I have been busy lately, and so I have not been spending much time on the esoteric or abstract; reality has been dominating much of my thought process. I have been trying to get a job, and to that end I have been boning up on my IT skills and working on certifications, both of which require a great deal of focus and energy. Nevertheless, here are a few of the things that have been niggling at me lately.
How is it that otherwise intelligent people can invest so much energy believing the demonstrably false? To a certain extent I understand religious people; it's hard not to believe that which has been pressed upon one since birth. What I don't understand is people who believe in the occult. How can one reject religion, only to choose to believe the outright asinine? To paraphrase the clever T-shirt meme, "I reject your mythology and substitute my own."
No amount of staring at the sun will bring one wisdom (in fact, it will more than likely result in one's eventual blindness), no more than chanting can open up Nirvana. I have a friend who left Christianity because he is gay, and Christianity rejects homosexuality, but he substituted it with New Age nonsense. He's a bright guy, and a much better writer than I am by far! Why would he then replace one religion with another, instead of merely seeking scientific fact? There is zero scientific evidence for an "astral" plane, or "ascended masters" or any of the other tenets of Unitarian/New Age gobbledygook. It just seems to me that rejecting one set of religious beliefs, only to replace them with another, is a bit disingenuous. Either religion is true, or it is not. Our ability to pick and choose does not confer reality upon our chosen beliefs, and since all religions are mutually exclusive, the odds are not any better for the religious than they are for those of us who are not religious. As for me, I choose to believe in that which I can experience or understand with my own cognition.
Individual fates are no more tied to the millions-of-years-old lights we see in the skies at night, than the tides are connected to the menu at Taco Bell; there is simply no causal correlation to be made. The only causal connections between different objects in the universe are those of a deterministic nature (more on this in previous posts). The light from stars that are millions (perhaps even billions) of light years away has zero bearing on how individuals will shape their lives. In some cases, these stars may not even exist any longer, but we're seeing the light (and will continue to do so for many millennia) because the light from the end of these stars' lives has not yet reached us, and will not until our own sun begins to die. Believing that one can interpret the events of others' lives based on the position of the stars (which isn't really accurate, since these stars are currently light-years away from the positions they are observed in), is naïve and silly. The burden of proof for such beliefs is on the believers, and since horoscopes from different astrologers are usually completely different and often contradictory, as a casual observer I would say that this burden has not been carried.
When I was Christian, I simply found such beliefs as astrology or New Ageism to be "evil," because they removed focus from the power of god (actually, we believed it was "Satan" trying to distract men from god's power), or some such B.S.. Now I recognize them as being nothing more than mental masturbation. Generally speaking, I think if you have to apologize for a certain belief, then there is a high probability that belief is false; this occurred to me after years as a Christian, and so it stands to reason -- at least in my opinion -- that the same metric can be applied to any set of dubious or questionable beliefs.
There is so much in the universe to be explored, investigated, and understood. Why do people spend so much time and energy chasing specters? Dark energy, dark matter, Higgs-bosons, black holes, the curvature of space-time, string theory, multiple parallel universes -- with so many questions yet to be answered, why do we waste our time with metaphysical bullshit? How much energy, intellect, and time is wasted pursuing that which does absolutely nothing to improve the human condition?
How is it that otherwise intelligent people can invest so much energy believing the demonstrably false? To a certain extent I understand religious people; it's hard not to believe that which has been pressed upon one since birth. What I don't understand is people who believe in the occult. How can one reject religion, only to choose to believe the outright asinine? To paraphrase the clever T-shirt meme, "I reject your mythology and substitute my own."
No amount of staring at the sun will bring one wisdom (in fact, it will more than likely result in one's eventual blindness), no more than chanting can open up Nirvana. I have a friend who left Christianity because he is gay, and Christianity rejects homosexuality, but he substituted it with New Age nonsense. He's a bright guy, and a much better writer than I am by far! Why would he then replace one religion with another, instead of merely seeking scientific fact? There is zero scientific evidence for an "astral" plane, or "ascended masters" or any of the other tenets of Unitarian/New Age gobbledygook. It just seems to me that rejecting one set of religious beliefs, only to replace them with another, is a bit disingenuous. Either religion is true, or it is not. Our ability to pick and choose does not confer reality upon our chosen beliefs, and since all religions are mutually exclusive, the odds are not any better for the religious than they are for those of us who are not religious. As for me, I choose to believe in that which I can experience or understand with my own cognition.
Individual fates are no more tied to the millions-of-years-old lights we see in the skies at night, than the tides are connected to the menu at Taco Bell; there is simply no causal correlation to be made. The only causal connections between different objects in the universe are those of a deterministic nature (more on this in previous posts). The light from stars that are millions (perhaps even billions) of light years away has zero bearing on how individuals will shape their lives. In some cases, these stars may not even exist any longer, but we're seeing the light (and will continue to do so for many millennia) because the light from the end of these stars' lives has not yet reached us, and will not until our own sun begins to die. Believing that one can interpret the events of others' lives based on the position of the stars (which isn't really accurate, since these stars are currently light-years away from the positions they are observed in), is naïve and silly. The burden of proof for such beliefs is on the believers, and since horoscopes from different astrologers are usually completely different and often contradictory, as a casual observer I would say that this burden has not been carried.
When I was Christian, I simply found such beliefs as astrology or New Ageism to be "evil," because they removed focus from the power of god (actually, we believed it was "Satan" trying to distract men from god's power), or some such B.S.. Now I recognize them as being nothing more than mental masturbation. Generally speaking, I think if you have to apologize for a certain belief, then there is a high probability that belief is false; this occurred to me after years as a Christian, and so it stands to reason -- at least in my opinion -- that the same metric can be applied to any set of dubious or questionable beliefs.
There is so much in the universe to be explored, investigated, and understood. Why do people spend so much time and energy chasing specters? Dark energy, dark matter, Higgs-bosons, black holes, the curvature of space-time, string theory, multiple parallel universes -- with so many questions yet to be answered, why do we waste our time with metaphysical bullshit? How much energy, intellect, and time is wasted pursuing that which does absolutely nothing to improve the human condition?
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