Seriously?

So I saw this appear on my facebook. My only reaction, is really? And this has been shared by 300+ people? I'm not even going to respond to it, I'll let you read it for yourself. Gives a few laughs I guess.

Sermon Ruminations

So the pastor at church said that she knows that she knows that she knows that God speaks to her. One of the few places in the world, where you can be sure something is true if you try hard enough to believe it.

Minecraft and Life

If you're younger than 30 and have not heard of Minecraft....then well I guess you do have a life. Minecraft is an open world  type game...meaning they plonk you in a world full of blocks without any instructions. There is no purpose to this game. There is no ending to this game. There are no bad guys in this game (unless you consider the wildlife that wants to eat you as bad guys). You can craft tools and build shit and stuff.

As per the cracked video (the second one above), it's basically like life. In a computer game. Where there is no such thing as circles or curves. But I think this raises one very important point:

A creator, does not necessarily entail an objective meaning for the creation's existence.

Rick Warren who has gain worldwide fame for the "Purpose Driven Life" series of books, is pretty sure that  only with God can there be real objective meaning or purpose. This is also the call cry of many other Christian and religious folk. If you don't believe in God, you're condemned to live life as a nihilist, wondering why you're sitting at home on a Saturday night by yourself and writing stuff on a blog instead of having fun with friends.

Well, I think Minecraft proves you wrong Mr. Warren. Minecraft is an example of something that has been created. There is a creator, Mr. Notch. There is an open world, with people playing in it. And yet...there is no objective purpose to the game. There are no fixed rules. There are no guidelines. And that is the brilliance of the game. That is why people love it.

So no, just because there is a God, does not mean that that God has decided a cosmic plan and purpose for every single one of us.

But really, do we need a purpose? Why is it always about what we're supposed to be doing? As one conservative evangelical slightly crazy preacher once said (I can't remember who it was), "We're human beings not human doings".  Isn't the mere fact that we are alive enough? Isn't that meaningful enough?

Democracy

My home country has just undergone its general election. So I thought, why not write something related?

Democracy. The problem with democracy is that by definition, the smartest people of any group are in the minority. Here's a situation:

There are 10 people locked in a room with a bomb about to go off. There is a green wire and red wire, cutting one of them will detonate the bomb and cutting the other will save the day. 1 of those 10 people is a bombs expert. The others know nothing about bombs. He tries to convince the others that they should cut the green wire. The 9 others disagree and decide to cut the red wire.

Democracy dictates that the decision of the 9 should be followed.

Questions

How is it that the church has made it so that an old homophobic conservative geezer who repeats oft-repeated religious cliches that any person who has been to church for one year could cite verbatim can garner so much respect and admiration as a great Christian teacher? On the other hand, presenting christians with different and new ways of looking and thinking of the Bible is received with a great big "meh"?

Doctor Who and Life

For those of you who don't know, Doctor Who is about the Doctor, one of the smartest guys in the universe who has a time-travelling machine in the shape of a 1960's british police box. He goes around having adventures and saving shit.

In my many days of having existential crises, when the days are dark, and the winds cold, Doctor Who has been there to supply comfort and joy. Here are my top six life lessons to be learnt from Doctor Who.

Oh he also regenerates whenever he dies...meaning that his body and personality changes and...oh nevermind.

Lesson #6: It's okay to be a bit silly sometimes

"There's no point being grown up if you can't act a little childish sometimes" - the Fourth Doctor


Lesson #5: When life is messy, cheer up and have an ice cream

I have to post this as a link for some reason.


Lesson #4: Life may be sad but it's also very brilliant

From Vincent and the Doctor:
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Amy Pond: We didn't make a difference at all.

The Doctor: I wouldn't say that. The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. Hey....The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice-versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant.
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Museum Curator: Pain is easy to portray but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world. No one had ever done it before.

Lesson #3: Everybody dies 

So it once occurred to me that my parents will die, that my siblings will die, that my relatives will die, that my friends will die, that my loved ones will die.That they might die tomorrow or the day after. How fragile life is. And I imagined life without them.It was sad.

It was strange, but this line from River Song from "the Impossible Astronaut" comforted me:

Amy: But all that's still gonna happen? He's still gonna die?
River: We're all going to do that, Amy.

It's inevitable, sometime at someplace everyone dies. It might come sooner or it might come later. There is no use fretting over whether we'll all live long contented lives. There's nothing we can do to change death. What we should do is live.

Lesson #2: Normal everyday boring life is just as special as any adventure

I have a feeling I can only embed one video per blog post so, you'll just have to deal with these links.

"For some people, small beautiful events are what life is all about" --Fifth Doctor

"When you're a kid, they tell you it's all... grow up. Get a job. Get married. Get a house. Have a kid, and that's it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It's so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better." -- from Love and Monsters (skip to 4:30 if you don't like ELO or don't like SPOILERS)

Lesson #1: Being logical and a realist doesn't mean you can't be optimistic and happy

This may not seem like much of revelation, but I've put it as number 1 as it has personally affected me. My personality is more that of a thinker...in saying that I'm not saying I'm a genius. I'm merely saying that if I were given a choice between following my emotions and hard cold logic, hard cold logic would be the way to go.

In my opinion, thinkers are generally more realistic. It comes with the personality. You think about everything, including everything that can go wrong. Passions and hopes don't pull your heartstrings that much. The probability of you being exceptional in life is significantly lower than being mediocre by definition and we accept that. When you think like a realist, you usually have a tendency to be pessimistic.

Most of the media doesn't help either, picture some of the great thinkers or at least thinking type personalities  that you read about or see on tv. They're not the epitome of happiness. Think of House and his misery. Think of Sherlock Holmes and his sociopathic tendencies. Think about Alan Shore from Boston Legal who's only healthy relationship is with an old man with Alzheimers.  The happy outgoing ones, are usually the dumb blondes or the adventurous types who use muscles more than brains (okay Indiana Jones was a professor, but really Indiana Jones is more of an action movie than anything else).

Even in philosophy, there weren't many role models to choose from. Wittgenstein was a social recluse who believed everyone else didn't understand his work. Soren Kierkegaard, died alone after not marrying his fiance and with his work at that time not being widely recognised.

Of course, every now and again you meet some thinkers who have developed their personalities a bit better. People who think a lot and yet are outgoing and optimistic. But I just categorised those people as different. They came from a different breed. They were born different.

The Doctor however is happy and optimistic, but importantly, has this genuinely sad demeanour. The image above, I think, gives the best picture of this. It's not a picture of sadness or depression, but just that lingering taste of melancholy. Unlike those people who really have a happy personality, to me the Doctor seems more like a person who has been beaten up by life but chooses to be happy and optimistic. He's the man haunted by the fact that he has, for all intents and purposes, eradicated his entire species. He's the man who realises that he's alone in the universe, and that no matter how many human companions he picks up, they will all die before him.

And yet he moves on and he's happy running off looking for adventures. Trying to take in as much life as he possibly can. Trying to do his best in this world. Trying to give his all eventhough no one gives back. And he is happy...or at least he tries to be.

Leftovers: Stuff

I thought I had posted this during the atoz, but apparently it was just saved away. Still interesting enough to be posted methinks:

Today I shall discuss a technical philosophical term...."stuff". I kid you not, take a quote from this which states:

These examples point to a ubiquitous but elusive conceptual distinction between stuff and things. Paradigmatic examples of stuffs are wood, water, hydrogen, and iron. Less paradigmatic stuffs include beer, salsa, and butter. The most general physical stuff-kind is matter. The concept of stuff is even more general than matter. Concepts such as ectoplasm, justification, or phlogiston may refer to spiritual or abstract stuff. ‘Things’ or ‘objects’ refer, most paradigmatically, to medium-sized entities such as tables and ladles, pears and bears, and locks and socks.

I still remember the example given by my first year philosophy lecturer. Let's go back to the cogito. You know, the argument that I exist because I"m thinking? Well let's say I am existing, but I don't really know what I am! I think therefore I am, proves that I exist...but what am i?

I could be an incorporeal being thinking that I have form. I could be programming in a computer. I could be a brain in a vat. Not all of these are material things, and so I can't call myself a "thing". The only way to encapsulate all of them is to call myself stuff.

Here are a few papers relating to stuff if you still don't believe me:

Simples, Stuff and Simple People- Ned Markosian

Some stuffs are not sums of stuff (get the pun?)- David Barnett

So the next time someone tells you that you need to expand your vocabulary when you use the word "stuff", tell them about the rich tradition behind the word.