MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
As you're probably beginning to notice, the singular momentum of the universe is one of moving from simplicity and chaos toward complexity and order. It's a very weird thing and perhaps the most intriguing thing about this place. There are people who think that all this happened by chance. Those people are called atheists. And there are people who think that there's some sort of being that made all this stuff and who is guiding it. They're called theists. Curiously it's mostly the theists who disbelieve all this business we've covered so far, even though, if you wanted to prove that the great being existed, the best place to look would be this weird desire the universe has for self-improvement.
Comments
This is really an awesome read. I came upon it by link happenstance, and it's one of my favorite accidents of late. Imagine you're a brand new dad trying to explain the purpose of life and living to your brand new son - with a reasonable explanation of how we all began thrown in. Then make it interesting, funny and real. He fills it with love without making it sappy while he wanders his way through ... you'll be left thinking about it long after. Promise.
by barefooted on Wed, 09/30/2015 - 12:49am
Fine until the ending. We build stuff, we control stuff, we mold stuff. We're mini-Gods building bigger and bigger dynamos, masters of our own little universes, petty tyrants and benevolent dictators and if unsuccessful just victims and roadkill on the highway of life.
Love like money is a tool, not a end. It drives us to create families and communities and kill people who threaten us (unless we rejigger definitions a little just-in-time). Beauty? an abstract notion - can be bigger, better, smaller, cuter, more efficient, more "aesthetic", more popular... it's a bit of a Rorschach, a bit like quantum mechanics - if you want to see it as a wave, it's a wave; want a particle? it's a particle. Now shove everything in that basket and tell everyone else they're wrong. Or if you're Heisenberg, tell them they're all right, within a certain probability.
Strangely enough for the Alabama theists, they insist there's a divine hand, a reason, behind life but seem to insist that knowing that reason is off-limits. A big billboard along an Alabama highway says, "Obey God. Understanding can wait." Yeah, like right, God moves in mysterious ways - perhaps he could simplify things a bit - frame it in a PowerPoint. It ain't that tough.
Even God 1.0 (the stern taskmaster) evolved to God 2.0 (the loving God), and presumably after a few thousand years we should have God 3.0 (the massively chaotic / endothermic God? the condensed abridged God? the "you-wouldn't-believe-it-if-you-tried" God?) All I know is that things are quite messy at the moment if you believe in God, so I'd expect a better housekeeper (God 3.0 = multitasking understanding female God for a change? one that knows when someone should clean up their room, not leave a mess and play better with others?)
Perhaps I'm not an atheist so much as I don't know which version of God to believe in? or I’m waiting for an upgrade, the God 4s or so, should have all the bugs worked out.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 09/30/2015 - 4:14am
More food for thought . . .
Our son is now 42 years old and what I attempted to "teach" him from a very early age is that every single day is a brand new "Call to Adventure" and a brand new day. I have never interfered with his personal spirituality.
~OGD~
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by oldenGoldenDecoy on Sat, 10/03/2015 - 11:40am