Day: February 14, 2019

Today’s Random Thoughts…..

Without a doubt, much of what we think we know is false. Even being as “smart” as we humans think we are we don’t even know everything about our own bodies. When we move out from there, into the world around us, and eventually into the Universe that surrounds us, our knowledge becomes exponentially less and less.

There are SO many theories on how the Universe started, where it’s headed and how it’s going to end. Some of them are theological in nature, and some are scientific. None of them are right, probably not even near right.

I shudder when I think about how little I know. I have to take most things I do every day on faith. I have faith when I plug in the coffee machine that it is going to make me a cup of coffee. If it didn’t, I don’t have the knowledge to tear it apart and remake it so that it would. If I put my key in the car, and turn the switch and it doesn’t start, most of the time I wouldn’t know what to do. When I had my heart attack, I couldn’t fix my arteries. Of course there are people who DO know how to fix these things, and it’s a good thing too. Otherwise, most of use would be in a heap of trouble.

But, even those people who are “technologically” smart, don’t have all the answers. Every few years or so, a new theory comes out about how the Universe began. Of course, all religions would acknowledge that it was ‘created’ if you will, by God. A thinking consciousness started the ball rolling and made use what we are today. Makes sense to us as humans, because WE are conscious thinking creatures. That’s what separates us from the rest of the creatures….at least so we “think” ( I am not so sure sometimes, when my little dog plays me for a sucker that she is not “thinking” about what she is doing) I guess there is all different levels of thinking, and I am SURE that we are not in ANY way close to the “thinking” if that is what it is, of a consciousness so powerful it could create the Universe.

Now secularists have a harder time trying to explain how something like the Universe started on it’s on. I read somewhere a few weeks back that they think all the matter that it took to get the Universe started, could be compressed down into a ball the size of a basketball, but that it would weigh some astronomically heavy weight. Some basketball! When this thing decided to explode and start the Universe, it continually spread from a central point and made us what we are today. The scientists can look at light coming in from outside our Galaxy that took billions of years to get here. That’s cool. When we look up in the sky at night, and see the stars, we are not really seeing what is happening at the moment we are looking, but what happened years and sometimes hundreds or thousands of years ago and is just now reaching us. For all we know, some of those stars could be, and probably are, gone. Mind boggling ain’t it?

Well, I just don’t believe that either group has ALL the right answers. I personally believe the Universe was created, and didn’t just happen, but I don’t even PRETEND to understand the type of intellect it would take to do it.

I know that we have had books and bibles, and documents from the beginning of the time that man learned how to write, with all the theories about how things happened. All of those came from the minds of man, and have been shaped by the mind of man down through the centuries. None of them are accurate. I don’t think that we even know how to define accurate.

Now, don’t go all funny on me, and think I am being sacrilegious. I’m not. I don’t go around telling people what to believe, OR that what they believe isn’t right. I don’t have the right to do that, and neither does anyone else. There are, however, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. who would disagree with me. All of those religions consider that they have been given the innate approval, by the being that created the Universe to tell everyone that there way of thinking is the only one that is correct. I happen to disagree with them. There may be some correctness in all of them. Being a Christian, I personally believe in that philosophy and some may think it is a conflict of teaching that I would state I don’t believe in telling OTHER people what to believe, but I don’t. Everyone has to decide for themselves, and I think on that particular point that the being that created us, God if you will, has been totally succinct. You choose for yourself whether to be good or bad, light or dark. This choice is yours no matter what your religion or philosophy.

I think we will all find out one day, of course. I think that God would be totally unfair to just leaving us hanging about the answer to things. Of course, I could be wrong about that too. We may go to Heaven, or we may lay unconscious of the passing of time until we come back around in the endless cycle of the Universes coming and going. We MAY know nothing, and that’s that. I highly doubt this to be the case, but….

Every day in every way Social media is becoming more of a minefield. It is the #1 source of false information and so called fake news (I really hate using that term). I see so much stuff that’s shared by friends that is blatantly false, especially if it’s political in nature. Obviously from sites or people who are not real, or who will lie about something simply in order to further their agenda. I’d guess that 90% of the “information” which floats around on social media is false or misleading. It leaves most of us to become like Don Quixote, always “tilting at windmills” and fighting invisible enemies…or fighting against causes and/or people who are doing us no harm, but whom we think are our enemies, because we see that they are according to the media outlets, or according to “social” media. Yet most of us cannot tear ourselves away, because social medial is such a powerful opiate, which feeds our ego and our need for positive reinforcement of what we say, and who we are.

Rarely is there a day that goes by in which I do not have to take some measure to combat a hacker, or a thief who originates from Social media. Whether it’s from a friends hacked account, or from information which I or someone else has inadvertently shared, and which bad players from anywhere across the globe have gotten hold of, and think they can use to cheat someone out of money or other goods, or use to further their narrative agendas, no matter what they may be.

Smart phones lend themselves so easily to being compromised, that it almost seems they were created with that purpose in mind. Once bad players get your number, whether by accident or mostly because someone who legitimately has it, sells your information so they can make money from it, you start to get call after call after call from people who want to scam you out of money or sell you something. I’ve talked to people from India, Pakistan or Kenya who say they are from the IRS, and they’re going to put me in jail. I had a dozen phone calls yesterday from numbers I didn’t recognize, and if I answer there is a recording on the other end wanting to sell me insurance, car warranties, online college enrollments, credit cards with lower interest rates, etc., etc.

I first thought back in the early days of social media, the “My Space” days, back in 1999 when I first got on Ebay, that this age of technology was going to be a boon for mankind, and in some ways it is and has been. There is good which has come out of technological innovation. But there is so much negative, especially in the way it has caused good people to think badly, that I fervently wish we could go back to the days prior to rise of this enormous monster. But we can’t. The bottle has opened and the genie is out, or maybe more appropriately the lid to Pandora’s box has been lifted and can never again be closed.

I don’t know what to do, other then to be as careful as possible during my lifetime and to hope my children or my grandchildren will be smart enough to solve this dilemma. I pray they can.

Days….

My word how time passes by, the days moving with the speed of hummingbird wings,

As the babies who listen to our lullabies, leave the notes of the last song they sing.

Echoing in the hallways and the bedrooms, as they pack their bags and wave so long. So long, see you soon. Maybe that might be.

So long, but oh so very short… that distance in between.

When we can call them our very own, and not someone else’s.

But it turns out that way, and it’s a natural thing.

Like a long cold old winter, that turns into spring.

Always moving forward as we catch a fleeting glimpse,

and turn it into memory, a color of love that age can’t eclipse.

By Larry Bowers.