The God Debate

First off, I would question whether life's biggest queston actually is: is God real? But more of that later on.

I would like to say that I have noticed in the past few months that I do not necessarily read things or listen to things and glean from them what I'm meant to, and I'm not willing to debate them under the presumption that they are true. I'm more inclined to attempt to learn something about the person writing or speaking based on how they wrote and what they said, and put the conclusion I arrive at at the forefront of thought processes about that particular data. Whether or not my conclusion is true, it is obvious to any skeptic (we should all be skepics) that everything ever written or spoken carries some level of misinformation with it. Whether intended or not, each word spoken and each action taken carries an inflection of our opinions and bears the "truth" we speak in directions other than towards the truth. I am as guilty as they are, and so are you, my dedicated readers. (at this point you're feeling the sarcasm)

As I read I imagined myself in the room with the two men. Having seen Mr. Warren speak before, I've seen his practiced mannerisms before an audience. But in my meager experience on board our boulder of a ship sailing the cosmos, I have seen that there is a massive difference between stage mannerisms and real life mannerisms. Based on the words spoken, and the inflections I imagined, I see Mr. Warren as condescending, so firm in his belief that he cannot even contemplate for a moment that anything Mr. Harris says is worth listening to- so he is not listening to garner anything but the appropriate response. Mr. Harris, I imagine as considering himself an intellectual (he's working on a Ph. D) and as of course correct. But also someone who has spent his life rationalizing and quantifying, and of course to justify both you need to acquire data. So perhaps he's collecting data if nothing else, and so listening for perhaps a bit more than Mr. Warren is.

So of course, these presumptions put me on Mr. Harris's bench, as anyone who goes to someone else's office aware that they will accomplish nothing deserves a little of my respect and based on my presumptions, is listening harder. That said. My bias is established. Lets also say that what Warren says is largely theoretical, undeniably so, it is theological. (they both have theo. Obviously living in the same house.) Mr. Harris, on the other hand, sprinkles all that he says with actual information based on what he knows. I'm assuming he knows a lot, and by a lot I mean a lot more than Mr. Warren, and a lot more than me. (knowledge is not wisdom)

I notice the contradictions that each makes on himself and in my mind, whoever made more contradictions lost the argument. So Warren lost.

Well, how? He only said what the bible does. Precisely.

The Bible is a book written by multiple people inspired in multiple ways by what they perceive as the same God. They moreover, are humans just like we are, and just as guilty of inflecting in what they write themselves and their faults. The Bible is a faulted text. It holds truths, indesputably. But also fallacies, and these fallacies, just like the people responsible for them, contradict each other. Warren as a faithful (blinded) believer, must believe all of it. So he can't help contradicting himself. As seen in his specifics about science in the Bible, as example. He says that he is aware he might be wrong, but never asks any questions of Harris about atheism that are designed to educate himself in ways that may turn him an atheist. He is not okay with being wrong. At the end of it all, his final thought is about a gamble. He simply isn't willing to lose is he? Well whats all this crap about faith and the life of Jesus being fulfilling? Is he doing it because he believes or because he can't stand the thought of possibly having nothing at all?

To disagree with his argument styling, he requests that Harris not cut him off, but cuts Harris off. Bad etiquette always upsets me.

Harris of course has his fallacies. He as well holds that he is open to being wrong, but will not let himself be turned to the faithful side of things. He says that atheism has a terrible PR campaign, while he himself contributes to its bad compaigning.

Harris is always on the attack, he always has something new to say, he is never on the defense. Warren is always on the defense and can never attack atheism. This proves either that atheism is inherently correct, as it is unassailable, or that it holds so little truth it must gain its truth through attacking what it disagrees with. It proves that either the religion standpoint, particularly christian religion, is indefensible, or that it does not need to attack those that disagree to maintain its importance.

Either way, I would say it doesn't matter. Faith is irrelevent and whether god exists makes no difference. What matters is what you choose to say and do. The motivations matter less than the good you manage to do and the evil you fail to see yourself doing. Eyes clear of anything are needed to notice evil in life. The faithful, the blind, need to clear their vision. The angry, the apathetic, the nonbelievers need to clear their vision. Whether God is real, it matters not. What matters is that we all do our best to do what is right and what is good and to help others. I don't care why you do it, only that you do. And nothing else matters. All this talk, all this debate, is wasted energy. Why do we waste our time debating whether our motivations are true? Just act. Why do we waste time explaining our motivations when it does not matter, and what matters is what we are motivated to do.

Neither man won the debate.

And it doesn't matter.

AHS TOK HOMEPAGE!!!!!!!

I'm just noticing the comment that Mr. Wilcox made that he hopes class will be like no class we have ever taken made me excited for a roller coaster ride the first time I read it but I am now noticing that although the class is like no class I have ever taken it is not a roller coaster ride.

That was a run-on sentence.
I will not fix it.

How many and who of your high school friends and acquaintances do you think you might know in five years? Ten years? Twent seven years? Thirty two years? Sixty four years? I think everyone should keep a running list. And when you get there, check back. See how close you were to right. And then judge how much of it was your fault.

Is there a god? Why or why not? Is religion necessary in the current age?

Are you afraid of death? How often do you think about it?

What is the most important natural number? Is that a trick question?

Will I do much more than ask questions in this journal? No.

Can you describe yourself in twenty pages without contradicting yourself? Ten pages? Five pages? Three pages? A page?

Is school difficult for you, or do you just freak out too much?

How did you answer that? What emotions drove your answer?

...did you tell the truth?

Are you judgemental?

If you are, is that so wrong? Why?

When challenged, how often do you rise to said challenge? Why? Is it always worth it?

When is it and when is it not?

Is it more impressive to be able to question or to be able to simply accept?

Which is more difficult for you?

Did you notice the conundrum in question thirteen and its response?

If you didn't before I asked, are you embarrassed about it? Does it make you want to kill yourself, eat a popsicle, crawl in a hole, or tear my eyes out most?

If you did, was it funny when I asked, and are you proud of yourself?

Is that pride well deserved?

How long did it take you to read the questions so far? Not paying attention? Too bad, huh. If only we had computers in our heads that allowed us uninterupted access to all things electronic and kept an uncensored record of our lives.

Would that be a bad invention?

Would you want that?

Does that scare you?

Can you tell where this line of questioning is going?

Do you think I'm done with my english quotes right now? Are you or were you? If the blog fails to inform of the time of posting, it is now 8:35pm on the evening of the not so much sabbath but sorta sabbath, Sunday, and the project is due tomorrow.

Is it more important to work hard or party? After all, we are only here once.

Which is more or less selfish? Why? Which are you?

What is intended in the word "party"?

Bored yet?

Will you post a blog that answers all of these questions?

If you say yes, will you post said blog in one, two, three, or should you really milk it, four journals?

What do you think that says about you?

Keep in mind, who you associate with and how you associate with them defines you in the eyes of others. How do you think you are defined? Did you intend this? Is that a just opinion, is it skewed by how you view yourself, and do you feel disgusted or are you exalting, and what does that say about you?

If you feel disgusted because you haven't showered today, shower and then revisit the question.

How many questions have I asked you?

Did you really just count them?

Are you counting these too? Should you?

Which is worse-murder or rape. Why? Does it matter how either occurs?

Do you consider yourself pragmatic or idealistic?

Which are you really?

Do you consider yourself hard-working, intelligent, determined, and independent?

Are you? Or are you arrogant, over-rewarded, stubborn, and delusional?

IB or AP? I expect rather ubiquitous answers of IB.

If you're still with me in this monotonous broadcast, did you find the preceding questions revealing, interesting, humorous, complicated, easy to answer, difficult, or arbitrary and redundant?

What does that say about you?

Now, what does it really mean about you?

Still not sure? Go out and kill someone, and then rape someone, and see which makes you feel more guilty. But alas that appears to be against the law and requires a sort of devotion to experimentation that I don't think any of us have, and I do not want to be killed or raped, so I take my request back. Don't.

Who is your biggest role model?

Now be honest with yourself. Who is your biggest role model, and is it(he/she) a real person?

Are they a person at all?

Do you honestly believe that Chaucer was a genius? Or did he have too much time on his hands? Was Hypocrates just a hypocrite?

Can you stand to read on?

You're probably sitting anyway, so I hope you didn't say yes if you are, because I now demand that you do if you said yes.

Please excuse any spelling errors that occured before now.

Define please.

Define sorry.

Following that, translate them literally into another language. Having any difficulty?

Although "I forgive you" is the most correct response to "I am sorry" it seems pompous and arrogant to our ears. Why is that?

Have I assumed that you are perhaps guided strongly by your emotions and need to hear(read) things more than once in order to answer them as honestly as possible?

Was I right?

Are you angry?

Now was I right?

Did that make you smile?

Will you really answer all of these?

Do you think its worth it? Its sort of like a free journal entry....

Will anyone bother asking me these same questions?

God only knows...if there is one! HA! pWn3d!

If only I knew what I meant by that...

Are our teachers worth more?

Well, are they? Come on now, out with it! But alas, you cannot speak through my fingers (not only do they not have mouths, you seem to lack mind-control, you anonymous reader you) nor will you comment on this post. As that would be stupid. Why read someone else's blog and then comment on it? You might actually end up having an intellectual discussion with the blogger (frogger, great game) and that just will not do! Regardless, are our teaches actually worth more?

I will begin by saying that I distrust all governmentally run organizations not because I do not appreciate the things that they can do for me but because I understand that without competition there is no such thing as quality control and insist that the government not weigh down their systems with useless money they spend bureaucratically running things but instead pay independent companies to run their services and audit them at the very least annually. My proof of the lack of quality control lay in the idea of a ten year(I am most familiar with our government's education system, and so have the most right and ability to critique it. Why aren't they asking us how we feel about the whole system when we are most intimate with it...? I fear I will never know.), a function in schools that by definition destroys the concept of quality control. It basically affirms that after ten years of work any given teacher can stop trying, relax and rest assured that their job is secure. There is no quality control in that the teachers rarely come face to face with their customers, the taxpayers, and taxpayers understand that they cannot avoid paying the taxes that support the educational system and so tend not to see teachers as people they are paying to do them a service. So quality or the lack thereof can go unnoticed and run rampant. I will also note, that although there are many teachers I would perhaps stamp the "not quality ensured" symbol on, there are also many that I would not. As much as I despise the man, Docta Dave was a great teacher, and I learned a lot. Mrs. Stroh on the other hand, did nothing, and went to far as to not even grade our papers. But she could not be fired, and the proofs we had for her not grading our papers could not be shown for fear of our getting in trouble. And so the system tends to fail. But I digress.

I think that some of our teachers are indeed worth more, but that many others are not worth more. I will not dance around the names either. I would say that Funk Master P-Rez is doing his students a disservice when he places more value in his union negotiations than his teaching. I believe that all teachers, by not being available to help their students because of union negotiations and rules, are doing their students a disservice. It seems to me that in all the humbug about raises here and there, teachers have forgotten that their job above all else is to teach and germinate the minds of the young people they work with with intellectual thoughts and tendencies. I would say that Mr. Burdett, in disposing of a competitive seating system in his orchestras and in general refusing to recommend students that wish to enroll in the IB Programme in order to save his orchestra program is acting irrationally and if he isn't fired he should at least have his salary lowered. Why? Because by destroying competitive seating he is ruining the motivations of the orchestra members to care at all about how they play and telling them that it is okay to be inept at playing because it doesn't matter how good you are, you might still be in the back "to help the worse players". This would infuriate me and I'm infinitely glad that I quit orchestra. I've heard that one of my fellow students that I hold in high esteem that remains in orchestra, whose name starts with an R, uses the period to eat. By refusing to recommend his students for the IB Programme in a reactionary manner he is hurting their overall education, which as an educator is opposite to what his goal should be. So no, he is not worth more. Mr. Pinzone, from my experience in his creative writing class, is not worth more. He fails to teach and looks as though he doesn't care. Surmising that he doesn't care, he wont mind losing his job or a chunk of his salary. But again, I digress. Accusations mean nothing without actions.

There are those that deserve more, however. For instance, Mrs. Walker, who has taught me more math than any other math teacher here at the esteemed AHS, deserves more. Whatever the seniors' opinions on her, I don't care. I'm getting something out of math for the first time. From what I hear, Mr. Rakow deserves more. I wouldn't know, but it seems he does. Mrs Pavicic, simply because she is willing to spend as much time as necessary to teach a student that needs help what they need to know. There is a lot of worth in that. She is doing her best to do her job. Mrs. Lindley, for setting the bar higher than any english teachers I had before her and actually teaching us how to write. And finally, the greatest raindeer of all, Mr. Radke, for shoving more history than we may ever need to know down our throats with a smile, ensuring that we do well on the AP US History test, if we put in reciprocal effort.

So yes, our teachers are worth more, but no, our teachers are not worth more.

Culture

In passing, the quote, "That's not cultured, that's just foreign." inspired this journal.

What is culture, and how can one be cultured or uncultured?

Culture, as I'm going to arbitrarily define it, is simply a sum of experiences and traditions. It can be applied to one person, a small group of people, a large group of people, and so on and so forth. So calling someone cultured seems redundant. Everyone has a sum of experiences and traditions and it is too subjective a subject matter to say that one sum has any greater value than another unless one simply bases it on quantity, in which case the only way to be more cultured than another is by being older than another. By this definition as well, there is no such thing as being uncultured and by that extension culture as a comparative substance is, again, redundant. You cannot exist without a culture or with any more culture than anyone else. Culture is so broad and yet so specific, it cannot and should not be seen as a way to place one above another. It is not better or worse, but simply is.

For the record, I count Nobuo Uematsu a better composer than Peter Frampton and someone who listens to Uematsu more cultured than someone who listens to Frampton, that both are of value in music culture, and that someone who listens to both is even further cultured than their peers.

But no, cultured is not a viable comparative adjective.

Funk Master P-Rez

Who is Funk Master P-Rez, and where exactly is he from? Is cuban a language(most definitely not, a dialect...perhaps) And most pressing, why am I taking IB Music, and what exactly am I intended to learn in it? The answer to the last of course, is because I could not enroll in AP Music Theory(Mr. Wasson is not teaching it anyway, so whats the point?) and I am not intended to learn anything at all, but more intended to benefit from the experience and become more culturally aware. I suppose for this reason our Cuban DJ makes sense as the instructor for this class, but I would affirm that in mannerisms he is thoroughly American in nature. Not because I am aware of what American in nature means, but because it is an extremely pliable term that can be applied to anyone. American culture is defined by rampant sectionalism, partisan activity, knowing and not knowing, unity and division, cultured and uncultured(what is that, by the way?), intelligent and unintelligent, driven and lazy, persistent and determined or obsessive and stubborn, and of course, white, black, latino, various eastern and western european sorts, Indian, native american(very few now, we did a fantastic job exterminating that particular race), asian at large, and the racism and disputes over racism that go with the territory. So in essence, anyone and everyone can be of the "american nature" and probably is. I think I forgot rampant capitalism. And conspiracies. But I digress. I fear that we will never know Funk Master P-Rez's true origins or name, or the purpose of his anecdotes mid-lesson. All that we can be sure of is that he is explicitly American in nature, and that his leading of the Union charge vs. their Confederate overlords is taking from his class-time quality. And that it bothers me.

The nature of judgement

My last four journals have centered around judgement, and convey simply the act of judgement. They were inspired by my reading of The Fall. (Fantastic novel. Read it.) Also inspired by The Fall are my thoughts on the nature of judgement. It is condemned by many but unavoidable by all. It is something that we do instictively on some levels, but often is depicted as the device of the divine. What is judgement? The most basic form of judgement is simply for survival. We judge how far we are from objects. We judge the distance we need to move. We judge whether we should speed through the orange light or screech to a halt. We judge with very very simple things, and then we judge with things slightly more comlicated. We judge our peers and elders in instinctual self-preservation. Should I befriend this person? Can I trust them? Will they condemn me? Will I condemn them? How will our association affect others perception of me? Of course, this sort of judgement brings about stereotypes and broad generalizations. The human mind cannot survive without compartmentalizing, this is unavoidable. But judgement becomes more complex yet. Moral judgement is passed on people by the divine, the educated, the privileged, and in fact all. This sort of judgement can have lasting effects or not effect at all. To be behind bars, or free. To be yelled at, talked at, scolded, rewarded and looked up to. Judgement is everywhere and affects everything. To condemn judgement is to condemn yourself, everyone else, and everything else. It is necessary and unavoidable(so we might as well get good at it). In the Fall it is implied through the main character and narrator that all mankind spends the entirety of its existence avoiding judgement. It implies that everyone behaves out of the simply wish that they be judged in a positive manner, and will do anything to be judged as such. It addressed the fallacies of friendship and the futility of happiness, the lack of a universal purpose. It makes the point that the things we do in life are far outweighed by the things we fail to do; by decision, laziness, or ineptitude. With this view of the world, lying must run rampant. If everything is about the image of judgement, then no one will ever see past the canvases the story of our lives are painted on to see the truth of who we are without further analytical judgement based on little fact at all. Why do we avoid who are? If everyone is filth then why hide beneath a small gilded surface? If no one is filth, then what to lose by shredding the facade from view? I do not think that judgement should be avoided, but embraced. I think that one should be honest with oneself and embrace one's faults and ineptitudes, and be as critical and judgemental to one's own soul as one is to the rest of the world. One should never pass up a chance to do good, and one should understand that one's life is no greater than the next. Most importantly, one should paint the truth and only the truth on one's canvas, penitent and unashamed.