I have been long recommended that I read God Delusion given my disbelief in organized religion, thanks to Bharat Shetty, I finally did.
First, the book sets out to convince believers of the futility of their beliefs by way of logic. I think the book is setup for failure because of this. But, still, the book did have a few points of note:
Have you seen this photograph?
Morality, as Wikipedia says, is “a set of beliefs distinguishing between right and wrong behaviors”. There is a perception among many people that moral codes are permanent, that, what now is morally right will remain so eternally.
My assertion (which Wikipedia calls Moral Skepticism) is that morality meanders with time. Paul Graham covers some aspects of it in his essay about What You Can’t Say.
2009 marks 10 years of radical change in my life. I am not the one for writing stories, but would like to note down different experiences that affected me the most this decade. This decade brought about change like no other.
I have been interacting with people online since 2000. In fact, that is how I learnt how to be sociable in real life (there are dozens of people who can testify to that transformation). I have always had a set of vague principles that I use to decide what I do online. Mostly, when it “doesn’t feel right” I either don’t write it or if it is too late, delete it or apologise for it. To reduce the occurrence of the last two, I have written down these principles instead of having my “intuition” guide me.
Michael Jackson’s death and the subsequent revival of allegations of child abuse against him, has just brought up some uncomfortable thoughts. It seems like most geniuses we know were/are eccentric. The stereotype of a genius perpetuates that relation too - so much so that we go looking for chinks in the armor of anyone who is acclaimed as genius. But what about those who were truly evil? Like Eric Gill?
I had tweeted about wanting to analyse my feed reading activity — mainly to track what different topics I followed over the years. Neither Google Reader trends nor NetNewsWire stats charted that kind of data. Luckily, the list of blogs I was subscribed to, in 2006 and in 2007, are still online (list for 2006, list for 2007 [.xml file]).
Here is what number crunching turns up:
I started learning to play the Veena when I was 11. It was the most irritating experience at that time. I did not want to play the Veena, I just wanted to read Tintin or draw. But I stuck with it and learnt till I was in my X standard (“O” levels by singapore standards).
Here is what I hope to achieve in 2009 (given that I hardly achieved anything I set out to achieve in 2008). I hope to keep blogging my progress with my goals.
I read this article titled “Without God” by Steven Weinberg a week ago and had to blog my thoughts on it.
The article is a very thoughtful analysis of the weakening of religious belief in countries with advanced science.
He attributes the causes for it to these:
