The Answer We Fear

Supposedly we are worried about the robots rising up and killing off us humans. I've read of this several times but I haven't yet read what I see as the uderlying fear: The fear that human extinction is a good thing - a conclusion that a superior intellingence would inevitably and coldly make.

I am afraid of this too and I see how things can't go on. Our greatest question is "how can we keep on growing and growing and growing our economy and race and not destroy the planet?" Technology will find a way, I'm sure. But won't any technological advance just push the inevitable catastrophe into the future?

It will, and we will either have great technological advance and melt into a virtual world, or we will have to dissolve back into smaller populations and stable economies.

Retaking Christianity

The Dalai Lama told me he doesn't want to convert me, though I think that Buddhism is a fine faith. No, he says, I should become a better example of a practitioner of the faith I was born into. Well, that faith is exclusionary, or non-syncretic, which means that it doesn't acknowledge the validity of any other faith. "There is no way to the Father but through me"

So when a student asked me, "Are you a christian?" I hear, "Are you (what I concieve to be) a christian?" I said I wasn't a Nicenean Christian, which is a term I made up on the spot. What I meant was that, yeah, I'm a Christian, but I have issues with the faith that was given me. Several year ago I discovered that there were about 100 Gospels at one time and the Church Fathers of early Christianity excluded all but 4. I wanted to know what they wanted to hide. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, has Jesus sounding more like a Buddhist or a Taoist. "Go into the abyss [the bottom of the ocean], and you find me there; split open the log, and there you will find the Kingdom of God."

Fundamentalist Christianity, will meet its end in the coming decades. If our culture is to survive, it must more closely align itself with the True, which is also close to God. It is time to re-examine the Lost Gospels and question the motives of early Church Fathers.

My criminal record

Ha ha! I'm not going to tell you. You have to pay someone $39.95 to let you know which laws I've broken. But you'd better act quickly, because my record will soon go away. The things there are so old, so minor, or I am so rehabilitated, that they're letting me delete everything!

If you ask me in person, I will tell you, but out of earshot of your son or daughter. I am trying really hard to be a stable, respectable, and productive member of society and I don't want to give anyone any ideas...

something new to worry about

I would have never occurred to me, but professional worriers have come up with the idea that our whole collective existence is a simulation going on in some imaginable computer which may, at any moment, be shut off by bored experimenters. The solution to this danger? Be as interesting as possible.

how I'm surviving the recession

We have to get credit moving so more people can borrow money? I don't buy this. Debt is slavery. I ruined my credit years ago and I realized that for seven years I could no longer put myself in chains. What's the downside?

Our economy is geared to necessitating 40 hour work weeks throughout the prime of their lives. Upon taking several bags of barely worn clothes to the GoodWill, I had an epiphany: Why not fight for a 30 hour work week? We work less, there will be more employment, and we will have less.

Let the banks fail. Let the economy go to hell, forgive all debt and start over with simpler lives. I have lived in a tent before and I swear, I was just as happy as I am now. You will be too.

Rather than having one employer I have ten. I invest in the future of human knowledge and I am a slave only insofar as my future taxes will pay off the nation's debt.

space travel and the future

In the opening paragraph of a high school science textbook, the author tried to inspire youth toward the future. He stated how humankind going into the future was like a baby coming forth from the womb. I agree with this and it was inspiring.

He then went on to describe his view of the future: humans leave their womb, Earth, and head out among the stars as miners or colonists of some kind. I find this to be unimaginitive and close to wrong.

It's close to wrong because we will have significantly less freedom in space and survival there will be much more claustrophobic. It is unimaginitive because life in space is not in itself any different than life on earth. After the novelty fades our colonists will rarely think "this is another day on Mars" but just "this is another day".

Space exploration will be best handled by robots and this will be true for a long time. But don't think of this as an unambitious outlook. We have barely begun to understand our potentials, not just for being better humans, but also for transcending humanity itself. Such transcencion might be heaven or it might be hell and my bet is that it will be a little of both. My point is that the walls of our womb are not physical boundaries in space and that our liberation will come from within.

rabbit's razor

I will not believe something because I hope it to be true;
I will not refuse to believe something because I fear it to be true.

That's it.