Have you ever noticed that people say “I read somewhere” when what they really mean is “at some point I heard someone say something interesting and I am about to lay claim to it myself without actually having done any of the research or fact checking.”  It’s just an abbreviation, I guess.  I say this with as little mockery as I can because, while I may not have invented this practice, I regularly pirate the intellectual property of whoever did.  It’s like I can’t stop myself.  It’s just so easy to say that I read something somewhere than to go into an actual explanation of what I heard on which quasi-educational channel (future blog topic by the way) or from which person and when.  I’ll be honest, if my brain were a computer, it would be a little shy of ram.  By the time I got through the complete introduction of where it is I got a given interesting tidbit, I’d forget the tidbit. Plus, who wants to sit through all that for a five second factoid about earwax or the psychology of honey bees.  It’s just easier to have a social convention that you can tell a lie if there’s intriguing trivia on the way.  It does make me feel bad for people who really do spend a lot of time reading so much interesting bits of informational flotsam that they can’t quite remember which one went where.  They utter that infamous phrase and their audience rolls their eyes as if to say “yeah right pants-o flame-o! just gimme the brain candy!”  and that is what those trivial facts are. Non-nutritious sweets.  No one was ever so impressed with party-trivia to change their vocation or goals in life.  “You’ll never guess what some guy at the church social told me about octopus eye-balls and their ratio to their body mass! I’m not wasting another second of my life on IT, I’m becoming a marine biologist!”  You see what I mean about losing my train of thought? Where was i?

                Dreams!  So I said all that to tell you this.  Someone told me they “read somewhere” that half of all people dream in black and white.  Then I realized that I’d never met anyone who dreamt in black and white.  Then I read somewhere (roll your eyes all you want I actually read it) that the study behind that piece of information was done at a time when we were transitioning from black and white to color TV as a nation and the ratio was about even.  So people dreamt what they saw.  That makes complete sense as most of my dreams have mouse pointers and consist of montages of guys getting kicked in the crotch, laughing babies, super cute kittens, and star wars fan films.  My normal dreams also have annoying banner ads for more pornish versions of those dreams.  I avoid those…mostly.  Give me a break. Every once in a while my id crawls out with the impulse control of a 3-year old peaking over the edge of the desk and grabbing the mouse CLICKCLICKCLICKETY.  Those are the days that I wish that my dreams had filtering software.  I’ve been having another series of dreams involving what I watch lately about rednecks, alligators, and space jesus.  More on that next time.

intellectual d-bagism

So I was finishing up this sci-fi fantasy novel I was reading and the climax was this chapter long speech about the triumph of reason over faith and how the human spirit will finally emerge and flourish when people overcome their useless religions. Bleh. First of all, that’s a terrible way to end a book. Not to mention it was written badly. If you have to say the same thing over and over, how much substance is there in what you’re saying. Second, it doesn’t take a couple dozen pages to say what I said in a sentence; if you can’t condense a tedious monologue, you are a bad writer. Second, I wanted so badly to argue, but I can’t argue with paper. Gah! Logic is just a way to check the reasoning in your arguments, it is not the end-all-be-all of philosophy. It’s just an empty frame, a blank structure. It offers nothing of any meaning in and of itself, and it certainly isn’t a foundation you can build a society on. Human nature has been borne out time and again, its not religion that has cause all of society’s ills, it’s the people that make up society. Religions, just like all other institutions, are made of people. People are greedy, mean, petty and cruel. With adequate push, or even just a flimsy pretense, people will do horrible things to each other. At times, religion has been that excuse, but more often it is something else, culture, ancestral right to a piece of land, business interests, politics, oil, whatever. The common denominator is people and their nature.

Also, faith is not the enemy of reason and logic; they go hand in hand. Even for those who are not religious, faith is still a preserver of sanity. It allows us to function by filling in the gaps between what we don’t know and what we must act on anyway. Logic, reason, common sense, whatever you want to call it, they allow you to contextualize and process what is already known; faith does the same for what is unknown. You could spend a lifetime learning everything you would need to know to function for a single day in absolute certainty, without any faith at all. To know how the electricity in your homes powergrid works, the quantum theory behind the semiconductor-based circuitry in your cell phone, the psychology of why those around you do what they do and how they’ll react to you. There is far too much information in the world for any one person to know. We believe in experts, texts, the internet (oh man don’t get me started), or what we hear from friends and family, all is taken in, faiths in various sources is ranked and compared and info is absorbed or discarded based on the results.

Besides this author (and many like him) is just substituting to make themselves sound less douchey. What they really mean by Indomitable Human Spirit is The Way I Think People Should Be, and logic and reason really mean My Point of View. With that in mind that stupid speech I read makes so much more sense.