Okay, so, I've gotten to the point in my orbit as a human being where I am thinking about spiritual matters. This is probably not a good thing.. I mean, hacker gets religion? It just doesn't sound right. But here are some of my core beliefs - and some random thoughts - and a lot of the things that go in between these two things.
1) Love will always find a way.
2) Life = energy + information + ?. The ? is the part that we can't figure out. If sentience is a emergant property of complex networks, this has fascinating implications. If sentience is *not* a emergant property of complex networks, then that's even more interesting.
3) There are many energy systems more complex and ordered than I am. Some of them want to help me.
4) The children are always going to hell in a handbasket, and usually having a pretty good time doing it.
5) The Earth can be heaven, hell, and all states in between. It is largely our ability to be openminded, and to act lovingly towards each other - and to recognize that sometimes we can't even see life because we don't operate on the same time scale it does that determines how good a time we all have.
6) Anyone telling you sex is evil is lying through their teeth.
7) You never know what you can make work until you try
8) Looked at it one way, humanity is a sexually transmitted disease. Looked at it another way, it's a expression of beautiful, complex, conflicted, confused, and extrordinarily alive entities. Perception controls reality to a astonishing degree - if you think the glass is half empty, it usually is. If you think the glass doesn't exist, we're not really sure what to do for you. In some ways, however, that is the bucket I currently find myself in.
9) Try, even when people tell you things like 'Do or do not, there is no try'. Do or do not is flawed.. this is not a black and white world. There is more than one and zero here.
10) No set of rules, no matter how advanced, can cover all situations.
11) If you take the digital number one, and keep adding one to it over and over, you express all possible digital strings in the universe, eventually. (Well, a infinate amount of time from when you started). Child porn, all the nastiest viruses in the universe, cures for cancer, God's root password if *e has one, *everything*. Hence, if you look at my DNA - and the information stored in the structure of my mind - as a extrordinarily long binary string, I have always existed, and will always exist. Whether I'm currently being expressed or not is another question.
12) There is such a thing as right and wrong, but it is not clear that right and wrong are the same for all people, or that a flat ruling of 'this is sin and you are a sinner' suffices.
13) If there is a God, he's better than he's given credit for, and much maligned. If there are a *bunch* of Gods, they're a really interesting team and it'd be fascinating to know what they're trying to achive. On the other hand, the ethics of creating life and then permitting it to suffer are a facinating study. If God created us - see #11. It's possible that we always exist. Certainly I haven't noticed myself not existing.
14) It is worth trying.. even if all will fall to dust, all attempts will come to nothing in the end, and in the blink of a geological eye you, me, and everyone we know will no longer exist, it is worth trying. I can't say why this is. It just is.
15) The internet is a good thing. Open communication systems are a good thing. We should always quest to grow more open - but the only way that we can grow more open is to grow less judgemental.
16) War aside from as a action of last resort is wrong and a action of evil. Currently, the U.S. is the axis of evil. Saddam had more or less learned not to unilaterally attack other countries. We haven't figured that out yet
17) Might does not make right. Having the ability to do something doesn't make that something a moral thing to do. This applies to all entities, not just to humans. I include corperations, God(s), governments, and internet newsgroups. ;-)
18) [after much thought and growth] Attitude does in fact control perception of reality.
19) It is okay to ask for help. However, one should not be astonished to discover none is available at times.
20) There is nothing I can say that won't offend somebody somewhere. Therefore, as a believer in peace I should really just be quiet. However, silence is not something I'm good at. Perhaps as I grow older I will grow more silent. This saddens me somehow.
21) It is not for me to decide what is alive and dead, what the meanings of the words alive and dead are, or what other people should be working on or doing.
22) God is too big for me to understand. My desire to befriend h* is probably a fool's errand, but I will continue trying anyway.
23) My ability to come up with dumb ideas is apparently unlimited. OFten I don't realize how dumb they are until years after I have them. Sometimes I think that the ideas that I thought were best are the worst ones I've had. I don't know what to do about any of this, so I keep on walking on.
24) We are not in a universe of unlimited resources - or, if we are, we don't have access to them. Therefore I suspect we are not in the most ideal of all universes. We are also not in the least ideal of all universes. We seem to be somewhere in the middle.
Why I could be a Christian
Why I couldn't be a Christian
I believe in Everything
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