God and science are in love and have been since the dawn of time. Ensue the flames! But no, seriously, give me a listen before you bash my head in, that means you religion monger! Yes, you too dear crazy scientist.

For very long I have listened to you people bicker back and forth on the internet, bicker forth and back in real life, have wars almost all about whether god exists or doesn’t exist and whether science is real or a fake. For fuck’s sake people, enough! In the interest of full disclosure, I have until recently fought vehemently in these wars and would take any opportunity I could find to bicker with religious folk over their beliefs.

Until, one day, I realised just how bad everything I was doing was. I’ve tried explaining this to one Unimatrix who still fights with great fervor and won’t let up no matter how much I try to show him the sad trap all warriors on the side of science have fallen into – they’re making science into a religion and have forgotten all science is about.

Aaagh the flames! Stop that, hear me out. Let me show you just how many correlations there are between people defending science against religion and … religion. It’s gonna scare the shit out of you, especially if you’re one of the warriors.

Knee-jerk reactions

Modern day science warriors have knee-jerk to anything and anyone saying their beliefs could be wrong and that there is an alternate explanation for a phenomenon. You will recall that this is the kind of thing religion prides itself in and has forever, most notably during the inquisition and let’s not forget about how eager religion is in damning anyone that says God is wrong. Science is about thought and discovery, it’s not about saying anyone who doesn’t believe you is an idiot.

Nonbelievers are stupid idiots

This is very common in modern-day science warriors, they will simply call everyone who isn’t on their side stupid and ignorant. Even religion didn’t use to be this bad until the modern day. Science isn’t about convincing people you’re right and they’re wrong, science is about knowledge and it doesn’t care who believes and who does not. As long as other scientists find you to be correct you’re good, real scientists don’t care about nonscientists and their beliefs, many scientists themselves are very religious. For example Newton only found his stuff by trying to explain God’s modus operandi, Einstein was bent on discovering who or what God is and relativity was the lovely side-product. So why do you care so much?

Converting people

Ever since its inception religion has been all about converting heathens into followers of the one true God, whichever of the many Gods that would be, science … science wasn’t. But these modern day warriors of science care much more about convincing people to follow the one true path of science and leave behind their ancient and stupid belief systems. Why? Why does it matter so much to you that everyone you know should follow the one true path? Are you by any chance religious and science is your religion?

We are absolutely correct

Religion is dogmatic, science is based on hypotheses and theories. The base of everything scientific is recognition of the fact that you could be wrong if somebody finds a better explanation. The base of everything religious is “We are right and you are wrong”. Why are you, dear science warriors, making this same mistake by saying science is infallible and religion is wrong? Do I sense a bit of hypochrisy right there?

Conclusion

There are probably many other correlations between religion and the mockery people are making out of science. But most of all I believe we should all realise one simple fact: Science and religion are just working models of the world based on our observation. There is no point in figuring out which is better, which is more correct, because they can both be correct. In fact they both quite enjoy coexisting and love each other. Hell, they even each have a perfeclty valid explanation for the other.

Science says that God is a mix of psycho-social phenomenae created either out of need to explain what we couldn’t explain mathematically or logically at the time of its inception or created by leaders so as to easier lead their people. A control mechanism if you will. While faith is, according to science, a coping mechanism. Most of all, science explains God as being an idea rather than an entity. That’s not saying God doesn’t exist … science does NOT say God doesn’t exist. So stop it you fucking morrons, stop trying to convince everyone God doesn’t exist because you have absolutely no scientific basis to be saying taht.

God, on the other hand, explains science as a puzzle. God put all of this funny stuff in place for us to figure out, it’s one giant puzzle and once we’ve figured it out, become smart enough to face him, we get to see what or who God really is. Some religions also explain it as a test of faith, but that’s based on the incorrect belief that science is about disproving the existance of God when in fact science has been trying for a long time to explain, rather than disprove, God. So you see, God doesn’t say science is stupid, God just says science is the explanation while he/she is the reason.

Now that I’ve shown you just how morronic all this fighting is. We can get on with our lives, stop fighting, leave religion to its working model, leave science to its working model and … well I guess the only thing left to do now is endure all of the flames coming from both sides of the fence. That’s what I get for sitting on the fence I guess.

Tags: commentary, food for thought, society

Was going to write a post about anything, pour out some thoughts for you, one of my boring essays that for some reason you all keep reading, yes both of you. But since, given my current mood, that would instill too much fear and spoil someone’s holidays I’ve decided just to play the tag game of spouting seven truths about oneself. Sparkica tagged me, now I feel so included and recognised it’s almost heartwarming.

1. I find miss piggy extremely sexy, always have, always will. For some reason this extends to real girls, just keep them round and juicy, I need something to hug comfortably without fear of breaking myself on a bone.
2. I often go out of my way to say something in such a manner as to allow for it to become a quote later on. Most of the time they won’t become quotes, but it’s a valiant effort.
3. Political correctness is bullshit. Nobody cares people and you should understand that any time you do something politically correct it just makes the rest of us laugh.
4. I severely dislike people who get hung up on petty and frivolous crap all the time. Sadly this means I also hate most women because it often seems they don’t do much else than get hung up on petty frviolous crap and in silly ways nontheless.
5. Emos … don’t even get me started, you guys ruined perfectly good music with your stupid behaviour and clothes so that now we can’t listen to it just because it’s emo. Fuck you.
6. I hate that at times I’m still too teenagery and care about something being emo or not. Why should I care? All that matters is whether I like it or not. Bah, stupid silly person.
7. I wear only black not because it’s such an awesome colour, not becuase it’s simple and neither because it’s slimming. I wear it because according to traditional colour theory black staves off evil and protects a person from bad crap. Sadly some people don’t know this and continue to throw bad crap my way despite my clothes.

So there you have it, seven truths about myself and now I’m supposed to list seven other bloggers, but here’s the catch. I don’t really know seven other bloggers who aren’t niche specific, but follow the slovene convention of blogs being personal nonsense sputtering places. So here’s a list of what I can think of: had, rat on crack, robert basic, dr. onyx and fuck, that’s it.

No wonder I have so few readers! I’m not doing much reading myself, crud.

Tags: life, society

Today, as many of you probably know, is Human Rights Day. Personally I didn’t know until I happened upon one @anca_foster and her One Day For Human Rights campaign on twitter. At least I think it’s a campaign, maybe it’s more of a marketing scheme for an already universally accepted day – I’m too cynical to ever have managed reading what it’s about, but I did sign the petition, because I believe in sticking it to The Man even if I don’t believe in human rights.

The problem with human rights is that they do not exist. I’ll say it again: There is NO such thing as basic human rights! See there is a subtle distinction between what most of us understand basic rights to be and what they actually are. Most proponents of human rights seem to believe that they’re universal even though they’re far from being universal. Firstly even though we have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that’s supposed to ensure the same basic rights for everyone. But upon closer inspection you’ll notice it was only accepted by the United Nations. Now, even though that might seem universal to us western people but to be honest Slovenia, for example, was only accepted into the UN some years ago (within my lifetime) and most of the world still isn’t part of it.

What this means is that whatever country isn’t a part of United Nations is not legally obliged to uphold basic human rights. Let’s not even get into the whole discussion of a country not necessarily being a nation right now. Furthermore, even the countries within the UN don’t give their citizens the same kind of basic rights. Each declaration is different in many subtle and less subtle ways. Just for an example, in the US the right to bear arms is a “basic human right” whereas nowhere in Europe does anything like it exist.

Ok, so basic human rights aren’t the same anywhere and thus are in no way universal – let me mention at this point that even if the whole world would agree upon the same basic rights they still wouldn’t be universal because we have no way of knowing what other sentient beings might there be in the universe and what THEIR basic “human” rights are.

Notice I mentioned “agreed upon rights”, but when people hear the words “basic human rights” they don’t think of something that’s agreed upon. They see it as coming from an outside source, they’ll either say “they just are” or eventually, after enough pressure, will go to the last argument of an idiocy sputtering man of “Well they come from god, they’re god given rights” (yes I stole this bit from George Carlin). Well if this so called god were the one giving rights, everyone would get the same and most of all, they wouldn’t differ religion to religion, let alone civilisation to civilisation. They don’t come from god, nor are they universal, the only thing these “rights” are, is an agreed upon set of privileges a certain society decides to give its members in order to sustain relative peace and ensure functioning as a society. They’re, so to say, rules and even then they’re more actual guidelines than rules. Laws try to amend this problem by enforcing actual rules.

But my biggest problem with “rights” is the amount of wars started in their name. You’ll notice a leader or two, or even a whole civilisation, every few decades decrying a neighbouring country as “OH NOES, THEY DON’T RESPECT BASIC RIGHTS” and suddenly, out of nowhere, attack that country and attempt to “civilize” those people. Stop it.

And all you new age activists are no better, you’re all enforcing your will and opinion upon others with your senseless activistic endeavours. Far as us westerners go, don’t we have a so called “right to one’s own opinion”, so why do we waltz in so many other countries and cultures, like say the African cultures, and try to teach them what to think and how to act? Don’t THEY have a right to have THEIR OWN set of rights (call it an opinion if that makes it easier)?

So please everybody, before you make another big fuss out of something that doesn’t really exist, think about what you’re actually doing and let people have a culture where everyone has the right to rape anyone in the streets.

Tags: commentary, life, society

There are many questions people ask in an attempt to be polite and fulfill their social obligations on par with proper social etiquette, but many of these questions upon further inspection prove to be quite rude, at times even insulting.

How are you

This is a very innocous question right? Seems quite polite to ask someone how they are, but answering it in fact poses quite some problems for the askee. First they must consider the level of acquaintance between you so as not to divulge too much information while at the same time not divulging too little. They must consider whether you’re just being polite or are actually interested (this question often seems to get used instead of hello). Furthermore, they must consider why it is that you are asking them, do you not know them well enough to see how they are from their body language, tone of voice, etc.? If the acquaintance is so close that you are interested in their actual state of mind, shouldn’t you intrinsically already know?

Personally I only ask this question as a conversation starter. I try to give the person a chance to speak up about what’s troubling them, or simply a chance to smile, shrug it off, and say they’re alright.

What would you like for birthday/christmas/whatever

Gift giving is a time honoured tradition meant to deepen acquaintances and inter-personal bonds. In this light people often ask what somebody would like as their present thinking how polite it is of them to be so considerate as to ask rather than buy the wrong thing. But this is wrong, instead of being a polite move it implies that you do not know the person enough to know what they’d like, that you don’t even have a clue as to what might brighten their day, that you can’t even think of anything bland and generic that nearly everybody likes. It implies, obviously, that you do not care to put any sort of effort into gift selection. The only thing worse than asking is giving money because that … that’s just lazy.

See the thing with gifts is that they’re supposed to be a way to gauge your care for the person whom you are gifting, it shows how much you are willing to spend on them (needs to be tried against how much you can afford), it shows how much thought you are willing to give and if you plain old ask then it is upon the giftee to put a value on your relationship and that’s just mean. They’re supposed to be the one enjoying your gift, not the one doing all the work.

How was it for you

I often ask this in one way or another after sexual coitus, I’m just curious, but it implies that I don’t know my partner and that I can’t tell from what they’re doing whether it was good or bad and, what’s worse, that it perhaps wasn’t good for me and I need to ask if it was for them – seeming as how I wouldn’t be asking if it was prefectly great for me and I’d rather be enjoying it. Seriously, whomever ever thinks this question is polite is an idiot, I don’t even know why I put it on the list.

Who was that on the phone

People will sometimes ask this question when somebody in their company breaks conversation to receive a phone call. Seems perfectly polite right? Not. Asking this is an invasion in privacy, it asks the person to divulge certain information they might not want divulged, because if you had clearance to know who it was, or if it was in some way important, the person would tell you anyway without being asked. This question is doubly tricky when asking a boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse since it implies distrust, sure you should technically have security clearance to know anything, but this particular call might just be unimportant to you. However it is similarly impolite for the other person not to tell you because that implies they have something to hide and whenever somebody in such close relationship is hiding something dark clouds start brewing.

Conclusion

Alright, I’m afraid I can’t think of any more impolite polite questions even though I’ve been brewing this post for a week. You got four questions you should be careful asking and a pretty clear guideline to discover your own questions of this kin. Yes the number ten in the title was pure sensacionalism, but screw it, I’m pretty sure you can fill in the gaps.

Tags: commentary, intrigues, society