PREAMBLE Google right now "on various kinds of thinking robinson" and hit I'm Feeling Lucky, then 'find' "On Various Kinds of Thinking". I would post the link, but I already have one infraction... -------------------- If you're too lazy to read the passage, then consider this: You think a lot of disgusting and detestable thoughts every day. I do too. So does Cogito. That sicko. But the ability to catch these thoughts in mid-flight and examine them for what they are is an ability I would like to see practiced in the world. Be the change you want to see in the world - Gandhi. If people could catch their conscious thoughts and interpret them with critical thinking, I believe we could be freed from our automatic ideological assumptions. Case: A girl sees another girl dressed prettier than she is, and her initial thought is, "That b*tch". After her initial thought passes, she catches it like a bird in the air and stares at it for a full minute. Upon investigation, she learns that the thought stemmed from her subconscious. Her subconscious produced this thought because of our biological desire for importance and value among social peers, in turn sending the "conscious bird" with the rude and lethal message attached to its little feet. Point: She learns more about her subconscious and underlying biological behavior. Knowledge is virtue, so she decides to reject her assumption of "That b*tch" and examine the processes in the other girl's head. Consider it
The following is a comment that I posted on somebody's blog the other day that had become much longer than I had expected. His name was Phil and he gave an extensive reasonable explanation to his problem with God... He claimed to be an agnostic because you can't really know if there is one. Today, I decided to feed my own ego and post this up here for your invading curiosity I'm up for debate, humiliation, what evs yo ---- hey Phil, I'm a Christian. I was born into a Christian family and I've been to church almost every Sunday for the past 17 years, and I do not believe that the Christian god pulled the universe out his ass and built little people for the sole purpose of worshiping him. BUT i don't think that this denial of a deity possessing suspiciously humanistic traits means you're an atheist. It really just means you know your history, and history tells us that other ancient documents like the Iliad and Gilgamesh are strikingly similar to the Old Testament, and that, historically, the bible is very inaccurate and contradicting of itself. These facts I think disproves the existence of Zeus and the Christian god, but I don't think it disproves God himself... because God is just a word that could represent so many things, and to associate it with a human-like personality is just selfish. To me, God is the engine in nature, our emotional charges, and a series of fantastic sequences and equations and natural laws so complex that it is really just simple, and I don't think the Christian god, as cool as He could be (sometimes), really measures up to this infinite standard. It doesn't seem right to just say, "Oh, we're all here by luck" because of how beautifully balanced the universe is... and if it is by luck, then it seems we're all worshiping luck, not God; and there wouldn't be any problem with that, because luck did a damn good job. so yeah... you're right about not being able to prove God. I can't even prove myself. I might be yelling at a tree right now because my senses are fallible, and if everything I perceive is possibly incorrect, how can I prove anything? but the idea of God... the idea of Jesus of Nazareth, the perfect man, has inspired me to strive to be that perfect man. You can completely disprove Jesus to me, but I wont care, because Jesus is just the idea that I associate with perfection, the thing i strive for (but will obviously never achieve). Plato was right: everything physical could be false, but everything in the ideal world could never be more real. To me, at least.