Finally Beginning?

Recently I’ve been looking for a new apartment around town, someplace that I can call my own. So far, I’ve only lived with my parents, or with roommates. But now, I think I’m finally ready to find a place and live on my own, with my own furniture, my own car, my own rules. The problem is, I own virtually no furniture, have no car to speak of, and am currently in the process of saving up the money with which to realize my dream of solitary living.

I won’t go into specifics about my income, but if my income were to stay relatively the same, I can see myself having to spend about half of it on rent and bills alone, not including car insurance/payments, food, and other miscellaneous expenditures. Since I’ve recently gotten my bachelor’s, I’m looking for a new job, one that hopefully involves a steady work week (with evenings and weekends free, ideally), and a pay raise. I’m tired of working fast food, and though the money is actually pretty good, I need a change. Though I know that I will get lonely sometimes in my new place, and I’ll regret my decisions sometimes, I know this will be good for me in building my independence and forcing me to handle the world on my own. While I wish my parents could help out more, it’s kind of nice knowing that whatever I get, I get it on my own, with my own efforts and ingenuity. I feel as if I can finally begin my life.

I imagine my new job being challenging but not completely overbearing, involving meeting new people and opportunities for advancement in the future. I picture having friends over for dinner, or a movie night, or drinks. Whatever, so long as I can get out there and meet people. I know I picture this future for one reason only: I’m afraid I’ll become somewhat of a hermit if I live on my own. I can be on the shy side, and can come off as needy or awkward if I’m nervous, or if I really like someone. People often don’t understand my humor, and I find it hard to be open and honest with new people. But I want to force myself to make friends, and hopefully even find a steady boyfriend out there…

Which brings me to my other vision: finally having a place where, if I actually had one, I could bring my boyfriend to spend the night (or whatever else we might want to do) without fear of roommates barging in or (let’s face it) judging me. All in all I just want a place to bring someone home to, to show them without words who I am and what I like. Maybe I’m reading too far into the whole going-out-on-your-own scenario, but this is how I want it to be.

Speaking of how I’d like things to be, one of the biggest draws for me to have my own place is the most frivolous. I want to be able to design/decorate it almost however I want (barring leasing restrictions and the like). The apartment before the one I’m currently in was unfurnished, and as the result of a splitting of roommates midway through our lease, I had to get some furniture of my own, and ended getting what I consider a most unique sofa, in that it is probably from about 1974, is burnt orange velvet-like material, and has one of those beds built into it. I know, I know, an orange couch? But my dear readers you have to believe me when I say that it was a purchase that spoke of my inner funkadelic nature (I suppose), and hearkened to my love of color and unusual design. Plus it was supremely comfortable.

But anyway, back to the point. As I didn’t want to have to buy another sofa, I thought, why not work around the orange couch and do some sort of swanky/funky 60’s thing with bring colors and a really fun atmosphere. I though I would use a lot of different shades of blues and greens (to counterbalance the orange, or course), but still bring in splashes of other colors like yellow and red. I really want my place to be inviting to others, and really show off that, even though I can be a bit standoffish sometimes, I’m really actually a warm and loving person… who likes a lot of color in their life. The design isn’t set in stone yet, and knowing me it will change over the months to suit whatever resources I have, but at least I’m brainstorming.

The only other design area I’ve considered is my bedroom, which I still want to be swanky (if anyone out there can help me solidify that word into a design schema, please help), but also a lot sexier, with darker, richer colors, fabrics with a bit of a sheen or luster to it, and thought-provoking, profound artwork. This is where I’d show my sexier side. The big problem I face here (aside from color choices and how to make it blend somewhat with the rest of the place) is how make a room feel a lot sexier, a little darker, a very dramatic, when I want to avoid painting the walls if at all possible. I like the idea of an accent wall, but how do I downplay stark white walls in my sexy swanky bedroom?

~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~

I just had a pause and realized how different this post is from my previous ones. But this is me, dear readers. One day I think about the existence of god or the nature of the universe, the next I’m worry about furniture choices and getting the right lighting. I guess this all ties into my struggles with formulating a new life and a new me. I want to be more independent, more outgoing, and more successful in the relationship department. I also want to delve into my belief systems, research more about my various passions, and in short figure out more about myself. I think that living on my own is a good way to start this. Without roommates, I won’t have anyone too close at hand to lean on, so I’ll have to find my own ways to socialize and entertain myself. I sincerely fear that I could become hermit, but I’ll try not to let myself do that. The big if part to my future life and lifestyle is the job I’ll have. I have no idea where I’ll be working, what I’ll be doing, who I’ll be working with, or (very nearly most importantly), how much I’ll be making so I can figure out a budget, and a plan of attack for the dating front.

So here goes, world. I’m going to start out now on my own for once. The job hunt begins now (as I’d like to have a new, better, job before May), and I will continue the apartment research. If any of you out there no some good resources for jobs, gay social life, decorating on a budget, or any other things that might help me in my quest, please message me (i.e., leave a comment) so that I may benefit from your knowledge.

Thank to the world out there that may or may not have been reading this, and until next time, adieu.

-Liridon

Update: I just had a talk with one of my roommates, and while previously she was moving out of town for school, she’s now considering staying.  Should I stick to my ultimate desires and live on my own for all the reasons listed above, or should I take the safer and easier, albeit possibly less fulfilling route and room with her possibly one more person?  How do I know what’s best for me?

“god” and the Concept of Free Will

As you few readers (if there are any out there) can see below, my first ever real post was commented not once but three times by a blogger who goes by the name of “god”. While I won’t go in to questioning his choice of name given that he is a professed atheist (does he admit that he himself does not exist? lol), he raised some very interesting questions. I can see from his few comments (and from a visit to his blog, which is very interesting if the topics happen to strike your fancy) that his is an opinion and a viewpoint that I admire and respect, and will most likely continue to do so if he should choose to comment again. “God”, if you are reading this, thank you so much for your comments and your intriguing thoughts and questions.

The comments to my first post have continued to fuel my desire finally to begin my personal quest for true understanding. I don’t know if I well ever be an atheist, but ideas presented by “god” and by his friends on his blog have given me a better idea of the path I want to take with my initial research.

Being a deeply personal and experiential phenomenon, as “god” so eloquently put it, religion or spirituality is not necessarily a thing that can be defined, nor will I attempt to do so in this post. All my life I was taught that there is a God and that he is a loving entity who happens to have the power to destroy utterly those who defy him. As a young child I didn’t object to this, and though neither my family nor I were particularly devout, we did go to church on a more or less regular basis, and I had many Christian friends. Only recently have I come to discover that that is not religion or spirituality in essence, but simply a physical ramification of society’s perspective of those things. The doctrine and dogma of the Christian church is not my idea of the true belief and worship of God, or as I am coming to think of it as, the belief in a Cosmic Force that is outside of complete comprehension. “God” brought up the point that it is often the dogma of faith that turns atheists away, such as the rigid belief in a creation myth despite obvious scientific proof otherwise, that homosexuality is wrong, that animal sacrifices are necessary to ‘appease’ a deity, or that male dominance is the way the world was designed. I believe the Bible and other such books were written by men (and women of course), not by God himself, and that they are discussions of religion and belief much like books written today on the subject, or even like blogs such as the one “god” runs. If you look at the history of the Bible, for example, you can find copious examples for the reasoning behind many of the laws of Leviticus and why there is a mundane, worldly background to a supposedly supernatural law. On the flip side, I am beginning to believe that religious texts can give insight into the nature of this Cosmic Force that I am just beginning to theorize. As such, I am currently researching books that discuss the similarities between religions, and the ideas they profess. While I have seen many atheists site this as conclusive reason for the invalidity of a particular religion and fundamentally the invalidity of all religions, I see it as evidence for possible basic truths about both the nature of the cosmos and of the Cosmic Force that is its core.

On a different strand, “god” in his second comment brought up the idea of probability. He is right in saying that the God explanation merely shifts the explanation for the complexity of the universe while doing nothing to explain it in real terms. But he goes on to ask the question, “Who made God?” That intrigues me, and I confess I do not have the answer to that question. Maybe God is a human creation brought about by a base yearning for there to be something else out there other than the mundane lives we know on earth. Maybe he is a delusion we have outgrown, as so many like to say. Or maybe our perception of God isn’t necessarily wrong, only misinterpreted and carelessly personified into human terms. We refer to God as “he”, “she”, or “it” sometimes, and speak of him/her experiencing love and rage, in some cases desire and happiness. But these are tools to try to help humans grasp an inkling of what an omniscient or cosmic being may be like. I do not hope to completely understand the Cosmic Force that may be out there, but I do hope to develop an idea of its complexity.

This brings me to the final point that “god” raised, and one that have been thinking about since I last posted. He wrote that is God made all, then it follows that he must be both omniscient and omnipotent. However, according to him, these two qualities are mutually exclusive, as God is powerless to change his knowledge (meaning he can’t unknow what he knows). This is a gray area that I don’t think I have the ability to delve into just yet. But I’m alright with that. As a psychology student you learn to accept gray areas, so I can live with this one for a while.

Finally, I reach the concept of Free Will that is mentioned in the title of this post. As I have been writing for a while, I will keep this part short. On “god’s” suggestion, I visited his blog and discovered a discussion about sexual selection and natural selection and how it can related to Free Will. I strongly urge the readers out there to visit this blog and begin to expand your perceptions of the universe. While I have read all the comments, nor do I remember everything about this post, what sticks with me now is someone’s comment about Free Will and its near impossibility. The poster (who goes by the name of Mangawitch if I remember correctly–you should look her up), claims that what we consider free will is actually environmental programming done by society (our parents included) since birth. Since it’s short, here’s most of what she said:

“Where we live, how we live and who we live with influences us to a massive degree before we even learn to talk. Why do I like the music I do? Cos it was always playing when I was young – I associate it with good times – therefore it is good.

My parents taught me to be open-minded and to explore everything. To question everything and not to be afraid of being different. I could choose what to wear, where to go, what to believe.

But that wasn’t my free will – I was just doing what my parents had programmed me to do. You see, we think we’ve made the decisions using our own free will – but we haven’t. We’ve made them based on the influences around us.

Even our dreams are created by what happens around us during the day.”

She raises interesting ideas, but I tend to disagree with her on a fundamental level. Being a psych student who does not gravitate toward cognitive behavioralism, I tend to believe that people are not simply organic robots. Free will by definition is the ability to choose among many different ideas, paths, and decisions. Free will can explain why children grow up to be completely different from their children despite the possible association of good emotions with certain types of music or other such things. I was raised hearing classic rock most of the time, but I don’t consider myself a fan of it at all. In fact, I don’t have any of that genre on my mp3 player or computer. Is this evidence that I have chosen the type of music I like on my own, without the influence of my programming? Maybe, maybe not. But I refuse to believe that we don’t have the power to make our own choices in life. We can be influenced by others, or even by some sort of programming, but the final decision is ultimately left up to the individual. Maybe that is the answer to it all. Maybe this Mangawitch person and I are both right and both wrong. Maybe it is a combination of free will being influenced by early childhood “programming”. Psychology has shown us that the way a child is raised and their level of attachment to their caregiver affects how that child eventually forms relationships and makes decisions. But they’ve also seen people overcome initial childhood setbacks and make their own decisions regardless of the attachment style of the primary caregiver. As I’m writing this, I’m thinking, maybe the example of attachment style of the parent affecting the choices and relationships of the adult is a good example of environmental programming and therefore evidence for a lack of any real free will. But who knows. I think I need to do some more research on this, and comment on it later. As you can see by now, I like doing research. ^_^ Oh, on the subject of dreams being influenced by what happens around us during the day, I have one simple thing to say: While this may be true, what we do with our thoughts and our dreams is up to us alone. That is our Free Will.

And now, to conclude, goodbye to any readers out there. Have a wonderful evening, and I hope to see you back around here soon!

-Liridon

Religion vs. Atheism, or The Earth’s Orbit and the Existence of God

Recently, I was watching a show on the History Channel about global warming called “A Global Warning?” (great title, huh? lol). I didn’t think much of it at first, as most if it made sense: the earth goes through cycles in weather, but humans are messing with that and really effin’ up the place with a total disregard for the future. It really made me think about my impact on the planet, and it made me want to try to make an effort to recycle and by natural products. Unfortunately, being a recent graduate with lots of loan debts and very little time, buying the more expensive organic products, or finding the energy and time to recycle is near impossible. Not the mention the fact that I have three roommates right now, and no car with which to go and buy necessities like recycling bins, or with which to take said recyclables to a center.

But that is not the real topic of the post. What really got me thinking was a part of the show where it talked about earth’s orbit around the sun and how it effects the climate of the planet. Apparently it changes every 100,000 years or so from a somewhat circular path to a more pronounced elliptical path. When it’s circular, the temperatures are fairly moderate throughout the planet and pleasant for sustaining life. When it’s elliptical, earth is pretty much a giant ice ball with very few living things on it. This is part of the explanation for our ice ages and how such different creatures as dinosaurs and humans can come about on this planet. So our climate changes dramatically pretty much like clockwork every 100,000 years. While I don’t quite understand how evolution could take place over millions of years and survive the climate changes, that also is not the point of this post. What struck me was the total and utter impersonal and dispassionate way this occurs. I know it sounds obvious that the earth’s rotation is impersonal because it is a naturally occurring phenomenon, but it really struck me that it was so regular and unforgiving. It honestly made me question the existence of a life-creating and life-sustaining God that cares about His creations, especially his supposed chosen ones, the humans of the world.

Why would a god make sentient creatures, beings with the ability to rationalize and think about the future, including our own mortality and the possibility of an afterlife, and put us on a planet (ostensibly also created by the deity) where the climate changes so dramatically that the creatures He made with love and affection would never survive it? Is it possible that this Creator only means his chosen creations to live in this limited timespan in order to therefore limit our production and possible destruction of His planet? Or is it equally possible that this ‘omnipotent’ being has no control over the orbit of the planet, in which case He is not the all-knowing, all-thinking, all-powerful deity that most have come to think of when they contemplate deifications?

I will admit that I do not much about other religions (though I’m open to the thoughts of those with other backgrounds of course), but the Christian viewpoint holds that God is the creator of everything and therefore controls everything in the universe except the free will of his creations. That He gave to us so that we may choose to follow Him in love, devotion, and gratitude. Okay, take that and put in the facts about the earth’s rotations. Either God created us to live only in this time section for some unknown cosmic reason (and it’s in His plans to do this since He knows all about the climate change), he created us as his ultimate beings but has no control over the planet’s orbit (in which case our perceptions of Him are completely wrong and meriting a serious reconsideration), or there is no rhyme or reason to it, no God, and we’re just here because of a few flukes in the DNA down the line.

It was this knowledge that made me seriously doubt the existence of God for the very first time. People cite the violence of man or terrible weather problems like tsunamis and hurricanes as proof that a loving god doesn’t exist. I say it is the will of individual people that causes these atrocious crimes, not the will of God, and that nature has terrible things like tornadoes and earthquakes because it is possible that God created the science of nature to work such that there is the natural ebb and flow of the “good” and the “bad”. Nature balances itself out quite nicely, and if a sentient Creator Being came up with it, I say good job. Atheists say people only want to believe in an afterlife to justify the horrible conditions that we live in on earth, and to give an excuse not to live the hedonistic life of the damned. I see them sneer at those with religion for holding on to their pathetic ideas of an afterlife, while deriding them for the tenacious clinging to this horrible life beyond which they supposedly want to move. If the afterlife is so great, why not kill yourself and get to it faster? Of course, many religions have an answer to this, but that is usually fodder for those atheists who like nothing more than to make fun of those with religious ideals. (Note: I’m not saying all atheists are antagonistic to those with religious beliefs. I’m merely stating that there are those like that out there, and I have met way too many of them. Why is it so hard to understand the concept of an intelligent person with religious beliefs? Science and faith are two completely different things if you ask me.)

But back to the original thought. If earth’s orbit is regular, and the climate is supposed to change dramatically and get much much colder in a few thousand years (barring the complete destruction of the earth from man’s folly beforehand), how does God figure in, or is He a figment of the collective unconscious? The facts in the film were presented in such as way that it seemed logical that God wasn’t in the picture, that humans are simply descendants of apes and just along for the ride while they still have some breathing room. It’s hard for me to think in those terms, because I’ve always believed that there was something bigger than us out there, something that had some answers. Whether our conceptions of God, Allah, Brahma, or whatever are correct or not, something is out there that maybe had a plan for all of this.

So I tried looking in to the idea of atheism in general. I got on the web, looked at some sites, piddled around, and just came out feeling upset. It wasn’t because the ideas they had were necessarily upsetting. It was that so many were content with mocking those of faith and belittling both it and their intelligence. It hurt me deep inside to think that I could be like that, that I could snub someone simply because they essentially had something I did not. I don’t want to be like that. Why is it that, in the atheist world it seems, to have religion, or even some notion of “otherness” out there, is equivalent to being stupid and naive? Why is the idea of an intelligent system of faith so foreign to these people? For that matter, why do they demand that every aspect of a person’s faith be probed and scrutinized methodically, and if you don’t probe as they wish you are afraid that you’ll find your beliefs are unmerited? Do they think that no one’s beliefs will stand up to the all mighty god of Science? While science has a lot of answers, and I rely on the knowledge that it brings the world, I still can’t shake the belief that Logic and Faith are two completely different, yet not necessary antithetical, modes of thinking. Logic is in the brain, while Faith is somewhere locked in the soul, the heart, or the mind. I refuse to believe right now that atheism the is the logical path of the intellectual.

For now, I will continue to research not only atheism, but other religions as well to see what the world has to offer. There are so many things that science has yet been unable to answer. Maybe religion has some clues.

-Liridon

Bonjour, Tout le Monde!

Welcome to INTROSPECTION: A Life of Inner Existence. My name is Liridon. This will be a blog designed to give the world my random thoughts about life, love, and trying to find some sanity out there. I’m a gay man in central Oklahoma just starting life after college, still trying to figure out who I am and what I want in the world. Throughout my posts you’ll most likely find poems or short stories, random thoughts, quotes, or ideas, and you’ll get to hear about my travails in the world of dating (if I can manage to get one, that is. lol) I’d love it if you would post your own thoughts or whatever, because it’ll give me something more to think about.  As evidenced by the name of my blog, I tend to do a lot of thinking, so feel free to get my gears cranking.

Here’s to the start of a new life, and to the start of my very first blog!

-Liridon