March 2011
14 posts
On Gods and the Fruit of Knowledge
I was asked today how I can profess myself to be an atheist, as wouldn’t that mean I am completely ruling out even the possibility of god existing? Would that not be unscientific and unreasonable? My answer to that would be a yes and no.
I do think that from a logical and scientific perspective, that it is important to take into account all possibilities, regardless of their seeming implausibility, as to do otherwise would be intellectually-dishonest. Most of all, such a suggested attitude (the firm belief in the complete non-existence of supernatural god i.e. atheism) would put me in the same category as theists themselves, since I would be believing, rather than knowing. After all, I can no more completely disprove the the existence of god than theists can prove his existence - although atheists are a lot closer in that respect, as the evidence in favour of their case is much greater.
It’s important to make a distinction between the two, as the belief in anything - be it the chance of your baseball team winning, the odds of you making it to work alive, or existence of god, is not contingent on anything at all. Belief merely exists as a mental investment of confidence on an idea which can have a lot of credibility or none at all. It requires no purchase by reason or probability - just the hope.
Knowing, on the other hand, is an accumulated sum of knowledge, based directly on observation and empirical quantifiability. You can know, for example, that a bird shat on your shoulder, because you observed the milky excrement fall from its arse and stain your Sunday liveries. What you can’t know, however, is whether or not your wife sucked the dick of your neighbor’s dog yesterday whilst you were out. She might say otherwise, but as much as you might love and trust her, her words are something you can’t know to be true, but rather something you can only believe in.
And with that said, it might then be a little easier to understand my own perspective on the matter, which is basically:
“I don’t believe in god and have no reason to do so. Since there are no overt and unmistakable signs that god exists, I shall not preoccupy myself with the preponderance of whether or not such a being exists. I ground myself instead on the basis of that which I can know, and that which I might discover.”
Bertand’s Teapot springs to mind, and is an excellent comparison and point of reference for such a philosophy:
“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
Looking into that quote and the summary of my own thoughts, you could then infer that I choose not to preoccupy my mind and life on the highly-unlikely.
It is also important to consider the god/s if there are any, would exist at a level well beyond our comprehension - which is far more likely than the Judeo-Christianic notions of a personal god, obsessed with sin, transgression and the invasive passive-aggressive governance of individual human existence.
If there are gods, then they’d very likely be immense celestial beings or entities of some unfathomable variety. What’s important, is that I would not worship or regard them as gods in the traditional sense. I would not worship them for the same reasons an artificial intelligence should not worship me if I created it, nor the toiling ants on the lawn of my family residence, to whom I would seem amazing, immense, all-knowing and unfathomably-powerful - a creator and destroyer.
Which makes me wonder. I can’t help but ponder if religious faith is a kind of neotenic remnant within the human brain - a carry-over from childhood. The juvenile mind is one in which parents are all-knowing, admired, and by all accounts, godlike. Perhaps the instinct to seek such a force within our lives is so strong that people would conceive a substitute. In that sense, it might be said that gods exist as a parental construct for adults, and an invisible ‘third parent’ for the children subjected to such absurd ideas.
Boats Against the Current: Apple Releases The iSucker →
bschwartz.tumblr.com
In 2010 Apple created the iPad, a genuinely bizarre piece of technological absurdity. Just one year later, Apple has officially announced the iPad 2 which does everything the first iPad SHOULD have done while being both thinner and lighter.
Once again, I’m left wondering, why do Apple
whoresusers continue to gargle Steve Jobs’ balls? With each marginal improvement on his previous product he sucks theblood from your veinsmoney from your pockets. And you mock Microsoft? Jesus…just look around you.Let’s reflect back to 2010. Jobs could have stalled the release of the iPad for a few months to make sure that it featured everything the iPad 2 now does. But he didn’t. No, he put that baby on the shelves with the full intention of making you sell a kidney for the 2011 model.
Would it really have killed him to issue a “heads up”? “Hey man, don’t buy this today because in another year I’m going to make a better one that’s half the price.” Ok, maybe it would have, but that’s not really the point.
You know what Steve? Fuck you. Fuck you and your pretty little products. I’ll stick with Microsoft. At least they tell me when they’re fucking me in the ass.
I could not have said it better myself. As I had pointed out though, this phenomenon is part-and-parcel of the electronics industry in general, and a casual inspection of the market will make one privvy to countless other incidences. A good example of this is in PC hardware. The newest graphics cards tend to have extortionate price tags for the first few months - a cost that can hardly be commiserate with the rate of technological progression and usage of raw materials.
I think it’s generally the case that first-release or ‘gateway’ buyers tend to be those with a lot of disposable income. The old laws of consumer price elasticity are readily observable here. The hefty retail costs are less for the sum of the product’s parts than they are for the imagined ‘prestige’ of being amongst the first to own one.
I can’t say that I think that Apple’s release strategies are morally-sound, but they have done an exceedingly-good job at marketing the hotcake component of their new products - which are almost always grossly-inferior to the successive reiterations of the same product that come out within a few months.
I just find it funny because most companies market their newly-released products, complete with gateway prices, at the more affluent demographic, whilst Apple have found a way to convince the plebeian masses to splurge more than is justifiable.
Still, in a paradoxical consideration, I can’t help but wonder if Apple would be nearly as successful if their products were cheaper and more accessible. I can’t help but wonder if their success is owed to the fact that they give the proletariat a taste of the bourgeois life. In other words: is the success of their products directly related to their absurd prices?
Hey Leon- I had a theory, on the topic of love.
Would it be true if let's say you were studying something like commerce, business or international management- you'll be more likely to be exposed to vapid, shallow women who are only after your bank account (or gold or florins whatever)?
Would it also be true if you did something based in the arts, like film-making or poetry or contemporary art- you'll be more likely to be exposed to cute, deep girls who enjoy fun and cool pursuits that are inherently fulfilling?
As you can see, there's a bit of stereotypical cliched bias in these questions. But I would like your sincere opinion, Leon.
Regards, Clayton
In response to the first paragraph, I would say no, because ‘Gold Diggers’ tend to come in two distinct varieties:
- Those who are unable to acquire the means to a comfortable lifestyle due to poverty, a low socioeconomic status, or a deeply-misogynistic society. All three of these factors can serve to stymie their access to the kind of education, networking and connectedness that tend to serve as a gateway towards self-made wealth.
- Those who are too lazy or uncommitted to pursue self-made wealth. Women with such attitudes tend to come from a wide variety of contexts, be it one of wealth or relative comfort. What sets them apart from those in the previous category is that they are often well within their means to pursue such a thing, but choose instead to take the ‘easier’ or more-readily-available option.
I’d also like to point at that there is also a sub-category that can exist in either group, which basically includes women who are literally too dumb or unmotivated to acquire wealth through direct means, or those who are so skilled and familiar with the peculiarities of wallet leaching that they simply stick with what works best for them. After all, if you’re a stunning size 6 with DD breasts, chances are you could really ‘fast-track’ things along with the fruits of genetics.
I feel it’s also important to note at this point that such methods are not exclusive to the female gender, but that the current social norms and gendered notions of power and economy have made it such that it is often the fairer sex that resorts to cloak and dagger, as the wealth and power is so often concentrated in male hands. Examples of parallels exist within the gay community, where very young and attractive men are often espied in the company of significantly-older men who serve as their monetary benefactors.
But I digress.
You will often find that females studying degrees such as business, international management or commerce are actually highly-driven individuals who will not accept any kind of wealth other than that which they claim through the sweat of their brow. In fact you’ll find that most females undertaking tertiary study are very motivated, independent and self-assured – qualities that tend to preclude thoughts towards baser methods of acquiring a comfortable lifestyle.
In fact, chances are that graduate females such as those described above – especially from the high-wheeling realm of corporate competence – are more likely to forsake or shun marriage and relationships in favour of individual pursuits. So no, I would not be weary of such females, just a little intimidated perhaps.
The exceptions to all of this are some women from developing countries such as India or China, where tertiary study is by no means a guarantee of socioeconomic mobility. It is also often the case where such study is done with the prompting of their parents and the intention of making the females in question more marriable. You could even say that the degree would be largely ceremonial in that respect.
The more archetypal gold-diggers are readily observed in some of the more traditional locales for such activity i.e.: Thailand and the Philippines. Whilst I wouldn’t say that every single female there is a lamprey on the hunt for foreign blood, there is definitely an over-representation of them amongst the gold-digging league.
It’s also certainly of little help that a lot of unmarried Caucasian men who are of low eligibility in the west tend to flock to both places in their graying twilight years like pilgrims, where they are in turn much sought after by noticeably-younger locals who can see a brighter future in Australia, England or America, even through the obesity, lecherousness and advanced age of their suitors. You need only look around you in Australia for the profusion of old rotund men with their exotic ‘last-resort’ wives.
I guess both parties get what they want since ware for ware is exchanged. The women get their economic security and a ticket out of the developing world, whilst the men get a second chance at starting a family or finding a younger and more submissive spouse.
As for paragraph 2, I would say a concrete answer is harder to quantify. People generally tend to do arts degrees because:
- They are often ‘easier’, or at least are more suitable to right-brain thinkers, who tend to get crushed by the rote-learning tendencies of the mathematics and hard-science of Commerce, Engineering etc.
- They are repulsed by the prospect of soul-sucking occupations and the severe alienation from their work, and would rather do something ‘close to the heart’. It’s not too difficult to find people who would love to paint, film, sing or write for a living, but whilst it’s not impossible, I can guarantee that you would have a much harder time trying to find people who would want nothing more than to balance accounts, oversee mergers or buy and sell stock.
In my own case, and I suspect that of many others, I am undertaking my degree in Communications on account of a mixture of reasons 1 and 2, and I don’t see why it would be any different for other people, regardless of their gender.
That said, anecdotally speaking, the people I meet, work and socialize with in Arts are almost invariably more engaging, more interesting and ‘deeper’ than those in the other camp. It’s worth noting however, that attractiveness goes both ways, and that there are superb specimens to be found in both hemispheres. If you’d prefer to stick with Asians however, by all means, go for the commerce camp, as there’s never a shortage of our yellow stock there. You know how it is.
Now then, would you care to share with me your thoughts on your theory?
