Enthusiastic people are a genuine puzzlement for me. Especially the ones who are all fired up about all things trite and blunderful!
"Oh! It's a great morning, it's going to be a great day!"
Many a cheerful induhviduals have started out their days saying this and most have proceeded to get their asses fucked through the course of the entire day. However, such grave misfortune deters not the cheerfulness of true optimists, and they end their day with this little gem of self-motivation:
"I should still be positive and thank God! Things could have been worse!"
Oh really? Why thats a fucking revealation! Here's another revealation for you:
Things can always be worse!
Just think about the shittiest thing that has ever happened to you, and I can assure you you'll be able to think of something shittier that could have happened!
Here's a possible response to my beautifully articulated argument:
But that's what i'm saying. Since things can always be worse, you should be cheerful and thankful all the time for the fact that they're not!
I have just one thing to say in response to this. Just try imagining for a moment how stupid you look being thankful about all the crap that's happening to you!Oh, a bird shit on my face,thank God elephants don't fly!
The answer, according to me, is not in being paranoid about an uncertain and possibly shitty future, as hardcore pessimists would argue. It's about being aware of the fact that shit can and probably will happen, and passively resigning yourself to it. It's about being adequately mirthful or sullen about the current situation, as the case may be, and not expecting anything from the future.
There is a possible pitfall though, and I know this because it has occurred to me. You may become so passive about what life has to offer that you may actually start looking forward to death, or something equally drastic, just to break the monotony. Having observed the lives of a gazillion people around me, I'm now aware of a certain set of courses that life is bound to take.
The problem is, I'm not motivated one way or the other. I'm not looking forward to anything. Good job, good marriage, good children, death! Bad job, bad marriage, bad children, death! Just fill in a few details and replace good with bad here and there and you can broadly chalk out the stages in the life of most of the people you know. The outcome is always the same,and it's the only certainty. Also, what happens after death is probably the only genuine uncertainty in life. From what I've seen, heard and read, I'm inclined to believe that nothing happens. This life is all there is.
Possible Motivation: There's just one life, you should make the most of it. It's your only opportunity after all!
Brilliant Rebuttal: There's just one life, does it even matter if you make the most of it? Do you think Alexander's victories will matter when the Earth itself has been consumed by the Sun?
Well maybe you will be relieved of all miseries after death, but what about those who love you? How can you make them suffer? Umm...once I'm dead, I don't really need to care for my loved ones, do I?
I'm currently reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, and this post if quite obviously an indirect result of the same. The essay starts with an amazing line.
There is but one truly serious philisophical problem , and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not individual choice must be safeguarded, whether abortion can be legislated—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
The author then proceeds to illustrate the absurdity of life through the example of Sisyphus, a character in Greek mythology who was punished by the Gods to engage in the meaningless task of rolling a boulder up a hill over and over again for eternity. It's a brilliant analogy in the sense that the majority,if not all, of the human race lives equally meaningless lives. However, in the last chapter, Camus abruptly concludes that it is not a meaningless task after all, in fact Sisyphus shouldn't be searching for meaning at all. He should try to find motivation in the task that has been assigned to him, howsoever monotonous it may be. After an exciting start, the end seems rather forced when Camus concludes, Sisyphus is happy! To put it very simply, you're not supposed to be worried about the meaning of your actions, you have to learn to be cheerfully dumb. This singular argument effectively attempts to render most of philosophical thought inappropriate. Or as my nanaji likes to put it, "Philosophy is useless".
Thankfully, I also read another amazing book recently, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene, an eminent physicist and one of the most prominents string theorists. It justifies the search for meaning in life by making it clear that Physics, and most other significant sciences, have emanated from Philosophy. If we had restricted ourselves to mundane tasks without ever worrying about how the physical world functions and how can we control it, we wouldn't have achieved much as a species. It's a great book, but it still doesn't answer the question. In fact, it renders me all the more skeptical of the fact that anything is worth anything.
Then again, to actually get it over with and end your time in the Sun requires possibly an even greater motivation than to live through it. When you've achieved a state of passivity, when most things don't motivate you, you don't look forward to life any more than you look forward to death, and vice versa.
If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd treat those two impostors just the same;
- "If" by Rudyard Kipling
But the good thing is, death doesn't scare you anymore. That's probably one of the advantages of being an atheist. Not believing in a supreme-being-who-is-perfectly-conscious-that-he-is-a-supreme-being enables your actions to not be guided by an eternal fear of divine punishment. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about God, but maybe it's just due to my bias that I find the ones denying his existence a lot more logical and convincing than the ones advocating it.
I, for one, believe that God is no different from luck, and as a consequence, I also believe that you can only resign yourself to it and not influence it by praising it. There's no concept of justice in the divine order of rewards and punishment. It's all random. Just as there is good luck and bad luck, there can be good God and bad God. You can't do squat about it. so when you are cursing your luck, you are effectively cursing God. Guess that makes the believers mighty uncomfortable. I'm okay with it though,and I never miss an opportunity to actively curse God whenever something unfavourable happens to me. What may be even more perplexing for believers is that I'm considerably luckier than many of the people I know! Don't attempt to explain it, because there is no explanation. Some things that affect you are beyond your control, and praying doesn't help. There aren't many things I'm sure of, but one thing is for certain: If there is a God, He definitely doesn't understand the concept of justice. Either that or he's just plain malevolent. To quote Jim Carrey's character from Bruce Almighty,
God is a mean kid on an anthill with a magnifying glass.
Let me quote an excerpt from possibly the greatest book ever written, at least according to me. Millions have read the master piece, and they can feel a little smug about it because I'm not going to name it, at the risk of copyright infringement of course.
'I wonder what he did to deserve it', the warrant officer with a malaria and a mosquito bite on his ass lamented after Nurse Cramer had read her thermometer and discovered the soldier in white was dead.
'He went to war', the fighter pilot with the golden moustache surmised
'We all went to war', Dunbar countered
'That's what I mean', the warrant officer with the malaria continued, 'Why him? There just doesn't seem to be any logic to this system of rewards and punishment. Look at what happened to me. if I had gotten syphillis or a dose of clap for my 5 minutes of passion on the beach instead of this damned mosquito bite, I could see justice. But malaria? Malaria?Who can explain malaria as a consequence of fornication?' The warrant officer shook his head in numb astonishment.
'What about me?' Yossarian said, 'I stepped out of my tent in Marrakech one night to get a bar of candy and caught your dose of clap when that Wac I never even saw before kissed me into the bushes. All I really wanted was a bar of candy, but who could turn it down?'
'That sounds like my dose of clap all right', the warrant officer agreed. 'But I've still got somebody else's malaria. Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe.'
'I've got somebody else's 3,00,000 dollars', the dashing young fighter captain with the golden moustache admitted. 'I've been goofing off since the day I was born. I cheated my way through prep school and college, and just about all I've been doing ever since is shacking up with pretty girls who think I'd make a good husband. I've got no ambition at all. The only thing I want to do after the war is marry some girl who's got more money with I have and shack up with lots more pretty girls. The 3,00,000 bucks was left to me before I was born by a grandfather who made a fortune selling on an international scale. I know I don't deserve it, but I'll be damned if I give it back. I wonder who it really belongs to.'
'Maybe it belongs to my father', Dunbar conjectured. 'He spent a lifetime at hard work and never could make enough money to even send my sister and me through college. He's dead now, so you might as well keep it.'
'Now, if we can just find out who my malaria belongs to we'd be all set. It's not that I've got anything against malaria. I'd just as soon goldbrick with malaria as with anything else. It's only that I feel an injustice has been committed. Why should I have somebody else's malaria and you have my dose of clap?'
'I've got more than your dose of clap', Yossarian told him. 'I've got to keep flying combat missions because of that dose of yours until they kill me.'
'That makes it even worse. Where's the justice in that?'
'I had a friend named Clevinger two and a half weeks ago who used to see plenty of justice in it.'
'It's the highest kind of justice of all,' Clevinger had gloated, clapping his hands with a merry laugh. 'I can't help thinking of Hippolytus of Euripides, where the early licentiousness of Theseus is probably responsible for the asceticism of the son that helps bring about the tragedy that ruins them all. If nothing else, that episode with the Wac should teach you the evils of sexual immorality.'
'It teaches me the evil of candy.'
In my continuous search for a convincing argument regarding the existence of God, I've read and laughed at the Cosmological, Ontological, Teleological and Moral arguments among others. I recently came across one particularly amusing one. It's called Pascal's Wager. Yup, it is attributed to the same Blaise Pascal whom you may have read about while learning probability theory,or the mechanism of hydraulic presses. It is all the more disappointing coming from a supposed man of reason. Here's how it goes:
If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is....
..."God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all."
Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. "That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much." Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.
Pascal decided to apply the logic of expected value to his beliefs about God. While the theory makes a lot of sense in probability and game theory, the man got a bit too carried away by it I guess. Many have offered plausible criticisms of the argument, and I especially like the one offered by Richard Dawkins. You can read about it on Wikipedia if you want, but I'm going to offer my own rebuttal here.
At first glance, the argument makes a lot of sense. What can you possibly lose by believing in God? Other than your sanity of course. Anyway, if the stakes are so high, and God truly is such a retarded egomaniac that he'll punish you for eternity if you don't praise him, surely he's also sensitive about what system of belief you follow. I mean if you're not a Christian, and the Christian belief is in fact right, you're screwed just as bad as an atheist. The same goes for all religions.
I believe in a supreme being but I didn't know that Islam was the true path. I'm sorry!
Too bad, motherfucker! You're toast!
It's especially confusing for a Hindu. There are millions of Gods and conflicting sects within Hinduism. What if Shiva punishes the Vaishnavas, or the other way round?
As is clear to me now after reading more about Pascal ol'fellow, he actually wanted to convince non-Christians to convert to Christianity when he came up with this little gem of his.
I guess I just miss my friends.
Alternatively, maybe I just need to get laid.
