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Being Ready to Believe
Hi folks. It's been a while since I've written on these topics. I'll explain why in a future post. For now, I'll only apologize for the hiatus, and offer you another dose of my rambling pseudo-thinkery.
In certain circumstances, is faith the best answer?
I just discovered the brilliant voice of Michael Kiwanuka a few weeks back, and ever since I did, his songs have seen regular rotation on the Goodspeed family playlist. I'm in no way a musical person, in that I can neither play an instrument nor carry a tune, but I've always been a great appreciator of those who can. Kiwanuka's singing reminds me of one of my absolute favourites, the incomparable Otis Redding, so naturally I've fast become a fan. I don't know, there's this ease in his voice that to me, somehow, seems... reassuring.
Why did God make rainbows?
Mysteries can be solved. Just ask questions that begin with "How" instead of "Why".
John Hobby is a reader of the blog and a Facebook pal, and the other night he told me a little story about rainbows. I'd like to share it with you today.
"As a young man I was taught that rainbows were God's promise never to flood the Earth again, and it stifled my curiosity about it. I was like "Oh okay, that's nice of God to remind us during rain storms, nothing else to know there."""But I do remember thinking that it was a contradiction, because I had seen rain storms cause flooding; especially in the desert where I grew up."
So after hearing that tale I did some poking around, and wouldn't you know it, the rainbow/flood myth goes all the way back to the bible. The reason that rainbows were the topic of our discussion was because John had already shared a recording of an MIT lecture earlier that evening; a lecture about the real physics of rainbows. While the video was an exciting lesson on the geometry within a common phenomenon, somehow John's personal story of divine promises gone unfulfilled, captured my imagination the most.
Top Secret Agents
Who's Really in Control of Your Destiny?
Allow me to paint a picture for you, one that will illustrate why it feels like you're being watched. I know I spend a lot of time debunking things on this website, but in this one case your paranoia is justified. There are indeed agents watching you every day, so many that sometimes you see them when they're not even there. They're in the woods and around the corner, and they're coming for you.
Anyway, back to the story. Here goes:
Full Disclosure
Google Calls Me a Failure. Now You Can Too!
In having a look at my most recent statistics on Google Analytics, I thought it was time to come clean. I've always tried to be (some would say embarrassingly) honest on this site, so I might as well take that approach to it's natural conclusion. Time to go right at the heart of the matter and admit how this blog is really doing.
Imagine you, the few regular readers of this rag, are the stockholders in a company, and I'll represent the CEO. As caretaker of an enterprise you're invested in*, I'm required to divulge any pertinent information regarding the potential success or failure of that enterprise. Well here's where I do just that, and Google Analytics is how I know what to tell you.
Left and Right and Wrong
Politics: Ignore it, and it will go away.
I know this educated, older gentleman of some local celebrity who absolutely detests right wing political thinking. At least, that's the editorial bent one can glean from the regular items he chooses to share on Facebook. His background is in the arts, and he's quite involved in Toronto's local music scene, yet he seems to spend all his time hunting down Huffington Post articles that support his ideology. He uses his lengthy social networking friend list to advance a very definite agenda of liberalism.
To be clear, if there are only two checkboxes in which to define one's philosophical identity, I'd have to choose liberalism over conservatism. When I was younger the choice would have been much more clear to me, and I'd have spent little time, if any, mincing words about exactly what those ideas mean. Youth is great fuel for the passions, and liberal concepts like equality, altruism, and free speech seemed like wonderful things to be passionate about. Furthermore, I've always believed in the educational principles laid out by the liberal arts, and equated liberalism with progressive-humanism directly. In short, I believed that leftist thinking was the most direct road possible to a freer, fairer, and more hospitable society in which mankind could live. Nowadays however, despite the fact that I have few beefs with liberal ideas, it seems increasingly true that I find liberals themselves somewhat grating.
Reason is No Reason
Many of my blog posts so far, while mostly rambling and nonsensical, have focused on issues pertaining to science and reason. While I doubt that a single one of them has been read end-to-end, and that most have been disregarded entirely, I've at least attempted to chronicle my thoughts on these ideas, for better or worse.
Why do so, beyond an overt attempt to bore some and ostracize others, you might ask? I've picked up hints that some people, made up at least partly by those who disagree with the conclusions I've drawn, would consider me at best long-in-the-tooth, and at worst a pompous ass. Since both of these assertions are largely accurate, I won't attempt to dispel them.
Do NOT Watch This Horsebleep Movie
'What the Bleep Do We Know?'
0.5/5 Stars
A tragic example of pseudoscientific fuzzy thinking. I couldn't finish it.
There's absolutely zero intellectual value in this picture. It's just filled with deep sounding utterances, which only sound deep because they're hard to understand, which are only hard to understand because they're nonsensical.
Trash, garbage, an insult to the mind of the viewer... utterly void of meaning.
And it's one of the highest grossing 'documentaries' ever.
