Happy Halloween

boo!

boo a) an exclamation produced when trying to scare someone with surprise
b)a call, often at a sporting event, to express displeasure and dissatisfaction
c)a word used in hip hop and by rappers to indicate their g/f (hey, boo!) (from beau?)

anyway,
season's greetings.  before christmas, and before that thanksgiving, comes:
a)halloween b)all hallow's eve c)day of the dead (dia de los muertos) d)all soul's day e)all saint's day

i'm not sure which ones are synonyms, the same day, or which come first.

anyway,
in spooky scary terrifying news of horror-
i'm now a (semi) vegetarian.
hitler was a vegetarian.  boo!

i've got some pamphlets from mercyforanimals.org
1)why love one but eat the other? (picture of a puppy, with a picture of a cute piglet)
2)25 reasons to try vegetarian
 there's horror in both, all the more terrifying, because it's actually all true.
 
i was thinking that christianity deals with eating animals being sinful with
the eucharist
where you both love jesus and eat him, too.
you eat meat?
go to confession! you are forgiven!
i jest, but i still think people should be vegetarian.
people are animals, too, and we don't eat each other! (and we shouldn't)

in other news,
i checked out from the library:
flight of the conchords cd,
freakonomics movie,
ludmila's broken english by DBC Pierre, and
the Quincunx by Charles Palliser.

i went swimming at the Y yesterday.  good to get back in the water.  been awhile.

i won tix from kalx to see Blitzen Trapper and Allelujiah choir next week

i read ender's game, by orson scott card, from the library (book club at claremont branch libary)

criminal congress

$300M/day

that's how much we (the US) are losing during this stupid, criminal gvt. shutdown
I got that number from the drunk dial your congressman website.

Barack calls it extortion, and I think -seriously- charges could be filed.
I'm pretty sure a case can be made, am I wrong?

they're saying "it's not the end of the world",
but IT IS $12M/ hour!!
and yet they are also saying "obamacare is the end of america"
if i remember correctly from yesterday's NY times.
the end of an insecure america
with a large portion of people without health insurance.
a healthier america, too, I would say.

Defining God

So atheists and theists can talk sensibly about Reality

We need to get our terms agreed upon, first

as Noam Chomsky said, "When asked if he is an atheist, Chomsky replied "What is it that I'm supposed to not believe in? Until you can answer that question I can't tell you whether I'm an atheist."

Here are some ideas, off the top of my head:
1)love, the creator- (wouldn't that just be your parents?)

2)goodness- (almost completely subjective, i.e. up to each individual to judge for him/herself)
as 50 cent said in an interview I watched this week, "If it makes you happy then it's right."

3)"omnipotent", i.e. the most powerful being in the universe.  that could be the most powerful human, or maybe an alien, far away.  the power to kill you, it seems to me, holds the greatest sway...so god could be a physicist with his finger on a button, an alien who could destroy the universe, or just a thug who holds your life in his hands.  I don't really want to think of God as an extortionist, though.  (I don't like thinking of Republicans as extortionists, either...but maybe they are, which is criminal, right??)

4)"omniscient"  I don't think it's possible to know everything.  If God is omniscient, I'm an atheist, lol.  Of course, "knowing" in the biblical sense, is having sex with.  And this could shift meaning to "being fuct", in reference to the previous definition, number 3, in which god kills everyone.

5)"omnipresent".  Is God "Reality" ??  Life, the universe, and everything, in other words.  Time, Space, Energy, Matter...  "I am" as the name makes God equivalent to The Universe, both Life and Death.  Death, or oblivion, is eternal.  Much longer than our puny, paltry lives.  But Consciousness, maybe a Shared consciousness, can also be understood as the deity, in reference to Godco., the community of believers creating the virtual reality, in the matrix/psychesphere/collective unconscious that includes constant prayer, both mental and verbal, spoken and unspoken.

6)words, language.  "and the word was made God" (am I remembering the bible correctly?).  So the word God is in fact the reality of God, in itself.  (kind of trippy, or the equivalent of a unicorn or a comic book character or a character in fiction).

what did I omit?  what is God to you?

I think

self-deception

today's philosophy talk treated of self-knowledge, the delphic oracle 'know thyself'

cogito, ergo blogo: i think, therefore i blog

Flannery O' Connor said
"I don't know what I think until I read what I write"

i wrote
1)(the bumper sticker) don't believe everything you think
2)we are each the center of our own universe, the god of our own world (atomism?)
3)"never look in the mirror when you're on acid" (I've never taken acid, however)

Philosophy Talk "questions everything, EXCEPT your intelligence"

"no, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical. "-Niels Bohr, physicist