Ring By Spring

This post started out about marriage in general, which I found out that I don't  have that big of a problem with. The root of my anger here is with my old school, Messiah College. There is this thing called "ring by spring." Basically it's that you should have the goal of being engaged by the spring of your senior year. It may not be a case of "should," but it is the case that a large number of students follow this trend. It isn't an official thing, but more of a social trend. I would say that about +20% of my graduating class was engaged to either a Messiah student or someone else, some of them were even married. Remember, they were no older than 22 and they had just graduated from college.

There are two major problems with getting engaged and married before you have a stable life; first is the drastic personality changes that happen to you during college and when you begin to live on your own, and the second is the difficulties created by having to synchronize the building of your own life with another persons, which I believe rarely works out as expected or intended.


Ch-Ch-Changes
If you met Steve 4 years ago you would have no idea who you were talking too. I was, for lack of better terms, and idiot, a brute, a neanderthal, a coward, a fool, an emotional weakling. Honestly, I don't even know why people talked to me back then. I constantly thought and talked about girls, petty issues, meaningless things, what alcohol was like, how to get away with tom-foolery... I was a hooligan. If I saw old Steve come into current Steve's supermarket, I would probably have someone watch him as he shopped. I have emotionally and mentally matured to a point that I couldn't even have imagined back then.

You may be in college or high school right now and say to yourself, "that's just you and you're very tall. I think I'm going to stay pretty much the same for the rest of my life personality-wise." I would windmill kick you in the face if you were right here, and believe me, I'm a pretty big guy. I may bruise my butt from the fall but you will have your jaw broken. You WILL change a lot by the time you graduate or you didn't do college right. I'm not saying that you won't like the same things or look back fondly at the same memories, it's that you will have to start justifying to yourself why you like certain things, whether the investment is worth it, how sustainable it is to your other habits, and whether or not you really enjoy whatever it is. You will even pick up new things you love. For me it was reading and public speaking, two things I genuinely hated prior to my sophomore year of college. I love reading books about philosophy and history, as well as giving speeches to large crowds about a variety of topics. I even used to play video games for 40 hours per week in high school, and while I still enjoy them, I only play about 10-20 hours per week to make time for my other, more important hobbies.

Chances are you will end up dating someone with similar interests as you, or that is currently the case. What will happen to your relationship if you suddenly realize you have an intense desire to pick up something they have no interest in? Even worse, what if you're new interest and your old interest clash? Will you keep up with the old thing just to maintain your relationship? Yes, this could happen at any time in life, but I find it much more likely to happen between 16 and 24. This is primarily due to the dynamic, ever-changing environment you're absorbed in. There are a lot of opportunities to try new things, opportunities that you should take! Unless someone asks you to do something you are fully opposed to like straight up murdering someone or plucking all the hair off of a baby, you should try whatever it is. You may like it or you may hate it, but this is the one time in your life where you can do just about anything with the justification of "I'm young." The best advice I can give to anyone is that they should put their own life and priorities first. Figure out what you're passionate about and keep on that passion. You should find someone to love who is compatible with your life, not find a life that is compatible with someone you want.


Eating For Two
It's hard enough for one person to find a job that utilizes their degree and pays well. Imagine trying to find another person a job as well in the same geographic area. When all of the fluffy emotions start to wear off and you both realize, "oh crap, we need to start living in the real world," you're going to have a hard time juggling wedding planning, job seeking, resume building, catching up with family/friends, adjusting to non-college life, finding a place to live near your eventual job, carrying any financial baggage from your partner, etc. There are a lot of real world issues that probably not many couples in love are thinking about when they pop the question. All you know is that you want to spend your life with that person, which is a noble thought in itself, but without a plan it is doomed to several months, if not years, of hard times.

I should also mention that you will learn a lot of things you didn't know about your partner once you start living together. That slight over-controlling quirk they have when you're in public may be tolerable, but what about when they need to have the cups and plates stacked in a certain way?




Lastly, I would like to address one final issue on ring by spring. If a big reason you want to get married is to have guilt-free sex, you're doing it wrong. There is no doubt that sex is an integral part of any marriage, but marriage itself is a societal symbolic tradition where you are saying " I love this person and I would die for this person." You may be completely compatible with someone emotionally, mentally, personality-wise, etc. You may both have rich parents who will take care of you for entire lives. You may even think that they are "the one." But if you really love them then you probably shouldn't be marrying them just because sex is the one thing you aren't allowed to engage in.




I will admit that there are probably couples that got married in this way and are still together happily to this day. I will also admit that there are probably just as many couples who got in a few years and thought, "I've made a terrible mistake." If you take nothing else away, take the wisdom that before you go off making monumental changes in your life, life-long decisions I might add, that you should think about what you want to do in five or ten years. Where do you see yourself? Do you think you could spend the next 50+ years with this person? Do your goals in life, your morals,your methods of raising children, your work ethics, your comfort with being vulnerable match up with this person? These are things you yourself may not be fully aware of until you get out on your own for a few months, if not years. I have only been out of college for 4 months and can safely say that every day I discover new things about myself, and understand aspects of myself more clearly than I did before.

Have patience, and when you are truly ready with no doubts, take those steps.

Faith and Works

Preface (Because This Is A Long Post)
As a disclaimer I would like to warn you that this is fairly hardcore philosophy. It took about 3 hours to write and I have not revised or proofread it as of this posting. This is academia level work on my part. Please do not reply based on a single sentence you understand. It is meant to be understood paragraph by paragraph.

I don't want religion to become a major component of this blog. It is dependent on phenomenological, metaphysical evidence, which in itself is logical to the individual but is difficult to relay to others in any convincing or meaningful way. In this post I will discuss how faith and works intertwine, why I see works as a by-product of faith, and why faith itself is a work that is substantiated by other works.

I do not discount any holy book as being fallacious, but for the sake of avoiding unnecessary arguments I will not refer to any holy book. This is purely an essay about the relationship between faith and works, not about what a specific passage says or how it should be interpreted.

This is one of the few very serious posts you will find in this blog, so there will be no mention of my ex-girlfriend, her douchebag boyfriend, meth, or anything related to hot dogs.



If you want a general idea of this essay, or just happen to be as lazy as I usually am, I have provided a concluding paragraph that outlines the entire essay. It is the very last section.



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Inductive Faith
The first question you may be asking is why I am debating faith against works as opposed to faith against reason. Name one unreasonable thing you have ever done. Perhaps things seem unreasonable to you now, but at any given time you can only do things that you find reasonable. Even if you're reasons for doing or believing something are not the most well-founded, you will always have your reasons. Faith itself is reasonable, and reason requires a certain degree of faith. It is not one over the other but a combination of the two.

Reason in reality is not like reason in an ideal situation, such as we tend to work it out in the mind. In the philosophy of time there is something known as the closure principle. It states that we cannot know the outcome of any action because there is no such thing as a deductive act. There are always events, objects, etc. that are out of our control. Even running the same test with the same instruments can lead to different results, the million-in-one chance. Kierkegaard plays on this in his dialogue wherein a man invites his friend to a party, his friend accepts the invitation and intends to go, and is immediately hit by a broken roofing tile, killing him. The man laughs at it, stating that his friend should have said he would be at the party assuming he does not get hit in the head by a falling roofing tile. As dark as Kierkegaard was, he did understand the problems with our idea of "common sense".

I do not believe anymore detail is necessary about the problem of induction, so we may now continue to our real conversation. The type of faith I have talked about thus far is simply assuming induction is a reliable source of information for later decisions. The faith of a religious person make a much greater claim. I am not here to claim truth or falsehoods in that faith, but to provide a working dialogue on how faith interacts with works. Lets begin.


The Importance of Experience
Works provide a person with experience. Experience piles up over time with more works, allowing a person to predict states of affairs. As any decent detective can tell you, though, that experience exists purely in your mind. There is no way to rewind time and experience something in the exact same way again. Not even video or photographic evidence is a viable alternative in this situation since they are not how you as a person experienced any event. It is that stockpile of experiences that directs you and prompts your future works to a degree. Yes, you could one day be faced with a new, unrelateable experience that forces you to act in an unpredictable fashion, but for the most part you will act in accordance with previous experiences.

With enough experience over time, you will base your works on predicted states of affairs. Just look at how people work the stock market every day. When you buy stock in a company you are saying, "I see this company growing in the future and will act as though that will happen." When someone agrees to marry another person, they are saying, "I see us as a family in the future and will act as though that will happen."The one thing Kierkegaard failed to realize in his example of the closure principle is that, even though the closure principle exists, for humans to act in such a way that sees nothing as predictable is nearly impossible. The friend said he would be at the party in spite of the fact that he could not control certain events. To plan, to think, to act in spite of the closure principle is the only option we as temporal beings have to act reasonably even though it is fundamentally unreasonable. For this reason alone there is a high degree of reason in predicting future events based on past events; not because it is logical but because any other option is considerably less so.


Acting on Faith
The woman who buys stock in a company is acting in accordance with her prior experiences. Whether it will be beneficial or damaging, she is basing her preset decisions on her experiences in the past and her predictions of the future. This is a smaller version of the faith a religious person possesses.

Faith itself is an action. No one is capable of creating a belief ex nihilo. Any belief is based on their experiences and they will relate any belief to be in accordance with those experiences. Unlike a physical causal relationship (i.e. electricity running through a wire, powering motor, which powers a car) the construction of beliefs is a phenomenological causal relationship. You are capable of thinking and relating things based on reason and experience. To form a belief that a certain stock will do well you must have justification for that belief and be sufficiently convinced that it either is or will be true. Having faith in something is not a quality you either possess or lack; it is a conscious decision based on experience.

(As a side note, this is why I despise debating with certain religious or anti-religious folk. God can exist or not exist, but the belief in either is based entirely on your experiences. It is fully possible to believe in God with no exposure to religious texts or organizations, just as it is entirely possible to not believe in God after being immersed in that religious culture. It is nearly impossible to give someone the same experiences as you. However, it is possible to explain to them why you believe what you believe and what your justification is for holding that view. Whether they agree with you or not is not up to you, it is up to them.)


Religious Faith
Once you have decided to genuinely believe something in this way your actions will reflect that belief. Take the Judeo-Christian concept of hell as retributive punishment. If you live a sinful life then you will spend eternity in hell. What a sin is exactly matters less than the fact that believing an all-powerful entity is watching you all the time will change your behaviors. Were a person holding these beliefs to acquire the Ring of Gyges they would not commit any action they consider sinful. Faith is an act by which all other acts must abide. This is not to say that beliefs cannot be changed, though. However, we shall assume for this essay that a person has unwavering faith in their position.

Unlike the woman putting her faith in a stock, a religious woman has faith in a certain metaphysical view. This view will direct all of her choices assuming she adheres to it strictly. All of our experiences in this world are temporal, temporary, time-based. Faith in inductive reasoning is time-based since it requires time to be a relevant belief. Faith in a God takes those temporal experiences, that temporary understanding and predictability of time-based events and derives a belief about the infinite. I am one of the belief that it is possible to experience things in this universe and logically derive, at the very least, fundamental necessities about things outside of this universe. One of my favorite metaphors is from "Imagining the Tenth Dimension." If we were to look at the entire universe and all of its possibilities as a whole, we could also understand the possibility of looking away from the universe. While we may never have experiential evidence of this event, it is still a reasonable metaphysical belief for some people.

Conclusion/ The Short Version
Every conscious action requires reasoning, justification. We constantly make decisions with a certain degree of faith that our past experiences and future predictions will be similar. This faith is in temporal things, whereas the faith of a religious person is placed in infinite things. This faith does not come about by itself but by a deep understanding of the temporal universe itself. This is an easily arguable statement but I see any genuine belief in God or any eternal object whatsoever as needing to be based on this type of reasoning. While faith is based on prior works, faith plays an overarching role in all future decisions a person makes.

Because of this, I see faith and works as equally important to each other. Works must come first for any person as faith is substantiated by experiences, but faith, in inductive reasoning, religion, or any other usage of the word, affects all works from the beginning. The way I see it is that faith guides works while works, specifically the experiences someone acquires from them, shape that faith.

Hot dogs.

Steve

Are We Free Or Are We Determined?

Primary Test: "Philosophy: The Quest For Truth," Louis Pojman, Sixth Edition, Pages 344-394

This is a conversation I find so dull that I no longer argue with anyone adamant about defending their viewpoint on either side. Yes, the dual between free will and determinism has gone on for ages and there are probably professional philosophers who, to this day, create very complex arguments to support their views. I don't really care about them because I see them fighting the wrong battles with the wrong ideas. In short, I believe determinism is true to a limit and that free will is always an option so long as it is logical. You may be puzzled by this stance which is why I'm the one typing the blog and you are the one reading it. Let us break it down with definitions straight from Pojman:

Determinism: Everything in the universe is entirely determined by causal laws (A causes B, which causes C, etc), so that whatever happens at any given moment is a result of a prior state of affairs.

Libertarianism (aka Free Will): Some actions are exempt from the causal laws in which the individual does not trace their decision from prior events, or an act which originates ex nihilio (out of nothing).

There is a middle-ground outlook called "soft determinism" but frankly they just want morals, so I will disregard them for being silly.

Now then, a determinist says that all things are effects of a prior cause, and that cause too is the effect of another cause, blah blah blah. So Z is because of Y, Y is because of X, W, V, U, T, S, etc. I bet you just sang the alphabet backwards to make sure that was right. Anyways, this leads to the problem of infinite regression: WHAT CAUSED A??? Some would say God or Allah or some guy named Jeff. Whatever your answer may be, determinism really can't account for this because it leads to only two plausible solutions; 1) there was something that caused itself and is exempt from the law of causality, and if there is one thing that is exempt then that means virtually all agents (people and stuff) are also plausibly free, OR 2) all actions are completely circular, such as counting from 0 to 9 and simply repeating yourself infinitely. 1 suffers from infinite regression and 2 suffers from being circular which, even if you believed time itself to be circular (looking at you, Nietzsche), it would result in all events coming about of their own volition. In short, determinism is dumb in this way.

Libertarianism isn't much better. There is no real test to measure the freedom of an act. If I say "We are testing you to see how much freedom you emit," sitting in a room is just as acceptable as bashing your head against a wall. Realistically, Libertarianism is just a response to Determinism. Free will is determined by where a person is, their skill set, their resources, their past experiences, their morals, etc. Even in the best circumstances it is nearly impossible for Libertarianism to stand up against Determinism since all states of affairs of a persons life are the result of a previous state of of affairs, all the way up to a persons first memory. By the time you realized how to make your own choices you were already set down a path with a very limited range of choices available. Albeit some choices are free, those choices you have to choose from are completely determined.

The biggest issue (for some odd reason) between the two parties is that of moral responsibility. If determinism is true then we cannot be held accountable for our actions, seeing as they are not in our control. For instance, if I was given some meth and got crazy high, and while I was crazy high I kicked my neighbors door down, I could use the excuse that my life was determined so that I would get crazy high and kick their door down. There was simply nothing I could do since I was meant to do this since the beginning of time. Libertarians, and most people I would assume, want to believe in moral responsibility, because it's fun sending people to jail. But seriously, this debate in itself requires us to look at meta-ethics, how we determine what is morally right and morally wrong, how the law plays a role, etc. It is a much larger issue than just, "How much meth did you do before you kicked-in my door?" I have just two words for people on both sides of this debate: just... no.

My Stance

 

More religious folk would probably know the quote, "Are you a free man or a slave?" I contend that all people are both whether we like it or not, but both free men and slaves are held accountable for their actions. You cannot control what others do but you can control what you do, or don't do.

 

While I agree that there is a causality to the universe I certainly see no reason why every action is pre-determined. Aside from the problems stated earlier, there are many things which have virtually no causal explanation, like when someone you love cheats on you out of the blue and then leaves you for that douche. Unquestionably I admit that molecule react in certain ways, physical objects react in specific ways as dictated by the laws of the universe, but gravity and electromagnetism mean very little when a person is deciding between putting black beans or red kidney beans on their burrito. We make hundreds of completely arbitrary decisions all the time, like which leg to start walking with, what to look at while taking a walk, or which memories happen to pop-up and give you terrible panic attacks.

While the physical world may be ruled by determinism, the phenomenological and metaphysical worlds have no such laws. They are almost entirely free with the exception of an agents life conditions. You are not free to decide where you are born, in which family, or how you are treated by those around you, but you are fully in control of your own actions. You can follow you own instinct, follow the orders of others, disobey their orders, do something you know is self-destructive, or do all of those at once by giving up on your best friend for a douche in a hat. (Seriously, I'm not really emotionally attached anymore, but that was a genuinely immoral move. You know who you are.)

10 second version: You're free to do whatever you want to do as long as it is logically possible for you to do it, including meth. Now shut up.

Steve