Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

A truth in question.

Before you make a testimony as a witness in a courtroom, you are told to tell the truth, the only truth and nothing but the truth.

Well, that begs for the question: What exactly is the truth?

I think truth is a personal interpretation. A statement is made in a neutral format and whether it is the truth or a lie depends completely upon the interpretation of the individual viewing upon that. Superstitions are the best example. 'It is bad luck to open an umbrella indoors'. That statement is neither true or false in it's original claim. It is only true for those that believes in it's truth and as false for those that believe it is so.

A statement will become the truth or a lie.

So in court, the truth is unknown. It is based on the interpretation by the jury and judge on the 'facts' presented, that we then make a conclusion. It is through this process that we make errors, sending innocent people behind bars and letting the genuinely guilty ones free.

But it begs for the statement in question:
"A truth is always the truth even if nobody believes it. A lie is always a lie even if everyone believes it."

Now what about you?

Thursday, March 18, 2010

A sword and shield.

What happens when an immovable object meets and unstoppable force?

I will attempt to answer this question my way.

This question is first of all assuming that both an unstoppable force and an immovable object exists as ideas outside the physical realm.

By using the analogy of a solid wall as well as Newton's law of motions: "Every action as an opposite and equal reaction", "A force will either be still or continuous until another force acts upon it", I will attempt to address the dilemma.


A wall. When you push against it, you are applying a force against the wall, and the wall does not budge. In that case, there should be an opposite force acting against your force. However, once you let go, the wall does not push back, resulting in neutral force. So this in turn suggests that there is no opposite force acting against your force when you push against the wall, or if there is, what is it?

This would suggest that not every action has an opposite and equal reaction, simply the action or force is not great enough to break the solid compounds of the object.

In this case, when the unstoppable force hits the immovable object, the force will be stopped, resulting in a great explosion. A force can only be stopped if another force acts upon it and in this case, there is no opposing force acting against the unstoppable force, only the object which halters the force so in this case, since there is no force acting against it from the object, it must be stronger than the force acting on it. So the object will remain intact while the force will be ceased.

Monday, November 16, 2009

It's about time too!

One thing that has been on my mind lately is "When did time exist?" As humans, we couldn't measure it until the sundial was invented, but time of course has existed. But since when?

I will look at this briefly from two perspectives. The biblical and scientific. Firstly, the biblical.

God created everything, so he must have created time. But for God to create time requires time. Even if it is the smallest of fractions of time, it still took time. So time must have existed before God created time. So did time exist before God? Looks like it has. So when before God did time exist?

The scientific view would start with the Big Bang. The Big Bang created the universe and such. But it took a very minute fraction of time to create the Big Bang, so therefore, time must have existed before the Big Bang happened and not during the process of the Big Bang, because it took time for it to occur. So when before the Big Bang did time exist?

I don't know how to answer these questions. If you are able to provide any philosophical insights or point out to me the flaws, please do so and I will attempt to refine them.

Thank you.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

The Thoughts of Minority.

I would like to take some time and speak about my transition into Atheism. I have witnessed that by declaring myself as Atheist, it has caused some problems and tensions in my household, primarily my mother who transferred to Christianity.


Note: This is going to be a VERY LONG post so if you do not wish to read all of it, you can turn back now. This is mainly stuff relating to myself so it may bore many of you. I apologize in advance.


I was not born Atheist. Nobody is. Nobody is born Christian either. Simply being baptized as a baby at birth does not make one Christian. I think this forced process of baptizing a child limits the freedom of the child. Back on topic. Everyone is born as a non-theist, a person who has no understanding about religion or science or the world in which they have just entered into.

Same case with me. As a child, my parents believed in Buddhism. I was not educated enough to understand the processes so I only took part because I had no idea what else to do. All my parents and relatives show and express great amounts of faith to religion. When I was nearing 9 years old, my mother transferred into Christianity, where she claimed she had found her divine purpose. She dragged me along and I sat in the lessons, learning about God. At first it seemed interesting, so I paid attention. I learned the origin of the universe and Earth, all the plants, animals and most importantly, humans. Us. I also learned about the wild stories which were told and found them fascinating. I learned the 10 commandments and so forth. I was a pompous, obnoxious and naive little prick.

In school, we learned about HSIE (which most of you will recall). Human Society and Its Environment. I learned about how things evolve, how things change. I learned about how plants and animals came into existence, the origin of humans and dinosaurs and the evolution of technology. This is where I first hit my wall. I immediately began to notice contradictions between the Bible, which I was taught from in church, and what HSIE taught. Since I didn't have any complex textbooks back then, the Bible was my source for answers.

You might remember Scripture classes. I loved them. Learning about human values, faith and morals were great and my mother was happy.

It wasn't until the story of Noah that really started to question my faith and belief in a supreme deity. I was told that God is perfect in every element. God told Noah to build an ark, and take two animals of each kind aboard the ark and then set sail. God caused a great flood which wiped out a large population of civilians, save Noah, his wife and two of each animal aboard an ark which landed on a mountain. Okay, fair deal. What about "Thou shalt not kill"?

I pointed this fact out to the pastors and preachers at my church. I said that how can God justify his actions of killing people with a flood when he gives the commandment of telling others to not kill? This was a sign of a flawed God. An imperfect God who has no concrete establishments of his own words. One who breaks his own code. My question was met with discernment and anger. I was only seeking questions. I was about 12 by this stage.

I started asking others around me for answers to this question. Nobody had the answer to that. Some claimed that God does not need to justify his actions and that his supremacy allows him to do so. I didn't someone to tell me that was a ridiculous answer. One cannot make rules for others to abide if you are going to break them yourself and let alone, provide no justification for your purpose or incentive to do so. This was an imperfect God, which was met by the answer that God was spiritual. This led to even more contradictions. If God is spiritual, then that means God does not exist physically, so that means, he cannot physically hear or understand my prayers, only in the spiritual world, so how does a physical being communicate with the spirits? It finally made sense all of a sudden that why I am still being bullied. Still the loner in class. the one without many friends. The socially awkward and inept. The one with restrictive parents. The one who grew up by corporal punishment. The one with divorced parents. The reason why the preachers were so defensive about any questions against the belief of God. There is no God. There is no supreme deity.

I wasn't Atheist yet. I started by reading over the bible. Starting the the Old Testament and going over what it taught. I started with the Old Testament was because the churches focused primarily on the New Testament and the Old was at times neglected. I realized why. Contradictions. The more I read, the more I lost my faith in a God. I started to realize that everything that has happened to me was due to my own actions and lack of actions to change the moment and circumstances for myself. There was no God to direct me. It made sense now that I was hurt at school, threatened by bullies and too afraid to speak up was not because God would make it all better or God had plans for me. Why did God want me to get hurt so badly? Mentally traumatized. There is no God and that is why God did not attend to my prayers of making sure I was not bullied.

By age 14, I declared that I was not going to attend church any longer, but instead stay home or go to the library and read the bible. Which is what I did. I read the bible in the library and started to look for answers to what made sense. The reality. Science was the answer. It provided visual evidence, empirical evidence which you can actually witness before you. After several months, I declared myself Atheist. My mother had a bit of a tantrum saying that it's wrong and so forth. But my decision has now been made. I started to research more and more on Science and Atheism.

From then to today, I am Atheist and will continue to be Atheist and spread the word and my beliefs on Atheism. I believe it should deserve more attention and that religion sometimes is the cause of problems.

I want to point out a few things before ending. I don't have a problem with other people believing in a religion, but I don't like it when you try and suppress me with the psychological impact of going to hell and suffering eternal torture if I didn't. I have an argument for that too. I said I'm going to try and spread Atheism, but I will do it so that I leave the options open. I am not going to use force or anything other than the power of speech and language and inspiration.

I also do not mean to make an attack on religion. If I have done so, I apologize. I was only trying to communicate my process of transitioning to Atheism with questions and examples.

I have noticed that the Bible contradicted reality, and itself, which ultimately led to my choice of becoming Atheist.

If you have any questions regarding my thoughts on Atheism or would like to know more about my arguments and reasons of switching out of religion. Leave a comment and I'll hopefully get back to you or drop me an email.

Thank You.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Abstract Education.

It puzzles me, it really does about why I have an education. I find myself questioning myself on the purpose of my education and consequently the purpose of education as an entire entity.

Why do I choose to go to school? Why do we all have to go to school when most of us dislike it, when there are school drop-outs? Why and when did the act of "jigging" school come into society? What was the purpose of that? What was it about the system of education that triggered people to "jig" school?

If school was interesting, fun, and entertaining, we wouldn't have people skipping classes to go down to the shops or go home. They would stay in school.

I believe that the current system of education provides no direction nor purpose to the amount of study we must go through.

I currently wish to be a secondary mathematics teacher. I wonder if I spent 13 years of my life at school to build up all the necessary knowledge and skills required to be a maths teacher. If so, then I didn't need science, didn't need to study history or geography. It seems a perfect waste of time and resource to be spending all that time on things that provide no useful outlet if I became a maths teacher. If not, then what is my direction in life? Why did I spend 13 years at school for?

The answer is to breed educated people in society. The more educated, literate and civilized people there are in society, the faster the world can expand and grow. We attempt to raise university professors and scientists and mechanics and mathematicians and physicists and chemists and lawyers and doctors and all those high paying jobs. From businessmen to congressmen. But this raises a problem. If all we are doing is attempting to raise educated people, the society will not function, unless some dramatic change could be implemented to account for the abolition of certain services, one in particular is the garbage system.

Most people I would assume just take out the trash once every week for the garbage truck to drive around and dump it elsewhere. If there were only educated people in educated professions, then the garbage system of society would collapse. So not only would you have to account for another method of towing away garbage, you also need to rethink what the education system is doing. I would agree that most people are not inclined to take their own garbage to the dump once a week. The stench is intolerable. Not only do you need people in educated professions, the people in other professions which do not require the same extent of education and degrees, are just as important.

This brings me back to my point about the purpose of education. Why is it implemented the way it is? And why is there a hierarchy of courses? It's universal. At the top are the Mathematics and Sciences, followed by English and the Social Sciences, with Information Technology next and lastly, we have the Arts, which includes dance, drama, visual arts, industrial arts and music. I think this is unfair. In society, we need cabbages AND roses. They are equally important. The cabbages will always exist in society because of natural human instincts and reactions, but we need to preserve the roses.

Because of the existence of a hierarchy, this i believe deters people from attending school. Not everyone is Albert Einstein. Not everyone is Gauss or Goldbach. Not everyone is William Shakespeare. Some people do not possess that "gene" or talent. There are only so many Rain Man's. The hierarchy system will put down a student's true abilities, it dampens their will or motivation to reveal to the world what talent they have. If you are not good at maths, so what? You may be a fantastic actor/actress or a prodigy in music, but the education system does not allow that growth to that extent. Maths is ALWAYS the dominant subject. You may argue as much as you wish, but it is true in all societies.

So if we change the education system so that it directs the student's wishes and goals in life, enhancing the abilities that the student DOES have, then school would be more fun and entertaining, rather than a strenuous place to cram and jam information into a brain. I think we should embellish the creativity in students by making the Arts more valuable to society, more roses. The cabbages will always take care of itself due to human instinct, the need to survive, but roses need to be embellished.

I don't have too much knowledge on any education system except Australia, so I will focus on Australia. I understand the scaling system is to encourage students to pick the harder subjects, otherwise, everyone will be going for easy subjects and achieving great results. But the scaling system has such as big disparity, a gap too wide that it creates inequality within the education system and school surroundings. Picking Maths means you're smart and intelligent, not picking it means you're not. This is the stereotypical psychology that almost everyone adopts. I think this is remarkably wrong. I think dance and drama are just as important as Maths and Chemistry. Scaling them down is undermining and restricting the growth of creativity within students. We need to create a system where Drama and Dance and Music is just as valued as Maths and English. To create equality, we first of all need to abolish the scaling system or make it more equal. As far as I'm concerned, 4 unit Maths scales the most, so much in fact that it makes subjects like Dance look dead.

I still have not found the purpose of me attending school. What would my purpose have been, my goal be if I did not attend school? A sport star? The next Bill Gates? Who would know. We need to restructure education to make it more entertaining, make subjects more equal, educate more people, decreasing drop-out rates and enhancing the overall utility of education. It needs to be enjoyable and supposed to direct the student for future needs.

Not only should we be teaching students how to write, read, speak, calculate and memorize large quantities of information, we must also learn social skills, skills that will help in the future, marketing skills, and life skills. I am very supportive of people studying Community and Family Studies. It actually teaches you skills that you CAN use everyday to support a family. I mean, Maths is not going to make a family more intimate, for functional. Maths cannot take care of a child, and it certainly does not help you through meetings. I believe that people who do drama are better at these things, as they are more relaxed about meeting people, more open, expressive and positive.

I think society is not always right. The education system needs to be greatly reformed to enhance and bring forth the natural talent that students have instead of stigmatizing them. That way, there will be more educated people, combining their specialties together to prod the society into a civilization of technology and opportunity supported by creativity.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Pyramids of modern society.

The countdown begins for the half yearlies to approach with each second ticking, faster and faster in pace with the heart as the nerves begin to kick in.

I'm glad that the jersey tags catastrophe has come to an end with the newer generation triumphant over the head authority.

Now the thing is, is that there is a thing called the "is is" epidemic within society. This is grammatically incorrect by the way. But it is very popular.

Now to ramble on with a thought.

Dignity I believe is one aspect that all humans should be born with, no matter what your race, skin colour, gender, sex and etc. This is not the case. The situation at the moment is, dignity is a reputation on earns throughout their lifetime, similar to an achievement hierarchy. Those that are raised better with better education and have better educated parents, tend to develop their skills to gain dignity from society faster. The more intellect one is, the higher the dignity one gets. Anyone else with me on this one?