Ambition Tempered by Apathy

Let apathy encompass your life and you will be a nihilist, everything will be equally worthless as everything else and it will be impossible to love or pursue anything in life. On the other hand, let ambition encompass your life and you may find that there is so much that is worthwhile and so much that is lovely that it will likewise be impossible to pursue anything because your love is spread so thin. If no roads are worth walking or if many roads are worth walking, you remain standing still staring at the landscape.

So you let your ambition run wild; you wander around collecting things to care about, ensuring that you stave off nihilism with will and desire. Then you look at your mere twenty-four hour day coupled with an anemic seven day week and your growing collection of fetal projects that just lack the nourishment to make it to term. Then you've got to turn around and go in the other direction: pruning, burning, chiseling. You are going to have to drop some hopes and smother some ambitions so that the others have enough resources to survive.

Remember: You are mortal, therefore finite, therefore particular. You can't be everything; every moment you spend carries a cost.

Well Rounded or Well Defined?

Which is better, being a well rounded man with a little taste for everything, or being a well defined man who has learned to excel in the narrow areas that he has chosen for himself?

I can not quite say. In my experience, oftentimes the only way around whatever your present difficulties are is to go looking in areas that are not a part of your life. Adding territory to your comfort zone, that is, becoming more well-rounded. On the other hand, time is quite limited, you cannot reach the summits in any aspect of life if you spend all your time exploring the foot of the mountain. Which suggests that there is reason to prefer being well defined.

Naturally, both of these have their charms, and there are balances that can be struck between the two. But I am not just being abstract here, there is a practical question to be answered here. When I choose my next book, should I stay within my common ground, or choose something out of the ordinary for myself?

God, Pain, and Why Christianity Struggles to Accept Evolution

There exists a popular misconception about Christianity and evolution, namely, that Christianity refuses to accept evolution because it runs contrary to the account of humanity's origin in Genesis. "Misconception" is probably the wrong word because for many Christians that is precisely why they do not accept the theory of evolution, but preserving a literal reading of Genesis is not that critical to many Christians who would still have a hard time meshing the theory of evolution with their Christian faith. It seems to be that the reason evolution is so offensive to the Christian is that it implies one of two unacceptable concepts: either the world is not broken, or God created a broken world.

Evolution does not work without death. If there is no way of removing traits that do not aid in reproduction and surviving until capable of reproduction, then evolution will not occur. It implies brutality. Christianity, however, teaches that God made a perfect world without death and teaches that death occurs only because the perfect order was broken when Adam sinned. If brutality existed prior to humanity - and therefore prior to sin - there are only two explanations. Either the world is not broken and death is just a part of the universe that God created; or the world is broken, death is an abomination, but God created a broken and abominable universe.

In the Christian narrative, God is blameless. It's all humanity's fault. Of course, the potter hath power over the clay, but still, Christianity makes humanity the cause of the pain in our existence, not God. Evolution states that death and brutality is the world's natural state. Consequently, the battle over a literal interpretation of Genesis is just a surface conflict for the Christian, even if it is conceded that Genesis does not need to be literally true there is still the deeper issue of the universe being essentially deadly while death is thought to be the wage of sin.

What would it take for Christianity as a whole to be reconciled to evolution? I suppose they would need to do away with the notion that the world is broken or shattered or in some way deficient from its proper design. To do away with this notion is to do away with the Christian narrative, though, it makes Christ's death superfluous. Is it possible to believe that the world is as God intended it to be and also believe that there was a need for Christ crucified? I do not know. From my vantage point, it seems that Christianity presupposes a diseased world. Besides all this, though, there is the fact that if the world is not broken and the world contains suffering and death, then that means God is the one who added suffering and death to the universe, which implies that God has a dark side to him that most of us would not want to contemplate while seeking comfort on a Sunday.

There does exist the alternative possibility that the world is broken, but that God intentionally made a broken world while intending to heal it later. This certainly makes more sense for someone who thinks that an unintentionally broken world implies incompetence on God's part, but it retains the implication that suffering and death exists because of God, not because of sin. Again, this causes friction when Christians try to think of God as the enemy of their pain.

So, can Christianity ever be reconciled to evolution? I think so. But to have a worldview that robustly embraces both the Christian faith and the theory of evolution would mean radically rethinking the relationship between God, death, and human suffering. It would have to accept pain as being an instrument and creation of God rather than an affront to Him.

A Trade-Off

Time spent talking is not time spent listening.

And time spent writing is not time spent reading.

So I have gotten a little more writing done than I have gotten done for a fair while, but the trade-off has been that I have gotten almost no reading done. This is the perfect recipe for becoming someone who posts a lot but says next to nothing.

But what can you do? Your available free hours are limited, every moment you set aside to do one thing is time taken away from everything else. And I can not multi-task worth shit.

When Does Death Hurt?

You are going to die. Probably not today, possibly not for a long time, but you are still going to die. If death lies a long time out in the future, though, it would seem that the harm of death also lies in the future. This is not the case, though, after you die you no longer exist and therefore cannot be harmed by death. You might say that the harm of death lies in the moment of death, but that is just a single moment where you transition from existence to non-existence, any harm would be eliminated in the very moment that is claimed to be a harm.

Death is a harm right now. Death may occur some time in the future, but the harm of death – or rather the effect of death – takes place right now in the present moment. Because even if you do not die for seventy years, you are still a mortal right now. In this moment you lead an existence where death is both a possibility and a certainty, and this fact is written into every thing you do in your life, every plan you make, every choice on how you spend your time. The fact that time is running out is a fact that is true right now, not in the future.

If it were not for death, we would not be the particular individuals that we are. We could, given enough time, become general humans. We could sample everything in life, become familiar with everything, involve ourselves in every possible situation. The fact of death is what forces us to carve out our own particular identity, values, and journey because we have a limited time in which to exist. And the fact of that limited time is a fact right now.

If You Have a Soul, You Still do Not go to Heaven

Suppose that men do indeed have souls.

Suppose then that a man dies and his soul goes to heaven.

The fact that a part of the man went to heaven does not mean that the man went to heaven. The soul is less than the whole of the man.

Either our bodies are like vehicles that we are driving, and therefore nothing physical makes up a part of us. Or, so far as we are concerned, dead is truly dead, even if we do have an immortal soul, since the configuration of parts that made us up is still dissolved.

Life Has an Expiration Date

Original Posting

If there is no afterlife, then there is a termination to your life. There is a point at which you will no longer exist. You will see nothing, you will feel nothing, you will know nothing. Positivity and negativity give way to absolute neutrality. All these facts about death are meaningless to dead men, because they can't know them or be moved to feeling by them. The fact of death can only affect those still alive.

The fact of death creates an opportunity cost for everything we do; because the fact that life will one day end means that we don't have infinity moments. Every moment we spend on an activity (or inactivity) is a moment that can't be spent doing anything else. The time you spend reading this blog is gone forever, there might be a million better things you could do, but you didn't do them, you did this instead. For a few moments, reading this blog was your greatest priority, because for a few moments that's where your focus was.

The only way we stay sane is by taking life one day at a time, maybe with long term goals, but mostly with our focus on the things we have in front of us. That's why we don't feel the loss when we spend thirty minutes watching an old rerun, or the loss of waiting on someone else, or the loss you feel after spending sixteen hours on the internet with nothing to show for it. Because we know that we've got another day coming, and it feels like we'll never run out of those days.

But you will.

Does this change anything? Maybe, maybe not. After all, once you're dead, you can't feel regret. You'll only regret wasting your life while you're still alive, once you're dead it can't matter to you anymore.

But everyone spends a little time wondering what the entirety of their life will look like. What kind of a man will you be, what will you spend your life doing, what will you value in life? And the potentially horrifying thing is that you have limited moments to put into defining yourself. Do you want to be a fiction writer? Are you prepared to give up the moments that you could otherwise use to become a historian? Or give up the moments needed to be a programmer? Did you know that there are people who have dedicated their life to being the best at Street Fighter 2? Really consider that: they have a life, and they have chosen to live their life for Street Fighter 2.

And why shouldn't they?

How we spend our time defines us as a person. You won't regret it at the end, because you'll be dead, it's all a question of what you want to be while you're actively defining yourself. Because there aren't infinite do-overs, and you can't be everything, you have only so many moments with which to create your character.

And you never feel this, because you take everything one day at a time. And wasting your life doesn't hurt so long as you piss it away one day at a time.

This is your life. Every moment defines you as a person. So make every moment count... or don't. Like I said, it doesn't matter, it's all the same once you're dead. It's all a question of what you want to be while you're still alive.

Sacrifice of Time

Original Posting

Each minute you can only do one thing (I'm not talking about multi-tasking, what I mean is that one can only do in a minute what one does in fact do in said minute), and then that minute is gone forever. We all have our minutes, but they are only good as sacrifices, we sacrifice them based on what we do in that moment.

Every moment spent reading a book is a moment not spent playing on the internet, every moment spent writing is a moment not spent exercising, etc. This is where the concept of sacrifice comes into play: I have to sacrifice this moment to something, what will it be? It's a sacrifice because once the moment passes you never get it back to spend on something else, it's gone forever.

Most of us take this very lightly, as well we should considering that we would probably go insane if we tried to measure the significance of every moment in our life as they passing away (not to mention it would be a terrible choice to sacrifice those moments to), but perhaps it's appropriate to spend a little time considering this. Ultimately, what you choose to sacrifice your moments to is what determines who you are; we are shaped by what we spend our time doing.

People who spend much of their time on intellectual matters become intellectuals, people who spend much of their time in social situations become more social people, etc. This is the largest way we shape ourselves and mold our character: if you ever wonder who you are look at what you spend your time doing, and if you ever wish to change yourself change what you sacrifice your moments to.

What, then, does your day reveal about you? As for me and my friends, we sacrifice our time to the Void. We prefer to pass the time, i.e. sacrifice time to nothing more than the sacrifice of time.

Damn browser games and Warcraft.