Their motivations were not religious or atheist-ic. Hitchens touches on this but in fact claims that the Catholic church was very much an ally of Nazism. From pages 235 to 252, he discusses how religion played a dirty role with fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.

But let's not forget the East, to where many Westerners appear to be drawn to in search of spirituality, possibly "those who become bored by conventional 'Bible' religions". In There is no "Eastern" Solution, Hitchens puts Buddhism at fault (though surely not the sole fault, one must always be careful to say lest everything gets simplified) for violent manifestations of the Japanese during the period of WWII. He also criticizes the Dalai Lama (something that makes me smile) and in brief shows that there is nothing any better in Eastern religions. An interesting albeit irrelevant-to-my-discussion anecdote he mentions and I paraphrase goes:

"Make me one with everything." requests the Buddhist humbly to the hot-dog vendor.
The Buddhist hands a 20-dollar bill to the vendor and, in return for his slathered bun, waits a long time for his change. Finally asking for it, he is informed that "change comes only from within."

He puts down the Koran as nothing but badly sewn together myths from the Jews and the Christians. He slams them as having draconian laws out of their insecurity and hardly gives them a breather as he criticizes them to absurdity for their claims to be "final" and for the ridiculous story of Mohammad's night flight.

Of course, Christianity can never be left out in a discussion of this nature especially in America. Many books go into details of the inconsistencies and absurdity of the bible. Hitchens focuses more on the evil stories within them, largely with the stories of mass murdering and forced child sacrifice (almost).

But proofs are not what this book is essentially about. It is a collection of cases which Hitchens argues to be evil caused by religion. Rightly so, since his book is subtitled How religion poisons everything. I feel like I hardly remember anything from this book unfortunately. I need to start taking more notes and talking to myself more when I read more non-fiction.

Does God Exist: Wolpe vs Harris

2009-10-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

Great debate to watch from 1 to 11.

Wolpe is extremely sharp and unlike other videos of debates or interviews between the religious and the atheist camps, especially those with dawkins, this exchange has a balanced feel that will be a good ride for viewers. A religious person inclining on the side of Wolpe will not be turned off, nor an atheist on the side of Harris too comfortable. To make things better, Wolpe is a Jew, not a Christian or Muslim (these 2 religions being the most anti-atheist, if that word makes sense without being a double negative, within the online community), and Harris is not the hardened to "science solves everything" kind of guy. If he is, he doesn't come across that way with his (correct me if i'm mistaken) openness to spirituality. I believe he endorses "rationality" rather than pure objective and quantifiable "science".

What this means is that a dogmatic scientist and a faith-filled christian isn't tied down to the words of either speaker. We are excused to hide and watch the debate from a purely observing position.

In a way, Harris is perfect for the debate against Wolpe, in terms of entertainment. Among the "four horsemen", Dawkins is the scientist, Hitchens the hands-on journalist in international relations and political situations, Dennett the one I know nothing about because of his boring beard, and Harris must be the philosopher. He is the best candidate to play on common ground with religious arguments that more often than not fall within the realm of philosophy and outside of everything else. Had this been a creationism vs evolution debate, Dawkins would be your man.

About BOOKS

2009-10-22T20:54:00.000-07:00

misquoting jesus*
god delusion*
god is not great*
end of faith - sam harris*

blind watchmaker - richard dawkins
selfish gene - richard dawkins
missionary position: mother teresa - christopher hitchens
breaking the spell - daniel dennett
cosmos - carl sagan

jesus interrupted - bart ehrman

history of god - karen armstrong
evolution of god(?)

why faith matters - david wolpe view from religious camp (utilitarian argument?)

reason driven life humanism?
the satanic verses fiction discussing the claimed "satanic verses" of the Koran

crime and punishment(?) dostoevsky
portrait of a young man(?) joyce
to the lighthouse(?) woolf
1984 - orwell
lord of the flies - golding
east of eden - steinbeck

2009-10-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

jehovah
YHWH
Yahweh

Virgin births...and the quantum Y chromosome.

2009-10-19T10:28:00.000-07:00

Virgin Births
are NOT miracles,
or are at least common ones.

Jesus to Mary (though Jesus is traced through Joseph's family)
Perseus to Danae through Jupiter
Buddha
Huitzilopochtli to Catlicus
Attis to Nana
Genghis Khan
Krishna to Devaka
Horus to Iris
Mercury to Maia
Romulus to Rhea Sylvia

With virgin births, we don't need men anymore, or do we? Ironically, only males are conceived (thus far) through virgin births. Breakthroughs in science have shown that they occur via the elusive quantum Y chromosome which combines with the virgin egg X chromosomes.

The quantum Y chromosome has not been found to reappear for a long time and according to basic statistics, the likelihood of it doing its work is increasing with every day that it doesn't. Yet, the scientific community claim that the quantum Y chromosome might be quantum to the extent that it does not follow statistics and probability. Others have claimed that the reason behind the apparent poverty of the Y chromosome is the knowledge and technology of abortions. It is argued that a virgin birth may be embarrassing for women and they many abortions may have followed silently.

Many supporters of this view blame this on the increasing percentage of Asians in the world population and their mentality for favoring male children over female ones. Feminist outrages have so far been sporadic. Less racist feminists protest against the sexist nature of the quantum Y chromosome. Scientists have dismissed that as a waste of time as the Y chromosome is by nature sexist. Itnow appears that genes may be selfish and sexist. Still others argue that the theory is sexist as it does not take into account a quantum X chromosome. The French scientist Laplace, who was crucial in the development of this theory, has said, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse", which translates to "I had no need of that hypothesis." Less arrogantly, a team of graduate students in California have claimed to have proof that the X chromosome would be too large to operate under the mechanism of quantum mechanics.

Cdesign proponentists have argued this to be further evidence for design in the universe. "It is not by chance that virgin births only give rise to male offspring. A man is necessary for normal fertilization to give rise to female offspring." Yet some young earth creationists argue against this saying that the quantum Y chromosome is still a controversial theory within science that lacks evidence. They insist that virgin births are divine. Billy Redneck of Alabama explains, "when you see a pregnant woman, you know that she got in the haystack with a man. For it to happen just by chance is liberal donkeys." Asked how his statement can explain the virgin birth of Jesus, he continues, "that's divine as written in the Holy Bible."

Pro-choice opinions increased dramatically on the internet but has reached a state of confusion, by expanding the term often unintentionally but mistakenly, to include the choice of getting pregnant. Various religious groups have different takes on the matter, the most vocal of which is from a prominent religious institution which takes the fatalistic stance and opposes human intervention against the will of god.

Conservative groups in the United States held protests last Monday outside various institutions of higher education demanding that further research into what they call "the sexual nature of God" be stopped immediately. Televangelist Robert Patterson announced on Wednesday, "...to the good citizens of the scientific community: if you have a disaster in your sex life, don't turn to God. You just outraged his modesty." Most scientists are not worried about this as they claim that viagra and artificial insemination usually solves the problem. One recent ad by pharmaceutical company Sex On Drugs in Britain has the theme "No talk, just action". It shows 2 men and one smoking hot woman in a little crisis. One man goes to the corner and starts praying and engaging in glossolalia. The other pops a little blue pill and gets it on with the lady. At the end of the commercial, the lady gives a satisfied smile at the camera and says seductively, "it's not your fault you're in a bit of a jam. Pay the toll and get on the highway to heaven."

The quantum Y chromosome discovery has been hailed as a momentous event in science because it is the first time an organic structure, whether this constitutes life is debatable, is found to be able to operate within quantum mechanics. This opens the possibility to future quantum entanglement of other organic cells and eventually full living complex organisms such as human beings. This would mean teleportation. Slightly more controversially, this has allowed the field of science and religion to meet although in dangerously unpredictable waters.

great quotes from Christopher Hitchens' book

2009-10-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

"In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than any man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides."
-Heinrich Heine

One thing I always remember is what Milan Kundera once wrote, that we uses quotes because we can't express these feelings ourselves. Maybe we're unable, not confident enough, or just lazy to say it in our own words...creatively.

Whatever the case, I don't think it is necessary for me to embrace this need to invent a new way of saying what's already been said just because i'm insecure as a quote copy and paste-r. What's nice about the quote is not simply the skeletal point of the quote. We probably already know that old methods are for old times and new times with new and more effective ways should be taken when they come without romanticizing with the obsolete ways and striving to retain them. What's great about the quote is the analogy and literary "style", also likely the fact that it is a quote, and moreover, a quoted quote.

More blatant taking of quotes. Too many quotes. I'm taking them all almost...not even compiling a select group. Why minimal-ize? This is not some high school teaching of academic writing which prescribes the criteria of 3 quotes, a bibliography, intro, middle, conclusion, structure, balanced arguments for and against, paraphrasing...

let's digress

check out 3:10.
Also, the irishman-englishman thing is hilariously...well...i'll let you choose your adjective...

You might be thinking...what the hell is so funny anyway...this author doesn't even argue that he HAS citations or evidence. This is not good journalism. This is not good science and if you are on the side of Hitchens, then you can't argue that intelligent design has no evidence! This is just plain bad and untrustworthy nonsense!

That's a good thought. If it sparks your interest, i'm glad.

"I am a man of one book."
-Thomas Aquinas

and that's why you are your followers are stuck with the blind man crossing a freeway when an overhead bridge has been built.

"Reason is the Devil's harlot, who can do nought but slander and harm whatever God says and does"
-Martin Luther
(Not Martin Luther King Jr.)

So the reason why i'm not dying in infancy to diseases is because of the devil's works in science and medicine. The reason i'm not condemned to be practically blind since the age of 13 is because the devil craftily introduced the reasoning leading to concepts of changing the direction of light through satanic glasses to bring my image into focus. Yes, the fallen angel had worked against God's divine punishment which I had brought upon myself for maybe watching too much TV or reading under dim lighting.

fair enough, i'm picking on old scholars who couldn't have known better.

"I had no need of that hypothesis."
Laplace to Napoleon on why Laplace's theory of the solar system had no mention of the Creator

finally, let's compare and contrast the quotation above from Heine (in orange) with this:

"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me."
1 Corinthians 13:11

2009-10-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

edit: 100 percent mid-term!!

2009-10-13T11:51:00.000-07:00

to the lighthouse - virginia woolf

Kirby!

2009-10-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

2009-10-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

end of faith/letter to a christian nation - sam harris
blind watchmaker - dawkins
the missionary position - christopher hitchens

2009-10-11T21:05:00.001-07:00

goodbye lenin

2009-10-11T12:13:00.001-07:00

cdesign proponentist

of pandas and people

2009-10-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

Misquoting Jesus.

Review of book.

New Testament approximated to be written in 70 AD, with the main source being Mark. Matthew and Luke were written with Mark and possibly some other source (outside of book, called Q). Including Q, this is called the two source hypothesis. Nonetheless, it is pretty much accepted that they were all written not during Jesus' time which we can assume to be around 0-40AD.

Problems with the new testaments. (need to check first)
Genealogy inconsistencies. Also, Matthew tries to fit the generations into multiples of 14 marked by an important figures or events (Abraham, David, exile, Christ). Speculation is that 7 was treated as a holy number and double of that was perhaps doubly-holy, 14.
Mark does not write as if Jesus was God.
What happened after death? Was the tomb empty? Different versions.
Where was Jesus born?
Historical records do not show a empire wide census but a localized one. It is claimed to be absurd for Joseph to be required to return to his ancestral home in Bethlehem which is supposed to be his home many centuries ago. Furthermore, the census did not occur during Herod's life.

Transcription issues.

Scribes may have ulterior motives.
Theological - Is there a Trinity?
Social - Gender roles. Trying to play down women.
Accidental - see ehrman's book for details.

Oh no....getting owned in class

2009-09-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

Why did RN560 become RN/IR560, and why is it more like IR560 with some RN !?
I forget...am I the only one in there who is not an International Relations major/minor?
If not, then am I the only one who isn't either an IR or Religion major/minor?

3 hour discussion is great.
The professor is excellent. Reminds me of Prof. Kirkpatrick.
Discussion discussion...no right no wrong...the liberal way!...the "educated elite" way? awsum.
Except that everyone's citing history from Iran, Russia, Europe, America, and the West. The West? Fuck the west. It's getting boring. Not that I wanna talk about the East cause that just seems pretentious. I guess the way world history has it, you can't avoid the West as the major topic. It would be nice to throw in modern issues that aren't directly relevant to the United States once in a while. How about Tibet? Religion...sure, Buddhism and the crazy Dalai Lama dog. Ethnicity...isn't that one of the oil cans lit on fire in an attempt to claim difference from China? Nationalism...exactly. But is that "nation" an illusion? Tibet just interests me more because it's closer to Singapore and closer to China which means somewhat closer to the Chinese race.

What i'm interested in will not be touched upon for sure. The nationalism of Japan. And even the rising narcissism of Korea. Singapore doesn't have this problem. Not yet at least. We just don't have the history or the trophies to back it up. Why were Chinese people susceptible to holding China as the motherland? Nowadays I don't know if it still holds true because I know most Chinese Singaporeans don't look kindly upon the adjective "China".

Anyhow, we don't have to talk about those. Except that I need some history lessons and backup if I'm gonna be active in that 3 hour weekly discussion with all those really smart and articulate people and that Harvard professor.

Sorry to that jap guy in class. I didn't know you were there. Had I known, I would not have introduced myself the way I did. I mean no animosity toward you. I just want to know if Romeo and Juliet were heroes who bridged the gap between a feud or if they were just irresponsible.

2009-09-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

Non-fiction interesting reads that may be worth checking out...

A history of God - Karen Armstrong
From Lucy to Language - Donald Johanson
Jesus, Interrupted / Misquoting Jesus - Bart Ehrman
Not a Chimp - Jeremy Taylor

Maybe...future readings?

Our Inner Ape
Why Darwin Matters

beauty of "nihilism"

2009-08-16T09:46:00.000-07:00

nihilism in quotes because i might not be truly be a nihilist according to strict definitions of when scrutinized by philosophy students

but the wonders of it are,

genuine loss of envy (not all the time of course)
sleeping sound and feeling no moral fault for envying when i do (and this is a good thing)
not having to deal with whether i'm being a hypocrite when i envy and then reflect and suppress or release my envy
selective hearing or accepting of information
not trying to live or find "ideals" like justice, being able to take sides
not having to take a side
gaining the ability to love, because i choose my definition of love. being allowed to hate.
feelings of "peace", and allowing delusion if the ends is worth it.
and the means don't have to justify the ends.
not having to adhere to what a "nihilist" "should" be

2009-08-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

an absurd world.

Let's see what is bullshit.

Al Gore.
The Nobel Prize.
The "Nobel" Prize in Economics.
Theology.
Linguistics on Language Acquisition.
Economics.
United Nations.

Still a white's man world. Why should we look up to Nobel Prizes. They are set up by the West and they have been given to advocates of Western ideals. Dalai Lama was awarded a peace prize. Why? Al Gore. Why? Definitely I can find reasons why they SHOULD get it. But are they the reasons why they were awarded it? Why do some Indians care that Gandhi did not get the Nobel Prize? Do Asians still have a colonial mindset where they need the approval of the white man? Many know that the Nobel Prize in Economics wasn't originally set up by Alfred Nobel. It was added many decades later under a different name but tried to associate itself closely with the Nobel, eventually becoming one of them. But the Nobel itself is not an approval by the world or of a God if any. It is given by a committee. Do the committee members have personal and political agendas?

The United Nations have enough bashers. Have they done any good? I believe so. But are they an absolute authority? Of course not. Participating in the sterilization of women without their knowing? Definitely humane.

Theology almost sounds like an oxymoron. Modern Christianity is like the superstitions they go about debunking. Of course, that doesn't say anything about whether Christianity is wrong or right.

2009-06-07T07:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/user/RusskogoYazyka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_Siege
http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/bureaus/eap/950907WiedemannTibet.html
https://www.shearmadness.com/order.php
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=galkin&aq=f
dramacrazy
video4asian
mysoju
veoh
http://www.imeem.com/lololink/playlist/9QzgFZL7/best-chinese-love-songs-music-playlist/
http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/donjuan.htm
http://www.singlishdictionary.com/
http://www.imeem.com/willen/playlist/rO1LLpNx/old-chinese-song-music-playlist/
http://www.imeem.com/moonstar22/playlist/ccYbtfeW/chinese-love-songs-music-playlist/
http://www.freepdfconvert.com/

2009-05-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

kafka trial...
what......wake up consciousness.....seek answers....philosophies....religions....religions, no you're not supposed to have more than one....but why not....slow...abusive....i'm becoming a slave...i listen to whatever you say...I BEG YOU to TELL me what to do....to COMMAND ME.......passion takes me away...a while....fleeting.....what's this....madness......no motivation to continue in this...work...no meaning....why...stop thinking.....3 ways....one almost impossible but HEARD of....total acquittal....finding of the ultimate truth..........second, delay...stop thinking......it never will come back......on hold.....third, find an answer to some extent......say that's IT, THE END OF IT ALL...and stop.....until something challenges me...........oh, confound whatever shall remind me.......

dostoevsky brothers karamazov
the grand....inquisitor.......................all is lawful, yes surely all is.....without god, there is no morality..........the very foundation shaken.......emptiness, meaninglessness..........nihilism..........replaced...with existentialism.... love for life. passions. no.....into philosophy, forget it! .....she, is my grushenka.......she comes back to me.....from wounded pride.........to revenge herself.........

dostoevsky notes from underground
thoughts.....lazybones.....that's what you are.......better stupid than intelligent........lies..... lazy...... self destruction.....changes in thought........ jumping from left to right...... destroy it all, out with it all......

2009-04-26T19:10:00.001-07:00

drunk on music,
want to drink and make merry and die.

2009-04-23T21:40:00.001-07:00

HDBs look so depressing.

2009-03-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

dostoevsky hits the spot, only on my second read. at 23 years old. gosh. didn't understand a thing the first time when i was what...19? and college students in the US are 19 at the start. they are way smarter than i am. or maybe it's just the times. maybe now is the time to read it cos of the ideas floating in my nearby society. i guess most knowledge is experience. u can't just learn them. they will be empty.

quotes:

...he solemnly declared in argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbours. That there was no law of nature than man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hihero, it was not owing to a naural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in arenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannilalism. Thats not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become, not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position.

...the more I love humanity in general, te less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experince. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self complacency and restricts my freedom...But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love fo humanity.

2009-03-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

i noticed my blog appears very pessimistic.
unfortunately, it is due to my poor expressing of what I think.
most of this stems from me finding life meaningless. life in the abstract sense. as in, i don't feel meaningless when i'm eating good food. i don't feel meaningless when i am in good company. i don't feel it when my mind is distracted that is. when i'm not distracted, it merely means i'm not thinking of anything else. it doesn't mean i'm at the state of oneness with myself. it just means my mind wanders back to thinking about things philosophical. perhaps, by this definition, not being distracted is the state of thinking philosophically. finding, also doe not mean that i've found it as if there was an end point. i have not made up my mind. i don't think it is neccessary either. we're always looking. i don't want to jump the gun and say i've decided on one way of thinking especially when i've not even uncovered most of it. or at least i think i haven't. maybe that is all there is to it and i have already found most of it. now it becomes some abstract thing. if i jump ahead of myself, i would need to find an authority on the subject i'm inclined to to follow. i would probably do so by choosing one philosophical category, or one philosopher, or one idea, or one religion, and following it. it would seem artificial to me. i could be exposed. and meaningless. it comes with negative associations. it seems like meaningless is a dreadful, empty and demoralizing feeling. a way of life or a view of life as meaningless seems to mean that everything is so sad and disconnected. but finding life meaningless doesn't just mean that. it just means finding no answers and no models to describe the world without other models also being capable of doing so. it just means that there are so mnay answers and ultimately maybe no answer. it just brings up the absurdity of life. the meaninglessness. there is just nothing. it is not sad. it is not wrong. it is not spite. life is still good without meaning. maybe better. i don't know how to express it in words. i can only throw big words. existentialism. absurdity. nihilism. maybe i don't know the full meaning of the words yet, but existentialism seems about right.

meaninglessness brings about the question: why be good?
this too does not mean that we should be bad. it more inclines to asking if good exists. if bad exists. why smile doesn't mean i should never smile or that i should frown. even if there is no meaning in life, it does not seem reason enough to commit suicide. even if there is no reason to smile, it doesn't seem reason to not smile. if we are animals, having evolved, and being no different from dogs in terms of whether we should have a higher spirtitual innate moral code, then when wondering why be good, i notice that my dog seems good. he might kill a rat if he saw one, but i consider that not a bad thing. i'm not much different from my dog. i can't wait to go back home and observe my dog. to spend time with it. i'm looking forward to learning a whole lot from it.

2009-03-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

some good times. enjoyable times. and then back to daily life. don't want to re-merge back into this stream. this stream that i just let myself float on, drifting drifting to nowhere. nothing new. no movement outside my comfort. afraid. still the same thing as last week, last month. last year. meaningless life. at a young age, the focus was all on me. parents attention. praises. you were a kid after all. now, you see everyone has the same experiences. everyone is the main star. of a show. whose show. is anyone watching your show? lost in the crowd. become one of many. identity? stop searching. no point, too narcissistic. does not feel good. thousands of people have graduated from Harvard. from MIT. from wherever. 23. going to 24. some want a photo of themselves. Facebook it. look at it. hobbies? for what? to spend your time. to kill your time. to kill yourself. you only have so much time after all. haven't accomplished anything today? why accomplish something. what difference does it make to others. are you a star. are you rich. money talks. love is just a feeling. feelings of freefall on a roller coaster. feelings of excitment. do i just come down to science? why should i care about you. religion. sin. morality. what are they. social constructs. just. just...what. las vegas is awesome.

2009-02-25T18:42:00.001-08:00

waking life. interesting movie.

2009-02-16T21:29:00.000-08:00

"Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only an insignificant part of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world though we can't explain them; people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree."
-- Picasso

True. But I think people have wondered why they love the night, the flowers, and everything around them.
Doesn't someone wonder why we feel happy when we make other people happy? If it's because there is some God and a force that creates good and evil, where good brings some kind of inner joy in us, and where good can be done by spreading joy, then that might be one explanation. And if there is no God, or if there isn't such a simple divide between good and evil, if those concepts don't really exist in an absolute form, then why should good be more innate that we should be happy to smile at someone else? Or maybe we're not only happy that way. Some feel happy when they watch someone's downfall too. Why should doing good feel good? Just as why should we love the night?

2009-02-15T23:06:00.000-08:00

my parents are getting ready to go for a function. My father is dressed up in a shirt and will wear a tie. He is thin but relatively tall. His glasses look clearly and the gold frame seems accented though I doubt he spent much time specifically polishing them for this. He sits on the chair in the room by the front door, seemingly thinking of nothing but not being absent minded. It is as if he's is preparing himself for something, though there really isn't much he to prepare for. I don't think he's preparing for anything. He is waiting. My mother will put on a nice dress. A woman enjoys dressing up. Without functions and events to attend, when will she have the chance to put on beautiful clothing and articles? Everything must go more right than usual. There is less casualness. Once dressed up, there are things I don't like to do. I don't want to sweat. I don't want to touch my glasses too many times. My finger oils might affect this feeling of formality I have. These events are one of the banes of my memories. A reminder of me being in a middle class family. Not even middle class. It reminds me that the ones I love aren't getting what I want them to have. The feeling is romanticized in me. The feeling is stronger in a memory than it would be in reality.

The ones who matter won't turn up at such functions. When they do, they either flaunt their extravagance or come dressed more shabbily than unspokenly required, exhibiting a sense of independence of the social constructs around them. The social constructs that my parents follow. A thorn in my side.

It's a cruel world. Although maybe it's all in my head. Then it's a cruel world in my head.

Why do we have to suck up like that.
The hypocrites, even in the church. The pervasive social constructs. My poor vocabulary.

2009-02-03T21:40:00.001-08:00

http://www.svf.uib.no/sfu/blombos/pdf/11.%20FDE%20et%20al%20Origins%20symbol%20JWP%202003.pdf

"Archaelogical Evidence for the Emergence of Language" article

2009-02-03T21:27:00.000-08:00

Such lapses in memory, according to this new research, could be blamed, at least in part, on rising blood glucose levels as we age. The findings suggest that exercising to improve blood sugar levels could be a way for some people to stave off the normal cognitive decline that comes with age.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081230072238.htm

Language in humans has evolved culturally rather than genetically, according to a study by UCL (University College London) and US researchers. By modelling the ways in which genes for language might have evolved alongside language itself, the study showed that genetic adaptation to language would be highly unlikely, as cultural conventions change much more rapidly than genes. Thus, the biological machinery upon which human language is built appears to predate the emergence of language.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/ucl-ldb011909.php
Hmm...so no innateness hypothesis?
No, wait, this is referring to how we don't have "language genes" whereby I might have "Mandarin language genes" and you "French language genes". Does this also mean that a child of purely Chinese descent, if born in Turkey and brought up in a Turkish environment, will not (on the basis of race) be disadvantaged in learning Turkish [SOV] and not advantaged in learning Chinese [SVO]? This fits with the Crain-Lilo reading regarding immigrant children.

2009-01-16T22:05:00.000-08:00

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.

-

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.

-

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.

-

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.

2009-01-08T22:44:00.000-08:00

what does "bye" mean to us?
If i have lived with you, or worked with you for 10 years, and now i'm leaving, to a place far away, where our lives will not cross except unless we make an out of the way phonecall, which might not be practical if say we both have our own families or work and chatting with friends far away via phone is not a luxury we want or can afford, then will a simple "bye" suffice? Or should it come at least with a handshake? A hug? A look into the eye? "Goodbye"? "Will miss you"?

2009-01-08T16:32:00.001-08:00

I won't lie...I am questioning my religion. I need to. I plan to start reading up on the history of religions, rise and fall, spreading, conversion, comparisons with other religions...etc. I think I am like a tribal person somewhere in early 20th century Africa, whose religion is taught to him, but seems absurd to outsiders who later come to convert them to, usually, Christianity. What is Christianity is absurd? It would be a blessing if I never questioned or felt the need to question, and if nobody who challenged me on my religion was able to convince me to examine it. But Christianity claims that Jesus is the only way to God, and that he was God too. That means that Muslims are wrong. That means Buddhists are wrong et cetera. And Muslims, I think, believe that non-Muslims are infidels.

I think alot of Christians are extremely ignorant. I'm not saying that I'm smart, but I have met a lot of Christians who say ridiculous things. One lady's husband was in hospital and when she found out his doctor was Muslim, she panicked. She saw a little bit of negligence in his work and confronted him. It was settled. But in her relating this story to her audience, of which I was one, she later half-jokingly said "I think they [Muslims] are trying to kill every one of us [Christians]." Actually she wasn't half-joking. I'm sure, from what I saw, she meant it. But the situation quickly turned into drama and laughter - laughter to poison and make things ridiculous - such that the comment is preferably thought to be a joke, or a half-joke.

There are people who attribute so many things to God. Thank God. Oh, that's good, praise God. Ah, you see that's God's work. No, we cannot understand God's ways, he has a plan.

I never really bought into this when I was not the one saying it. Everything can be explained by God's mysterious ways simply because they are mysterious. Right now, the reference of "God" is the Christian God. Yes, which brings the point. Some say all gods are the same. Like different roads leading to the same point. The Christians through Jesus and Christian faith. The Muslims through I believe Mohammud (I never actually researched, so for all I know it could be not through Mohammud). The problem is that Christian faith demands that all other ways are wrong. Perhaps they all lead to the same God in that once, people agreed correctly on God, and then over time, one group thought that believing that person A did so and so is a must to God, another thought that a crucial element to God accepting that you accept him as God is that you believe that this particular person B who did so and so died for your wrongs. And you cannot adhere to both sides.

But then, another question. What exactly is Christian belief? What is the important thing? Is it important that I believe that every time I participate in the holy communion, the liquid that I physically drink actually cleanses me of my sins. Is it important that I reject that belief? Or does it not matter? Is it neccessary to believe that God exists in a Trinity? Would it be wrong and damning in the sight of God if I thought that maybe he could be more than a trinity. Maybe he could be 10-nity except he didn't reveal the rest, or maybe he could be anything, trinity now, but actually one, but actually 800 is fine, all at the same time, maybe not at the same time. A problem is that God is God which in my definition, is just simply hard to define. Basically, if I say God is just, does he always have to be just? Is he a subset of justice? Could he not be just? He is God after all. But let's not get distracted into that yet. What is important in Chrisitian belief?

See, there is a comparison between the Eygptian entity Horus and with Jesus of the Christian faith. Certain comparisons, which some say is unfounded but that would be another distraction for now, go that both were born of a virgin. The names might even be shown to be similar. Both were baptized by someone who was later beheaded. Both walked on water. Both had 12 disciples. Both died and rose again 3 days later. Now now now...lots of issues to deal with. But firstly, I would say most people will simply reject the Horus story. I don't know about people in Eygpt now. But the thing is that the Horus story isn't a major religion for sure. In fact, I think it is mostly regarded as a story in astrology, basically a story derived from looking at the stars, where the 3 wise men were the 3 stars of Orion and Horus the East star or something. And 12 because of the zodiac. But Christianity is a major religion. I will not go into whether Jesus is an "imitation of Horus" because I don't have research material. But the question I have to ask is, which events are important to the Christian belief? Does it matter if I don't believe that Jesus was born of a virgin? and if someone says "how can God be born of human sexual affairs" as if it is corrupt, I might say "it's not corrupt except you think it so, just as it is possible that it is corrupt that God was conceived through a human being even though a virgin". Is it important I believe in the virgin birth? Does it matter if I don't care, just as I don't care if Jesus was right handed or left handed. Does it matter if I don't believe the virgin birth. Okay, so it's in the bible right? But I subscribe to the belief that the bible was written or at least edited, maybe compiled selectively (since apocrypha is not in the bible) or something like that. Basically, I don't believe that the bible had a first incarnation, be it in Latin or Chinese, that was divinely sent from heaven in one piece, and that that incarnation of the bible is what I'm getting in stores now, albeit translated. The books of the bible were written by people. Maybe not the people it is named after. Maybe it is a bunch of records. That's what I think it is. Maybe some of the writings were divinely inspired, I don't know. Does Christian faith require me to believe so?

Is it alright for Christian faith if I don't believe that Jonah was in a whale's or fish's belly? Or if I believe only some portions of it, like maybe I think he was on a whale for 3 days and not in the whale? Or if I believe but with doubt that I never bother to resolve, like me believing that people of ancient China knew martial arts that let them jump really high and stand on thin branches of trees like in "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon", but somewhat I doubt it, but can't be bother to research it?
What about if it's not about Jonah, but about whether the 10 commandments as we know it, as 10 bulletpoints so to speak were inscribed on rocks? Or what if the issue is about whether Moses split the sea?
Are those neccessary to believe, since they are in the bible? Let's say there was this man who believed in God and was under attack by cannibals. And i'm making this up, but say he prayed to God and received strength such that he fought the cannibals with his bare body, bare hands and feet, unable to be hurt by the weapons such as spears not because he evaded them but because he was somewhat invulnerable. And say he defeated them. If such a story existed, it is not in the bible and I don't need to believe it. In fact, I probably shouldn't believe it within the context of Christianity. I shouldn't think that such a man existed who prayed to the same God as I do who did all that in around 1000BC. But because Samson is in the bible, must I believe? Is it needed? David and Goliath?

Let's move on to stuff regarding Jesus. As said before, must I believe the virgin birth? Ok, must I believe he was baptized? Must I believe he walked on water? Must I believe he healed the sick and raised the dead? Must I believe his father's occupation? Must I believe he had 12 disciples? Must I believe he had the last supper and must I believe that we should keep up this ceremony because we should "do this is rememberance of me" ? Must I believe he died on the cross? Must I believe that his death cleansed me of my sins? Must I believe he rose again from the dead? Must I believe he was God? Must I believe in the Trinity and not in 3 separate gods or any other thing? Must I believe in Jesus's existence?

Which stuff are required?

I recently read someone saying that Herod died in 4BC. He criticized Christians for changing the dates of the birth of Christ to "make it fit". What this means to me is that a lot of things are unreliable. The date...is it neccessary to believe the dates to be of Christian faith? And when I mean of Christian faith, basically I mean that when I die I will, assuming Christianity true, be in Heaven and not Hell. Changing the dates, if really happened, could mean Christians had the dates wrong and adjusted, sounds good for them. But it doesn't refute Christianity. To me, that embarrasses me. But I'm looking...honestly speaking, the salvation of my soul. And it doesn't matter if the dates were messed up. Or if every thing about Christianity such as the story of Ruth is refuted, or if Paul was actually a group of people and not one person (I'm making this up)...etc. I want to know what is really neccessary, and I want to believe it. I want to. I don't want to be condemned to Hell.

"Do you believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the light, that there is no other way to the Father except through Him, that He died for your sins and rose again on the third day?"

"Yes"

I think it's something like that right? So, does that correctly (in God's eyes) list the fundamental requirements to God and to Heaven? Belief in the existence of Jesus seems like one of them. Which parts of Jesus must I believe? Can I believe he existed, but don't believe that he changed water into wine, while believing the next few parts, that is he is the way truth light...etc?
Oh i forgot, there's usually the phrase "personal saviour". Of course, it seems like these words are chosen by people.

I'm guessing the main thing I need to believe in is that sin separated us from God, and Jesus died for my sins and opened the way. I acknowledge that, and I'm back with God again.

But that raises questions like "what about people who never heard of Jesus, but it's not that they rejected him?" With this, it seems like we are fitting God into the confines of our concept of justice if we should think that those people will go to Hell (let's not argue if Hell exists). If they can still be saved, then what happens to Jesus being the only way to salvation? Perhaps it is more complicated than that. But to say it is more complicated, to be fair, seems like human rationalizing, like trying to avoid the troublesome issue that God might want to let those people suffer for not happening to know Jesus. Again, the fact that God might not be just by our standards does not refute that this God does exist. Really, it does nothing.
Maybe another question along the same lines could be "what about the person who died while Jesus was on Earth, but was in China and didn't know about Jesus?"
Or "what about the person who passed Jesus on the street but didn't know he was God?"
Or "what about the person who was sitting in his town, heard about Jesus, some stories about him raising the dead and changing water into wine, and this person was fascinated, and he continued working his farm near the town, later died without accepting Jesus as Saviour because he didn't know he should"
You can imagine more scenarios for yourself.
Or, I think quite popularly, "what about the people who died before Jesus came?" They didn't have Jesus to believe in.

so on and so forth.

Maybe the answer lies in the personal relationship with God, to convince me that God exists. Well, there are a few things I want to be convinced of actually (that doesn't mean I don't believe it now, it just means I want to be convinced, like a girl who wants to be told she's loved). There's the issue of whether God exists. And there's the issue of whether the Christian faith (whatever is neccessary including beliefs in and rejections of certain things) is true.

Okay, a personal relationship...a personal experience is, as of yet, the most convincing thing I have to lead me to believe in Christianity. To be more precise, to believe in God, and since I pray to Him as Jesus and with the idea that He is the God in Christian scriptuers, I also am believing in the Christian faith. But I've never prayed to God as another god. I've never prayed to any other god or if they are the same god, then I've never prayed to him as though he were another god. Also, maybe the feelings of relationship with God is no more than chemicals. But then again, love, hate, maybe hunger or sleepiness may be just chemical reactions but that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean that if the feeling of a relationship with God can be observed and explained through brain scans, that the relationship doesn't exist. Faith, yes...I guess it will come to a point where you have to decide if you believe or not. "That's why it's called faith" right? Yes, but how should I handle this? Should I research on the science explanations and then decide on faith (I don't know how much science at the moment or future will support or scorn a decision on believing in the relationship with God, on a decision on "faith" but judging from the fact that the word used is "faith", i'm thinking science most likely will work against it. Isn't that interesting?) and then decide on faith? When I mean "should I?", I really mean, will this end up bringing me away from the salvation of my soul (if there is) and end up bringing me more likely to eternal damnation? "Should I?" also means "is it pleasing to God (assuming His existence)?". After all, it wouldn't be flattering at all if a son goes through a bunch of DNA tests just to convince himself (or futher convince himself) that his dad really is his father. But should the son do it? And then we know DNA tests aren't 100% accurate (in fact I think they are not accurate at all, well, not to 80% even i think, maybe even 50%) so similarly, science could be wrong on the issue of God in this analogy)

Okay, getting tired. What did I leave out? Probably a lot. Discussions have this nasty power of growing super huge to require research in too many things.

2009-01-07T13:25:00.000-08:00

thinking about the past, about someone of the past, brings memories. sense of want. it's so addictive...but it's BAD!!!!! it's like a druggggg!!!!~~~~ ahhhH!
truth is, we all move...we had some times...and objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.
no! i can't obsess into this. i want to be like forest gump....always forward...no need...maybe no capacity for narcissistic thinking of the past...nonoonoo
think happy! we laugh. we forget. but then maybe i need something else to fill that space when it happens. so go go go...meaningless! good. meaningless is goodness...because than i shouldn't hold on to anything. a name, a past...without it you lose your identity. but it is just that. don't live in the past. ever

2009-01-02T18:53:00.001-08:00

what makes something beautiful?
what makes a picture, a piece of art, a scene, a person's face...etc...what makes it good to the eyes and what makes it not?
is it a question of culture and society?
is there a innate default mentality, generalizable for all people to not be considered a cultural thing?
all the questions below the first aren't even questions i'm interested in. i had them written hoping it will help me remember the context of my first question if i forget it soon.

WHAT!

Read the alchemist today.
it's a really great book. good. live life simply. live for the present. it's all been what i've been pondering over recently. but when i hear "live for the present", i am reminded of some TV commercials...a white backdrop, lots of colors like in splashes of paint...red..green...blue...yellow...all vibrant....young people in jeans and colorful splashy t shirts jumping around, all so cool....."live in the present"! Ok, reminded is a wrong word, because i made that commercial image in my head, i think. but that's not what i'm thinking. i mean, live simply. all is meaningless. today is as good a die to die as any other

2009-01-01T16:12:00.001-08:00

Readings.

So my last entry on readings was on "The book of laughter and forgetting" by Milan Kundera. Okay. Why am i blogging on them? I'm trying to pen some thoughts down, perhaps a summary or just portions that I want to remember the book by, just so I don't entire forget I've read the book. I need to feel like I have accomplished something and added something to my living collection by reading the book. Do I enjoy reading or am I doing it to fulfill a goal? Sometimes I enjoy reading. Often in fact. I really liked Kundera's work until I was halfway through "The unbearable lightness of being" Then I found myself concentrating to find a way to enjoy the book. This, ironically, was perhaps what made me lose interest. Nonetheless I completed it. Do i remember it? Let's find out...

Also, I'm thinking of giving up Moby Dick (at least for now, maybe forever though)

Book of laughter and forgetting

all i remember is that the 2nd short story is called "mama" and it's about a wife who for some reason...well basically the whole story paints images and lets you see how she was thinking...and makes a threesome possible for her husband. a lot of other stuff. i guess books like these are hard to summarize because they are more about the psychology of the person at a time...and the thoughts can change, can contradict...just like in real life. i should read it again if i want to actually piece the puzzle together, though the very action of piecing it together may make me blind to seeing it from another angle or may make me see it in a way i never actually saw it when i read the book, and this new view of mind will be called the "clearer" view. clearer? don't know. maybe you just lose stuff along the way in life. but from dust to dust. not only do we not bring our possessions such sa my ipod with me when i die, but maybe i don't bring my thoughts...my prized thoughts...my worldview...my whatevers...maybe i lose my identity. is that a bad thing? sounds like it when phrased that way. well...we forget don't we? can't study so much and remember everything. gotta just do what's relevent so i can keep doing it and be fresh on that topic.

sigh.

then there's a story about "angels"
basically the main drift i get is that when you group together for some cause, you may find your whole direction going off-target but it won't even concern you. you (as a group, reinforcing each other maybe) just go...go...go....like aristocrats...la la la la la....into another world...and people left behind are like "what the frree....?" lalalalallalalalallalalal

the story about that waitress in the bar. oh. lost letters. she wants her letters back. but why? bla bla bla bla bla....so on and so forth...lalaaalallalaaa zzz...

MAN this book is just something to be read and enjoyed at the moment. i feel like i've learnt things. like it has increased my understanding the way you go into some new place and when you come back you feel like you have more knowledge...but of what? like i see the sunrise but i'm not feeling more knowledgable in the sense that OH now i saw the sun rise..OH the colors...OH...lalala...no...you just feel like you had a moment with life.

so i will stop on this book.

and i will not start writing about the other book.

as for
"The sorrows of young werther"

zzz..
guy goes to this town. meets this girl. warned not to like her. likes her. meets her fiance. he knows the guy like his fiance but they are friends. ah he can't take it anymore, he leaves and gets that government job. class issues. some problems arising from class. oh yah, good part about some old woman, left with nothing but the protection of her "class" because she is supposed, and is still considered as, middle class or slightly higher. otherwise she might be seen by people as just some old worthless uncared for 'beggar (she's not a beggar)' woman. anyway, finally, this guy leaves his job goes back to find the girl...lala....knows he can't be with her. decides to kill himself. bang. good game.

2008-12-31T21:55:00.000-08:00

live in the present or for the future?
no matter, happiness seems to come from simplicity. and yet, you cannot deny yourself if you happen to ask a few questions. it's not that you're smarter or more aware. you're just simply asking a question. and if you don't have that question resolved, and if you think there is an answer, maybe you can't rest. and so you pursue your questions. not all. just whatever you feel like. and then, maybe you find no really important question. no question that can rule over all others, as if it is the master lock. or you find no important answers.
so many things. but we really are quite separate from our surroundings. almost even from our own body. is there a soul? why should there be? do we all need to be equal based on being a person? i mean, maybe there really is no wrong in discriminating. maybe we should not judge a book by its cover because we might find ourselves in unprepared and unfavorable scenarios if we had done so, but an ugly face is an ugly face.
i am not advocating discrimination. but life will pass. so many thoughts but unable to be fully expressed because of limited vocabulary or grammatical skills. but everyone has thoughts. it is all nothing anyway. and i think that's where some happiness can be found. it's like as if happiness is a glimmering side of every rock where each rock represents a thought, an idea, a thing, a way of seeing things, anything. and happiness can be found when the rock is approached or seen from the right angle. and sometimes maybe it feels like we can manipulate that rock and see the glimmering side. sometimes it is like we must move ourselves to the right position to see the glimmering side of that rock. a time for everything.

2008-12-22T12:37:00.001-08:00

Long Distance Relationship, with God.

how does this work. Coming soon...

2008-12-22T12:17:00.001-08:00

"...characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a metaphot containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."

"Sometimes we forget how difficult that is for some people and how valuable that makes us. Lots of people would give anything to be able to say what they mean. But they can’t. So, they turn to songs, books, and art that communicate for them."

2008-11-26T10:51:00.000-08:00

the Monty Hall problem. heard of that? You would have if you watched the movie "21" regarding some MIT students' beating the odds in Vegas casinos. It's really counter intuitive, and I couldn't understand it. So while my professor was explaining using mathematical signs and symbols for probability, I scribbled on my own paper what I'm more comfortable with - pictures and simple numbers and fractions. My mind isn't built for abstract formulas. I need to see things like I see them in real life. A box. No box. 1. 2. One-third. Maybe I can deal with negative numbers.

What I don't understand is "does it matter what the host knows?"
Does it matter what his method of choosing the door with the goat to reveal is? If he has a rule that says "open the first possible door to the right of the selected door whereby the immediate right of the rightmost one is the leftmost one" or if his rule is more complicated, maybe he looks at the hands of the clock when the contestant selects the door, and then proceeds with mathematical rules before concluding according to the rules which door to open (assuming he has 2 to choose from, cos otherwise there is no choice). What if he doesn't know which door to open...he walks into a veiled booth and presses a button to open one door. If it contains the prize, the door doesn't open and he presses the other option, so that unless a door refuses to open, the host himself never knows where the prize is.

Do these things change the probability?

I can't understand. It seems to tie in with the quantum chemistry stuff in class. Something about "observing", or "measuring" changing the result. Like that test to see if light was a wave or particle...and when it was observed, or when "shots" were fired one by one, one result turned up, and when left alone to do its "thing", another result appeared. Like how when we apparently "observe" some property of a particle, its originally random properties are now defined. Some complicated thing like that. How come KNOWING, SEEING, somehow...observing....changes things?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand%27s_paradox_(probability)
under Classical Solution it seems to give some answers although to a different problem but one of similar nature. So, "random" really isn't random? The method of "randomizing" matters? WHAT!?

Now if you're going to explain the Monty Hall solution, I've already understood that...well somewhat. I just cannot understand if the host "knowing" certain things changes the probability. Check Wiki under Monty Hall, under "other host behavior" and it says that if the host didn't know, the chance is 1/2. otherwise, 2/3. WA~~~

Also, what's appalling are the consequences. It means...this. Can you calculate probability? If the probability of something happening now is the conditional probability that it happens after all that has happened in the world has happened, then without knowing all that has happened in the world before, how do we computer probability?

i.e if flipping a coin 1/2 chance goes heads, 1/2 tails, BY RIGHT. But maybe chances of getting heads today is conditional that WW1 happened, that i ate an apple on a certain date...etc...that a stone fragmented into 24 parts, not 23...etc

2008-11-26T06:46:00.000-08:00

back to books.
The book of laughter and forgetting

Lost letters:

main point revolves around how we try to change the past. When we look for change, for a better future, we may actually be trying to change the past. We try to attain power to change our past which we may be ashamed of or which may be a barrier to our "future".

He wanted to efface her from the photograph of his life not because he had not loved her but because he had. He had erased her, her and his love for her, he had scratched out her image until he had made it disappear as the party propaganda section had made Clementis disappear from the balcony where Gottwald had given his historic speech. Mirek rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its counternance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.

And I liked the touch of...meaninglessness that follows his above thoughts. Having stopped in his car for a moment as he was thinking on this, he woke from his thoughts and wondered how long he had been in thought. And what did this stop mean? It meant nothing.

But earlier, he (Mirek) had wanted to end his twenty-over year affair with this woman, seeking freedom. For he had made love to an ugly woman because he didn't dare approach pretty ones. He thought himself unworthy of anyone better...that weakness, that deprivation, was the secret he was hiding. And yet later he had been evenly ashamed because he did love her - someone he was ashamed of.

What is this? Pride? It seems much more complex than that. Shame of his past, but why? Was he expecting himself to have had a better past? Did he think we was better than to deserve an affair with an ugly woman in his youth, in the supposed prime of his life? He did later have proper marriages and affairs with other women that can be inferred to be not-ugly. Why was he still haunted by his past? By some insecurity and some apparent failing? And yet he loved her then. How does love come about? Do two people spend time together and form a bond? Is it impossible to love someone really when you never really fell for them? Was that love for her, somehow, tainted by this shame of her. Perhaps he was just using her. But can you not love someone you use? How does this all work?

But we forget.
The assassination of Allende quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia...until everyone has completely forgotten everything.
In recent times, some time ago people thought about Tibet. People suddenly dug out its past to discuss issues. Moral issues, historical claiming, human rights...etc. Then as the Olympics started, Tibet was forgotten. Some then "remembered" Georgia. And soon Georgia is forgotten. The American elections. No more.

And sometimes we forget what we started out to do. We can distracted, we fall out of track...ever so common. I have noticed it firstly with myself. I found that I was unable, years back, to get into a proper discussion especially in group work. Partly because of that and self-righteousness, I stopped serious participation in group work. I couldn't keep on track. I would deviate, and I wasn't the only one. Others would too, and eventually I wouldn't know what we were talking about. I only remembered I was a guilty of straying. And discussions with friends strayed too. Suddenly perhaps a statement that was not agreed upon would be scrutinized. It would open up into a bigger discussion. Ideas that altered relative to the new discussion. Sometimes they didn't seem complementary with my earlier idea of the subject. I was fickle.

But I wasn't just trying to defend myself at all costs, though it may have happened at times. It was be false humility to say that I always got distracted off-course because I took the agruments personally. No, I tried to be objective. I tried to separate myself from the discussion. The result was me changing sides frequently (if sides even existed in distinct forms which I felt was the more imposing belief of the people around me). No I don't profess to be a genius; everyone has had private thoughts. Nonetheless I feel embarrassed to talk about it without a disclaimer such as the previous sentence.

The result was I changed sides. And then I found that my credibilty fell as I changed sides, naturally. And the discussion started to matter less and less in those circles. Instead, victory was that of the one with most credibility. If you didn't change sides, you would be more substantial. It makes sense, except that I believed a lot of people were busy defending their stance and appearing substantial. I was not substantial, but I couldn't see others as substantial either. They were stubborn. And when they flaunted a victory, I thought how stupid my company was. I became arrogant. It was a start to my discovery that I too was stupid, except in moments of indulgence, even when suppressed to some extent for whatever my reasons might have been, that I felt smart relative to the other stupid people about me. Sometimes I kept quiet because I thought I was better than that. Sometimes I spoke because I thought keeping quiet was arrogance. Later I just didn't know what I was thinking anymore. Everything and nothing.

I stumbled across a word - "dialectical" - and I chose to define it as a form of...contradiction. A contradiction that more closely describes the world I saw than a world of no contradictions which I found only a fantasy. I loved that word. I loved it maybe for it's appearnace in English, for it's sound - no i think not - but mainly for the meaning it meant to me, not in some sentimental sense but rather its semantic value to me. Most things seemed contradictary to me. A bundle of facts could mean everything, and nothing. The table is measured 30cm across and yet has almost infinite surface length on a micro scale, but we create from the measurement of 30 whatever we need. Maybe we build structures based on that calculation. We can love and hate something at the same time.

I rationalized that someone who does not change his sides must either know everything, or does not know everything. If he doesn't know everything, then in the light of new information, one should have to re-think his position. He should have the privilege to change his mind. If he doesn't change his mind, then the new information had not compelled him into changing his mind whether because the info was just not convincing or he didn't understand it the way it would have convinced, or should have made him change his mind but was decided to be downplayed or ignored.

So it's good to change your mind. But how can that be good? How can you trust someone who changes his mind all the time, trying to be "true" to himself? It's too unpredictable. And a whole bunch of people like that is fickle and probably is what the civilian population is made up of. And they are easily swayed and manipulated. Maybe credibility is more important than a "right" stance. Maybe everything is inherently stupid anyway.

And when we don't forget, we get tormented by our past, if perhaps we haven't resolved it, as in Mirek's case? But why think so much about something? Why take it so seriously? Maybe it IS a serious matter and we should dedicate our lives to it. Just as maybe the destruction of our envirnoment and its ability to provide for us a living future is a serious issue! If it's so serious, we should all be very very serious about this. Do all we can. What you want? Change to this kind of bulb? Ok! Change all! don't use this too much? Ok! I won't even use it at all; I can live without it. It's a serious matter, we must be serious. Maybe too serious. Can we be too serious on a serious matter?

Forgetting is a great thing.
I think that there's too much burden in trying to do everything. We are not Gods. We aren't meant to be. Being a God would be such a tiresome job...knowing everything.

2008-11-25T14:00:00.000-08:00

perhaps we laugh because we know certain things are absurd. And we do not want to challenge them on the surface, so they have remained underlying all this time. Perhaps it is intuitive, or just learned as language is somehow picked up, assuming it were not innate in us to learn language, and we laugh because we know something's really hitting the truth now. Or not.
If we didn't know about a certain absurdity, would we laugh? If I considered Socrates to be the wisest person of some sort, or perhaps I treat him as a symbol, and he is mocked, made fun of in ways that I find just absolutely unfitting for someone I place in that category of dignity and respect, would I laugh? Would I be troubled? Or would I be unaffected? Perhaps blind to being affected?

Maybe laughter isn't the problem. But if I feel troubled, why would I? Perhaps there is some...inconsistencies that I find annoying. It disrupts my view on a certain someone or something. It makes me doubt. And if I don't doubt, does that necessarily mean I am stubborn or have I known enough to know that it is not worth doubting. Is there such a thing? Can one know everything? If not, then he cannot be absolutely sure about the topic or the item in question, and is it right to doubt at opportunity in order, perhaps rationalized, to learn more about it, though with a certain, maybe blind, faith that ultimately my doubt will be resolved? Will I worry that my doubt will consume me and destroy every thing I had known until then? Will I be afraid of the truth? And if I choose not to doubt, is that fear? Is that faith?

What if the unsettling image makes logical sense to me. What if a wretched image, or perhaps a hero going down in agony and flames, to be revealed as ultimately nothing, is logical and although something I prefer not to think about, is as close to the truth as everything could be but isn't always in that state? Why are they called wretched by me? Because it's unsettling. To what? To a certain image I have in mind. An image of what? Order? Security? Good over Evil? Do we laugh? Perhaps if I care about the subject, I would not laugh as the insult is more imposing on me. Or I am simply more troubled than willing to embrace the ridicule of my notions until then. But if I didn't care, if this was some kind of order I knew existed, and now it is ridiculed, maybe then I laugh? But why laugh? Why not just ignore? Maybe I laugh for other reasons. Maybe I just wanted to laugh. Maybe, sometimes laughing keeps further thoughts.

There is a phrase, "don't take yourself too seriously."
But why? If something is serious, and you are serious about it, then it must be taken seriously. If it is mocked, can I laugh at it under the notion that "i shouldn't take things so seriously"? Is that implying something...wrong...with my...image of the subject? Well, let's say the satire isn't personal, and I could ignore it...then perhaps I would. Would I laugh? What for? But what if the mockery shakes certain foundations of mine....perhaps foundations that I am reluctant to give up because I like them, or am afraid or how things are like without them...or something else? Then, maybe as above I will be unsettled. Or maybe I will laugh. Maybe I will be the one who cracks jokes about it all the time? Maybe it's because I need to laugh at it to fulfill my inner thoughts that the subject is ridiculous. And maybe by laughing I can set my mind as ease. After all, we forget. I may be able to forget about it's ridiculousness. Maybe, I will tell myself "don't take the joke so seriously" and get back to work. "Don't take yourself too seriously".

Wait. What am I taking seriously?

I don't know why we laugh at mockeries. I don't remember why I thought we did, although I remember the scene from "Andrei Rublev". But they were bored anyway...didn't have anything to do with the upper class, and were maybe even drunk. Or maybe the jester's actions were ust funny....somehow funny...inducing laughter, for who knows why but not so much related to the fact that it is a mockery of a system.

So laughter is a concession? We smile, and laugh, when we concede something. Or we don't want to take a stand on something. I read that primates like monkeys smile to avoid challenges. Yeah we do smile to people to appear friendly. Look like we're not challenging anyone. So is that why we laugh? We concede something. We say, oh yeah that's right. Ha ha ha.

Long distance relationship - with God.

2008-11-25T10:27:00.001-08:00

How is man supposed to live on earth? With his breathen? With other people? In constant prayer? Like a monk? In seclusion? With people, and when alone with God?

If there is a planet Earth, and we are all human beings on it, and we are near to one another, and have a community in physical presence, then surely we should communicate with one another and not go about ignoring one another. But how much do we want or need each other?
If God also placed us on Earth, let's say because he wanted us to have life and communicate with God, because he loves when we talk to him, then how much of our time should we give to people and God?

God surely isn't as physically present as the person sitting next to you. God and me can have a long distance relationship. He is somewhere, I am here. Through prayer, or what it may be, we can communicate. He may have his other special ways of letting me "feel" his presence. With modern technology, it is also possible to have a long distance relationship with a friend or someone closer than mere friends. We can talk through the telephone, we can send messages, we can even see each other on computer screens these days. Is that person on the other side, on the other line, real? Yes, I've met them before. Or if it's a penpal we're talking about, we still assume the person is real, not a robot or some other form. What's "wrong" if there is any "right" with having a long distance relationship? One that isn't really....there.

A relationship with God is also long distance in so many ways. You don't do things together. Well, actually you could in certain ways, such as doing something "for God" or "because you're living for God"...etc. I suppose you could do that with friends and spouses that you are having a long distance relationship with as well. But when does this long distance relationship with people become a fantasy. When does it become...wrong, strange, perverted, escapism, living in the past, or any other thing that seems inferior to actually being with people who are around you instead of spending more time with people who aren't.

What is a person who goes to work and then goes home and spends time with...God. I can imagine in the past, if I were a shepard, I'd tend the sheep...move them around...go back to my house...and maybe along the way I might meet a person or two I know, and get into short conversation or simply exchange greetings from a distance, maybe even from a distance of one hill to another, and at home if I were not yet married, or if I were married but somehow in my culture husband and wife don't spend all the time together, but women are constantly tending to things like food, and I'm back from work, maybe go into my room, and if I were such a person as would, I would start praying, spending time with God. In this scenario, it seems that God placed people on earth to have a relationship with God. Not exclusively, but God isn't just a minor routine.

And if in the modern world, one does that in the city, let's say not because he or she has no friends, but because this is the life he or she chose, just as we assume the shepard was not somehow condemned to that fate against an inner will of his, then what do we have? A crazy person? A normal person? What changes? Is a long distance intimate relationship, one that consumes lot of time and energy, with someone healthy? After all, there are many people around you can talk to, why are you spending your time and energy, and affection, with someone that's not really there, someone so based on memories perhaps...or a kind of...symbol? What about a long distance relationship that takes time and energy and affection, that affects the way you live, the way you think, with...God? Is that...healthy? When does it cross the line? Could it ever?

symbol. fear. laughter. mockery.

2008-11-25T09:54:00.000-08:00

Today let's discuss the meaning of a symbol.

A symbol is not of the same quality as the things we touch, the things we know. It has the power to unite and unify people, to converge interpretations onto a single thought if one authoritative interpretation is present. A symbol keeps people tamed. It should not be questioned, but I believe that we are reluctant to question the authority of a symbol because we are afraid that it will collapse. We are afraid that it is fragile in reality. Perhaps, we already know it is fragile and yet we hold on to it and try to keep it standing in order to avoid a collapse and uncertain disorder that we are not used to.

The jester in Andrei Rublev makes fun of the upper classes. He creates a story of a man in those upper classes who loses his beard, and with it is shamed even by his wife. It topples the order that we had that those people are respectable and should not be seen in such a despicable light, of having lost what is seen as a symbol of status, his beard. How he runs back home just like any creature, and how he is insulted by his wife...when the order is that a wife should not be disrespectful to a husband. And more so for people of that class. More so for the man of that class. It is mockery, and on one hand we laugh. The audience laughed. Why do we laugh at mockery? Why do we laugh? I remember one position vaguely, it being that we laugh at what we are afraid of. Perhaps we laugh at that because we are afraid of that happening in reality. It will shatter so much order that we feel comfortable in.

Women are not allowed to watch certain events. Should they see fear and pain in a man's eyes, will they still, and I'm refering to women of centuries ago, respect their men whom they have been brought up to see as a symbol. They have had little real contact. They don't know men, as men don't know women. They only know that they are the ones they look up to.

If God were mocked, we would laugh at God. Can you imagine if he had to go through the wretchedness of the world. If we personified God and imagined a scenario where he had insecurities or fallings. We shouldn't mock God. But firstly, we do not understand much of God enough to actually make a mockery. Whereas the mockery of a pope, should one tell the story of perhaps how he sat on a thumbnail and jumped up and for a moment lost dignity, we can actually think it true because we know the pope is a human.

A symbol seems to build artificial walls. But how artificial are they? And how good, or necessary are they? Good here is a very ambiguious term. Can we disrespect our parents? Can we be so liberal to consider ourselves equal human beings that our parents do not deserve a certain right over us? Or perhaps only up to a certain age? How do we determine the age? How wretched it would be to see a father as a symbol of love and strength, and to witness by chance or not a situation where he is getting scolded by his boss, or being fired, or finding himself helpless...etc. How wretched this world really is. That symbols are built and crushed. That apparently disorderliness seems to rule, and that acceptance of disorder is a defence mechanism against disappointment.

2008-11-08T22:48:00.000-08:00

Batman and the Joker.
Who is really delusional?

The one who believes that...well, what does Batman believe in anyway? Justice? Revenge? Maybe nothing? To have rules...to not kill his enemies? Belief that there is good in this world...in people? Belief in a deeper and greater something among people? Whatever it is, it's reflected in his behavior to some extent. Delusional?

Or...the Joker? who believes in chaos in the world, that underlying the brittle social structure set up by people or other living things, there is no real meaning? No real justification for anything? If that's what he believes...or perhaps he doesn't believe in that....maybe believes in nothing...or just doesn't believe in some particular thing that makes society tick.

Batman vs the Joker...and with guys like 2-face who apparently even becomes this other alter-ego called, i think, the Judge, walking around with a judge-like hammer but in sledgehammer form....is really a interesting look into...what would this be...philosophy?

Is courage noble but stupid? If you calculate and odds are in your favor to the degree that you are comfortable, are you still brave for going ahead? If odds aren't good enough and you still go ahead for perhaps the ideal of a greater purposes or something...is that just stupidity, pure risk-taking? Or does that moment of bravery actually cause your odds to go up?
Is hope also just a drug? Is religion a drug? I'm not saying that religion(s) are false or that the particular God in a religion does not exist. But religion, as far as we know it and practice it...especially when it pivots mainly on "faith" ant that point where we cannot further explain according to our observations, rules and laws (which by themselves could already be utterly misguided and formulated according to all sorts of things, like public opinion, like the words of someone hundreds of years back and upon this history is taken as an authority...etc)...is it also not justified according to...say science or logic? And if one follows science or logic, then do we reach contradictions? Can we take both sides of the fence? Is it good to "not take ourselves too seriously" in such affairs? Or is taking both sides of the fence perfectly fine except it has gotten a bad name?

Presidential victory for Obama.

2008-11-05T08:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Barack Obama became the president elect of the United States of America.
For many, this is hailed as a milestone in the history of America, a landmark in the country's progression. But for some like myself, the impact did not really hit until I was flooded with news that talk about this being a historic day. Perhaps I am not an American. Perhaps, I am not African-American, or black for that matter. Perhaps, I am not a Democrat. I am only a bystander living in the United States at the moment.

The important lesson reinforced yesterday to me was that at the point of change, change may not be obvious. At a grand and historic moment in history, the people living in it may feel nothing special or nothing comparable to what history lessons of the future may portray it to be. Unless perhaps you are in the actual heat of it all be it a trader in Wall Street when the economic crisis hits, a mid-range supervisor in a prestigious bank when it collapses, or an African American who has lived through the times when they were not given equal rights as whites up to the time when an African America takes office in arguably the same and most powerful and influential nation in the world.

In the future, with the benefit of hindsight and lacking the benefit of actual experiencing of the moment, causes will undoubtedly be assigned to explain the unfolding of certain events. Analysis of some sort will reveal why the economy took a downturn. Sometimes, these occurrences will then be said to have been inevitable, or obvious in the coming. But who can really foresee the future. The fog of war is the same fog of the future. When you are living in a moment, nothing really is apparent. The linking of causes to effects are not so casual. Perhaps we are blinded and unable to see the big picture at the time. Or perhaps, the causes and effects being linked together is a far more complicated thing, maybe even one out of a hundred possible and equally credible cause and effect relationship, and that in hindsight a specific cause and effect gains popularity for any form of reasons and also undergoes simplification.

For classification is simplification. And we need to classify. When I say "Boston Terrier", one can imagine a Boston Terrier probably not by the words itself or the sound, but the image it brings to one's mind. Depending on one's exposure thus far, one will see a Boston Terrier in many ways. Language is a code and accuracy of transmission from one mental image of one person to another requires both parties to have the same version of encrypting and decrypting tools. And, even in elementary school, we learn Classification. The world is classified. Jeans and shirts...they are clothings. Cars and Computers....Hmm....well, shall we classify them as things that start with C? No, probably we will prefer to classify them as Machinery. But classification is only useful for some times and should not be overemphasized. Cars and computers are quite different things. Classification nonetheless helps us speed up our thoughts for useful purposes in the world. Similar for stereotypes. And Obama's presidency will be seen along side other winnings of the presidency. Causes are needed. Direct links are needed. We need to explain our world. And rightly so, though it will blur out finer details. Different offee may appear all the same to many of us but to an expert, they are very very different.

It is like the "scaling" properties of things. A rock looks like a rock. A bunch of rocks together making a big rock, like one in the badlands, from far looks just like that first rock. Take that first rock, look at it under a microscope, and it is made of tiny similar rocks. To see the big picture is to flatten things out.

What does Obama's winning (assuming the electoral college voting goes as expected without more than 70 or so faithless electors), mean? Let's hope he really means change, and that he really brings about change, in a good way...good for those who want change and good for those who don't need change. The next two years, I hope, will be an exciting time for me to watch from Boston.

2008-11-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

DR. PNG

2008-10-31T11:51:00.000-07:00

perrytong.blogspot.com
http://parlerment.blogspot.com/2006/07/language-cleansing-evils-of-speak.html

ahh! so late!
Read the blogs, read the books (ah, books are insufficient now. to keep up with modern and ever changing views of casual people, blogs and newspaper forums will come in handy), and you know what? You should talk to people about these issues. Have a discussion.

Of course, A Sleepwalking Land is getting very boring. It is written in such a strange format, all allegorical. But perhaps in such a book, the content is less important than the language and descriptions that portray a set of mentalities - in this case African mentality, though not generalized. For Russian mentalities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dostoevsky is always available for reading. *wink wink*

Unless you've got the time, perhaps that should wrap up "African studies" for now, having Things Fall Apart completed as well. For further readings in the future, search for the "12 best African novels" online and add Arrow of God.

For "Economic studies", there is an insane amount to be done. Moreover, it is constantly on-going and evolving. Start with Hot, Flat & Crowded to level the playing field. To know what other business oriented people might be influenced by and therefore are more inclined to think, reading the top books based on sales may be a good start. Freakanomics seemed popular, although it may not be my taste. I think it would be useful to learn the history behind the modern system of money and banking and a book from the Mises Institute may be fitting for this. I also suggest reading The Post American World.

"Linguistic studies" will be definitely useful and interesting as I continue my university education in this field. Its concepts can be applied to any language being learned to make it much more interesting. There is also a treasure in my possession and that is Singlish. Studies have surely been made on this creole language and it will serve well for a Singaporean interested in linguistics to analyze Singlish.

"International Relations", "Political studies" and "History" will also account for a wealth of knowledge. Knowledge about Singapore in every aspect is essential to becoming a good commentator of the country and its policies. Areas like its "Speak Mandarin, No Speak Dialect" or equivalent campaign can be scrutinized, observing "social engineering" and attempted "linguicide" as quoted from other sources. Its education system and policies will be a very interesting area for critical analysis.

Night makes a great book to be read not only because of its international fame but also because its author is a professor at my university.

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann.

Cops...

2008-10-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

Newlywed shot dead by cops in his yard

A story on CNN's website today. Can you imagine, the wife of this man, having her beloved killed on her wedding day? Her biggest day, her new life...she is widowed on the day she leaves her family to start a new life. And the shooter...cops....COPS....

You think it would be better if the groom had been killed by a thug instead?

Or if he was injured and left crippled on this day instead?

Of course, surely being mistaken shot in your yard by COPS 20 years after your marriage probably should be as big a deal. It's just more musical to die and be widowed on your wedding day. Which is why I lied so far...he didn't die on his wedding day. But he got married just a few days ago. Shot...bang bang...

By COPS...

Cops who were chasing burglar suspects...looks like the groom was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cops shot without verifying his identity. But then, could they without risking their lives?

who are these cops anyway? Brings the question, how good are these cops? Are they men of highest virtue selected to police the country and enforce the law? Or are they just people who have few other job options. And what's going through their heads? Are they seeking action...do they love holding a gun...do they have fantasies of being in a battle...have 80s and 90s cop vs thug movies as their vision of their job? Can they be trusted and given a gun?

Are they neutral in matters such as race...?

What is their idea of justice...?

If cops can be armed...perhaps that's the best justification I have had so far of why owning a gun should be legal in the country. Because you don't know when you'll meet some idiot with a gun, and if guns are only available to cops, then that idiot might just be a cop. Except...you can't shoot a cop, so idiot cops are granted immunity from the bullets of righteous citizens. Bet most of you don't remember that Rambo was a idiot-cop shooter.

But then Rambo was fine...because after his psychotic jihad against the idiot cops, he was either living peacefully in another country or serving in the military. He wasn't gonna be around civilians or our streets posing a threat. Nah, he was killing those justified to be killed by his commanders, in battlefields. Idiot cops, should be promoted to the military...away from peaceful settlements...

things fall apart

2008-10-22T18:32:00.000-07:00

interesting book. didn't know where it was leading, which caused me not to have any pre-conceived endings. Though at times, I anticipate that a certain part is the turning point of the book and that the main novel revolves about that event and its consequences, with the hint coming only from its title...it turns out not to be so. In fact, it is great because it is like life. just going though, and yet not boring. and yet all the parts of the novel served a purpose. skillfully done, with all the previous parts turning out to be a good foundation for the last part and last events, which aren't too heavily harped upon either. it is like taking gathering information about many things over time, and one day encountering a period when all those u gathered became useful the understand one momentful week of your life. good book.

spoilers ahead. i recommend reading the book without wiki-ing it or anything. it is short after all. and preferable without reading the summary if any on your book back cover. :)

how ignorant and arrogant are we when we don't actually fully understand a type of people and make judgments on them...more so when we have power over them. shows ignorance and arrogance of the westerners colonizing africa. like how different classes may look down on the lower classes. personal experience for me was in the military when i mingled with people different from those i was more naturally meeting in school.

also, religion...terrible...won't argue about the validity of the religion. but the way it is used...abused....the initial aims of the missionaries may be good.....i expect the things they belief and talk about to be what i experience in church when i was young...sounds all good and all that...like going out to convert ppl...to the one true God....face difficulties....must reach the lost....oh the devil has strong hold over the lost....etc. but from the other point of view, especially since missionaries tend to be imperfect, and in the book even had their own government set up according to their rules...which they deem fair. they think throwing away twin babies is evil....fair enough i can undestand. but the igbo people have long believed they were evil babies of some sort. they had their rituals. religion is powerful....gets into the minds of people...crusades, islamic terrorists...etc but maybe not merely abused by misinterpreted...or just interpretated differently and is realized differently. First pastor in missionaries had gentle approach. peaceful. 2nd was more radical. both probably have their justifications. district commissioner doesn't understand the people. concerned with his career and thinks he knows enough to write what he was going to call "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger". What an insult to the africans. pacification? primitive? moreover, a man had hung himself. and they were more peaceful and forgiving that the missionaries in the book whose company beat and hanged people.

the kite runner

2008-10-22T18:15:00.000-07:00

not much to comment on this. just a short glimpse of afghanistan...some cultural aspects...and the change from peace to troubles...

most striking thing, perhaps what the whole novel leads up to, was when it talks about how forgiveness just crept in.

"I slipped the picture back where I had found it. Then I realized something: That last thought iI had brought no sting with it. Closing Sohrab's door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night."

i guess many things are like that. not just bitterness. but even sadness....it harps on you so much, u feel desperate....but suddenly, u're fine and u never worry. though it may not last, the sadness did not go away with a boom. neither does glory always come with fanfare. something you achieve something, and it's just that. maybe scoring a winning goal in the world cup finals would be different.

future.

2008-10-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

ah! where is my future now? It all started when I became 21. Suddenly, without me feeling the real impact it would have on me, I left Singapore for an education in America. How long would I be there? What was the system like there? I didn't know. What was I going to be after I graduate? Where was my future headed toward? Ohhh...such questions...terrible questions. The future is so uncertain. Yes there is the common phrase that people often don't end up doing what they studied in university, or that university is when you discover yourself. But I don't like the uncertainty. I wish I had just gone into a vocational concentration like engineering, medicine, law, or architecture in Singapore. Why was I in America? I could study the same things back home if it were these vocational fields of education. As it turns out, university is a time of discovering about myself. But probably every period in time is a time of discovery anyway.

What am I going to do with a degree in Linguistics? A science. I think of it more as a social science. I like to slap the word "pseudoscience" on it. Oh, people are going to say "Oh! How many languages do you speak?" as if Linguistics was the acquiring of as many languages as needed for graduation. I'd have to answer "Oh, just two. English, half of Mandarin (I'm already being generous), and half of Russian (likely more generous here)."

They'd probably go, "Ooooh, that's nice."

As if speaking 2 or even 3 languages these days is anything special. I'd need to know Arabic, Spanish and Hindi to command some respect.

Well, I'd learned what I didn't want to do. Or at least I had more doubts about more things that before and more openness to others that I had shut out at first glance. I know I didn't want to study business because I thought that what corresponded to success in business, even in the educational aspect of it, was not intelligence in the kind of knowledge a school or classroom education can give but height and public relational skills. I took science courses and university halted there. I was transported and floated in a period of Junior College and Secondary School. Eventually I decided that a liberal arts education did not seem worth the money paid for the university education. I could probably read it elsewhere myself anyway. I should be studying something that gives me a job when I graduate! Ah!! But in the liberal arts, where does that lead? Everywhere and nowhere. That's the thing. Economics looked promising if not for some influences on my life that has made me doubtful of economics especially in its prescriptive-ness, but the bigger problem with economics was that there were just too many people doing it. The competition would be high. Too many people within my school, or from the people I had met to constitute my sample group, and too many other smart people in nearby Harvard and probably even M.I.T. to compete with.

But Linguistics is not the source of my troubles. I am happy with it. The stress comes from expectation.

My parents want me to become a doctor. a doctor? Oh my gosh. It is prestigious, it pays well, the working hours aren't my main problem with being a doctor. In fact, I don't mind being a doctor. But wait, really? Well, I discovered America only two years ago and man is it different from Singapore. Back home, we're a small place. Now, studying to be a doctor in America might, who knows, lead me to become a doctor in America. Stay in America?? Ah. Well, it's not too bad I suppose. But wait, which part? What if the job is not in the city? It's horrible! I can't spend the next decades of my life in Indiana driving to the 5-storied and tallest building in the nearby region to work with blood and coughing, sad looking, grumpy people amongst the smell of antiseptic. Life is not like "Scrubs". Oh my gosh! Moreover, blood and naked tissues, physical pain and mental numbness...these aren't my fortes. I'm not a true Spartan! And I'm not a masochist. I don't want to deal with light but intensely bright blood, viscous fluids like puss or mucus, or slice up a person and sew him back like a toy! Well, people can get used to anything. But I'm not exactly inclined to want that. It would be so much easier if I didn't have a choice. It even took me long seconds before I was able to pierce the prawns I caught straight from the water and hold them as they struggle, their life essence almost transferring with sick and innocent cries from their inanimate shells to my fingers, and then laying them up orderly like soldiers on my BBQ grill. The only thing short of making me a monster that moment was my ironic allergy to prawns. Wait, maybe that makes it more monstrous. But I don't have an allergy to humans, sickness or blood. So I theoretically could be a doctor. Oh No! But there are people who aren't allergic to prawns and don't want to eat it!

I'd rather go to do law. Law is prestigious. Maybe looked upon in a different light nonetheless. But it is more appealing to wear shirts and suits, hold briefcases, attend boring meetings in classy buildings, spend hours working on a computer and having none of it actually used, never having the fun of court moments as in "Boston Legal" et cetera, than it is to be a doctor. The pay is good. And I would be closer to the world - more meaningless than the doctor's world though it might be. I can picture having a drink after work nearby in the city. I picture doctors sipping coffee in the eatery.

And the MCAT. Oh my gosh. I'd rather sit for the LSAT. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but the MCAT means a lot of studying of science and things that I have no more love for. LSAT on the other hand is about logical arguments and critical breaking down of things or creating effective categorizations. Well well...that sounds more fun for the nerd I try to be! I don't want to know about chiral molecules, or about benzene, or have every boy's childhood fantasy "physics" degraded to a enemy of my future holding a spear that is the short time I have to neutralize it, or about the frickin' animal anatomy, or the names and processes of the cells. Plants are okay; I developed a recent fascination for them, especially for fungi and its mycelium.

But I want to do my family proud. This is my life. But life is so fragile. Life is so...meaningless, in the grand scheme of things (if any). And so, living for myself is also so futile. Maybe I should live to do my parents proud. After all, people can adapt to anything and I'm not being in denial here. I just have too much choice. The choices that give me something to regret. Damn you choice! I am only a sheep-like human. I am no God. I cannot cope with excess choice! Give me back my innocence. Send me back to the matrix. Give me back my humanity!

Ahhh.......so I sit here on my bed, in this wonderful hotel, with fresh city wind coming in through my window opening slit, a night view of the city and a river that does not let this place become still and stale....and I do not know where I am going. And as long as I do not know, I am happy. When I think I am going where I want, I am alright. But when I hear those words on the phone and the joyful tones that are covered over and in it, my heart sinks....and I don't know what to do. I must, begin on my preparations. And I must go one way. One way or the highway. One way or into the river (metaphorically, don't worry).

evolution of written language.

2008-10-06T21:48:00.000-07:00

languages probably started as speech, maybe first to grammar, but eventually for many to the written. maybe even before it became written, the concept of the breakdown of a word was already created in our heads.

how do we classify english as alphabet based and japanese as syllabary based if not for the written forms (or even the adoption of alphabets to explain the sounds of a japanese minimal sound, as we also do so when we written the pin yin of mandarin)?

today i am thinking about English, since it is the language i use most. it seems that the written form of it was transcribed phonetically. we assigned "a" to a certain sound (as it turns out, we have more than one sound assigned to "a" as we have "air" for the first "a" in "Africa", and "ahh" for the last "a". In "Goldman", it is "err" and there wil be many more). So maybe i just contradicted myself. Did we derive "a" phonetically? if we did, we jumped too far ahead, because later we would break it down using tools like the International Phonetic Alphabet. those alphabets are greatly reduced in ambiguity.

so, why don't we spell phonetically and write with IPA alphabets? it it just because we have already a strong writing system in place? Where did this alphabet system come from?

What is more concerning is this. What if we did create the alphabets phonetically? What if we has decided "rock" would be spelt "rock" because we managed to break down the word we spoke into 4 sounds (r, o, c, k) and we created the spelling? maybe we were not smart enough as we seem to be now then and did not realize that we had ambiguity in our pronunciation of our primitive alphabets. why does IPA use 3 alphabets? was "ck" considered one sound then and now considered one under a new symbol used in the IPA?

english surely isn't a great example because it's derived from older roots like latin right? or greek? or both and more probably. why, in english and other languages (for now i can only think on alphabet based ones and not others like Chinese) do we have a spelling that does not immediately show the pronunciation? I had learnt to read from those alphabets. why do we have silent alphabets? perhaps we simplified languages over the centuries too much (which makes it less complex though, surely?). how do we relate spelling and pronunciation now?

maybe...the alphabet isn't as strong an influence as the smaller words we had come to learn through the alphabets and then adjusted in terms of sounds. Like "work", pronounced (by me at least, i am quite sure same for most others to consider this the 'right' version) "werk". so maybe we used the 4 alphabets at first to make "werrr...orrr....rrrr....kkhh"..."woorrrkh"..."workh" and then we decided it would be "werk". and so now, "working" is "werking", "workplace" is "werkplace".....then...."world" extracted "wor" as "wer" and made "world" into "werld".....or do you say it some other way? maybe..."werl"? and so a big bunch of strange rules appearing almost with some and no logic took over everything.

anyway, since this is just academic....i can find more info online when i have the time.

Bailout, without a fight.

2008-10-03T13:30:00.000-07:00

263-171 from 228-205.

Apparently, the bailout has become more receptive with the added 100 billion dollars worth of tax breaks in various matters such as movie production, wooden arrows of some sort for children, racetrack ownership, and in perhaps the more useful field of alternate energy. But what has all these got to do with the subprime crisis? Apparently $17b in tax incentives for alternate energy, but $700b elsewhere. Which part of the bailout or rescue plan is a rescue, and who is being rescued?

What will happen with $700b pumped into the economy? Unless basic monetary policy is not sufficient here due to the complexities of the real world, more money of such high quantities will create inflation. Higher prices on goods. Lower purchasing power of the American dollar. Prices of bread may rise and the same will follow for milk, eggs, candies, soda, clothing, gadgets, and even oil. After all, taxes on oil and gas production is set to be raised to fund the bill's incentives for green energy. In the big picture, that may encourage companies to move toward a more environmental source of energy production and expedite the move to eco-friendly fuel. Thomas Friedman may be getting the results of his arguments. However, I suspect that a switch to green energy is not going to be swift and easy and the average American is still running his or her vehicle on oil. Oil prices have gone up from about $2 per gallon to over $4 per gallon in two years. Can we expect oil prices to fall in the future? No. Firstly, people are so dependent on oil in america and the producers have so much more power than the consumers that they would not consider dropping prices for the welfare of the people at the expense of their revenue or profit. Secondly, oil production has gone up and so this cost, in this oligopoly, will be reflected back onto the consumers. Surely, oil prices will jump. With an increase in prices of commodities, the bailout has yet to address the common person. Will any of the $700 billion of the bailout or the $100 billion in tax breaks go toward subsidising the commodities that the average person considers a neccessary good? I don't know. But as of yet, I have heard nothing about that. If there is indeed subsidising on these products, does it cover the negative impacts the bill would have financially cost? Will solar powered sedans be available at competitive prices to the public soon? Will they be subsidized so the less affluent people in the country can trade their oil-dependent vehicles for something that runs cheaper?

Here, Thomas Friedman will be disappointed with the truth of his analogy of nobody wanting to pay extra to have his lamp powered by green technology when he already has light from his lamp. Perhaps he would if he knew that a non-green technology driven lamp will not be available during his time due to decreasing natural resources. But oil is not exactly running out in the lifetimes of the leaders of the nation. Will the goverment spend money to subsidise the people and help usher an era where funding will no longer be available from the taxation of oil? When J.P. Morgan found out that Nikola Tesla's free power Wardenclyffe Tower would conflict with the idea of a meter to charge for electricity or for the need to construct cables for the transmission of electricity, both ways through which a business was possible, investing came to a halt and was advised against by Morgan himself. Unlimited and free electrical and related power in the world, were it truly possible by Tesla's tower, was denied to the world in place for monetary profit. Surely the national government must have known of Tesla's project, if for no other reason but national secutiry. Surely, it could have provided the funds if it so desired as it would later fund space exploration. And surely the priorities of the governments and the nature of men have not changed considerably to warrant trust over distrust that one should expect government support toward free energy.

Tax breaks are instead directed into movie production. While some may consider movies a neccessary good, the vast abundance of entertainment available for free on the internet should not make it as important a product as basic groceries or oil. When Merill Lynch is being bought over and other financial institutions are collapsing at the benefit to the surviving players, the cost of making a movie is getting cheaper. The government is claiming less money from the movie production industry for its budget and probably going to claim it instead from somewhere else, possibly the households. Racing car tracks will be taxed less. Who will be taxed in its place? After all, $700 billion dollars and more is being transferred out to save the financial institutions troubled by the subprime crisis. Will the money come from withdrawing military prescence in the Middle East? The tax breaks for those industries are irrelevant.

A saving of the companies that have until now been financial giants will surely save a lot of jobs. It will keep employees with a salary. With retrenching or retiring of some employees or with a company deciding to hire more people, this also means jobs for people seeking to be employed in the relevant field. But if the purchasing power of the average person's salary in that field of business and that of someone in a totally different industry declines due to increased cost of living, then even among the small players of the world's money, the share of the pie is being redistributed. Those in the business sector may get a slice but also a considerable amount taken back in the form of a higher cost of living. Those in other sectors that have no benefit from the bailout will have more of their pie taken away too. Some will have less money so that more people have some money. But then of course, surely people employed in the area of business could get a job outside of those firms that are saved by the bailout whether in another business sector or in an entirely different field altogether. Without the sustaining of these financial giants, workers in this financial sector may be laid off and the high earners in the field will stop, temporarily or not, getting thier large salaries. In that respect, less people will have some money (in terms of a regular pay) so that more people will not have less money.

The first case sounds rather socialist - taking money from some and having more people have money. But it becomes capitalistic if the new people make more money than those who paid the sacrifice.
The second sounds capitalistic - less people with money so others can have more money. But it is also socialist if the people paying for the benefit of the others were the richer lot.

What happens now to the free market model? A $700 billion investment into the companies the government deems it wants to uphold, probably paid for by the average taxpayer, blatantly resembles a command economy. What's more is that there was not even a fight. The rejection of the bill 5 days before it was revised with auxillaries and approved surely does not constitute even a decent show of force. The first bill was ridiculous with its request for total control over bailouts in the hands of one man. Yet, the ridiculous only became more ridiculous 5 days later before approval.

meanings and language as communication

2008-10-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

i was watching a talkshow about business, regarding the economic crisis in US, and the guest was chatting about leverage and such. have you wondered how so little words can mean something so deep? by deep, i mean a concept that's not just visible but something more abstract. leverage may not be an abstract idea, but other abstract ideas, especially those not described by mathematics, are often described in language and words. how do we understand these concepts through the usage of words? how do we understand a brand new idea that we have never heard of from the words spoken to us and the associations we have with those words?

do we need a model already somewhat similar to the new idea in order to have words merely mold it in a certain direction and give us a new picture? or can words alone, perhaps the method of phrasing, the chronological order of the words and sentences spoken to us, the pace et cetera all included, transmit a new concept in one person's mind to another person's mind? how accurate is this transmission of the concept? is it possible that after a conversation, two people seem to agree on the nature of a concept...that in their further talks they don't find any inconsistencies or misunderstandings...and yet the concept is different in each person's mind?

art is a way of expression. in various piece of art, the picture has a meaning to the artist and the picture is shown to an audience to convey the idea. there are also art whereby the picture is intended to mean different things to different audiences. perhaps there are pictures that don't even have meaning at all to the artist. for those, an audience might nonetheless derive a meaning either because the picture strikes an idea in them or the audience expects a meaning within it and leads his or her mind down a certain path that eventually force creates an idea to identify with it.

this is interesting. language is like art. it is yet another form of expression, as is music, drama, poetry (what i considered language but merged with a sort of rhythm, tune and rhyme), and all sorts of devices, including new or radical ideas...perhaps like a man jumping in a trash can attempting to convey a message, which for all i know could be "the children is our future, we should invest in them" or something else like " music is the key to the soul". but language is the most used of all. it is, perhaps, the most fundamental. everybody uses it and often effectively. to discuss music, we use words to convey the feelings we feel. we don't discuss how we feel about Chopin's ballades me playing the drums and you replying with tunes on a flute. we don't discuss it by me performing a mine and you conjuring what you can by performing whatever crazy stunts you can. perhaps we could do this to express our ideas, but we don't. language is effective and much less tiring. we have a tongue and mouth. but then again, we have fingers and toes. we have eyes too and although it apparently conveys a lot, how can we initiate and proceed with a conversation on current affairs and how we might be able to solve our economic crisis with our eyes alone. when it comes to something more abstract, the visual isn't enough or precise enough but words, newly conjured words, can somehow bring the idea to life. probably the next best thing is sign language. but then, i guess i have to define "language" in this context more strictly to the spoken or written word, including widely accepted languages like English, Arabic, and Chinese, but not mere symbols written on paper that the reader doesn't know how to decipher.

ah! so the key is this. the secret to effective communication is the synchronization of the encrypting mind and the deciphering mind. the language is but a code. all English speakers have the key to deciphering the words to an idea and the more similar the "version" to the one of the one who spoke or wrote, the closer the accuracy of the communication. if the speaker of writer thinks of a boston terrier and says dog, then the idea is most efficiently gotten across if the receiver pictures "dog" as a boston terrier and not a siberian husky.

subprime mortgages.

2008-09-30T18:05:00.000-07:00

subprimes mortgage loans are given to people with poor credit score or basically someone who cannot get a prime mortgage. in that, i just learnt that normal mortgages are called prime mortgages.

the main difference in the mortgage loan itself to the borrower's concerns is that subprimes offer an introductory period during which interests may be low or the payment only covers interest and not the principal. basically, the required monthly payments during the introductory phase is lower than normal. if that's not the main reason why people get subprime loans, it's because they simply cannot get normal prime loan due to bad credit and no approval.

why so many subprime loans given out? because the system largely used brokers who got a commission from selling one of these loans, i.e. getting someone to get the loan. therefore, the incentive for the broker is maximising sales and he is not concerned with whether the borrower actually is trustworthy or has a decent background for a loan et cetera. to get more commission, some - not all probably - may employ cheating tactics. to cheat the borrower, the house in question may be overvalued. to cheat the lenders, information may be bent, twisted, or omitted in order to qualify the borrower for the loan.

problem arises when the borrower is unable to make his or her payments. one, it could be because the introductory period is over and the interest rates jump up. for example, during the 2 year introductory period of a 2/28 (2 year intro, 28 year remaining) mortgage loan, the interest rate may be 1% [number arbitarily chosen by me]. the monthly payment is lower. though i did not check, it makes sense to think that the monthly payment has not been the same and not that the only effect of a lower interest rate is that during the intro period, less money is allocated to the interest payment and more to the principal. after the intro period, the interest rate may jump up to 5% (or perhaps 5.1% if a normal 30 year prime loan would have a 5% interest rate and because of the subprime discounted intro period, the remaining 28 years require a 5.1% interest rate to balance the figures). the fundamental idea is that the payments increase. the borrower cannot repay and defaults. foreclosure occurs. the lending institution now takes the house.

for the borrower, this spells doom because he or she has no house now. but the economy and my academic interest is more concerned with how this affects the market altogether and created the economic crisis. I gather that the main issue now is not just that the lending institutions have a lot of houses, but because the houses are depreciating in value. this happened because of the housing boom following the subprime lending but with it failing, the houses started to be foreclosed and the supply vastly exceeding demand. the lending institution may have gotten some of its loan money back from earlier payments (say 10% until the borrower defaulted) and now claims the house which is however only worth say 60% of the loan. Assuming the house can be sold at that value, the net loss is 30%.

who lent the money. because of the securitization of subprime loans, as it is called when these loans were packaged into an investment vehicle and traded on the market, the money lenders (I believe normal prime loans are also securitized and traded on the market?) turn out to be the regular market trader. the straw through which they lent turn out to be investment corportations such as Merill Lynch and other similar institutions, though not limited to them. With the value of the product, being the house, dropping, it should only follow that the value of the stock is perceived to be lower that what people had imagined it to be. instead of rising, say from $20 a share (or is it stock) to $21 and above (as property was perceived to always appreciate in value), a 60% value of that share would now be $12. Though it may not reflect on the market, confidence drops and people start selling. perhaps that is the power of efficient markets and perfect knowledge, as I somewhat understand it. Selling and selling leads to the stocks losing value. I don't know how, but this causes the company to collapse.

well, apparently the sell of stocks is not directly a cause of the company's failure. a company does not pay when shareholders sell its stocks nor does it earn money when another buys it except for the time when stock is initially issued and sold. the relationship here occurs because the firms involved are investment firms and banks (Merill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros, Washington Mutual...). With them, their existence is dependent on people's confidence and pumping of investments through them. The falling prices of the company's shares signal that something is wrong and confidence drops, decreasing investments and initiating withdrawal of savings and investments from the firm. After all, the former is an investment in the firm itself and the latter investments through the firm into another company.

why did the borrower take the loan when they knew the interest rates would jump after the introductory period. The simple guess is that they needed or wanted a house and the intro rates were easier than going straight for normal rates. Not only that, they may not have been able to get prime mortgage loans because of their credit history. The profile of the borrower is poor and less able to afford housing. Both the borrowers and lendings assumed that the people would become wealthier and would be able to afford the normal interest rates after the intro period. Not all subprime borrowers have defaulted, so subprime lending has worked for some in giving them a home. As for refinancing, it was difficult as the houses had depreciated in value (or they were overvalued in the first place and the loan was too high compared to the real value of the house).

then there are speculators who purchase the house with a loan and low monthly rates with the intent to sell high as the property appreciates in value and covers the initial principal loan, interest paid so far (which is low during the introductory period and therefore appealing for such speculation), the effects of inflations, and the early repayment charges all combined with yet a profit. such speculation widens the gap between the actual demand for the houses and the supply as the housing boom took place.

so the subprime crisis is basically lending to the wrong people (in the sense that they ultimately failed to keep up payments), the devaluation of the houses caused by excess supply and foreclosures (would the problem still happen if the houses were not depreciated but merely vacant and owned by the bank with the value of the house and money received back from the loan so far equal to the principal loan issued? in such a case, the only loss I see is the loss from not getting interest payments from the initial loan. however, if the house continued to appreciate in value as property should have, no net loss would have occured, yes?), and panic and drop in confidence leading to pulling out of investments and savings in and through the financial institutions.

the first reason constitutes a range of factors such as poor rating on the actual risk of the securities, bad regulations perhaps with apparently banks being forced to give subprime loans or be sued, a faulty system of commission for the brokers which led to loans being issued to people who perhaps were very likely to fail to keep up their payments et cetera.

life of pi

2008-09-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

information about animals and their nature.

habitual...animals prefer habit.
[ reflection: same thing can be applied to humans. human to gods, humans to authority, women (traditionally submissive) to men (traditionally leaders) ? ]

ending reveals a more grim actual happening of events, covered up by Pi to cope with the craziness.
which story to believe? either makes sense. the animal one is fantastic but plausible, the other mundane and dark. religion is like that? the canons are like the fantastic?

also, why do people (as the 2 japanese at the end of story) want to believe the mundane one? more predictable? people only believe what they can believe? that's one side. the other side (animals and fantastic) hard to believe so rejected? same for religion? flaws on both sides? one does not want to accept fantastic stories that don't fit in with historical trends or already comfortable data and ideas? other side might be lost in fantasy?

hint that the dark story (without animals but with humans killing one another) is the right one
...forgot what it was.

war and peace

2008-09-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

attempt on war and peace, months after failing to complete reading "the idiot" and years after the same fate with "the brothers karamazov". These russian authors...the way the write...it's hard to read on not because it's boring but because the bulk is in the details.

war and peace.

bookI

lady holds a ball. Peter comes around and doesn't quite fit in. lady keeps a watch on him to avoid him making any unfitting remarks but she doesn't succeed entirely.
family does not seem to want peter to visit his father. peter is illegitimate son of a prince who is dying. prince has left all his belongings to peter and other family members are trying to find that will and destroy it. the will, or letter, wants to legitimize peter as son and give him his belongings. peter doesn't know what's going on but lady looks out for him and confrontations occur at the old man's house.
old man finally dies. but no info about wealth yet in story.
another prince and his son. prince sends son to army to find Napoleon's french forces.

bookII

soldiers at a parade. minor confrontation between inappropriately dressed soldier (D...something) and officers. D... was a officer, demoted to ranks. idle chat in office and one makes fun when news of austria's defeat arrives.
battle area. a certain colonel and his regiment are told to burn the bridge. they do so with minor losses which are not even told to higher authorities (not worth mentioning).