Thoughts from after the rains

With the weather here lately, my thoughts have lingered on the power of water, floods, and the terror they hold. Until now, floods of this magnitude were something that happened elsewhere. I mean, yeah, occasionally a river would overflow, back up, spill over, whatever you want to call it. But serious flooding had never crossed most people's minds. The weather of the past two weeks has shown just how damaging they can be in a modern society. Major cities struggling with containment, houses destroyed, lives lost and there was nothing that could be done to stop it.

New Orleans after Katrina was even worse. A major US city, one of the busiest port cities in the nation nearly wiped from the map. The aftermath was a fools errand, but the destructive capacity of water was shown in full force. Arguments have been made about global warming, how much of an impact mankind has on the weather, and what not. But those are topics for a later blog. This one has a slightly more positive slant.

In the aftermath of such flooding, it makes me wonder how mankind ever survived to begin with. And it fills me with pride in being human. Imagine the first settlements that later developed into cities that humans began to make. All around rivers with fertile flood plains. Those first real signs of mankind's potential in a zone that the dangers were known. The people who settled there knew that their lives depended on the river and its cycles. They lived every day knowing that the rivers should flow by normally, except at the times of year when it was supposed to flood. They charted, the observed, and they used logic to draw wonderfully skilled and accurate conclusions about their world that amaze even us.

That's one of the things that really pisses me off about people that try to say the pyramids and all the other great monuments of ancient history were built by aliens. The people that lived then were no dumber than we are today. They didn't have the technology that modern man has, but they had all the brain power to accomplish great feats. How does Stonehenge align so perfectly with the sky? Because the people who built it lives depended on knowledge of the world around them. They charted everything they could to make their lives easier, and those beautiful observations drove them to record it. And their religions gave rise to ceremonies around the symbols, trying to exercise some control over a world that they could observe and think about and draw conclusions over, but that their control was limited.

But that is another topic for another time. The fact that they understood the cycles came not from any mystic connection with Nature, but from the realization that their lives hung on a very thin balance. They could see the cycles, follow them, but at any point freak storms could send the river swelling, and those civilizations could have been wiped away. Mankind could have vanished in a torrent. It is no wonder that flood myths are so wide spread. They come from the knowledge that everything that made us who we are could be taken away for no reason at all, completely randomly.

It is a wonder that we have survived as long as we have. The fact that we did learn to control our envirornment so is a testimate to what people can do when we put our minds to things. When we dare to dream and take the risk to reach our full potential. That belief in mankind, in humanity, in a drive to do great things is what is lacking so often in the modern consciousness.

You know, I'm sure the ideas were much clearer in my head than my fingers have decided to put them out on here. If you think I'm a rambling fool, then leave a comment, if you think something else, also, feel free to comment.

A revelation on Revelations

After much thought about a subject that should be an easy answer, a realization dawned on me about a subject that has absolutely no relevance to anything to do with the first subject. The first subject is more than slightly personal and quite boring, so won't be talked about here. But the second subject is much more interesting and earth shattering. I have finally figured out the popularity of both Biblical and non religious doomsday prophecy.

It's a subject that has always fascinated me mainly because I couldn't understand why anyone would want the world to end. Given where I am from, it's a popular subject and people are all about the saving before the end times. As much as people try to wrap it up in a message of hope, it has always come off like the largest load of bullshit in the world. The popularity of the "Left Behind" series, pseudo-documentaries on Armageddon, 2012, televangelists preaching the end is near...it all rang as completely meaningless drivel of the highest class, to be laughed at but never taken seriously. The fact that so many people do made me shake my head and gave me a ton of laughter. But now that things have clicked, I am more disgusted about the subject than I have been about anything in a long time.

Yesterday, I realized that the appeal is in complete apathy. A total lack of caring about the future. It hit me like a kick in the balls and I wondered why I had never seen it before. It's the perfect justification for greed, slovenly practices, and a complete lack of caring about tomorrow, about the future of the planet, and about the next ten generations. People convince themselves that the end is just around the corner, so there is no need to do anything to help the world, to contribute, to think ahead in a positive manner. It is such a radical idea for me because it is so far away from the way I think about things, from the way anyone who is sane and has half a brain should think about things.

Yes, I'm well aware of the history, that every generation for at least the past 2000 years has thought that they were in the last generation to survive. These were normally very local, very confined systems of belief that died out with the death of those preaching it. They have always been wrong, but yet the belief persisted. But with today's wide spread ease of communication, more and more people are roped in, and the message is pounded in from angles that have never been available before. Even those who aren't religious have their own pseudo scientific classification of belief about a coming apocalypse and are pumping those fake facts for all that they are worth. And due to the growing popularity of these beliefs, very few people are standing up and calling it the bullshit that it is. And this disgusts me. How the hell can people be so lazy, so greedy, so narrow minded that they can't see the future for all the bright possibilities it holds? For all my cynicism, I do have the highest belief in mankind. Not because of any divine providence, or mistaken belief that we are the highest possible rung on the evolutionary ladder. But because we do have sentience, the ability to think and effect the world around us.

The world needs long term thinkers. It needs people to speak up, to press the idea that today's actions will have effects 100 years from now, hell, 500 or 1,000 years from now, just like events from our past shape who we are today. That we are responsible for our time on this planet even more so than in the past. We have a duty to ourselves, to our posterity, to do what is best based on given data, on facts, on reason. Not to act on the short term lunacy which we are so easily taken by. We hold more power to change the world, for better or for worse, than at any time in the past. Actions must be thought through for the future, for possible impacts, for the things that we can see and those we can't. We must be willing to alter our ways of doing things, our thought processes, our lives and our actions for what could be. People need not be afraid of change, of ideas being turned on their heads, of abandoning beliefs that have no logic behind them at all.

Am I arguing for a total abandonment of religious thought? No way. It is a fundamental part of humanity to make up stories, to believe odd things, to try and make sense of our place in the world. Ethics, religion, morality, creativity all need a place any future that I would want to live in. That is what so many "skeptics" and "rationalists" refuse to see. They get stuck in their own narrow view of things and cling to certain principles that have no more basis in fact than most religions.

And that is why I take refuge in science fiction. Good scifi can highlight the wonderful dreams of humanity as well as it's darkest nightmares. It serves to inspire and to warn in a way that no other form of literature or other media can. Star Trek is probably the most well known example of bright and shiny sci-fi. It shows mankind as what it could be, in its highest form, reaching for the starts, reaching for beyond. And that is the message that is lost from every other facet of life today. There are few Jeffersons, Paines, or Rousseaus any more, whose ideas of hope and prosperity swept through the world three centuries ago. Politicians thing small, leaders think small, and that makes citizens think small. Religious leaders that once served to provide hope, preach despair and offer solace only in the coming end. Philosophers find the most dismal views of humanity to be the most proper, wrapping themselves in relativism and 'science based' metaphysics. Only in sci-fi do we get the sweeping, hopeful, bright vision of humanity that religion and philosophy has provided in the past.

Yes, I am probably a romantic and a fool for ever believing this. But I would rather be such than be a naysayer. To wrap myself in simple human greed is to sell out imagination and hope and is for fools who can't see further than their next desire. To believe that the world will end without any reason and to base all action on getting prepared for that is the behavior of an idiot. To plan for, to change, to adapt, to dream and to hope in the highest is the proper action for a well meaning human being.