degringolade

Spent some time this morning trimming down the bookmarks for my daily “news”. I must admit that I was getting a little out of control in my search for evidence of the decline of the west. I really don’t need to do that.

Look, like it or not, the condition set that allowed us to take more off the table than we put on the table is ending. It was a great deal here in the land o’ the free while it lasted, but the world is making the adaptations needed to even things out.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how I process the data coming in from the world around me. But on days like today, I start wondering if that is just self-indulgence and a form of intellectual masturbation. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I am going to continue pondering this in hopes that by doing so, it helps in making sense of the information coming in through my sensorium.

All of this comes about because of the simple fact that I paid too much attention in my humanities courses back when such things were deemed to be necessary. Then I forgot about those ideas when I had to go into society to make nickels to support my materialist side. Now that I am retired, I have time to reconsider things that I never got to the bottom of back in the day.

I suppose that my problem is that I am neither fish, nor fowl, nor good red meat. I am definitely neither a christian or an atheist. I believe in things that have no proof, but the things that I believe have no disproofs either. I have years as a scientist, but I also have years as an altar boy. I am not at all certain how to deal with this kind of thing. But it puts me smack in the middle of the nastiest, longest running, and violent argument of the past four millenia.

So, I will post here on this out of the way cul de sac of the internet and try to work through what passes as a philosophy in my brain. I am leaning strongly towards the idea that there is such a thing as a soul and that it does have an impact on my life. I have no opinion as to whether it is immortal. I think that there are things out there that we cannot perceive using the five senses but that still have an effect on my life, I have no idea of how they work.

I just know that thinking I can get to the bottom of all this and “know” how the world works in toto is not possible and I will die wondering.

Today, this doesn’t bother me. The sky is bright blue and the temperature is damn close to perfect. I think that I will pay attention to that.