Glory in the Goodness of Reason. Choose Reality



My response to having to endure seeing way too many religious bumper stickers. I'm making a bumper sticker. Aaand there goes half my viewers. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.

Popular posts from this blog

The Good Game

Image
Can a single person make the world a better place? I propose a game to fix the world. All it would take is the sacrifice of most of one billionaires wealth. If Jeff Bezos donated 152 billion dollars to the game, he would still have, as of July, 20 billion dollars left to himself. Here’s the game: Announce to the world that those between the ages of 20 and 40 today would have a chance to win 1 million American dollars in 5 years time if they have completed a 4 year college degree, with a greater than a C average, and have less than $50,000 (I’m not sure about this amount…) in total family assets as of today. 150 thousand winners throughout the world would win. The distribution of winners would be completely unbiased and based upon population density as of the current census. Where you are designated as living, as of this past census, is where you would be counted. The only other criteria that would be taken into account would be how good the person is in 5 years. During that time, ...
Read more

The Purpose of the Life in the Universe

Image
  Life has a purpose in the universe, and that is to evolve into its next form. Virtually infinite minds or “singularities” born when life on a planet reaches a certain level of technology. This group will speculate on what that form may ultimately be, taking into consideration that our intermediate form will be an intelligence that we will create that will be able to make itself nearly infinitely smart and more capable in a short amount of time once “born”. We have calculated that there must be a vast number of advanced civilizations out in the universe, so…where are the aliens, and why haven’t we come across evidence of them yet? This is known as the Fermi Paradox. Where does all this life go? Given the postulate that all life must evolve into ever higher complexity to compete to win, I’ve simply extrapolated this vector to it’s obvious conclusion. Since life has had billions of years to evolve in the universe already, you would think that some life forms would have figured out h...
Read more

The downside of a goal oriented world

Image
All around us, day in and day out we are suffused with messaging to be our best selves. As Henry Rollins sang “Do it, don’t think about it, do it!” (which Nike immediately stole and turned into their own “Just Do It” ad campaign). Self help books instruct us in a miriad of ways about how to visualize our goals and how to achieve them, despite the odds. After being dragged to church the preacher has us pray as a way to reach our goals, no matter what. I remember thinking at this time that I guess that I should leave my wife and kids to reach my goals, unachievable otherwise. This “Achieve your goals, no matter what” mantra that life gives us causes tension and is probably the root cause for many broken homes. Many of you have endured from me over the years an expression of this tension. My massive mental bag of goals, such as having hours a day to play my piano, ride every skatepark in the world, yada yada, have given me nothing but grief. I have great kids and a hard ass May as...
Read more