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Thursday 10 April 2014

Don't Even Try

I have a warning out there to all human beings who wish to change my religious ideology:

Don't try to make me religious.

No, seriously, don't.

(For those who are interested, I am an agnostic/don't really care/a Timewaiter/an experimentalist atheist. I don't give a banana fudge souffle on what religion you follow, whether it be Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikh, or Pastafarianism - although I might enjoy your company a little more if you're of the last one)

I used to be solid atheist, mostly because of the people trying to make me otherwise. There were only a couple who actively tried to make me religious, but a few more brought it up and didn't seem to be able to leave it alone, and plenty more were shocked or surprised about it. I never particularly cared that people were shocked, in fact, I reveled in it after a while because it was just so predictable, so I knew what to expect. The pests who didn't like to leave it alone, well, they may have been patronizing in their tone, but they were only doing it to be entertained, so I didn't really care.

It was Mr I'm-going-to-make-you-religious that frustrated the pants off of me.

Mr I'm-going-to-make-you-religious (Or Mr I for short) was one of those people who used his religion as an excuse for bigotry. Mr I was a fan of women being forced to wear coverings on their head. Mr I also seemed to be a fan of stoning people to death if they don't conform.

All of this was revealed to me at a time when my thoughts and speech centres were even more disconnected then they are now. I had problems wording right (and often still do) which made conveying what I meant difficult.

('Wording right' is my phrase for 'not adequately being able to express my thoughts in a clear, grammatically correct, normal way, even though the thoughts themselves are about perfectly simple things such as wearing a head veil to be my choice.' It may seem grammatically incorrect, but when I've got my words all muddled in a case of not wording right, 'I can't word right' or similar is the only way I can tell anyone that this is the case)

Mr I also thought that I'd go to hell if I didn't believe in a God. I (now) understand the sentient behind this, but it's an attack that is not very effective when you're facing someone who doesn't believe in hell. But then, my attack of 'It should be my choice whether I should be religious or not' wasn't very effective either. It was like an ongoing Pokemon battle that was never going to go anywhere (as if you were trying to battle a particular old man...).

And it never did get anywhere. We both seem to have given up on the whole thing. Or at least, I didn't see him around for a year and since then we haven't talked much, so I doubt I'll need to start getting het up again.

And that's good, cause now I don't need to care. You can't change how I feel about religion, except in a way in which you don't want.

So don't even try.

Thursday 3 April 2014

25-5

Recently this question was posed to me:
How many times can you subtract 5 from 25?
 The supposed answer is once, because then you'd only have 20.

I see it differently. It's a calculation, and you can do the same calculation over and over again forever, if you wish. With an infinite amount of time and resources, you could do the problem forever indefinitely.

Let's consider something more realistic. If you were to do that calculation all day and night, without doing anything else, for the rest of your life, you would die in 3 days because you haven't had any fluid intake. If the calculation takes 2 seconds each time, you could do it 30 times in a minute, 1,800 times an hour, and 43,200 times in an entire day. So, in three days, you would do the calculation 129,600 times. Not too shabby.

Let's cut in time to eat and drink and sleep and survive. Let's assume that survival to a ripe old age means you have to spend 11 hours a day on it. That leaves 13 hours a day for calculating. In one day, this would be 23,400 times. And as life expectancy in the UK is about 80 years, if you did the calculation every day of your life, accounting for survival, you would do the calculation 683,280,000 times. That's quite a lot and it doesn't account for leap years, either, so it's slightly larger than that (or you decided to have a break every February 29th)

That's about how many times you could do the calculation.

Fun, isn't it?