Saturday, January 30, 2010

Surrogates

Maybe I'm just easy, but Surrogates just blew my mind.

It raised a lot of thought-provoking questions (would you have sex with a robot? As a robot?) and also had a iRobot like story.

The ending also wrapped everything up so nicely.

Man, that was awesome.

I haven't been this pumped after watching a movie since I saw Taken.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Dealing with Death

As a follow up to the last post, below are two excerpts from When Bad Things Happen to Good People by (Harold Kushner) that help me grapple with premature deaths:

"If the bad things that happen to us are the results of bad luck, and not the will of God, what makes bad luck happen?" I was stumped for an answer. My instinctive response was that nothing makes bad luck happen; it just happens. But I suspected that there must be more to it than that... Can you accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe? Some people cannot handle that idea. They look for connections, striving desperately to make sense of all that happens. They convince themselves that God is cruel, or that they are sinners, rather than accept randomness. Sometimes, when they have made sense of ninety percent of everything they know, they let themselves assume that the other ten percent makes sense also, but lies beyond the reach of their understanding. But why do we have to insist on everything being reasonable? (pg. 46)...

Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. A bullet has no conscience; neither does a malignant tumor or an automobile gone out of control. That is why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone. No matter what stories we were taught about Daniel or Jonah in Sunday School, God does not reach down to interrupt the workings of laws of nature to protect the righteous from harm. (pg. 58)

The Unknown, Unknown

Every few months I get the itch to change the name of this journal to reflect the current flavors in my life. But then, about just as often, something completely unexpected, an "unknown unknown," or a blackswan, enters my life. It's usually after the initial suprise, or"holy s#$%!" phase wears off, that I remind myself that: "we live in an uncertain world." It's not a judgment about good or evil, right or wrong, but a mantra that alleviates the echoing questions in my mind and helps me accept the randomness in life.

I found out today that a family acquaintance passed away unexpectedly on Friday. He was a year younger than me (~23 yrs old), a friendly trumpet player in the high school marching band, and died from complications associated with his diabetes. I am both shocked and saddened by his death.

We live in an uncertain world.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Life Choices...

In every life we much choose between the following two philosophies as presented in the following quotes:

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” - Ayn Rand (John Galt's Oath from Atlas Shrugged)

Vs.

"Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved." - Victor Frankl (Sharing how he survived Auschwitz from Man's Search for Meaning)


...

I don't think Ayn Rand knew what she was missing.