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.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
November 12, 2009 - 11:06 a.m.
Because I moved my car yesterday morning I didn't have to come straight home from school to move it. That made my life much easier. After school I was able to go straight to Aiden and Christine's house. My school is about halfway between my house and theirs. I saved a lot of travel time starting from school.
The reason I went was that Christine offered me Aiden's old trench coat that they were going to get rid of anyway. It's a bit small for me, the same size as my old one, but perfectly wearable. So now I can dress for cold wet weather. Guess what we are going to have the next few days; yes cold wet weather.
When I got there Aiden was at work and Christine was making the last minute preparations for NERFA. They are musicians. Think some of Aiden's talent will come with the coat? I did write a song on the way home; maybe there is something to it. I hope none of my Gentle Readers fell for that crap. You can't get talent from a coat.
You can get good conversation from a friend. It might not last as long as the coat but it was the best part of the trip.
When I got home I stayed home. I totally forgot I was supposed to go to the Knick game. I think it was for the best. I need some days taking it easy. I don't intend to get dressed today. I guess I won't be wearing my new coat.
I try to make Wise Madness a record of what I'm thinking about. The problem is that there are some things that I think about often and I don't want to bore My Gentle Readers with repetition. That means I have to keep finding new ways to present it. Here are a couple.
At some point in my teens I realized that my problem with tests for ESP is that they were all too subtle. If someone could actually read minds you wouldn't need to do a statistical analysis of how many cards he guessed correctly to prove it. They could just every card, or almost every card right. They could convince you in seconds by just telling you what you were thinking. If they had telekinesis they could just make something move. A torsion balance can measure the pressure from a beam of light. Anyone that could affect a dice roll would have to exert more force than that. What the statistical tests do is allow room for cheating, conscious or unconscious. It's like counting cards at blackjack just changing the odds a little becomes significant in the long run.
It's the same thing with the existence of God. Unless God were trying to be difficult if he existed it would be obvious. He could just talk to all of us. If he isn't constrained by the natural laws which he created any time he did something it would be a miracle. It would be obvious. Is that proof he doesn't exist? No. But it puts the burden on those who believe to come up with a reason God hides his existence.
Now for a new feature. I know The Lord of the Rings along with The Hobbit and The Silmarillion the way other people know the bible. I often think about passages in them. I’m going to start quoting the passages I think of. It's another way of letting you know what's going on in my mind. I won't tell you what inspired any passage but I will sometimes give some thoughts about the passage itself.
Yesterday two passages came to mind. The first is at the end of the chapter Many Meetings in The Fellowship of the Rings.
There are no folk like hobbits after all for a real good talk.
The second is from Appendix A (Yes I have read and reread the appendices) part III: Durin's Folk.
It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf-women, probably no more than a third of the whole people. … The number of dwarf-men that marry is actually less than one-third.
I always have trouble with the section, the numbers seem wrong. If one third of the dwarves are women then of every three dwarves two would be men and one a woman. So you'd expect half the dwarf-men to marry, not one-third. Now yes it would be possible for any fraction less than one-half to marry but that's how it would be natural to phrase it, "less than one-half," not "less than one-third." I think Tolkien was being innumerate. I'm sure that doesn't bother most people but it always brings my reading to a full stop when I get to this part and have to figure out what he means. Did he perhaps mean that there were one-third as many dwarf-women than dwarf-men? Not one-third of the total? I'm afraid we'll never know and I'm probably one of the few people that care.
I'm not going to try and think of Tolkien. I’m just going to record when it comes naturally. I have no idea how often that will be. I thought of doing this after the first quote I gave but then realized I had gone through that entire line of thought about the second quote earlier in the day.
I always love having cheater segments that I don't have to actually write. Most of the time They'll come without comment, like the first quote. It's a way of telling you what's going on in my head without telling you what's going on inside my head.
If You're Reading This You're Elite - November 17, 2009
I'm Not A Number I'm A Free Man - November 16, 2009
Ives-y League - November 15, 2009
Gangs of Horvendile - November 14, 2009
Does God Believe That I Exist? - November 13, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile November 12, 2009
