Oh how I wished to be able to shield those that are close to me from all the pain, the suffering, and sometimes the knowledge this hideous life can throw at them, and how miserably I failed. In the end, I find myself left only with what I can actually offer: My utmost love, care, remorse, and hope that I can help heal the wounds I couldn't prevent in the first place....

Dogma

Is there any difference between a perfect machine with just a tiny flaw that cannot be corrected and a completely flawed machine? What's the difference between a person with perfect thoughts that are constricted with emotions and belief, and a person with no good thoughts at all? It is when people stop applying logic in their thoughts, decisions, or actions that they cross the line between reason and dogma.

One of the most serious dangers of dogma (of which religion is a big example) is that it doesn't contain a self-correction mechanism, it doesn't require thinking, hence it's a comfortable path for people to follow. It's always much easier to go with the flow than to go against it, especially when going against it is considered nothing short of a revolution.

Looking at all the great minds that were, and still are being, wasted because of such dogmatic lines of thought (excuse the oxymoron), one is left with only one thought: What a loss....

As day turns into night, lights start spreading before my eyes, a whole city, alive.... A city filled with cripples most of which have enough intelligence to think they see, yet nowhere near enough to actually see. I can't help but wonder: What would it take to cut the ropes that bind so many? A whole city, alive, yet so dead....

I Seek...

I seek no happiness, for it's too heavy
I seek no satisfaction, for it's short-lived
I seek no money, for it's too silly
I seek no God, for there's none

I seek....a sunrise....

Darkness

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
Vladimir Nabokov

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."
Aldous Huxley

I find humans to be quite strange creatures. No other living organism on this planet is as intelligent, yet as gullible as them. To think that the same species that discovered the laws of nature, that created such beautiful music, that made such fascinating art, is the same species that came up with religion, racism, and sexism, is an idea that astonishes me.

Days pass by and I still cannot find those elusive words that would give my ideas the form I want. Could it be that some ideas aren't meant to leave the walls of the brain alive? Passing emotions and thoughts, each of which seems like a revelation, like a spot of light passing through the darkness. But alas, the light scatters on the barriers of other people, and one is left waiting for the next glimpse of complete understanding, and hoping....

Fluidity

One characteristic I've recently come to realize I admire greatly in people is fluidity. Religions, many traditions, and many mentalities adhere to a strict set of laws which are considered "sacred" and "timeless". However, as faults in these laws come under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that one has only three options:

1. Stick to the laws no matter the circumstance.
2. Overlook the faults and pretend they don't exist while making small adjustments to the laws to make them more acceptable.
3. Realize that the laws are man-made, time-dependent, and far from perfect, and discard them completely.

Who has the right to define how you live your life, how you treat people around you, the things you can and cannot do, or even what you can eat or drink? People try to suppress what they cannot understand or accept, their memes fight a losing battle for dominion, hindering progress and destroying generations in the process.

I always find it funny to see some narrow-minded traditionalist, or religious apologist, struggling to keep up with globalization, trying in vain to close all the holes in a sinking boat. A small rubber band, trying to stretch to contain what can no longer be contained until it ruptures. The casualties of the process, however, are children that grow up in a severely contradicting environment, children who are usually not lucky enough to escape the viruses of the mind their environment is infested with....

Virgin Births

Believers always have the amazing ability to look at an event in a completely abstract way, take it out of its surroundings, and fabricate all sorts of stories around it to make it more appealing to whatever belief they hold. As one inspects the history of religious myths, it becomes evident that none is more special, true, or even original than the others, and that religions simply evolve out of each other to escape their natural predators, logic and science.

As an example, I'll consider the myth of virgin birth. This myth is considered by two of the three Abrahamic religions as both true and exclusive to Christianity. However, after reading this article and many other articles available online, one comes to the realization that such a myth was quite common many years before, and many years after the time Christianity was established, which made it a somewhat basic requirement for Christianity to claim virgin birth to gain credibility and support.

However, with all the myths of virgin birth and divine children, and no way of confirming any of them, I find myself compelled to wonder: Is god a womanizer or simply a man-made delusion?

Ripples

He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured, he saw them scolding and insulting each other, he saw them complaining about pain at which a Samana would only smile, and suffering because of deprivations which a Samana would not feel.

Siddhartha
Herman Hesse

I feel truly saddened by how humans trap themselves in self-indulgent delusions and superstitions, how they let themselves be controlled by emotions and lose sight of the big picture, how they allow themselves to be reduced to mere ripples in a pool when they can be waves in the ocean....

Borders

After reading this article I couldn't get the thought of how delusional and stubborn most humans are out of my head. People insist on drawing all sorts of borders around themselves. Borders that give them their much-needed sense of specialness, but are, in fact, no more real than a mirage.

One particularly interesting piece of information mentioned in the article is that love and cocaine activate "exactly the same system" in the human brain. This makes me question the reason why love is considered noble, while taking drugs is considered very low....

In my attempt to answer this question, I recalled Aristotle's statement that happiness is the only thing that humans desire for its own sake. So what difference does it make where it comes from? I believe that one crucial difference is that, for some reason, humans like to have a side nobody understands. Accepting the fact that drugs and love give the same effect and equating them, naturally, violates that.

I find it amusing to watch so many people fighting over matters that, to them, define their humanity and make them higher than other creatures, such as the time at which a group of cells can be called "a human being", at which it is given "a soul" (whatever that means). But I truly feel saddened when these people hinder research that is critical to all mankind, in fields such as embryonic stem cells and cloning, in the name of their own beliefs.

The fact is that humans are nothing more than highly complex systems. If you start taking them apart there are no mysterious basic elements, just regular animal cells. Our lack of a full understanding of ourselves is analogous to the incomprehensibility of a supercomputer to a regular computer user. It's not impossible, it just needs time.