Watched ‘The Avengers’ today. Learned something. Loved it.

So, Avengers is quite a good movie I must say.
It helped me finally understand the underlying metaphysical concept of superheroes, which in turn lead to some anthropological revelations. Keeping those in mind, I sorted the superhero movies sprouting up over the past few years into a timeline and compared it to the timeline of global political and economic events, followed by an analysis of similar times in recent and human history when similar concepts of folklore were popular; and I completely understood why this crap is so successful again these days – why we all desperately need to watch superhero movies.

Using my findings I could lean back and enjoy the concepts and messages in the film exactly the way they are subconsciously intended to work. Having never really been a fan of what I regarded as fantastic superficialities, it really was a 180 degree turn in how I look at and appreciate it.

So, bottom line, I liked that movie a lot.

Also, I think Captain America’s haircut is awesome.

P.S.: I’m not a nerd. My mother had me tested.

I wish I was stupid

Being stupid must be bliss, because so much simply goes so far by you that you do not even bother trying to understand it. In addition, maybe stupid people have the ability to just shut off their brains and don’t think all the time.

Thinking is poison, actually. Especially if you do not have enough input, this is when the popular ‘thinking too much’ occurs. Just like when we see a fragmented shape, the brain will automatically try to supplement what we see to form a shape that makes sense to us, just like this picture shows four 3/4 circles, but we actually see a square. Same applies when we hear or read things. Only this time it is not a shape, it is content, ideas, complex stuff. The more complex the stuff your brain has to complete the more wrong it can get.
I am one of these people who never stop thinking, taking bits of fragmented information, little incomplete purple circles, and trying to figure out what could be missing in between to form a shape familiar, or pleasing, or that at least makes any sense. It’s a very bad thing that causes lots of sorrow.

I think stupid people live happier because of that. They just take what they see and don’t try to make sense of it. Of course, sometimes that prevents them from seeing the big picture, or coming up with visions and plans, but it also means their brains don’t send them on wrong paths by trains of thoughts going on the wrong track. Hence, their lives must be easier (in this aspect) I have seen many stupid people in my life, extremely stupid ones, some literally dumb as shit. I have also seen many smart, very smart and highly intelligent people. The intelligent ones are usually the ones who are more unhappy and have more emotional trouble.
And even I, though not particularly intelligent, constantly find new reasons to be unhappy, mostly caused by long nights of lying awake and thinking about things I have no business thinking about because I simply have not enough input. Caused by little events and emotions being put into a context of reasons and outcomes, making the whole big picture look bad. Caused by over-analyzing everything. And then it actually costs a lot of brain energy to actively see the good things (and at least in my life there are much more good than bad things), include them into the considerations to relativize the complex of reasons and outcomes of some little bad thing.

The thing is, for many years I have wondered what it might be like to be stupid. Plain stupid. Eat to be fed, sleep to be rested, work to get a paycheck, then take it from the top. No analyzing and creative interpretation of things you know so little about. It must be so easy.

“The tide goes in, the tide goes out.” Trying to explain that

A while ago my friend showed me some YouTube clips of Bill O’Reilly, who apparently became somewhat famous (the bad kind) for using the change of tides as an example to explain the existence of a (or for him most likely the) god.

Now, there is no doubt that this man, as most fanatically religious people, has a very shallow thinking. In this video, he admits that the tide is caused by the moon, but asks how the moon had gotten there. To him, the existence of the Earth’s moon is a sign of intelligent design.
At this point it is valid to argue that many (actually most) other planets have moons, and the Sun is just a star like billions of others out there, and not even a significantly big or bright one. By today we have finally even accepted the fact that we are not the center of the universe, not even the center of our own galaxy. Apparently, with the past four billion years creating a star neither too big nor too small and nine (yes nine, Pluto ftw) planets around it, one being in the exact perfect distance to allow for water to stay in a liquid state constantly and temperatures not too extreme for carbon-based life forms*, circling around it one moon big and close enough to keep most asteroids from hailing down and even causing the tide we are just some lucky bastards.

*Foot note: I am not much of a biologist, so this point is merely an assumption.

Chance appears to be what has brought us here and only thanks to chance are we in the lucky state to witness the tide coming in and going out twice a day. As a northern German I could hardly even imagine the world without the miracle of the tide.
O’Reilly even picks on evolution indicating it could have barely happened by chance. As for that, I just have to share this wonderful comic strip at this point:

Anyway, we can not discuss evolution. It is happening and it’s great. Just as the existence of our planet as we know it, including the tide, is a great thing and easy to explain.
But if you follow the chain of causality – the movement of the tide, caused by the moon, put there as a formation of matter while whirling around a star which itself is just part of a whirling cluster of small balls of matter and so on – you get further and further into the foggy past, to ages we can only imagine. All that is fine. Actually, I may refer the reader to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Their planetarium has a great film guiding the visitor through these ages and explaining the universe in a great way. My girlfriend slept through it but I have to say she missed out on a lot!
While the nebulous nature of the universe’s past is not a problem at all – there are stretches in the history of evolution which are just as nebulous – we eventually reach a dead end. When I was a kid I still learned that the universe was infinite in dimension and thus I imagined in time. That might have been told as to not provoke me to ask further questions. Later, however, I learned that the universe originated from a ~thing~ as small as a fist, blowing off in an event known as the Big Bang.

So the whole universe comes from a little ~thing~ that suddenly exploded. This is how far I have gotten with my reading and this is where all scientists just stop explaining. But I have always asked a few questions:
- Where did that thing that exploded come from in the first place?
- Why did it explode at exactly the time it did?
- And what the heck is outside of the universe, or rather: what is the universe in?
So far, nobody has been able to give me an answer to even one of these questions, leaving me no choice but to look for answers myself. And as we all know, where science ends, metaphysics comes in. A few hundred years ago, metaphysics began right at the tip of people’s hands, by now science has clarified many metaphysical (ie religious) theories and theses. Clarified, not necessarily falsified. At least not in all cases. Inarguably, some religious theories are just bullcrap. But people just didn’t know better, so what, we can’t blame them for that.
Some people like to claim that by now, science has explained, or clarified, everything. False! As of today, science has only gotten as far as the Big Bang. Nobody has ever been able to explain how that pack of dirt which would one day become all the stars and planets and the keyboard I am currently typing on got there. Science has gotten us really far and we ought to be thankful for that. But somewhere, it just ends. It ends where the world of measurable and countable things ends, it ends where the chain of explanation ends. This very chain has led itself to a dead end – to one specific point in time and space at which a certain ball of dirt exploded.

How’d that get there? You can’t explain that.

You might have caught my drift already – while believing in the sciences, evolution and reasonable explanation (the slander which cold-bloodedly killed off Pluto was none of that, btw) I am not an atheist. If anything, I am an agnostic because in this one thing I have to agree with ol’ Billy: You can’t explain that.

Now, I have to put this note ahead of the upcoming paragraph: I am not trying to defend Bill O’Reilly’s honor. To me that man seems to have a lot of issues, ignorance being the first of it. I don’t know if they don’t have children’s science books in America but they should have given him one, then he wouldn’t make a complete jerk out of himself on the internet.

Anyhow, I think all the instant criticism might be a little too superficial. Because after all what this man says has a valid core point. We just can’t explain where that damn Big Bang material came from and we just can’t explain what made it explode. On a personal note, I do not really believe in intelligent design to be even involved in the process of evolution. Nonetheless, even the great Tony Piro, who is the author of the comic strip I posted above, personalized nature, whether he did this intentionally or not is beyond my knowledge. Haven’t we just replaced the word “God” with the world “nature” when explaining things to our children? Does it make any difference?
Yes, we can explain where the tide comes from. We can explain where the moon comes from. But we can not explain where the humble beginnings of virtually everything we know came from. What O’Reilly does here is nothing but simplifying that problem, putting it into proportions and context everyone can follow. Whether you use the tide or the Big Bang as an example doesn’t really make a difference, except in the number of people being able to understand.
So, can we explain where the tide comes from in its core? No, we can’t, and for everything we can’t explain we just keep looking for an explanation, which we ultimately find in metaphysics. Unfortunately, O’Reilly doesn’t think that far. If he did, he would be a respected theologian instead of a ridiculous American stereotype on YouTube.