11-VII-2005.
This on UA, sparring with one of the cop brothers.
Science is man's attempt to explain. There are thousands of "scientific facts" that are no longer "facts".
I agree completely, except with the weird use of quotation marks. Any scientific fact is under scrutiny, and can be disproven by another scientific fact at any time. It grows.
God is unchanged even yet.
It doesn't grow.
It's yours to believe or not. The Bible only says one thing about that . . . "the fool says in his heart there is no God."
And I'm supposed to believe in this guy who says I'm a fool if I don't? That's an insult from his side, and he's a fool if he thinks he'll get me to his camp that way. It's undignified.
Personally, I think people who claim there is no god have reached that conclusion so they can have no rules. If there is no God, then who can say what is right or wrong?
Right and wrong are social categories, not metaphysical, no matter how does any religious hierarchy claim it has a monopoly on the definition.
Hedonism rules the day for those.
Ah, the old echoes of "without religion there is no morality". No monopoly there, either. I have my moral values, derived from my upbringing and experience, not dictated from any pulpit. And I'm sticking to them not because anyone blackmailed me with eternal flames and whatever, but because I think they're the right thing to have, if I want to live among the people.
Hedonism? What's the purpose? After a life of binges and orgies, what trace on Earth would one have left? Trail of beer corks and used condoms? Life is more than just partying.
I contend that all laws are based on morality. Murder, rape, robbery, burglary, etc. are all prohibited by laws that have a moral underpinning. That underpinning comes from religion.
Then how come that the same things were illegal in socialist countries as well, with punishments pretty much the same as elsewhere? These countries were utterly unreligious, to various extents, and they took great care to mention no religion in their laws.
...
This is my first non-selling point with pretty much every religion I know of. The hubris. The claim that they have The Truth and that all other religions are wrong. And then their urge to spread. Sounds so big-money capitalistic: you shall buy only from us, and more and more people should be buying from us. What are they doing, playing monopoly or being spiritual?
The AC died. The outside unit is not quite outside, it takes a hole in the rear wall, in the corner, where its grille faces outward. Its fan just sprouted flames all of a sudden, and we promptly turned it off. Nothing caught fire, we were lucky that it happened while we were in the kitchen and saw it start.
I took a few minutes to sign off from David, find the proper screwdrivers and dismantle the thing. It's a cylinder fan, two-parter with one axle, and probably as old as the house itself. Something quite simple from 1977, General Electric (electric what?). Picked up the phonebook and looked up who sells parts. After lunch we just got in the car and went to buy one. Amazingly, they did have it (I wrote down the make and the model and the year) but no, can't sell. I'm not a certified repair guy. Why would I need a certificate to replace a fan, it's four screws and one cable. It's on an AC, you need to be certified to handle freon. This is a bloody fan, c'mon, doesn't even have any tubes nor valves at all. Nope, we must not sell you anything AC related unless you show us the certificate, it's the law.
Well, fuckit. We survived a few days as the heat was mounting, using our old fans that we still kept around from the last year. Found some guys who'll replace the whole outside unit (the inside unit in the attic is just a grille and a fan) for paltry 5000$, but that'll be a reversible, which would act as a heater in winter.
They had to completely remove the old unit, so I was left with a gaping hole in the wall. That I closed, for a time being [there are many of those time beings, don't know which one], with a piece of sheet rock, left over from the bathroom.
Soon thereafter, actually the same day (15th), we noticed water dripping from the ceiling in the hall by the bathroom door. Exactly where the inside unit is in the attic. Went up and saw that the squirrels have made several holes in the hose which takes the condensated water from it. It's a thick tractor hose... Well, as a stopgap measure, I took a piece of garden hose, attached that with duct tape, and led it to the upper bathroom, into the shithole, which was open anyway until we lay the tiles and mount the next crapper. It was dripping regularly. I'll fix this better in august, when we return. So far, I at least achieved no more wetting of the clapboards in the ceiling and the walls.
Mentions: David Krakovski, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian