Here's what I'm listening to right now:
-----1-----
First, the current state of the epistemological argument I've been working on: I drafted a speech, and I was thinking that if I could get that speech past my wife and my pastor, with their blessing, then I would ask the ASU atheist society for an audience to really test it in full by delivering it and then taking questions or challenges. My typical testing grounds for arguments has been YouTube comments, but it's hard to get a full argument out in those comments, because if you say too much then the other person won't read it, and if you say too little then they'll easily forget that the point you're making in this comment is logically tied to the points you made in earlier comments.
Anyhow, I wrote a speech, got it spellchecked by my mom (my mom was a professional English teacher, so she's really good for that.). After having her check version 1, I delivered version 2 to my wife for feedback. She said that it needs a slideshow, and that it comes across as disorganized. She told me to rewrite it so that it is more relatable, and present every point in terms of the relationship between its premises and conclusions. I'm still working on version 3, which will have my wife's advice worked into it.
-----2-----
Up next, I've been listening to the news a lot lately. They've been talking about Chinese re-education camps for Muslims. It's a pretty tragic situation over there. The Chinese government seems to feel threatened by the potential for Muslims to radicalize in their land. In any case, one of the broadcasts had an interview with a man from Kazakhstan who grew up in China with his Muslim family. The man described the re-education camps and the unpleasantness therein, and his life after he got out. (He was released after a suicide attempt). He said that, having been "re-educated", he has not given up Islam, but has become thoroughly, and in some instances which he described from his recent history, senselessly hateful towards all Chinese people. I guess that's a small picture of the imminent future if China doesn't submit to the Prince of Peace. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.
A segment of the interview which I thought was interesting was when they talked about the kinds of things that the Chinese forced the Muslims to chant in the camp. They included some miscellany about how wonderful the communist party is, and a few statements about the role of religion. One such statement stood out to me, a familiar proverb, "religion is the opiate of the masses". I thought about that a lot since I heard it. I can't imagine that the Chinese government really believes that statement, since they're hoping to prevent religious radicalization.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous the statement seemed to me. "Religion is the opiate of the masses". Whoever said that must have been completely ignorant about religious history, religious psychology, the weight of human conviction, and really, psychology in general. I mean, where was the "opiate of the masses" during the Sumerian Wars, or the Jew's conquest of Canaan, or Sennacherib's campaigns, or the Roman persecutions, or Muhammad's conquests, or the Crusades, or the Reformation, or the Inquisition? When will ISIS realize that what they've been taking is actually an opiate? Maybe they're just suffering withdrawals! Maybe ISIS has too many atheist members. We just need to give them their religious fix and then they'll calm down. [/sarcasm] It's a laughable sentiment entirely!
The only time when religious people have ever been settled and relaxed was when they lived in a land whose laws did not conflict with their religious convictions -- for example, if they live in a land whose government was founded on principles which they believed to be fundamentally rooted in consideration for their own religious values. For example, Christians in the west.
Who said that anyway? [Googles it]. It was Karl Marx! Ha! That explains a lot.
-----3-----
Last item on my list, the recent elections in AZ. Well, me and Chowon did some research on the candidates and I voted based on what we thought was best for our ideals, our way of life, and for Arizona as a whole. In the end, I voted for a mix of democrats and republicans. I thought I was weird, because the country seems so polarized. But in the end, the people who won the vote were a mix of democrats and republicans. Hmmmm.... in order for that to happen, a significant group of people in Arizona would have to have voted for a mixture of democrats and republicans! If everybody voted either "all red" or "all blue", then I suppose all the winning candidates would have been from the same party (whichever party had more people voting). But it looks like a significant group of people voted somewhere in the middle.
I'd like to suppose this means that the party binaries, which are the entire context of all discussion on the news, do not actually represent a significant majority of Americans, or that a significant portion of Americans are not being really thought about by the news. That is, the many Americans who think for themselves and don't vote just along one party for the sake of that party's name. Praise God for those people!
But while both parties are throwing mud at each other, it's this group of people in the middle who get hit. At this point, I don't suppose it's profitable to advocate the establishment of a "third political party", necessarily. Rather, I advocate a complete restructuring of the electoral process in light of modern technological advancements. I realize that people are afraid that if computers govern things then the elections will get hacked... but a lot of resources have been put towards hacking bitcoin, for example, and it's still pretty secure. The point I intend to make by that reference to bitcoin is that electronic elections aren't really all that insecure if they're done right.
The way it's done now, I feel like the electoral college is an aristocratic filter through which all our votes are cast and ultimately depreciated. That said, I do not necessarily advocate a pure popular vote for president. Rather, at this point, I advocate more transparency and segmentation at the local level. A more complicated government, maybe, but one which empowers a plethora of tiny local governments, and where land is not the dividing apparatus. I don't have time to go into detail about the government model which I currently advocate here, but I suspect the changes which I advocate are radical enough to be rejected by most Americans.
"Falls like oil down Aaron's beard"
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