I didn't chew gum much as a child - my parents didn't like the habit and I had a limited amount of pocket money. My dentist, however, was all in favour of my chewing sugar-free gum, on the grounds that I could do with stronger jaw muscles. Ironically, because of sugar-free gum containing aspartame, I now won't chew that at all because of the headaches I get. One of my friends chewed gum, so I did for a while, but stopped, as it made me hungry without giving me the ability to gain the calories I felt I needed as a result of chewing it.
I find it interesting that you register religion as a lifestyle choice. One part of me says you're absolutely right, and the other part of me says you're not. If you're brought up religious, it can be seriously bound into your worldview in a way that a lifestyle choice isn't. I mean, for me, practising Catholicism or not is a lifestyle choice, but deep down, I have a whole spectrum of thought that is specifically defined by its agreement or otherwise with the teaching of the Catholic Church. Catholic teaching of minors has an uncomfortable amount in common with what Nazis did to children.
Things-other-people-do. That's interesting. I think having tattoos or piercings is something other people do. I have no interest in this. This may just be because I'm a bit of a wimp. Taking hard drugs is also in the t-o-p-d category, but that's because I'm quite fond of my mind, my life and not being in jail. Otherwise, for most common things, I'm probably prepared to try it. And then decide that I was right after all, and didn't want to do it really.
I find it interesting that you register religion as a lifestyle choice. One part of me says you're absolutely right, and the other part of me says you're not. If you're brought up religious, it can be seriously bound into your worldview in a way that a lifestyle choice isn't.
I think this is approaching being precisely my point, in fact. It's entirely possible, and a major thrust of my speculation on this subject, that the main reason that (say) smoking falls into the things-other-people-do category for me is because my extended family and their friends have all always been non-smokers, and hence I grew up with a basic ingrained attitude that said smoking was something done by people on TV and not real people. This was, as you put it, "bound into my worldview" in a way that remained unshaken by starting to meet people who did it in real life. In precisely the same way, being brought up in an entirely atheist family and social group caused me not to even consider the possible existence of God until I started reading theologically inclined fiction and having secondary-school lessons which encouraged us to give it serious thought.
Perhaps smoking is something you can genuinely choose, whereas (one of) belief or disbelief in God is a conclusion you find yourself inevitably drawn to once you sit down and think about it seriously. But in either case, the common element is that as things-other-people-do they were things that for a long time it never even occurred to me to sit down and think about seriously.
Actually, I find it rather more interesting that you consider religion as something which people actually sit down and think about. Whilst I suspect that a lot of the people reading this (myself included) are the kind of people who actually would want to have a careful justification for their religious position, the fact that the vast majority of the world follows (or at least claims to adhere to) the same religion as their parents tends to indicate fairly strongly otherwise.
Of course, the fact that this statistic also applies to my own smugly-enlightened atheism is something I'm not sure I could argue my way out of. I'd like to believe that my considerations of the issue have a fair degree of logic to them, but proving that it's not just worthless self-justification is non-trivial.
Hmm. I don't think I intended to suggest that everybody sat down and thought seriously about religion: only that some people eventually do, and people who haven't (or haven't yet) will tend to follow the religion in which they were raised because it's never occurred to them to consider alternatives. I'm not sure this contradicts you.
You too! There is another who walks into newsagents and can't drink anything in the fridge!
I used to chew chewing gum when I was smaller and starting to learn algebra, because if I distracted my mouth I found my brain went clearer, and too many pencils died in horrible ways. I'm not sure why I stopped chewing gum, possibly because the more I started carrying bags around and buying my own shoes, the more I noticed gum on the floor, and my brain made some sort of link, gum=floorstuff. Either way I can't think about gum now without thinking "eew".
Smoking I always found disgusting, because my parents did it and they smelled bad.
Religion, now, people used to keep trying to get me to believe in God but I decided that if there was a God I wasn't going to be nice to the bastard and if there wasn't it would be less effort, so to me believing in God is very consciously a thing that other people do and I don't. And just...the more I think now of there being a god the more silly the concept sounds, for some reason I don't know. I tried going to church for a couple of weeks when I was sixteen just to see what it was like, and I couldn't go for a third week because I'd been so close to laughing out loud the second week, which would obviously have been a very disrespectful thing for the people there who did believe it.
Most of the things I register as "other people do this not me" are because either my liver, my legs, my bank account or my brain will break if I do them. I can't think of any single thing for which I haven't thought "I wonder if I could do that".
I just don't understand the mentality of anyone who would drop chewing gum on the floor (or stick it underneath a table, or whatever). They might as well be aliens.
No, I hate the dropping litter thing. I chew gum but am always very careful to make sure it goes into a bin and not into the floor. I think the people who spit their gum onto the pavement are the same people who go around spitting in the street anyway (i.e. the ones who can't walk without drooling for some unappetising reason).
People are lazy and think that the world disappears when they personally can't see it. This theory is called "The magic place called Away".
Any place the subject can't see contains a wormhole that leads to a magical place called Away. Such wormholes are to be found on the road behind the subject's car, on the ground under the subject's feet, in any place the subject is about to walk away from (or, in a cunning twist of relativity, in any place that is about to move away from the subject, such as public transport), and at the bottom of everything that looks like a bin.
This is why believers in Away persist in throwing cigarette ends at cyclists, stacking rubbish in a bin that is obviously full and needs emptying, and never clean out the bottom of their own household bin even when something really hideous has leaked through the bag.
Recent hypotheses indicate there may also be wormholes to Away hidden under tables and chairs; this is inferred by the rarity of non-believers bashing their knees on the table. Thus chewing gum can be safely sent to Away by sticking it underneath a table in the same place that knees are supposed to go.
The general belief as to what happens to the rubbish once it reaches Away is a little vague; since it appears to be able to swallow such objects as cars and washing machines (and even, in the case of governments composed entirely of believers, buildings), many believe that Away is a parallel universe that was once right and varied, but all matter converged and it is now only inhabited by one large black hole.
There is some supporting evidence for this:
Our own universe may be an 'Away' for other universes less far along the chain of universe evolution; this explains the appearance for no reason of strange smells and the occasional discovery of plant species once thought extinct
The noise purported to be made by wood pigeons, which is often heard when there are no wood pigeons to be seen, and that funny noise made by machinery when you've oiled and cleaned every single bloody bit, may be manifestations of the Hawking radiation thrown out by the giant black hole in Away.
This last point is mildly worrying; if the Hawking radiation can make its way into this universe (albeit changing completely in nature from electromagnetic to acoustic radiation as it does so), would it then be possible for the objects sent to Away from this universe to one day come back as a solid wall of noise lasting hundreds if not thousands of years?
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I find it interesting that you register religion as a lifestyle choice. One part of me says you're absolutely right, and the other part of me says you're not. If you're brought up religious, it can be seriously bound into your worldview in a way that a lifestyle choice isn't. I mean, for me, practising Catholicism or not is a lifestyle choice, but deep down, I have a whole spectrum of thought that is specifically defined by its agreement or otherwise with the teaching of the Catholic Church. Catholic teaching of minors has an uncomfortable amount in common with what Nazis did to children.
Things-other-people-do. That's interesting. I think having tattoos or piercings is something other people do. I have no interest in this. This may just be because I'm a bit of a wimp. Taking hard drugs is also in the t-o-p-d category, but that's because I'm quite fond of my mind, my life and not being in jail. Otherwise, for most common things, I'm probably prepared to try it. And then decide that I was right after all, and didn't want to do it really.
I think this is approaching being precisely my point, in fact. It's entirely possible, and a major thrust of my speculation on this subject, that the main reason that (say) smoking falls into the things-other-people-do category for me is because my extended family and their friends have all always been non-smokers, and hence I grew up with a basic ingrained attitude that said smoking was something done by people on TV and not real people. This was, as you put it, "bound into my worldview" in a way that remained unshaken by starting to meet people who did it in real life. In precisely the same way, being brought up in an entirely atheist family and social group caused me not to even consider the possible existence of God until I started reading theologically inclined fiction and having secondary-school lessons which encouraged us to give it serious thought.
Perhaps smoking is something you can genuinely choose, whereas (one of) belief or disbelief in God is a conclusion you find yourself inevitably drawn to once you sit down and think about it seriously. But in either case, the common element is that as things-other-people-do they were things that for a long time it never even occurred to me to sit down and think about seriously.
Of course, the fact that this statistic also applies to my own smugly-enlightened atheism is something I'm not sure I could argue my way out of. I'd like to believe that my considerations of the issue have a fair degree of logic to them, but proving that it's not just worthless self-justification is non-trivial.
I used to chew chewing gum when I was smaller and starting to learn algebra, because if I distracted my mouth I found my brain went clearer, and too many pencils died in horrible ways. I'm not sure why I stopped chewing gum, possibly because the more I started carrying bags around and buying my own shoes, the more I noticed gum on the floor, and my brain made some sort of link, gum=floorstuff. Either way I can't think about gum now without thinking "eew".
Smoking I always found disgusting, because my parents did it and they smelled bad.
Religion, now, people used to keep trying to get me to believe in God but I decided that if there was a God I wasn't going to be nice to the bastard and if there wasn't it would be less effort, so to me believing in God is very consciously a thing that other people do and I don't. And just...the more I think now of there being a god the more silly the concept sounds, for some reason I don't know. I tried going to church for a couple of weeks when I was sixteen just to see what it was like, and I couldn't go for a third week because I'd been so close to laughing out loud the second week, which would obviously have been a very disrespectful thing for the people there who did believe it.
Most of the things I register as "other people do this not me" are because either my liver, my legs, my bank account or my brain will break if I do them. I can't think of any single thing for which I haven't thought "I wonder if I could do that".
I just don't understand the mentality of anyone who would drop chewing gum on the floor (or stick it underneath a table, or whatever). They might as well be aliens.
I don't understand people who drop litter either.
People are lazy and think that the world disappears when they personally can't see it. This theory is called "The magic place called Away".
Any place the subject can't see contains a wormhole that leads to a magical place called Away. Such wormholes are to be found on the road behind the subject's car, on the ground under the subject's feet, in any place the subject is about to walk away from (or, in a cunning twist of relativity, in any place that is about to move away from the subject, such as public transport), and at the bottom of everything that looks like a bin.
This is why believers in Away persist in throwing cigarette ends at cyclists, stacking rubbish in a bin that is obviously full and needs emptying, and never clean out the bottom of their own household bin even when something really hideous has leaked through the bag.
Recent hypotheses indicate there may also be wormholes to Away hidden under tables and chairs; this is inferred by the rarity of non-believers bashing their knees on the table. Thus chewing gum can be safely sent to Away by sticking it underneath a table in the same place that knees are supposed to go.
The general belief as to what happens to the rubbish once it reaches Away is a little vague; since it appears to be able to swallow such objects as cars and washing machines (and even, in the case of governments composed entirely of believers, buildings), many believe that Away is a parallel universe that was once right and varied, but all matter converged and it is now only inhabited by one large black hole.
There is some supporting evidence for this:
- Our own universe may be an 'Away' for other universes less far along the chain of universe evolution; this explains the appearance for no reason of strange smells and the occasional discovery of plant species once thought extinct
- The noise purported to be made by wood pigeons, which is often heard when there are no wood pigeons to be seen, and that funny noise made by machinery when you've oiled and cleaned every single bloody bit, may be manifestations of the Hawking radiation thrown out by the giant black hole in Away.
This last point is mildly worrying; if the Hawking radiation can make its way into this universe (albeit changing completely in nature from electromagnetic to acoustic radiation as it does so), would it then be possible for the objects sent to Away from this universe to one day come back as a solid wall of noise lasting hundreds if not thousands of years?1) For "right and varied" substitute "rich and varied"
2) Acoustic waves are not really rays. D'oh.