Saturday night Adam came over and brought 4 Cecil Whittaker’s pizzas. It was customer appreciation day which meant we could enjoy the pizzas at $5 each. I provided the beer. We were trying to think of something different to do with our evening. So we decided to check out a place we’d never been to before, Frederick’s Music Lounge. We ended up seeing The Trip Daddys perform. Quite a fun show. We met up with Laura and some of her friends at the Halo Bar. Laura kept pestering me to be more social and talkative and buy a girl a drink. So I bought her friend a drink. I don’t think she was interested in me, though.
On Sunday I went into the office to get some work done and didn’t do much the rest of the day. Woke up on Monday feeling bad so I stayed home. Did some reading last night. I’m almost done with The Abolition of Man. I highly recommend reading this book if you haven’t already. Here’s a sample quotation or two:
If Good = “whatever Nature happens to be doing,” then surely we should notice what Nature is doing as a whole; and nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part of the universe, so that Dr. Waddington’s ethics, stripped of their unaccountable bias towards such a parochial affair as tellurian biology, would leave murder and suicide our only duties.
and….
In a sort of ghastly simplicty we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
The book is basically about why society needs objective value, which he calls the Tao, that which is true, independent of our wishes and systems of thought.
Tags: Personal
June 24th, 2003 at 2:22 pm
Isn’t Laura one of your friends? It seems quite rude and disrespectful that you would talk about her in a negative way in a public forum. And this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this on your site. If you have a problem with a friend’s actions, shouldn’t you discuss it in private?
I just don’t understand these websites that take jabs at friends and acquaintances…are you trying to impress others with your cattiness? Or just alienate your friends?
June 24th, 2003 at 11:04 pm
Pardon? I think you obviously don’t know me very well if you thought my comment was a negative jab at Laura.
June 30th, 2003 at 1:18 pm
Hmm. Whoever posted this reply was either being highly sarcastic or has poor reading comprehension skillls. In order, the solutions are to a) please use some smilies to indicate your dry sarcasm or b) find an elementary school and attend it.
Anyway, back to Jamin’s quote about society and such. It’s interesting that so much in society today is based on “subjective truth”. What’s “normal”? What’s “deviant”? What’s harmful? What’s just a good time? What is right for me. Hell, what does “is” mean?
There are some things that should be universal truths, like murder is bad. Oops, wait, I’m an infidel, I must die. Scratch that then. We have a problem when we can’t figure out something that simple. That’s why moral relativism irks me. For example:
If my child committed crime XYZ, I’d lie on the stand to protect him/her.
OK, what if my kid killed your kid, and I’m the freakin’ Iraqi information minister? That change your mind? But I guess it’s OK to bend the rules in your favor.
Don’t get me started…
July 1st, 2003 at 7:32 am
Yeah, I agree, completely. When I find someone arguing for relativism, I can’t help but sense the irony. They are using the standard methods of logic to formulate an argument, but the very conclusion they are trying to arrive at is that there are no absolutes, no rules. What’s true for me may not be true for you. It moves the argument to the absurd.
July 2nd, 2003 at 9:50 am
Jamin, there’s a certain person that you and Ben and I used to work with who made a relativistic argument about what was “deviant” sex. He said that some would argue that anything besides missionary is deviant, while others would go much further. But it was all relative, based on your preferences. Well, how far does that go? When someone from Hicksville takes a roll in the hay in the barn with the horses, do we all just say “well that’s not deviant to him“? What about NAMBLA? Look, we should have a pretty broad range of acceptance, but there are lines that are fairly obvious. Relativistic arguments try to blur those lines so that those on the fringes of society don’t feel so “fringy”, but “mainstream”.