he experience of aging becomes quite enjoyable and actually somewhat adventurous once you hit the third decade of your life, where youthful vitality intermingles well with adult responsibility. In other words, you suddenly have all the money you need to be as wreckless as possible.
erhaps one of the most irritating types of person I have to deal with on a semi-regular basis are those who believe that ‘questioning the question’ and semantical argument are two respectable approaches toward intellectualism. While I think that intellectualism itself is nasty business, once people try to behave as intellectuals through such asinine methods, my tolerance for humanity dips melodramatically.
They further aggravate the moment by combining the two, asking senseless meta-question after senseless meta-question while interrupting themselves to argue briefly about the true meaning of very simple and well established words or phrases as if the whole exercise was some kind of edgy and stellar out-of-the-box thinking that would, somehow, lead to a moment of clarity so enriching that you’d immediately have to stop what you were doing and smoke a joint just to make sure gravity didn’t turn into sausages or something.
This whole thing is nothing more than the snobby older brother of the frat house drinking game.
Of course, I don’t mind philosophical discussion. But I like it when abstract ideas are presented concretely and are argued within their context. My eyes glaze over as soon as someone asks a question like, ‘Yes, but what does the word “God” really mean?’ Tangental discussion is quite simply trite, pretentious, and boring. I know you’re trying to participate and that’s fantastic but if you want to argue etymology and semantics, that’s a different discussion entirely and one I won’t shy away from. After all, I’ve got the OED right here.
The trouble with Westerners is that they want to witness their own enlightenment.’ – Chogyam Trungpa [lifted from Whiskey River]
18 November 2005
I get what you’re saying, however am not sure the God example is a very good one. Consider the thousands of different gods humans have managed to dream up. Hell, every tiny variation on the christian religion seems to have their own ideas of this God person. Then there’s all those other religions…
So surely in order to have any kind of intelligent discourse on the question of God, existence of, or God, WTF does she want from us now dammit, we have to agree on a definition first.
Also, and this is the most important bit, which you may have picked up if you’ve read my own weblog, which it seems you have… and the most important bit is this: Crocodiles are really strong and ferocious and will eat anything, but especially like the taste of tourists.
As protector of the innocent Henry the Adequate vows to take down the evil Lord God who created those nasty creatures.
976 days ago
My mistake was capitalizing the word ‘God’ which implies a very specific connotation (and possibly a specific individual) rather than ‘god’ which would’ve more accurately reflected what I really meant.
Furthermore, seeking clarification or altering the scope of a particular word’s definition within the context of an argument is fine; it’s expectable, even. It’s when people try to do a little verbal sleight-of-hand (sleight-of-tongue?) in an attempt to distract you from the fact that they don’t really know what they’re talking about that I begin to draw lines. Often in blood and never my own.
Finally, I was once told that you can eat crocodile meat but that it should not be eaten ‘against the grain’. No further explanation was given to us and none was asked. We just ran him out of our quaint but terrified-of-crocodiles village.
976 days ago
Distract people from my ignorance? I wouldn’t think of it. I usually point them to it, just to get it out of the way.
976 days ago
“We just ran him out of our quaint but terrified-of-crocodiles village”
That was very wise. And don’t believe all that stuff about people eating crocodiles. Studies show that in a hand-to-hand contest it is almost always the human that ends up being eaten.
976 days ago