I am a great one for there being many ways to truth or salvation or happiness or enlightenment or whatever one is seeking -- however, the fact that there may be a great many ways to get there does not mean that all ways get there. 

Constantine's pagan Arian orthodox Christianity

This business of people in history were some particular religion -- in this case Christians -- mainly for political reasons rather than out of deep conviction -- brings to my mind the Emperor Constantine, who as we know "converted" to Christianity and enabled Christianity to later become the state religion.  It so happens I just finished watching a series of lectures on the subject, so my mind is fresh with it and a lot I learned is new to me.

Constantine seems, all his life, both before and after becoming a Christian, to have been a fairly typical Roman "pagan," in that he was mainly superstitious and wanted the favor of any deity who happened to be around, including Jesus.  The Romans had never really denied Jesus as a god of some sort -- they just didn't like the sectarianism (we have the truth and you are going to Hell) attitude of the Christian churches.

There was a small political gain in giving tolerance to Christians and even favoring them in certain ways, but not a huge gain as at the time maybe ten percent were Christians.  However, one of these was his mother, so he no doubt had been influenced by her to some extent.  So the gain may have been more familial than political.  Of course once the lay of the land became clear, ambitious people all over began becoming Christians -- not necessarily hypocritically -- people are great in finding truth in whatever to them is convenient.  I think Augustine was an example of this.

Once he had stopped the anti-Christian laws, he may have regretted it.  He seems never to have understood the niceties of detail the Christians fought and killed each other over, and seems to have favored Arianism (when he finally was baptized it was by an Arian priest in Arian ritual) as more logical, but of course he was not a priest and Christianity did not allow him much of a say except to use his power to force settlements they agreed to.  Standard pagans never had riots over the proper form of some belief statement or the exact nature of some demi-urge's being.  This sort of thing was rather alien to them, and no doubt the cartoon buffoonery of the Alexandrian theatre attacking the hoomousia vs. houmisia (or whatever) really burned the local bishop.

We all have an "absurdity" checker in our minds (well, most of us do), but many have found clever ways to get around it and hence come to believe such absurdities as original sin and a divine/human sacrifice to magically offset a divine curse on all mankind because the supposed first man and woman committed a minor act of disobedience.  The whole thing, no matter how metaphorically one chooses to take it, is patently absurd and worthy or not just rebuke but mocking.  That we refrain is just being polite.

What do I see here?  I see an effort to put absurdities such as I have just mentioned on a level equal to that of reason and objectivity.  Down that road lies superstition and the destruction, in the end, of education and civilization and learning.  Of course we are not in such danger today, I think mainly because the major elites of learning see the reality, but we don't know what may happen in the future and it behooves those who support reason over superstition and faith claims to do whatever reasonably possible to control it.

I have to say I tire of all this, and really can't see how people can be so stupid or blind or whatever one is to call it.  Reason and critical thinking are superior and myth and spiritual superstition and basing beliefs on faith or tradition or authority are clearly not only inferior but worthless.

One's philosophy can be a variety of things, and perhaps before one decides to write it all down one should have an idea of which kind one intends, or of course maybe all of them, a bit of a challenge.

There is the problem of how to be happy.  Then there is the problem of what it means to be and how to be good.  These aren't necessarily the same.  I dare say there exist rather happy but either evil or at least amoral people.

Then there are philosophies of work, of beauty (music, art, literature, poetry, love, food, and whatever we do), as well as the theory or philosophy behind politics and economics and history and law and so on, often tempered by ideas about justice and progress and alleviation of suffering.

Then there are more "analysis" things, such as what is it to know something, how to know something, how to understand something, on what grounds if any to believe, what is science and how to do it, what is sentience and emotion and experience and living, and of course why we die and what happens then if anything.

Finally, it is always useful when one thinks one has a great new insight into some issue to check the literature (mainly the great philosophers of history) to be sure it hasn't already been thought of and either refuted or at least debated.  There is no point going to great mental effort re-inventing the wheel.  I find reading philosophy (mostly commentary or description of the great ones, who tend to be hard to follow and at a minimum need annotation) a considerable joy, as so often I am either forced to abandon some notion or at least modify it, or realize that it is nowhere near the final answer I had thought.

I haven't mentioned God or deities, frankly because they are not relevant and just confuse matters.

I'm not sure what to make of NDE's.  They don't seem to happen in Asia, which tells me it is culturally influenced -- people who report them already know "what" to report.  It might be a trick of the brain and no doubt much of the time it is a fabrication (various motives -- pious fraud, attention, mental disorder, implanted memory (by the questions of others), whatever).

For the reason that there is so much wishful thinking surrounding the subject, I think it is impossible to draw any sort of affirmative conclusion and certainly is not valid evidence of any sort of afterlife (besides, for all we know that tunnel leads to oblivion).  It strikes me that people who latch onto such reports are similar to those who "remember" past lives -- except with different cultural expectations.

The end of the classical period was a tragedy.  It had its pantheon of harmless gods and goddesses for the superstitious and some profound philosophical traditions for the informed and aware.  It was ultimately suppressed by a brutal and arbitrary set of myth based and primitive sectarian dogmatisms, Christianity in its two autocratic forms and later Islam.  I am glad Asia had no similar experience and very much hope the Western infection can be kept at bay.

I'm aware a lot of Westerners don't like being told what their tradition really represents, so maybe I can soften it a little by pointing out that the West produced science, much to the dismay of its clerical class, something that would have happened in China except for the fact that it became insular and devoid of stimulus -- nothing external but barbarians and nothing internal in the end but a stifling bureaucracy, although for awhile there was progress, human fear of change eventually stifled it.

I don't know that we are all entitled to have an opinion about everything; I refrain from forming them about things where I'm ignorant and I think that is the wisest way to go -- at least I try to not form them and certainly don't say them out loud.  Often of course I just follow the experts -- they are useful that way so long as one is aware of possible vested interests.

As far as to whether aliens exist or not and if they do what they might be like, I think we are all ignorant and are therefore better off keeping out mouths shut.  However, since we are all on fairly the same level, I suppose wild-ass guesses don't hurt so long as we don't get too committed to them.

My guess is that they don't exist, at least in any form and distance we are ever likely to understand and actually encounter.  Otherwise they would long since have been here, and they aren't.  There are in addition to that rational difficulties that have been pointed out in the evolution of such beings that would seem to imply they are going to be incredibly rare.  My guess since of course the probability factors are at this point pretty wild-ass and may kick us hard some day.

In a few centuries I trust we will have a much better handle on things.  What if it turns out we really are alone?  What conclusion would it be appropriate for us to draw from such a conclusion?  The conclusion might be, "Oh, wow, we have a deep responsibility here to preserve life and spread it to the rest of the universe."  Nonsense.

The story is told of the blindfolded men who feel parts of the elephant and report back different beasts.  The problem is, all they have to do is (1) either be more methodical in their exploration and not stop until they have felt the entire beast or (2) take off the damn blindfolds.  Christians refuse to do either.  They keep themselves blindfolded and they won't study anything that might conflict with their beliefs -- their knowledge of Buddhism, for example, is limited to what their preachers tell them about it.

I don't know that I accept the idea of "situational" ethics all the time.  Obviously sometimes something is right in one situation and wrong in another, but there is always a deeper ethical principle to be looked for when this happens.   The rule against lying, for example, is sometimes for situational reasons not valid, but a deeper principle, that of not harming someone, is one of the principles that underlies the need for truthfulness (although by no means the only principle -- one could write a book).  So when the truth hurts someone, a falsehood may be appropriate ethical behavior.

When it comes to hiding something from one's spouse -- say an indiscretion -- if it is not going to become a pattern it may be that the lie is the most ethical course, albeit fraught with tar traps.  Both the spouse and the relationship are less hurt and better off long run with the lie.  Problem is it is easy to begin to justify lies with such reasoning and before long one loses track of basic truths.  This leads, guaranteed, to a major train wreck.

One of the worst moral offenses of this world is even encouraged strongly by the self-declared guardians of our morality.  This is the routine and even organized indoctrination of children before they are of a maturity to be able to assess what is going on and make up their own minds.

I think rape is about as accurate to describe this as anything.  To impose something one someone else without their informed permission is rape, and doing it to innocent children is to saddle them with a belief system all their life.  It is an outrageous thing to just contemplate.

Religious questions, such as about death or God, as well as political questions and questions about sexuality, need maturity to handle properly, and children do no have that maturity.  Therefore they should properly be answered with, "When you are mature, you will learn about these things and decide for yourself." 

Perhaps too often we force maturity on children, and they are of course eager to assume it, so they do need to be told that they are not mature, and that maturity comes in time slowly, and they must therefore respect their elders, even though many times even the elders are not mature.  Most importantly, teenage and early twenties years are not years of intellectual and emotional maturity.

It is not necessary to threaten a child with a vengeful God or with some magical karmic cycle to get them to be moral beings.  Indeed, such things interferes with true moral behavior.  Most children (although unfortunately we know that a small fraction of the population are sociopathic and thereby absent this instinct) are born with a desire to do what is right.  All they need to learn is how to figure out what is right.

Rules are not the way to go.  A lie may be generally wrong, but there are exceptions when a lie is even the morally essential way to go, such as to prevent hurting someone.  That is the key -- harm and help.  Acts that harm others are wrong, all else being equal.

Descartes underwhelming

Widely viewed as one of the great philosophers of history, and often as the "founder" of modern philosophy, we have Rene Descartes.

I am underwhelmed.  He is of course famous for "cogito ergo sum," "I think therefore I am."  Anything else?  Well of course he gets there by questioning (doubting) everything -- now what teenager hasn't done that many times?  And then from there he concludes that this thing that thinks is the soul, that others besides ourselves do likewise, and that God exists and God gives us these souls.  (Most of the rest of this is not payed much attention to because it is pretty obvious to even the most determined believer that the argument is flimsy).

I think Descartes proposition is popular because it has an emotional appeal -- at least we can be "certain" that we exist, or something about us that thinks exists, to be more exact.

He doesn't accomplish this.  His thinking, and my thinking, and your thinking, proves nothing exists, not even thinking (what exactly is a "thought" anyway?).  The idea is that if there is an activity then I guess there has to be something doing the activity.  Here the activity is thinking, so something doing the thinking has to exist, and that something is obviously (really?) me.

No, Descartes just thinks he's thinking.  He doesn't know it, nor can we.  We don't even know that thinking is an activity at all or if it is that it needs an agent to be doing it.

One thing science can't prove is that something is endless.  It can prove something is finite by finding its edge or boundary, but if it is endless there is no boundary to be found -- except it could still be over the next hill.

Presented with a being claiming to be infinite, we would have the same problem -- we could prove it false if we found or showed how there had to necessarily be a boundary, but absent doing this we still could not be sure the being was telling the truth, since the boundary could exist but be out or our range.

Mathematical infinities are different.  Irrational numbers, for example, are decimals that go on without end.  The "density" of the number line is infinite.  And, of course, the counting numbers are endless, as well as things like the number of primes -- it isn't that we haven't found a largest prime but that we have a logical proof that such a number would be self-contradictory.  Indeed, in spite of this, we also know that there are "sizes" of infinite sets.  Heaven forbid by getting into that, but it shows to me that mathematics and reality are not the same.

This is an area, then, where I think there is a massive difference between the "real" world and the thing we have invented called mathematics.

It may be gays "coming out of the closet" by telling those around them of their sexual orientation is the main reason gays have come to be much more accepted than before.  When real homosexuals were invisible and all one saw were caricatures created by the press or the lies of some religious groups, it was harder to realize that they are real people.

Zero is not a number in the set of positive integers, which are the counting numbers dating from antiquity.  It had to be invented and is still to my mind something we call a number but isn't quite, since it is not used to count anything but only to indicate absence of anything to count.

It is of course essential for modern mathematics, but mathematics is divorced in many ways from reality and is abstract, maybe and maybe not the basis of existence (one can find quotes on both sides of this).

I try to be non-judgmental and say to myself it's just their background, they can't help it, but I have a tough time dealing with homophobes, racists, sexists, and so on.  I tend to think they are that way only to justify themselves and feel superior to others.  In the modern world though there really is no excuse for such things.

What particularly gets me is people who say they are open minded and not prejudiced and then go on to say prejudiced things.  What gives with such a person?

In Vietnam we find the same sort of thing with Chinese and Cambodians, and with dark skins in general (the standard of beauty here is really stupid -- be as white as possible -- and millions are wasted on whitening creams and such).  And, of course, sexism here is outrageous, in spite of half a century of Communist party indoctrination that men and women are equal, even male party members are too often as sexist as ever, and women in high positions in either government or business are few.

I want to add something, a post script if you will, to what I said above.  We recognize tolerance as a virtue.  The self-referential question is natural: should we be tolerant of the intolerant?

Well I guess we can try to understand where they are coming from, but I fear such understanding will only serve to increase our intolerance of them, as we will recognize that prejudice and intolerance come from ugly, spiteful, selfish, arrogant, etc., personality characteristics.  Cultures that encourage these things, and there are many such cultures in the world, are destructive and harmful.

I guess a certain amount of patience is needed, but dammit I have no intention to listen to slurs and racism and so on without protest, and without telling the speaker where they can go.

What do I "believe?"  Ah that is the problem; I have opinions that change from time to time as I learn things, and some of which I act as though I believed, since I am highly confident of them, but I try very hard to "believe" nothing.  Belief is a pernicious thing -- it is a view of the world deeply embedded in the subconscious that people are not even aware of, but around which they base their lives, and which creates great unhappiness when it comes into doubt (both fear and guilt) as well as anger and resistance.

Opinions are a better thing entirely -- we have them on the surface and can examine them whenever needed and aren't attached to them nearly as much (only ego is involved with opinions while the very basis or our lives is involved with beliefs).

Isn't it known that homophobes are those with strong gay tendencies and who fear them (I figure everyone has a few such tendencies but most people don't worry about it)?  Seems like every time a politician is "outed," he has a history of homophobic stands.

Homosexuality certainly exists in Vietnam (twenty years ago it was officially a Western thing), and I think gay marriage will be "legal" shortly (it already is in a way, since the law makes marriage a strictly civil contract and any church ceremony is irrelevant -- the only thing in the air is what happens in separation to any children -- a proposal to legalize gay marriage was tabled this year, I think because of Catholic objections, but that may go away).  The society has always been tolerant of transsexuals, but the main mass of gays have existed pretty much unnoticed (who would want to do that?) in a society where a couple of guys or couple of girls living together for long periods are just accepted as "good friends."

I observe that monks, like priests, are often gay, I think because it relieves the pressure to marry and have grandchildren for the parents.  In both cases they are supposed to be celibate, but I doubt it.