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That’s right bitches.

Judge sentences graffiti vandal to eight years

A habitual graffiti vandal gave a tearful plea for probation Friday but instead got eight years behind bars.

Sebastion Perez, 18, pleaded guilty to three graffiti charges along with possession of marijuana, all state jail felonies.

State District Judge Marisela Saldaña sentenced him to the maximum two years in a state jail on each count. He broke into loud sobs when the judge announced her decision to stack the sentences.

Perez had told the judge that for months he had gone out with friends night after night, smoking marijuana and then spray-painting.

“Spraying became a habit for me,” he said. “I stopped when I saw it was getting me no where.”

He told her it was all behind him and that if put on probation he would finish high school, help clean up graffiti and find a job.

He wore a white cross around his neck and tears streamed down his face as his mother testified about his younger brother’s holiday wish — to have him back home.

But the judge was not convinced. At one point, she started to read aloud the names of the people whose properties were spray-painted. She stopped in frustration after about more than two dozen names and stared at Perez.

“You were a busy, busy, busy young man,” she said. “Why do you pick on innocent people who have done nothing to you?”

Police said Perez went on a spray-painting spree that lasted from March to August along South Padre Island Drive.

His targets included a vacant car dealership, a pediatric clinic, a medical imaging facility. He also left his mark on fences, homes, garages, traffic signs, and telephone boxes in what amounted to more than $7,300 in damages, police said.

Perez’s attorney, Stephen Giovannini told the judge state jail would do his client no good. He suggested Perez be made to pay restitution and submit to drug treatment.

“He’s crying because he’s remorseful. He’s repentant,” he said. “He really is sorry.”

Prosecutor Joe Mike Peña pointed out Perez already had a chance to turn his life around and violated his pretrial supervision.

Deanna McQueen, the department’s graffiti coordinator, said the sentence should send a strong message to other would-be vandals.

“It was a good day for the graffiti task force and for the citizens of Corpus Christi,” she said.

This is fucking silly, 8 fucking years, please.

Ignorance

When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, “This is the way it is going to work, I’ll bet,” he still is in some doubt. And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt, we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.

If we were not able or did not desire to look in any new direction, if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would not get any new ideas. There would be nothing worth checking, because we would know what is true. So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure; some of them are nearly sure; but none is absolutely certain. Scientists are used to this. We know that it is consistent to be able to live and not know. Some people say, “How can you live without knowing?” I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

This freedom of doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away. I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.”

- Richard Feynman

My Philosophy for Life: Exploring My World from an Impartial View

If matter acting on matter for a sufficient period of time can create anything, then I should be able to go out to the Hills of San Jose and find naturally-occurring computers, cameras, and cell phones. As we’ve seen, those inorganic devices are much less complex than a “simple” organic bacterium. Yet, most people would find my statement to be “silly” at best. Why? Whether organic or inorganic, the complexity and design is obvious.

To take this concept to a simple level, I examined the watch on the wall (mine is digital). I contemplated the interdependent system of silicon chips, wires, and LED displays? Actually, by today’s technological standards, that’s a pretty simple device. However, is there any question that it was created by a group of designers, handed off to a team of mechanical engineers, and then placed into production by a team of automation specialists?

Then I took a minute to look at the arm. I’ve grown comfortable with its apparent simplicity. I looked closer at the skin and hair follicles. I touched them. I thought about the nerves that just told my brain to synthesize that touch. Then I focused more closely and pondered the microscopic makeup of each of my cells. I imagined the complex cellular city at work, and contemplated the wonder of my brain that allowed me to imagine such a thing. I thought about the veins just under the surface of my skin. I thought about my heart pumping oxygenated blood through those veins to keep my wrist and hand alive. I thought about my lungs as they inflated, deflated, and processed that oxygen for my heart.

Then I flexed my hand. I pondered the miraculous communication effort that occurred in a milli-second. I created a thought — my brain processed the subconscious instruction and translated it into a task for my body — my nervous system delivered that task to my wrist - and my wrist performed the task perfectly. I never really thought about what just happened? How does an interconnected system like that evolve gradually and randomly over time?

It goes on and on… My digestive tract — How did that evolve gradually over millions of years? Without processed energy, how would my earliest, evolving ancestors even exist? My part in a two-part reproductive system — Come on, how did that evolve randomly over millions of years through natural selection and genetic mutation? How do you pass on new and improved genetic traits without the means to reproduce in the first place? I was finally thinking about these things!

So, out of all this, I developed a new thesis for my view of life… We need to drop our preconceived notions. Dump our presuppositions. Just meditate on this material with an impartial mind. Does this stuff have “metaphysical” implications? Sure. But why should that deter us from logically examining the evidence? Where did we get the notion that science and technology somehow have to exist in a naturalistic vacuum? That’s not true science. True science is observing the evidence, creating a hypothesis, and testing that hypothesis through various means. Philosophical presuppositions have no place in true science. If science reveals things outside the bounds of known physics, then science should be applauded for its impartial contribution to philosophical and metaphysical thought.

I. L. Cohen is a mathematician, researcher and author — a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and officer of the Archaeological Institute of America. In his book, Darwin was Wrong — A Study in Probabilities, Cohen writes:

• In a certain sense, the debate transcends the confrontation between evolutionists and creationists. We now have a debate within the scientific community itself; it is a confrontation between scientific objectivity and ingrained prejudice - between logic and emotion - between fact and fiction.
  
  …In the final analysis, objective scientific logic has to prevail — no matter what the final result is - no matter how many time-honored idols have to be discarded in the process.
  
  …after all, it is not the duty of science to defend the theory of evolution, and stick by it to the bitter end — no matter what illogical and unsupported conclusions it offers… if in the process of impartial scientific logic, they find that creation by outside super intelligence is the solution to our quandary, then let’s cut the umbilical cord that tied us down to Darwin for such a long time. It is choking us and holding us back.
  
  …every single concept advanced by the theory of evolution (and amended thereafter) is imaginary and it is not supported by the scientifically established facts of microbiology, fossils, and mathematical probability concepts. Darwin was wrong.
  
  …The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science.

Society today

The conscious mind is your creative mind. It’s the one that has your personal identity, it does the real thinking, and then there’s your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is equivalent to a tape player. It records behaviors and at a push of a button it plays behaviors, it’s automatic. It’s a very convenient thing  because we don’t have to relearn all the time, once you know it you can make a pattern. The problem is the basic pattern of belief and behavior that are programed in the subconscious mind came from our teachers, primarily our parents, our family, and our community. The thing is people don’t even understand how easily we are influenced by our environment. Every person we encounter, every single situation that we are faced with, every little word that is said on television, may not seem too influential to our conscious mind, but your unconscious is designed to take in every information brought to you without your awareness. So the question is that are we leading conscious, or unconscious lives? Science tells us that only 5% of our lives is controlled by our conscious mind, and 95% of the time controlled by our subconscious, with other programs and feeling of other people we get from. We don’t realize that other countries, entire civilizations, that think they are free and independent, but are unconsciously too afraid to be free and independent, they will beg to be controlled and governed, and if they can’t do it themselves who do you think is going to consciously or unconsciously take control? It usually ends up that person who consciously want power and control.

When we think we are in danger we’re not looking for our mother to nurture us, we want our father to protect us, and right here in our age of civilization, this age of fear, we see masculine domination. One of the major factors that give us responsibility and giving our conscious energy away is money. We don’t want to admit that our dependency on money is flawed, but that would imply that the fault is our own, and god forbid we take responsibility for our lives, so we blame the money. This is all an illusion brought to us by the government, or higher power. Money is said to be the root of all evil, yet it cannot be evil because money is only a symbol. Symbols only carry the faith and spirit of the observer. So this means money evokes and surfaces the evil intentions of the observer. Money only exist because we agree for it to exist and accept it as valuable. There is no law that states that we have to use federal reserve notes as money, but we choose too because we fear the alternative, independence. Its not even about money, its the enegry put fourth for money. Money is this material thing that allows billions of people to crave one thing, and put their energy into this one thing. Its not the plasma tv or the house or the lifestyle or the job or the significant other or the status, its cause we know we are empty. These people know that they feel sadness and loneliness and void just like everybody else, and its either that they want to fill that void with materialism or it is just that they think it can make them feel better or they want to sedate the void feeling with material possession, so it all goes back to putting our feeling back in to dependency into an external source that we have absolutely have no control over. What we are seeing right now is all the competition of each other, killing each other, all of the wars, competing for material existence, all of the raping of the planet and tearing it apart to get some pieces of it to hold in your hand just to say you won the game, everyone of those moves is destructive, not just of the planet but of human civilization, because human civilization will thrive with cooperation and will die with competition, and if you operate off these truth then you end up with the extinction of the human civilization.

Well you see we all have demons, so to speak, we all have inner demons in our lives, but we expect to see devilish monsters when you think of a demon, kinda what you see in the movies, but our demons are really the people in our everyday lives, people that we argue with, the people that we envy or hate, the ones we want to physically or emotionally harm in some way shape or form, and its not because that we envy or hate certain qualities in these specific people, its cause they remind us of ourselves. They reflect qualities about ourselves that we wish we had more of or qualities that we wish we never had. So what do we do? We alleviate that pain, not by fixing or fighting our own demons, but by harming people the people that remind us of our demons, by harming the people that remind us of things we don’t like about ourselves. Then when we become frustrated that we are not in control of our emotions because we really don’t know whats effecting our emotions, we take it out on others or things that act as a catalyst for our hatred. So we do the same thing to animals. Animals are perfect because they can’t defend themselves. Its a perfect catalyst for our inner aggression, our confusion, our hatred, just take it out on something absolutely helpless. Just image how unconscious a person has to be of his/her actions that to torcher or mutilate or brutalize any living thing. Think of lack of compassion you must have towards life in general to feel no sympathy to whole populations, let alone just individuals, but I will tell you something even more dangerous, it’s not so much people carrying out this cruelty, because that has already been established, what I’m really worried about is the people who against inhumanity, the people who are against animal cruelty and that they feel self righteous enough that they think its justifiable to inflict harm or even wish harm on these people. Because those are the people who take unconscious cruel behavior to a whole new level of conscious cruel behavior that is perfectly acceptable in their minds, because they feel it’s their jobs to bring other people to justice, like they are an authority figure of some sort. Those are the people who will have a much harder time figuring out why they harbor so much inner hatred and resentment. They don’t seem to realize that it is another form of the same exact hatred, so to keep from facing our inner demons, consistently what do we do? when we began to realize, “hey, wait a minute, maybe its not alright to inflict harm on any other living thing” then the ego has to come up with more esoteric forms of cruelty to trick us into performing the same kind of self hatred, the same indigent attitude, in a different way to a another group of people, but the emptiness will always find its way back in, and people will always start to feel restless, and yet transfer blame to yet another group of people. We need chaos in our lives, we crave destruction, we beg for catastrophe, because if you don’t have these things to act as a form of exorcism, or a catalyst for us, we start to notice these things in our self, and that’s what we don’t want, you see, we can deal with wars, we can deal with terrorism, we can deal with stock market collapse and economic collapse, we can deal with these things, but once we start noticing these chaos within our selves, that’s what we are really afraid of. We’ll take a million September 11ths over one moment of true insight of towards our self hate.

My Philosophy for Religion

The philosophy of religion is one of the most fascinating areas of philosophy. It addresses not only the question Is there a God?, but also the questions If there is, then what is he like? and, most important of all, What does that mean for us?

These are questions that everyone should ask themselves at some point. Attempts to demystify the philosophy of religion, and so to help people to reach views on these questions.

Is There a God?

The first section, Arguments for the Existence of God, explains the classic arguments for a positive answer to the question Is there a God? The debate concerning God’s existence has, of course, been going on forever. That does not mean, however, that no progress has been made. Some of the classic arguments for God’s existence have been largely abandoned, others have been refined, and new arguments or points about arguments do regularly appear. The search for an answer to the question of God’s existence should not be written off as futile simply because the question is an old one.

If There is a God, then What is He Like?

If they are successful, then none of the classic arguments for God’s existence proves exactly the same thing. The ontological argument, for instance, purports to prove the existence of a perfect being; the cosmological argument purports to prove the existence of a necessary or eternal Creator; the teleological argument purports to prove the existence of a Creator concerned with humanity. Each of these arguments, then, bears not only on the question of God’s existence, but also on the question of his nature, of what he is like.

The same can be said of many of the arguments for atheism, explained in the second section of the site. Many of these arguments seek to exploit a perceived incoherence in the traditional doctrines concerning God’s nature, raising questions as to how those doctrines are best formulated. The challenge If God is just, then how can he also be forgiving?, for instance, has led theists to understand both God’s justice and his forgiveness in ways that can be reconciled. The challenge If God is all-knowing, then how can our choices be free? has prompted a similar approach to divine omniscience and human freedom. The arguments for atheism, then, no less than the arguments for theism, influence the way that theists conceive of God, so contribute to the project of answering the question If there is a God, then what is he like?

What Does that Mean for Us?

The third question, What does that mean for us?, is asked less often than the previous two, and so is covered less explicitly by this survey of the philosophy of religion. What follows is admittedly an oversimplification, but is, I think, an accurate representation of common responses to this question.

The implications of classical theism, if it is accepted in all of its details, are clear enough: If God exists then we were created for a purpose; we are valued, loved. If God exists then we also have an incentive, not to mention a moral duty, to fulfil this purpose; our eternal fate hangs on whether we follow God, as we were created to, or rebel against his authority. Classical theism is therefore often felt to restrict our freedom, but to do so not because we are unimportant but rather because we are important and so have a duty of care to ourselves and to others. Theism thus affirms our value even as it constrains our freedom.

Atheism, plausibly, exerts pressure in the opposite direction: it affirms our freedom but, it is often thought, threatens to compromise our value. In general, those who have lacked belief in a next life have thought that this makes our choices in this life all the more important. Sartre, for instance, thought that the absence of a divine Creator who defines who we are gives us absolute freedom to define ourselves. Because there is no God, there is no God-given human nature, and so each of us is, in a sense, his own Creator. We are free to be who we want to be.

Atheism has also, rightly or wrongly, been associated with a pessimistic view of human value. If we were not placed here on purpose, but are the accidental product of random processes, and if we came from the dust and will return to it, then in what sense are we important? There are, broadly speaking, two ways to respond to this question. Atheists can, on the one hand, argue that value is about what we are, rather than why or how we got here. They can thus affirm that we are special despite our inauspicious origins. Or they can, on the other hand, accept that we have no special value, but argue that it is better to reconcile oneself to this fact than it is to deceive oneself with religious belief.

Whatever conclusions we reach about these questions, the time spent answering them is time well spent. Religious belief or unbelief underpins the way that we live our lives. The more clarity and confidence we have in our beliefs on these issues, the better.