Strange Habits.

I am a really strange person. I realised that I do some of the most ridiculous things subconsciously for no reason at all. One classic example is that when I change the volume for the television or radio or anything with a digital volume display, the volume must be a multiple of 5. I don't know why I do that. I was only made conscious when my friend noticed me doing so. He changed the volume by holding down the button and letting go at a random point. It happened to land on the number 39. He watched me pick up the remote and change it to 40. The rest is history.

I don't know or understand why I carry out such actions. It even seems absurd to me when I am not consciously aware of it. It also annoys me when other people leave the volume at a number that is not a multiple of 5. I become increasingly frustrated until it has been corrected.

Anyone else with that problem?

Travelling in history.

I have a fascination with humans measuring and calculating time. We all measure a day as 24 hours. An hour is 60 minutes and a minute is 60 seconds. Didn't need a genius to tell you that. Anyway, the Earth actually spins on its axis once every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds. So I was wondering, what happened to those 4 minutes, approximately. we are adding an extra 4 minutes to each day so we are 4 minutes ahead of the new Earth day, each time we measure 24 hours. So how do we account for the lost time?

It's about time too!

One thing that has been on my mind lately is "When did time exist?" As humans, we couldn't measure it until the sundial was invented, but time of course has existed. But since when?

I will look at this briefly from two perspectives. The biblical and scientific. Firstly, the biblical.

God created everything, so he must have created time. But for God to create time requires time. Even if it is the smallest of fractions of time, it still took time. So time must have existed before God created time. So did time exist before God? Looks like it has. So when before God did time exist?

The scientific view would start with the Big Bang. The Big Bang created the universe and such. But it took a very minute fraction of time to create the Big Bang, so therefore, time must have existed before the Big Bang happened and not during the process of the Big Bang, because it took time for it to occur. So when before the Big Bang did time exist?

I don't know how to answer these questions. If you are able to provide any philosophical insights or point out to me the flaws, please do so and I will attempt to refine them.

Thank you.

Headache.

I don't know about the experience of anyone else, but I find it ridiculously difficult to try and think of something as a present for a teacher. What exactly do you give to say, a Mathematics teacher? An English teacher? Perhaps something in their field would be nice, but I think giving them something in their field is more or less stereotypical and it would be nice for them to take their minds off what they teach, temporarily.

I am stuck and out of creativity in terms of getting something for teachers. Perhaps I could make something by myself, but that just makes things worse. What do I make? It leads to more complex questions to answer than the first time round.

Hope everything turns out good in the end.

Blind Lead Blind.

I find it vastly intriguing how the elder or older generations always compare their lives to the generations of today. They have this prejudice against us, how we are more rebellious and more technologically advanced and therefore more imbecilic and less mannered and more disrespectful. I find this majorly disturbing. Why do they always compare our generation to theirs? It is always "back in my days/times" or "when I was your age".

Just because Generation Y is more technologically advanced means that our minds are more developed and more capable of understanding complex ideas. There is no need for the older generations to say that technology is blinding us. Secondly, why do they never compare themselves to say, the Jews of the Holocaust or the people in Ethiopia or even the people living in fear in the Arab countries? Compared to them, you are in paradise. Why not compare with the cavemen who had to hunt to survive. Killing lions and tigers and deers with spears, hand crafted. You didn't have to hunt, you had clean water, you had food, and you didn't live in the traumatic state that an explosive may land over the top of you any minute of any day. Paradise.

I am getting annoyed at the fact how Generation Y are being compared to the older generations. I am not saying that everyone does that, but I have had one too many "back in my times" that I needed to blog and rant. I get that while you were in your country, you were poor and ate the very basic foods, but really, some people didn't have anything to eat.

I certainly do hope that I am not a person who will ever use the phrase "back in my times" or "when I was your age" because the idea of comparing yourself to the better to emphasize how bad one is highly disturbs me.

Thank you.

My Shopping List.

I have decided to make a list of my idols, only the top 10 whom I find most inspiring and who I wish to aspire to become. Hopefully. I may be a bit naive but here goes (in no order of preference):

1) Lu Chen
2) Richard Dawkins
3) Gary Kasparov
4) Warren Buffett
5) Derren Brown
6) Stephen Hawking
7) Andrew Lloyd Webber
8) Randy Pausch
9) Richard Clayderman
10) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This is not my official list but from the current list of people I know by name, these people are my idols and the people I greatly admire for what they do and are capable of doing.

Note: The need to write this list developed from a conversation with a friend. Enjoy.

A Glass of Wine.

Those that are wise, are old and those that are young, are fools. Those that are old have experience and know what they are talking about and those that are young have not a clue.

I think this is a great misconception how we as humans, automatically attach and assign age and experience together. We always think that the older the person is, the more experienced they are at a certain thing than the young one. This is a wrong assumption because we fail to comprehend with the personal abilities of each individual and instead, assign our prejudices on them. The young person may in fact be much better than the old person.

For example, look at Magnus Carlsen. The fifth player to crack the magical 2800 ELO barrier for chess at 18. He is young, and better than most players, but still with less experience in terms of playing chess than some of the other Grand Masters and even International Masters.

We can also see that just because he is young and inexperienced in relation to other chess players, it does not mean he is bad. We can adopt the same mentality into society. We simply are suppressing the abilities of the youth because we think that because they are young, they are inexperienced and therefore, they can't be good at a particular thing.

I think we need to stop automatically attaching age, experience and our prejudices together on a person simply based on how old they are. We fail to recognize the history of that person to see whether they really are inexperienced. It is the same case in almost any occupational sector, from teaching to programming and from fishing to painting.

Just because someone is old does not necessary imply the fact that they are experienced and better when comparing a youth to a mature person in the same field. We need to take into account the history of both individuals and weight them accordingly.

If this happens, we can flourish the talents of the youth who possess them instead of stigmatizing them by not giving them any opportunities, which will create a more prospective world to live in.

Black and White Checkered Flag.

Well. The HSC has drawn its curtains on me as I make my exeunt from the stage, leaving it clear for others. It has been a wonderful journey and a remarkable process. I would like to comment on the wonderful teachers I have had, providing me with the education that I will use, treasure and value in the future years to come.

Study on!

The Thoughts of Minority.

I would like to take some time and speak about my transition into Atheism. I have witnessed that by declaring myself as Atheist, it has caused some problems and tensions in my household, primarily my mother who transferred to Christianity.


Note: This is going to be a VERY LONG post so if you do not wish to read all of it, you can turn back now. This is mainly stuff relating to myself so it may bore many of you. I apologize in advance.


I was not born Atheist. Nobody is. Nobody is born Christian either. Simply being baptized as a baby at birth does not make one Christian. I think this forced process of baptizing a child limits the freedom of the child. Back on topic. Everyone is born as a non-theist, a person who has no understanding about religion or science or the world in which they have just entered into.

Same case with me. As a child, my parents believed in Buddhism. I was not educated enough to understand the processes so I only took part because I had no idea what else to do. All my parents and relatives show and express great amounts of faith to religion. When I was nearing 9 years old, my mother transferred into Christianity, where she claimed she had found her divine purpose. She dragged me along and I sat in the lessons, learning about God. At first it seemed interesting, so I paid attention. I learned the origin of the universe and Earth, all the plants, animals and most importantly, humans. Us. I also learned about the wild stories which were told and found them fascinating. I learned the 10 commandments and so forth. I was a pompous, obnoxious and naive little prick.

In school, we learned about HSIE (which most of you will recall). Human Society and Its Environment. I learned about how things evolve, how things change. I learned about how plants and animals came into existence, the origin of humans and dinosaurs and the evolution of technology. This is where I first hit my wall. I immediately began to notice contradictions between the Bible, which I was taught from in church, and what HSIE taught. Since I didn't have any complex textbooks back then, the Bible was my source for answers.

You might remember Scripture classes. I loved them. Learning about human values, faith and morals were great and my mother was happy.

It wasn't until the story of Noah that really started to question my faith and belief in a supreme deity. I was told that God is perfect in every element. God told Noah to build an ark, and take two animals of each kind aboard the ark and then set sail. God caused a great flood which wiped out a large population of civilians, save Noah, his wife and two of each animal aboard an ark which landed on a mountain. Okay, fair deal. What about "Thou shalt not kill"?

I pointed this fact out to the pastors and preachers at my church. I said that how can God justify his actions of killing people with a flood when he gives the commandment of telling others to not kill? This was a sign of a flawed God. An imperfect God who has no concrete establishments of his own words. One who breaks his own code. My question was met with discernment and anger. I was only seeking questions. I was about 12 by this stage.

I started asking others around me for answers to this question. Nobody had the answer to that. Some claimed that God does not need to justify his actions and that his supremacy allows him to do so. I didn't someone to tell me that was a ridiculous answer. One cannot make rules for others to abide if you are going to break them yourself and let alone, provide no justification for your purpose or incentive to do so. This was an imperfect God, which was met by the answer that God was spiritual. This led to even more contradictions. If God is spiritual, then that means God does not exist physically, so that means, he cannot physically hear or understand my prayers, only in the spiritual world, so how does a physical being communicate with the spirits? It finally made sense all of a sudden that why I am still being bullied. Still the loner in class. the one without many friends. The socially awkward and inept. The one with restrictive parents. The one who grew up by corporal punishment. The one with divorced parents. The reason why the preachers were so defensive about any questions against the belief of God. There is no God. There is no supreme deity.

I wasn't Atheist yet. I started by reading over the bible. Starting the the Old Testament and going over what it taught. I started with the Old Testament was because the churches focused primarily on the New Testament and the Old was at times neglected. I realized why. Contradictions. The more I read, the more I lost my faith in a God. I started to realize that everything that has happened to me was due to my own actions and lack of actions to change the moment and circumstances for myself. There was no God to direct me. It made sense now that I was hurt at school, threatened by bullies and too afraid to speak up was not because God would make it all better or God had plans for me. Why did God want me to get hurt so badly? Mentally traumatized. There is no God and that is why God did not attend to my prayers of making sure I was not bullied.

By age 14, I declared that I was not going to attend church any longer, but instead stay home or go to the library and read the bible. Which is what I did. I read the bible in the library and started to look for answers to what made sense. The reality. Science was the answer. It provided visual evidence, empirical evidence which you can actually witness before you. After several months, I declared myself Atheist. My mother had a bit of a tantrum saying that it's wrong and so forth. But my decision has now been made. I started to research more and more on Science and Atheism.

From then to today, I am Atheist and will continue to be Atheist and spread the word and my beliefs on Atheism. I believe it should deserve more attention and that religion sometimes is the cause of problems.

I want to point out a few things before ending. I don't have a problem with other people believing in a religion, but I don't like it when you try and suppress me with the psychological impact of going to hell and suffering eternal torture if I didn't. I have an argument for that too. I said I'm going to try and spread Atheism, but I will do it so that I leave the options open. I am not going to use force or anything other than the power of speech and language and inspiration.

I also do not mean to make an attack on religion. If I have done so, I apologize. I was only trying to communicate my process of transitioning to Atheism with questions and examples.

I have noticed that the Bible contradicted reality, and itself, which ultimately led to my choice of becoming Atheist.

If you have any questions regarding my thoughts on Atheism or would like to know more about my arguments and reasons of switching out of religion. Leave a comment and I'll hopefully get back to you or drop me an email.

Thank You.