It may seem arrogant to post a massive page like this devoted to just my opinions. However, just as posting my artworks on this site enables me to express myself artistically, posting my thoughts enables to express myself intellectually. Being able to express myself is something that is very important to me.
Although many of the opinions I share are ones that I hold to quite strongly, I don't intend to give anyone the impression that I think that I have the answers to all the world's problems here, itemised for your convenience. I'm simply expressing myself. Writing helps me get out what is inside me - and in the process, it helps me form it more succinctly and thoughtfully in my own head. If people read some of my thoughts here, then that's nice. If someone gets something worthwhile out of some of them, then even better. If nothing else, then it has at least given me an outlet to express myself.
Opinions: Anglo-Saxon culture tends to be a bit scared of them. Yet try to imagine a conversation without the exchange of any opinions: it would almost always be pointless and dull. Everyone has opinions, and without the constant sharing of them, human communication would make little sense (and learning from others would be almost impossible). An English word that, in my opinion, shouldn't exist (and indeed has no equivalent in many other languages) is "opinionated". Another such word is "emotional" (that word also has no equivalent in many other languages). Both of these words usually have slightly negative connotations. This is a shame, since not only do they describe two of the most central elements of the human experience, but perhaps two of the elements that most make the human experience such an exciting one.
The witholding of opinions, like the witholding of emotions, is seen by some as a mark of tasteful restraint. I see both rather as the witholding of an important part of a person's humanity. If you also dislike opinions, you should probably stop reading here. I have lots of them, and I've compiled below a collection of many that I've accrued over the years. I doubt anyone will want to read them all, but I invite you to peruse a few of them as you will.
Success: Our Western culture teaches us that success is measured by how readily we can achieve wealth, financial stability, comfort, and social standing. And it's astounding how many millions of otherwise intelligent people actually swallow this. Think for a moment: if this were true, then would a society that has come closer than almost any other to achieving these goals for its people (as the West has) be the sort of society that has some of the world's highest rates of depression? Would darkness, alienation, brutality, meaninglessness, and restlessness become dominant themes in this society's art? Would the definitions of "violence" and "entertainment" continually merge towards each other and blur in such a society? Would life in such a society be marked by increasing levels of stress, anxiety, relationship breakdown and dissatisfaction? Would such a society be one of the world's leaders in suicide rates?
Elections: Surrounding the average election, there is usually a whole plethora of issues of national and global importance. Though in the end, people usually count these as secondary and just vote for the guy who will take the best care of their pockets. Amusingly, these same voters then become outraged when the guy they voted in seems less interested about issues of national and global importance, and more concerned with taking care of his pockets.
Vegans: A vegan is simply a meat-eater who dared to look his food in the eye.
That famous image of Che Guevarra: The Capitalist beast that Guevarra spent much of his life fighting eventually defeated him, killed him, chewed him up and excreted him in the form of a pop icon image - thereby immortalising him as a part of the very Consumerist machine that he so despised. His image has been used to sell almost any product you can think of: from vodka to bikinis, from keychains to lip-balm. If you wear a T-shirt with Che Guevarra on it and you aren't a bonafide Socialist, then I'm afraid you are, wittingly or unwittingly, the messenger of a very sick joke..
Creationism: I believe in God. And if someone ever proved to me beyond all doubt that the world was created some 6,000 years ago in 7 days, that the Earth is the centre of God's plan for the universe, and that we all came from Adam and Eve, then I'd be severely, bitterly dissapointed. Because I find in God's universe a mystery and grandeur of such magnificence that it fills me with awe just to think about it, and with a sort of peace just to know that I'm part of it.
With every scientific breathrough - with Copernicus, with Darwin, with Einstein - we find that the universe, Earth, and we humans, are more complex, more fascinating, and more wonderful than we previously realised. The ancients looked at the numerous stars in the sky and they marvelled. We have the advantage over them that we know that there are even more galaxies in the universe than there are visible stars in the sky, and that in each galaxy are more stars than there are grains of sand in the Sahara. And that even our unfathomably giant universe is possibly just one of many others. This is the majesty of God. So complex, so infinite that we have no way of ever understanding it. Yet so magnificent that to even grasp it even in the most miniscule, rudimentary, blurry way, is to in some sense be touched by the spark of the Divine.
Evolution. I believe in evolution. I believe we evolved from amoebas to fish to four-legged mammals to homo sapiens. Yet it bothers me that many people think that evolution can explain just about everything about life on Earth. And it bothers me just how vehemently some people cry against anyone who dares even question it. I don't see much difference between these people and those who persecuted Copernicus and Galileo.
I have no doubt that Darwin and his successors have brought us significantly closer to the truth of the origin of human beings than we were before. But to assume that current evolutionary thinking has given us a satisfactory framework with which to understand our origin is as naive as thinking that Copernicus gave us a satisfactory framework with which to understand the universe, that Newton gave us a comprehensive understanding of physics, or that we thoroughly understand the human mind because of Freud. Evolutionary theory is a piece of the puzzle, but the puzzle is huge. No doubt science will continue to bring many new breakthroughs that will turn everything on its head, just like science always has done. And no doubt there will be pieces of the puzzle that science will never understand, as they'll remain forever beyond the grasp of our little human brains.
Evolution. Pt 2: When people think of evolution, they usually think about things like dinosaurs, chimpanzees and Neandarthals. Those things are all cool, but I think it's even more interesting to think about what evolution will bring in the future, not what it brought in the past. Inside every ancient amoeba was the genetic material necessary to evolve a Brontosaurus. Inside every trilobite was the potential for Rembrandt. Imagine what potential lies dormant in us; imagine what we might evolve into. Imagine a species that is as far advanced from us as we are from the amoeba.
Of all the species on Earth, homo sapiens has the most developed capability of empathy. It's one of the reasons we thrived - we could understand the other, therefore we could cooperate; we could think outside ourselves, therefore we could create. Common belief is that evolution is about who is stronger, who is more dominant. Yet for the most part, the Hitlers and the Caesars of the world are remembered as parasites; it is Buddha and Jesus and Ghandi who history truly reveres. Empathy is perhaps our greatest genetic treasure. Our genetic destiny. Imagine what we might evolve into one day - perhaps a species as defined by empathy as homo sapiens is defined by intelligence. A species for whom love is not a tantalising poetic concept echoed distantly by the religious and philosophical traditions, but for whom it is the foundation of existence.
Conservative Christians: I don't know what exactly it is they're trying to "conserve" about the past. The racism? The endless cycle of wars and retaliations? The repression of women? the opression of the poor? The exploitation of the Third World? The hateful religious intolerance? the negligent disregard of the environment? I struggle to understand why people think there is so much about the past that is worth "conserving".
Jesus was probably the most radical person in the history of our planet, and his call is a radical call that tells us to go against the grain of history, and against the grain of our human nature itself. In 2000 years, no country has ever come close to creating the sort of loving and peaceful society that Jesus urges us to create, so why would anyone be "conservative" and look backwards for the answers?! When we look backwards at history, all we can see is a history littered with injustice, cruelty, and suffering. If we keep looking hard enough, we'll see a few people here and there who made a difference - for example, those Christians who helped end slavery, liberate women, lessen political opression of the poor, and so on. Those people made a difference because they were looking forwards!
To the society of his day, many of Jesus' teachings seemed very strange, alien and new. Upon reading them 2000 years later, a great many of them still seem strange, alien and new. So let's finally stop looking at the past, and take up Jesus' call to look forwards!
The strange subjectivity about preying on the weak: When a man violates the body of a child, for nothing more than a few minutes of selfish sensual pleasure, we react to it in a way so massively inconsistent that, to me, it goes beyond the bounds of reason. If the child is a homo sapiens, we rage at the injustice. We call the man a monster. We can imagine few crimes more heinous. We unapologetically demand revenge. If the child is a Bos taurus, we call it "veal" and make daytime cooking shows about it.
"Anti-Semitism": I don't like this word. All racism is wrong, and when we start giving certain types of racism their own special words, we begin to imply that some types of racism are worse than others. And if we imply this then we're implying that some races are more deserving of respect than others - which gets dangerously close to implying that they are better than others. I believe that all racism, just like all races, should be treated with equality.
World War II: For every Jew that died during the Second World War, more than ten non-Jews died. It is a good thing that we endeavour to never forget the 6 million Jews that died. They were members of a great people who have suffered as few other peoples have. It would be a crime if we forgot them. Just as it is a crime that so many people have already forgotten the 17.5 million Chinese, 20 million Russians, 2.1 million Indians, 3 million Ukrainians, 400,000 Roma......etc...etc...etc......
Fighting Back: When Hitler invaded France, the French were defeated fairly quickly, and thereafter offered up relatively little resistance. Poland on the other hand fought longer than any other nation in the war, and as resiliently as any; they were the only European country to refuse to offer up a Nazi-controlled puppet-government; they created the largest underground resistance of the war, and conducted the largest scale uprising.
Poland had tens of thousands of its people executed or sent to the gulags by Stalin, 85% of its capital city destroyed by Hitler, and overall lost 17.5% of its population (a far larger proportion than that of any other country). After the war ended, Poland was sold into political slavery to Stalin by her so-called Western 'allies', with considerably reduced borders. France had much fewer casualties and, after the war ended, was left with a beautiful and relatively untouched capital city, and the economic boom that resulted from being outside of Stalin's new domain. Was fighting back worth it? On paper, it is difficult to see how.
Materialist Atheism: Those people who believe that the only world that exists is this physical one that we can see: what supreme self-confidence it must take to go against every other group in the history of mankind who, without exception, gave experiential accounts of other worlds that exist alongside our own. And, ironically, it must take a lot of faith to keep denying science, which has been declaring for decades that there are at least 10 or 11 dimensions to our world, that linear time doesn't really exist, and that what we know as physical matter actually only comprises a tiny percentage of the matter in the universe...
Why materialist atheists and Christian fundamentalists have very much in common: Materialist atheists - those Atheists who deny the existence of anything other than the world we see - and fundamentalist Christians - those Christians who believe in the literal, word-for-word truth of the Bible - have a great deal in common.
Both require faith, and a lot of it. The sort of single-minded, unshakeable faith that the rest of us may find enviable, or a bit disturbing. In many cases, neither can be truly said to be seeking the Truth. Rather, they have a pre-established version of what the Truth is - or what they want it to be - and they seek to order and reshuffle everything they encounter in accordance with that. This truth, in both cases, involves a comfortably black-and-white worldview that in many ways turns its back on the irreducible, though unnerving, mystery the of universe. Rather than fully embracing the quest to discover as much as we can about the universe, both must continually discard and explain away information which does not fit with their worldview, whether it is evolution or the improbability of Noah's Ark for the fundamentalist Christians or, for the materialists, miracle healings or the countless anecdotal evidence of supernatural experiences that occurs in every culture known to history. Such things are rarely given the benefit of the doubt, and theories to discredit them are hurriedly sought. Some things can be explained away very easily, though with other things the reasoning often becomes spurious, convoluted, and occasionally ludicrous or downright obscene.
Furthermore, both need to believe in miracles. No matter what your beliefs, any understanding of life on Earth and its astounding complexity and delicacy reveals that its existence was mind-bogglingly improbable. Even though neither are qualified to speak on the matter with any accuracy, the fundamentalist Christian insists that God created everything from nothingness in about 7 days, while the materialist atheist insists that it all created itself from nothing with absolutely no guidance from any kind of sophisticated and intelligent power or mechanism. Both options are necessarily grounded on the belief in the completely miraculous.
Modesty: People think modesty is a virtue, but I don't think it is. I think they confuse it with humility (which is probably one of the best qualities a person can have). Humility is being honest with oneself about one's weaknesses, whereas modesty is being dishonest with others about one's strengths.
Giving money to beggars: A lot of people refuse to give money to beggars on the street, because they claim that the beggar will just spend it on drink or drugs, and so giving it to them would cause more harm than good. I take my hat off to these people, because they've found a very cunning and effective way to be compassionless, judgemental, or a cheapskate, while actually appearing to be responsible and genuinely concerned for the beggar.
My question to them, though, is this: If they were an employer, would they refuse to hire somebody because of what they suspected the person was going to spend their income on? "I'm sorry Fred, you seem to be the right man for the job, but I heard that you like a drink, and frankly, I don't want any of my money going towards your drinking - personally, I think you'd be better off without any income at all", or "Sorry Bob, but I saw you walking into McDonald's a few weeks ago; cardiovascular disease is the #1 killer, so you understand that if I gave you a job, it would make me complicit in the harm you're doing to your body - goodbye."
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that an employer would have to be a complete prat to behave like this. So, if an employer - who will give a person a large amount of money on a regular basis - doesn't have the right to judge a person by how they may spend it, what gives any one of us the right to judge a beggar before we make a tiny one-time donation of a few bucks? Perhaps the beggar will spend it on something that's bad for him/her (just like you and I spend plenty of our money on things that are bad for us) but perhaps they will spend it on food or something else that's good...you don't know.
So, the next time a beggar asks you for money, either give or don't give, but if you don't give, be honest to yourself about why you're not giving: maybe you're cheap. Maybe you feel anxious when near the beggar and your discomfort overpowers your generosity. Maybe you simply don't have enough money. Maybe you get a small thrill from making a paternalistic judgement call about a complete stranger. Maybe it's some other reason. but whatever it is, don't feed yourself some rubbish cover-up story about how by not giving them money you're doing the responsible thing.
Jesus: Pictures and movies about Jesus generally portray him as tall and handsome, with beautiful clean, flowing hair, and often with an impressively rippled physique. People figure that since Jesus was a great figure, he therefore must match our idea of what a great figure should look like.
However, the real Jesus was anything but what a great figure 'should look like'. He was born in the provincial, scorned backwaters of a small, subjugated nation. He was born a refugee, and for most of his adult life, was a vagrant. He was a peasant, a pleb. By today's standards, and perhaps even by his own, he was undoubtedly very short. His body would have been substantially hairy. Neither he nor his contemporaries would have even heard of toilet paper. Given his background and his lifestyle, it's very likely that his hair was dirty and matted, his teeth were yellowed, and that his breath and body odour, by today's standards, would have been really bad. Chances are, that his face was quite ordinary, and perhaps even ugly. To some Christians, such a realistic portrayal of Jesus would probably seem almost blasphemous. Yet, it's this total ordinariness and realness of Jesus the Messiah, that is one of the great things about him. It challenged the grandeur, pomp and fakeness of the political and religious sensibilities of his time, and it continues to do so today.
Subcultures: They come in very handy for those people who refuse to let mainstream society tell them how to dress, behave, and what music to listen to - but who would still prefer that someone tell them how to dress, behave, and what music to listen to........
Microsoft: For every cynic who refused to buy a legitimate copy of Windows because they thought Bill Gates was a selfish, greedy, bastard, I have this to say: If you had bought it, your money would now be curing malaria in Africa, you selfish, greedy bastards.
Satanists: God loves humans (in fact, God is love). He loves all of them with a passion.....even Satanists. On the other hand, Satan hates humans. He hates all of them with a passion....even Satanists.
"What music do you listen to?" An amazingly powerful question. Few questions will reveal as much about the inner life of a person's mind, heart, and soul as much as this one. Yet despite its probing power, it's a question that we can ask in the earliest stages of knowing someone - it's like a little glitch in code of social etiquette
Apostrophes: There are two types of people in the English-speaking world. There are those who will already know why I'm writing about apostrophes, because they share my frustration. And there are those who have no idea what I'm talking about. You are the ones causing all the frustration.
