So I have posted quite a few essays about religion and am slightly interested in who actually reads the essays.  I have been using christian beliefs as the foundation of what I talk about but that is only because I have studied Christianity more than other belief systems.

So let me know the beliefs that you have.

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Loneliness must be one of the worst emotions a man can feel. The feeling of having nothing, having no one, it really can dig into someone. To wonder where this emotion comes from is something I have been thinking about more and more. Working more than half our lives away, just to make a living, how do people find the time for themselves? Find the time to find someone, and to give that person everything he/she deserves. It seems to get harder and harder the more “advanced” we get as a people. Hence loneliness sets in on people. So with this I want to talk a little about society related to “loving partnerships” and why loneliness is something that is felt today but will be felt tenfold in the future if we keep down the path we are on.

Society in general tells us that we must be coupled with someone, but doesn’t give us the time we need to nurture those relationships correctly. Society then reacts to this foreseen consequence by making the divorce socially correct. Over the last 30 years the divorce went from something that was shunned from society to something that we deal with on a daily bases. The average time span for an American couple lasting is at the lowest it has been in the countries entire history. This is something that is not seen just in America but in most industrialized countries. Is it the freedom of choice now that we choose more than one “permanent” partner?

Of course this is not the reason but if we look deep into our society the reason that divorce has moved into the mainstream is because the time is not there, the time to spend building a true permanent relationship. Some say that humans were not built to be monogamous creatures but this is something that has been overstated and for the wrong reasons. For all the science stating that humans are not meant to be monogamous something quite important is missing. The human brain. We are self aware creatures who think very logically and who have the ability to do whatever they set their minds to. We choose to build relationships with people; this is something we have moved to from thousands of years of evolution. We no longer are driven totally by instincts, and with this gift we have choice. The real underling reason for issues points back to society. So when we build a relationship that will not last we then feel an emotion that no one ever wants to feel…loneliness.

Humans in general are social beings but with that our social behavior is shaped by other social beings. So society plays a huge part pointing us in certain directions, even partnering up. In general social beings will pair up, but will not always stay partnered up. Humans though, being aware, make long term, strong, partnerships and bonds, and in our current environment this is a very good thing. It is much easier to get through issues with someone rather than alone. Something that society is, again, familiar with and has pushed partnering up as the general solution to problems. Something is wrong with a person if he/she does not get married. Society has been putting more and more emphasis on this practice. In the mean time society has also been taking personal time away from these people so that they can do more work, ask fewer questions, and become “droned”. The side affect of all of this is that we as humans can no longer make strong bonds with other humans. No longer can true partnerships be made so partnerships break up and people start to feel lonely.

When humans make poor partnerships, or partnerships that will not last, the human is apt to make mistakes in future partnerships or will choose not to make new partnerships in the future. When a person does not make new partnerships loneliness will slip into that person’s life. With the emotion loneliness comes other emotions as well. The emotions of depression and self hatred can follow loneliness. These emotions can have terrible side effects on the person feeling them. The worst of these are suicidal thoughts for the extremely depressed person. When a person acts on suicidal thoughts they push the proverbial game over button. Studies have shown that when depression sets in based off of loneliness suicidal thoughts skyrocket. And a society of depressed, lonely people cannot be good for our future. Along with the emotional problems that loneliness can cause, children born into bad partnerships are apt to have just as many emotional problems as the partnership they come from. Those children, if they get out of the partnership unscathed, are likely to make poor partnerships in their own lives and the cycle continues. Only second generation issues tend to be worse than the first generations. This can point us in the direction that after many generations of poor decision making and societal pushes toward bad relationship practices we may come to a point when the human race no longer makes partnerships. Losing some of the best and worst of the “Human” way. Society pushes partnering and then breaks the partnership, only to push another partnership. To compare this to metal if a piece of metal is bent back and forth over and over sooner or later that metal will finally fall apart the same can be said about our society.

Humans cannot get as close to other humans and loneliness begins to set in. Even humans in partnerships based on “less free” time feel this loneliness because they cannot bond with their partners correctly. So our current way of life can only point us to being a “lonely” society, among other things. Unless society changes its way and gives people a better quality of life, being that it gives people more social time to make the correct partnerships, we will be a very lonely society, or possibly a society of broken people.

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Space the final frontier.  How many times have we heard this phrase while flipping through the channels on our TV, or watching a Star Trek episode?  Space really is a frontier all by itself, but what really make it interesting are the laws that put it together.  Laws we think we know, laws that we have no idea about, and maybe there are no laws at all.  The one thing that is quite interesting about space/universe is the one law we are so sure about that if it is broken all our other laws mean nothing.  Light, or rather nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  Albert Einstein theorized that it was impossible to travel faster than the speed of light.  Others have said that it would take all the energy in the known universe to travel faster than light, and being that we would never be able to harness all the energy in the universe, in turn would render FTL travel impossible.  I, myself, do not like limits, but if I have to follow one I guess I will follow this one for now.  What I really want to dive into is things that happen when we approach the speed of light.  How time and space actually warp, and how this would affect a society of people, like us.

The first interesting phenomenon that happens when we start traveling extremely fast is space starts to warp.  This would seem understandable to a normal person because it is something we can see in our everyday lives.  The faster we go the weirder things will start to look.  We cannot expect anything to look similar when we are going super fast.  Traveling at 70mph in a car looking at a point out a car window we can start to see some distortion effects.  Things do not look exactly the same as they do if we were standing still.  Another example would be watching light pass through water or thick glass.  Light actually slows down when it passes though different materials and we are able to see some distortion effects.  There are many different examples of light distorting in our everyday environment, but where it gets interesting is time.  When we travel faster and faster not only space gets distorted but time does as well.  Space-time as it is called.  Time warping is something that is difficult for people to get their head around.  This is because it causes some paradox shifts in our society if we really think about it.  Now what do I mean by time warping?  The simplest way to put it is that time is not constant, as so many of us believe.  Time actually does not progress at the same speed everywhere.  The closer we get to the speed of light the slower time progresses.  So if I was traveling close to the speed of light and someone else was standing still it would feel to me like 5 or 10 seconds have passed when actually 5 or 10 hours have passed.  Wow!

The actual reasons why this happens is not exactly known, it could be because of gravity, a force we still do not fully understand, is trying to balance the differential bubble that gets created when objects are not stationary or to simplify the reasoning, light is constant so everything else must fluctuate to function.  Not to focus on the reasoning why time is not constant, the fact that time is not constant is what is really mind boggling.  One example that I have seen of this actually taking place is with satellites orbiting earth.  Satellites orbit our planet at an extremely fast speed, still only a drop in the bucket to the speed of light.  Even though the speed is so much slower than light it is still much faster than our daily lives down on earth.  Each of these satellites have a clock on them and the clock runs ever so slightly slower than the clocks on earth.  So in this example, our GPS systems which calculate our positions by exact time measurements have to be tuned with their velocity in mind so that we can calculate what the actually time difference is here on earth.

So how does this affect us?  Well today it doesn’t because we all are on planet earth traveling roughly the same speeds in the same environment but what happens if we have the ability to travel the cosmos.  The ability to live on different planets, traveling at different speeds, things start to get interesting.  Does a people settled on one planet that is traveling 5 times faster than people settled on another age slower?  It would seem that this is the case.   Which planet would you rather live on?  It would seem that traveling close to the speed of light really shakes up the universal ideas that we as a people accept.  Time is constant, but is it?  To a human on planet earth time appears to be constant but appearances can be, and in this case are, deceiving.

How traveling close to the speed of light will change our society cannot be predicted.  What we do know is that it will cause a paradigm shift in the way the human race understands time, and behaves because of it.  But remember, this will only happen if the theories of Albert Einstein are true.

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Reality.  What an interesting subject, reality.  For ages man has wondered about reality, does it exist, is it all around us, or is it just a figment of our imagination?  Tough questions, that is probably why they are still unanswered today.  Will they ever be answered?

Reality is the world we live in.  It is what we all believe exists around us.  Honestly, it is hard to imagine a world behind the one we see everyday.  Many different philosophic ideas center around the notion that there are more than one reality.  Our visible world is just a screen hiding the real one.  Others believe that there is nothing around us at all.  We are just minds floating in nothing, just imagining the things we sense.  These are all argued for ideas and none of them can be disproven, yet neither can the age old idea that what is around us, is….around us.

The idea easiest to imagine for most people is the idea that what we see is really what is in front of us.  The things that we see, the things that we hear, the things that we taste all point us to believing that everything around us is actually there.  The closest distance between two points is a straight line.  What we see, hear, sense is the straight line pointing us in the direction that our senses are giving us correct information.  That there is only one world and we are living it day to day.  This is the notion I find myself believing until I start doing thought experiments, but for the record it would be hard for anybody to function in society if they didn’t believe anything was real or any of us were here.  Some may consider a life like that, a person like that socially unavailable.

Religion has us take what we sense and ignore some of it.  Religion tells us that the universe is run by a Being that none of us can see, hear, taste, and sense at all.  Religion tells us that there is another reality that none of us have ever seen.  That is not a straight line, but yet a majority of people believe that the world works in a different way then the straight line of reality.  By no means is that wrong, I can’t prove that there is not another world, I can’t prove that this world is the real and I am not just a ball of mind floating in a sea of nothingness.  The only thing I honestly believe I can prove is that I exist.  The Descartian way of “I think therefore I am.”  Personally, it is interesting that most of the world follows a path that deviates from a straight reality line.  If I was to ask someone if they believed that the chair they were sitting on was not really a chair but a greater idea of chair.  That they did not know what they were really sitting on only the chair really understands what it is to be chair.  They would look at me like I was fresh out of the loony bin.  But yet, the same person believes in a Being that is invisible, unable to be proven, all knowing, all powerful, and able to be anywhere and everywhere at once.  A Being that really only knows what it is to be itself.  We have no idea, but this person believes that he or she knows this being.  That a book written by the hand of man is the word of God.

To believe in science and to believe in religion are two different things, but people will have you believe that they are not.  Both are belief systems.  Both are parts that make up reality for each one of us.  I person that believes in religious Beings must make a leap into their reality just as a person that believes in science does.  The difference lies in how far the leap must be.  Take Christianity for example.  A person must believe in an all powerful Being, that’s 1.  That person must also believe that the bible was written by God, that’s 2.  The third is that if the bible was written by God then they must believe everything in that bible.  Which brings us to the fact and belief system of the Christian believer, the bible.

Now lets look at the same person who believes only in science.  That person needs only make one leap, and a leap that all functioning humans make in their daily lives.  Now if you were not to make this leap it would be almost impossible to function in our current human society.  What must we believe?  The answer is simple; that we can know the world around us.  To use science as a belief system all we need to believe is that we can know the world around us.  Once we make that jump science opens itself to the masses.  Quite a straight line.  There is yet another theory that also comes to mind in situations like this, where we need to explain our reality, it is Occam’s razor.  It states that all things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.  Fancy that, but when you think about it, when talking about reality, there is never anything equal about it.  It is close to impossible to apply the razor to a belief system because you are limiting yourself to believing in a belief system that includes Occam’s razor.  That being said a religous belief system just cannot function on a foundation that includes Occam’s razor.  We would always come to the conclution that we can know the world around us, being that, the world can be known and God cannot it is a far simple and shorter conclution, and as far as the universe goes, not one person knows God.

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Quite a while since I have posted anything to the site.  Could say I lost some of the interest I had when I first starting posting.  The truth is I have written a couple drafts from time to time but they really just turned into ramblings.  An evil side effect of having to work a full time job I guess.

I have decided to post a couple more things and see how it goes, when I started posting I wanted to post ideas or thoughts on a regular schedule but found that it just wasn’t going to work like that.  Didn’t want to turn this site into a chore.  Having to write something when I had nothing to write about.  So forgive me for the lack of foundation and organization but for those of us that like reading peoples random thoughts and takes on the world please enjoy the next couple posts.  And sorry for the delay…

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Time you are an evil devil.  Aren’t you?  Why do we as a society put so much value on the definition of time?  Why is time almost always in the center of everything we do?  Truth be told time doesn’t really exist does it.  We measure time in hours, days, years, decades, but what does this all mean?

Time as we understand it is all focused on earth’s rotation around the sun, moon, and stars.  We base one of the most important things in our society on how long it takes a celestial body to rotate a star.  That seems kind of far fetched.  So what is the connection between time and the rotation of stars in the sky?  Well there isn’t one.  Actually, the “time” it takes for the earth to rotate around the sun is always changing.  So we are actually basing a way of life on something that never stays the same.

Time does exist though.  If it didn’t life wouldn’t exist.  Everything would be in a state of suspension.  Still, time as we think of it really does not exist.  For example I can walk to the end of the street in 10 minutes, those minutes are units of measurement based off of…what?  Are these units of measurement constant?  I hope you didn’t answer yes.  These minutes may be timed out to be the same, yes 60 seconds but in the long run they mean absolutely nothing.  They have no basis.  We made it up.  Minutes, seconds, hours change based on how we as a people need them to.  Leap year for example.  We just add days, or erase hours to match what a star is doing.  But that star is totally random.  Our unit of measure for one of the most important things in our entire society is actually totally random.  Wow.

So what I would like to say is what would happen if we took all this value away from time, because it is something that is always changing.  Wouldn’t this make our lives more meaningful.  The area of space which we take up from one point to another point is not always constant.  Lets not focus on it.  Death, aging, these things are actually a random part of our lives.  Parts that can actually be manipulated and changed.  Aging is not based on time.  It has nothing to do with time.  It is a natural thing that happens when cells do work.  If we are able to change the way our cells work, lets say, fix them so they do not break down while they do their work.  Then why would we measure age?

You see we are not infinite beings.  The reason focus is placed on time is the fact that we are all finite.  It is a philosophy that most of us live our lives by.  It is a way of life many of us our pushed into.  Think just for a minute what life would be like without the “TIME” thing hanging over your head.  The stress would just fade away.  It is a way of life that some people still follow today.  Not hunkered down by time.  A come and go lifestyle, definitely a different way to look at life.  The reason I bring this up is the fact that we are only on earth for a finite period.  Even though we always have this thrown in our face we still don’t live our lives to the fullest.  People who don’t obsess over this fact seem to live a more relaxed, fruitful life.  Interesting, maybe they know something we don’t.

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Could this post be about ethics? Well, yes. In philosophy ethics are a giant umbrella of ideas. Medical ethics, personal ethics, ethical treatment of animals, and many many more. What I would like to focus on is how we use ethics and if they really mean anything at all. The ethics of ethics…

So do ethics hold any bearing on our decision making, or really should they hold any bearing on our decision making. This is a question we can only answer when we have made up our mind on a couple key questions. The debate is probably over if you do not believe ethics are a human creation. If you believe full heartedly in an all powerful Being then the will of god should take precedence of ethical belief.  God’s “will” is always ethical, no matter what. That means you really take ethics out of the equation. As long as what you do is in God’s “will” it is always correct.

Now, if we throw out the all powerful being then we can truly look into ethics. There are so many different kinds of ethical belief systems. Pragmatic ethics, Utopian ethics, Kantian ethics, etc. Being that there are so many ethical systems how do we know which one to follow, or should we follow any at all? In this question we can see why I titled this post the ethical part of ethics. With so many choices why should we believe any ethical system?

Ethics is a way we live our lives. It is how we make decisions that affect our lives as well as other’s lives. The argument I would like to make is that we should not base our life on any ethical system. The reasoning behind this statement is the fact that ethics are a belief system made up by man. There are so many different ethical beliefs how can we put our life behind any of them? Men have tried to create systems to base our society off of for the best possible outcome. What we have seen from the past is that most all encompassing ethical systems fail because we cannot have an answer for every logical question. In Utopian ethics we see that the wellness of the masses is much better than the wellness of one person.  One big problem with this system is that we take away the rights of the individual.  In Kantian ethics Kant tried to fix some of the major issues with Utopian ethics but still failed. So how do we make decisions without an ethical system?

Well, we do have somewhat of a system of ethics. It is based off of society. Our decisions are made based on what the masses do. In fact in the US the supreme court actually makes almost every decision based on what our society thinks is right and wrong. Only in extraordinary cases does the supreme court rule against society. These are times of cultural change.  Our system of decisions is always changing so can we say that our ethical system is ever ethical?

I do not think we can. 150 years ago it was OK to enslave blacks, to buy and sell another person for a white person’s personal gain. How is that ethical? Well by todays standards it is not, but in the past in most cultures this was quite alright. So how can ethics ever be ethical if they are always changing? They cant, right?

Ethics are a funny thing. Really they are a dream thought up by man. Something man can use to make decisions, but not only to make the decisions but to prove that the decisions they make are correct, backed up by facts and solid ideas. In truth, the decisions man makes will always be unethical. This is quite a statement. Every decision I make can be considered unethical. How is that possible? It is possible because there are an infinite amount of ethical belief systems. Because time is infinite there will always be a different ethical system and in any one of those ethical systems I could be wrong based on the system. I am always unethical no matter what.

So then the only truth I can know is that any ethical system is, in reality, unethical. This point is easily seen by looking into our past. Many decisions we made believing we were in the right, by todays standards are unbelievably wrong. They are wrong in every respect we can think of. So then how do we make decisions? How do we know what to do, what is right and what is wrong?

This is a question we cannot answer. Today society makes our decisions for us. Whatever the masses believe is what we believe is correct. If you disobey society they throw you in prison.  Different societies have different beliefs, and different beliefs, as we see in history, start wars. There is no way to get around the fact that people will always believe different things. A vary unsettling fact, that there is no correct underling right answer. Maybe this is why people argue for an all powerful being. To bring order to chaos.

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How do we rate freedom in America? Is it what we can say, what we can do? And how do we know when our freedom is gone? Does that even mater? What if what we say doesn’t matter, then do we still have freedom? If no one listens is it freedom? Freedom is an interesting thing.

Today we are living in something unreal. The gray area between freedom and the illusion of freedom. When our country was started it was started on the idea of freedom and until recently we have gotten pretty close to a clear and accepted idea of freedom. But what is this idea? The idea of freedom is an idea that people should be free to do as they please as long as it is not hurting other persons and in some way contributes to a growth of some sort of a society. That is about as close as I can sum up the idea of freedom, in words. Though my idea of freedom may be different from the next persons but we should somewhat agree on the vague idea.

So why do I say we are living in the gray area? It is tough to sum up in words but things are changing, as they always do, but they are changing in a way that seems wrong to many Americans. The United States of America has been living in an era of great prosperity and growth of people from small homesteaders to a world power. With this prosperity people have been slowly wained off of freedom and given material things to make up for the lose in freedom. Many people today blame this on George W. Bush, now it is not GW that started this downward spiral. It really cannot be pointed at anyone other than ourselves. We let this happen to ourselves. What GW has done is try to accelerate the progression of absolute government a little faster so more and more Americans are finally waking up to the paradigm shift.

It used to be legal to do any drug you wanted. It used to be legal to do what you wanted to do on your property without getting permission from every organization on the planet. Heck you could smoke on an airplane. That means you could bring lighters and matches on an airplane and no one would bat an eye. I use these examples because they are more recent events that have taken place. Today we have a thing called a patriot act. The reason it is called this is to fake Americans into believing that if they do not agree with what is in this act they are not patriotic. What is patriotism anyway?

Since we have been born we have had patriotism pounded into our heads as a good thing. Believing that our country is the only country blessed by god and we must love America. Sounds like a little brain washing to me. Just to put patriotism in context it started two world wars and has spread war and genocide across countries for thousands of years. How patriotic do you want to be? There is nothing wrong in believing your country is great, but there is a fine line that should never be crossed.

So the patriot act. Among other things it takes away rights given to us in the constitution. THE CONSTITUTION THAT OUR COUNTRY WAS FOUNDED ON. It takes away our constitutional right to a trial, it allows wire taps without a court order. THE BIG PICTURE….it allows authority to pick a person out of a crowd, slap a label on them and put them away forever! WITH NO EVIDENCE JUST HEAR-SAY. That doesn’t sound like American freedom to me.

I cannot get on an airplane without pretty much stripping down and giving away all my rights to privacy just to travel. I cannot cross the border…a fake line made up by a patriotic country without a passport that has all of my personal information locked into it. This is so government can track everywhere I go. The next thing just around the corner is the REAL ID act. DO you know what this is? The REAL ID act plans to give everyone an ID with microchips in it to track everything we do, everything we buy, everywhere we go. A tracking system for every American person. Is that freedom?

The problem is that Americans have been so dumbed down by material possessions and money, money, money that we have lost track of what really matters. REAL FREEDOM. Our government tricks us by telling us we will be safer if we give just a couple “unnecessary freedoms” up. Give up your right to privacy, allow us to tap your phones and then we will be able to find out if you are a terrorist. How many quotes are there saying it is never correct to give up a few rights to feel safer. Were is the limit? How much should we give up for safety? How much is too much? None. Absolutely, positively, none. NONE. We should never be expected to give up any constitutional right. All the power should sit with the people of a country not with a select few. Never forget this. As soon as we do we lose that power, the most important power we will ever have. We the people, we the people have the power, we have the power to change and we will until we pass it away. And how close we are to giving this power away.

Americans, when will we learn. Look into history. Societies that gave up freedom for safety destroyed themselves. Look at Germany, Germans gave up right after right to feel safer until they had none left. This could happen again. I should not lose my right to travel in an airplane with a bottle of booze, a full size tube of toothpaste, and a scissors because some F-upped people blew up planes. I will not be tracked to feel safer. I will not give up my rights. It is about time others open there eyes to what we are losing and figure out what they need to do. DO NOT GIVE UP YOUR RIGHTS just to feel safer. They are yours under the constitution of the United States of America. They do not change. You inherited them when you became a citizen. They are not god given rights, they are rights inherited from your country and they cannot and will not change, because when that happens it is no longer your country. It is something totally and unmistakenly different.
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Sorry for the last long hiatus but it has been quite busy lately. I have a special post that I am writing that should get posted WED. about Freedoms in America. Hopefully it makes up for the long wait. This is a subject I am very passionate about and hope it starts some discussion.

Also thanks again for reading and posting on the site I appreciate the feedback and comments I have been getting since I started the blog last year.

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Time to mix it up.  How about a post on global warming?  This is quite a popular topic currently and it looks like it is finally shifting in the correct direction, people are starting to believe in global warming.  I personally believe that the earth is warming and I also believe that humans have something to do with it.  Now there is evidence for and against this.  Both sides have valid arguments and both could be correct.  But the real issues lie in if we should do something about global warming even if it doesn’t exist.

Now you can see people every day that fight for or against doing something about it.  Now on the argument of global warming we really do not know if we are the cause of it.  The earth heats and cools for other reasons, axis wobble, the area we are located somewhere in our never ending galactic revolutions, etc.  Please do not post saying it is a scientific fact that we are the cause…period.  That is not the point of this post.  The point is should we change our actions toward global warming?  Here is another argument we should look at.

So we know that greenhouse gasses are bad.  If you were to inhale CO2 or NO2 you would um…..DIE.  Little extreme but if locked in a room with these gasses it wouldn’t take long for you to succumb to the all mighty.  So why do we think it would be OK to pump millions of tons of these gasses into our atmosphere. Shouldn’t we do something about pumping these dangerous gasses into the air we breath?  I do not believe we should worry so much about the fact that they are warming our earth as much as we should look at the fact that these gasses are poisonous to most animals on the planet earth.  If you were not suicidal would you start a car in your garage with the doors closed?  NO!  So why do we pump it into our atmosphere.

The argument stated above, I think, has a lot of merit.  Some may say the earth is to large for humans to ever pump enough poisons gasses into the atmosphere to cause harm to humans.  But I am not so sure that this argument really holds ground anymore.  Humans have finally become a force to throw off nature.  We have the power to terraform our world.  We can destroy worlds now.  But any species with the power to destroy has the same power in the opposite direction.  We have options now to use other non polluting gases.  We are very close to producing cars that only produce water, we have cars that run on air.  The ability to pump your car up with air and run a vehicle, wow.  Why may I ask, do we still feel it is necessary to dispose of millions to billions of tons of toxins into our atmosphere.  Who cares if it harms the environment….IT HARMS US.  Isn’t the whole point of human nature….really the point of any living organism self preservation?  Yes, yes it is.