I’ve come to the conclusion I’m horrible at making posts on days when I’m stuck at home. Maybe it’s something about having a routine that gets the typing juices going. Of course, there always was a quiet time when I got home in which I unwound from the day before. Filling it with the clickity-clack of blogging seems right. Though I must admit a contributing factor to this could be the lack of real updates on things. I have to get people together before I’m liable to do anything with them, and finding those rare days the schedules align is more difficult than you might imagine. We’re still running through exam time at college and university, so several of my friends have been swamped. I’ve been lounging around sipping scotch and smoking cigars, but that’s because I enjoy the luxury of working full time sans school this semester.
The situation is due for a reversal however. Once these exams pass merrily on by, most of my previously occupied friends will be picking up jobs of some description and probably end up with a lot more free time than I have. I suppose we’ll all sip scotch those days, just I’ll do it slightly rarer and with slightly more expensive bottles.
I’d like to give a bunch of good news on upcoming videos, but honestly even if we could get the damn audio to work we’ve run into more problems. Coordinating the schedules of three or four people is hard; doing it for eight or nine is nigh impossible. Frankly it’s actually hard even finding that many people who consider getting hit in the head with a sword something worth showing up for. Couple this with the April living up to its reputation and all but flooding us every couple days making outdoor activities a hit or miss even if you do get everything else to work and… Well, we’re having trouble. I feel assured we’ll get something on video eventually and upload it to the much unused you-tube account, but when is anyone’s guess.
Anyways, since I don’t have anything like real news to present to you today I’m going to take a lovely drive down another mad tangent; for Andrew Had A Bizarre Thought. Oh, only if we had a show of some sort with segments, I could have an intro people would skip and everything. This time it was actually about prophecy, or rather the fact the cynicism has gotten to such a point that there are literally no possible ways for prophecy to be taken seriously anymore. The gist of it is that we’ve now had access to so many mad prophets down the centuries that it’s impossible to notice should one of them, by some cosmic impossibility, be really telling the truth.
Take it as a bit of thought experiment; even if we had records of some unfortunate mad man making a bunch of statements in the past about what doom’s about to unfold and they began to happen in a more or less perfectly accurate way to the predictions; what are the odds we’d get a majority believing in the validity of any other statements from said person? I can tell you with reasonable confidence that the answer is no. We’ve had the scenario occur before where people have, if only by random chance, foretold the future to a remarkable degree of success (Remarkable being a handful of accurate guesses here). Now of course we didn’t believe they were really prophetic, and the logic we use to dismiss them is that if enough people make guesses like this some one’s bound to get lucky eventually. It doesn’t prove they can see the future at all, really.
That’s where I had my bizarre thought. Prophecies are one of the few things out there where even perfect 100% success rate would be utterly meaningless to the majority of people. Casual disbelief of this sort of thing isn’t only the readily accepted option to pick, but actually the only expected one. Fanciful ideas have no place in the real world, regardless of how well they hold up under inspection.
Now I’d like to include the disclaimer that while this does sound like it’d be somehow tied in with or attributed to a discussion on religion, it wasn’t. Though the context could be used in such an argument, that’s not the source this came from at all. I’m actually pulling it from a documentary on the Discovery Channel (Do channels get italics? Oh, whatever) concerning the notes left behind by Leonardo DaVinci. Even with all the supporting evidence they pumped out for his various predictions I didn’t believe it in the least, and realized I pretty much never would. Cue argument with other viewers.
It does make me sort of wonder if we might have missed some one down the years who knew something. I suspect not, but isn’t that the basis of my original argument? Still, at the end, a bizarre thought.
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