Blaine's Home Page

Current activities

Life Goals

Things which I really want to accomplish before I die.
• Impart the following traits to my daughter.
  • Perseverance. To decide on her own that important long-term goals are worth hard work.
  • Empathy. For her to experience and appreciate that the happiness of other moral agents makes her happy, and the inverse.
  • A thirst for knowledge of the truth for its own sake.
• Influence people not to support religion's constant battle against human progress. I don't have time to address all religions here, but I urge potential or by defaultChristians to ask themselves these questions.
• Become good at violin
• Make sense of the directionality of time, particularly with respect to evolution, conscience, and free will.
• Make sense of free will, or at least isolate the singularity or clearly understand where the mind/body boundary (or lack thereof) is. (UPDATE: After many years, I have some far-reaching conlusions to write up, after studying much academic research on free will. I'll write it up as soon as I have time.).

Current objectives

I.e., ones that I am working on daily right now.
• Teaching my daughter the essentials of critical thinking. The goal is that this will make her a better learner of all academic and non-academic subjects which she studies in the future; and when I am gone and she has a real interest in understanding reality, she will avoid the common fallacies which are a collosal waste of time for most of humanity.
• Working through Copi and Cohen's Introduction to Logic. (I have written a very useful program for learning categorical syllogisms. Email me if you're interested.)
• Working through What is Mathematics?. 1/20 done.
• Teach my daughter some basic Astronomy
• Find some people who live close to me who like to discuss the topics that I am interested in.
• Update my web pages (largely in support of previous item).
• Write up an essay about my theory of World Consciousness, which will describe fundamental practical, historical, and metaphysical aspects of animal (including human) existence. This will be the fruit of years of academic study of time, consciousness, and free will.

FAQ. Frequently Asked Questions

• Why did you quit being a Christian?
• You aren't certain that there is no God, are you?
• As a rather average human being, aren't you ashamed to risk the immortality of your loved ones, (not to mention impressionable, innocent people on the Internet) based on your imperfect understanding of reality?
• The consensus opinion of tons of brilliant Christian thinkers, past and present, is that God exists. Why should anybody think that there is any likelihood that you are right and all of them are wrong?
• I have my own Frequently Asked Questions about the consequences of Christianity which I pose to Christians.*

Resources

• My Reviewers Reviewed Speach by Col. Robert G. Ingersoll. Written and presented (in San Francisco) in 1877, it is still the best example I have ever encountered for
  1. Displaying the sublime morality and honest possible without religion.
  2. Displaying how his religious critics rationalize immorality and the worse inhumanities imagninable.
  3. Laying out Biblical examples of atrocities, slavery promotion, polygamy, anti-democracy, xenophobia, etc.
  Right click on the link to download the document. Compare how well the thoughts of this fighter against slavery withstands the test of time compared to the intolerant bigotry of Christians in history, like the popes, G. K. Chesterton. Today's apologists still have no answers for Ingersoll's questions.

  I have this in MP3 audio format (to listen to on my work commute). If anybody else is interested in this, email me and I'll post the files here.

• Richard Dawkins' new site.
• Rational answers to all of your religious questions. This is Paul Tobin's Rejection of Pascal's Wager site. Soon to be published in a book!
• Various technical UNIX and Java HOWTO documents which I have written.

Primary Wisdom

What have a I learned over my 40 years of life? More specifically, of the things which I have learned over my lifetime, which of these items are so important to me that I wish for them to survive my death (and which are not already generally appreciated)?
• You have no wisdom at all until you critically evaluate your beliefs-- therefore, do it now! This is the essential point to any Introduction to Philosophy or Introduction to Logic course. Just as knowledge is impossible by holding true beliefs without good reasons, wisdom is impossible by holding good values and philosophies without good reasons. I.e., if you are adamant about your values and philosophies, but have never explicitly reasoned about them or considered them critically, then you are not wise. There's little point to discussing philosophy or religion with anybody who doesn't agree on this point, and reasonable Christians do agree with it. C. S. Lewis would agree. I think that even Josh McDowell would agree. (Aquinas and Constantine probably wouldn't agree, since, in their own words, they are enemies of learning except where it confirms Christianity).

  Understand the fact that nobody knows the answers to the ultimate questions. I mean this as literally as possible. Think of the most wise person you know of. Think of the most blessed and intelligent religious person you know of. Nobody-- not these people, and not you yourself, know the answers to these ultimate questions. For example: Why is there something instead of nothing? If you believe in God, then include God in "something"-- why does God exist instead of nothing existing? Nobody in the world can give a reasonable positive answer to this question in any respect whatsoever. (One can make a positive answer that is unreasonable, for example by basing the answer on the correctness of an assumed answer).

  Maybe you think it seems like I'm being nihilistic or an extreme skeptic-- I am not. We can be confident of lots of knowledge. But, if you never study for yourself what things are knowable and what things are not, you will have no clue as to what you really know. Every person needs to evaluate truths critically for themselves, because even the foremost authories do not know all the truths. There is one way to tell a blow-hard for sure: If somebody claims to know all the answers, they are full of shit.

  I am in agreement with reasonable Christians in thinking that humans can't answer questions like Why is there something instead of nothing? because it is beyond the abilities of the human mind to comprehend, in the same way that a blind person can not comprehend what the impression of "red" is like. I think humans lack this ability because human bodies exist to perpetuate genes over time, and there is no intelligence useful to perpetuating genes which can be useful in answering questions like the present one.

  Unfortunately, I have no ability to impart the urge for wisdom or criticality of beliefs to anybody (my daughter provides deductive proof of that), but for anybody who has the least susceptibility, Socrates can: Apology, Crito And Phædo.

• Don't sweat your own mortality too much
• Personality is all, or nearly all, determined by one's physical body.
• Spirits are useless to satisfy any human needs
• All of the features of "human life" are products of evolution.
• Some non-human animals do not differ from human animals in any significant qualitative way.
• I have no logical disagreement with liberal Unitarians, Deists, and Pantheists.
• Ultimate Goals and the alleged ethical relativism of Atheists.
• I'm sorry to say, but human being are born to be cheaters. One needs to be vigilant to understand their motivations.
• Purpose of life.
• Utter uselessness of the God hypothesis to answer the difficult questions.

---

Footnotes
* A fantastic exercise of free, intellectual entertainment is to make a bargain with a Jehovah's witness that you will accept their book if they will sit down and answer these questions. You will witness first hand, incredible mental gymnastics, evasions, and ignorance. (BTW, they will not cooperate to the end of the list... you will understand everything eventually if you allow them to follow their memorized script.)

---

Page last update: $Date: 2006-11-05 14:03:47-05 $