Category Archives: beliefs

amusements, arts, beliefs, medical, quotes, science, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s accumulation of leaf-mould …

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
[Martin Luther King, Jr]

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.
[Steven Weinberg]

What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.
[Anthony Robbins]

The idea of monogamy hasn’t so much been tried and found wanting, as found difficult and left untried.
[GK Chesterton]

The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful.
[Carl Jung in a letter to Freud, 30 January 1910]

Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?
[Susan Squire, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage]

If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.
[Peter Ustinov]

When we were kids, our mums used to write our name in our school uniform. Now we are adults, we have other peoples names on the front of our clothes!
[Thoughts of Angel]

beliefs, history, memes, words

Word of the Week

Dzong.

A religious and/or governmental centre in one of the Buddhist kingdoms of the Himalayas (Bhutan and Tibet). A Buddhist monastery. The architecture is massive in style with towering exterior walls surrounding a complex of courtyards, temples, administrative offices and monks’ accommodation.

beliefs, thoughts

Secure Your Own Mask Before Helping Others

There is often criticism of Zen Bhuddism for being self-centred, selfish and insufficiently altruistic. This is true up to a point; as Brad Warner explains in a recent post on his Hardcore Zen site it is difficult to help others if you’re woozy yourself because you ain’t fixed your own oxygen mask. Here’s an extract of what Brad has to say …

Zen [seems to be] self-centered. Rather that hearing a lot about how we should be of service to others, the standard canonical texts of Zen appear to focus on what we need to do to improve our own situation and state of mind … They say we need to help others, but don’t go very deeply into how that might be done. This focus on the self is ironic considering that Zen is often portrayed as a practice aimed at eradicating the self.

But have you ever glanced up randomly when you’re on an airplane ignoring the flight attendants safety instructions? When they tell you how to use those oxygen masks they say that you should first secure your own mask before helping others. There’s a good reason for this. If the plane is losing oxygen you’re going to be too woozy to be of service to anyone else until you first get your own stuff together. This is the way it is in life as well.
…
Much of what passes for religion … takes as its underlying unstated assumption and starting point that we ourselves are OK … It’s painful when that assumption is challenged …

The underlying problem is the same as the problem with the emergency oxygen masks on airplanes. In our usual condition we are far too woozy to be of much service to anyone else. When our own condition is all messed up our attempts to be helpful are more likely to make things worse than to improve them.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t do anything when we see someone is in trouble. We always have to act from the state we’re in at this moment. It’s our duty to do what we can with what we have.

One of the greatest and most useful lessons I’ve learned from Zen practice is how not to help … People learn best from their own mistakes and learn nothing when you fix things for them.
…
The problem is not whether we should live for others or not. The problem is how we should live for others … It’s important to discover how to truly help. And sometimes that means not helping.

Immediate take-away moral: don’t jump in and fix things for people but teach them how to fix the problem themselves. Kindness can be cruel in the short-term. It’s a bit like school is dull, tedious, boring and apparently pointless but later in life you realise it did actually enable you to fulfil your dreams.

amusements, beliefs, books, quotes, science, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

The usual eclectic and kleptological collection this week …

Blunt common sense is valued above Gauloise-wreathed nuances of gossip about concepts.
[AC Grayling, The Form of Things]

Religion is false but the masses should be encouraged to believe it; it keeps them in order.
[Plato quoted in AC Grayling, The Form of Things]

Harvester of maidenheads
[Description of the second Earl of Rochester, circa 1660, quoted in AC Grayling, The Form of Things]

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.
[Bertrand Russell]

… and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]

I like prime numbers … I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your lifetime thinking about them.
[Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time]

The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
[Thomas Carlyle]

Long range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.
[Peter F Drucker]

Life begins at 40 — but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.
[Helen Rowland]

If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
[Anon]

beliefs, freedom of speech, memes, thoughts, words

Word of the Week

Libertine.
1. A freedman; one freed from slavery. [Roman]
2a. The name given to certain “free-thinking” sects (of France and elsewhere on the continent) of the sixteenth century.
2b. One who holds free or loose opinions about religion; a free-thinker.
2c. One who follows his own inclinations or goes his own way; one who is not restricted or confined.
3. A man who is not restrained by moral law, especially in his relations with the female sex; one who leads a dissolute, licentious life.

The word ‘libertine’ was first applied in the 1550s to a sect of Protestants in northern Europe who, with unimpeachable logic, reasoned that since God had ordained all things, nothing could be sinful. They proceeded to act accordingly. Their views were regarded with horror by both Catholics on one side and Calvinists on the other.
[AC Grayling, The Form of Things]

amusements, beliefs, books, current affairs, freedom of speech, nudism, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

So here’s this week’s cornucopia of quotations. There’s a philosophy PhD in this lot somewhere!

A clean house is the sign of a broken computer.
[Unknown]

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
[Rose Macaulay]

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
[Robert Frost]

The human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve intact its splendour and its beauty … Nakedness as such is not to be equated with physical shamelessness … Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person … The human body is not in itself shameful … Shamelessness (just like shame and modesty) is a function of the interior of a person.
[Pope John Paul II, The Theology of the Body]

The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
[Jean Cocteau]

The best things in life aren’t things.
[Unknown]

Those who are at ease with themselves […] want to undermine authority rather than exercise it.
[Prof. Paul Delany]

[Tony] Blair has […] told us, “Hand on my heart, I did what I thought was right”. If a dry-cleaner said this after ruining our jacket, we would not be pleased with the explanation. Politicians are different: don’t look at any unfortunate results, they say, just admire my generous motives.
[Prof. Paul Delany]

A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason, and the real reason.
[Financier JP Morgan]

One of the basic human rights is to make fun of other people, whoever they are.
[Anthony Powell quoted in John Russell, Reading Russell: Essays 1941 to 1988]

If you don’t like our sense of humour, please tell us so we can laugh at you.
[Unknown]

beliefs, current affairs, medical, science, sexuality

Sex and Religion in Public Life

Jeana over at MySexProfessor writes an incisive post about why it is more important that we know about the religious lives of public figures than their sex lives — albeit the article is built on the words of one of my hate figures, Richard Dawkins. It isn’t that I disagree with the sentiments behind much of what Dawkins says (I don’t), but the bigoted and intransigent way in which he says it — he is just as fundamentalist as any of the religious believers against whom he rails.

As so often others have said what I think so much better than I can, so here are a couple of seminal extracts.

[O]ur society has so many hang-ups about sex that we’re practically responsible for creating an environment in which any sexual expression could potentially be deviant […] even fairly innocuous acts (which one could argue, taking pictures of one’s genitals counts as) are made out to be of huge significance because so many people are hung up on the idea that ANY sexual expression outside the norm is automatically inappropriate or gross or bad.
…
Dawkins asserts that it does matter what a public figure’s religious beliefs are, since those beliefs, far more than their sexual acts, may determine how they pursue public policy. He gives these examples: “[…] George Bush has publicly boasted that God told him to invade Iraq […] To push to an extreme, who would deny Congress’s right to ask whether a candidate for Secretary of Health is a Christian Scientist or a Jehovah’s Witness? Or take a Christian sect that fervently desires the Second Coming of Christ, and believes the key Revelation prophecies cannot be fulfilled without a Middle East Armageddon. Would you wish the nuclear button to be made available to a follower of such a creed?” This is scary stuff.
…
[W]e must grant people the dignity of privately pursuing things that oppose the sexual mainstream.** Just because a politician likes unconventional sex doesn’t mean they’re going to try to force it on everyone through legislation. Unfortunately […] politicians have done much to make anything that deviates from heterosexual monogamous reproductive sex a crime.

** And not just the sexual mainstream. People must have the right to deviate from and oppose mainstream thought and opinion on anything. For that is how opinions are changed, new ideas formed and progress made. But this doesn’t give anyone the right to force or attempt to force (violently or otherwise) their opinions on others.

beliefs, science

Speeding Lemons

1 Comment

I came across a very curious thing yesterday. The way in which we associate qualities with things and thus develop intuitive beliefs.

As an example, look at these two shapes.

If I tell you one is called Bouba and the other Kiki, you can probably intuitively know which is which. Yes, that’s right, apparently the vast majority of people will agree that Kiki is the star-like one and Bouba the more blobby one. No-one can tell you why they think this, though, beyond statements like “Bouba goes more appropriately with that shape”.

Nor can anthropologists yet agree why this is so. Although it seems it is something to do with belief systems, and may have some relationship to synaesthesia — that peculiar trait where people associate colours with words or smells with sounds: Monday is always red; the note C# always smells of rubber.

Let’s try another one.

Is a lemon fast or slow?

It’s a curious, almost nonsensical, question. But think about it for a minute … and most people will intuitively conclude that lemons are fast.

And for me (I have no other data on this) it seems possible to intuitively rank citrus fruit by speed: grapefruit are faster than oranges but slower than lemons, while limes are faster than lemons.

WTF?!

Find out more about such intuitive beliefs and synaesthesia.

beliefs, books, memes, pleasures, thoughts, topographical

Listography – Travelling

6 Comments

Unlike me, many who responded to last week’s listography about decision they’re glad they made included some item of travel. So this week Kate is asking us to nominate five places we would still like to visit.

For me this is quite easy as I have some places I know I would like to see. But it is sad because I know I likely never will see most of them: I don’t much like the actual travelling to get to these places (too much stress) and at 60 and living on my pension I’m unlikely to be able to make myself afford (even if fit enough) the cost of getting there. Quite a number of the places I won’t visit on principle because of their lack of respect for the environment or the people. But leaving all that aside, here is my choice of five places I would love to see.

Japan. I find Japan a fascinating country. I’d really love to see all those Buddhist, Taoist and Shinto temples; Kanamara Matsuri, the annual Shinto fertility “Festival of the Phallus”; the koi carp farms; the unspoilt mountainous country; zen gardens; Mount Fuji; and the bullet train. What a photographic experience it would be. We have friends in Japan, so we should be able to do this easily; and as our friends are in topical Okinawa islands we’d get some great music and wonderful beaches too. But I won’t go to Japan on principle because of their intransigent stance on whaling. And I don’t much relish a 12-14 hour flight.

Iceland. Land of glaciers, volcanoes, geysers and geothermal hot water. The country looks frighteningly beautiful; Earth in the raw; new land still very much being built by plate tectonics. Visiting should be easily achievable (there are endless package tours) and a wonderful photographic experience, but again it’s a land I won’t visit because of the whaling issue.

Norway. Like Kate I’d love to see the Aurora Borealis. The midnight sun. The fjords. And to go to Hell. (Yes, there really is a place called Hell). And Noreen has friend who lives on a tiny island off the south coast. Again it should be easily achievable. But again it is off-limits for me because of the whaling. (Why is it that my top three picks are all off-limits because of whaling? It really wasn’t designed that way!) Although we could achieve a lot of that by visiting (friends in) Sweden; which we might yet manage — at least do keep talking about going to Sweden!

Tibet. It must be one of the poorest countries on Earth, but it’s hard to find out because it has been assimilated into China. But it’s a land of rugged mountains, high plateaus and curiously interesting Buddhist monasteries. But it is another place I’m unlikely ever to visit: it is so hard to get to and I won’t go on principle because of the way China has occupied it and largely destroyed the culture and the people. Again it would be just such a wonderful photographic experience. One really should have done this when young and fit.

The Amazon. I’d love to see the Amazonian fishes and parrots (not to mention Jaguars) in the wild. And for once I have no moral objections to going there other than tourism beginning to impact the environment, although nowhere nearly on the scale of Africa. Again I can’t help feeling this is travel one should have done when young and fit.

So they’re the five places I’d probably most like to visit. But there are so many others which should be more achievable: Bruges, Kyle of Lochalsh, Ireland, Italy, the pyramids, the Alhambra, ride the Orient Express, travel from Thurso/Wick to Penzance by train, Scilly Isles.

So much to do, and so little time to achieve it.

amusements, beliefs, current affairs, medical, personal, science, thoughts

Works of the Devil

Katyboo recently listed a number of things she considers the works of the Devil. And naturally this got me thinking, the way such things do. So here are a few more things which the Devil has sent as a pestilence upon us.

  • Top of the list has to be RELIGION. Now look all you religious people, you’re all Devil worshippers! If you didn’t believe in the Devil you wouldn’t need God to save you from him.
  • And then comes politics. Need I say more when one looks at workers of Devil like Tony B Liar and Gordon Brown.
  • Fast food: especially McDonalds and KFC (or as it’s know in this house Kentucky Fried Food Poisoning). As an adjunct we must include ready meals, and indeed all False Food.
  • Then there is a collection of actual food stuffs, which includes Egg Custard (yeuch!) and Jellied Eels (double yeuch!) and tinned sweetcorn. I love eel, but jellied, no, disgusting – salty and slimy.
  • And a few beverages, especially Pernod and Absinthe which are just vile. They even look like the works of the Devil as well as tasting disgusting.

What else should one add?

  • Hermetically sealed clam-shell packaging. Well you could make that all plastic packaging.
  • Night clothes, especially pyjamas. Haven’t worn anything in bed since I was a student apart from the odd occasions I’ve been in hospital. It’s just so uncomfortable.
  • Braces (suspenders to you Americans). Something else that’s vilely uncomfortable and looks stupid – if you need braces your trousers don’t fit properly.
  • And while we’re on clothes, there’s fashion. Pretentious and a waste of time and money.
  • Girls wearing far too much make-up (so that’s most of them!). Why do they need to look as if they’ve strayed a 2mm thick skin of plastic on their faces?
  • Facial pubic beards and pudenda (on both sexes) without them.
  • Ballroom Dancing. I refused to have anything to do with it as a youngster, despite my parents’ prediction I would be a social outcast. So I’m a social outcast: it’s probably for the best!
  • Maggots. Anything that smells nasty and wriggles. No more to say really!
  • Cinema and films. I just ask “Why?”. What is the point?
  • And finally there are a few people including Lord Winston (I remain convinced that IVF is the Devil’s work), Richard Dawkins (who is just as bigoted as the believers he objects to) plus most of the twats that fill our TV screens.

Oh, you’d better add daytime TV too!

Interesting. Reading back over that list it is very much a reflection of our theory about False Life. Worrying!

Image from 123RF Stock Photos.