June 21
If humans are made of atoms, which is deemed to be non living, then how did we become living things? What gives us a mind on its own, having the ability to think, to feel, to be alive?
Not our atoms, that’s for sure. It’s true that you can dehumanize a human being by reducing him to his component particles. At a certain level of magnification, the person who thinks, feels, lives is lost. This clump of cells is actually a clump of atoms, less than a shadow. If you take a strictly physicalist/materialist view of the universe, the human person becomes something like a phantom presence hiding inside a biochemical machine.
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June 22
Are we born without any control over our lives?
No, when we’re born we are not in control of anything. All we can do is scream and writhe. Just imagine the sudden sensory overload the newborn must experience! Conscious control of our limbs comes a few years later. We are compelled to explore the strange new world outside our mother’s body. Dizzying, terrifying, fascinating.
Control, and the various illusions thereof, come later in life and persist until death.
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July 21, 2022
Nobody wants to be The Problem in everyone else’s eyes. In the most ruthless and inhuman sense, the only way to avoid being The Problem is to sacrifice someone else to the fire of inquisition in your place so that you may live. This ruthlessness ands inhumanity is course the opposite of love, friendship, compassion, justice, and sanity.
Quora July 28
Has Adversity In Your Life Drawn You Closer to God or Pushed You Farther Away?
It has drawn me closer to Him, not farther from Him. It’s the difference between basing your faith in God on the idea that he will spare you pain and hardship as a reward for your faith and doing the same with the expectation that the faithful are less deserving of pain and hardship than those who do not have God and will therefore be rescued from such by Him in life.
02/19/23
Quora Asks:
Could we really decide to change our personality? If so, how much?
I don’t see how you can pretend to be something you’re not and have no cognitive or emotional dissonance. But then again, personal growth is voluntary transformation. No one ever became more or better than who they were yesterday without the desire to do so. Once we have discovered through trial &error (as much as it takes) the Self with which we are comfortable we will not change anything. The sculptor knows exactly when to put down the chisel.
May 6th 2024
Beauty is truth, but is it just a lovely covering for the ugliness it sometimes conceals? Maybe it conspires to hide ugly truths which we would not have discovered if not for a innate distrust of the superficial appearance of things. How extensively does unlovely truth underlie beauty?
September 3, 2024
I think heroism is ultimately what a person finds within themselves, inspired by others whom we admire. We all make conscious choices to do certain things at certain times and we do not necessarily think of ourselves as “heroes” at the moment of our heroism. To be inspired by heroes is to have something stir inside us which may or may not have stirred without any external prodding. And really, the moment of our heroism could fill most if not all of our lives in the chronologically sense. A person can goes through life with a heroic heart as their default.
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