Dreams Of Mud

Blog post # 8:

I start off today with a children's joke.


Why are dogs usually so healthy?

Because people keep telling them to "heal"!

------------

On that depressing note, I move to something not at all a joke.

You all who like happy writing more than my more dark writings may want to skip the rest of this post, except for the pictures (which ARE happiness-inducing, I hope). Be sure, though to read all my other posts, anyway. Those before this post are for the most part more cheerful.

.
.
.
.




I was listening the other night to a BBC story about the mass-rape during the Balkans conflict about a decade ago.
In the story I heard of such unimaginable evil. Also, in other stories of the conflict I heard of incredible atrocities being committed.
(People being forced to have sex with their own family members; women and children being raped and forced to become pregnant by the thousands; I heard that at least one man was forced to bite the testicles off of another man, then made to drink motor oil; women having their breasts chopped off. Stuff like that.)

Then, to add to my disgust for humanity, I just recently read an article about how US-held prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq not only were tortured, but hundreds of these prisoners were tortured TO DEATH. (I already knew about this, but I still was shocked when I was reminded of it.)

So, I conclude, I really doubt that there is a benign god or gods, at least a god or gods with any ability to affect reality. But, I continued, there may indeed be a Devil.

Yes, there is a devil, and it is humanity. Maybe it is ALL of humanity, including the so-called innocents. Yes, it is just a few of us who have committed infinite evil. But this evil is so infinite that the guilt extends via our very humanness to all of us. For one thing, we are all at least somewhat guilty because the evil has been successfully committed. We have failed, or never tried in the first place, to prevent this evil. That makes all of us culpable.

And if we are all guilty for such evil, then maybe we all deserve to be damned.
I am not saying that we all will be damned, just that it would be a fitting punishment for our extreme failure to prevent such horrific evil.

(continued below)



And, yes I doubt that there is a god. But maybe there is, and god is evil too, maybe more so than humanity.

For, God rewards those who are humanity's most sinister, and punishes those who are humanity's innocent victims of evil. (For example, "honor killings" of rape victims, which I admit may not be God's will; But it is God's will, I bet, that people who suffered emotional trauma as children live decades less than others on average, according to a new study.)




And, as we hear time and time again, stress will kill you. Is this really fair to those who have suffered? Is that really fair to the women and children who were raped or to those who suffer in any of the world's many wars?

Tell those who were tortured in Guantanamo that stress is going to kill them.

"Now now, Mohammed. You have got to do something about your blood pressure!"....

This all makes me sick.


Cheerier posts later.
I promise.

Thanks, sorry,
Leroy

The Big Questions

Blog post # 4:

First of all, thank you to all who read my .. asymmetric thoughts .. here.

(Note: There seems to be a bug with blogspot's comment-posting. If you get the message that your comment was not published, try again in a little bit. I seem to be able to post comments successfully about 50% of the time.)

------

First, an anagram:
What is this an anagram of?

Ah, man strains a GI.

(Clue, it is not about a constipated drill-instructor. But you can tell that I STRAINED to come up with a semi-coherent sentence that anagrams with the secret phrase.)

-----------

Maybe I saw this before, but I realized just the other day that:

A mustache is a.... mouth brow....

-----------


(And I may have heard the following before too. It sounds like a George Carlin observation.)

Why is the top of the inside of your mouth called the ROOF of your mouth?

Since the "roof" of the mouth is really the underside of the inside of the mouth,
shouldn't it instead be called the CEILING of the mouth!???...

------------

Ah, all this talk about constipated drill-instructors and mustaches and mouths makes me turn to thoughts about the nature of reality.


Or more specifically, I am wondering about the nature of God. For those who know me and my lack of beliefs, and who are religious, don't worry. I am NOT here today to attack God or God's existence.

(Or should that be the existence of "God", or maybe the existence of " ' God ' ", nested inside any number of quotation marks.)

I am here instead to seriously wonder, hey, what if God DOES exist.



I saw Allah in Valhalla....

Well, first let me tell you all where I am.
I have no beliefs of any certainty. I am an agnostic.
But if I believed in anything regarding the topic, I would be an atheist.
But if I was religious, I would probably be a Buddhist.
But if I believed in the theistic God, then I would probably be a Deist.
But if I were a Christian instead, then I would probably be a Unitarian.

Maybe I would. I don't know. I don't even know if WE exist at all, let alone if God exists!

But let assume that God exists. I would say then that God is PROBABLY the 'zero-point energy of the false-vacuum' (maybe), to borrow terminology from physics.
This energy is the lowest possible energy of empty space, which is a positive amount of energy, since -- because of quantum physic's uncertainty principle -- there can be no energy lower than this. (For, if there was zero energy in parts of space, then this energy level would be absolutely certain, which is forbidden.)

So, maybe God's existence is defined by uncertainty itself!

Or maybe God both exists and doesn't exist. (God's existence is in a "superposition of states", to borrow more physics terminology.)

-

And as long as we are merging science and religion, I would say that the singing of the angels (maybe there are no angels, but their singing does exist) is the cosmic background radiation white-noise.

And maybe God is all about being omniscient, but does not have any super-powers and perhaps did not create this universe.
Or maybe....

So much to consider, so little time.

Ha! Life after death. What about that, Great Leroy, the knowing one???

Well, hmmmm.

I heard on the news one time that SOME people who are close to death, but recover, remember seeing Heaven and all that. Muslims see Mohammed, Christians see Jesus, and (get this) atheists see a Heaven without any god. Some people have even reportedly seen Hell. (I heard about the visions of Hell from an unreliable source, though.)


But maybe the after-life experience is all an illusion caused by the dying brain. Maybe. Maybe not.

Going back to the zero-point energy theory of God, maybe the afterlife is the merging of the soul with the energy of the universe,... man.

And yes, the soul!

The soul is basically what, outside of our physical selves, makes us each an individual, or that is what it has been defined as.

So, is it our memories? Is it our consciousness? As far as consciousness is concerned, some scientists have theorized that little carbon structures in all our cells called "micro-tubules" (I am going by a distant memory of mine here) interact with the physical world via quantum mechanics, basically because the structures are so small. Some have theorized that these micro-tubules are where consciousness arises in us.
If these are indeed the center of our being, of our awareness that we are aware that we are aware that we are aware that..., then that would mean that our ENTIRE body is the seat of the soul.
There is some small evidence that this is indeed fact. When some people receive donated organs, they report having vague memories once belonging to the donors.

I once had a dream that every individual's soul had a unique shape. This shape related to our personalities. (And so I guess it could change throughout one's life.)

But maybe the soul is indeed shaped, just like in the movies, like our bodies. (Although, we all may be sans robes or any other clothing in Heaven....)

Anyway, all in all, I am skeptical of the theories favoring the existence of a Heaven and a God (or gods). But nobody really knows.

Still, the point of this essay, if there is any point at all, is that The Answer to the Big Questions may be found in science. I don't think anyone should be afraid to look, anyway. But I think we are.

------------

One last thing before I go today, a simple word puzzle.
(I think I got the idea for this kind of puzzle from Will Shortz's segment on NPR.)

*Start with the English name of a certain color.
*Change one letter to get a relatively uncommon spelling of a common girl's name in America.
(2 syllables)
*Change this to the most common spelling of the same name.
*Change the last syllable of this latter spelling to get another color's name.
(There are actually two colors that will work for the last step.)

I will answer this (and the anagram puzzle above) later in a couple of days in the comments to this post, unless someone else answers these earlier (in the comments).

-----------

Thank you,
Leroy Quet