Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Patriotic Backfire

It seems that whenever someone pushes for something based on patriotism, that thing they are advocating makes the country something to be less patriotic about.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Forces Against Pursing Happiness

Needing to work together in a society that tries to push people to be independent causes so much stress and anxiety as to make pursing happiness all but impossible.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Life Support

Existence is a support group for everyone’s eventual death, no different than a support group for older parents about to die. But we don’t treat each other as well, looking to get over on one another as if no one dies.

Divine Abuse

It seems to me that the way believers defend their god is very similar to the way an abused wife "defends" her husband (and her marriage) before realizing there's a way out.

Happiness Is Losing Your Self

It seems that the most common form of mental peace is described as the loss of “I”--the sense of individuality gives way to a connected experience to everything else. It comes from drugs, meditation, strokes, etc. People don’t get a “moment of clarity” and declare they were separate from everything. Yet, we still fight to maintain a sense of separate uniqueness with all of its unhappy results.

You Don't Deserve It

No one deserves the required experience of their own success or failures because they are not solely reached.

Wasted Plans

No matter how much we plan, we seem to rarely use those plans when the time comes.

See What I Mean?

While trying to rationalize, people will switch back and forth between definitions and meanings in order to suit their prejudices and immediate needs.

Immoral Reason

If a god can make anything moral by declaring it so, even though we can reason otherwise, why do we have reason at all? Is reason then to be delcared immoral?

Flat v. Hollow

Looking at the rest of humanity as an atheist is like attending a never-ending debate between people who believe the earth is flat and those who believe it’s hollow.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Nothing IS a Theory

Nothing is a theory. A theory is an explanation of a set of facts and/or how those facts produce an observable phenomenon and likely contains within it a means to disprove its validity. To say something “is just a theory” would be similar to asserting your secret dessert is “a just recipe," a statement that is pure nonsense.

The Theory of Gravity, Music Theory, Theory of Mind, and Theory of Crime, are just a few theories that go right along side the Theory of Evolution, all of them offering explanations of the subject being studied--not something that eventually gets “upgraded” to a fact. Available facts gets used to build the theory, which changes as new or corrected facts get discovered.

If people misunderstand the scientific use of "theory" they don't understand that the best layman's equivalent is "explanation." When anyone hears someone use "theory" in the scientific sense, replacing it with "explanation" would be extremely helpful.