Jabbering my way to a biography

So.. I have this unhealthy obsession with getting rid of things. From sentimental junk (for almost all things sentimental are) to to personal notes almost everything in my life gets edited and taken out fairly regularly. (I even edited out a lot of journal entries at one point.)

Except, of late, I haven't been editing my e-mails.

And so I suddenly realized that the only ways that anyone could know much of anything about me is through a progression of e-mail conversations and a couple of blog posts.

Not that posterity will care... but, you know.. it's interesting that I've nearly edited myself out of history.

Maybe I'll get rid of those e-mails.

What time do you think you have?

Time. Consciousness. Existence. Nothing. Perfection. Knowledge. Truth.

Seven of the oddest concepts that I have ever run into.

Time wasn't ever odd to me until I ran into a book titled: "The Calendar" which seems to suggest (I haven't actually read it) that time is entirely a human invention.

What is time?
The only purpose and defining feature of time seems to be that it is a measurement between a past and current event.

So five ideas that have been driving me crazy:

1. Can one reach a point at which time can no longer be divided into smaller units? If so then it would seem as though time does not exist at each one of those moments because there would be nothing to compare it to.

2. If it were entirely possible for something to not change for say, one second, would a measurement of time necessarily skip that one second?

3. Seeing as one is always living in the present moment, never in the past, and never in the future, can we conclude that there are truly such things as the past and the future? Are the past and the future the present?

4. If, as many religions suggest, time will not exist after death doesn't this mean that there can be only the options of a sort of Buddhist-nothingness after death, or an existence for persons which is stuck in one mode so that if one had a body that body could never move, eat, talk, etc. because doing so would allow time back into the game board as a measurement between when the person did and did not act?

5. If time is cylical would the circle of time taken as a whole, meaning the greatest time unit that could be reached, be the measurement at which time does not exist because one time around the circle would be the same as the next time around the circle and so on and would, thus, indicate not a measurement of change, but instead a pattern?

I just had to laugh my brains out

The other day I suddenly realized that I had discussed insanity caused by cannibalistic practices of eating the brain quite a few times but for the life of me I could not remember the exact details of what happened or where I read about it.

I finally found it and I have found where I read it.

It's called Kuru.
It was located in a tribe in New Guinea. (Not Europe as I have claimed.)
And I read about it in a book Titled: Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Goodness. I was starting to think that I'd made it up. (Although, I was quite wrong on quite a few of my memories of it.)

Here is an official site discussing the disease and here is Wikipedia's article on it if you would like to read about it.

Just thought I'd confirm at least part of what I told probably all of you at one point or another. The rest my brain must have added in.

"A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible. . ."

Throughout the course of the day I was able to check out three different translations of the Bible bringing me to have five different copies of the Bible in my room (Cambridge, Cotemporary English, KJV, Complete JST, and Oxford). It was an adventure.

It's shocking how little I know about the Bible. I'm finding out through "GOD: A Biography" all of the things that I have missed in the past.

I embarrassed to admit that up until a couple of months ago I thought that Franklin's ever-so-famous line: "God helps those who help themselves." was in the Bible. Until tonight I thought the title of this post was in the Bible. And until tonight I thought that Tydale's remark: "I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you!" was in the Bible.

I don't know what I'm talking about. It's time for some serious review of Bible-related books and, of course, the Bible.

I'm just glad no one has tried to Bible bash me. I'm doomed if they do.

Oh! Two Bible related fun facts while I am on the subject:

When Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God he stated that he did not believe, he knew. This makes me wonder if this is the place where the shift took place in English religious discussion because you rarely hear someone say that they "believe" in God, today people tend to use the word "know" instead. It was, apparently, shocking that he would've said such a thing then, but fairly common to say now.



One can call himself or herself a gnostic! I had known that the term "agnostic" was coined by the ever-so-attractive man above T.H. Huxley (Aldous' grandfather), but for some reason it had never occured to me until the other day that Huxley was using the two roots of "a" and "gnostic". I'm really tempted to tell the next person I talk to about religion that I'm a gnostic just to be able to see the reaction I get.

"Agnostic?"
"No, you know, a gnostic."

"It's the end of the World as we know it . . . and I feel fine."

Chandler Scott showed me this website a while back.
It's called: Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the Earth? dot com.
Hope you like it.

That's a bunch of BS.

So. Today I was in the BYU library trying to find a book titled:

"GOD: A Biography"

I typed in the title on the catalog search. And what came up? BS 1192.6

I started laughing and smiled the rest of the time I was at BYU.

It made my day.

Side note: I went home and checked if the man who came up with the Library of Congress Classification System was an atheist. Apparently, he isn't. The labeling of books on the bible under the group and subgroup BS was an accident.

Go figure. :D

(For Spencer: OH! And it's the G-O-D God!)

Too, too solid flesh

"Maybe this world is another planet's hell." - Aldous Huxley

Anybody else think about this more often than is probably healthy?

For a long time I consider Eastern theology to be entirely without a hell.
Then one day I realized that I couldn't think of a hell that could be much worse than Earth. It holds genocide, torture, hate, lust, rampant illness, insanity, poverty, starvation, nihilism, absolutism, saccharine everything, selfishness, brutality, and ignorance.

Eastern theology might just have the worst punishment of all theologies for not getting in touch with the divine.
To do this over and over and over again without some knowledge of what one is ever really doing would be hell beyond imagination.

Reincarnation would be horrible.