First republish of several OG scribblings pieces

content/post/2016/10/one-life-live-it/index.markdown

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+layout = "post"
+title =	"One Life. Live it."
+date =	"2016-10-07"
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+**One Life. Live it.**
+
+The proposed existence of an afterlife is irrelevant to this current existence, in short.
+
+There are two main possibilities. Either the afterlife exists, or doesn’t. Let’s take possibility one, it doesn’t. Well, presumably if it does not, after you die, you just cease to exist. This sounds scary at first, except by definition it…cannot be. If you have ceased to exist, you therefore **cannot **be aware of the cessation in your existence…by the very fact you have ceased to exist. So, thereby if the afterlife doesn’t exist, it doesn’t matter.
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+The other possibility is naturally that the afterlife does exist. And if it does, you will acquire the knowledge of its existence upon entering it. And so, the question of the afterlife doesn’t matter in this possibility, because it will be answered when it is most important.
+
+There is no point spending this life worrying about the next.
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+This theory does have a number of caveats, such as the concept held by many religions which is that you must live a good life in order to pass to the next. Firstly, everyone should be trying to live a good life in the first place, irrelevant of the consequences an afterlife might bring. Secondly, this life is certain. The next is not. (discarding for the sake of brevity ideas about The Matrix)
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+Furthermore, what kind of supposedly omnibenevolent God/Supreme Being would inflict *eternal *suffering and torment in return for *temporary *sins in this world? What sin could one commit to deserve literally infinite suffering?
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+*“The only thing you can really control is how you react to things outside your control”* — Bassam Tarazi
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+*Originally published in 2015 on my old now lost blog, and has since been re-edited*
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+  

content/post/2016/12/facts-not-faith-or-else.markdown

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+layout:	post
+title:	"Facts not faith. Or else…"
+date:	2016-12-16
+---
+
+  Sometimes, I wonder how people can possibly deny the facts of climate change. Then…I remember that there are still those that legitimately believe, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the Earth is flat.
+
+Yes, that’s right. There are people on this globe (particular choice of words here very much intentional) that genuinely think that the Earth is flat. To give some context as to how ridiculous this truly is, the Ancient Greeks not only knew that the Earth is a sphere, but calculated its radius to within 0.16% of the current satellite measure accuracy. The concept of a flat earth is a pre-scientific one, and yet the belief is held **by some **to this day.
+
+Put in that context, climate change deniers seem slightly less ridiculous. Only slightly, mind.
+
+*“Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf…[on which stand] four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the disc of the World rests” — The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett*
+
+As observable by climate change deniers and ‘flat-earthers’ alike, humans have a strange penchant for clinging tightly to their beliefs, and being able to ignore facts to do so.
+
+Why exactly that this is, is a question for psychology to attempt to answer, and quite outside the scope of what I’m trying to do here. Also momentarily irrelevant are the myriad possibilities that what we call fact could actually be opinion. In other words, I am temporarily dismissing the surprisingly real possibility we live in a simulation or dream (an article for another time, perhaps) for the sake of argument.
+
+That argument is that fact is key. *“Faith means not wanting to accept what is true” — Nietzsche*
+
+Dependence on blind faith is at best stupidity and ignorance, and at worst flat out hindering to progress and damaging. In the case of flat earth societies, it is the former. Not particularly harmful, just charmingly misguided. However, those that deny the existence of climate change, which by this point is a brute fact, are legitimately dangerous.
+
+As I keep asserting, keep yelling into the void, climate change is real. All the facts tell us so, and yet, nobody listens to the increasingly desperate warnings of scientists. The scientists are the experts here, and yet their opinion is ignored. People think they know better than those in the know. Another oddity of the human mind. The fact is, climate change is a significant **threat to the existence of the world as we know it. **To deny it is…madness. Threateningly so. The longer we wait to take action, the worse the already catastrophic effects will be. We can’t continue this reckless exploitation for much longer. One way or another, it will come to an end. Either we choose to do better, or we **kill the planet.** There is no alternative.
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+I would say I’m prophesying doom and gloom…but the word ‘prophecy’ implies that the facts are not pointing overwhelmingly towards the conclusion I have just laid out above. Better to say ‘predicting’. As I have said, the facts are key.
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+Facts, not faith.
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+