I am utterly aware I need to get up to date on my "30 Days Of Pictures" blogs. Believe me, it will be explained in further posts why I am so behind. However, because I am a passionate, busy, distracted man, I tend to get built up with emotion about things and then burst out in rants, which pretty much sound like "Ihateallyoufuckingpeoplewhyareyounotdeadyetgetoutofmywayandletmelivemylife!" Which is not the right answer. I do not enjoy being frustrated, but due to the world we live in, it happens all too often.
Now. I know I have posted rants before. Anyone who knows me knows I rage quite often at the stupidity of the human race. However, as of late I have begun to examine why I feel as though everyone is running around in a rat cage. Do I have a superiority complex? Am I arrogant and conceited? Do I simply suffer from an overactive imagination and an unclear view of how the world works? No, no, and no.
Did you know there is a simple system which allows us to examine a set of statements and determine whether they are valid? It is called logic. No, not reason, which I will get to in a moment, but logic. I have not realized I have not been using the term "logic" correctly until recently (when I started reading "Logic for Dummies"), and I now understand just why exactly my use of logic can help me to conclude why I am so frustrated at the world at large.
See, the majority of my problems lie in what are called unsound arguments.
Wait...Whaaaat?? Let me explain.
1. An
argument is basically a set of finite premises that lead to a related conclusion.
This is a valid argument.
Premises:-All men are mortal.
-Socrates is a man.
ConclusionSocrates is mortal.
This is an invalid argument.
Premises:-Socrates lived in Greece.
-If Socrates lived in Greece, then all primates are left-handed.
Conclusion:All animals are left handed.
As you can see, the premises and conclusion in an invalid argument have attempted to have a relation, but they do not. This is where the first problem arises. We can turn an invalid argument into a valid argument easy peasy:
Premises:-Socrates lived in Greece.
-All animals are primates.
-If Socrates lived in Greece, then all primates are left handed.
Conclusion:
All animals are left handed.
If you
accept the premise and
the conclusion follows the premise then
the argument is valid. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN THE ARGUMENT IS SOUND. An argument is
sound only when the premises are
factual, not just when you accept them to be factual.
Therefore, we get such arguments as this:
Premises:-Science cannot explain everything in the Universe.
-If science cannot explain everything in the Universe, science is wrong.
-Science cannot explain God.
-God is the creator of the Heavens, Earth, and Everything Else. He is omnipotent and benevolent.
Conclusion:God exists, is benevolent, and omnipotent, and science is wrong.
THIS ARGUMENT IS NOT SOUND YET IT IS WIDELY ACCEPTED BY PEOPLE EVERYWHERE. Why, you ask? Because people
want to believe it. People want to believe that there is a greater power watching over them, guiding their actions, protecting them and teaching them life lessons. And this is the crux of unsound arguments. People can, do, and will believe
unsound arguments because
if you accept the premise, and the conclusion logically follows the premises, then the argument is valid. And most people stop their thought process right at that point because they believe that is all they need. My argument does not need to be sound, because I have faith and we don't all know God's plan.
This is where I begin to want to claw out my own eyes. People,
THINKING, INTELLIGENT PEOPLE, come to conclusions such as this. They believe that there comes a certain point where the only thing which guides you is a) faith, b) trust in a higher power, or c) the understanding that the Spaghetti Monster will bless us all with Parmesan cheese if we all just pray a lot. Exaggerations, of course, but
reductio ad absurdum works here. I will grant you: no one is perfect. But, goddamnit, when did we stop trying to be? When did we just turn over our lives to whatever is the most prevalent power of the moment? See, because it manifests itself in every way:
-People don't trust the government, yet they still allow it to make decisions for them
-People don't know anything about God, Allah, etc, but yet turn their lives over to them on a Daily Basis
-People don't trust other people (i.e. family) but yet allow them to run their lives and cause them massive amounts of grief
And on... and on... and on... and on....
They believe these things and act this way because society tells them this is how they must act. Extremely convoluted and basic causality chain: philosophers hundreds of years ago decide that everything is relative and we cannot tell what is real in life, so the woman who gets high all the time and nearly dies in a car wreck blames her lot in life on God, her family, and the government
for not doing enough to help her get out of her bad habits and end her misery, then she teaches THAT to her four illegitimate children. Because society has told her not to believe in what is real, factual, and right in front of her eyes: it has told her that everything is relative, so why shouldn't her problems be everyone else's fault instead of her own failure to reason?
People are losing their reason. It is Reason which tells us whether a set of premises is sound. It is Reason which tells us we cannot run out into a busy street and stand still and still live because A FUCKING CAR WILL HIT YOU AND YOU WILL DIE. It is Reason which is allows us to analyze our world and interpret our surroundings. God does not do it for us. The government does not implant processing equipment into your brain so you can survive. Your family does not act as a proxy through which all your decisions can be made and which your life revolves around for its entirety. You Are The Sole Arbiter Of Your Destiny. And the only thing which separates you from a snail is that gray area between your ears. A snail has no control over its destiny: it only knows pleasure and pain. Turn off your reason, and you are a snail. Yet this is what society teaches us. Accept valid, unsound arguments because it doesn't matter if your FACTS are correct, it only matters whether your FAITH in what you BELIEVE is right, but which you have no PROOF for, is strong. Kill those Muslims, boys, because they are all Anti-American, and they don't believe in the Bible, apple pie, Chevy, and the American way of life. Murder those infidels, sons of Allah, because they are corrupted by greed and sin, immersed in a consumerism culture, and have no faith in anything anymore. CAN WE PLEASE JUST FUCKING GROW UP AND STOP JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS? For the love of all things holy, it's like we give two children blindfolds to block their sight and bats with spikes, put them in a confined room, and tell them to start swinging. It's asinine and ridiculous.
And it manifests itself here in America as well. I used to
despise Colbert and Jon Stewart because, being raised uber-conservative, I found them to be "destroying the American way of life". Now that I am all grown up into a real boy, however, I realize... they are simply pointing out all the stupid ass decisions the people in this country make hour to hour. And, disorganized as I sound over here, passionate as I may be, I do have a point: we need to pull our heads out of our asses.
I am a soldier in the United States Army. I joined to serve this country and protect the citizens of the United States and the Constitution. I swore to uphold the law and to obey the orders of the officers appointed over me. And no matter how stupid and foolish those orders get, as long as they are not unlawful and immoral, I will follow them. I do this for a reason. My premise is this: if I do not serve in these positions, a person of questionable character may and most likely shall serve in such a position, and possibly allow the people and country I love to come to harm. I cannot allow such a catastrophic failure of responsibility. Because I have a mind, because I can use my reason, I must (for now) serve the people of the United States. But in order for this to work, it must go both ways. PEOPLE NEED TO START THINKING. People need to stop operating on false premises and take a look at why they behave the way they do. I get that y'all have differences of opinion. I get that most everyone has different cultural, religious, and political backgrounds. However, there comes a point when the positive and negative forces of this universe become absolute. One cannot escape death. One cannot ignore reality and evade destruction. Destruction is the effect of ignorance. The laws of physics and reality cannot, in fact, be ignored. You can immerse yourself in whatever virtual world you like, you can live off liquid food and hide yourself away from the world... but you still have a body. You still need oxygen. You can still be killed. Seem intensely off subject? Think about it. When you get good grades in school, have a good home life, work hard for what you get, then thank God or Allah or the government for providing you with the opportunity to allow you to do these things... aren't you evading reality? Aren't you ignoring the ever present reality in which You Accomplished What You Set Out To Achieve?
I'm not saying God is not real. I am not discounting or disproving anything because I CANNOT. I have no evidence. I have no premise on the subject of God. I know the Universe exists. I know there are things in this Universe I cannot yet explain. I
BELIEVE that a Supreme Being of some sort created the Universe and dictates its rules. But, and this is the most important part of this rant
...
My belief in the existence of a Supreme Being, which I call God, does not have any bearing whatsoever on my views about human behavior, my desires for my own life, or my interaction with any other human being. I cannot, and will never, to ANY degree, ask another person to believe what I believe simply because my belief exists.
My only way to convince another person that I am right is through reason. Extrapolate the above statement to any degree, substitute your own facts and circumstances and then use it as the baseline, and you will discover that people everywhere, to some degree, ask/demand/intimidate/persuade/seduce others to believe what they believe
simply because their belief exists. And this throws sound arguments right out the window and into the rain to die. When we operate on these types of emotions, we can no longer behave as sensible human beings, because we are no longer using sense. And, in a world in which a falling object will hit you if you stand in it's path, if you decide to ignore that falling object, ignore logic and reason, and believe that everything will be okay just because you want it to be, then you are in for a big surprise when that object hits you directly in the head an knocks you unconscious.
...
Okay, Eric, breathe a second.
...
My final point in all this is I am tired of human beings running around this planet, operating on emotion and not reason, giving in to passions simply because their society tells them to, and treating other human beings as less than such because they believe that they are right simply because they believe it. It is circular, it is destructive, and it is so prevalent now that it is almost impossible to determine which causes in this world are just and which are not unless you sit down and draw out an engineering schematic leading back to every decision a person has made in their life. We have reason for a Reason. It is there, it is a tool, it is the only tool which we can use which will allow us to interpret the world. We use our five senses to receive data; we interpret said data; we break it down into valid and invalid data; we break it further down into sound and unsound data; and we act on the sound data and discount the unsound data. To do otherwise is, by its original definition, insanity.
And I am now exhausted.
