Well, last time I checked, there were more than a dozen onions in my cellar. And since my cellar is orbiting the Sun… along with the rest of the Earth…
As for who says what about who made what…
This morning I had to shovel some snow. I live near a kindergarten so the sidewalks should be clean. Along with the snow, I also had to shovel some dog turds.
Snow coming down from the sky and dogs dropping turds are natural occurrences. People shoveling snow so that other people may walk on the sidewalks is de rigueur. Also de rigueur is to pick up the turds dropped by the pet you take out at least twice a day.
People have a clear idea about who is responsible for the dog turds on the side-walk. Even if they were dropped by dogs, the responsibility lies with the owners. It’s the owners who have raised the dogs, who take them out to poo and who ‘forget’ to pick up the droppings.
In the last couple of centuries, people – well, some of them – have also developed a rather clear understanding regarding the snow. Regarding the water coming down from the sky. About evaporation, clouds, condensation… etc. God is no longer held responsible for these matters.
Which brings us to the real subject.
There is a guy, Richard Dawkins, who tries to demonstrate there is no God.
And here we go again… I have at least a large china teapot. And since my house, along with the rest of the planet, does follow an orbit in the solar system…
More about who made what, if you care about the subject, can be found here:
I’ve been struggling for a while to understand why God is still relevant for us. Why so many of us continue to believe in him and why so many of us struggle to demonstrate he doesn’t exist. Why so many of those convinced he doesn’t exist blame him for so many of our own follies…
Because we’re ‘escape artists’!
So many of us continue to smoke. Since not everybody who smokes develops a cancer or dies of COPD – Chronic Obstrusive Pulmonary Disease, those addicted to nicotine find ways to rationalize their habit. For it’s simpler for them to hope they are among the lucky ones than to accept the fact that they’ve acted foolishly for so long. I know what I’m talking about, I’m one of these people.
Similarly, it’s a lot simpler to use God as a scapegoat than to accept full responsibility for your destiny. The less control/resources you have, the simpler it is to ask for God’s help. To lay your fate in his hands.
‘He must have had his reasons. The fact that I don’t know what they are doesn’t change anything. He’s in charge, I can do nothing but accept my fate!’
Same thing for the disbelievers. It’s simpler to blame (a) God, or (a) religion for aberrant/abhorrent behavior than to accept that human beings can be manipulated – in certain conditions – into such behavior. Into such inhuman behavior.
‘If they could have been manipulated in such a manner then I might be manipulated in the same manner. This is not acceptable. It’s their God/religion which is at fault. Something like this cannot happen to me. I don’t belong to any religion – or to a different one, so I’m immune to all this.’
How many times have you been hit by something you didn’t see coming?
Not very often… for the simple reason that these encounters use to end up badly! Bent fenders, broken bones… Hence we pay attention. Or get killed… end of story!
But how many times have you experienced bad consequences, really bad consequences, after misjudging a situation? After a ‘doesn’t matter’ uttered nonchalantly?
We make history. We write history. We read the history we wrote about the things we’ve done.
Then we keep ruminating about what we (don’t) learn from and about history…
Are we nuts?
But is there anything to be learned from history?
Yep! What happens when we fail to learn from the mistakes which keep shouting at us from the history books our ancestors had written for us. Had written to warn us…
The only intriguing aspect in all this is the courage of the person who had affixed it!
You see, the first religious beliefs/cosmological explanations maintained that the whole ‘creation’ had been given birth by the ‘First Mother’. People in those times – like all of us – were just extrapolating their everyday knowledge into the metaphysical realm. Which hadn’t yet been given that name…
After the advent of agriculture – which had introduced the notion of property/inheritance, hence the need to defend those things – men took over. As owners – better suited for war – and then as dispensers of meaning. A.k.a. priests. God followed suit. It had become a Father and a Shepard. It still is in the minds of the ordinary believers.
Reading some theology – it’s enough to scrap the surface – I found out that most theologians maintained that God was unfathomable. That its main characteristic is the fact that it is ‘hidden’.
Then how come some of us are so sure about its gender? About its will? About what it means for us to do?!?
Holidays are very good opportunities to reconsider, And to learn new things.
These days I learned that while having nothing makes you feel ‘uncomfortable’, having too much can be very limiting.
If you have just enough, you can go forward. Explore new venues. Learn new things. Enjoy life!
If you have too much, you spend too much time and energy protecting what you already have. Trying to get more… The venues open for you to explore are suddenly reduced to one! Only one… You become the guardian of your fortune! Can you enjoy such a life? Are you sure? Have you examined the alternatives? In earnest?
‘Are you implying that all wealthy people are unhappy? Unable to enjoy their lives?!?’
On the contrary, my dear Watson! I’m only saying that being wealthy is complicated. “Just enough” is a matter of individual ability to cope. That enjoying wealth needs a lot of skill. And that being wealthy comes with a lot of responsibility! Towards yourself in the first place!
And towards your kids, family and the rest of the gang…
I’ve been talking about complementarity, equality and freedom. The implication being that unless people treat each other fairly – as in consider the others as being equal, and equal with themselves – none will be actually free. Free to fully complement each-other. Free to ‘boldly go where no one has yet been’. Together. What’s keeping us from doing it? To figure that out, we need first to understand how we got here. ‘I’ve been talking about…’ To talk about something means the talker is aware about the existence of that something. They may not fully understand what’s going on but they have already noticed that something’s afoot. Furthermore, for a human to attempt to communicate about something means that that human considers there’s at least a small chance that others will understand the message. That others understand the language used and that those others already have a modicum of interest in that matter. In other words, any attempt to communicate means that those involved are not only aware that something’s afoot but also have reached a certain degree of consciousness. That they are not only aware of something being there but also aware that they, together, can/should/must do something about it. They key word here being “together”. Why bother talking about it when/if you’re able to deal with it on your own? Which brings us to ‘war’! How many do we need to be in order to ‘deal’ with this ‘thing’? How many of us will be able to ‘feed’ themselves after this ‘thing’ will be dealt with? How much will each of us have contributed to the whole process? How will the spoils be distributed among ourselves? How will we deal with the ‘loose cannons’ among ourselves? How will we know who will do what? Who will lead? Who will be responsible for the whole thing? This is the moment when I’ll remind you that this is a blog about the consequences of our limited consciousness. A blog where I gather my attempts to understand the limits of our ability to make decisions – as individuals, and the manner in which different societies have come up with different methods to mitigate the consequences of those limits. Happy reading, every one.
Destination first. If you know where you’re going, getting there will be a lot simpler.
According to Daniel Moynihan – “you are not entitled to your own facts”, facts are obvious. So obvious that doubting their existence, their factuality, would push us beyond the realm of the reasonable. Appropriating facts – transforming them into ‘private property’, banishes the perpetrator from the community….
Hm…
Let me put it differently. Moynihan had said something. What was it? A fact? Or an opinion?
Currently, we – well, most of us – believe that freedom of opinion is the cornerstone of our Weltanschauung. When it comes to facts… We’re OK with the definition – we do use the word/concept, quite extensively – but we seem to have some problems when dealing with the actual reality. Remember the still famous ‘alternative facts’?
Let me add something personal to all this. My opinion about ‘facts’.
The current definition is somewhat incomplete. We take something for granted. To the tune of no longer mentioning it. We assume all of us see the elephant in the room and no longer talk about it.
For something to become a ‘fact’ we have to notice it. First. And then we have to agree among ourselves about its meaning!
Things used to fall down since …. We’ve been discussing the matter since… we’ve learned how to speak! But gravity had become a fact only after Newton had noticed the famous apple, wrote about it and we agreed. Gravity had become a fact, and continues to be one, only because his contemporaries had agreed with Newton on this matter. And we continue to believe Newton was right!
In this sense, alternative facts have been with us since day one. Well, something like that… God had told something to Adam and Eve, the serpent had said something else… and the rest is history! For some…
Newton had said something to us. And most of us had chosen to believe him. Or ignore his words… Darwin had said something to us. Many of us have chosen to believe him. To accept his arguments about the matter. While some others have chosen to dispute Darwin’s findings. To actively negate Darwin’s explanations about how we’ve got here.
Gravity is a fact while Evolution is still a theory. Statistically speaking, of course.
In this sense, Moynihan was wrong. For his words to ‘hold water’, we must to agree on how to separate facts from opinions. Until we agree among ourselves about how to determine ‘factualness’, we’ll keep having to deal with ‘alternative facts’.
I actually cannot wrap this up before ‘unveiling’ my litmus test for factualness. Consequences.
Does it have consequences?
Yes? It’s a fact! No? Then it’s not – not yet, at least – a ‘fact’. It did happen – otherwise we wouldn’t be speaking about it. It even does have consequences – we do speak about it, but that occurrence doesn’t yet have meaningful consequences. It is not a ‘factual’ fact.
What WE know about the reality WE are speaking about drives ME to the following ‘inkling’:
We are living inside a three layered reality.
The ‘real’ one, the ‘perceived’ one and the ‘result’.
We ‘measure’ reality using our conscience. Through our senses. Very much like when we gauge a length using a tape measure. We apply the tape measure over the length and ‘read’ the number.
We apply the standards we’ve been groomed into over the underlying reality and we decide according to those standards.
Then we attempt to deal with the consequences of our decisions.
“Sheer hatred of the regime”….
Who’s painting the pictures we’re hanging on our walls? Who chooses them? Who has to make do with the ‘aftermath’?
nicichiarasa 