If that were true, you wouldn’t be able to recognize it in women.
Meaning
“Everything on the radio is crap…It’s fast food for your ears. It doesn’t make you think. It isn’t even about anything - not anything real. Don’t you think music should say something?” Hannah Harrington
And then there’s talk – squawk – radio.
“These songs tell me I’m not alone. If you look at it that way, music…music can see you through anything.” Hannah Harrington
Anyone here still believe that?
“We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.” José Saramago
Anyone here still believe that?
“Death is only meaningless if it does not change us." James Islington
Oh, it changes us, alright.
“God, it’s like reality’s completely shifted on me. I used to think I was standing on such solid ground. If I wanted something badly enough, I just worked like hell for it. Now I can’t decide what to do, which move to make. All the things I counted on aren’t there for me anymore.” Tess Gerritsen
Of course, that could never happen to you.
“Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.” José Saramago
You first.
Yuval Noah Harari
You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
On the other hand, has this ever actually been confirmed?
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.
In fact, for some – objectivists let’s call them – it’s not.
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.
No, really, actually think this through for once.
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
“We don’t own them…they own us!”
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
As for those who punch in and punch out…?
We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.
Does it know that?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
…deep inside me there’s a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person.
Me? Into someone who is considerably less fractured and fragmented.
Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?
Unless, of course, your arguments prove and clarify everything.
The fact that we cannot write down all the digits of pi is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.
No, really, is it a shortcoming?
One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.
Okay, but nowadays can one ever be nasty enough?
What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.
No, the other queer. But point taken…and then some
Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business.
If you know what he means.
New thread, perhaps?
Science
“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” Carl Sagan
In other words, you can’t just believe something is true “in your head”.
“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” Baruch Spinoza
Ceaseless indeed.
There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.
Of course, he’s now on his way back to star stuff.
“If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” Stephen Hawking
Come out, come out wherever you are.
“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?” John Maynard Keynes
Cue the objectivists, in other words.
“People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah’s ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it’s about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.” Neil deGrasse Tyson
Of course, I do what I can here.
God
“I don’t believe in God. I believe in…Al Pacino.” Javier Bardem
That from the flip of a coin.
“God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men.” Thomas Jefferson
Next up: principled slaveowners.
“Don’t forget to pray today because God did not forget to wake you up this morning.” Oswald Chambers
Next up: the morning from Hell.
“A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.” Victor Hugo
He meant Muhammad of course.
The world is a goddamned evil place, the strong prey on the weak, the rich on the poor; I’ve given up hope that there is a God that will save us all. How am I supposed to believe that there’s a Heaven and a Hell when all I see now is Hell.” Aaron B. Powell
Yeah, goddamn it, what about that?!
“If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees.” Lao Tzu
Cue Eddie Willers?
Iris Murdoch from The Sea, the Sea
Sometimes I felt I would die by wishing it when I went to sleep but I always woke up again and found I was still there. Every morning finding I’m still me, that’s Hell.
Well, get out of Hell then! The gate’s open and I’m holding it!
I can’t. I’m Hell, myself.
Tell me that doesn’t make all the difference in the world.
Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
Next up: her posts.
That’s how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that’s how bloody awful it is being Irish!
Surely, she can’t possibly mean that. Or what am I missing?
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
Not sure what that means? Figures.
Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time.
Let’s explain that. While we still have the time to, right?
I may add here that one of the secrets of my happy life is that i have never made the mistake of learning to drive a car. I have never lacked people, usually women, longing to drive me withersoever I wanted. Why keep bitches and bark yourself?
You tell me.
x5
1 Like
Death
“No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.” Samuel Beckett
How about now though?
“For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.” Plato
How about now though?
“Leonard asks me if there’s anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what’s the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that’s an easy one, my son, it’s whatever you want it to be.” James Frey
Ask how easy that’s going for me.
“They say even death can’t cure an idiot." Tite Kubo
And very, very few pinheads.
“You must know that I am made of death, from head to foot, and it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!” Gaston Leroux
Virtually, as it were.
“Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.” Gregory Maguire
Nope, that never works for me.
Richard Wright from Native Son
I didn’t want to kill! Bigger shouted. But what I killed for, I am! It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder….What I killed for must’ve been good! Bigger’s voice was full of frenzied anguish. It must have been good! When a man kills, it’s for something…
…or other?
An organic wish to cease to be, to stop living, seized him. Either he was too weak, or the world was too strong; he did not know which. Over and over he had tried to create a world to live in, and over and over he had failed.
Only now he was, well, running out of time.
For, in other words, anything to matter.
If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.
Let’s run this by the strict constructionists..
How constantly and overwhelmingly the advertisements, radios, newspapers and movies play upon us! But in thinking of them remember that to many they are tokens of mockery.
Then they invented the internet. So that, once again, nothing would change.
So far removed are these practices from what the average American citizen encounters in his daily life that it takes a huge act of his imagination to believe that it is true…
See, I told you.
If you think I’m telling tall tales, get chummy with some white cop who works in a Black Belt district and ask him for the lowdown.
And this time don’t forget to upload it to YouTube.
Aldous Huxley from Brave New World
No social stability without individual stability.
Let’s run that by the ruling class, for starters.
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Indeed: “Wage slave workers of the world unite!”
Behind Trump?
…reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays…
Let’s synchronize our atomic clocks.
“The Savage interrupted him. “But isn’t it natural to feel there’s a God?”
You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that’s philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to.
Besides, what’s one more God, anyway?
One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
Any volunteers?
To join me.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
Never again!
Then repeat as necessary.
Meaning
“When I reached the street I didn’t know whether to go right or left. Soon I’d have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.” Denis Johnson
Wow, does that take me back.
“After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited–long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms–what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling.” Alain de Botton
Fortunately, however, we did all end up here.
“To live, is to suffer. To survive, well, that’s to find meaning in the suffer.” DMX
Of course, he only had about 50 years to figure this out himself.
Did he?
“We possess art lest we perish of the truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche
He means religion, of course.
“So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason — to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?" Molly asks when Vivian reads some of these stories aloud.
“It certainly helps,” Vivian says.” Christina Baker Kline
Want me to read you mine?
“Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.” Howard Schultz
What we got instead: Scientific management - Wikipedia
John Fowles from The Magus
It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
I know that I do.
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
So, how might that possibly be appropriate here? And let’s name names.
“The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
So, don’t forget to vote!
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.
Of course, now he’s being dead.
I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.
Tell that to military industrial complex. Then get back to us.
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
Like, uh, logging in here?
Can we skip past the naughty parts?
Yuval Noah Harari
Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
Uh, theoretically?
The romantic contrast between modern industry that “destroys nature” and our ancestors who “lived in harmony with nature” is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.
That can’t be good. If for some more than others.
Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
Define “usually”?
This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.
In other words, our freedom is better than theirs.
So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.
So, instead, we killed Him.
As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.
Next up: as far as others can tell.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word (“good”, for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings.
Let’s start with this one: dasein.
Telling someone something that he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not understand it. If you have a room which you do not want certain people to get into, put a lock on it for which they do not have the key. But there is no point in talking to them about it, unless of course you want them to admire the room from the outside! The honourable thing to do is to put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest.
How might that be applicable here?
For remember that in general we don’t use language according to strict rules-- it hasn’t been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.
Logically, as it were?
Philosophy must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought.
Again…
Philosophy must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought.
Hope that helped.
It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves.
Then the part where the grooves themselves just get deeper and deeper.
Science
“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.” Isaac Newton
God, right? Until the child asks, “who sent God in motion then?”
“You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.” Ben Goldacre
My guess: that is exactly what they are thinking about us too.
“If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.” Bill Bryson
And, no, not just theoretically.
“What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school…It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see my physics students don’t understand it…That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.” Richard P. Feynman
He suspected, however, that some understand it better than others.
“I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.” Robert Sapolsky
Next up: scientism.
“The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.” Kurt Vonnegut
Or four if you count what we do.
God
“There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.” Victor Hugo
See, not much God and religion can’t be twisted into.
“Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will. Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race. What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.
Unless, of course, he’s wrong.
“There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the soul.” Neal A. Maxwell
Next up: shrinking and stretching No Soul.
“Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile…it an grow new life.” John Green
So, you’ll have to ask yourself, “am I suffering enough?”
“I’ve been a Christian since I was a little girl. But my Christianity is a muddy mess of thoughts and opinions and making God into what works for me-like going shopping at the mall and picking out whatever I want, putting together faith like I would an outfit. Somehow I don’t think the Creator, the I AM, the savior of the world is something we can mix and match to out liking.” Cindy Martinusen-Coloma
See, I told you. With so much at stake on both sides of the grave, you had better be very, very careful who you make that leap to.
“The true Christian was intended by Christ to prove all things by the Word of God: all churches, all ministers, all teaching, all preaching, all doctrines, all sermons, all writings, all opinions, all practices. These are his marching orders. Prove all by the Word of God; measure all by the measure of the Bible; compare all with the standard of the Bible; weigh all in the balances of the Bible; examine all by the light of the Bible; test all in the crucible of the Bible. That which cannot abide the fire of the Bible, reject, refuse, repudiate, and cast away. This is the flag which he nailed to the mast. May it never be lowered!” John Wycliffe
Your guess is as good as mine?
Iris Murdoch from The Sea, The Sea
However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a ‘bad trip’. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one’s stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. ‘Undetachable,’ I remember, was a word which somehow ‘came along’ with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course I never took LSD again.
So, how bad was your trip? Coming here, for example.
Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’.
Next up: “True in a way” here.
A childhood hatred, like a childhood love, can last a lifetime.
New thread?
It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who’s a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.
Decent straightforward violence here. And not just from the men.
You don’t understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You’re like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don’t look…
Ominous enough for you?
To say we were ‘in love’, that vague weakened phrase, cannot express it. We loved each other, we lived in each other, through each other, by each other. We were each other. Why was it such pure unadulterated pain?
Uh, Hell is other people?
Death
“Endings are not always bad. Most times they’re just beginnings in disguise.” Kim Harrison
Just out of curiosity, what are they here?
“That is death - shifting from “is” to "was.” Veronica Roth
Billions of them so far. In case you were wondering.
“Do you know why hurricanes have names instead of numbers? To keep the killing personal. No one cares about a bunch of people killed by a number. ‘200 Dead as Number Three Slams Ashore’ is not nearly as interesting a headline as ‘Charlie kills 200.’ Death is much more satisfying and entertaining if you personalize it. Me, I’m still waitin’ for Hurricane Ed. Old Ed wouldn’t hurt ya, would he? Sounds kinda friendly. ‘Hell no, we ain’t evacuatin’. Ed’s comin’!” George Carlin
Next up: Helene’s coming!
Signed, God.
“For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.” Hermann Hesse
In other words, whatever that means.
“Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn’t entirely there.
Yᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇɴ’ᴛ ʜᴇᴀʀᴅ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ Bᴀʏ Oғ Mᴀɴᴛᴇ, ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜ? he said.
“No, sir,” said Mort.
Fᴀᴍᴏᴜs sʜɪᴘᴡʀᴇᴄᴋ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ.
“Was there?”
Tʜᴇʀᴇ ᴡɪʟʟ ʙᴇ, said Death, ɪғ I ᴄᴀɴ ғɪɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴀᴍɴ ᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ.” Terry Pratchett
Kant would have told him, for sure.
“On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. … Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights.” John Muir
People actually think this stuff up. And even believe it.