In the beginning… according to scientists there was a Big Bang and the Big Bang was a singularity into which both time and matter cease to exist. The dilemma we are faced with is how to quantify that which cannot be explained by the laws of science and exceeds the grasp of human rationality.
The Big Bang represents a gaping hole in the sum of our knowledge because just a tiny fraction of a second before this event all scientific laws cease to exist. All laws of science stop functioning at this point except for one, the scientific method. The scientific method is a set of guidelines by which a hypothesis becomes a law: information is gathered; a question is defined; a hypothesis is formed; experimented on; analysis; interpretation; publish; retesting. The hypothesis that survives retesting by other scientists becomes a law unless at some point it is disproven at which point you start the process all over again. The only thing that survives the Big Bang then is the scientific method, all known laws cease to exist and the only thing remaining of science is its doctrine.
Is science’s doctrine the only thing that survives the end of the universe or are there other doctrines that also survive. Take for example death, death is what happens when we lose consciousness and all bodily life functions stop. It’s not the end of the universe, but for the individual whose death we’re talking about, it might as well be. Are the laws of science still applicable to this person, for example, will this person still experience gravity? The answer is no; but as I said earlier if the scientific method can survive the Big Bang then couldn’t it also survive death and since the scientific method is an example of doctrine, what other doctrines are applicable?
If it were me who died the other doctrine I would choose to apply in such a situation would be Christianity. According to the scientific method what I would be doing when death occurs is sifting through the data and hypothesizing that the doctrine of Christianity is what best fits all data on the subject of death. It would then be incumbent upon me to apply the rest of the scientific method to my hypothesis.
Even though Christianity hasn’t yet become a law according to scientists, the ending of the universe through our deaths is the most important trial we will ever face. Applying the rest of the scientific method to my hypothesis is something I will carry out for the rest of my life. As for what survives the ending of the universe, I think you will find what Jesus says agreeing with my theory about the immutability of doctrine;
“Heaven and earth will disappear, but my words will never disappear."
Mark 13:31 International Standard Version
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
The Hidden Meaning of Charlie the Unicorn
Charlie the Unicorn is the title of a 5 min animation on You Tube. It’s from a website called FilmCow.com. If you haven’t seen it yet here is the oglink: http://oglink.com/2op. After the first watching I didn’t think much of it and forgot about it right away, then I joined a clan on AskaNinja that featured some of the Charlie the Unicorn art work, the clan is called The Believers and the slogan is “We are the believers of everything that is to be believed”, that was made up by the moderator not Film Cow. The slogan has certain religious undertones, which got me to thinking about the religious undertones in Charlie the Unicorn. From a Christian perspective the animation appears to be making fun of two believers, who believe in a place called Candy Mountain and are famous for uttering the one liner “shun the non believer”. To me the believers are Christians and Candy Mountain means heaven, while Charlie the Unicorn is the pragmatic atheist. The animation is a social satire on Christianity and judging by what happens to Charlie the Unicorn in the end, “They took my frickin kidney”, it leaves the impression that the end result of Charlie’s brush with the two Christian unicorns could only mean that Christianity is inherently harmful which echoes the message of Bill Maher. Also the representation of the two Christian unicorns made fun of their pie in the sky outlook on life as well as pointing out Christianity's weakness which is its seeming reliance on blind faith. When Charlie the Unicorn is interpreted this way it becomes a work of genius that is also funny, a masterpiece of atheistic writing.
It reminded me of another work called Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Before I started reading it I was told that it symbolized some of the concepts of existentialism. As I read I could definitely see how the minimalist writing style mimicked the existentialist statement existence precedes essence as the two main characters Estragon and Vladimir sought to put into words everything they saw around them and to postulate how they should act based on their observations. It also affirmed the existentialist value that our lives are only given meaning by our actions. The play did this by portraying the opposite of this, because Waiting for Godot is basically a play about nothing. Not being a tried a true existentialist I searched the web for other interpretations of the play and found that there was a different interpretation for each school of thought. The political scientists had political interpretations; psychiatrists had psychological interpretations; in addition there is religious and homoerotic interpretations; but which is the correct interpretation is what I wanted to know and the only way for me to find that out was to get it from the author himself. According to the explanation given by Samuel Beckett the answer was the only correct way to read Waiting for Godot is exactly as he had written it and no other way, that’s it.
Apparently minimalist writings have a propensity for multiple interpretations that can be completely different from what the writer originally intended. Samuel Beckett simply wrote what he wrote and when I extrapolated my own views on his writings I was reading too much into the work, usurping the writer’s views with those of my own.
So Charlie the Unicorn to me represented a great work of Christian satire from the atheist's perspective while Waiting for Godot was a philosophical marvel, but to someone else it was baby talk nonsense. It was great for a while thinking that there was deep intellectual meaning to be found in these works of art when in fact there was none. It would be great to be able to write like that, to be able to convey great thoughts and ideas in a few simple sentences, Raymond Chandler could do it and that Revelations guy John could do it. The technique looks simple enough and if you could reverse engineer the thing and go the other way from a level of simple understanding to a level of divine enlightenment then that would be magic. Just imagine being so divine that you could convey complex philosophical and religious ideas in simple to understand metaphors and symbolism. You could surpass Shakespeare in terms of greatness; but to do that you have to write what you know and what a writer knows is the self.
The idea of the divine or to hold one self above others and consider yourself the better so that you hold yourself in a lofty position from which you look down on the rest of mankind reminds me of Nietzsche's concept about the Ubermensch (overman in English). An Ubermensch is someone with a rationale and a code that leads to success, of winning and eventually victory. In other words master of his destiny and creator of his own reality.
A writer's self is their knowledge and wisdom, a writer is their thoughts. The self is the subject, so how good something is depends on the person. In order to be a writer it is not enough to simply be, in order to write well you must aspire to be great.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Existentialism
Reading about existentialism on the web, I felt as though I had come to the limits of my intellectual potential. Nonetheless I was able to figure out that existentialism was about defining the human individual as the starting point for a philosophy that describes conditions of thinking, acting, feeling and living. A person is their actions and it lays out a basis for their responsibility. Existentialism writings often feature cases involving “the Other and the look” about intersubjectivity and objectivity which is best described by Sartre: “a man is peeping at someone through a keyhole. At first, this man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. This is an example of the existentialist concept of facticity, where an individual decides to remain true to his past thus being defined by it or employ the existentialist concept of freedom and become inauthentic to one’s past, choosing to become something else.
Existentialism posits that existence precedes essence and presents arguments that originate with the human individual as the basis for describing the universe in which we find ourselves. I found trying to figure out the meaning of this philosophy to be a very entertaining way to spend my time and very helpful in trying to figure out what is meaningful to me and how I am defined by the nature of my thoughts, but what I learned most was the only meaning life has is what I choose to give it.
To touch on that last point, a perfect example of giving meaning to our lives was Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, not just the way they wrote about existentialism, but also through their personal lives. Jean-Paul Sartre in his book Critique of Dialectical Reason sought to reconcile existentialism and marxism, he took part in the student revolution strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested for civil disobedience- Simone de Beauvoir wrote about existentialism and feminism, they were the living embodiment of the principles of existentialism where the person is defined by their actions and it is through these actions that give our lives meaning; for Sartre it was Marxism; for Beauvoir it was feminism.
Since man has started congregating in mud huts our earliest civilizations sought to define the nature of man. First through ethics by classifying what we are not to do through sin. With the arrival of the philosophy of existentialism we can now complete the process that ethics has started: not by telling ourselves what we are not to do, but by telling ourselves what we should be doing. Existentialism is the embodiment of the French expression “joie de vivre” and can best be understood by this sentence from Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road - "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
Existentialism posits that existence precedes essence and presents arguments that originate with the human individual as the basis for describing the universe in which we find ourselves. I found trying to figure out the meaning of this philosophy to be a very entertaining way to spend my time and very helpful in trying to figure out what is meaningful to me and how I am defined by the nature of my thoughts, but what I learned most was the only meaning life has is what I choose to give it.
To touch on that last point, a perfect example of giving meaning to our lives was Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, not just the way they wrote about existentialism, but also through their personal lives. Jean-Paul Sartre in his book Critique of Dialectical Reason sought to reconcile existentialism and marxism, he took part in the student revolution strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested for civil disobedience- Simone de Beauvoir wrote about existentialism and feminism, they were the living embodiment of the principles of existentialism where the person is defined by their actions and it is through these actions that give our lives meaning; for Sartre it was Marxism; for Beauvoir it was feminism.
Since man has started congregating in mud huts our earliest civilizations sought to define the nature of man. First through ethics by classifying what we are not to do through sin. With the arrival of the philosophy of existentialism we can now complete the process that ethics has started: not by telling ourselves what we are not to do, but by telling ourselves what we should be doing. Existentialism is the embodiment of the French expression “joie de vivre” and can best be understood by this sentence from Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road - "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
Friday, March 20, 2009
Having a Bad Day (metaphysical)
Having a bad day in its metaphysical context can only allude to thoughts that can be disruptive and negative. Such a state may take the form of hysteria, depression and aggression. Having a bad day can be of great concern to Christians for to us thought life is so important, because it is the reason for our salvation John 3:16, saved through faith means we are saved by the thought of Jesus Christ. Early examples of schizophrenia in the bible were described as demon possession, so Christianity bears a close relationship with the medical specialty of psychiatry. In fact the relationship of Christianity and psychiatry are so close that the proponents of intelligent design would be better served if they reformulated their theories to conform with the medical specialty of psychiatry rather than the branch of the natural sciences known as biology.
The subconscious mind is the source of our dreams when we sleep. Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". The unconscious was defined by Freud to contain three parts the ego, the super-ego and the id. It is this subconscious that can be the cause of your bad day and the main reason for having a bad day is repression. Repression is the burying (without our knowing it) of painful memories and traumatic experiences. Freud also believed that the underlying cause for many disorders was sexual which gave rise to the complaint that Freud was too obsessed with sex. Hence the back and forth when Sigmund Freud was asked whether his cigar habit was evidence he was repressing certain sexual desires which he quipped “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Stream of Consciousness
My Personal Experience With Stream of Consciousness
I’d like to start of by saying that stream of consciousness was a writing technique taught in my high school writing course. The stream of consciousness was used in the first step of a 3 part process. First you wrote furiously whatever came into your mind without worrying about periods and then in the second and third steps you would employ an editing and re-writing process, much like a sculptor chipping away at a block of stone that will eventually result in the finished product.
What is Stream of Consciousness?
Stream of consciousness is when the narrative takes the form of an interior monologue about the characters thoughts. It also disregards syntax and punctuation. It is spontaneous and informal, but how spontaneous and supposedly unintentional it may actually be is subject to debate, in other words the complaint about it is it usually ends up that this style writers may strive to achieve intentionally, with purpose and then made to look like it is off the cuff.
My Favourite Author Jack Kerouac
List of Jack Kerouac’s books containing elements of stream of consciousness: On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans.
Jack Kerouac was called the Father of the Beat Generation, this was the generation that preceded the hippie generation of the 60’s. The Beat Generation was defined by listening to Jazz and Bebop music. Jack Kerouac’s writing method used the breathing technique of Jazz musicians where words were improvised in a long monologue without using the period but separated by the dash where the phrases between the dashes resembled improvisational jazz licks and took on a rhythm that was all their own. Here is Jack Kerouac from the beginning of Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan as an example- http://tiny.cc/RU7OL. As a bit of trivia, Woody Allen is a big Jazz fan and plays clarinet in a New Orleans style jazz band, tickets can be bought under the name of Woody Allen And His New Orleans Jazz Band.
Authors Inspired by Kerouac: Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami also an author who has a style similar to Jack Kerouac is David Sedaris.
An example of Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness style: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
—from On the Road
Jack Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose Method: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose a List of Thirty Essentials
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
I’d like to start of by saying that stream of consciousness was a writing technique taught in my high school writing course. The stream of consciousness was used in the first step of a 3 part process. First you wrote furiously whatever came into your mind without worrying about periods and then in the second and third steps you would employ an editing and re-writing process, much like a sculptor chipping away at a block of stone that will eventually result in the finished product.
What is Stream of Consciousness?
Stream of consciousness is when the narrative takes the form of an interior monologue about the characters thoughts. It also disregards syntax and punctuation. It is spontaneous and informal, but how spontaneous and supposedly unintentional it may actually be is subject to debate, in other words the complaint about it is it usually ends up that this style writers may strive to achieve intentionally, with purpose and then made to look like it is off the cuff.
My Favourite Author Jack Kerouac
List of Jack Kerouac’s books containing elements of stream of consciousness: On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans.
Jack Kerouac was called the Father of the Beat Generation, this was the generation that preceded the hippie generation of the 60’s. The Beat Generation was defined by listening to Jazz and Bebop music. Jack Kerouac’s writing method used the breathing technique of Jazz musicians where words were improvised in a long monologue without using the period but separated by the dash where the phrases between the dashes resembled improvisational jazz licks and took on a rhythm that was all their own. Here is Jack Kerouac from the beginning of Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan as an example- http://tiny.cc/RU7OL. As a bit of trivia, Woody Allen is a big Jazz fan and plays clarinet in a New Orleans style jazz band, tickets can be bought under the name of Woody Allen And His New Orleans Jazz Band.
Authors Inspired by Kerouac: Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami also an author who has a style similar to Jack Kerouac is David Sedaris.
An example of Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness style: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
—from On the Road
Jack Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose Method: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose a List of Thirty Essentials
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
Sunday, March 15, 2009
My Opinion of the Left
My political opinions have always skewed to the right, largely media driven they reflect the political American landscape. They mirror American values of devotion to the family where politics are learned at home and then later influenced by the media. The left controls the media and universities and uses this position to do its proselytizing. I feel that political opinions are influenced by their method of recruitment, for example because the right is pro family they enact policies that benefit the family such as low taxation, favouring a small government and a huge military making the military the de facto government. While the left favours higher taxation, promotes homosexual rights, helps the poor and immigrants, with a large government and a huge military (which usually results in the purge of the population, abolishment of religion and the forfeiture of liberty).
A deeper view of my opinion of the left can be found in how the left feels about religion. A microcosm of left leaning liberal thinking can be found in Hollywood. Hollywood is also home to a new religion called Scientology. I just happen to know of one case where Scientology has resulted in the death of one person, whereas if all the victims of communism were buried in Mt. Pleasant cemetery the cemetery would be a mile higher. At the recent Academy awards an obvious jab against Scientology was delivered by presenters Steve Martin and Tina Fey. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtW6ZooB9cI&feature=related The jab I’m referring to was “And every tiny seed on Earth was placed here by the alien King Rondole, to foster our titrates and fuel our positive transfers.” Then Tina Fey makes the crack about no on wants to hear about a religion that we made up (Scientology is a made up religion by L. Ron Hubbard). This for me represented the first shot across the bow in a conceivable war on Scientology by the left. For years we have witnessed Scientology make inroads into Hollywood’s billion dollar entertainment industry. We have seen many of the stars we knew growing up convert to a new, strange and mysterious religion. For the most part we thought nothing of it and Scientology’s growth and prosperity went unnoticed…, at least by most of us, however the left on the other hand, to them, this prosperity was an entirely different matter. The growth of Scientology was becoming a threat to the left’s control of the liberal media. This threat that is once again threatening to topple one of the left’s bastions of left thinking, their pillar of support and safe haven. If the left were to lose the media, what could this mean?
Enter Anonymous, as mysterious as the religion it seeks to oppose it appeared out of nowhere announcing its existence with this slick ad on You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ It was a battle cry, a narrator declares a detailed battle plan over a catchy beat that threatened to finish Scientology once and for all. A faceless organization unless of course you happen to be me and I say the face of Anonymous is communism. The ad has all the characteristic hallmarks of communism’s view of religion as something that is totalitarian, immoral and that must be stopped. The reality is the exact opposite, Scientology merely seeks to provide a moral standard that is pro family, it just happens to threaten the iron grip by the left over the liberal media providing a new voice and a breath of fresh air from the oppression of political correctness. Scientology promotes an alternative form of ethics from that of the left, jeopardizing the left’s ability to create guilt trips and point the finger of blame at perceived enemies. Here is Tom Cruise giving a speech on ethics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFBZ_uAbxS0 The encroachment by Scientology on the left’s territory creates a spectacle that can only be looked upon with a great sense of humour. Watching the left trying to hold onto its power exposes them for who they really are and I hope to find out more about them as this battle wages on. I will support Scientology in this endeavour and hope to see them victorious. The values of the right are pro family, pro freedom of religion and if the right is successful hopefully we’ll see Hollywood restored to its heyday of the 40’s and 50’s when it was last ruled by right wingers.
A deeper view of my opinion of the left can be found in how the left feels about religion. A microcosm of left leaning liberal thinking can be found in Hollywood. Hollywood is also home to a new religion called Scientology. I just happen to know of one case where Scientology has resulted in the death of one person, whereas if all the victims of communism were buried in Mt. Pleasant cemetery the cemetery would be a mile higher. At the recent Academy awards an obvious jab against Scientology was delivered by presenters Steve Martin and Tina Fey. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtW6ZooB9cI&feature=related The jab I’m referring to was “And every tiny seed on Earth was placed here by the alien King Rondole, to foster our titrates and fuel our positive transfers.” Then Tina Fey makes the crack about no on wants to hear about a religion that we made up (Scientology is a made up religion by L. Ron Hubbard). This for me represented the first shot across the bow in a conceivable war on Scientology by the left. For years we have witnessed Scientology make inroads into Hollywood’s billion dollar entertainment industry. We have seen many of the stars we knew growing up convert to a new, strange and mysterious religion. For the most part we thought nothing of it and Scientology’s growth and prosperity went unnoticed…, at least by most of us, however the left on the other hand, to them, this prosperity was an entirely different matter. The growth of Scientology was becoming a threat to the left’s control of the liberal media. This threat that is once again threatening to topple one of the left’s bastions of left thinking, their pillar of support and safe haven. If the left were to lose the media, what could this mean?
Enter Anonymous, as mysterious as the religion it seeks to oppose it appeared out of nowhere announcing its existence with this slick ad on You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ It was a battle cry, a narrator declares a detailed battle plan over a catchy beat that threatened to finish Scientology once and for all. A faceless organization unless of course you happen to be me and I say the face of Anonymous is communism. The ad has all the characteristic hallmarks of communism’s view of religion as something that is totalitarian, immoral and that must be stopped. The reality is the exact opposite, Scientology merely seeks to provide a moral standard that is pro family, it just happens to threaten the iron grip by the left over the liberal media providing a new voice and a breath of fresh air from the oppression of political correctness. Scientology promotes an alternative form of ethics from that of the left, jeopardizing the left’s ability to create guilt trips and point the finger of blame at perceived enemies. Here is Tom Cruise giving a speech on ethics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFBZ_uAbxS0 The encroachment by Scientology on the left’s territory creates a spectacle that can only be looked upon with a great sense of humour. Watching the left trying to hold onto its power exposes them for who they really are and I hope to find out more about them as this battle wages on. I will support Scientology in this endeavour and hope to see them victorious. The values of the right are pro family, pro freedom of religion and if the right is successful hopefully we’ll see Hollywood restored to its heyday of the 40’s and 50’s when it was last ruled by right wingers.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Little Brother by Corey Doctorow: a book review
I finished reading Little Brother and I felt my personal knowledge of the writer would give me insight into the novel that the general public didn’t have.
My association with the author goes back to high school where he and I attended Alternative Independent Studies Program, otherwise known as A.I.S.P., together. Having spoken to him on occasion my opinion of him was simple, he was a genius. Corey was a punk rocker who wore a black leather jacket with a white spider on the back and sported an odd looking jewfro that made his head look like a mushroom. I knew little of his activities outside of high school other than the one time that he mentioned he attended an anarchist demonstration, mostly because the female demonstrators got naked. His mother was also my kindergarten teacher.
I’ve read all of his published fiction writings and attended the book launch for Little Brother in the summer of 2008 at Lillian H. Smith library. His previous writings could best be described as odd little pieces about Toronto, Kensington Market, dumpster diving and collecting antiques which he calls crap hound, there was also a component of anthropomorphism to his writings with one character whose father was a mountain and whose mother was a washing machine and another time about sentient machines, or A.I.’s with one A.I. being a yacht for diving off Australia. I was attracted to Corey’s writings because I knew him in high school, but none of his writings exemplified the genius teenager I knew, in fact his stories sucked!
Then along came Little Brother and it seemed Corey may be on to something, Corey was raised around computers by his father and the plot centers around hacker subculture. It seemed Corey may finally become something of a success, so I dusted off the dust of past failures and sat down with an open mind hoping to find that greatness had finally sprung from the fertile mind of the genius I knew in high school. I read and I started to be encouraged by what I saw there, there was praise for the democracy protesters in China as well as for George Orwell’s telling of the story 1984, a damning account of the brutal repressive policies of the Soviet Union and from which the title Little Brother got its name, was Corey changing his political views and adopting a more towards the center political philosophy, I was excited. As I read I noticed the story was based on the United States war on terror (a war I favour) and seemed to be about its response to a terrorist attack on the Bay bridge in San Francisco. The Department of Homeland Security played a main role as the antagonist to the novel’s protagonist Marcus Yallow. Marcus Yallow and three friends, age 17, were arrested and detained by The Department of Homeland Security after the terror attack and placed in Alcatraz Island for no reason. Marcus and two of his friends were eventually released but one of his friends stayed in jail throughout the book and his family was left to think he died in the terrorist attack. As he leaves the jail a female guard puts her finger to her lips and says “Don’t Tell”. Marcus then blissfully carries on with his life as though nothing had happened, but he also becomes a leader in a cyber rebellion against the Department of Homeland Security’s invasion of privacy like, war on terror, policies.
This is an example of a thought experiment, Marcus, his friends as well as the other U.S. citizens detained by the U.S. government are being used to represent the terrorists being held in Guantanamo Bay, in fact Corey specifies this fact in his book by calling the place where they are held as Guantanamo by the Bay. This is similar in style to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale a novel about a young woman growing up under the repression of a Christian fundamentalist government. Now this is my complaint, Corey is a left of center, some could say a communist with a small “c, writing a story about one of the greatest countries in the world whose citizens enjoy unparalled freedom and liberty and Corey is portraying that country as though it is as oppressive as Stalinist Russia. The pot calling the kettle black as some would say. Corey’s communist beliefs don’t exactly endear him in the genuine department either, it sounds more like a left wing pinko just simply resorting to name calling. This sort of thought experiment I could see being used by an expert on Constitutional law whose background is libertarian, but when used by a person whose background is Trotskyist communist it comes across as plain old propaganda. It is sort of like a conservative such as myself writing a story about North Korea, am I going to write about North Korea in a positive light? Ofcourse not and no one should expect me to! My only chance of success would be to expose some sort of eternal truth about the regime and try to interest the readers with my honesty and sincerity, in a similar manner to the way George Orwell did in 1984 and not, to use as a bad example, the way Margaret Atwood did in The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood made the same mistake as a feminist writer when all she did was simply state the obvious viewpoint that feminists hate Christianity, as if readers would expect her to say anything else. Her inexperience on the subject of Christianity was evident in the taking out of context the passage;
Genesis 30:1-3 (King James Version)
Genesis 30
1And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.
2And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel: and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?
3And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.
Which was extrapolated upon outrageously to become the policy of a right wing Christian government’s attempts to repopulate the planet. A more George Orwell in the vein of 1984 style criticism of Christianity would have saw Margaret adopt the policies of Jerry Falwell’s moral majority and incorporate them into a Christian governments attempts at repression, or at the very least set it in the past as an historical revisionist account of the Catholic inquisition. That’s how George Orwell did it and that’s how I would do it. Corey adopts a lot of the hacker persona in his hero and it is amazing in its use of the current jargon and cultural mores of the day, but the use of exaggeration to alter the perception of the public’s view on The War on Terror is a slander that makes Little Brother nothing more than a biased piece of propaganda.
My association with the author goes back to high school where he and I attended Alternative Independent Studies Program, otherwise known as A.I.S.P., together. Having spoken to him on occasion my opinion of him was simple, he was a genius. Corey was a punk rocker who wore a black leather jacket with a white spider on the back and sported an odd looking jewfro that made his head look like a mushroom. I knew little of his activities outside of high school other than the one time that he mentioned he attended an anarchist demonstration, mostly because the female demonstrators got naked. His mother was also my kindergarten teacher.
I’ve read all of his published fiction writings and attended the book launch for Little Brother in the summer of 2008 at Lillian H. Smith library. His previous writings could best be described as odd little pieces about Toronto, Kensington Market, dumpster diving and collecting antiques which he calls crap hound, there was also a component of anthropomorphism to his writings with one character whose father was a mountain and whose mother was a washing machine and another time about sentient machines, or A.I.’s with one A.I. being a yacht for diving off Australia. I was attracted to Corey’s writings because I knew him in high school, but none of his writings exemplified the genius teenager I knew, in fact his stories sucked!
Then along came Little Brother and it seemed Corey may be on to something, Corey was raised around computers by his father and the plot centers around hacker subculture. It seemed Corey may finally become something of a success, so I dusted off the dust of past failures and sat down with an open mind hoping to find that greatness had finally sprung from the fertile mind of the genius I knew in high school. I read and I started to be encouraged by what I saw there, there was praise for the democracy protesters in China as well as for George Orwell’s telling of the story 1984, a damning account of the brutal repressive policies of the Soviet Union and from which the title Little Brother got its name, was Corey changing his political views and adopting a more towards the center political philosophy, I was excited. As I read I noticed the story was based on the United States war on terror (a war I favour) and seemed to be about its response to a terrorist attack on the Bay bridge in San Francisco. The Department of Homeland Security played a main role as the antagonist to the novel’s protagonist Marcus Yallow. Marcus Yallow and three friends, age 17, were arrested and detained by The Department of Homeland Security after the terror attack and placed in Alcatraz Island for no reason. Marcus and two of his friends were eventually released but one of his friends stayed in jail throughout the book and his family was left to think he died in the terrorist attack. As he leaves the jail a female guard puts her finger to her lips and says “Don’t Tell”. Marcus then blissfully carries on with his life as though nothing had happened, but he also becomes a leader in a cyber rebellion against the Department of Homeland Security’s invasion of privacy like, war on terror, policies.
This is an example of a thought experiment, Marcus, his friends as well as the other U.S. citizens detained by the U.S. government are being used to represent the terrorists being held in Guantanamo Bay, in fact Corey specifies this fact in his book by calling the place where they are held as Guantanamo by the Bay. This is similar in style to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale a novel about a young woman growing up under the repression of a Christian fundamentalist government. Now this is my complaint, Corey is a left of center, some could say a communist with a small “c, writing a story about one of the greatest countries in the world whose citizens enjoy unparalled freedom and liberty and Corey is portraying that country as though it is as oppressive as Stalinist Russia. The pot calling the kettle black as some would say. Corey’s communist beliefs don’t exactly endear him in the genuine department either, it sounds more like a left wing pinko just simply resorting to name calling. This sort of thought experiment I could see being used by an expert on Constitutional law whose background is libertarian, but when used by a person whose background is Trotskyist communist it comes across as plain old propaganda. It is sort of like a conservative such as myself writing a story about North Korea, am I going to write about North Korea in a positive light? Ofcourse not and no one should expect me to! My only chance of success would be to expose some sort of eternal truth about the regime and try to interest the readers with my honesty and sincerity, in a similar manner to the way George Orwell did in 1984 and not, to use as a bad example, the way Margaret Atwood did in The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood made the same mistake as a feminist writer when all she did was simply state the obvious viewpoint that feminists hate Christianity, as if readers would expect her to say anything else. Her inexperience on the subject of Christianity was evident in the taking out of context the passage;
Genesis 30:1-3 (King James Version)
Genesis 30
1And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.
2And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel: and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?
3And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.
Which was extrapolated upon outrageously to become the policy of a right wing Christian government’s attempts to repopulate the planet. A more George Orwell in the vein of 1984 style criticism of Christianity would have saw Margaret adopt the policies of Jerry Falwell’s moral majority and incorporate them into a Christian governments attempts at repression, or at the very least set it in the past as an historical revisionist account of the Catholic inquisition. That’s how George Orwell did it and that’s how I would do it. Corey adopts a lot of the hacker persona in his hero and it is amazing in its use of the current jargon and cultural mores of the day, but the use of exaggeration to alter the perception of the public’s view on The War on Terror is a slander that makes Little Brother nothing more than a biased piece of propaganda.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Darwin's Folly
I thought I’d write a criticism after reading Scientific American’s Darwin Edition, which was celebrating 150 years of the Theory of Evolution, which in itself speaks volumes. I personally don’t believe in the Theory of Evolution due to the blazing gaps and contradictions between it and the known laws of science which are patently obvious to the naked eye. Nonetheless it still becomes necessary to expose the ridiculous to examination.
The common belief of biologists is that life did not originate on this planet but that the earth was seeded by a virus carrying meteor. Such a belief is evidenced whenever a meteor hits the earth’s surface and is immediately descended upon by Darwin’s Atheists looking for the proof to complete the blazing gap that is obvious to everyone in the Theory of Evolution. The gap that I’m speaking of is the Law of Biogenesis,
that states life comes from life. Hence if Darwin were to be correct it would be impossible for life to originate on this planet, but does an extra terrestrial source for life negate the Law of Biogenesis?
The importance of the Theory of Evolution is thus, it is what 100% of atheists hold to be true and what justifies their non-belief in God. As a joke I came up with my own Theory of Evolution which states that the origin of all life as well as the simplest form the virus was created by God and not only that but he also nurtured said virus like a gardener so as not to become extinct. This virus then went on to become all known life as we know it, it is my wager that allows any backsliding atheists the option of believing in a god and allows the Theory of Evolution to exist in the face of the Law of Biogenesis.
But the atheists may have beaten me to the punch, I think atheists much like above, are considering another creator for the virus, a creator much like a god but separate and distinct from the life it created and not subject to the Theory of Evolution. This alternative to a god may be in the form of intelligent alien life. This life form may in fact exhibit qualities that have never before been considered, it would be non-biological and may in fact be an inter-dimensional being having not originated in this universe.
It would then be reasonable to assume that such a life form that exhibits such qualities could also have characteristics that it may have in common with human beings. As a matter of fact the alien life form may also be human. Christians have long put forth the belief that they did not originate from apes as Darwin proposed but were descended from Adam and Eve who according to Genesis in the Bible came from the Garden of Eden. Eden is a term Moses used to describe a paradise of plant and animal life, a vision created by someone who wandered around in the desert for forty years, could the Garden of Eden of Genesis be the heaven latter referred to in the Bible. Could Heaven be in another dimension other than this one meaning man is an inter-dimensional life form. Would this inter-dimensional quality also mean there is a non-biological component to our nature, a component that would give us infinite life spans and could therefore mean man is immortal. In other words humans are the alien life form that the atheists extrapolated and hypothesized to exist using Darwin’s Theory of Evoluton.
Church of Christ, Scientist
The common belief of biologists is that life did not originate on this planet but that the earth was seeded by a virus carrying meteor. Such a belief is evidenced whenever a meteor hits the earth’s surface and is immediately descended upon by Darwin’s Atheists looking for the proof to complete the blazing gap that is obvious to everyone in the Theory of Evolution. The gap that I’m speaking of is the Law of Biogenesis,
that states life comes from life. Hence if Darwin were to be correct it would be impossible for life to originate on this planet, but does an extra terrestrial source for life negate the Law of Biogenesis?
The importance of the Theory of Evolution is thus, it is what 100% of atheists hold to be true and what justifies their non-belief in God. As a joke I came up with my own Theory of Evolution which states that the origin of all life as well as the simplest form the virus was created by God and not only that but he also nurtured said virus like a gardener so as not to become extinct. This virus then went on to become all known life as we know it, it is my wager that allows any backsliding atheists the option of believing in a god and allows the Theory of Evolution to exist in the face of the Law of Biogenesis.
But the atheists may have beaten me to the punch, I think atheists much like above, are considering another creator for the virus, a creator much like a god but separate and distinct from the life it created and not subject to the Theory of Evolution. This alternative to a god may be in the form of intelligent alien life. This life form may in fact exhibit qualities that have never before been considered, it would be non-biological and may in fact be an inter-dimensional being having not originated in this universe.
It would then be reasonable to assume that such a life form that exhibits such qualities could also have characteristics that it may have in common with human beings. As a matter of fact the alien life form may also be human. Christians have long put forth the belief that they did not originate from apes as Darwin proposed but were descended from Adam and Eve who according to Genesis in the Bible came from the Garden of Eden. Eden is a term Moses used to describe a paradise of plant and animal life, a vision created by someone who wandered around in the desert for forty years, could the Garden of Eden of Genesis be the heaven latter referred to in the Bible. Could Heaven be in another dimension other than this one meaning man is an inter-dimensional life form. Would this inter-dimensional quality also mean there is a non-biological component to our nature, a component that would give us infinite life spans and could therefore mean man is immortal. In other words humans are the alien life form that the atheists extrapolated and hypothesized to exist using Darwin’s Theory of Evoluton.
Church of Christ, Scientist
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