Wednesday, August 31, 2011

I'm sick

This morning I was sitting on the couch, and I guess the white blood cells must have given up or something, because all of a sudden I was sick, just like that.
It's weird, but why do we get sick? What is the point of sitting on the couch feeling awful with your head pounding and your heart-rate way up? How does that help anything?
I know this sounds like the constant question, why does god let murders happen, or why does god let people go broke, and stuff like that, but there is a difference. Humans created the guns that cause people (Some) to be murdered and are the murderers themselves, people create the money that people lose. I'm not saying that money itself is evil and that humans should never have created it (Although I am saying that about guns), but there is a difference. In those two instances, it is a human action, not a metaphysical action, that caused pain. But disease is a natural thing, so why did god create it in the first place?
The obvious answer is to keep the population in check, but what kind of god who loves all his people would allow them to be thinned out just for the sake of preservation. Why not make us not have too many kids?
Because that would be too easy.  it is part of the human condition that we need suffering and pain and even death to truly understand things. We can't all have it given to us on a silver platter. If we were never been given problems to overcome, what is the point of living. What fun would it be to watch a movie in which nothing ever went wrong? it is the same with life. And disease is an opponent we can never kill. Sure, we can hand out vaccines and have all the medical attention we want, but disease keeps mutating to penetrate our defenses.
I'm not saying here is anything good or fun about death and pain, but it is a reminder that we are all mortal, and no matter how far we advance, we will have to keep facing the same old nemesis.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Running out

It's kind of weird, when I started this blog, I had lots of ideas for posts. However, a few months in now I'm kind of running out. of ideas. Don't worry, I'm not stopping the blog, but I may continue my hiatus may continue while I attempt to regenerate ideas.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

I will follow you into the dark

As many of you know, I will follow you into the dark is a song by Deathcab for Cutie, a band which I saw in concert last night. One of my favorite songs by them is I will follow you into the dark. At first, it sounded the lyrics sounded weird, almost suicidal. But then my father rand brother explained to me that it is not about guy who will kill himself, but rather someone who is dying at the same time as his wife, and wants t be when her when she dies.
I saw the music video a few minutes ago, and I liked it. It showed the lead singer living his daily life while there was a hole in his one room apartment that was growing larger and larger, until he finally falls in. The end he is standing in the hole with just the top of his head sticking out from the pit, and he walks in through the hole to somewhere else.
I assume the hole represents a cause of death, like a growing disease, which eventually consumes him. The thing that struck me as odd is that he didn't try to pull himself out, he just walked on through to the afterlife.
When I asked my brother about this, he said that he simply wouldn't be able to pull himself back up, but I'm not so sure. I think they made the hole purposely within reach of his escape, but he chose  not to. Why?
I think it is best t this point to quote J.K. Rowleing from her 6th book (Quote approximated): "People do not fear death, but the unknown."
Dumbldore said that, and as most know, he is about 150 years old. I can link this back to a quote from my mom "sometimes old people who know they re about to die re fine with it. They don't fight it. It is their time."
Since I am young, I can't imagine being just "Ready to go". If I were dying of cancer or something, I would cry and scream and be miserable the last days of my life. what if there is no afterlife? What if I just go out, like a candle?
But nevertheless, some old people feel lie it is their time to go, no matter what  the end brings. Besides, people who have died and then had their heart re-started say that, while dead, they were still expeirienceing something. I wonder what it would fell like.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Colleges

I heard somewhere that there are colleges some where that won't admit gay students and put all kinds of pressure on the students not to illegally marry each other. They won't let the students of the opposite gender in the same dorms as each other and, well, yeah. You get the picture.
Other than the anti-gay marriage rule, all of the rules seem reasonable At least, there is some good intent for the student behind it. Having a baby in college is generally not a good thing. However, I wonder what would happen if they said, "You know what, do it if you like. Having a baby with you is fine." And put all the work and energy funneled into the old rules into learning, which is generally what you go to college to do.
 It makes you think, if an approach like that could (Possibly work in a school) then why not in a government? WHy not stop the wars in the middle east and put the effort into getting out of things like the debt that takes up more than 1/60th of all the money in the world. Thats more money than any individual could ever hope for. It's more than many countries have put to together. So why not forget killing people in far away countries and focus on helping the people of our own.
My dad told me that you can't just back out of war like that, but why not? Is it against some unwritten law that the opposing country needs to be battered into submission before any peace is reached?

Sunday, August 21, 2011

writing

it's odd, but a few centuries ago (Not very long in the grand scheme of things) It was very, very hard to get anything you wrote in print and read by people. Today, I can write this blog post and someone across the world could read it, if they wanted to.
I have decided it is best to take advantage of this and make a book for the kindle (Which there is no age limit for. You can be as young as you want and it will still be published). It's going to be fiction, because if I tried writing a whole book about theology or something like that, I would end up with at least 50% filler.
FIller is an odd thing. In speaking it's words like "Uuuh" and "Yeah" and other random grunts. In cooking it's random stuff that you don't want to know where it came from. And in writing it is a sentence, paragraph, or even entire chapter of pointlessness. The thing that all three fillers have in common is they are useless and are used to take up time and space.
If I had to something about what I thought about a certain (Theological) aspect, it would be relatively easy, depending on the subject. But if I had to write a whole book, forget about it. I just can't generate enough thought.
 That's what's great about fiction, none of it has to be real. Sure, a bit of fact here and there is expected, even required, but you can make up anything you want from your own head and make it reality in your story, although I should try to keep it from being too far-fetched, probably.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Escape

A few months back I went to a role playing game store. I had a good time there because I was into a certain game they sold there. When I asked my mom what she thought of it, her response was this:
"I didn't like it. It was so dark in there. And some of the people, it seemed as if the game is the main focus of their life now."
She had a point. A lot of the people there looked obese or otherwise unhappy with their physical appearance. It seemed as if other people might pick on them. I could understand that they might want to escape from their real life into a land of dragons and magic that only exists in their own mind.
I remember when I first moved to Austin I liked to escape into memories of the time before we moved. In the summer, or later on saturdays when I had little to nothing going on it seemed tempting  just to live in memories of a year ago. Many people similarly try to escape into somewhere else, whether it is to the internet or another time period.  
As Osler pointed out, Jesus escaped to, and always came back. He escaped for the right reason, not to envision himself in somewhere else, but to  be productive, and do, as my youth minister calls it, Jesus stuff.
I wonder sometimes if it is possible for anyone less than the son of god to escape, and enjoy it, without forgetting the real world around them.  

Thursday, August 18, 2011

The metaphor of body parts

Lately, I haven't been posting because I have been reading my last two posts and thinking "Man, this sucks". I figured I was going to have to stop posting for good because I was out of ideas. However, I'm stopping the hiatus and starting up again.
A friend of my brother's mom broke her ankle. The same thing happened to my toe last winter and my dad's ankle this spring. And I can tell you for sure, when my toe was broken, my thoughts were most definently not "I sure am glad my arm is okay". And a few years back when I broke my arm I wasn't thinking "At least nothing is wrong with my toe".
They explain all this in a bible verse that goes something like (Quote approximated) "A body needs all pars to function. If all parts were eyes, they couldn't hear and if all parts were ears, were would you see? So eyes must not say 'I am not an ear, so I am not needed' and ears must not say 'I am not an eye, so I am to needed" When one part is hurting, all hurt, and when one part is rejoicing, all rejoice. That is how it must be with the church".
 That was a speech by Jesus, or at least a part of it.
I can see where he's going with it. It works with families and communities, if someone is hurting, others focus on the hurting one. In short they take the others for granted. But still Jesus doesn't scold us for taking them for granted. He says that all of us are useful and all of us matter. Take into account that if Jesus came for all of us (Which his teachings make pretty clear that he did) then imagine all 6.6 billion of us. Assuming Jesus is speaking to all people (Including people of the future) then that means that we should fell everyones pain. That seems pretty hard considering that every few seconds someone dies.
To me, once I think about it, it seems almost like a challenge. Make the population of the world so every time someone hurts someone, not everyone but someone, hurts with them. And every time someone celebrates, someone must celebrate with them. And if no one had to mourn or celebrate alone, then the world would be a much better place.
I know, he said he was referring to the church. But many of the things Jesus said about the church can apply very well to the entire population.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

I said in one of my previous posts that "In the long run, all people are ADHD".  I've been thinking about it, and I have decided it really is true.
I remember hearing about the earthquake in Haiti and the one in japan. Things are still bad in Haiti and Japan, but no one is talking about it. Why We were all taken off guard by the sudden deaths of thousands of people, but our minds are long term, ADHD. We don't focus on one thing that long. We get bored. But things are still really bad, we just forgot about it.