Every now and then my mind turns to philosophy, and religion. Naturally, I take these subjects based on how I was raised, and how I have come to understand them during a couple of intro classes in college. I’ll tell you right off that I never got past the intro classes because it seemed to me that much of philosophy is thinking too hard about things that are utter bullshit. Basically, it didn’t differ too much from what I learned in church growing up. Thinking up ideas like that the whole world we experience could be a dream of only one person is no different than thinking that the whole world is the creation of some God.
I was brought up in one of the religions who think that all of humanity is on earth, placed here one by one, by a God that wants to test us all to see if we are “worthy” of being in his presence forever. I can definitely assign that God a male gender, because it certainly seem a manly thing to run such a test.
So, there are basic problems with this proposition. The testing environment is severely flawed. Hi, you are here for a test that will affect you forever, result in you going to Heaven or Hell, and so on, but as an infant your mom fell asleep smoking in bed, and burned your house down. Test over for you, and you are not really tested at all. They say babies go right to Heaven, but what if you were baby Hitler?
But it is not just limited to carelessness of other humans! There are lions that can eat you, planes that go down, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis, lightning, and so on. More than 200,000 people were killed in an earthquake and tsunami in 2004, and you mean to tell me that their “test” was all through, adminstered by a God that loves them, to see if they should be sent to Hell or not?
The problem is God is the school administrator, and the school’s active shooter, and al he wants you to do is graduate with high marks, while he continues to work on his marksmanship.
The whole prospect is nothing short of silly! I don’t think that people who are loved should be subjected to murder at the hands of the test administrator. I don’t see hwo people can have their personal tests cut short because of accident, carelessness, mistake, or at the hands of other test participants, and it chalked up to “whoopsiedaisies!”
Much more likely is the scenario that we are all part of a species of animal on this planet, under the same kinds of existence as all the other animals, with the risks and deaths inherant to being some sort of mortal or another, but our particular species has the disadvantage of imagination to really screw us up.
Our imagination and our ego combined has us thinking up religions and philosophies that get us thinking we are more than what we really are. We are amazing already as a species that has risen to creat tools and objects that we can use to help us survive. The dinosaurs were here for nearly two-hundred million years, far longer than we have been, and there are no fossils of steam trains, or airplanes among them. There are no dinosaur city ruins to dig up, as far as we know. In the two-hundred thousand years or so we have been apart from the other primates, we have come a long way! But we don’t need to make up bullshit to take us farther. Best to be where we are at, and what we are, and go from there.
I’m sure I will suffer more of these thoughts in the future, and will subject my blog to them, so I will put them under the “philosophical” category, then put this kind of thing under a sub-category called “problems” in order to consolidate them for consumtion, or to know what titles to avoid, if you are the reader.
Like Deep Thought, and the meaning of life being 42, I am sure I am right, because I have thought about it a really long time. And that, is Philosophy for you!