What's up The Internet, it's your humble servant paul here, writing another update.
What have i been up to? many things, yes, many things.
I've been working some, but not enough because it's been raining. I'm working farming jobs, so not working in heavy rain is a good thing, but still,,, i need the money!
It's cold here, because it's winter. But I can handle it better than the locals, who complain so much even though it isn't even below zero. At work there was a lady who was wearing a black hat, in canada would be called a touk or something, and it said 'KIN FREEZIN on it, which i thought was funny. It was more funny because it wasn't actually freezing. I know it does snow up in the mountains, and i plan to go up to a place called Cradle Mountain sometime soon as i hear it's a world heritage site because of it's good looking scenery. There's also another mountian i'm going to climb called mount Roland. Oh and another thing i want to do, is called W.W.O.O.F ing, which is being a Willing Worker on an Organic Farm, getting to stay someplace beautiful for free and getting free food in exchange for a few hours work; but for that i'd need to save up some money because they don't pay you for the work you do.
But i'll write a bit more on the work i've been doing. With the farm work, im usually making about 18$ an hour. Which is sweet, and more sweet right now , is my setup at the backpackers residence where i clean the kitchen at night, and two nights of that is one night of free rent. And 1 week of rent is 113$, so let me calculate how much it costs for me to stay there.... about 10$ a night, which isn't bad because i have my own room, and it's a hosptal room because the place is an old hospital they rennovated.
Have i written all i can about broccoli? yeah it's kindof backbreaking, because all it is is bending over and cutting out the broccoli with a paint scraper, then throwing it in a bin carried by the tractor. The tractor can carry 10 of these huge bins at a time, and im sure a better basketball player now that i've thrown so many collys into faraway bins; not without missing the bin, and once they hit the ground they're dirty and no good. We were working in this rich red soil, and one day it was raining and we got it all over our boots and shoes; i didn't notice that i had it on my shoes, and as soon as we got dropped of at our hospital house I quickly went straight to my room so i could get to the laundry before anyone else, but little did know I had tracked mud all the way from the front door, down two long hallways to my room. The manager was really upset and he yelled at me, using kindof funny language like 'HELLS BELLS' and, 'i've had it up to my eyebrows with this mud!' and so fourth,, but while he's yelling at me, at least 3 other people tack even more mud into the place, but noone admits to doing it and everyone blames me because i was the one caught. Eventually i got a little help from one other guy, but i later found out it was two ladies who did it too but they didn't own up because of how mad the manager was. One girl was this german girl, who tracked it all up the stairs and then blamed me , even though i never went upstairs, betch. Perhaps i will go on a digression just to talk about how annoying she was....
. ...ok my first impression of this girl, she's telling a story of how she 'pissed herself laughing' at a girl who fell on her face, and just the way she told it i was like wow that's kindof harsh. Then later, almost at the end of the day, she starts cutting into my row of collys, perhaps because she notices that im about to be run over by the tractor while trying to be a hero cutting out every last one without missing anything,, and i notice her helping me, and i say Thanks, and then she goes, ' JUST KEEP MOVING' in her thick german accent. And a few days later she calls me an idiot because i think the bag around the bin is tied tight enough and she doesn't agree. And she was rude to everyone! and alot of people i worked with would talk about it behind her back; we all thought it was weird how she could be that mean and bossy even though she was the youngest person on the team. damn, she was evil. but anyways... im glad collys is pretty much over.
The farming season this year, i hear, is kindof a strange one. Like, the crop is 5 times what it usually is. Maybe more, because i heard they usually get 800 bins, and this year they got like 4500. Im not sure if this is the result of climate chage, but it seems to benefit the collyflower farmer in tasmania....
After a few days off, i decided to call up some number i got from a friend about a job, and they agree to pick me up the next day. It's picking a vegetable they call Sweeds, which is actually a turnip in canada (or as the tasmanians often call it, CANADIA). Turnip picking was a brutal job, but it was kindof fun, for the one day that i worked it. It isn't paid by the hour, but they give you 55$ per half ton bin. A half ton is a huge amount of Sweeds, but i hear some people can do 3, 4, or 5 bins a day. They give you a sharp knife, which they deduct from your pay, and some smaller buckets to fill up before dumping them in the bin. I only finished 1 bin that day, but i guess my strategy wasn't very good, and maybe if i gave it a chance i could have been getting 3 bins in a day, but i couldn't do it because i felt it was too rough on my wrists. I wasn't going about the job right because most people were filling their buckets till they overflowed and get someone to help them carry them over to the bins, while i would fill them half way and carry myself. I might have noticed if i was working next to the locals who have been doing this job for years, but instead, i chose a part of the 'paddock' (aka field) where i could pick along the fence next to a field full of cows. Perhaps if i had not been next to the cows i would not have been so distracted and i could have worked more and made more money, but, i was so amused by being next to the cows that i spent alot of my time paying attention to them and not working. At first the cows walked over, and were just kindof checking me out, staring at me. Like 20 or 40 cows! Sometimes some of them would get bored and leave , but usually there were alot of cows just 2 meters away from me! so close i could smell their stink. I thought it was cool, that they were so interested in me, and perhaps they enjoyed my whistling or beat boxing. Later i found out they were more interested in the sweeds, and when i got a small one i would toss it over and they would all fight over who got to eat it. Yes it was an amusing day next to the cows. After a day of not working hard and not making much money, i decided it wasn't worth my sore wrists and back, so that's that. No more sweeds.
Broccoli planting. This past week I didn't have work, and so i fell into a schedual of going to bed very late, staying up reading. I'll write about the books i've been reading next. But yeah, i go to bed on thursday at 4am after finishing 2 books, and i was nice and comfortably sleeping at 7 when i get a call asking me to come into work because they really need somebody. Now, usually i know ahead of time if im going to work so that i know to go to bed early, but yeah even though i was extremly tired i still went to work that day and did some broccoli work. Basically, i just walked behind this tractor that 3 people were sitting on feeding little plants into the planter, and my job was to make sure there were no gaps and that all the little plants were covered with soil properly because if they aren't they would die overnight. It was an easy job, walking around kicking dirt on plants that weren't covered right. No problem, and maybe there's lots more where that came from.
One thing that is getting annoying, is gettting my stuff stolen. I had a huge load of my laundry stolen off the line, including all my warm clothes. But now that i've been in devenport, it's my food that i need to be careful with. There seems to be a food theif staying with us, and with only about 12 people staying there, i have my suspects. It seems that everyone is getting food stolen from them, although some people could be just saying that so they would not be suspected themselves. There is this one guy that says up really late into the night, and maybe i suspect him because he wears a black leather jacket. He's a cool guy, nice to me, and he often says 'Dead Set!' which i think is funny, but im not sure about him. He says that he lost his sugar, but im like, why would someone steal only your sugar and not your milk bread and other stuff that other people seem to be complaining about. A few nights ago, the film The Fugitive, with harrison ford, was on tv, and that made me think how leather jacket dude (i forget his name) is in fact a fugitive himself, hiding out in tasmania, avoiding the law, no money and stealing food... but im not sure. Not yet. Anyways, it's really really annoying to have someone stealing your food. SO ANNOYING. I made this really good stuff with Tempeh (soybeans) and curry, making enough so i could eat it for a few days, and the next morning i find it's gone! GRRR. oh well, no use crying over stolen food...
It's now saturday, i've been at the internet cafe for a while. I bought a new 2GB USB MP3 player and i've downloaded some music and interesting lectures. I'm kindof tired of typing so i'll say goodbye for now, untill next time
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Saturday, July 12, 2008
This post was written over a week or so, saved as a draft in my email because i didn't get too much time on the internet to write all i wanted to write.
So i'm now in davenport. much has happened and i've not got much time to write.
So i'm now in davenport. much has happened and i've not got much time to write.
The reason i left Launceston was because i couldn't find a job, despite much searching and applying. Many places said they'd call me back, including various jobs as a pruner of grape vines, a job picking gum tree nuts off the old growth forest floor, a takeaway shop (greasy food and sammiches), Taxi driver, Cafe staff, and delivery driver of dominoes pizza. Many of these places said they would call me back and then didn't. Finally I found a job planting onions, which i wrote about in my last post a bit, and then that ended and i moved to davenport to do collyflower picking. I'll write about that a bit later...
But i'll write a bit about my last days in launceston. I moved back into the Launceston backpackers, a nice place that has a piano and some nice people staying there. I stayed there before during the summer and it was crazy full of people, and it was nice to be there during the quiet season. I met alot of canadians too, including a group of students doing volunteer work (although i do'nt think they were required to work all that hard, because they told me they did tree planting, and said they planted about the same number of trees in a week that i did in one day). A couple of things really do annoy me about backpackers: one thing is getting my stuff stolen- i've had my sweet little tape player with the speaker on the side stolen, and one day i had most of my laundry stolen off the line which was a terrible loss- i lost all my sweaters, or, as the australians call them, 'Jumpers'. Also, it was all too easy to lose food. This one time during the summer months i put my bag of groceries that i bought into a box in the fridge, because it was the only free space there, and later, after all the groceries disappeared, i found out that this was the FREE box, only it didn't have a sign on it telling me that it was the FREE box. i might have written about that in here before, but it still annoys me because there should be some warning to someone who might mistakenly put his groceries in the free box by accident, perhaps a sign that says FREE would have worked... and there's always the possiblity of getting your food stolen, because i can't watch my stuff all the time... and another annoying thing is how i always get my food covered in crap from other peoples food on the higher shelves in the fridge- like my bag will be full of some sticky mystery liquid, milk, or blood from some nasty meat. GROSS. There are some nice people though, and the thing about traveling is you'll always meet new people.
So now im in Davenport, working the collies. I'm staying in this backpackers that used to be a hospital or something, and because it's the off season, there aren't many people staying there, and i have my own room, which is great. There aren't alot of people here which is nice, and there is a comfortable common room with a fire place and sweet tv satellite. One annoying thing, i've noticed it alot but especially here, is pee on the toilet seat! i guess some people never learn.
Last night was friday and i went out after a friend gave me some vodka here. There was a girl i wasn't all that attracted to who was kindof being friendly with me; i think she's a really cool girl and everything but we're much too different for it to work i think, and she swears so much! The tasmanians swear alot generally, and she's not as bad as some that i've met. One word that i find harsh is the word CUNT, but locals here don't seem to mind it, and they tend to use it in speech often. Perhaps i'll write a bit more about speech differences at the bottom, as i have been doing in earlier posts. I've been doing alot of reading as well, and have read just under 20 books since i got here, and i have a pile waiting to be read as well - the libraries here are great, and i've been taking advantage of their books as well as their internets.
Last night was friday and i went out after a friend gave me some vodka here. There was a girl i wasn't all that attracted to who was kindof being friendly with me; i think she's a really cool girl and everything but we're much too different for it to work i think, and she swears so much! The tasmanians swear alot generally, and she's not as bad as some that i've met. One word that i find harsh is the word CUNT, but locals here don't seem to mind it, and they tend to use it in speech often. Perhaps i'll write a bit more about speech differences at the bottom, as i have been doing in earlier posts. I've been doing alot of reading as well, and have read just under 20 books since i got here, and i have a pile waiting to be read as well - the libraries here are great, and i've been taking advantage of their books as well as their internets.
One time i was in this takeaway shop and i saw what i thought was Cosmopolitan magazine, or Cosmo, the womans magazine. I thought i'd take a look at it, because sometimes i like to read those types of magazines; even though i don't like to be seen reading them, i feel like i'm spying on women by reading their trashy mags. anyways,, it wasn't cosmo, it was Cosmetic surgury magazine, a thick glossy magazine devoted to plastic surgury with really nasty before and after pictures. It's something i've never seen before, i wonder if they have it in canada.
I'm sure most people know of the Tasmanian devil, but maybe not everyone knows it's giong extinct. It's kindof gross how it happens, but i guess the tassie devil is a kindof gross animal in the way it lives. See, the tasmanian devils eat other dead animals, and when they're eating a corpse of a wallaby or kangaroo or whatever it is, they fight and bit over the corpse biting each other. But the thing is, this biting and fighting over food causes the spread of an infectious disease, or, it's like a mouth cancer.
I've also noticed some differences in names- i can't remember where this came from, but there was a man/ woman couple named MIF (the woman) and HAMISH (the man); apparently Hamish is a common name for a guy. weird eh? I also might have written about these two guys i met, named ASHLEY and COOKIE; in canada, ashley is a girls name, but i guess it's more of a guys name here, and cookie i thought was a weird name but apparently it's only a nickname- at the the time i thought, 'it's weird how australians name their kids 'COOKIE'.
There's something about australian speech; it's not that they're lazy when they're talking... or maybe they are talking in kindof a lazy way, but it's not like there's anything wrong with it i guess, it's just different. Like, when a word ends in A, like the word area, or australia, an australian would say the word as if it ended in an ER, like AIRYER, or AUSTRALIER,,, and to oppose this, if a word ends with ER, like the words worker, eater, killer, filler, ,, those words would be said, WORKA,EATA, KILLA, FILLA, or whatever. i think that's a strange difference. Also, if someone says the word NO, they actually say NOY, like as if they were saying soy, like the soybean kind of soy. I had a bunch more examples but my hands are cold and my time on the internet is up....
Sunday, June 29, 2008
As usual, i have little time to type. Not enough to type everything but still i feel i should get something down.
typing is much faster for me than writing, i can get my memories down before they're gone.
anyways, im here at the internet lounge for a couple hours - i can afford it now. I've been working and i got another loan / gift from the parents. For a long time i didnt have work but now I've been enjoying onion planting. It was a pretty good job while it lasted, got a weeks worth in, and i can go down to cavenport to cut collyfolower, if i want. I was working with cool people, and we were lying on this mattress on a rig being towed by a tractor, and with onions in front of us we planted the onion in a row dug out by the tractor, root down was the goal and we had someone behind the tractor checking to make sure that we planted ROOT DOWN. (anyone who knows the beasties will get the joke HOW I GONNA PLANT IT, GONNA PLANT IT ROOT DOWN, but noone i worked with did,) It was a boring job and sometimes i would change the words of pop songs to fit in with onion planting. Such as this one sung to the tune of We are the Champions
--WEEEE are the planters of the onions,,
DAH, ,, DAH,,
and weee'll keep on planting, till the end of the row
DAH DAH DAHHHH,
then we'lll plant another one,
AND THEN WE:LL PLANT ANOTHER ONE
no time for slow hands,
cause we plant the un-yans,
..... IN THE FIELD!!!!
...And there were a few more that i can't think of now. It was pretty sweet getting paid 110$ for 6.5 hours of work. I should get another sweet paycheck soon enough... perhaps tomorrow.
OH there is one thing i would like to talk about, perhaps i will call it a series of unfortunate events. I'm sure i've touched upon the subject here in this BLAHG; my getting a small appartment, then losing my job and being unable to pay for the appartment.
On this I should say that things were going pretty well at first. A small 1 bedroom appartment was a welcome change after spending two months or so living in 6 or 8 bed dorm rooms with a lot of other stinky snoring people. But my problem is getting up in the morning- i found it difficult, especially after coming home after a long day of tree planting, going to bed without dinner because i was too tired to make it, and then hitting the snooze alarm the next morning, thus sealing my fate and losing my job. Yeah i can't help it, I'm a dreamer, sometimes i like the dream world so much better than this one... what happened was, i was a little late for work, and i ended up missing the ride out to the tree fields. About 5 days later, i got a text message from my boss telling me that i'd lost the job.
And now the plot thickens. A friend, cookie, who set me up with the place, came over one morning asking if he could buy the single mattress in the appartment. I told him he couldn't buy it but that he could use it, so i drove it over to his place with him, under the conditions that in the future he would have to return the bed. So he ended up giving me 100 dollars for the bed, which i accepted because i didn't have any money at the time. My plan was that I would pay him back once i had a job, because at the time I didn't have enough money to pay rent. I do'nt feel like talking about this too much longer, but long story short, i had trouble paying rent, and i was getting a phone calls from Ella on my cell phone but it didn't have any money on it so i wasn't getting her calls, and then Ella calls cookie and asks what's up with paul have you seen him, and cookie is like, yeah he sold me the bed a while ago, and ellas like what the fuck is he doing selling you MY bed. This was on a friday, and i spent the whole day hanging around the library waiting for an email money transfer to come through ( it never did come through) and i needed to pay rent, and now ella is freaking out thinking im a theif, and she calls her dad who comes to the appartment and sits in his car all day waiting for me to arrive. So im at the library when i get a call on the cell phone that works, and its cookie and he's upset and not making much sense but he tells me that shits fucked and everyone is pissed because they didn't know how to get ahold of me, and they're going to call the police because i sold ellas bed, and her dad is waiting outside the appartment for me. That totally sucked. So when i get back to the place, the angry dad is there; i assume it can all be explained, but he doesn't listen to anything i have to say- he doesn't even shake my hand when we met, which is understandable because he'd been waiting outside my place for a long time waiting for me to arrive. Anyways, i'll finish up this by saying it was a mistake to get the appartment, i have trouble holding a steady job, and my parents are great for sending me money when i run out.
i've got a point form list of a bunch of other stuffs i'd like to talk about but im going to have to stop this now cause thinking about that appartment has got me annoyed. GRR
typing is much faster for me than writing, i can get my memories down before they're gone.
anyways, im here at the internet lounge for a couple hours - i can afford it now. I've been working and i got another loan / gift from the parents. For a long time i didnt have work but now I've been enjoying onion planting. It was a pretty good job while it lasted, got a weeks worth in, and i can go down to cavenport to cut collyfolower, if i want. I was working with cool people, and we were lying on this mattress on a rig being towed by a tractor, and with onions in front of us we planted the onion in a row dug out by the tractor, root down was the goal and we had someone behind the tractor checking to make sure that we planted ROOT DOWN. (anyone who knows the beasties will get the joke HOW I GONNA PLANT IT, GONNA PLANT IT ROOT DOWN, but noone i worked with did,) It was a boring job and sometimes i would change the words of pop songs to fit in with onion planting. Such as this one sung to the tune of We are the Champions
--WEEEE are the planters of the onions,,
DAH, ,, DAH,,
and weee'll keep on planting, till the end of the row
DAH DAH DAHHHH,
then we'lll plant another one,
AND THEN WE:LL PLANT ANOTHER ONE
no time for slow hands,
cause we plant the un-yans,
..... IN THE FIELD!!!!
...And there were a few more that i can't think of now. It was pretty sweet getting paid 110$ for 6.5 hours of work. I should get another sweet paycheck soon enough... perhaps tomorrow.
OH there is one thing i would like to talk about, perhaps i will call it a series of unfortunate events. I'm sure i've touched upon the subject here in this BLAHG; my getting a small appartment, then losing my job and being unable to pay for the appartment.
On this I should say that things were going pretty well at first. A small 1 bedroom appartment was a welcome change after spending two months or so living in 6 or 8 bed dorm rooms with a lot of other stinky snoring people. But my problem is getting up in the morning- i found it difficult, especially after coming home after a long day of tree planting, going to bed without dinner because i was too tired to make it, and then hitting the snooze alarm the next morning, thus sealing my fate and losing my job. Yeah i can't help it, I'm a dreamer, sometimes i like the dream world so much better than this one... what happened was, i was a little late for work, and i ended up missing the ride out to the tree fields. About 5 days later, i got a text message from my boss telling me that i'd lost the job.
And now the plot thickens. A friend, cookie, who set me up with the place, came over one morning asking if he could buy the single mattress in the appartment. I told him he couldn't buy it but that he could use it, so i drove it over to his place with him, under the conditions that in the future he would have to return the bed. So he ended up giving me 100 dollars for the bed, which i accepted because i didn't have any money at the time. My plan was that I would pay him back once i had a job, because at the time I didn't have enough money to pay rent. I do'nt feel like talking about this too much longer, but long story short, i had trouble paying rent, and i was getting a phone calls from Ella on my cell phone but it didn't have any money on it so i wasn't getting her calls, and then Ella calls cookie and asks what's up with paul have you seen him, and cookie is like, yeah he sold me the bed a while ago, and ellas like what the fuck is he doing selling you MY bed. This was on a friday, and i spent the whole day hanging around the library waiting for an email money transfer to come through ( it never did come through) and i needed to pay rent, and now ella is freaking out thinking im a theif, and she calls her dad who comes to the appartment and sits in his car all day waiting for me to arrive. So im at the library when i get a call on the cell phone that works, and its cookie and he's upset and not making much sense but he tells me that shits fucked and everyone is pissed because they didn't know how to get ahold of me, and they're going to call the police because i sold ellas bed, and her dad is waiting outside the appartment for me. That totally sucked. So when i get back to the place, the angry dad is there; i assume it can all be explained, but he doesn't listen to anything i have to say- he doesn't even shake my hand when we met, which is understandable because he'd been waiting outside my place for a long time waiting for me to arrive. Anyways, i'll finish up this by saying it was a mistake to get the appartment, i have trouble holding a steady job, and my parents are great for sending me money when i run out.
i've got a point form list of a bunch of other stuffs i'd like to talk about but im going to have to stop this now cause thinking about that appartment has got me annoyed. GRR
Saturday, May 31, 2008
i've been having trouble finding work, and even considering returning to canada, thinking it would be better for me to go to school and get a trade so i could make money easier as a piano technician making 80 dollars an hour and enjoying what i do, how much better is that than wasting time not working and trying not to spend money while looking for a job and not finding one but i guess not looking hard enough but why would i want to stay here anyways when there are so many other places i could go to find work. what should i do?? I'm thinking i'll move down south to hobart; i still have much to see in tasmania.
I have a car now, had it for a few weeks now, it's pretty good but im living so close to down town anyways i can easily walk anywhere. but yeah no job thing is making me think i should move on - i couldn't cut it as a tree planter, or, well, i was late for the 6.30am meeting in the parking lot of the grocery store and the rest of the guys went to work without me.. And i lost the job! it's not like i didn't try to make it, i just missed them. my reason for getting the appartment was to work for a while saving money before i can travel more and that's still my plan but i now need to start over. Maybe i can someday get to the mainland and work in some resort somewhere or restauraunt or feild picking vegetables or packing pumpkins into boxes or some other seasonal farm labor that a backpacker can easily get. unfortuntetly for me, it's hard to get work in tassie right now, but like i said, there might be a job working in some takeaway shop.
Tonight i was driving on the 2 lane highway through the bush, and i almost hit a kangarooo, i had to break real fast, the brakes squeeled, and the kangy jumped off a little scared. he's one of the lucky ones. The roads here are littered with dead marsupials; and i could often see their glowing eyes in the bushes on the side of the road.
Its saturday night so i might make my way down to the downtown where it should be getting interesting considering its past midnight. Can't spend any money but i feel ok about that, i just feel different enough already being a quiet one in a group of loud tasmanians on the drink. Should be fun though, maybe i'll set up in the mall, a street for pedestrians full of stores and benches, and watch for pretty girls asking me about canada and fights between drunk guys being like, ya lookin at me mate? yeah ? whydo'ntcha comeover heren' say that eh? eh?? arggg. There's no late night food except for greese, but i do have a good salad mixture with marinated tofus back at me place should fuel me up after a day without eating much.
Last night was fun. I hit up a bunch of bars but didn't drink anything cause i drove in to town. I later was annoyed at driving in because someone decided to let the air out of my tires, all four of them, like they unscrewed them and let the air out with their finger or something, because when i tried to drive on the highway i really noticed when it wouldn't go above 50 km an hour. That was rude, but anyways, the bars were ok, saw some music that was also ok, was hanging out with rasta who is fun to be around, he's really keen on starting a band with me but i dunno if it will take off because he's so much of a stoner and as much as i like it i'm trying to lay off it a bit and, as much as music and weed seem to go well together it's not always an improvement on your skills when you want to do something like organize what two or more people are going to play, and as much as i like listening to reggae im sometimes not sure i can stick around here to play in a reggae band when i should be traveling or , i dunno, be in a different type of environment than that, like i've been doing alot of reading but when i do hang out with nayah and eli or whoever else it is that's over at their really nice and comfortable house full of interesting things i know im going to be getting high with them which is a burst of energy but also a downer in a way because later i'll feel tired or lazy and in no mood to read or go out or make any real decisions although definitly coming up with good ideas yet not putting them into ACTION. like now im going to take action and go out, find some food maybe or just eat my salad at home, go downtown find some fun because tomorrow i'll hopefully be working in hobart.
also there's something called Footy that seems to be everywhere, all over tv and news, all australians love it, it's their national sport, but there's alot of it i think is weird and different and annoying, the players are very violent with one another and also very affectionate with each other to the point when i'm laughing at them rubbing each others stomaches or patting butts. Oh there's another thing on tv, a trend where there's alot of shows that have young teenage girls who are really badly behaved and then they're kicked back into shape, like there's one with a group of british girls go to the mountains to camp out as punishment for their drugs and stealing and drinking and smoking and swearing and being badasses, and the shows are so full of drama and fighting and hilarious scenes of teen girls who are usually hotties just getting into crazy situations and untimately becoming better people through tough no nonsense authority figures who are in this one i've been describing- the mountain bootcamp show, but theres another show called Ladette to lady that's usually pretty funny, but in a way it seems like they're always putting the girls in situations where the old british teacher ladys are like ok we're going to leave now and you can drink wine but don't drink to much because that would mean that you aren't a lady, and then the ladys do end up getting real drunk and get filmed doing crazy shit like fighting or throwing food or flashing the camera or yelling or hitting on random dudes in a pub. but it's set in this fancy mannor house estate place that's really huge and they go through weird tv reality show situations and at the end of the episode one of them gets kicked out. And yeah, more waste of time on tv but i'm sitting in my appartment watching because i don't have much else going for me here, it just sucks i agreed to keep this appartment. There was an annoying situation that i might write about later but not now, involving the appartment, but i tired of type, it's now 1am!!!!!!!
I have a car now, had it for a few weeks now, it's pretty good but im living so close to down town anyways i can easily walk anywhere. but yeah no job thing is making me think i should move on - i couldn't cut it as a tree planter, or, well, i was late for the 6.30am meeting in the parking lot of the grocery store and the rest of the guys went to work without me.. And i lost the job! it's not like i didn't try to make it, i just missed them. my reason for getting the appartment was to work for a while saving money before i can travel more and that's still my plan but i now need to start over. Maybe i can someday get to the mainland and work in some resort somewhere or restauraunt or feild picking vegetables or packing pumpkins into boxes or some other seasonal farm labor that a backpacker can easily get. unfortuntetly for me, it's hard to get work in tassie right now, but like i said, there might be a job working in some takeaway shop.
Tonight i was driving on the 2 lane highway through the bush, and i almost hit a kangarooo, i had to break real fast, the brakes squeeled, and the kangy jumped off a little scared. he's one of the lucky ones. The roads here are littered with dead marsupials; and i could often see their glowing eyes in the bushes on the side of the road.
Its saturday night so i might make my way down to the downtown where it should be getting interesting considering its past midnight. Can't spend any money but i feel ok about that, i just feel different enough already being a quiet one in a group of loud tasmanians on the drink. Should be fun though, maybe i'll set up in the mall, a street for pedestrians full of stores and benches, and watch for pretty girls asking me about canada and fights between drunk guys being like, ya lookin at me mate? yeah ? whydo'ntcha comeover heren' say that eh? eh?? arggg. There's no late night food except for greese, but i do have a good salad mixture with marinated tofus back at me place should fuel me up after a day without eating much.
Last night was fun. I hit up a bunch of bars but didn't drink anything cause i drove in to town. I later was annoyed at driving in because someone decided to let the air out of my tires, all four of them, like they unscrewed them and let the air out with their finger or something, because when i tried to drive on the highway i really noticed when it wouldn't go above 50 km an hour. That was rude, but anyways, the bars were ok, saw some music that was also ok, was hanging out with rasta who is fun to be around, he's really keen on starting a band with me but i dunno if it will take off because he's so much of a stoner and as much as i like it i'm trying to lay off it a bit and, as much as music and weed seem to go well together it's not always an improvement on your skills when you want to do something like organize what two or more people are going to play, and as much as i like listening to reggae im sometimes not sure i can stick around here to play in a reggae band when i should be traveling or , i dunno, be in a different type of environment than that, like i've been doing alot of reading but when i do hang out with nayah and eli or whoever else it is that's over at their really nice and comfortable house full of interesting things i know im going to be getting high with them which is a burst of energy but also a downer in a way because later i'll feel tired or lazy and in no mood to read or go out or make any real decisions although definitly coming up with good ideas yet not putting them into ACTION. like now im going to take action and go out, find some food maybe or just eat my salad at home, go downtown find some fun because tomorrow i'll hopefully be working in hobart.
also there's something called Footy that seems to be everywhere, all over tv and news, all australians love it, it's their national sport, but there's alot of it i think is weird and different and annoying, the players are very violent with one another and also very affectionate with each other to the point when i'm laughing at them rubbing each others stomaches or patting butts. Oh there's another thing on tv, a trend where there's alot of shows that have young teenage girls who are really badly behaved and then they're kicked back into shape, like there's one with a group of british girls go to the mountains to camp out as punishment for their drugs and stealing and drinking and smoking and swearing and being badasses, and the shows are so full of drama and fighting and hilarious scenes of teen girls who are usually hotties just getting into crazy situations and untimately becoming better people through tough no nonsense authority figures who are in this one i've been describing- the mountain bootcamp show, but theres another show called Ladette to lady that's usually pretty funny, but in a way it seems like they're always putting the girls in situations where the old british teacher ladys are like ok we're going to leave now and you can drink wine but don't drink to much because that would mean that you aren't a lady, and then the ladys do end up getting real drunk and get filmed doing crazy shit like fighting or throwing food or flashing the camera or yelling or hitting on random dudes in a pub. but it's set in this fancy mannor house estate place that's really huge and they go through weird tv reality show situations and at the end of the episode one of them gets kicked out. And yeah, more waste of time on tv but i'm sitting in my appartment watching because i don't have much else going for me here, it just sucks i agreed to keep this appartment. There was an annoying situation that i might write about later but not now, involving the appartment, but i tired of type, it's now 1am!!!!!!!
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
hmm it's been a while since i've done a real post so here it is
i can't remember what i talked about in my last post here, i think i just wrote about some weird dreams i had. Well i'm still having weird dreams as usual but i'll try and talk about things giong on in the real world for now. what have i been up to? have i talked about my tree planting yet? maybe a little bit, but i only worked there for 3 days before i missed work that 4th day and i guess lost my job because of it. It was a good 3 days. Interesting conversation and people- i remember a few of the funny things the guys were talking about, and the funny things they did. the whole operation seemed kindof amateur, from the gay jokes over the hand held radios (dusty is a homosexual, repeat, dusty is a homosexual , over) , to the huge fire they would set at the end of each day where they'd burn all the cardboard and plastic from the boxes that used to have trees in them. I remember seeing the guys looking at the 'people' section of the newspaper, which was just a bunch of pictures of people out at clubs or wahtever, and the guys are like, 'yeah i had sex with that one, that one, last weekend i slept in between those two', ,,, yeah come to think of it i have alot of sexual stories from treeplanting. I overheard them talking about how a woman once died for trying to have sex with a horse. i was like what really?? another time they were talking about how when one of them was 16 and at a pub an older lady took him home, and later she was like , how old you think i am, he guessed 28, she was like no higher, he guesses 30, she's like no higher, and finally it is revealed that she is 48. Then this other guy tells the story that one time he was drunk and he met this older lady who was drunk as well, and the lady asks where he's going and guy responds -whereever you're going--- so they go back to her place, which is actually an old folks home, because she's 72 years old, and i guess they make love, and it must have been an ok time because the guy goes back a month or so later to see the lady again (this guy must have been like 30) and he knocks on her door, and the neighbour comes out and tells him that she died. ouch. OH and this is an even weirder story. i'm back at the truck to refill my bucket with trees and i hear a yell, and, i didn't see this, but apparently one of the guys became aroused somehow while sitting and eating lunch, so he unzips, pulls his hardon out and is like, hey , check this out! and the other guys like aww mate that's nasty! Then the other older guy (the guy who got with the older lady) goes to tell a story about how another guy they used to work with pulled the same joke on this other guy who was from scotland, and then he did an impression of the scottish guys reaction to this other guy pulling his dink out. Meanwhile im thinking, weird eh, how tasmanian dudes would pull out their peen just to show other blokes that they got a stiffy. Now that i think of it i know i have a friend who did that once (B.B.) but i still think it's pretty weird anyways, doing that. I guess it's too bad that i didn't last more than 3, because otherwise i'd be laughing or shaking my head at all their crazy treeplanting antics.
What else is going on. It's getting cold out. I have NO money, im so poor it's ridiculis. I've been watching tv a bit, and i think it's sometimes so stupid, for example: ET: Entertainment tonight is still talking about the osmonds, donny and marie osmond, WHO CARES ABOUT THE OSMONDS?? there is a show called cheaters, where a team of Private investigators spies on a spouse and then they go and confront them with upsetting results. I saw a show that's about telling the truth, but what they do is ask terrible questions for money, like are you glad that your mother lives really far away? YES. Do you trust your boyfriend alone with your best friend? NO. Have you ever slept with someone to further your career? NO. OH NO you loose because the polygraph test has found that to be a deceptive answer. sorry. Oh yeah and i saw another one last night that was a bunch of guys together fighting over one girl, and they had to guess which one of the guys was gay- it was an australian show, it was so weird. lots of closeup shots of someone being like, i think cliff is the gay one because he's always doing this or that,, and then they're like, ok you all need to run a race to the clothes line to see who can get the best looking shirt for when you 're alone with the girl, and all the guys are like, i think I"M the one for her and i'm NOT gay.
Anyways, enough about TV. What the hell am i going to do for money? I'm thinking about working for Forestry Tasmania, picking nuts of the ground which they will later use to plant trees. It seems like a sweet job, walking around in old groth forests picking nuts off the ground and getting 80$ each bag i pick. Could be sweet. But im not sure how much longer i'll be staying here because im seriously considering giong back to london ontario in september and going to school to become a piano technician. Also i'm feeling kindof lonely out here, missing canada, ect
OK well here are some more little facts about tasmania.
There is no tipping, in restauraunts or bars or anywhere. It's kindof cool, because im so used to upset bartenders (karova in monreal especially) who get really upset when i don't tip them. Also there are no taxes, or, there are but you don't have to do the math in your head- the price is what is on the pricetag and that's great!
AND HERE ARE SOME MORE WEIRD AUSTRALIAN TERMS AND SAYINGS:
1 Hit the terbs- this means to get drunk.
2 Meet some sheilas- to meet girls, a sheila is a girl you'd like to meet.
3 Get some tucker- this is to get some food, if you're hungry, you'll get some tucker.
4 Full as a fat ladies sock - this is after you've got your tucker and eaten it, you're full
i can't remember what i talked about in my last post here, i think i just wrote about some weird dreams i had. Well i'm still having weird dreams as usual but i'll try and talk about things giong on in the real world for now. what have i been up to? have i talked about my tree planting yet? maybe a little bit, but i only worked there for 3 days before i missed work that 4th day and i guess lost my job because of it. It was a good 3 days. Interesting conversation and people- i remember a few of the funny things the guys were talking about, and the funny things they did. the whole operation seemed kindof amateur, from the gay jokes over the hand held radios (dusty is a homosexual, repeat, dusty is a homosexual , over) , to the huge fire they would set at the end of each day where they'd burn all the cardboard and plastic from the boxes that used to have trees in them. I remember seeing the guys looking at the 'people' section of the newspaper, which was just a bunch of pictures of people out at clubs or wahtever, and the guys are like, 'yeah i had sex with that one, that one, last weekend i slept in between those two', ,,, yeah come to think of it i have alot of sexual stories from treeplanting. I overheard them talking about how a woman once died for trying to have sex with a horse. i was like what really?? another time they were talking about how when one of them was 16 and at a pub an older lady took him home, and later she was like , how old you think i am, he guessed 28, she was like no higher, he guesses 30, she's like no higher, and finally it is revealed that she is 48. Then this other guy tells the story that one time he was drunk and he met this older lady who was drunk as well, and the lady asks where he's going and guy responds -whereever you're going--- so they go back to her place, which is actually an old folks home, because she's 72 years old, and i guess they make love, and it must have been an ok time because the guy goes back a month or so later to see the lady again (this guy must have been like 30) and he knocks on her door, and the neighbour comes out and tells him that she died. ouch. OH and this is an even weirder story. i'm back at the truck to refill my bucket with trees and i hear a yell, and, i didn't see this, but apparently one of the guys became aroused somehow while sitting and eating lunch, so he unzips, pulls his hardon out and is like, hey , check this out! and the other guys like aww mate that's nasty! Then the other older guy (the guy who got with the older lady) goes to tell a story about how another guy they used to work with pulled the same joke on this other guy who was from scotland, and then he did an impression of the scottish guys reaction to this other guy pulling his dink out. Meanwhile im thinking, weird eh, how tasmanian dudes would pull out their peen just to show other blokes that they got a stiffy. Now that i think of it i know i have a friend who did that once (B.B.) but i still think it's pretty weird anyways, doing that. I guess it's too bad that i didn't last more than 3, because otherwise i'd be laughing or shaking my head at all their crazy treeplanting antics.
What else is going on. It's getting cold out. I have NO money, im so poor it's ridiculis. I've been watching tv a bit, and i think it's sometimes so stupid, for example: ET: Entertainment tonight is still talking about the osmonds, donny and marie osmond, WHO CARES ABOUT THE OSMONDS?? there is a show called cheaters, where a team of Private investigators spies on a spouse and then they go and confront them with upsetting results. I saw a show that's about telling the truth, but what they do is ask terrible questions for money, like are you glad that your mother lives really far away? YES. Do you trust your boyfriend alone with your best friend? NO. Have you ever slept with someone to further your career? NO. OH NO you loose because the polygraph test has found that to be a deceptive answer. sorry. Oh yeah and i saw another one last night that was a bunch of guys together fighting over one girl, and they had to guess which one of the guys was gay- it was an australian show, it was so weird. lots of closeup shots of someone being like, i think cliff is the gay one because he's always doing this or that,, and then they're like, ok you all need to run a race to the clothes line to see who can get the best looking shirt for when you 're alone with the girl, and all the guys are like, i think I"M the one for her and i'm NOT gay.
Anyways, enough about TV. What the hell am i going to do for money? I'm thinking about working for Forestry Tasmania, picking nuts of the ground which they will later use to plant trees. It seems like a sweet job, walking around in old groth forests picking nuts off the ground and getting 80$ each bag i pick. Could be sweet. But im not sure how much longer i'll be staying here because im seriously considering giong back to london ontario in september and going to school to become a piano technician. Also i'm feeling kindof lonely out here, missing canada, ect
OK well here are some more little facts about tasmania.
There is no tipping, in restauraunts or bars or anywhere. It's kindof cool, because im so used to upset bartenders (karova in monreal especially) who get really upset when i don't tip them. Also there are no taxes, or, there are but you don't have to do the math in your head- the price is what is on the pricetag and that's great!
AND HERE ARE SOME MORE WEIRD AUSTRALIAN TERMS AND SAYINGS:
1 Hit the terbs- this means to get drunk.
2 Meet some sheilas- to meet girls, a sheila is a girl you'd like to meet.
3 Get some tucker- this is to get some food, if you're hungry, you'll get some tucker.
4 Full as a fat ladies sock - this is after you've got your tucker and eaten it, you're full
Monday, May 12, 2008
Here are a few points i wrote down on a book I recently read: lectures on natural theology by carl sagan, from the mid 1980's.
A serious search for God is one with rigorous standards of scrutiny. How is it that the eternal and omniscient creator from the bible can assert so many fundamental misconceptions about creation? Is the earth 6,000 years old? Have we been created separate from all other living things, or have we evolved over the eons through natural selection? Which offers the more satisfying spiritual experience? Science or Genesis?
Perhaps the little we know about nature suggests that we know even less about God. The laws of the cosmos guide the evolution of trillions if not infinite amounts of stars and worlds. With our new knowledge, we've made the God who created "THE" world seem hopelessly local and dated, bound to transparently human misconceptions of the past. Why separate science from sacred; searching for what is true from the truths which inspire love and awe. our understanding of the sacred is complete, while the search for Truth is never ending. One should search for sacred knowledge, not a pallative for ones fears. What should be wanted is not the will or faith to believe, but the desire to find out; which is the exact opposite.
Institutional religion, choosing to deny new revelation, can do little more than build a protective wall around itself. We cling to a spiritual ideology that is rootless in nature, and in many ways, contemptuous of what is natural. We are star stuff, pondering the stars; organized assemblages of 10 billion billion billion atoms. And we humans are tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.
Is God but the wall that stops all further questioning? Why does something exist rather than nothing? Who are we? Why are we here? It's through errors, and asking questions, that insights emerge.
We sit somewhere between godlessness and superstition; superstition being belief without evidence.
The word religion comes from the latin for 'binding together.' The objectives of religion and science are identical, or nearly so, but the question has to do with the reliability of the truths claimed by the two fields, and their methods of approach.
It's difficult to know WHO we are without knowing WHERE and WHEN we are. The universe is mainly made of nothing; something is the exception. Darkness is common; light the exception. The universe is almost complete impenetrable darkness, and the sparse sources of light, the stars, dot the prevalence of black. The world we live on is part of a vast collection of worlds, many of which are much smaller, few of which are much larger. There are about a trillion such worlds around our sun. And our star , of course, is one of a vast multitude. The stars we see in the night sky are part of a huge concentration of stars that we now call the Milky Way Galaxy; one with a specific shape, and specific center; 400 billion stars,of which our sun is one. The sun is a reasonably typical star in the Milky Way, located somewhere on the edge, far from the center. And there are many galaxies; more galaxies in the universe than stars in the milky way. This vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, has not been taken into account, even superficially, by the religions of the world- especially the western religions....
It seems the earth is of very little consequence. We've learned that the earth is not the center of the solar system; in fact we have learned that there are a great many solar systems. It was unsettling to discover these facts. The church threatened to torture Galileo if he persisted in the heresy to claim that the earth moved around the sun. It was serious business. When we see a comet or a supernovae explosion with the naked eye, what does that do for the idea of perfect unchanging heavens? Geological and paleontological evidence accumulates, proving that the earth is much older than a few thousand years. And so, in time, as in space, we've been wrong; we know know that the earth is 4,500 million years old. The debate continues.
And what about creationism? Does the complexity of a single bacteria show evidence for a creator? Or, is it possible for enormous order to emerge from a more disordered natural world, without a creators 'hand.' The idea behind natural selection is that there is hereditary material which had the potential for spontaneous change, expressed in external form or function of an organism, and that organisms made many more copies of themselves than the environment could support, and therefore that some selection among various natural experiments was made by the environment for reproductive success; this means that some organisms, by pure accident, were better suited to their environment and to leaving offspring than others. Over immense vistas of time, the complexity and beauty of the biological world on earth may evolve. The universe is consistent of the evolution of stars and planetary systems; life and intelligence have evolved- at least here.
Is the universe designed with the goal of generating and sustaining observers? Are there multiple universes? Alternative universes splitting off at every instant?
It was long believed that the planets were held in their orbits by crystal spheres, controlled by the gods or god. Once, god was thought to control the bloom of each and every flower; which we now know to be false. As sciences advance, there seems to be less and less for a god to do. It seems that whatever we can't explain lately is attributed to a god- and then after a while, we explain it, and so it's no longer gods realm. Now, it seems that maybe god got the universe going, established the laws of nature, then retired, or went somewhere else. The most major question is now the origin of life. The evidence is fossil record. Animals over the eons are too similar, chimps and humans are very similar too. We see the remains of species extinct, even recovering their organic matter. What we have today is quite different from what was present at the time of the origin of life. But we have seen organic molecules in the comets, and data that suggests complex organic molecules in the outer solar system, and everywhere else for that matter. There is evidence to suggest that the origin of life is in some sense, located in the laws of physics and chemistry.
When a religion believes the world will end, or that with enough faith its believers can levitate, what are the skeptical to think. Perhaps with more faith it would work. In reality, there are probably more liars than believers. Because the same motivations, people claim they were abducted by aliens, or that they have an original religious relic like a piece of the true cross. And of the ancient religions- history is re-written over time. If all wisdom passes through a small group, or priesthood, think of how they could change the facts or fabricate new fantastic tales of gods and men.
In religious questions, if we have an emotional stake in the answers, if we want so badly to believe, then it should be important to know the truth and be skeptical. Like buying a used car, it needs to work; a friendly salesman is insufficient. Natural theology is theological knowledge based on reason, experience and experiment alone; a somewhat novel look at religion.
The Romans called the Christians atheists, because they didn't believe in the Olympian gods. Judiasm, christianity and Islam are very similar, having a god that is omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, loving, created the universe, responsive to prayer, intervenes in human affairs, and so on.... but what if we had proof of a being that had some of these qualities; originated the universe but indifferent to prayer, omnipotent but not omniscient, or oblivious to the existence of humans? The range of hypotheses covered under the idea of 'god' is immense. God could be thought of as the total number of physical laws in the universe; gravitation, plus quantum mechanics plus unified theory, plus more. Laws that apply to the most distant galaxies. There is great power in this regularity- no one can deny the laws of nature.
There is a huge range of belifs, and a grab bag of religions and alternatives. Usually, a religious convert joins the religion of their community; people from the west rarely have visions of a blue headed elephant god, as is common in india. How is it that appreciation of an elephant god happens only in India, or in places with a strong indian tradition? Why are visions of virgin mary common in the west and not the east? Why don't religious belifs cross cultural barriers? Religion is culture, music, art, ritual; attractive to the young.
Would you accept a new prophet, claiming revelation from god, and saying all previous religions are false? First, I woudl ask, what is the evidence? It is insufficent to say "well, a really charisthmatic person told me!" We cannot depend entirely on what is said or written.
But, you may ask, with the world full of things, who made them? You could say: the universe was always here, or, god was always here. Or ask, what happened before the 'big bang'? Or do we live in an oscillating universe with an infinite number of expansions and contractions? The answer will surely be found in contemporary satellite astronomy.
The universe and god- Is there no beginning and no end? Maybe beginning with no end, or no beginning with an end? A universe with a finite or infinte age?
And what of intellegence? Did god put it there or was it natural selection? Is consciousness a function of the number and complexity of neuronal linkages, archetecture of the brain?
THESE 4 STATEMENTS CANNOT ALL BE TRUE
God is benevolent.
God is omniscient.
God is omnipotent.
Evil exists.
Arguments for the existence of god, in the western sence, are not very compelling- they go after the emotions. Why is god so clear in the bible, yet so obscure in the world? Why is god never seen?
Hammurabi said that his code of laws was given to him by the god Marduk; a claim that probably isn't true because, when you think about it, his subjects would be more likely to follow the laws if a they were given to hammurabi by god, more so than if hamurabi wrote them up himself.
What does religion offer? Ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in times of bereavement, continuity with the past, faith in the future. But there is much that religion does not provide....
Tradition is a precious thing- it is a gift from our ancestors, but it is important to remember that it is created by humans for their purposes. In a changing world, our survival depends on our ability to change rapidly. Indeed, there is unprecedented change occuring right now, in 2008. We've moved from the spead of horses to the speed of rockets; and in communications, the speed of light.
We, as humans, want to investigate the natural world, and the nature of ourselves. Many different animals have intellegence and emotions, but it is our intellegence- our interest in figguring things out; our manipulative abilities coupled with our engineering talents- that is responsible for our success. Our populations are HUGE, with outposts everywhere, including antacrtica, the ocean depths, earths orbit,moving outwards to other planets, and with the voyager space probes, beyond the solar system.
We started out as itinerant tribespeople millions of years ago, with loyalty only to a small group, an allegiance to about a hundred people. Groups merged and grew large, became city states, settled nations, and empires. Today, a person is typically a mix of political, economic, ethnic and religious identifications, owing allegence to a group or groups consiting of a hundred million or more. Soon, identity will be with the Human Species.
But our history is, in part, a battle of inadequit myths. The idea that I have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, corresponds to an external reality is something to consider. It's a painful realization; but in a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question Everything? Very few religions accomodate the astonishing discoveries of the last few centuries.
How rare is it that we see a projection 20, 50 or 100 years in the future of a world in which we have come to our senses and figgured things out? There is nothing that says we will fail. We have solved many difficult problems. It used to be argued that all kings were divinely selected by god- yet we are now enlightened and know that they are not. Slavery has been eliminated. The status of women has improved. Diseases, thought as inevitable and god given facts of life have been cured. We have accomplished much, yet there is still much to be done...
Kings and slaveholders claimed the divine right of their rule over others. We cannot limit ourselves to one idea, one religion, one language, or one planet. It takes courage to greet the universe as it really is; to avoid putting our emotional dispositions onto it, but to explore.
It is wrong for a religion to make false pronouncements on matters astronomical, physical and biological ( the Bible is quite clear about the earth being flat for example), even if they have made significant contributions to human behaviour. Isn't the goal of religion to have a personal god, to have a purpose for individuals? What is the purpose of life? Surely, you could say, it's not in the stars. But lifes purpose is not imposed from the outside. We make our purpose, we don't find it in a book written thousands of years ago.
If we can understand the issues, pose the right questions, point out the contradictions, then we can make some progress. It is within our capability to survive; yet if we don't make a change in our thinking, all is lost.
A serious search for God is one with rigorous standards of scrutiny. How is it that the eternal and omniscient creator from the bible can assert so many fundamental misconceptions about creation? Is the earth 6,000 years old? Have we been created separate from all other living things, or have we evolved over the eons through natural selection? Which offers the more satisfying spiritual experience? Science or Genesis?
Perhaps the little we know about nature suggests that we know even less about God. The laws of the cosmos guide the evolution of trillions if not infinite amounts of stars and worlds. With our new knowledge, we've made the God who created "THE" world seem hopelessly local and dated, bound to transparently human misconceptions of the past. Why separate science from sacred; searching for what is true from the truths which inspire love and awe. our understanding of the sacred is complete, while the search for Truth is never ending. One should search for sacred knowledge, not a pallative for ones fears. What should be wanted is not the will or faith to believe, but the desire to find out; which is the exact opposite.
Institutional religion, choosing to deny new revelation, can do little more than build a protective wall around itself. We cling to a spiritual ideology that is rootless in nature, and in many ways, contemptuous of what is natural. We are star stuff, pondering the stars; organized assemblages of 10 billion billion billion atoms. And we humans are tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.
Is God but the wall that stops all further questioning? Why does something exist rather than nothing? Who are we? Why are we here? It's through errors, and asking questions, that insights emerge.
We sit somewhere between godlessness and superstition; superstition being belief without evidence.
The word religion comes from the latin for 'binding together.' The objectives of religion and science are identical, or nearly so, but the question has to do with the reliability of the truths claimed by the two fields, and their methods of approach.
It's difficult to know WHO we are without knowing WHERE and WHEN we are. The universe is mainly made of nothing; something is the exception. Darkness is common; light the exception. The universe is almost complete impenetrable darkness, and the sparse sources of light, the stars, dot the prevalence of black. The world we live on is part of a vast collection of worlds, many of which are much smaller, few of which are much larger. There are about a trillion such worlds around our sun. And our star , of course, is one of a vast multitude. The stars we see in the night sky are part of a huge concentration of stars that we now call the Milky Way Galaxy; one with a specific shape, and specific center; 400 billion stars,of which our sun is one. The sun is a reasonably typical star in the Milky Way, located somewhere on the edge, far from the center. And there are many galaxies; more galaxies in the universe than stars in the milky way. This vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, has not been taken into account, even superficially, by the religions of the world- especially the western religions....
It seems the earth is of very little consequence. We've learned that the earth is not the center of the solar system; in fact we have learned that there are a great many solar systems. It was unsettling to discover these facts. The church threatened to torture Galileo if he persisted in the heresy to claim that the earth moved around the sun. It was serious business. When we see a comet or a supernovae explosion with the naked eye, what does that do for the idea of perfect unchanging heavens? Geological and paleontological evidence accumulates, proving that the earth is much older than a few thousand years. And so, in time, as in space, we've been wrong; we know know that the earth is 4,500 million years old. The debate continues.
And what about creationism? Does the complexity of a single bacteria show evidence for a creator? Or, is it possible for enormous order to emerge from a more disordered natural world, without a creators 'hand.' The idea behind natural selection is that there is hereditary material which had the potential for spontaneous change, expressed in external form or function of an organism, and that organisms made many more copies of themselves than the environment could support, and therefore that some selection among various natural experiments was made by the environment for reproductive success; this means that some organisms, by pure accident, were better suited to their environment and to leaving offspring than others. Over immense vistas of time, the complexity and beauty of the biological world on earth may evolve. The universe is consistent of the evolution of stars and planetary systems; life and intelligence have evolved- at least here.
Is the universe designed with the goal of generating and sustaining observers? Are there multiple universes? Alternative universes splitting off at every instant?
It was long believed that the planets were held in their orbits by crystal spheres, controlled by the gods or god. Once, god was thought to control the bloom of each and every flower; which we now know to be false. As sciences advance, there seems to be less and less for a god to do. It seems that whatever we can't explain lately is attributed to a god- and then after a while, we explain it, and so it's no longer gods realm. Now, it seems that maybe god got the universe going, established the laws of nature, then retired, or went somewhere else. The most major question is now the origin of life. The evidence is fossil record. Animals over the eons are too similar, chimps and humans are very similar too. We see the remains of species extinct, even recovering their organic matter. What we have today is quite different from what was present at the time of the origin of life. But we have seen organic molecules in the comets, and data that suggests complex organic molecules in the outer solar system, and everywhere else for that matter. There is evidence to suggest that the origin of life is in some sense, located in the laws of physics and chemistry.
When a religion believes the world will end, or that with enough faith its believers can levitate, what are the skeptical to think. Perhaps with more faith it would work. In reality, there are probably more liars than believers. Because the same motivations, people claim they were abducted by aliens, or that they have an original religious relic like a piece of the true cross. And of the ancient religions- history is re-written over time. If all wisdom passes through a small group, or priesthood, think of how they could change the facts or fabricate new fantastic tales of gods and men.
In religious questions, if we have an emotional stake in the answers, if we want so badly to believe, then it should be important to know the truth and be skeptical. Like buying a used car, it needs to work; a friendly salesman is insufficient. Natural theology is theological knowledge based on reason, experience and experiment alone; a somewhat novel look at religion.
The Romans called the Christians atheists, because they didn't believe in the Olympian gods. Judiasm, christianity and Islam are very similar, having a god that is omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, loving, created the universe, responsive to prayer, intervenes in human affairs, and so on.... but what if we had proof of a being that had some of these qualities; originated the universe but indifferent to prayer, omnipotent but not omniscient, or oblivious to the existence of humans? The range of hypotheses covered under the idea of 'god' is immense. God could be thought of as the total number of physical laws in the universe; gravitation, plus quantum mechanics plus unified theory, plus more. Laws that apply to the most distant galaxies. There is great power in this regularity- no one can deny the laws of nature.
There is a huge range of belifs, and a grab bag of religions and alternatives. Usually, a religious convert joins the religion of their community; people from the west rarely have visions of a blue headed elephant god, as is common in india. How is it that appreciation of an elephant god happens only in India, or in places with a strong indian tradition? Why are visions of virgin mary common in the west and not the east? Why don't religious belifs cross cultural barriers? Religion is culture, music, art, ritual; attractive to the young.
Would you accept a new prophet, claiming revelation from god, and saying all previous religions are false? First, I woudl ask, what is the evidence? It is insufficent to say "well, a really charisthmatic person told me!" We cannot depend entirely on what is said or written.
But, you may ask, with the world full of things, who made them? You could say: the universe was always here, or, god was always here. Or ask, what happened before the 'big bang'? Or do we live in an oscillating universe with an infinite number of expansions and contractions? The answer will surely be found in contemporary satellite astronomy.
The universe and god- Is there no beginning and no end? Maybe beginning with no end, or no beginning with an end? A universe with a finite or infinte age?
And what of intellegence? Did god put it there or was it natural selection? Is consciousness a function of the number and complexity of neuronal linkages, archetecture of the brain?
THESE 4 STATEMENTS CANNOT ALL BE TRUE
God is benevolent.
God is omniscient.
God is omnipotent.
Evil exists.
Arguments for the existence of god, in the western sence, are not very compelling- they go after the emotions. Why is god so clear in the bible, yet so obscure in the world? Why is god never seen?
Hammurabi said that his code of laws was given to him by the god Marduk; a claim that probably isn't true because, when you think about it, his subjects would be more likely to follow the laws if a they were given to hammurabi by god, more so than if hamurabi wrote them up himself.
What does religion offer? Ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in times of bereavement, continuity with the past, faith in the future. But there is much that religion does not provide....
Tradition is a precious thing- it is a gift from our ancestors, but it is important to remember that it is created by humans for their purposes. In a changing world, our survival depends on our ability to change rapidly. Indeed, there is unprecedented change occuring right now, in 2008. We've moved from the spead of horses to the speed of rockets; and in communications, the speed of light.
We, as humans, want to investigate the natural world, and the nature of ourselves. Many different animals have intellegence and emotions, but it is our intellegence- our interest in figguring things out; our manipulative abilities coupled with our engineering talents- that is responsible for our success. Our populations are HUGE, with outposts everywhere, including antacrtica, the ocean depths, earths orbit,moving outwards to other planets, and with the voyager space probes, beyond the solar system.
We started out as itinerant tribespeople millions of years ago, with loyalty only to a small group, an allegiance to about a hundred people. Groups merged and grew large, became city states, settled nations, and empires. Today, a person is typically a mix of political, economic, ethnic and religious identifications, owing allegence to a group or groups consiting of a hundred million or more. Soon, identity will be with the Human Species.
But our history is, in part, a battle of inadequit myths. The idea that I have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, corresponds to an external reality is something to consider. It's a painful realization; but in a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question Everything? Very few religions accomodate the astonishing discoveries of the last few centuries.
How rare is it that we see a projection 20, 50 or 100 years in the future of a world in which we have come to our senses and figgured things out? There is nothing that says we will fail. We have solved many difficult problems. It used to be argued that all kings were divinely selected by god- yet we are now enlightened and know that they are not. Slavery has been eliminated. The status of women has improved. Diseases, thought as inevitable and god given facts of life have been cured. We have accomplished much, yet there is still much to be done...
Kings and slaveholders claimed the divine right of their rule over others. We cannot limit ourselves to one idea, one religion, one language, or one planet. It takes courage to greet the universe as it really is; to avoid putting our emotional dispositions onto it, but to explore.
It is wrong for a religion to make false pronouncements on matters astronomical, physical and biological ( the Bible is quite clear about the earth being flat for example), even if they have made significant contributions to human behaviour. Isn't the goal of religion to have a personal god, to have a purpose for individuals? What is the purpose of life? Surely, you could say, it's not in the stars. But lifes purpose is not imposed from the outside. We make our purpose, we don't find it in a book written thousands of years ago.
If we can understand the issues, pose the right questions, point out the contradictions, then we can make some progress. It is within our capability to survive; yet if we don't make a change in our thinking, all is lost.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)