Everybody wants to be okay. No matter what is going on we want to believe we will be able to handle it. We buy insurance policies. We save for old age. Some of us buy guns, not for hunting but for protection. We make hurricane preparedness kits. We have first aid kits. I know CPR and so do lots of others. We carry spare tires and many of us even know how to change a tire.
All this stuff we do is fairly reasonable. The trouble is it is never enough. Listen to the news and you are likely to hear about some impending disaster you have neglected to prepare for or, are unable to prepare for. One time it's a pandemic, next it's that nut job in North Korea threatening nuclear war, later it's meteorites colliding with our planet.
There are so many different things that can go wrong! Obviously the human race has survived this far on pure dumb luck! The trouble is this kind of luck cannot last forever. In fact it almost seems a principle of Karma that once you grasp something you are going to have to deal with it in the near future. And of course we are constantly grasping more and more stuff, our protective ignorance is slipping away.
Most of us are fatalistic. We just sit waiting for the end bravely watching American idol or Fast and Loud as if we haven't a care in the world. Meanwhile the forces of nature whether gigantic and cosmic or microscopic and insidious conspire to do us all in! There is really no point in making plans for the weekend, might as well just stay in bed and wait for the end.
Some souls braver than I, refuse to give up the ghost. They call themselves "preppers" and they are getting ready for doomsday! These brave souls are building bunkers, stockpiling supplies of food and weapons. One guy built himself a fireproof miniature pyramid that could withstand having an automobile dropped on it! Another set up a flame throwing device on stairway down to his underground bunker so he could incinerate intruders. Some preppers intensively train with guns in order to wipe out their former neighbors when the end comes and their friends turn on them for their food. The apocalypse will be no time for being of feint heart!
I have an idea for a sort of bunker. Inside of it you will be completely protected from all the horrors of the end times. Nobody will be able to take your provisions. No tsunami will get to you, no meteor will threaten you, no disease sicken you, zombies might be another matter. My ideal bunker is not original they have been around for thousands of years. The only place you can be safe from life and its vicissitudes is in a coffin. I don't think I want one right now. I would rather live like a fool caring not a whit about whatever disaster awaits us.
Russell
Sheep
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
The God Of The Gaps
When I was a teenager I actually read and for a while entertained the hypotheses put forward by Erich von Daniken in his book Chariots of The Gods. A few years later I read The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague De Camp. If you have a serious case of the runs, read the von Daniken book, it will provide an interesting distraction from your plight. If you are looking for a fascinating read by someone who is not a crackpot read the De Camp book, it will amaze you.
I do watch nerd shows like Ancient Aliens and Conspiracy Files (I am a secret nerd who could never keep it secret!) because they are of tremendous honk value! I listen to George Noory on Coast to Coast AM (it was so much better before those Fox Nazis took it over!) to hear all those liars spin their tall tales about UFOs. Hey one of my first postings was about my own UFO story (utterly false) I convinced other kids of as a child.
I would love to believe this stuff but unfortunately I am sane and have a three digit IQ. Oh the curse of functionality! What drives me crazy sometimes, as anyone paying regular attention to my ramblings (God bless you!) knows, is how so many people cannot differentiate between shit and Shinola.
I sympathize with our ancestors for making up myths and legends to explain things they could not understand. Some of those stories are pretty cool. Nobody believes them anymore. Of course people still use God to explain anything that is beyond their comprehension. This gets annoying! I think it is cooler to just admit there is stuff we do not understand rather than either blaming it on or assigning it to God (depending on whether it is bad or just baffling).
The term for this is "the God of the gaps." It is a convenient way of stifling your curiosity by assigning stuff to God or to ancient aliens or some government conspiracy. If none of those work you can always blame stuff on the Masons or the Illuminati (who the f&$# are the Illuminati?).
The truth is it is much more interesting to actually learn something. Gaining some minimal understanding of evolution or quantum physics is so much more satisfying and awe inspiring than believing in creationist or new age mumbo jumbo. You should try it!
Carl Sagan was an absolute atheist but also as spiritual a person as I ever read. His book Contact (his only fictional work) was so cosmic, so profound, so intelligent, it will amaze you. Sagan died before we learned that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. I wonder what he would have had to say about this? He would not have made something up or blamed it on a supernatural force.
This kind of stuff is mind blowing. For almost a hundred years we have known about the "Big Bang." We assumed that for the last 14 billion years that explosion was slowly waning. This is what seemed commonsensical. Once again the universe is not the way we perceive it. In fact we only perceive 2% of it! The rest of the universe is invisible ("dark") to us. The universe is not slowing down, it is speeding up! It is growing bigger and bigger, faster and faster!
Okay I have my own crack pot idea about that. I do not think the "Big Bang" ended 14 billion years ago. I think it is possible that it is happening right now! This may be the moment of creation. I like this idea, it may be crap, but the idea that the reason the universe is expanding at an increasing rate is because this is still the "Bang" is exhilirating to me. Man am I a nerd or what?
Russell
I do watch nerd shows like Ancient Aliens and Conspiracy Files (I am a secret nerd who could never keep it secret!) because they are of tremendous honk value! I listen to George Noory on Coast to Coast AM (it was so much better before those Fox Nazis took it over!) to hear all those liars spin their tall tales about UFOs. Hey one of my first postings was about my own UFO story (utterly false) I convinced other kids of as a child.
I would love to believe this stuff but unfortunately I am sane and have a three digit IQ. Oh the curse of functionality! What drives me crazy sometimes, as anyone paying regular attention to my ramblings (God bless you!) knows, is how so many people cannot differentiate between shit and Shinola.
I sympathize with our ancestors for making up myths and legends to explain things they could not understand. Some of those stories are pretty cool. Nobody believes them anymore. Of course people still use God to explain anything that is beyond their comprehension. This gets annoying! I think it is cooler to just admit there is stuff we do not understand rather than either blaming it on or assigning it to God (depending on whether it is bad or just baffling).
The term for this is "the God of the gaps." It is a convenient way of stifling your curiosity by assigning stuff to God or to ancient aliens or some government conspiracy. If none of those work you can always blame stuff on the Masons or the Illuminati (who the f&$# are the Illuminati?).
The truth is it is much more interesting to actually learn something. Gaining some minimal understanding of evolution or quantum physics is so much more satisfying and awe inspiring than believing in creationist or new age mumbo jumbo. You should try it!
Carl Sagan was an absolute atheist but also as spiritual a person as I ever read. His book Contact (his only fictional work) was so cosmic, so profound, so intelligent, it will amaze you. Sagan died before we learned that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. I wonder what he would have had to say about this? He would not have made something up or blamed it on a supernatural force.
This kind of stuff is mind blowing. For almost a hundred years we have known about the "Big Bang." We assumed that for the last 14 billion years that explosion was slowly waning. This is what seemed commonsensical. Once again the universe is not the way we perceive it. In fact we only perceive 2% of it! The rest of the universe is invisible ("dark") to us. The universe is not slowing down, it is speeding up! It is growing bigger and bigger, faster and faster!
Okay I have my own crack pot idea about that. I do not think the "Big Bang" ended 14 billion years ago. I think it is possible that it is happening right now! This may be the moment of creation. I like this idea, it may be crap, but the idea that the reason the universe is expanding at an increasing rate is because this is still the "Bang" is exhilirating to me. Man am I a nerd or what?
Russell
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)