Hello Again
Entry posted by Razor
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Hehe, I like philosophy class. I especially like the way baptists gang rape logic and philosophers pretend to be experts in the other sciences. I have also decided that philosophy is probably the most useless waste of brain power possible. There is absolutely no realm within philosophy anymore other than ethics; almost all of the other major questions they pose can be answered by one of the other sciences with concrete evidence, as opposed to shaky inductive arguments.
Don't even get me started on the God thing. Hehe, I do so love the way they figure these things, though. The ontological argument for God's existence is always fun. It goes something like...
1. God is, by definition, the greatest being one can think of.
2. Assume that God does not exist.
3. If God does not exist, then God exists only in the understanding and not in reality.
4. If God exists only in the understanding and not in reality, then it is possible to think of something greater than God.
5. It is impossible to think of something greater than God.
Therefore: It is false that God does not exist.
Did ya catch that wonderful little rhetorical somersault? 
Of course, as usual, there's a really good way to shove that right back in a Christian's face and completely belittle their intelligence and beliefs. For instance, this classic little flip...
1. I can think of the greatest possible <insert random thing>.
2. The idea of the greatest possible <random thing> is the idea of a <random thing> none greater can be thought.
3. Assume that the greatest possible <random thing> does not exist.
4. In that case, one can think of a greater <random thing> that has all the properties of the original <random thing> plus the property of existence.
5. But 4 contradicts 2.
Therefore: The greatest possible <random thing> exists.
I especially like substituting the words "hot, sweaty, gay anal sex" for <random thing>. 
It seems to me that most of philosophy is about people attempting to twist words in such a fashion as to dilute logic just enough to make it seem like their idea is plausible. Besides that, what is the point of ever studying an inductive argument? If it is not true, or at least extremely likely to be true, then why accept that as a strong possibility?
Anyway, I have fun with it. It's quite funny the way they feel this overwhelming need to be prepared against arguments that a three-year-old could come up with, and their responses would always make the three-year-old say "...that's stupid." 
Anyways, I'm kind of tired and slightly bored. I believe, therefore, that I shall go to sleep soon. But first, I shall regale you all with a teensy lil short story. It got me a 100 in English comp. ~shrugs~
I Didn’t Hear the Owl
“Did you hear that owl?” my mother asked me. I looked up from Pug to where she sat perched on the porch swing and nodded. “When an owl hoots in the daytime, it’s supposed to mean there’s been a death in the family.” I scratched Pug’s ears while I thought about this. In a ten-year-old mind, death is an abstract concept with no real form or figure; the tooth fairy has more solidity in everyday life.
“Really?” I asked. She nodded and smiled.
“It’s just superstition, though, it doesn’t really mean that.”
“Oh,” I nodded with a solemn face. Running through my head was a list of family members. My grandma, my memaw, both pepaws, older sister, uncles and aunts. I imagined what it would be like for them to cease to exist, but it wasn’t possible for me to actually grasp the concept of nothingness filling their niche in my life. The next day, I heard the owl again. Then again on the third day, the owl was just as loud. None of those family members disappeared, and the owl’s hoot lost its fearsome power.
Almost a year later, my mother walked into my room slowly. She was crying. I remember thinking that I’d never seen her cry openly before then. Her mouth opened to bite a chunk out of my world.
“Your pepaw Clark just died,” she said. “He had another heart attack while he was in the hospital.” My eyebrows furrowed in confusion as I thought she must be mistaken. I heard my older sister start to cry, and my mother hugged us both tight. I didn’t cry at all. It didn’t feel real, as if the concept had just been invented.
A week before that I had run up the driveway barefoot and stopped at the wooden gate around my grandparents’ lawn. My pepaw had a green thumb for certain. His yard was well-kept, always in bloom. I reached down for the long, L-shaped metal pin that kept the gate shut by sliding through a bracket and into a hole in the ground. For my efforts I received a nice jolt of electricity that knocked me back and made tears come to my eyes. My pepaw was in the lawn working on planting some four o’clocks and came running when he heard me yell.
“What happened?” he asked.
“It shocked me!”
“Oh hell, it must’ve sunk down ‘cause of all the rain and hit some line runnin’ under there. C’mon, we’ll go get grandma to check on you and I’ll fix this for you.” He took off his belt, caught the top of the upside down L-pin with it, and jerked it out of the ground. My pepaw scooped me up and took me inside where my grandma fawned over me and made everything better with fresh popcorn and the cartoon channel.
“Okay, buddy, I fixed that gate. You wanna come help me put this tire swing up on the jungle gym?” he asked me. I nodded and grinned, following him outside to the mini-playground he’d built for my sister and me. “Alright, first off, when you’re putting up a swing you wanna make sure it’s balanced. Can’t have one side longer than the other. Any idea of how we’re gonna do that?”
“Um, count the chain things on both sides?” He grinned and nodded at me.
“That’s my boy, smarter than the average bear.”
Even though my mother had just said he was gone, I kept thinking that the next time I did something even slightly clever, he’d be around to say I was ‘smarter than the average bear’. My dad was in the living room, sitting there with a blank stare on his face. He’d ran up the road when pepaw had the first heart attack and performed CPR while the paramedics were on their way. When I was older, my mom told me exactly what happened that day. When my pepaw regained consciousness, he told my dad “I wish you hadn’t done that.”
My mother packed us up in the car and took us to the store to get decent clothes for the funeral. She picked out the suit and shirt, but I picked my own tie. It featured Taz, the Tasmanian devil from Looney Tunes, whirling all around and hunting for that tasty wabbit. I felt defensive as I picked it up, thinking my mom would say no when she noticed it. I knew my pepaw, I watched cartoons with him enough to know that he liked Taz. Instead, she just smiled and nodded as she set it in the buggy and headed for the register.
We entered the funeral home to find it packed. People I didn’t know told me “you look just like Jimmy”, and “your pepaw was a real fine man”. One couple recounted to my mother how my pepaw had built a little pink playhouse for their daughters for Christmas because he knew they didn’t have the money to get anything like it. A local minister praised him for doing drafting and architecture work for free on his church.
My mother took my hand and squeezed it as she wiped her eyes and led me over to the casket. I saw my pepaw, arms folded, eyes closed. My dad put a hand on my shoulder.
“Do you want to leave your tie with him? I know he’d like it,” my dad asked me. I nodded, and took off the clip-on tie and laid it down beside my pepaw.
The tears started flowing, but I wasn’t crying because I missed my pepaw. I was crying out of anger and outrage. I was furious to the point of sobbing in frustration. The world had done me wrong.
Nothing signaled this for me. No one gave me a chance to give him one last hug, sneak one last pretzel from the giant jug in his study, or watch one more episode of Looney Tunes with him. I was angry because I hadn’t heard the goddamned owl.
Meh, I know, it's not really my bestest work ever, but I figure it's almost like a less happy Chicken Soup for the Soul story. Anyway, hope ya liked it. Have a wonderful whateverthehellitisrightnowwhereyoulive.
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