With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
November 25, 2005 - 12:09 a.m.
Today was thanksgiving. I really had a thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. The duck came out great. Alison took care of my mother today so I was able to take it easy, well except for doing the dishes and running out shopping. So I should be feeling really happy and thankful right?
When I sat down to the computer just now to write this entry, this is what came out.
Is anybody there, does anybody care, does anybody see what I see?
That’s from the musical 1776. Everyone once in a while those words just force themselves on me.
I was going to leave that as my entire entry. I won’t. Sure it’s a holiday and nobody is going to read this but I need to write more for my own sake.
So on to the philosophical points I alluded to yesterday. I was going through my old entries and found one that has half of my personal creed.
“when I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me—that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter—except to show how very dull we are,”
It is from James Branch Cabell’s Cream of the Jest. It is said by Felix Kenneston; a name I don’t mention much. You are probably more familiar with the name he uses in his dreams, Horvendile.
The other half of my creed is by Democritus.
Nothing exists but atoms and the void.
Actually I believe in an updated version of it:
Nothing exists but quanta and space-time.
These two statements might seem like polar opposites. The first speaks of miracles and the second is the essence of materialism. They aren’t though. They are two complimentary versions of reality. The first is about how I feel about the universe; the second is about how I reason about it. If someone came to me and explained something by a miracle I wouldn’t waste a nanosecond considering it. If someone told me that something that obeyed all the laws of physics but was still magic, I’ll listen.
The great watershed in human thought was when Isaac Newton came up with his law of Universal Gravitation. Before then it was assumed there were two sets of rules, one for the earth and one for the heavens. Newton’s great insight was that the whole universe follows the same natural laws. This was more than discovering a law, it was discovering that such laws exist. With that idea everything becomes connected to everything else in the universe. Your body is exerting a force on distant galaxies and they are exerting a force on you. Not only that but anyone in those galaxies is living under the same rules as you. Einstein’s theory totally changed the mechanism but that idea remained the same. Now it wasn’t about exerting a force, the effect is even more profound. The mass of your body changes the geometry of the entire universe. Every time you move that change ripples across the cosmos at the speed of light. If that isn’t a miracle i don’t know what is.
So I wrote about that and I’m feeling better. It even put me in a good enough frame of mind to remember else good that happened today. I downloaded a CD burning program and I started preparing my Festivus CD. It is going to be good. It will have classics you are familiar with and songs you have probably never heard. I can’t wait to hear it myself.
Oh yes, one more important point. It is now past midnight.
Whee Festivus!
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile November 25, 2005
