Sigh.
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So because I have exams starting Monday, and thus won't have enough spare brain faculty for uploading anything even vaguely intelligible or interesting, I am going to be parroting some fairly hackneyed quasi-thoughts about the different types of humans - and their behaviours. Owing to my inability to concentrate for more than eighteen seconds on any one topic, I am going to try my utmost to link what I'm going to say with how I am going to act in the above section. That way it will seem like a seamless segue; even if explaining my rationale - how forethinking of me - means that my link seem convoluted and contrived. I guess there are probably two reasons I have been thinking about human behaviour: I have been watching more House than is healthy for one human, and I will do anything which even semi-resembles procrastination from revision. I started too early on the latter, and have peaked way too soon - visual sigh. You see, I make the fact that I am sighing clear because you can't hear and/or see me.
It has often been colloquially assumed that there are two types of person: rational, and emotional. These two divisions are capable of assuming the role of the other, but are - by and large - reserved solely for their one premise. We often divide these two further into the appeasing binaries of scientific and religious. We argue that if you're religious it is because you aren't scientific; but we also try to suggest that to be emotional one doesn't need to be religious, nor does one need to be scientific. In terms of superficial criticisms then, suggesting that to be religious is to be emotional has the one glaring error: emotion being a product of an internal process not necessarily linked with either of the above categories, cannot thusly be inextricably linked. It can, as fallacy tells us, be a result, but emotion does not then in turn cause belief in one of the above. Obviously, anyone with an eighth of a brain would see this suggestion for the transparent belligerence that it is - so we can safely assume that no one is doing that seriously, or at least if they are they aren't attempting to actually convince anyone. Simply because I feel uneducated in both of the above, I'm reticent to engage the nexus of emotion and rationality using the criteria of science and religion; instead I will concentrate on the product, rather than the cause. You could suggest that this is superficial and slight, and you'd be right, but puzzling out a reason can sometimes give us the cause too. There is one aspect I want to address but briefly, however: natural disasters and their impact on the superawesomebeing:
"Humanity chose knowledge of good and evil instead of an eternally good world. This is argued to be why earthquakes, volcanoes etc [sic] came to be, as a consequence of this choice. However the question remains: "Why does God allow this to happen now, leaving us to deal with the consequences of an event that supposedly happened at the dawn of time?" To my mind, God has to let the consequences of this choice stand. Otherwise what choice is there if there is no consequence?"
An incredibly interesting argument, undeniably. The man seems to be suggesting that cause and effect are inseparable; which has been accepted as a given for aeons as far as I am concerned. If our decisions do not have ramifications then they are irrelevant and true free-will is impossible. My issue is taken with i) the fact that free will is impossible under this scenario, ii) if we pay eternally for consequences we cannot technically make an informed decision, and iii) if we pay immemorially for other people's actions then cause is irrelevant because nothing is free and everything is pre-determined. Letting the consequences of the first decision stand negates the possibility of their being choice in the future -- but only in the religious reading of this. If a consequence had immortal ramifications - like the big bang - then we can still affect outcomes and results; if, however, the first consequence is pre-determined by a vengeful or merely bystander superbeing then we are entirely adrift in a see of pre-determination and theistic determinism. That is an unsettling thought to me, at least. This argument is still more convincing than the one which alleges natural disasters are merely products of God's 'test'. For starters, that means that religion isn't a choice because to be permissible as a test it would have to be for all. That disturbs me greatly. Secondly, this is way too subjective to be possible: arbitrary testing - which has only been associated with hardship because it acts as a brilliant validation for atrocities, and assuages a person's guilt in situations where they feel they could have helped - this arbitrary testing cannot possibly be indicative of a person's value, nor their qualities. You'd also struggle to parrot that pathetic argument that humanity has "corrupted" the "perfect creation", and that the world has now lost its "original beauty". Well, yes, but surely given that the world is directly corrupted by the first two people's idiocy - in the image of God - we are merely pawns in a game where God has failed? Surely we would be legitimised in blaming a deity because it is his creation which has corrupted his creation?
Finally I reach the reason I brought this up: "I would like to say that even though Christianity has not come up with a sufficient answer to the problem of evil, nobody has." Well, of course they haven't: evil isn't a concept demarcated by criteria, or even by stability -- it is a subjective label that exists solely as an emotional reaction to an action. Nothing can come up with an answer to this, because there is no answer to this - not because either science or religion has failed to. Science, however, has explained why these phenomena exist; religion has not. Religion blithely palms these happenings off on an inexplicable and entirely unanswerable conception of 'evil'; religion, to my mind, is henceforth entirely unacceptable as an argument for why natural disasters happen. I am not saying that there is no deity, but I am saying that it's a syllogism to call a disaster 'evil' simply because you know it cannot be disproved.
So back to rational people. I've always considered myself fairly rational. I obviously make laughably stupid emotional decisions: I love, I sing, I run around naked, I dance in the rain, I laugh; I do everything expected of an emotionally recalcitrant human being. On the other hand, I also like to analyse what will be the result of my actions, why they will be such, and what could be achieved by behaving differently. It's probably one of the reasons I suffer from intermittent - though fairly consistent at the moment - insomnia: I simply cannot stop thinking about how a situation might be altered by the placing of one different word, or a flick of the wrist. It's not that I want all the answers, I really don't - life would negate its own interest if your only passion is knowing all the answers, because eventually you would run out of answers and will have bored yourself. I don't want all of them, I don't even care for most of them. I don't care about very much, to be brutally honest - I'm merely curious as to how people behave, and why, and how reactions are so superficial and changeable. People are easy to manipulate: guilt is a powerful tool, as is emotion. A simpering smile will gain you a free latte at an independent coffee house, a sycophantic gesture will win you the regard of your employer, and a nod to cultural patois will gain you friends. It's so fun to watch these things gyrating around a point of guilt. And oh so machiavellian attempting to see how far you can push a person's boundaries, as long as you are behaving within their accepted comfort zone. So to be rational, I would normally assume that emotion is entirely useless to reason -- I would be wrong.
Emotional people, mostly women in my life, tend to have better lives. They seem to be in decent, healthy relationships with nice, caring people. They hold down jobs and have families, then they get pets and switch careers. They drive cars and go to work, and laugh and sing and play. Then they get divorced, the kids get addicted to heroin and they suck on their own exhaust fumes from their own car merely to end their pain from their own decisions that were made all on their own.
Hahaha. Imagine had I tried to explain the emotional argument maturely. I might have made some kind of interesting conclusion. My lack of staying-power has lead me down a road, I'm afraid. I can't be bothered to try to puzzle out the emotional view because I don't understand it. I can be emotional, I like to cry when things go wrong - it's cathartic - but I'd rather understand why they went wrong, so I know they won't again in the future. Unless someone with a different emotional chemistry is on the receiving end. You can be an emotional rationalist, you cannot be a rational emotionalist.
Sorry kids.
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I just signed into my IM programme, and one of my friends has the tag on their name "Would you like the truth, or something beautiful?" How delightfully fitting. And that sums up why I like to be rational. Who'd choose the latter!? The solution is beautiful, the beautiful is not a solution.
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Moderately tipsy. Delightful. We're taking the house. Splitting the shit room three-ways and sharing it over the year. Go irritating and long ideas which sound great inchoate but are logistically impossible.
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