“When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God’s son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed – whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions – is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross — how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?”
-Nietzsche
Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
Good ol’ Nietzche!
Tuesday, November 8th, 2005The Bible is Evil!
Monday, November 7th, 2005I found this site dedicated to showing all the evil stuff that God is all about. I keep trying to tell people about this stuff, but most people don’t want to hear it.
The Official God FAQ
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005happy brain death
Tuesday, October 11th, 2005That’s me right about now. Happy brain death.
human doings
Wednesday, October 5th, 2005Men need to be useful; women need to be understood.
Eternal Philosophical Questions
Sunday, October 2nd, 2005Eternal Philosophical Questions
(hopeless tender yearnings)
skepticism
Tuesday, August 16th, 2005I realize today that I’m something of a radical skeptic. I don’t think we can know anything with certainty. We can believe things with absolute and unshakable certainty, but that’s not at all the same as knowing! This is because I can (and probably do) believe things that turn out to be wrong.
Luckily I can learn from my mistakes, and hopefully come out wrong with lesser frequency in the future.
QotD
Thursday, July 21st, 2005QotD: If it’s true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?
consciousness
Sunday, July 10th, 2005Excerpted and adapted from last week’s e-mail correspondence:
The problem of long term happiness has been an obsession of mine for years. The self-help gurus all say that happiness is not something that happens to you, but rather something that happens in you. In other words, being happy isn’t dependent on anything outside yourself. I have a hard time believing this though. It seems tantamount to denying the reality of the world around us.
Phil once pondered out loud what it would be like if we went through all our typical behaviors but with the sole exception that we weren’t conscious at all. I told him it reminded me of Monday. ;)
conscious – Saturday
unconscious – Sunday
subconscious – MondayThe whole “reality is in the mind of the observer” idea implies that the world ceases to exist when you sleep, and is recreated when you awake. The other theory I like is that all creation gets its size from invisible “size rays” which emanate from your toes and fingers, and this is why things which are farther away from you look smaller. It’s another wacky slant on the philosophy of solipsism, in which nothing is real except you. Logically unassailable but somehow unrewarding.
So yes, I do believe in an external reality. I don’t think I’m imaginative enough to have come up with the whole world all by myself.
slow recovery
Wednesday, June 29th, 2005I’m still trying to get back into the swing of things. It’s been difficult.
Yesterday I had to get up early and go downtown for a project update meeting. So much pain for such little benefit. It destroyed my concentration for the rest of the day. I kept flitting from one thing to another every 2 minutes. I couldn’t even watch TV!
I’ve been reading up on relativity, quantum mechanics, and consciousness. I’m convinced that these all tie together nicely somehow but I haven’t been able to understand the mechanics of it just yet. One problem is that I don’t know how to describe consciousness in terms of physics. There’s something there though, probably in the temporal perception bit, that I believe will turn out to be central to a deep understanding of the nature of consciousness. I’ll keep thinking about it.