Une vie trop belle: October 2011

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Ella

Last night I painted my nails and watched Ella Enchanted by myself. Yayerrr! I love nights like that.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Today, I read this statement in an online thread: "Your statment is based on your religious belief therefore it is irrelevent and invalid." Really, people? The pseudo-intellectual comments all over the internet blow my mind. Because anyone has religious convictions, they must naturally be brain-dead and incapable of coherent thought, right?
If anyone is being narrow-minded in all these political/religious discussions, it is those who discount the views and beliefs of the religious simply because they can't conceive a way of "knowing" other than the scientific method. They believe whatever science "proves" to them. Science is one discipline of many, made up of theories and hypotheses that are constantly being disproved and altered. All of these theories and hypotheses are potentially falsifiable. C.S. Lewis said it so well:

Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, "I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 A.M. on January 15th and saw so-and-so," or "I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so." Do not think I am saying anything against science; I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science--and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes--something of a different kind--this is not a scientific question. If there is "Something Behind," then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, "Why is there a universe?" "Why does it go on as it does?" "Has it any meaning?" would remain just as they were?

From my observation, those who are truly intelligent are the people who have religious convictions which they uphold despite scientific "evidence" to the contrary. What kind of backbone does it take to go along with whatever science has most recently proven, simultaneously ignoring certain moral and behavioral absolutes? None at all. That's the easy road. You've let someone else do all the work for you. It takes true brain and a strong spine to believe something even though science may currently say otherwise. F. Scott Fitzgerald said this:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The end.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Blast from a Beautiful Past

I was just thinking about the great experiences I've had in the past few years and thought I'd allow myself some reminiscing through pictures. These are from my time in Europe during Summer 2007. What a great experience.