So where's the nearest IHOP anyway?

Have you ever sped past another motorist on the highway, some shmuck in an auto just like you, and wondered where the heck they were going?  I find this to be an especially prevalent source of bemusement on less popular routes at odd points in the day.  If I’m going down Hwy 14 back home to Ridgecrest at 2:32 am on a Wednesday, I could reasonably expect to see precisely no human activity.  Sometimes even, I’d be right; but more often than not, I’m wrong.  Almost without fail, I’ll pass a handful of cars and trucks, even at that hour, in that circumstance.  Now, I realize that to see freight trucks on the road at any time, day or night, rain or shine, is in no way remarkable (that’s literally their job- and they don’t work 9 to 5) but I’m consistently consumed with what these folks could possibly being doing out on the road.

Will I ever know?  Most likely not: there’s no real way for me to find this sort of thing out, short of following someone to their ultimate destination, though I’m pretty sure that’s some sort of civil crime and, in any case, their gas reserves may prove more substantial than my own.  Anyway, the thought remains.  Even today while I was driving back from Long Beach at approximately 7-9am over a barren wasteland that no one should have any business attempting to cross, I zoomed by plenty of chaps rolling along their merry way.  Inevitably, I always end up examining my own purpose for driving wherever I am and comparing that with what I feel to be a reasonable proposal.  When I do that, I tend to discover that my hyper-unique situation could only ever come to be under a very specific set of circumstances that would be tough to replicate.  It would not be exceedingly difficult however, to create a situation of equivalent uniqueness that could produce the same outcome.

This is always what I come back to but it is by no means a very intellectually satisfying conclusion.  Sure, everyone’s situation could be as unique as mine, great, but I still don’t know anything more about them than I did before!  There may yet be a life lesson to be learned from this exercise, hmm?  Modern society frowns upon standing out from the crowd, opening your heart and mind to strangers, or otherwise becoming in tune with the interconnectedness of the human race.  Yes, via all our intartubingz and txting and unlimited mobile minutes we certainly feel like we’re more in touch with the people we know and love (I’m certainly not arguing against this point, I use/love all these methods in my everyday life), but is it possible that this is just a ruse, masking a great deficiency?  Not to sound too hippy dippy on y’all right now, but could it be that this connectivity has actually made us increasingly more exclusionary and impersonal than before?  Or if it is not such a direct cause, at least a willing observer to a great such decline?

Again, I’m not arguing the tired old dog of “Facebook and video games have made this generation’s personal relationships rubbish!” because that’s a load of… well, rubbish, quite frankly.  What I’m saying is that we’re more polarized than ever in such relationships.  Our empathy toward those we’ve never met and probably never will meet has declined, our ability to communicate feelings with those who we don’t know feels more constrained than ever.  Gone are the days of the village bazaar bringing everyone together, fear of community reprisal keeping reputations among the whole valuable, religious sentiment across a culture bonding those who would still never speak face to face but hold a certain regard for each other.  At the same time, paradoxically, my buddy Emilio is only a txt, tweet, poke, call or post away at any given moment.  We can fly across the continent in 5 hours or less to reach someone we love but don’t feel need to take 5 minutes to speak with a stranger sitting next to us on the bus.

I would never propose myself as a paragon of a better methodology, I’m simply crafting a somewhat lugubrious thesis I’ve constructed haphazardly from experiences I’ve had on the open road.  When you’re out there, it feels like just you and your machine taking on hundreds of miles of asphalt and gravel… In actuality, there are plenty of other folks doing the same thing, thinking about you just as little as you’re thinking about them.  I think this gets accentuated a bit by the fact that you can rarely take the time to see that there’s a real person behind the wheel (for safety reasons this usually isn’t a great idea).  It’s a rather odd feeling, when you get right down to it, but one that upon investigation is not at all unique in our society.  Is it pure materialism that’s doing us in?  Are we all just a bit too selfish?  Is it just the nature of a modern civilization to forsake the community for the individual?  I don’t have these answers, I just find it prudent to ask the questions.

Someone should take a road trip across this great country, interviewing motorists and locals along the way, and see what they could find out about how other people feel regarding this whole mess.  Is it the general consensus that driving is a singular experience?  Would you stop to pick up a hitchhiker?  Would you help a crash victim on your way to work or an important event?  I think it could make for an interesting, raw look at America’s motorist culture…  Then you could write a book about it, eh?

This is what my blago looks like, currently

I generated this bit of lovely word art from Wordle.net – a fine resource for creating your own word awesomeness out of literally any website, RSS feed, or sample bit of text you provide.  Check it out, and link whatever you create somewhere (our venerated forum, chat, Twitter, whatever) for everyone to see.  The options available for color, layout and font are fairly impressive so do yo thang!  I ran my blogzor through the generator and viola, right before your eyes some words that look very much like typographical love popped out.  Yum!

EDIT:  A self-fulfilling prophesy the title of this post turned out to be!  On that note, I’ve fixed the URL to one that *gasp* actually functions.

Touched by His Noodly Appendage

Here’s a reply to a comment left on my previous post by my esteemed friend, Jack.  Initially I wasn’t going to get into this for another few days but he called me out for failing to inform by readership of something specific that they may have overlooked in my last entry.  Jack’s right on it though, with some valid (and annoyingly common) criticism.  So here’s my rebutal to the following question (granted, this was not intended to be a full-fledged post, just a reply, so some of this as a literary work may need some more refinement and fleshing out… I’m willing to do so, just keep asking questions):

“the probability of there even existing a God is so mathematically low”

Where the fuck do you even come up with a number for something like that? It’s bullshit and you know it. Either a god exists, or one doesn’t, and until we die, we are NEVER GOING TO FIND OUT. You can’t apply math to God/gods, just like you can’t apply it to hope, love, or hate.

This is that issue that many, many people have that I was talking about earlier.  I realize it’s at the onset difficult to combine two modes of thinking that you’ve been told your whole life are separate but it makes sense when you finally do.  I should have explained myself better in the post, but I didn’t want it to drag, hear me out:
 
Why should the search for God be different than the search for life on other planets or the cure for cancer?  Religious leaders encourage ignorance (Martin Luther was marvelous at this) precisely to dissuade individuals from seeking answers outside of faith.  Really, faith and mystery are the two pillars of religious belief, many believers will easily grant this.
 
If you look at history, faith has been systematically relegated by discovery just as mystery has been solved by science.  By probability of God existing I simply mean that the initial 99% chance thought to exist by the ancients has been proven rather silly over time.

Take any ancient religion’s tenets and juxtapose them with modern knowledge.  Pretty off-base, right?  So we can safely assume that most of those guys were wrong.  When you consider the vast number of religious sects that have sprouted up and faded away, we can also assume they weren’t right about Valhalla or Hades.  Maybe 1% of religions that ever existed are still around today (human history is pretty long) but that doesn’t by itself make God improbable, though it certainly makes you think.

Now, as I say before, the real statistical rub comes from areas once controlled by theologians being relinquished to explainable realms such as science.  Consider that 99% certainty I cited before, created out of seeing vast amounts of wondrous, mysterious things that could certainly have not been created by forces the ancients would comprehend… soooo… God, right?  Made total sense at the time, I don’t fault them.  With your modern knowledge, start taking bits away (from really any religion) that you know are explained elsewhere and cannot be as the holy book says, in reality.  Almost immediately you’ll find that you’re left with damn near nothing and that’s to be expected, right?

The statistical analysis comes from transposing these ideas into numbers; by refuting nearly everything “divine providence” has said, over history, to be true, we’ve virtually annihilated the credibility of those who proposed them as true.  Consider the amount of doctrine that has been unequivocally revoked over human history, that’s quite a low number left standing and they are relegated almost exclusively to abstract ideas, soft doctrine and metaphysical speculation.

If that didn’t convince you of anything, you simply need to look at the number of dissimilar, mutually incompatible religions to have existed.  As they say in the Highlander, there can only be one!  From what you yourself say, either a god exists, or one doesn’t, right?  That’s certainly true.  So how do you decide which is real and which is false?  You can’t, as I’ve stated, base your decision on who’s understanding of the world is more correct, obviously they all fly in the face of modern understanding.  So what do you base it on?  Faith.  Pick an idea that sounds the most pleasant to you… go with that.

Now this IS a probability question, undoubtedly, right?  You might as well put each sect on a wheel and play roulette because IF a god were to exist (or many) one of these religions must be worshiping the proper one!  Otherwise… how would he know a god existed?

It’s rather silly to not see the improbability of God existing as being anything but low.  You cannot simply claim a 50-50 chance.  By your reasoning the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all his associated doctrine have the same 50-50 chance as Yahweh, and no reasonable person would ever think the FSM is very plausible, would he?  I grant that there is a chance God exists, of course I don’t know better than anyone else, but to call it an equal shot is just flat out wrong.

EDIT:  I didn’t notice this additional criticism of my statistics due to his comment being stuck in queue for moderation but it is another valid point from my friend Brian that I will now address:

You are incorrect in your statistical analysis. Since his religion is based off one common god that spawned people in tune with him it would actually be more probable. Standard thinking is that one religion is right all others are wrong and thus not only do you have a huge improbability with simply having an existence god while also the improbability of “beating out” other religions by having the one that is true. In his however, only one needs to be “true” the rest are merely portions of the whole, people not 100% in tune with god. In this case you only have the improbability of existence.

Well thought, my good man.  On the face of things it is true that by accepting all religions as manifestations of the one true God, the probability of your religious beliefs being correct improves dramatically; good catch.  I wasn’t addressing the Bahai earlier, just most “regular” religions let’s say, lol, but that doesn’t mean my analysis doesn’t apply to them as well.  What you neglect is that by accepting all religions as manifestations of the same religion, and all theoretically on the same level of correctness, you must also then accept EVERY doctrine they’ve collectively constructed as true in the same sense.  So although you may have upped your odds at the beginning, you can’t ignore the rest of the baggage that comes with accepting every religion as true.  When you factor in the amount of blatant falsity inherent with an acceptance of every world religion, you’re right back where you started: highly improbable (maybe even worse off than you were before, obviously I haven’t ran the numbers, haha). You can’t pick and choose with stats, you have to take the bad with the good.

Also, I read the end of your comment slightly wrong. The Bahai don’t believe that just ONE religion has to be right to validate all of them, they believe they are all right already and that someday (doomsday, presumably) they will all be validated. If you were correct in their beliefs I would readily agree that the raw probability of them being true would be quite high (however illogical it seems, haha).

EDIT 2: There were some significant formatting errors on this post’s initial incarnation… but they should all be fixed up now =)

This is What Heaven Looks Like

Recently I began following The Office’s Rainn Wilson on Twitter (you can follow my Twitter feed too!) and as a result I’ve learned some interesting things about his spiritual inclinations.  Apparently, he is a member of a religion called Bahá’í, something I’d never even heard about up to that point, that believe some pretty cooky things.  The wiki entry for their faith isn’t particularly helpful in clearing the whole mess up so I had to do a little more investigating.  Oprah (yes, THE Oprah) interviewed Rainn on her radio show regarding his upcoming website SoulPancake, and from the hour-long discussion I managed to discern some new things about the Bahá’í.  But first, here’s what the wiki has to say:

The Bahá’í writings describe a single, personal, inaccessible, omniscient, omnipresent, imperishable, and almighty God who is the creator of all things in the universe.  The existence of God and the universe is thought to be eternal, without a beginning or end.  Though inaccessible directly, God is nevertheless seen as conscious of creation, with a will and purpose that is expressed through messengers termed Manifestations of God.

Seems pretty run-of-the-mill, right?  Similar to other monotheistic traditions with which you’re well acquainted.  Here’s where it gets a bit cookier: those “Manifestations of God” are all the world’s religious leaders and prophets who have existed up to know.  Obviously, they reject the exceedingly off-base “prophets” whom were obviously not connected with God (how do you pick?  I’ll leave that criticism for another day)… but on the whole Jesus, Mohammed, Abraham, Krishna, even Buddha are considered to be manifestations of the one true God, messengers to particular populations of people in particular areas at particular historical points, but all interconnected in their message, even if the doctrines vary.  Forgetting for a second that Buddha didn’t advocate the existence of ANY god, let alone one (Jesus) or many (Krishna), it’s an interesting philosophical theory, one that has great appeal if you can overcome the logical hurdles (and they are vast, surely).

As a result of “unity of world religions” being a tenet of their faith, the Bahá’í have the fortunate side effect of respecting all points of view, all cultures and people, judging none, loving all.  The elimination of racial and social prejudice and the equality of man are ideals they strive for, and ones that do not smell foul to me.  Out of the many religious traditions I’ve encountered, the Bahá’í seem uniquely adept at shunning the more violent, hateful and exclusionary aspects of the world’s “great” religions and embracing those of love, forgiveness, devotion and kindness.  On that front, the faith is a lot closer to Buddhism than Islam (from which it was birthed).

Now that I’ve got my admiration for their personal relationships and world view out of the way, they’re faith makes no fucking sense at all.  None.  In statistics, you often multiply the probability of separate events together to find the chance that they all proc simultaneously.  When you consider that the probability of there even existing a God is so mathematically low and that the respective chance of the world’s religions being correct in their assessments even more detrimentally improbable… the product of all this leaves the Bahá’í with a pretty sharp razor on which to stand.  They’re ALL right?  Really?  Well, that seems to lend itself to a high degree of improbability, now doesn’t it?  Of course, they could be right, as could any religious individual or faith, we simply don’t know, but that by no means makes it a 50-50 shot.  Not. Even. Close.

Many people have a problem applying mathematical or scientific principles to the area of theology and philosophy, but I feel in the rather unique position (and I hope this to be a more common one in the future) of finding the two to be mutually dependent upon each other.  Without asking the big, philosophical questions about how the world works, where things come from and why everything is to exist, scientists would have little inspiration upon which to expound.  Similarly, without physical inquiry, heady speculation would be lost in a metaphysical ocean of unprovability (made up another word?  I’m a regular Shakespeare over here) forevermore.  By not applying what I feel to be fundamental principles of inquiry, religious folks often smirk at statistical analysis of theological ideas, but, as I’ve demonstrated, I don’t see a better path by which to travel if one is sincerely interested in the truth of the matter (but again, that’s often a problem with the faithful).

Back to Rainn Wilson, his new website SoulPancake has the declared mission of making the discussion about God and spirituality cool and fresh for a new generation.  He’s sick of the so-called “hippy dippy” spiritualists that young people can never relate to.  ”Chew on Life’s Big Questions” is their catch-phrase, and I think it’s an admirable one (another I’m fond of is “splatter your spirit on this skillet,” but my love for alliteration is well documented).  It’s very difficult for my cynical side to go to sleep on this one, but, if I were to manage it for a moment, I think the whole site is a good idea that will promote discussion and openness about such philosophical questions, ultimately leading to a new generation less adverse to discourse on the topic.  When the cynic rears his ugly head again, I fear it will soon become a self-perpetuating, unproductive squad of individuals overly infatuated with escaping the reality in which they are actually living.  This is supported by the fact that a huge majority of Americans who call themselves Christians today also say they’re “nondenominational” or “evangelical,” two terms that carry almost no doctrinal consistencies and which generally denote a soft, mailable monotheistic belief in eternal salvation.  This is the logical continuation of a history where solid religious tenets have been systematically refuted, leaving only the “soft” metaphysically speculative realm for the non-ignorant religious to reside.

At the moment I don’t see a reason to find Rainn’s new site to be much different from Christian rock music or snowboarders who go to church.  Probably 95% of visitors are going to be Christian (of course, there are hardly any Bahá’í lurking around), at least 75% of them nondenominational, and ALL interested very much in something beyond this life and this world.  I just can’t see that being very productive, but I’m always willing (and hopeful, even) to be proven wrong.  In fact, it being “cool” or “the it thing” may draw young people who were questioning their parent’s beliefs and their own view of the universe to a spiritual realm that feels fun and exciting… thus distracting them from reason that could have provided a more satisfying fulfillment.  I guess we’ll just have to see how such communities play out and what impact, if any, they eventually have on America’s religiosity.  It’s an interesting concept and I’m willing to get on board if only for love of asking questions.

EDIT: I made an account with SoulPancake (I’ve linked them enough, lol) and am really enjoying trolling the “Question Collective” area where users can submit questions for discussion.  I’ve already pwnd n00bz in Indian history, the Bible and gay people, and $cientology!  I’m trying to keep it legit so they don’t ban me for dissenting opinion, which would be interesting in and of itself… but yeah, I’m finding it to be quite cathartic and miiiiiiildly productive.

Visual Representation of Von Däniken's Brain

This is an idea that’s been around for some time now but has seemingly yet to lose it’s mysterious appeal.  I’ll sum the proponent’s argument up for you: there is astounding archaeological, literary and historical evidence to suggest that human beings have been frequently visited by extraterrestrials who have aided our species in scientific (mostly architectural) advances and development.  As a subplot, these aliens account for the vast majority of what many ancient cultures called “God” or gods.

Interesting enough theory, sufficiently inventive and necessarily vague on details.  I respect the desire to find the answers to some of these great questions (how were the pyramids built?), but it seems like these alien apologists are putting good scientific inquisitiveness to waste.  Finding some obscure reference to something that may have potentially been theoretically a smidgen of relative evidence for some pet idea you have doesn’t seem very productive to me.  Though these researchers do prove to be quite methodical in their speculation, I remain unconvinced.

Surely, there are many many bits of mysterious information that lend themselves well to such conjecture.  For instance: the great pyramid of Giza was supposedly built in 22 years, which would mathematically require one several-thousand-pound brick to be laid every 9 seconds, day and night, for that duration.  Sounds ridiculous, right?  They surely couldn’t do that, and in fact, neither can WE.  Putting aside the arrogance of modern man for a moment, why not just question the one tidbit that claims it was 22 years, and not invalidate the whole monument with needless fantasy?  Mistranslations and misinterpretations in archeology are commonplace, and even if WE did our part correctly, who’s to say the scribe 3000 years ago wasn’t just lying or mistaken himself?  The possibilities on the “reasonable” end of things really are quite endless, but it’s easy to see how people can so easily bend toward the fantastic over the benign.

The author of the groundbreaking book Chariots of the Gods? (question mark included, and I respect him for that), Erich von Däniken, has already had many of his initial theories debunked simply for giving the ancients too little credit.  You’ve probably heard about the famous Easter Island Moai (the big, creepy face statue things) whom many alien-lovers claimed would have been impossible to erect with the tools of the day, even with 1500 people.  Well, in 1999 Jo Anne Van Tilburg supervised a group of 60 individuals, using only materials those ancients had available (and a lot of human ingenuity), who successfully erected a replica Moai without much trouble.  This is the kind of thing that makes me relate “ancient astronaut theorists” (as they’re called) to religious authorities, clinging to the unknown.  Though obviously less reluctant to accept science as theologians often are, these theorists seek to validate their ideas by way of there existing no superior explanation.  Priests and their kin have been doing this for centuries and for self-proclaimed scientists to not realize the parallels between themselves and well-known unscientific figures is curious at best.  See if you can discern the following arguments from each other:

“I can’t explain this.  There’s no way that my brain can figure how natural forces could have done this.  It must be God.”

“I can’t explain this.  There’s no way that my brain can figure how primitive humans could have done this.  It must be aliens.”

In a documentary on the subject I recently saw, one researcher (who, admittedly, appeared pretty cooky just in appearance) was so smug as to say that he’d be the first the gladly accept that ancient astronaut theory is false if presented with evidence.  ”But for now… not everything has been debunked!”  Really?  That’s how you come up with scientific theories?  In law, the burden of proof is on the prosecution, the defendant is assumed innocent until proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, to be guilty.  Science works a similar way in that a theory is assumed to be false until proven, again beyond an even more reasonable doubt, to be factual.  That burden of proof must be on the conjectors (did I make that word up?  maybe) and they must be held to the same standards as everyone else, even if their evidence does not then produce the opinions they desire.

Still, despite my lack of affection for many of the field’s researchers, the theory’s proponent’s constant search for mystery has turned up some genuinely intriguing pieces.  Two of which really caught my attention (among the dozens proposed) in that aforementioned documentary:

1. A map dated around 1500 C.E. that contained extremely accurate depictions of Antartican and American locations that had not been discovered yet.
2. Ruins somewhere in America (and I’m killing myself for not remembering, but it was 2:30am by then) that have uncannily straight cuts, interlocking pieces and what appear to be machined architectural elements in solid stone.  The kicker?  The site predates Stonehenge… By a lot.

My fascination with the map is obvious… Though I don’t think for a moment that aliens are responsible, it proves that SOMEBODY had discovered those areas long before we reckoned.  Similar historical gaffs have been unearthed such as the Vikings landing in North America long before Christopher Columbus or Egyptians performing brain surgery with anaesthetic.  I’m intrigued simply because I’d love to know WHO created such a map and WHEN they went to Antartica.  That’d be information worth having, surely.

The ruins are interesting because it was the only piece of evidence they put forth in the whole documentary I saw that I genuinely could not even imagine people that long ago being able to accomplish.  Many of the blocks were composed of an element that fears only diamond in density.  Did they have diamond-tipped, machine-quality implements that long ago?  You’d certainly have to doubt it, but alas, there the blocks lie.  I’ll try to Google this place and edit the post, you need to see it to believe it.  Though even as remarkable as such a find is, there’s nothing to have me believe it cannot eventually be explained in a rational manner.  I still feel no reason to jump to unfounded conclusions simply out of ignorance.

I guess that’s the crux of my argument against people who call themselves scientists yet exhibit very unscientific tendencies within their own fields, such as these ancient astronaut proponents: the burden of proof is on you.  Yes, there are a vast many mysterious things in this world, and yes there are striking similarities between cultures who’ve never encountered each other, and yes that might look like a spaceship if you squint your eyes, and yes Enoch was an interesting fellow but to immediately assume that your theory of extraterrestrials being at the heart of the matter has much evidence is simply fallacious.  Do I know how they lit the cavernous tombs of Eygpt?  Nope.  The air is too thin to support flame, bronze mirrors wouldn’t reflect enough light and we don’t think they had electricity… So how?  I’m not saying aliens DIDN’T help out a bit, it’s fairly improbable but greats like Carl Sagan have proposed as far back as the 1960s that we ought to seriously consider the possibility that our planet has been visited at some point in it’s history.  I’m simply stating that there’s zero proof of this and searching for mystery won’t prove your point any more than it will prove the existence of an old guy tossing lighting from the clouds.

Mysteries are only such for a finite period of time.  As we grow and learn we discover the solutions to life’s riddles, gradually.  In modern times we have uncovered more than ever before and I think that is a prime source of anguish over our inability to continue solving increasingly massive problems we present to ourselves.  It’s a good, positive kind of pain though; one that will spur yet further innovation.  This speculation into ancient astronauts is useful, in a sense, for stimulating the imagination and popularizing these decent and important questions… but beyond that it is pseudoscience more akin to speculative spirituality than rational scientific method.

These are what dinosaurs looked like. Exactly.

Welcome, humans and extraterrestrials alike, to the least sucky blog you’ve probably ever read.  My sentiments toward my own intellectual property are necessarily robust, though I hope to acquire excessive amounts of praise from you fine internet-goers in the nearest of possible futures.

I’m not sure who I’m trying to kid here, you’re probably not special, and neither am I (of course, if you DO happen to feel like a special little boy or girl, please email me or drop a comment, I’ll get right to you shortly)!

But I’ve gone and lost my train of thought now haven’t I?  Right, I’ll get back to kissing your anonymous asses so you’ll worship me like Perez Hilton; that seemed pretty effective from the onset.

Have you, as so many before you, discovered that life is like a box of chocolates but it always seems like you bite full-on into the fruity ones that nobody fucking likes and that you’re convinced are as analogous to the innards of a dung beetle as anything you’ll ever taste?  Me too.  Let’s go on a journey together, shall we?

We’re all just people, living on this planet earth we so joyously call our home.  Some of us like to discover and learn about how things here work, why they do what they do and how.  Others are content.  Some find solace in recognizing the way of things, sorting facts from fiction and ruminating the great mysteries of our time.  Others like turtles.  For you masses too dense for basic prose, I’m attempting to draw a very clear distinction between two kinds of people.  Is that divisive?  Clearly it is, but I don’t have any trouble calling ideas what they are, even when they’re my own.

So this blog is for the learners, the philosopher, the introspective dilweed artists of the internet, right?  In short: no.  Though these sorts of people will certainly find things they agree with, enjoy, are stimulated by or laugh at, they will not be biasely favored or presented with diatribic ramblings and intellectual fundamentalism.  These “twats,” as we’ll call them henceforth, are more likely, in fact, to be just as insulted and challenged as the rest of you complacent.  Why?  Because your average theologian, physicist, plumber or mathematician often holds far more in common with the “I like turtles” bunch than they’d like to believe.

My audience is ideally the “turtles” who fail to even consider how their Mac & Cheese came to be in their mouth, let alone the vast mysteries of the universe; as well as the intellectual snob who finds the simple joy of a Seth Rogan comedy to be unfathomable.  Artists who think they know art, scientists who claim to know science, priests who claim to know God: these people are full of shit more than a lot of people realize, and that’s what I aim to overcome.

Am I, or this blog, the perfect vessel by which to belay your ignorance?  Of course not, but I’m willing to give it a crack because I, unlike so many claiming to be smart or enlightened, believe in the human race.  I have to believe we can do better, that we’re not all lost to foolishness and despair.  YOU, kind turtle, have the potential for perfectly reasonable thoughts and actions, so why don’t you ever follow that path?  Why do you continue to be happy with not knowing when the answers are literally presented to you, free of charge or commitment?  And YOU, asshole intellectual, why don’t you put aside your pretentions and help the goddamn turtles come out of their shells a bit?  Why don’t you stop being a dick and use your capabilities to help everyone?

These are questions I ask myself, in fact, I ask a lot questions.  You should too.  That’s how we got where we are now as a species and that’s how we’ll continue to thrive in the future.  Without asking the questions, obviously we’ll never find the answers.

I hope you enjoy my forthcoming posts, I hope they bring a spark to your brain, a grin to your face and maybe, if I’m so fortunate, a tear to your eye (I’ll tell everyone it was just dust, don’t worry, I got your back).  These initial few words turned out to be a bit more substantial than I anticipated, but I don’t believe in proof-reading, so you’ll have to live with it.  Stay tuned for answers to your questions and the questions to all your answers: this… is The Emotional Pandemic.