So SicK

'm going to post my views on everything (that I can think of at the moment), then you guys do the same. Once we're done with that, the intellectual ejaculation can begin.

Metaphysics

Our knowledge of this reality is based on our senses, but our senses can be fooled. So, we can never be completely sure that the world we're living in is, in fact, the real world.

However, I find it very unlikely that everything I perceive is an elaborate sham, unlikely to the point that I don't consider it as a serious possibility. So, even though I can't be sure what I'm seeing is right, I live my life as though it is.

As for the origin of the universe, I can think of two possibilities. Either it was created, or it wasn't. Neither makes sense to me. I can't prove or disprove any of the claims made by organized religion or atheism, so I don't make claims. That makes me an agnostic. I require proof to believe in something absolutely (to believe in something absolutely means to admit no chance that I'm wrong); faith is not good enough. I don't claim to know whether or not God exists because there is no proof either way. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say a creator makes more sense than the universe just popping into existence of itself or always having been around, but only slightly, because it begs the question, "Where'd God come from?"

Don't get me wrong, I think a certain measure of faith is necessary to live any kind of meaningful life. It's simply not enough for believing in something absolutely. Faith can never be substituted for proof. Having said that, if I completely disregarded faith, I would fall on the ground and not move until I died of dehydration, because there would be no point in doing anything. As stated above, I can't say for sure that I'm not living in a fantasy world. I take it on faith that this is the real world (because the alternative seems so unlikely), and that allows me to live my life as though it is.

The only thing I know for sure is that I exist. That is independent of my senses. I know it's true and admit no chance of being wrong simply because I think. I may not be able to prove it to any of you, but that's irrelevant. I know it for myself.

My take on metaphysics gives rise to my views on everything else.

Ethics and Virtue

I severely doubt that objective morals exist. Rather, I think that our sense of morality developed as a way to help ensure the survival of the species. Morally upstanding, "good" acts are those that further mankind, and immoral, "evil" acts are those that are in conflict with our survival. This is practical, how it should be. Unfortunately, people have corrupted this and we've gotten to the point where many of us just make it up as we go along. Ethics have become frustratingly impractical and, in many cases, outright stupid.

When you look at ethics the way I do, the taboo regarding casual, responsible sex couldn't be more ridiculous. Teach kids how to do it responsibly; don't demonize it. Responsible means no chance of unwanted pregnancy (don't have intercourse, which is overrated; if you must, use the pill or the patch), no chance of STDs (get tested together at a free clinic), and no chance of emotional problems (for lack of a better term). The last one is a little more complicated than the first two. Both people have to be smart. There has to be a mutual understanding that what happens is casual. No strings attached, no commitments, no exclusivity. Just pleasure. Having casual sex in this manner results in nothing bad whatsoever, and therefore should not be considered immoral.

Another result of my stance on ethics is the opinion (informed opinion, I'd like to think) that there is nothing wrong with doing drugs in the same way that there's nothing wrong with driving your car. It shouldn't be illegal to smoke pot in the privacy of your own home, just as it's not a problem to drive your car from place to place. The problem occurs when you interfere with someone's rights as a result of being intoxicated. In such a case, you should be punished accordingly. (Feel free to ask me to elaborate if you need it.)

I consider open mindedness to be a virtue. In a lot of political smear campaigns, you'll hear a candidate being attacked for changing his mind on an issue, or "flip-flopping". Are politicians expected to be perfect and form the correct opinion the first time they consider an issue? Is it bad to reconsider your initial decision and think that you might've been wrong? Of course not. Being stubborn and closing your mind once you've made a decision, while touted as virtuous by many people these days, is incredibly harmful and ridiculously stupid. Human beings are not perfect and cannot be expected to always make the correct decision the first time around.

Also, being open-minded rules out religion (atheism included) as most people think of it. Organized religion these days seeks to lure you in with the promise of unconditional love from an omnipotent God and an eternity of blissful afterlife. Once they've got you, they try desperately to close your mind to anything that conflicts with doctrine. If you're like most Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or anything else in this day and age, you admit no chance of being wrong. By definition, your mind is completely closed to anything that says your holy book is a fallacy. That is evil. Atheism is included because, while it doesn't lure you in with love and comfort, it does makes a claim and require that you close your mind to any alternative. A true atheist admits no chance of being wrong, just like Christians, Muslims, and the rest.

Another virtue that goes hand-in-hand with open-mindedness is reason. You need reason to come to your own conclusions, which is quite virtuous indeed. Too many people rely on tradition or authority for answers. They never stop to think that those sources might be wrong.

Politics and Law

We really need to be united under one global government, the role of which should be limited to ensuring that everyone has equal opportunities. To this effect, the government should take care of education, form regulatory committees to protect consumers from corporate corner cutting (laissez-faire didn’t work too well the first time around; I'm still kind of torn on this point in any case), and isolate people from society who interfere with the rights of others (prison). That’s it. John Locke held that people have the right to act as they choose, as long as they do not infringe upon anyone else’s right to do the same. That right is what life, liberty, and property boils down to; it is basically the only right the government needs to worry about protecting.

Everyone pays a flat tax. It doesn't have to be too high, because the government won't be spending any money on the war on drugs or public welfare programs. Even with this relatively low flat tax, there would still be tons of money to put into education, and that's where most of the tax revenue would go. The rest goes to sizeable salaries for the people on the regulatory committees to protect against bribery. Who needs a bribe if you're rolling in dough? And, due to the importance of the position and the size of the paycheck, only extremely well-qualified people would be hired for the committees.

The law is supposed to be about what's right and wrong, but it's written by human beings who aren't quite perfect. So, it's not necessarily wrong to break the law. Obscenity laws are a great example of this. Being offensive is, in most cases, not morally wrong. Obscenity laws demonstrate why, in and of itself, the law is not some objective truth to be followed unquestioningly. The people who uphold the law need to remember this, as do the people that write the law and those that keep it in check. It is not bad to murder because it's against the law, it's bad because it's wrong.

There would be prison for people who break the law, but the focus for fighting crime would be on preventative measures (education), rather than the threat of punishment as deterrent. Criminals are like a teenage son you tell not to do something because you'll ground him for a month. Doesn't work too well, does it? I think it's safe to say that most people who refrain from committing crimes do so because they consider it wrong, rather than being scared off by the potential consequences. People who do commit crimes are obviously not being deterred by the threat of punishment. There would be much less crime if we figured out an effective way to reach kids before they become criminals later on and teach them why they shouldn't commit crimes.

Education

Thanks to all the tax revenue being poured into education, teachers would be paid a lot of money and resources for students would be top-notch. Like the aforementioned committee members, teachers would have to be extremely well-qualified to earn their hefty checks.

Along with math, science, English, history, and everything else that's usually taught, a certain amount of time would be spent regularly teaching kids how to be productive citizens and generally good people. The main focus of that class would be open-mindedness. If you can convince kids to never close their minds to any possibility, a lot of major problems in the world simply vanish. As the class gets further along and more advanced, students would be taught how and why to use reason, as opposed to relying on tradition or authority. This would be useful for teaching kids how to make their own decisions in an intelligent manner.

Miscellaneous

The news needs to be about news, as opposed to human interest pieces (read: of crap). It's such a waste to spend an hour watching the nightly news and hear about nothing but animal abuse and kidnapped children. How about you report on pressing social issues and public policy? I don't want to hear about a little girl getting caught in the crossfire of a shootout and how her family is dealing with it, I want to hear about important scientific discoveries that have been made. Don't spend twenty minutes talking about a dog that saved its owner's life, tell me about why the Middle East is so unstable and what steps are being taken to rectify the problem. Basically, drop all of this emotional bullcrap designed to get the attention of the average American idiot and start reporting things that matter.

The concept of obscenities really needs to disappear (especially relevant with the new filter). A wonderful example of how ridiculous it is to be offended by curse words is "crap". Means the exact same thing as poop. Hell, it doesn't even have any different connotations. They're interchangeable in every situation (granted, poop isn't the most effective way to emphasize a point, but it still works). So, why is one offensive and the other isn't? There's no good answer. Dirty words are just plain stupid. For the most part, the entire concept of getting offended needs to disappear. People are weird.

As a true psychopath, before answering what my views are, I'd first have to decide which "me" to describe my views of. I'll save you the multi-personalities, and give you two basics.


Metaphysics - Our idea of reality is mostly determined by two things -- our senses, and our knowledge. Since our senses work second in hand to our mind's perception, our senses are dependent upon our perception. Our mind is trained how to perceive things while we grow up in what I believe to be the first year of our life. We are taught about our senses, and using our developing minds configure some kind of grasp on that piece of reality. Because I find that the basis of our perception of reality is built upon two flawful components -- our deceiving senses, and our knowledge of the predetermined reality -- I feel that while we accept the reality that we have as the absolute, that there are possibilities for another sort of reality to exist. I don't know how to come in touch with this alternate reality, as I am in tune to the objective reality we all succomb to.

Human Race - We are an interesting bread, the only (to our knowledge) that has the capability to analyze itself in such great detail, and interesting in that no matter how advanced we become, we still do not know everything about ourselves. I find that, as a race, we are ironic. Each decade contradicts the decade before it, each country has contradictions to another (such as being fat in the US being a sign of gluttony, and in Africa as a sign of wealth) yet still follow a strict structure of being most critical of others rather than ourselves. We tell others how to live while fighting inside our own heads what we want to do with our own lives, what our goals and initiatives are.

Politics/Media - Politics and media, particularly political media, has become the moral defabrication of our society.

First, the media concerns viewers and listeners by devaluing them in two categories, image and ethics. Your clothes are out of date, your teeth aren't white enough, your diet isn't healthy enough, support our troops or support the terrorists, how to be a good parent, mistakes you make every day, why you aren't as smart as you think you are. The media has turned "News" into "Bad News", everything is unhealthy for you, anything can kill you, you're not safe anywhere and neither are your children. Killings, rapes, robberies, explosions, wrecks, and they're all happening within a 50 mile radius of you.

Second, instead of governers, presidents, and representatives, we have politicans. A politicians' job is to bullcrap you into their way of thinking. They use what're called "Straw-man arguments", where you create a weak, fallacious standpoint of your opponenet, such as "Some would say that we should get out of Iraq tomorrow!", then blow it over with a much stronger, well augmented argument, such as "But that's impossible. We must finish our mission, or gradually remove our troops from Iraq. It can't be done in one day." While they stated the obvious, their argument seems more logical on their side because they've completely misrepresented the opposing argument. A politician's job is to talk their way out of answers, bringing a question to its knees with a response that has nothing other than opinions, compromised statements that are neither here nor there, and by the end of their response you not only have no answer, but have a smiling jackass in front of you with a smug sense of self accomplishment for doing nothing other than distracting you from your own question. It is a politician's job to make everybody feel better, when really we shouldn't have politicians at all -- we should have representatives and presidents who make the decisions that are right -- not the decisions that the people think is right, or the decision that the people of political influence think is right. All decisions of law should be decided Utilitarianly, not politically.

Ethics - Ethics don't exist. We have a guide of general ethics that have been adopted by logical consensus -- don't steal, don't kill, be respectful. But right and wrong is determined by what the individual feels is right or wrong. And while others disagree, its irrelevant. There are always opposing sides as to what is right and wrong, and it is only human arrogance that allows one to believe that they are in a position of power to decide once and for all what is good and what is bad. Ethics are personal opinion, and opinions mean nothing. But we all have moral flexibility.

Education - Why the F**K aren't teachers paid better? By capitalist perspectives, teachers shouldn't be paid well -- as they produce no income themselves. They don't make anything, they don't sell anything; instead, they teach others how to do the things that produce income. The government should re-realize the importance of teachers, and drop the capitalist bullcrap that runs our system. This would do two things indefinately: It would increase the effectiveness of the teaching system, as teachers would be more likely to teach more effectively if their pay was better; it would increase the rate of general knowledge upon graduation of schooling, because with teachers teaching more effectively, the students will be able to learn and absorb more knowledge, and upon graduation will know the difference between the three "theres".


Religion and God - Upon many debates with myself, going from side to side on the subject, I have decided upon much deliberation that there must be a God. While I know that by the logics of epistemology we actually know nothing for sure, it is most logical -- therefore most correct -- that a God in fact exists. However, though a God exists, and even though the human race is a creation of God's, it is only out of arrogance to believe that we are the center of the universe and God's attention. The human ability to reason develops a sense of higher being naturally, in that because we find ourselves to be the most advanced, that we are the best. This deducement projects arrogance, which will be the proponent in much of Human life's story, along side with stupidity (arrogance's side kick). It is only arrogance that is the cause of the logic behind the human race being the center of God's attention, that this world and all creatures and habitats were created just for us. Who is to say that the entire existence of the human race would be more interesting to a God than the deterioration of a large mountain, or the melting of the ice caps? God, though I can only relate his powers to the realitites of human perception (like time), sees in passes of time that are exponential to ours. There is no reason to doubt that our entire existence through the span of time passes faster than a blink of our eye. With that, I find that the majority of organized religions are focussed too much on themselves, rather than the place they inhabit. With this said, I think that some of the Eastern religions, if any religion were to be right, are the most correct in their convictions that life in the now is most important, and that environmental unity, selflessness and sacrifice are keys to finding enlightenment. For by becomming one with the environment you inhabit, you are stepping outside the realm of normal human beings, blinded with a fixed reality, blinded with fixed ethics and beliefs, that were taught and trained into them rather than having them be discovered for themselves. Perhaps becomming unique like that would earn you the attention of God, however miniscule the span of attention is. I do not believe in an afterlife; when we die, we cycle through the universal laws that all other specimens do, and should not expect ourselves to be different. We die, deteriorate, and become one with the planet. However, taking such a firm belief can be life changing. On this note, I bring in William James' genuine option: in short, it's your own responsibility to find which you find to be most logical -- thus, most likely to be correct and take that belief.


Race (in particular Blacks) - Yeah I said it! We can't be held responsible for social groups' vernacular. It's a different culture, and we should respect that. Because of the uniqueness of the stereotypical "black" vernacular, when people outside that social group use it, it seems unfitting, inappropiate, and sometimes insulting. You don't talk to broken-english speaking asians with their same accent do you? It's insulting, and asians take that very seriousry.

Be respectful of others' cultures, no matter how you feel about them.


Metaphysics - We are here in a fixed reality. There is no possibility of anything else existing because our minds are incapable of perceiving it. Therefore, if it cannot be perceived, it cannot exist.

Human Race - We are stupid, self destructive creatures. Soon, we will become so enveloped with hate, distrust, fear, stupidity and egotism that we will try to destroy everything but ourselves. Our entire existence proves, to this day, to be in vain. As much as we think we've accomplished, all those things accomplished have been material. The enlightening questions and the answers that will shape humanity's values and understanding have not been found.

Politics/Media - F**K the media, F**K politics. It's brainwashing and is comparable to Peter's flute that attracts the mice. Bullcrap.

Ethics - The ethics we create are only created to protect ourselves. Don't steal (from me), don't kill (me), respect (me). When these ethics are not practiced towards you, you become defensive and accuse the other of being immoral. But when these ethics are not practiced against someone other than yourself, you do nothing and think nothing of it, saying "It's between those two, I have nothing to do with it.", thereby rejecting your own moral responsibility to uphold the ethics you find to be right and wrong whether you are the victim of immorality or not. We are, at heart, generally immoral characters.

Education - Teachers get shat on, because of our capitalistic government and their underappreciation for the men and women of the nation that are responsible for all success and failure. A successful business man had, at one time, a good teacher. A good teacher should try to teach best they can regardless of pay, but because we are human, and humans are greedy and stupid, there are teachers who teach to the grade of pay they receive. Those are the teachers that raise the students who rarely become successors, and encourage the lack of integrity in the teaching system.

Religion and God - A loving and all powerful God does not exist. There is a creator, and it thinks nothing of us. We are not special, and your religion is a crock of fairy tales and lies explained as metaphors to teach the ethics and beliefs of your particular religion as absolutes -- values that cannot be falsified, when in fact, they can and are falsified endlessly. Religion is an answer to the questions people seek, and an answer acceptable enough to allow people to sleep easy, under the premonition that they have closure and understanding of what is going on in the universe, and what will come of them when they die (Death being the number one concern of the human race). Guess what? You die, and lie in a hole. No afterlife for you, so I hope I die before you so I don't have to sit at YOUR funeral and be subjected to rants about how you're in a better place. We all know the house I'm living in is a better place than that dirt hole you're dying in.

Two different sides for you to read...

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