Moving Forward

Sometimes I get tired being drug back into the muck arguing about religion. Also, the 'idea' of atheism is a negative. It is reactionary. It is a response to the overwhelming weight of theism in which we must live. Sometimes you just need to step away and think in a more positive way.

Rather than the label of atheism I'd prefer to think of myself and many others as rationalists. People who in the face of no evidence of magic in the universe take a rational approach to their world. Having been largely caught up in the now boring arguments about religion vs atheism I'd like to try to 'move on'. I'm pretty done arguing with theists and by the way I won. Now maybe it's time to think more deeply about the truly pestering thoughts about existence, consciousness, and what the hell are we doing here anyway? Those kinds of questions can and should be approached in a reasonable way.

Lately, I've been printing religious nuttiness and then responding to it. In retrospect most of this is a re-hash of my main rant that started this blog. I'm a little tired of it but may come back to it when there is something especially funny (that's not hard!). Instead, I hope to take a slight turn in this blog to the more interesting and positive ideas that truly boggle our minds. I intend to start by writing notes/reviews of the new book by Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop. He is the author of Godel, Esher, and Bach which is an immensely fascinating book from 1979.* He wrote that when he was 27 (by hand on lined paper). Now he is 62 and is still working on what might be the key ideas to the nature of consciousness. I've only just begun and will be writing my impressions and ideas along the way.

So, stay tuned. I'll try to write more often and you try to comment!

*Interesting to us rationalist is the key idea from this book which is really a long proof of Kurt Godel's icompleteness theorem which proved that no matter how logicial of a logical system you create there will be a way to create crazy 'sentences' that contradict themselves without breaking any of the rules of logic. Heady stuff and perhaps a key to our consciousness. . . ?