SH Thoughts

This blog is on the move… ;-)

2005-05-04T13:26:00.000-04:00

Dear readers and visitors,

As a part of my eternal struggle to make everything even more confusing and unpredictable than it already is, I decided to move my blog to a new home. Please record the new address and follow me there for more details and hopefully more pleasant blogging experience:

http://www.MyFreeThoughts.com

I’ll see you there. :-)

Blogger bugs...

2005-05-01T12:18:00.000-04:00

It seems that blogger has a new (at least to me) bug… It happened a couple of times now. People write a comment and the comment does not appear with the other comments, nor do you get an email notification about it, UNTIL someone posts another comment to the same post later... I don’t know if other people noticed this but it is a very annoying bug because I do rely on my email notifications to know when someone wrote a comment and I almost missed a couple of the comments so far.

Some things are better left unsaid

2005-04-24T17:41:00.000-04:00

Alarm. Confusion. Anger. Car.

The rhythm of the music wakes me up. The bass and the drums are giving me the strengths to be. Powerful relentless force from the guitar riffs carries me forward. I am one with the music. I am the music. The music is what keeps me alive right now.

The tires cry for help on the sharp turns. “Help!” they scream, “Heeeeeelp!” The noise of the engine competes with the guitars on the long stretches of the streets. The car is a deadly weapon. It is a metal casket rushing to its final destination. I am the only thing that stands in its way to destruction. I am the only force that makes it move. I am one with my car for that is the only way I can make it through the turns alive.

Is it rain or do I see some snow flakes? I reach out and touch the pavement with my tires. The street feels cold and wet. My rear shoes are very old and worn out, can they handle it? Am I going to slip? I better check my speed.

I am being sucked onto the highway. The fast lane. The streams of dirty water are tearing my face to pieces. I can feel the paint being torn off my sides. It’s hard to see. I wipe my eyes – left, right, left, right, left, right…

The high pitch of the guitars breaks into the routine of the rhythm. I see a battlefield. Black clouds are so heavy they almost touch the valley. Countless bodies pilled up as far as my eyes can see. Spears, swords, banners lie helplessly among those who carried them with pride just some hours ago. Nothing lives here anymore.

The lighting strikes. Its electric snake tears through the heavy air and touches the earth in the middle of the valley. But it doesn’t disappear. Instead it attaches itself to the ground and begins to dance. It is a flower of electricity glowing in the midst of death, destruction and darkness. It twists and turns slowly. It moves its neon arms towards me. It is calling me as it sways back and forth. “Here, here, come here...”. As it turns side to side I feel that every muscle in my body becomes tense. I am in pain. It is pain. I am one with the pain.

The phone vibrates on my side. “Yes. No. Okay. Bye.”

Turn, another turn, I stand on the porch of her house. I can see her through the window. She is sitting by the table. She doesn’t know that I am here. I take a few seconds to look at her face. She has an unusual face. She interests me. She saddens me. I don’t know her at all but I know enough to realize that she and I are alike. I’ve seen her eyes, they tell stories. She might have seen the lightning dancing on the battlefield. She just might have.

But she is not the one I am here to see. I ring the bell. Her friend comes out and we are back in my car.

At first she is quiet. I break the silence. She comes alive showering me with details. I comment, brief disagreement, silence again.

We are in a crowded restaurant. I dislike this place. The bird that made a nest in the letter “b” of their sign is the only life around here...

They brought my coffee. I look at her sitting across the table form me. She is lost in her thoughts. I look into her eyes. I want to tell her that I love her... but I stop.

Love. She hears this word a lot, but does she really know what it means? Is it just a word for her? Is love just a word? Is the meaning, the intensity, of love proportional to the amount of pain one experienced? Isn’t it utterly strange to speak of love in this place?

I close my eyes. My body drifts slowly through the air, forward, towards her. Nothing, not even the table can stop me now. Like a cloud my being surrounds her and I hold her tight in my arms. I don’t need to speak. I don’t need to say a word.

Perhaps some things are better left unsaid...

They say it’s cold today

2005-04-23T17:30:00.000-04:00

They say it’s cold today.

Liars.

Oh sure, it looks cold...

It’s grey.

The sky is a muddy milkshake. It is almost entirely uniform with occasional splattering of chocolate Oreos dissolved in its greyishness. It is depressingly dark, yet it is still the brightest object there is, for the light is still able to penetrate it and give us some kind of semblance of daytime. The blue sea of a sunny day is not gone forever, it is just behind the clouds, it is waiting its turn. Tomorrow we might have a day of blue. Today is grey.

It’s windy.

The trees are conducting invisible orchestra with violent movements of their branches. They are waving up and down, hundreds of little green flags in their hands trembling in the wind. Spring leaves act as if there were about to be torn of the branches and carried away. They are young and powerless, yet it is only though them the wind is capable to exercise its full power upon the trees. If it were not for the small green flags the invisible orchestra would fall silent.

It pours.

A little puddle of water in front of my window is peppered with tiny circles that appear and rapidly vanish into nowhere just to be replaced immediately by dozens of others. The surface of the water is the definition of randomness. No being is capable of discerning any recognizable pattern in such a hurricane of succession of shapes. The confusion of unpredictability is shaped entirely by the disturbance of the water. It’s amazing how logically perfect circles wreck such havoc upon the mirror of the puddle.

It is death.

I dial a number. My friend is very upset. His voice is raised, he is angry. He tells me a story of ducks.

Some people came late last night and set some baby ducks free in a little pond next to his place. Little ducks were hiding under the bush most of the night and now they are gone. “It was very cold at night”, he said. “What is wrong with those people?” he asked. He paused for a second and added, “I think the little ducks are dead.”

I look outside of my window, at the sky, at the trees, at the puddle. It’s not a weather for the little ducks to be out there all by themselves. No, definitely not.

“They probably just found a warmer place to hide…” I say into my phone.

I don’t think my friend believes me…

I look outside again. It’s still rains...

They say it’s going to snow tomorrow.

Liars.

I’ll wear my shorts and sandals out...

Two sides of an empty room

2005-04-23T00:52:00.000-04:00

I was sitting on the floor and I was drawing a picture of a rose on my big toe. The room was empty and dark and walls were painted in different colors. The wall in front of me was white and the wall behind was black. One on the left side was red and one on the right was blue. Two doors in the room were closed.

The door in the blue wall opened and a green man walked in.

“Hi!” - he said.

I picked my gun up and shot the man.

I almost finished my rose when the door on left opened and a yellow woman came in.

“I’m not really a woman.” - she said.
“I am sorry.” – I answered.
“My nails are fake.” - she said.
“Oh yeah?”
“My mother is a whore.” - she said.
“Hmm…” - I responded.

She made a few steps and stopped in a bloody spot on the floor. She looked somewhere behind me.

“What do you see?” - I asked.
“Red rose.” - she answered.

“Well, let me tell you a story.” - I began. “It happened a long time ago when the moon was full and the earth was wet. The wind was cold and the night was dark. A man was sitting in the room. He was painting a rose on a wall and he was so alone that he painted the rose red. And since then this rose is red on the black wall.”

“Okay.” - she said. “Now it’s my turn to tell a story. It happened just now - about a second ago. I felt something that I’ve never felt before. I think it was love but it has a dark side.

“I painted a rose in my heart so my blood can wash its sadness and loneliness away. But now, I think I’m dead. The rose is sucking my blood away and nothing can break the ties of love inside my heart.”

“Well, let me help you.” - I said. “I know just a thing to help you out.”

And I reached for my gun...

I don’t know why my life is connected to this rose in such a strange way. All I know is that there is no end to the blackness surrounding my rose and there are no edges to the emptiness inside of me. And it means that I’m happy.

------------------------
October 29, 1995

Translated from Russian. Maybe...

Evening by the lake

2005-04-18T22:47:00.000-04:00

Evening by the lake

Unitarian Jihad

2005-04-13T20:08:00.000-04:00

A friend sent me this link. This is pretty good: Unitarian Jihad

Blog restoration…

2005-03-26T19:56:00.000-05:00

Thank you all for sticking around and your support.

I am currently working on trying to restore some of my old posts. I found a way to restore the text of the posts but, unfortunately, I still yet to find a good way to restore the comments. I really want to restore the comments because there were some very good ones in almost every post. Even if I will not be able to do it immediately I will figure it out later.

That should teach me not to delete stuff… Argh… ;-)

Still here?

2005-03-24T04:08:00.000-05:00

I have to apologize to all my regular readers for disappearing of the face of the Blogger. I am going through some serious organizational and professional changes in my life and somewhere between trying to figure out how I can improve my blog, thinking of where I can possibly find any available time to do anything at all and trying to find the meaning of life I removed my blog. Part of me was saying that it is time to let it go, while other part hoped that I would find a different way to make it all work.

It’s been a couple of weeks and I am missing my blog and your thoughtful comments. So perhaps I should find a way to make it work. It is quite possible that with all the changes that are happening to my life I will need a way to communicate my thoughts even more than before. Maybe, I underestimated the value of this blog for me personally.

With that said, I am sorry for disappearing. Hopefully, you will continue to check back every once in a while. There are some new ideas that might be interesting. Consider this to be the second incarnation of “Second Hand Thoughts”. Stay tuned for changes and updates.

Thank you very much for your support.

The road to hell. Part 2: Myth of evil THEM.

2005-02-07T10:54:00.000-05:00

My last post touched on many issues and brought up many heartfelt, insightful and informative comments. I want to thank everyone for participating in our dialog, for taking the time to share your thoughts and for keeping this blog “flame war” free.

I would like to further consider one of several very important points that came up in our previous discussion, even at the risk of boring and depressing everyone to the virtual death. I figured that you probably did not come here for laughs anyway, so you are unlikely to be disappointed to find me in a depth of my second hand thoughts… ;-)

Nobody likes bad news, reading about other people problems is depressing enough, but to learn of some bad news concerning you is much worse. Having someone point out issues in our world is disconcerting, being criticized personally and having fingers pointed at you raises all the alarm flags within us at once. Our natural reaction is defense. We are being attacked and we feel that we have to flight the battlefield or fight back. Rarely do we see criticisms directed at us as an opportunity to learn something we wouldn’t otherwise know. But without disagreement coming from outside or from self one has no chance to improve.

Every single one of us at this very moment strongly believes something to be true that is in fact false. Our ability to be open to questions, to doubt, to be criticized and disagreed with is our only way to shrug off the weight of any false beliefs that we might hold. There are many problems with holding false beliefs, but one that is most obvious and yet the most dangerous is that until the time when you learn that you are wrong you are, well, so very sure that you are correct. Unfortunately, we often act on our beliefs and that makes any false belief that we might have a potential recipe for a disaster.

Some false beliefs are held almost universally, across continents, cultures and centuries. Even when such beliefs defy any common sense, findings of science and lessons of history people continue to see the world through the filter of such falsehoods.

One such belief that is held almost universally is that there are “good us” vs. “evil them”. We are always on the right side, have good intentions, make only minor mistakes, make the world a better place, knowing what’s best. They are mostly wrong, have evil plans, make huge errors, drag the world to its end and do not understand or know the truth.

In my last post I proposed that EVIL THEM are not some abstract persons out there to be somehow discovered but are in fact US. I don’t think that I convinced many of you. Which I suppose was to be expected. After all we are never like them. We might make some mistakes, bad decisions, wrong choices here and there, but we are not fundamentally bad, we are on the good side, we are for the better world, we know the truth. We would never be brainwashed, we would never be supporting evil decisions, we would never support organizations that cause harm and distraction, we would never vote for an evil totalitarian government, much less participate in hate crimes or cause physical harm to other human beings. Right?

These are all very natural and comforting beliefs. There is only one trouble with them, namely it’s that EVERYONE believe that they are good. EVERYONE believes those "I would never"’s to be true. Yet many people out there are wrong, have been brainwashed, do support organizations and governments that are evil and do at this very moment torture and kill innocent people. One must ask where do all those “evil them” people come from? It is easy to dismiss the entire question by attributing all the evils to some people with bad genes. Some “bad apples” among us are responsible for the bad things. And again, I am never a bad apple, right?

Well, unfortunately, the evidence seems to be to the contrary. The history and years of research seems to suggest that us, ordinary people, are just as capable, given the appropriate circumstances, of all the evils we ascribe to some abstract them. It is not a big secret that we are influenced by our surroundings to a great extent, but it is conveniently ignored by most of the people. The notion that we can be lead by some external events and influences to commit evil acts or close our eyes on evil deeds unfolding in the front us is so against everything we would like to believe about ourselves that we are protesting the very idea with every cell of our body. WE are NOT like THAT.

When people talk about evil on the mass scale they inevitably bring up the example of Nazi Germany and horrors that took place during the World War II. We ask “How could those people do it to the other human beings?” But we rarely ask, “Where did all those “evil” Germans come from to cause all the untold horrors?” Did Germany suddenly have a very “genetically unsuccessful” years when most of the Germans being born were pathological murders, maniac and people whom we might otherwise categorize as “evil them”? No, the reality is that those “evil” people came from people like us, ordinary everyday citizens of an ordinary everyday country. How could it happen? How could people like you and I turn into such monsters? Philip G. Zimbardo (see links blow) writes:

In Germany, as the Nazi party rose to power in 1933, no target of Nazification took higher priority than the re-education of Germany's youth. Hitler wrote, “I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. A violently active, dominating, brutal youth -- that is what I am after." (The New Order, 1989, pp. 101-2). To teach the youth about geography and race, special primers were created and ordered to be read starting in the first grade of elementary school (see Brooks, 1989). These "hate primers" were brightly colored comic books that contrasted the beautiful blond Aryans with the despicably ugly caricatured Jew. They sold in the hundreds of thousands. One was titled: Trust No Fox in the Green Meadows and No Jew on His Oath. What is most insidious about this kind of hate conditioning is that they were presented as facts to be learned and to be tested upon, or from which to practice new penmanship.

Please note Hitler’s quote in the above passage. It is a direct testimony to the assertion I’ve made in my previous post that evil thrives on ignorance.

“Well,” you might say, “all this brainwashing of German children might explain how they came to hate Jews but it does not explain how people came to kill and torture other people.” You are correct, it does not explain how people came to do the horrific things done during the war but it does explain why it became socially acceptable to hate and kill. Following passage talks about the murders. Zimbardo writes:

One of the clearest illustrations of my fundamental theme of how ordinary people can be transformed into engaging in evil deeds that are alien to their past history and to their moral development comes from the analysis of British historian, Christopher Browning. He recounts in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1993) that in March, 1942 about 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, but a mere 11 months later about 80 percent were dead. In this short period of time, the Endlösung (Hitler's 'Final Solution') was energized by means of an intense wave of mass mobile murder squads in Poland. This genocide required mobilization of a large-scale killing machine at the same time as able-bodied soldiers were needed on the Russian front. Since most Polish Jews lived in small towns and not the large cities, the question that Browning raised about the German high command was "where had they found the manpower during this pivotal year of the war for such an astounding logistical achievement in mass murder?" (p. xvi).

His answer came from archives of Nazi war crimes, in the form of the activities of Reserve Battalion 101, a unit of about 500 men from Hamburg, Germany. They were elderly, family men too old to be drafted into the army, from working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds, with no military police experience, just raw recruits sent to Poland without warning of, or any training in, their secret mission -- the total extermination of all Jews living in the remote villages of Poland. In just 4 months they had shot to death at point blank range at least 38,000 Jews and had another 45,000 deported to the concentration camp at Treblinka. Initially, their commander told them that this was a difficult mission which must be obeyed by the battalion but any individual could refuse to execute these men, women and children. Records indicate that at first about half the men refused and let the others do the mass murder. But over time, social modeling processes took their toll, as did any guilt-induced persuasion by buddies who did the killing, until at the end up to 90 percent of the men in Battalion 101 were involved in the shootings, even proudly taking photographs of their up-close and personal killing of Jews.

Browning makes clear that there was no special selection of these men, only that they were as "ordinary" as can be imagined -- until they were put into a situation in which they had “official” permission and encouragement to act sadistically and brutishly against those arbitrarily labeled as the “enemy.” Let’s go from the abstract to the personal: Imagine it was your father shooting to death a helpless mother and her infant child, and then imagine his answer to your question, “Why did you do it, daddy?”

Similar events took place during other dark chapters of the world history. Psychological studies demonstrate time and time again that we all are susceptible to transformation from good to bad (see links below).

I am not trying to prove to you that you are a bad person. I am not trying to make you believe that all humans are dirt. The fact is that we all have capacity for evil just as much as for good. But to divide the world into “good” and “bad” people is to avoid the truth. The myth of “evil them” is a dangerous myth because it makes us belief that we are somehow immune to being manipulated by others or by situation. Instead of erroneously shrugging everything off to some bad genes, some “bad apples”, we have to have the courage to look the painful and uncomfortable reality in a face and learn from it. We need to understand how normal ordinary people can be transformed into terrorists, murderers, torturers, warmongers, and into millions of people who actively supports those evils or stand by silently as those horrors takes place.

I don’t know about you, but I want to know what I can do to avoid becoming one of the elderly family men of Reserve Battalion 101, I want to know what I can do to avoid becoming an executioner of someone else’s horrific orders. I want to know what I can do to not be manipulated into hating my fellow human beings. I want to know how I can tell that I am not being manipulated right now. I want to know...

References:

A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil: Understanding How Good People Are Transformed into Perpetrators by Philip G. Zimbardo (PDF File)
Stanford Prison Experiment
The Milgram Experiment

The road to hell

2005-02-03T02:41:00.000-05:00

Have you ever been wrong? Fundamentally and utterly wrong? You know, one of those situations when you are absolutely convinced that you are doing the right thing, when your friends tell you that you are making a mistake, but you are so sure of your reasoning that you just have to dismiss all the suggestions and move forward with your decision. You might even experience a brief period of “See? I told you it would work!” You might walk around smiling and patting yourself on a back for being so clever and perceptive.

Only later, when cruel reality finally sets the record straight, when things become painfully obvious, your are forced to accept that you might have been mistaken. No, in fact, you were mistaken and about the only thing that you can think of is “What in the world was I thinking?”

How could you not see? How could you be so wrong about everything? There is no telling, but one thing is clear that if you knew what you know now you would never do what you’ve done, you would never believe what you believed, you would never make the same mistake again.

Most of the mistakes we make are very insignificant. Sometimes we do stupid things resulting in minor inconveniences, sometimes we lose time or money, sometimes we cause headaches to loved ones, sometimes we get hurt ourselves, but sometimes we hurt others. Sometimes we hurt others a whole lot. Oh how it pains us to know that we hurt someone... how sorry we feel for what happened... Oh how we wish that we knew better...

But did you do it because you were evil? Did you do it because you wanted to cause pain? Did you want for everything to go wrong? Of course, not. You had only the best intentions in mind, you wanted for everything to be well; you wanted a happy ending. People say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. They might be onto something.

But if you and I are capable of causing pain out of our best intentions isn’t it reasonable to assume that most of the people in the world are just like us? Sure, there are some people who enjoy inflicting pain and causing destruction, who will go out of their way to hurt someone, but I would have to think that such people are very few and far between. Call me an idealist, but I think that majority, a vast majority of the people are not pathological murderers, rapists, tyrants or sadists.

Yet we look around and we see that our world is full of horrors, destruction, poverty, suffering and wars. People are being murdered, starved, raped and tortured. How is it possible if most of us are good? How can good people tolerate, support or even promote this state of affairs?

May I suggest, that the people who stand behind the wrong decisions are just like you and I, they have only the good intentions and they are desperately trying to make the world a better place. They have children, they have families, they have friends, they have pets they love, they enjoy life, and they want happiness. Never do they think of inflicting any pain on any good person. The problem is that just like you and I before we commit our mistakes, they are wrong. Just like you and I they are wrong about the world, they are ignorant about facts, they are blinded by emotions, by false premises, by disinformation, by ideologies that are misleading and confusing. Most of them are not bad or evil people, they simply are ignorant, don’t understand or in a state of denial.

Have you ever met a racist who admits that he is a racist? Or if he admits that he is, who thinks that there is something wrong with it? I haven’t. Just the other day, I’ve met a nicest couple, the kind of people who are open, friendly and kind. The type of people who would risk their lives to pull you out of a burning building; who will share the last piece of bread with you if you were starving. The only trouble is that they think that Jews are responsible for the most of the problems in the world. Literally.

They would go on and on explaining all the conspiracy theories behind everything. They have “facts” and “references”, they read about it here and there, and they even saw “that” program on Discovery channel. Jews are out to get us and they are so clever about it that we don’t even notice most of the time. And if you are a very good listener they will even share the big secret with you: “Jesus was not a Jew”. That’s right, most people don’t know it but Jesus was really the same nationality as them. Imagine that? And they have a “proof” of that too...

Naturally, after being bombarded with so much “new” information I had to ask a few questions. “No. No.” they protested “we have nothing against Jews, they are very clever people, they have to be clever to pull this off, you know...” *wink* *wink* *nod* *nod* “No, we are simply telling the truth...”

He gave me the widest and the friendliest smile as he was shaking my hand goodbye and wishing me well and I thought, “Is this the face of evil? Is it?”

No, this is not a face of evil. This is a face of a careless driver speeding up the road just before he loses control of his car and runs some people over. This is a face of an airline technician singing his favorite song as he forgets to check an engine that causes a plane to crash. This is a face of president Bush telling us that we will “build a better world for our children and grandchildren” as he leads us towards more deaths and greater destruction. This is a face of you or I before we make our big mistakes. It is the face of blissful ignorance.

The evil in the world does not come from evil people - it comes form the lack of knowledge and understanding.

Do the math!

2005-01-15T19:27:00.000-05:00

Have you ever seen a man die? Not on the screen as you watch a Hollywood movie, not on a painting of an artist, not in your imagination as you read a book. Have you ever SEEN a man die, bleed to death, screaming, chocking on his own guts and blood? Have you? Have you ever seen a man being reduced to a wet pile of broken bones and flesh, a pile that moves, trying to reach out to you for help? Have you ever seen anything like that?

Have you ever been in pain? In a lot of pain, in excruciating pain when all you can do is twist your body in a ball on the floor, when you clutch your teeth or scream on the top of your lungs. When your nails go thru the palms of your hands. When your mind goes dark and the only thought that remains in your head is that IT MUST STOP NOW. Oh please, please, please make it stop, just make it stop… Have you ever felt that?

Have you ever lost someone you loved? Have you ever stared at the darkness, at the emptiness feeling broken and empty? Have you ever faced that inevitability of not being able to ever hear that voice or see that face? No more smiles, no more words, just nothing left. Have you ever cried until there are no more tears to cry? Have you ever faced that?

Can you add and multiply? Good. Add all the pain that you’ve ever seen and felt and multiply it by millions. And if you did your math right, the next time someone says “war” you would know what he is talking about? And until you’ve done your math, you have no idea what war is… Not a clue.

And so the next time you hear someone talk about the necessity of a war, the next time you go to vote for a politician who says that war is a solution, next time you think that war is just. Do your math! And then spit in their face, vote them out of the office and check your fucking temperature.

For when you think that the war is a solution you become war. You become the source of the unimaginable pain endured by thousands and millions. You become the cause of blood and guts, and tears, and darkness. You cross the line and you become your own enemy. You are no longer part of the life - you are death.

Do your own math!

------

Masters of war
by Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

Feeling is believing

2005-01-03T21:06:00.000-05:00

Someone wrote the following words on their blog:

I'm not sure I would consider myself [a skeptic]. i.e. I want to believe, not feeling God's warmth leaves me cold and depressed. I can't imagine a world without God

Below is my reply.

--------------------------------------------

I used to smoke. I smoked since I was a teenager and I continued to smoke for almost 20 years. Sometimes I smoked as many as 2 packs per day. I smoked when I woke up, when in my car, at work, before and after meals, while by computer, before I went to bed - I smoked all the time. And then one day I quit, cold turkey, no patches, no acupunctures, and no group therapies – I just smoked the last cigarette in my pack and decided that it was it.

Next several weeks were very difficult. Physical cravings as bad as they were for the most part went away after just a few days. The worst part, however, was figuring out what to do with myself. Cigarettes became such a big part of my life that a complex set of rituals was associated with smoking and I followed them almost religiously. When I lost my “ability” to fill my time with smoking cigarettes I found myself at a loss. What do I do with all those times when I usually smoke? What do I do with my idle hands? What about smoke breaks at work? How do people live like that?

It took quite some time to re-adjust but I finally figured out what to do with all these “empty” time slots. I filled them with other useful or sometimes not so useful but still healthier activities. I re-aligned myself to new things in my life and I do not even think about smoking anymore.

I know many people who left religion and they all describe something similar to my experiences of quitting smoking. When your entire life from the early childhood is set up in such a way that religion is an integral part of it; when everything you’ve been taught and everything you know has the idea of god in the center of it; when you are told that there is no meaning to this life unless it comes from the teachings of bible, it is almost impossible to imagine living without those ideas. It is only natural to feel the need to believe that there is something to it or to feel the warmth of connection with god that you are so used to feeling.

The question, however, is whether believing something simply because it feels good is a smart thing to do. I happen to think that feeling good is nowhere near a good reason to believe. Smoking cigarettes sure felt good to me, but no amount of beliefs in the positive effects of smoking would change the fact that it was harmful to my body, people around me, was a stupid and unnecessary thing to do.

The good news is that just like I found something more useful and healthy to do with my time after I quit smoking, hundreds of millions of non-religious people all over the world have found meaning in their lives, as well as warmth, love, peace, friendships, excitement, personal connections, appreciation for beauty, sciences and awesome complexity of the world we live in – all without the need to resort to mysticism of supernatural, beliefs in afterlife or god hypothesis.

Sure, leaving the fold of religion is difficult on so many levels, but finding your own meaning and purpose, discovering the world with new eyes, freeing yourself from irrational fears and attachments is healthy, a lot of fun and most importantly – it is the smart thing to do.

Good luck in your search.

Thank you.

Puzzled by atheism

2004-12-04T19:24:00.000-05:00

This post is a slightly edited version of my response to someone in a different forum. I was responding to the following:

I am puzzled by atheism because as I understand it, an atheist is one who is as sure about the nonexistence of God as a Christian, Jew, or what not is sure there is a God. I have yet to hear anyone who has any definitive proof one way or other about the nature of God or the nonexistence of God.

Webster dictionary defines atheist as “one who believes that there is no deity”. And this is perhaps how most of the people in the world think of atheists. However, I think it will be fair to say that many atheists have a problem with this definition. The definition that most of the atheists will probably prefer to see is “one who does not believe that there is a deity” or some variation of it.

At the first sight, this later definition might appear to be only semantically different from the Webster’s definition but in fact it does offer an important distinction.

One who believes that there is no deity is basically making a claim that deities do not exist. And as you have rightly pointed out in your message, this is the claim that might be difficult to defend due to the lack of “absolute” proof.

On the other hand, one who does not believe that there are deities is not making any claims at all, but is merely rejecting theistic claim that there are deities. In essence, this is a position of an agnostic to the question of existence of gods. Agnostic atheists do not claim that there is no god; they simply suspend their judgment due to “impossibility” to prove either existence or non-existence of gods.

The majority of atheists seem to be in the agnostic atheist “camp”. Sometimes agnostic atheists referred to as “weak” or “negative” atheists (negative because they are not making a positive claim).

The other, smaller, group of atheists is “strong” or “positive” atheists. Strong atheists do in fact make a claim that there is no gods. They use a variety of arguments to defend their position.

One of the arguments is the absurdity of requirement of absolute proof to attain the knowledge about the world. Not even the existence of ordinary everyday objects can be absolutely and undeniably proven. Does it mean that we need to suspend our judgment about existence of everything? Of course not. We simply work with the degrees of certainty. Some things are more certain than some other things. For example, it is more certain that the sun is going to “rise” tomorrow than we are going to win a lottery.

Working within this framework strong atheists evaluate all the evidence that is available to us and assert that the probability of there being any deity as described by any known to us religion is so minuscule that it is not worth our consideration. Therefore, strong atheists claim that for all practical purposes we know that there is no gods in the same sense as we can say that we know that the sun is going to come up tomorrow.

Why "Second Hand"?

2004-10-21T21:10:00.000-04:00

“What’s with ‘Second Hand’?" you might ask. Well, there are a few reasons why I’ve chosen that name:

I like the way it sounds. :)

I like that it has connection with time. One might argue that the second hand of the clock is the most important hand – it corresponds to and represents the basic unit of time.

It moves quickly reminding us how time is slipping away from us - unstoppable, irreversible and cruel. It is also the most energetic hand on the clock. Unlike liturgic minute hand or hour hand that seems to be frozen in time the second hand flies by, it is full of energy and life.

Perhaps it represents everything young, progressive and new. It might not be as wise or as stable as the other two hands, but who are we to blame it? We were just like that at some point, without a worry, sure of ourselves, open to the world. Well, hopefully some of us still are like that. But I digress.

A noun “Second hand” is defined as “an intermediate person or means”; an adjective “secondhand” is defined by Merriam-Webster’s as “acquired after being used by another, not new”. What does this have to do with someone thoughts?

Well, I believe that hardly any ideas are really new. Most of the thoughts, ideas and images that come to our mind are recollections of things we’ve read, heard or seen. Even the ideas that came to be known as the greatest inventions of their times where hardy completely original. People do not really invent new things out of thin air. New ideas are products of integration of old concepts and approaches.

It is not necessarily the ability to come up with original thoughts (even if it was possible) that is important. It is the ability to assemble old ideas into new configurations, patterns and concepts that makes the difference. It is ability to look at things from the new angles, to look at them thru different “eyes” that leads to inventions, breakthroughs and intellectual revolutions.

So perhaps there is nothing wrong with being a “second hand thinker”. As long as we don’t become “second rate” thinkers we shall be fine… :)