It's 'Go-Go' not 'Cry-Cry'

I finished Catch-22 today, I remember the book turning morbid, horrifying and unenjoyable towards the end. And it does, but the ending itself I think summarises beautifully the principle. I would infact advocate replacing the bible with Catch-22 for the betterment of Society.
Here now I will say are three books that should be permanantly on school syllabus to help facilitate what may be called 'an education'

1. Catch-22
2. 1984
3. The Selfish Gene.

The only one I haven't read, is the selfish gene, but soon I feel I must. Today may be a new record for me, as I post three posts in one day, but I do so because tomorrow morning I go to a country where I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post on my blog at all. Should that be the case at least my sight will have this Kobe Bryant widget that will update in my absense.

But it is about Kobe Bryant and not about my thought, Kobe is however a pretty exciting player, edging closer and closer to Jordan with each successive performance.

Right now though I'm excited about 'Individualism' though, and it came about from trying to explain Ricardo Semler to Miki and flicking through Dawkin's 'the Selfish Gene' in the Takamatsu book store, in which Dawkins seems to lead towards how seemingly altuistic behaviour may actually on the whole be selfish when viewed from the perspective of genes.
All summed up by the phrase of Ricardo Semler I like 'What would you rather have? The tail of an elephant or all of an ant' to explain the counter intuitive logic, of instead of retaining all profits for yourself, to let the employees actually share in the profits and decide what to do with them. He also allows a lot of his employees to set their own wages and so forth.
The same underlying principle was explained to me by Brenton when I revealed my ignorance about dividends, to which he said you had to give investors dividends, paid out of company profits because otherwise they had no incentive to invest in the company. By giving away your profits to investors you raise capital in the company, enabling furthergrowth.
But I digress, Individualism seems to be the answer and builds on my inverted Golden Rule of 'Demand for yourself what you would do onto others' which in turn, is like Eleanore Roosevelt's 'No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.' which is one of my favorite succinct lines in history. And if a bunch of people consent to your superiority by consenting to their own inferiority, then I believe you are best off just consenting it right back at them, but be thankful for the complement.
So that is where my curiosity leads me next in terms of pursuits of the head, and in terms of pursuits of the head, Japan has been invaluable.
Yesterday I said goodbye to Misaki, and felt good, two people frustrated endlessly by our own caring and effection to eachother. As Damian pointed out, Love is not always a positive emotion.
Except that I am sure we will both gain by it.
After Misaki and I spent the best part of our remaining time together arguing ineffectually about why we don't want to be together, we ended up parked in a car on the Takamatsu warf, a dirty body of water possessed of its own beauty, much like how we met, in a bar on the waterfront of the Yarra, an filthy river I wouldn't swim in if you paid me.
And the big factor is how slight the chance that brought me so much pleasure and so much grief. Our meeting in the end was chance and almost not to be, and yet I find myself a long way from home, in a foreing country in a Town I never would have heard of if I didn't feel sorry for Miho turning 30 and thus extremely hungover from my own birthday party the night before, resolved to do Miho a favor and turned up to her party, where Miho negated her own applaudable efforts in pre-selling me to Misaki by introducing me to Misaki and then commenting on how kawaii she was, at which point I was overcome with fear that I might end up attracting some hello kitty into my life, that would fill every corner of it with cuteness.
But here I was, deeply upset to say bye to her. It was reassuringly awkward for the both of us, in one of those 70 goodbye hugs, neither of us, wanting a goodbye to be our last one.
But alas now I am sitting in a net-cafe, bored with Japan and eager to fly tomorrow to another country where by chance I have a 'brother' named Jerry, who by chance happened to be in my tutorial with my most hated teacher, who had failed me because my friends refused to let me join their group and I had adopted a proposal to let anyone join my group. I happened to be sitting next to a guy called Troy, and behind Jerry and his friend Felix.
Jerry and Felix begged the class openly to work with 'local students' and after turning around and joining our group, and nobody else wanting to work with the likes of Jerry or Felix, we ended up in a group with Jerry, Felix, Moggie and Andy.
And the next week Troy was gone, so I had four English as a Second Language speakers in a group, and me. And I did better in that subject than any others I have taken, and my grades kept improving as I finished my degree because I kept working with them.
And now from a chance meeting I have at least 2 rich backers from soon to be the most economically significant market in the world and 2 others of indeterminate wealth.
The moral of the story is, that people are tremendously good to know, and one should build one's network indiscriminately. Kindness and altruism really are the best policy.
One hand washes the other.
Japan has so many problems it is wonderful for someone like me to come here. I hold Misaki is wrong in equating enabling with helping, but am satisfied in my efforts to at least create a strong precedent for her relationships. I am sad I cannot keep her, but she seemed impressed with my idea to package and sell 'baby misakis' as a cute toy, so all is not lost.
I guess in the end, you get full value for all your efforts, you just may not know what form they will take.
I do wish though to say, I have lived in Japan for almost 3 months now and not had to touch my savings, which is achievement in itself. I couldn't have done it without the generosity of Chie and her family, whose grandma may have recieved her last hug from anybody from me, and possibly was why she cried when I left, that's seems to be the effect I have on Grandma's. Or the Taki's with whom were invaluable in their enthusiasm for debating the various aspects of the new things I learnt about Japan every day, even if looking into their mothers driblling mouth was offputting.
And Brenton who I realised is my most common subject matter in my artistic pursuit of drawing, most offen appearing with a cock in his mouth. He put me up in his flat sacrificing his personal space in an already cramped and claustrophobic Tokyo.
I appreciate you all, and Misaki, for sacrificing what time her boss left her to sleep so as to spend time with me. Those that have little can be most generous of all it seems. So thankyou Japan.
My desire to get out of here, seems matched by a desire to stay forever that I don't quite understand. Its been fun.

Work Explained (With a Matrix No Less)

Today I had an epiphany, but now it escapes me. Actually I just remembered it 'Henry George: The Greatest Thing To Happen To Sex' so I'll note that as a precursor to a future blog post. You can read the wikipedia article on him, and try and guess if you like, but you may aswell slack off right now and just wait for me to do all the thinking and writing for you.
What I was thinking about before my epiphany was this quote I stumbled across from Theodore Roosevelt:

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Let's assume this to be true, and not contest it. It seems on the whole to be true. One time for Brenton's birthday a bunch of us went to Cumberland River on the ocean rode and slept in tents and went fishing. The fish were biting such that all you had to do was cast out a line and reel it back in. Brenton complained that we were catching too many fish, the excitement was gone. For me lacking the patience in the most part to ever go fishing on my own initiative, it seemed to be the ideal type of fishing. I would probably be the kind of sadistic bastard who would shoot fish in a barral though, so on the whole part working hard at fishing at least varified by Brenton's account is a greater reward than not working hard at fishing.
Okay, but the post is supposed to explain work.
So if this quote we take to be true, then by rights if we invert it to its polar opposite that phrase to should be true:

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance not to
work hard at work not worth doing.

So we have two good outcomes. And two variables, or conditions for the 'Far and away best prize' 1. Working Hard & 2. Work worth doing both need to be satisfied for work to be good and rewarding.

I like things with two conditions because it means I can use a Matrix, Matrixis are fancy diagnostic tools to enable us to evaluate our decisions or actions and most people can understand them so they tend to pop up everywhere.

Here's mine.

Let me explain the quadrants to you in agonising detail:
If we go around clockwise from top left the quadrants are 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Quadrant 1: Work Hard at Work Worth Doing

Well this is obvious, if your job is worthwhile, it means the results of your labors are of value to someone else, or to yourself. Examples might be, cooking a meal, performing surgery, scholarly study, exercise etc. Therefore energy put into the work creates value, thus thusly its own reward. Pretty much a no brainer, and the fundamental yardstick of all business ROI or Return On Investment.

Quadrant 2: Slack Off at Work Worth Doing

So the first half of the equation is known, you are engaged in cooking a meal, performing surgery, scholarly study, exercise etc. All that's missing is the energy or the effort. You give up on the surgery stating that you are 'bored' and leave early to play World of Warcraft. You can't be bothered walking to the shops, so you just use soysauce as a topping for the waffles and when customers complain you throw a tantrum go home and play World of Warcraft. You are enrolled in University and engaged in study for which you are the primary benificiary, and you break your study schedule up thusly: attendance rate at most 10%, exam preparation 10 minutes study per hour, 50 minutes per hour picking herbs in World of Warcraft. You wake up to your Alarm at 6AM in the morning and get dressed to go running, but find yourself a little chilly and sit down to play World of Warcraft.
In this case you simply forego the benifits of the worthwhile activity, by not investing any energy into it. Here the ROI goes down a bit, because arguably you aren't making an investment. Except we always are making an investment, and that is time. So slacking off when there is something worthwhile to be done, costs us our time available to work at what is worthwhile. The time is gone and it doesn't come back. And furthermore we can't make more time. To ever achieve the worthwhile activity, we are going to have to chose between it and other worthwhile activities with our time in the future.

Quadrant 3: Slack off at work not worth doing.

I am sure by now, I have been kicked out of the Guild I joined in World of Warcraft almost a year ago now, I played World of Warcraft for a grand total of 4 weeks. Whilst in general I am a fan of video games, what makes World of Warcraft bad is that it is an MMOG or MMPOG which is Massively Multi-player online game. And as it turns out, I hate all those people I was forced to play with, talking about noobs and chuck norris all the time. I quit because I didn't want to associate with people I don't like, and frankly wished ill things of, instead of spending time working with people I do like. But there are other examples of where I succeed in this quadrant, I am incredibly slack at digging holes and filling them in again, I also slack off at memorising facts about Gundam, I refuse to toe the line on producing wool, infact I'm so slack at producing unwanted wool that I don't even get up at the crack of dawn not to produce wool.
This is simply the complete opposite of Quadrant 1, made true by the same principles of Quadrant 1, that if the work is of no value to anybody, then any effort exerted in its cause will lead to waste. It's the Return on Investment. Interesting to note here is the wool example I just sighted. It demonstrates that 'worthwhile' is not a static concept. It is possible that producing wool is a worthwhile endeavor, like the wool jumper I am wearing now. It is cold outside and a wool jumper keeps me warm. I have it in white which is a nice neutral shade that is easy to coordinate with. Therefore the farmer that owns the sheep that produced the wool that was made into a jumper, that was purchased wholesale by a store that was bought by a consumer and then donated to a second hand store and then bought by me, were for the entirety of the value chain, engaged in worthwhile work. I do not however have need of any more wool jumpers. I do not need 10 wool jumpers for example. Much less 100. But if the farmer and the sheep and the store and so on, where really into hard work, they would produce 100 jumpers for every 1 I actually need. Bringing us to Quadrant 4.

Quadrant 4: Work Hard at work not worth doing.

I could explain this quadrant simply as 'World of Warcraft' but I choose not to in case you don't know what World of Warcraft is, or the useless people who play it call it 'WoW' who knows someday in the future, like Golf or other shitty pastimes played by people who run corporations, people who play WoW will run big companies and it will be considered a legitimate way to build relationships and thus 'work worth doing' by helping your boss get to Level 60 you may be fasttracking your career. Early signs don't indicate this though.
More poigniant examples are the construction workers of Japan, and this is the real fallacy of GNP, GDP or anything else, it measures worthwhileness on expenditure, therefore if you spend a heap of money digging holes and filling them up again your economy appears to grow.
And as said, you are always wasting time, when it comes to doing something not worthwhile above something that is worthwhile. This one is worse than slacking off on something that is worthwhile in my opinion because it is so often hailed as virtuous. It is people thinking in terms not of a two x two matrix, but a 1 x 1 Matrix, or work hard.
I could go out and run around a track from sun up to sun down tomorrow, the next day and the day after that. I probably would simply just destroy my body and never do anything more than get into the Guinness World Records, infact the Guiness World Records is really if anything a celebration of hard work at things that aren't worthwile. Like 'Longest Beard' and 'Longest Fingernails' a person gets etched into fame forever for really doing nothing but disabling themselves. As Lenny said in the simpsons 'Its like a lottery that rewards stupidity' and this is pretty much what a 'good' government in current terms does. But to truly appreciate it, you have to go to Tokyo, and watch a construction crew rip up a perfectly good piece of asphalt and then lay it down again, all in a single day. And walk past them two, and marvel at the complex system of flags and battons, of signs and cosigns between uniformed-hard hat wearing employees where some traffic cones would have sufficed.

So in summary, I agree with Ted, and give myself a further pat on the back for not putting any effort into anything of no value to anyone. I object though maybe to the use of the word 'hard' for effort should simply be no more and no less what is required to get the job done, which in essence is covered in that second criteria of 'worthwhile' as in any effort that is more than was sufficient to get the job done is contributed not to the 'worthwhile' part of work but the 'unworthwhile'. Now if only marketers didn't approach this problem by trying to figure at a way to sell more wool jumpers to people.

Why I Don't Miss Australia

Dicks like Dick Smith and articles like this one.

"Having a beer", and such candid intellectualism as Dick Smith's "He shouldn't make a cent out of it, he'd be absolutely crucified"
As far as I see it, Hicks doesn't 'owe' anyone an explanation. An explanation I'm much more interested in is what is the value of Australian citizenship if the government doesn't want to protect my rights as an Australian citizen? as demonstrated with Hicks.

Why I am a Hoarder (A Million Little Pieces of Crap)

The Native American, it was argued by a book I read, called Apache, had one distinct disadvantagein preserving its own interests. Its belief system. It presents a powerful case against superstition and religion.
Namely, that rocks, trees, rivers and everything have a spirit. That all outcomes are derived from devine will which is unquestionable. The book argued that if one were to go into battle and lose, it was simply not in ones medicine to win. This conflicts somewhat with what I understand of their superiority in developing horsemanship, but otherwise the book simply argued that what killed Native American culture more than anything else, was the near complete absense of the empirical system an ability to test theroes against outcomes based on observable evidence.
An ability to distinguish correlation from causation in other words.
But enough about them, what about me?
I believe subconsciously, that my things have feelings, that they are worthy of my care. I mean someone may agree with me that they would be hardpressed to rip the head of their beloved childhood toy Mr. Bunnykins just to prove that things don't have feelings.
But I feel incredible sadness and a sense of loss, of future potential when confronted with the decision to toss or keep any old piece of shit.
Packing up my room to move house is a very emotionally taxing process for me, particularly because my happiness tends to directly correlate to my sense of laziness.
But if I come across some card I picked up from some restaurant on some school trip 13 years ago where I bought a sandwhich that had a peice of bread that was brown and a piece of bread that was white and no choice either way, I find myself wanting to keep it, just in case I ever refer to it again.
I first became pragmatic about throwing shit out in year 12, where I was extremely honest with myself and admitted that I was never going to refer to the teachers photo copied handouts ever again. There is a tendancy in Year 12 to paranoidly hold on to everything in case it might appear on the exam. Better to throw everything out that isn't a past exam or private test paper, such as those produced by Neap.
Everything else, I just chucked it, often as soon as the class was out.
But that only extended to Teacher's emotional attachment in believing their handouts would be utilised by students, which I overrulled.
Come to anything personal, and I would hang on to it for dear life.
Clothing for example, by the time I moved out of brunswick I had about 7 pairs of shorts that I had stopped wearing because my house keys had chaffed their way through the pocket and my lose change could fall out.
But I couldn't bare the thought of them being orphans, left out in the cold, with nobody to care for them.
Eventually I chucked them.
Pete who now lives in my room's travel advice was 'pack light' and living out of a backpack is emotionally liberating I can tell you. Right now I am chucking out everything I don't need and/or haven't used on a basis so regular, I wish i could just wear a new McDonalds take away bag for underwear each day. Unfortunately the croth is not friendly and they don't have any bags that will sit on my hips.
I have learnt to pack my backpack first, and my larger hiking pack second. This is because if I end up throwing a heap of fucking leftover into my backpack, it will be heavy, whereas my hiking pack simply goes from station to station, room to room. I only heave it in 10-30 minute intervals.
But getting both as light as possible is the true aim, so when Japan hands me maps, brochures, glossy tickets, business cards, servietes, bag carrying bags, range catalogues, free foreign publication magazines, interesting souveniers and so forth. My immediate reaction is to toss it as soon as polite.
In nomadic life, which the American Indians and I do have in common, sometimes the best thing you can have, is not to have something.

Plush

At the RYLA reunion 2006(???) one of the camp coordinators spoke about how RYLA had changed her life. I was struck by her referring to several incidents of crisis that left her shut in her room thinking the world was a cruel and unfriendly place. I couldn't imagine anything so surprising ever happening to me, to imagine that suddenly my view of the world would shift so drastically as to result in a crisis.
Yet crisis I have had, and as a result very little sleep. I've been cruising along pretty cosy thus far on my self proclaimed 'warriors pilgrimage' but yesterday it all got to me, so I did what anybody would do, and climbed a mountain and listened to 'The Stone Temple Pilots' to make myself feel even worse. And almost immeadiately I felt much better.
The outcome of it all, was that yesterday was infact, a great day by all accounts. I hiked up a beautiful mountain, sat under a corragated roof in the rain, talked for 3 hours with my protoge and caught up on all sorts of news and managed I hope to have been again of more help to advancing her career.
I went to dinner at a fast food joint called Coco's who make curry, they are a franchise all over Japan. Takamatsu is a very friendly town. It is particularly good to be foreign in this town, because unlike Tokyo, Osaka or even Nagoya, foreigners are still a bit of a novelty. I see 1 or 2 other whiteys a day but I also get customarily asked 'may I sit here' in restaurants by teenagers wanting to talk to me at lunch and practice their english.
Up until Takamatsu the friendliest people I met in Japan was an Indian guy called mark who talked to me while waiting for my meal in Tokyo.
But at Coco's the waiter asked me how long I had been in Takamatsu in english and I responded in Japanese. I told her one week choosing to take her question literally which I realised was not her intention when she followed it up with 'how come your Japanese is so good?' obviously she had assumed that people only come to Takamatsu because they are forced to but I replied that long ago I had been an exchange student and then told her her english was really good. All in Japanese.
This lady was middle aged, short, dumpy, terrible teeth and one of the most beautiful people in Japan. She was really puffed up with pride at my compliment. And later in plain view I observed her ask her boss if she could talk to me when I had to pay for my meal.
And she really made me feel important. Her timing couldn't have been better really, because my crisis all oriented around Miki, from reading Straitjacket society, I was almost filled with horror at the viciousness of Japanese groupism, and insider/outsider status. I have alluded before that whilst in Toyota I became self consciouss that almost everything I was reading or discussing about Japan was bad. But overall my feelings were ill founded not to suggest that groupism in Japan isn't vicous, but that I was actually getting on my hosts nerves by talking about problems all the time. Almost everyone I have met in Japan have really been what makes Japan tolerable, they are like most human beings I find, sharp, thoughtful, caring and mature. They take the embarrasment of the construction state with good grace and humility, they engage in conversation and generally confirm a large part of what I am reading.
None have confirmed it more than Misaki though, and in turn have made it really hard for me to see her.
The crisis tripped off by her was basically this, I became conscious of what I had taken for granted and to placate her needed to accept that I was wrong about many things that I will go in to detail about a little later.
What really was the outcome of it all though, and the truly great day yesterday was, was that I realised the 'Golden rule' is back to front. Much like catch-22's inversion of 'Better to die on your feet than live on your knees' to 'Its better to live on your feet than die on your knees' which is certainly true of dodging the draft.
The Golden rule more or less is 'Do onto others as you have done onto you' this I now realise is completely flip flop, because it assumes altruism. That is a willingness to sacrifice or disadvantage ourselves in order that others be better off. What the Golden rule should infact be is 'Demand for yourself what you would do onto others' to which it is safe to assume altruism.
Japan has taught me this. Japan is all about the Golden rule. But the flaw with the golden rule, is that I would gladly tolerate a lot of shit that I would never wish on anybody else. For example, I don't mind catching a cold, or cleaning up some drunken idiots vomit. For the record I did vomit once and flee a drunken idiot at Dean's 21st. Possibly a contender for my most shameful night.
But the golden rule states that since I really don't mind the occasional throwing up on my floor, it is according to the Golden Rule perfectly acceptable for me to throw up on other people's floors since I really don't mind if they do it to me.
Japan though highlights this floor of the golden rule perfectly though. The Japanese are so caught up in morale compliance to the golden rule that it has becomes simply a culture of self sacrifice.
See if everyone gives of themself, sacrifices themself for the group, then everybody simply sacrifices. The Japanese are so generous, they give without recieving.
Case in point, Misaki earns $700 a month. Not pocket money, but her wage, what is her Job, working full time in a Jewellery store. Not a student, but doing actual work from 10 in the morning to 10 at night. That's a twelve hour day, and she works 6 days a week. Or rather the store is open 6 days a week, she works the day it is closed having meetings. Furthermore after hours it is perfectly acceptable for her boss to call her, or hold a meeting until 4 am because under the golden rule, he has no problem sleeping only 3 hours a day.
Misaki doesn't work for money, but was surprised when the owner of her company gave her an 'otoshidama' envelope of money.
But if Misaki is effectively 'on-call' 24-7 then you divide a month by days and then days by hour. 700 a month boils down to a wopping $1 an hour. If I can be callous Misaki is here to learn how this Jewellery company is so successful and makes so much profit, and in my view the answer is simple, Labor is typically the biggest expense of any business, and his labor costs $1 an hour. Misaki is not the only 'student' infact she is the senior most employee of the shop.
It is a business whose workers are effectively free.
Contrast with my Door to Door salesman job, I made no money, I made no money because I had a tendancy to make no sales. Whilst it is true to say I cost the company virtually nothing to employee, I also brought about no real benefits to them employing me.
I did learn a lot though, one thing that i hate door to door sales. And it helped me get later jobs just having done 'the hard yards' the next job was paid and I made sales.
The whole time my parents urged me to quit, concerned for my welfare.
Yesterday misaki had a cold and we met for breakfast whilst I talked about my plans for my organisation and tried to explain all the ideas I am excited about, and she had frankly had enough of my shit.
Sadly my whole existence undermines why Misaki is happy to work for a dollar an hour, with no vacations, no sick leave, no free time and variable sleeping time. Because she is 'helping' she is sacrificing herself for the sake of her family 'which is in crisis'. Keep in mind the 5 day work week was introduced in May, 1992 in Japan. They also have laws for overtime and maximum overtime allowances a day. The catch is that Japanese organisations put a lot of stock in voluntary overtime and other meaningless displays of 'loyalty' it is all underpinned by a demerit system. An employee like I was at Honda would never get away with working in Japan because my whole strategy was to minimise useless displays of loyalty and dedication and focus on trying to achieve effective results and develop further capacity to do so. I did it so I could selfishly lead a luxurious life outside of work.
In Japan, there is more merit in arriving first and leaving last than anything you actually achieve in between.
The logic of my position is much like Alfred Sloan Jr. of General Motor's view 'the business of business is business' that is, to be effective. In Japan, the business of business is sacrifice.
Misaki helping her folks from my perspective has no meaning, her employer is breaking the law, her family want to 'continue the business at all costs' a one generation busines, her mothers, it is not important that the business make profits as such, just that she remains in charge, and her daughters inherit it.
If misaki is taking back lessons like 'pay the employees $1 an hour' and 'no vacation ever, and they can sleep when I give them permission' now again despite what I have learnt from other life experiences, I placidly try to support Misaki in her dream of helping her family to my own detriment of enjoying life with Misaki. I do so out of respect for Misaki's love for her family.
And here's where the inverted golden rule comes in. When I catch up with Misaki, there is nothing to stop her mother from calling and talking to Misaki for an hour or more whilst I patiently wait for her to finish. Now I would 'do onto others' by respecting them, respecting their time and relationships, and as far as I could see, Misaki's mother had absolutely no respect for my time or relationship with Misaki.
The simple truth of their position is that I don't matter, my time is not important, my money is not important, my thoughts, opinions and feelings are not important.
Both Misaki's boss and Misaki's mother are mutual in agreement, that I am not important. What is important, is selling jewellery. Jewellery must be sold 'no matter the cost' even if the cost is as high as $1 an hour.
And here's the thing, the ridiculousness of being a millionaire, or even a billionare and working 21 hours a day and sleeping the balance, with no annual leave, no sick leave etc is ridiculous plainly to you or I. But what I don't understand and am plainly incorrect about is how noble it is. By paying nothing for an incredible amount of work, over an inconsequential luxury good in a saturated market - the boss is really highly moral, and so are everyone else, by taking all the money himself and never spending it enjoying life, he provides his employees with the opportunity to sacrifice themselves for the good of noone, incredibly noble. One is a fool or simply 'doesn't understand' to suggest it may infact be an incredible waste.
I can make a strong case using the fine western institutions of 'reason' and debate, and I am happy to, and that is where Miyamoto Masao is invaluable. A psychoanalyst who wrote 'Straitjacket society' concleded from his experience within the ministry of health, a microcosm of Japanese society at large, that the Japanese mind is that of an infant, unable to deal with emotions in adult terms. Furthermore the Japanese ideal is actually masochistic, which is were pain becomes a reward in and of itself.
I had little evidence of this though up until Misaki, Madoka was a volunteer when I knew her in highschool and university, has never subscribed to fashion or groupism of any kind, sees the good in people, stands up for herself and regards other people as very important. Her parents likewise enjoy interesting and stimulating conversation, are supportive of their children and respected me as an adult and didn't coddle me, letting me butter my own toast. A true show of familiarity with a guest.
Chie likewise is very progressive, and whilst having to work two jobs for her sons education has a range of her own interests mostly relating to jasmine her dog and is highly dissatisfied with the average 'japanese lot' particularly that of a woman, and furthermore will openly acknowledge shameful policies of the construction economy.
Misaki uses all the tactics highlighted by Miyamoto Masao as symptoms of the arrested development of Japanese people.
That is:
1. stifling debate or conversation on the pretext that it causes negative emotions such as jealousy and anger, and that these are to be avoided at all costs.
2. Insisting that "I don't understand" with the actual intent being that "I can't understand" as the standard response to all questions. I of course can't understand because the answer to any question is that "I don't understand" to elaborate, the reason Misaki for example 'had to beg her parents to stay in Australia' rather than doing what her visa permitted, her university permitted, I permitted and anyone else would do and simply just stay in Australia regardless of her parants permission is that her mother was using emotional blackmale, and regards Misaki as her property, that is that Misaki is to obey her parents. For misaki to explain this to me though violates tactic number one, which is avoiding negative emotions, like resentment for her parents, therefore she cannot explain so I cannot understand, simply hypothesise or infer.
3. Inability to handle negative emotions, when criticised I feel bad, I might reflect upon the criticism and then either accept or reject it, I would however much prefer to hear it. Misaki however feels incredibly disrespected by any criticism and that I have made a major breach of ettiquette. She will get so angry that she will storm off or lash out like a child throwing a tantrum. And these needn't be any criticisms of her personally or even directly, they can be about the Japanese government, or culture, or anything.
4. Sanction for lies, there is no personal responsibility in Japan, and this takes two forms as subpoints:
i. apologies, if a person in America smashes their car by accident into the back of another vehicle, they are expected to apologise, the offending driver is also obliged to pay for the damages. In japan an apology is a socially binding contract, it is the responsibility of the victim to accept it, and the offender is under absolutely no obligation to modify their behaviour in any way or pay any damages.
Misaki for example will apologise to me, every time she is late and every time she answers the phone to have a long conversation with her mother. As such I am all squared away with my apology and she continues to be late and answer the phone whenever her mother rings to talk about what was said by everyone that day.
ii. The boss takes responsibility for the subordinates fault, Masao in Straightjacket society claimed full responsibility for publishing his expose in the Asahi Shinbun, a leading newspaper. His boss who had no involvement in the decision at all however took responsibility for it to the powers that be. Thus Masao was held in contempt for putting his boss in this position despite his willingness to absolve his boss and take responsibility, simply meaning that he was placed in his boss's debt for no reason at all. Thus any attempt at independance from the group is seen as 'causing trouble for everyone' individual responsibility by being disbarred through such acts of unwelcome 'altruism' put people under a social obligation to toe the line.
Interestingly, from RYLA I first learnt the BOBS technique which is how to effectively complain in order to actually be heard, and the O in BOBS stands for 'Own your point of view' that is to use tactics like generalising and saying 'everyone is upset by this' is ineffective because nobody has the ability to speak on behalf of everyone and claims like this are easily refutable, which means your problem is ignored. But referring to everybody is standard practice in Japan, therefore an individual has almost no ability to affect change in Japan. One simply cannot act on oneself's behalf, it is all done on everyones behalf.

But supposing I do accept Misaki's logic and the masochistic interpretation of the traditional Golden Rule, what does that mean?

It means that I am not important, what I think, feel and want are not important. No person is important. Individuals must disregard their interests for the sake of Everybody.

It means that making money is not important, what is important is pain and suffering, one should not expect to take a share in the fruits of ones labor but instead be glad to labor.

It means that beliefs do not have to be based on reason, reason is not important what is important is to avoid the embarassment of mistakes, and that means ignoring problems that cause suffering and pain, because everybody should be glad they are helping and not being embarassed or suffering.

It means that wellbeing is not important, ettiquette is important. Pain and suffering should be tolerated politely and with minimum inconvenience to anybody else.

It means that thinking is not important, what is important is to obey. Thinking creates conflict, obeying harmony.

It means outcomes are not important, intent is important. One's family is helped through intent, not through actual results.

I could go on forever, but this was my crisis, to avoid hurting misaki, I had to disregard my own interests as unimportant. And I simply can't do it.
I want to be important, just like I find misaki important enough to visit, see the problem was that I had been very generous with Misaki's mother and employer in respecting them through my behaviour. I had done onto them as I would have done onto me. And all that resulted was that without so much as a 'thanks' they simply refused Misaki any annual leave, call and interrupt my conversations with her and so forth.
Whereas if I demanded they afford me the selfsame respect that I would afford them, I wouldn't lose and neither would they. we would all treat eachother respectfully.
So after realising how unimportant I was, and having a self indulgent crisis on top of a mountain listening to Plush by the Stone Temple Pilots, I returned to find at Cafe Coco's a friendly delightful lady whose boss respectfully granted her request to take the bill. And of course I smiled and treated her with respect, just as I expect them to treat me. And I felt important and I bet she did too.
How immoral of us.

We suck at this

Of course who am I to judge. Just about nobody, I'm someone and someone is better than noone, usually but not always. Somebody though is important. I may say that somebody like me, may be in a situation where it would be better for everyone if I was nobody. Like being in a disciplinarian teacher's classroom, who despite imposing strickt discipline on his students takes about 20 minutes on average to answer a question. The bell rings and he says any questions? Everyone is to remain to hear the response to a question and I have a question. From the class perspective who we safely assume would rather be outside enjoying their break, in this case me being nobody is better than me being somebody, or as the case may be anybody.
Do I raise my hand or not?
If I have a genuine gap in understanding, and getting an answer to my question is important, I should be able to obtain that gap and make myself more complete. Here is where I must confess to have absolutely no understanding of utilitarianism. The greatest good for the greatest number and all that.
I would simply suggest that the individual in this case can be protected from the tyranny of the majority in a simpler matter and that is for the teacher not to design the situation so the masses suffer to satisfy an individual. It would be simple for the teacher to say something to the effect of 'if you have any questions, please come and see me yourself. The rest of you may go.' And that is what we call win-win.
Anyway I may as well confess that blogging is not good communication, and my writing here is very prosey, or possibly more correctly, crap. On the few occassions I've actually read my blog, I have been appalled by my own writing. But for me, it is better to write something over nothing, it is very effective for me and know that I would write this blog if nobody ever read it and in those terms it is a success.
Ironically I have been listening at length to podcasts from manager-tools who focus specifically on how to be effective. Recently I was going over their performance review podcasts and they made a point which was interesting to me. It was about the nature of the scale used to determine performance achievement.
You have two types of scales as far as I know, relative and absolute. Relative is probably the one most of my friends and everyone really would know from school and University. Your Enter Score and Exam results are Normally distributed over all the results of the sitting students. That is my result placed me in a certain percentile of student performance, or how well I performed on my Year 12 exams was in terms of how poorly or how well everybody else sitting Year 12 exams was.
Absolute might be something of a scale like in the Game Point Blank, the game where you had to shoot stuff. Say their were a hundred bottles your performance would be in terms of an absolute scale. You wouldn't get a percentile rank based on the performance of other shooters, you would shoot 100 bottles or less.
From memory point blank may have used a relative scale or some other grading system now that I think about it.
Anyway how do I want to be measured? I think I want to be measured in absolute terms. I am not content to be measured just in terms of my relative distance from the worst manager/leader/professional in the world. I find it unethical.
I find it unethical because I could sound good when in fact I am pretty bad.
For example, most businesses are not good. Any industry may have hundreds or even thousands of firms competing in its market. But most consumers can only remember a very small group of select brands, or firms out of them. And then statistically speaking given any particular market the brand on top makes the majority of the total money to be had, and then down the ladder in diminishing returns.
A lot of leaders, managers and whatnot I don't think it is a stretch to conclude, probably are in over their heads, doing tremendous damage and whatnot.
I'm not going to single anybody out, but what that means for a relative scale is if average management (that is the average competency of all managers) is actually below competency, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the top managers or top 5% are the only ones to achieve competency. What's that mean for a relative scale. It could mean that even if your in the top 30% you might still be incompetent or ill suited to your role.
Or you could take an absolute scale, which would still in my view be pretty relative but you might go about it by selecting the best leader/manager of all time and then mark everyone down from their.
Who the greatest leader of all time is open to debate, you have Gandhi and Abe Lincoln up their of course, someone like Drucker might put forward Sloan Jr. or the dude from Bell Telephone Company. Jim Collins talks about Level 5 leadership and in his way probably has the closest thing to an absolute scale as you get.
Something tells me though that there is something beyond Level 5. Hence the weakness of absolute scales. Level 5 more or less is that 5% of the relative scale.
That is its incredibly rare for one to actually reach it.
One thing that slapped me in the face that wasn't a dick recently was from my readings, it started with some critical works of Japanese culture like Straightjacket Society, Dogs and Demons and Shutting Out the Sun. In there I found quotes by Abe Lincoln in a lot of places so I started reading up on Abe Lincoln and then Mark Twain. I've also reread 1984 and Catch-22, I have to say Catch-22 in my mind is the book in that it is one of the few books I've ever read possibly the only one where almost every line, every paragraph is pure gold.
What I found was almost universal contempt for the powers that be, and then there's Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky comes from one end of the spectrum on capatilism when he says things like:

Personally I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -- there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy."

And it rung back to Ricardo Semler's observation that whilst democracy is lauded as the best system of government available, you almost never find it in business. He set out to create a natural and democratic workplace. Did he succeed?
You judge why don't you. I get a feeling though, tickling my balls is that what all this indicates is that influence and power are not the same thing. I know power is defined as 'the ability to act or do' and wiktionary describes influence as one and the same just about -

The power to affect, control or manipulate something or someone; the ability to change the development of fluctuating things such as conduct, thoughts or decisions; the status of being able to dictate the actions or behaviors of an object or person; moral or political power over a person or group; ascendancy.

But I suspect one can be a leader without being powerful at all, or powerful in much more different dimensions than traditionally thought. Gandi stands out as an example. His tactic specifically was as it appears to me almost a judo principle of using the opponents strength against them, that was British power was based on a military monopoly, their identity was caught up in their own belief of moral superiority. Gandhi undermined their identity and their power over India effectively collapsed.
But such contradictions are still rife, Noam Chomsky's most striking passage thus far in hedgemony or survival was his allusion to the dualism of the US foreign policy. That the war in Iraq was about regime change and 'bringing democracy to the world' whilst simultaneously being happy to criticise the Turkish government at the outbreak of the war by listening to the will of the people (demos in greek) which overwhelmingly (95%) did not want Turkey to be used as a launching base by US forces. Democracy is bad in Turkey, and the Turkish government is weak because it listens to the will of the people, but good for Iraq?
That's the next step, in my series of steps, in a nutshell. My recognition that truly great leaders, actually empower people, and are powerful because of it. Ricardo Semler allows the employees of Semco far more freedom to determine their own careers, working conditions, compensation and so forth and he also removed himself from official power. He created a lasting democracy that is also a highly successful business, with highly satisfied participants.
Then you have Abe Lincoln, who actually stopped himself from interfering in the war, recognising Ulysses S Grant's right to actually do the job he was appointed to do. He shared power with the Slaves, a first step to be sure but he simply did not have to. This did though fit in with his vision of the US becoming a truly great nation. He unified it, surrendering half the country to win it back, and complete power over a race of people and eventually his own life.
I doubt manager-tools would endorse the view, but they do certainly regard the foundation of management to be an ethical profession. As such I think development as a leader has to be fundamentally ethical. Ethics is hard, but I am trying to come up with a meaningful absolute scale by which to aspire my development. And I have almost nothing to offer.
Suffice to say I recognise that I started off as a Grade E leader, using my own scale. This grade was obtained due in large part to my genes and priveledge of birth, I am intelligent, and born one of the wealthiest people in the world. I had access to a good education which trained me in critical thinking, adversarial debate, power and influence. This made me good at winning. It is only with much passage of time that I have since graduated to a D level leader where I currently reside.
This is based on my knowledge of how easilly ineffective I was relying on being smart, critical, assertive and political savvy is. Infact success resting on those laurels is in my view really a failure. I think level D is becoming conscious of interests other than your own, and attempting to satisfy as many individual interests as one can in an ethical manner. It is to utilise ones capacity not for personal gain, but lasting gain for multiple benificieries.
And that's as far as I have, if I knew what C (a pass) was I'd go there, in the meantime i'll keep digging.
Maybe its something like this guy though. Lions are pretty cool.

An Open Letter to the Agents of Change

Dear Agents of Change,

Congratulations on your victories, be they incremental or complete. I was glad Obama when you won the Iowa nomination, like this incremental victory it may be a step towards incremental change. Certainly Hillary Clinton's strategy has shifted, I watched her distress as she lemanted the lack of recognition she recieves for her vision of 'Change'.
I like a lot of what you say, but this thing you said in amidst the revelry concerned me:

Hope-hope-is what led me here today - with a father from Kenya; a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

The first bit I bolded I can let slide, it prickles me up but still I will assume that what you meant was not that the United States of America has some intrinsic, magical property, or some process by design that allowed you to win the Caucus vote, but more along the lines of the immortally incompetent Colonel Cargill of Catch-22 fame:

Men...You're American officers. The officers of no other country in the world can make that statement. Think about it.

That is what you meant by it was a mere truism. Nowhere else in the world could someone like you win the Iowa caucus, because Iowa is in the United States of America, you have to win it in the United States of America, there simply isn't an Alternative.
But if what you meant was something along what Chomsky insinuated of you:

I mean, what's the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth, political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same secret society where you're trained to be a ruler - they both can run because they're financed by the same corporate institutions. At the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama said, 'only in this country, only in America, could someone like me appear here.' Well, in some other countries, people much poorer than him would not only talk at the convention - they'd be elected president. Take Lula. The president of Brazil is a guy with a peasant background, a union organizer, never went to school, he's the president of the second-biggest country in the hemisphere. Only in America? I mean, there they actually have elections where you can choose somebody from your own ranks. With different policies. That's inconceivable in the United States

But that is kind of petty, to nitpick that only in America could a guy like you succeed. I think a lot of the time I read that America is one of those places where you should recieve special commendation because it is one of the places in the world where it is actually really hard for a guy like you to do what you are doing.
From what I've seen of the surveys, a godless guy like me would have a much harder time of becoming president, particularly while, being fortunate enough to win the lottery of birth over billions of other semen that lived in 'The balls of my father' which doesn't have the ring of your biography, unfortunately a wasn't pushed out of a Vagina in the United States, thus my hope to one day have the opportunities you do would be truly Audatious. If you were to look into my eyes Obama, you would see that I have no hope.
Which is what really concerns me about your emotive speech. It's a bit up the page now so I'll paraphrase:

the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

As a business professional, currently successfully employed as a vagrant, one of the wealthiest vagrants in the world mind you, if you question my credibility. Why I don't have to ask anyone for change, and even have access to the internet. So I guess you would have to call me an elite really, and a seniour, by world standards.
This is vague, and I recalled the snippett I saw on Japanese news as 'together we will, remake this country, together we will remake the world' or something, but I can't find the details and I can't remember most stuff word for word on confusing Japanese TV.
But needless to say, it rubbed me up the wrong way. Who do you mean by 'all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is' do you mean Americans, do you mean me? I certainly am not content to settle for the world as it is, seldom am I content to settle for the weekend as it is.
If you had excluded me, a non citizen of the country, which is an artificial concept used to deliniate a geographical jurisdiction whereby an entity seperate from the geographical concept of a country, called a 'government' administrates policy for its membership, determined by the citizens of the geographical jurisdiction, which in turn is determined artificially by a group of early predecessors who took the land by force, in defiance of their Government and the law of the time. If its on that basis I am excluded, I wouldn't much mind, except all this talk of remaking the world as it should be.
This concerns me because I may have to be living on the world, I cannot as yet live anywhere else and my only other alternative is to be 'not alive' as an atheist if this is the case when you are proposing to remake the world, I don't much care what happens to my remains which unfortunatley, and sorry for the inconvenience, will still be on the world. You have my permission though to jettison them off into space.
Before contemplating the possibility though that I may have to live through this 'remaking of the world' my other problem is, I know a lot of people. Infact most of the people I know in my self same predicament. We all live on the world, and most of us aren't citizens of this concept called 'The United States of America'.
So if what you are saying, is what I felt you were saying when you said 'together we can remake the world as it should be' I feel a little bit slighted, a little bit left out.
It's not a good feeling. Because I don't know what 'the world as it should be' is, its a little vague. Sort of like that Christian concept of Heaven, which in turn is quite vague. When told specifics I am simply told it is 'the best' or when people get really specific 'the best place you can imagine' which is really quite funny, because I can't see my mother enjoying dunking on Kevin Garnett, Hakeem Olajawon, Ben Wallace, Marcus Camby & Bill Russell in a friendly game of me vs. the best shot blockers of all time as much as I could, and that's certainly one of the best places I can imagine being.
So what is 'the world as it should be?' what specifically do you mean by that.
Early signs are encouraging from the same speech -

I'll be a President who finally makes health care affordable and available to every single American the same way I expanded health care in Illinois - by--by bringing Democrats and Republicans together to get the job done.

I'll be a President who ends the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and put a middle-class tax cut into the pockets of the working Americans who deserve it.

I'll be a President who harnesses the ingenuity of farmers and scientists and entrepreneurs to free this nation from the tyranny of oil once and for all.

And I'll be a President who ends this war in Iraq and finally brings our troops home; who restores our moral standing; who understands that 9/11 is not a way to scare up votes, but a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the twenty-first century; common threats of terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.

I like a lot, except that 'ship our jobs overseas' thing, what do you have against foreigners competing in a collective labor market. I would apluad an effort to reduce the mobility of Capital, so it can't just fuck off to the next poor country whenever they try to put their prices up, because as it turns out, cheap labor is highly immobile. Not a problem for a wealthy vagrant like myself though.
So let's talk about the real implications over who is involved in this remaking of the world. With the aforementioned common threats of the twenty-first century.

common threats of terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.

Terrorism's largest perpetrator remains the wealthy post-modern nations of the world, of which the US is the largest. Today it still supports terrorism in Columbia. Are you saying that this is to stop? It has a history of terrorism in Indochina, South America and the Middle East.
Climate Change again, most of the worlds energy consumption right now is concentrated in the United States, another 6 planets and so forth if everybody lived like the United States does now.
Poverty, America's NAFTA agreement brought about great poverty in Mexico, as do most of its trade agreements, and methods for securing access to the world's scarce resource.
Genocide, does this mean you propose to stop supporting fascist regimes, and state sponsored genocide, like you did against public opinion in East Timor recently?
Disease, well that's easy, you mentioned the health care and building up the scientists and entreprenuers and what not.

So do I audaciously hope, that what you are proposing is that America in rebuilding the world as it should be, is actually mostly going to withdraw all its fingers reaching into the world that thus far have fuelled the American way of life, and thus placed poverty and slavery upon the people of nations outside of America.
I find it hard to believe but there you have more or less committed to it.
If so, I'm on your side, I find I am always on the side of people being able to determine their own course for their life.
If that's so, your first step should be to give all citizens of the world a vote, in the issues that they have interest in. Their own freedom, self determination and comfort.
Then it's all settled.
If we get to vote the representative that is most representative of the world as it should be, you may just be in with a shot. And I'm sure the rest of the current racehorses would drop out.
Maybe you'd find yourself relaxing all kinds of policy, once you start identifying world issues with the people of the world.
Wouldn't that be nice?
And that other Agent of Change, Rudd, well you've won haven't you. I look forward to reading the exit strategy, a climate change policy that addresses the issue, and all that shit.

A New Fear

Sure being single sometimes is a daunting scary prospect. But a thought occured to me the other day, that resulted in pure abject horror.
What if there is something worse than being single? What if I know what that is?
I do. Loser couples, self referencial microcosms of loserdom. It's something I've seen a couple of times but thought, no that could never happen to me.
It's like when Nathaniel and I were in highschool together, talking about our singular status. I wasn't happy with binary single/couple toggling. I believed that I was something more than single. A cut above single. Nathaniel said 'that's me too, a cut above single.' That was the first I ever expanded the black and white world into shades of grey, but there's good gray like graphite, carbon fiber etc and bad grey like grey wool and well 80% of my old school uniform really.
Bad gray is the inverse situation, something less than being a couple, less even than being single, but not single but a couple? a couple of losers.
You've seen them, insidiously oblivious to how tragic they are whering their bad clothes reading comics together, or lining up to see that movie you wanted to see until you saw them lining up with you. Or making out in the TV room, or on public transport.
Possibly the most tragic view though, is if when you see a loser couple, you are looking at your parents. But things could yet still be worse, you could be a loser family.
Morley wherever you are, tell me I'm not a loser.

btw if you happen to be a winner, do the charitable thing and date a loser, that way your children will at least be half loser half winner.

Conclusion

In the end it all boils down to faith. I have faith in reason, and as such my existence is simple, elegant and internally consistent. If I do not know something I do not know it.
Others have faith in god, or country or both. One can hold that certain things are unquestionable, but who benifits? and who wins? ultimately my series of God questions are full of holes, but for me they do the job.
Take antidifferentiatoin, if you need to find the area under a graph, there are some good ways to do it, some slow ways to do it, and some ways to get there through observing some general principles.
If you have a big old curve on a cartesian plane, you can draw in rectangular blocks and take points and work out areas and then how much the area changes and so fourth until you start to notice as you decrease the interval and increase the sample the answers start conforming towards one hypothesis over another.
Or you can use antidifferentiation. Where you have a curve that is 3x^2+2x+1 and you apply the rules of antidifferentiation to find that the area is x^3+x^2+x+c there are ways to know c or 'the constant value' but at any rate, someone doing the painstaking meticulous work of answering the question will probably find in the end I am right.
The answer though is no where near as important as the question. I think this is what strikes me about Huck Finn, and particularly Mark Twain. There is the debate about weather or not god exists, but I believe a sub debate is just as important, that is 'should we worship god presuming he does exist' pascal says yes, but for me I think the default is no.
My faith in reason tells me that morality and God in general do not go hand in hand, that there are some principles worth dieing for and they are all founded in morality. As such it is a simple matter to escalate that not only are there some principles worth dieing for, but there are some principles worth suffering every damnation a god can throw at you for.
My questions of god, I simply raise not to disprove God, but to highlight that for me, an omnipotent entity is not an easy explanation but an incredibly demanding explanation, requiring the active suppression of reason and pouring time and effort into 'faith'. By contrast I reason that based on the evidence around me, the simplest explanation is infact that god does not exist, if he does exist, my questions highlight that god can only exist with two caveats:
1. God is inscrutible, god's methods and motivations cannot be known, his purpose is unknowable, his payoff is unknowable, his decision and thought processes are unknowable.
2. God is decietful, in order to promote faith as a virtue, god makes the environment of his worshippers require faith. Thus god lies by ommission of evidence for his own existence.　Whilst God may exist in many irrefutable holy texts, the failure of nature to reflect their content is the failure of nature and not the texts or by extension god. The existence of texts containing fallacies as shown by nature implies that god is a deciever in either his texts or in the creation of nature.

And that's why it boils down to faith. I remember being in grade two and asked 'what makes a bird a bird?' and we sitting at the foot of the teachers chair all called out answers that came to our head, 'they can fly' but so too can insects and bats, 'they have beaks' but so too do fish. 'they have clawed feet' again so do bats and platypi. It wasn't a trick question though, its feathers, feathers make something a bird, nothing else does.
I'm not even sure if that's true but I'll take it on faith. I hear velociraptors actually had feathers and feathers are evolved scales, and so I will either call the velociraptor a bird, or say that lizards too can have feathers, not just birds, but they are of the same family.

What makes religion? faith. Religion is the only thing where reason cannot be applied to determine truth. Furthermore, reason must be applied to prove that something doesn't exist based on no evidence. I believe in belief, and I believe belief to be to our detriment. I can think of nothing else that can overcome morality than a chemical imbalance in the brain, or devout faith in an omnipotent being.
When all else is a hypothesis or theory until confirmed, religion is something where it is a fact until disconfirmed and sometimes can remain so until quite a time after it.

God is useless in my conclusion. If god is inscrutible how can we act? if our eyes tell us reading one thing that the world is 6000 years old and our eyes reading another thing tells us the world is a million times a billion times 6000 years old and both presumably made by god, what use is god, to send two messages. Let alone the thousands possibly millions of messages that contradict eachother.
If one version of God's story is that he sent his son to die for my sins, thousands of years before my birth, and another that he sent an angel to dictate to a prophate in a cave, and yet another that he lives on top of a greek mountain and throws lightning from the sky, and yet another that he sat on a battlefield and revealed himself to a prince as he explained the Baghvad Ghita? and I am left with nothing my reason to grasp, and god will not provide anything tangible at all I can confirm with then god is more inscrutable to me than the weather.
God is a force of nature, like the weather, but weaker in influence from my frame of reference.
I wear t-shirt and shorts just about every day, no matter what the weather is doing, and I intend to do the same with God.
I don't wish to pour over each belief system, ask questions all day and scrutinise my faith. I've never done that to determine the area under a curve but I put my faith in antidifferentiation to pass my exams. Likewise, they all seem to indicate that despite the easy but less examined conclusion that god is useless, the trick of reason seems to be that God never existed in the first place. Nature tends to be quite efficient at eliminating anything so unnecessary as god.

God Question 3.

what is he up to back there?
otherwise could be stated as 'what is god's motivation?' or as captain kirk put it in that star trek film, what does god need with a spaceship? One can clap one's hands and say brilliant when Captain Kirk does it, what a "god test" to prove one hasn't found the residence of the all powerful being. Because if god was god, he wouldn't need a spaceship.
But what does god need with people? what is god doing? why? Christian belief has it he's obliged more or less to prepare for showdown. But the popular dodge, used by South Park in Go God Go, is that where science is concerned with How, religion can tell us why? which whilst the episode makes fun of Dawkins, and Mrs Garrison is the best character on that show, and I can imagine that fans of 'the God Delusion' being smarmy, they do miss the point that we are overly generous in giving religion domain over "why".
Why did god create the earth in seven days? he was bored no doubt, but then that presumes he created the solar cycle thus defining days, as ricky gervais points out in the dark. And then he just made light up! but why, religion in the form of Judeo commentary doesn't tell us why at all, it tells us how, and the how by faith in reason, is wrong.
I don't know the other creation stories well, a bit of the homeric ones, and the dreamtime stories.
None of them explain why, some entity decided to do this thing, no why. So why? what fucking game does an omnipotent being play? there's the heathen game, and the game of morality I guess. Telling people rules to alter their behaviour. But it seems to me God, being the creator, and all powerful, shouldn't really care? or again, is god merely not that powerful, because if God's powers are so limited as to depend on my behaviour, why do I give a shit about god at all.
Why for example does god let me write this post? what omnipotent purpose does he have in my doing it? or allowing Muslims to believe and spread herasy? or allowing Jews to believe and spread herasy? or allowing Hindus to believe and spread herasy? or allowing Christians to believe and spread herasy? or allowing Quakers to believe and spread herasy? or in allowing Zoro Astrians to believe and spread herasy? or allowing Buddhists to believe and spread herasy? and so on ad nauseum.
Why does he create life on a tiny mote of a spec of a dot of a point of the universe, swimming in a vast beyond comprehension ocean of elements, inpenetrable to us for our entire history save a brief expedition to our nearest desolate sphere?
Just to watch us and our own interactions?
And at what point in god's own time did he decide this all needed to begin?
There's another answer to the question if you can figure it out.
What is god up to? what is his motivation?

God Question 2

'Is God a nice person?'
this is the one that I wish I had done better psychoanalysis on or whatever, because then my ramblings may have actually had some impact. I'm thinking something along the lines of Miyamoto Masao's 'Straightjacket society' where he psychoanalyses Japanese beuracracy and discovers Japan is essentially a masochistic child.
Or the questionable analysis in 'the corporation' where they assess the classic corporate structure (a corporation is an entity with the same rights as a person but not the same liabilities) that we discover corporate structure is in essence psychotic. And yet a lot of the CEO's interviewed in the documentary come off as quite progressive and sympathetic.
So that be that, here's the equation as I see it, and George Bush with the whole 'the strong should protect the weak' notion. If you have two kids and one is bigger and stronger than the other. then we would naturally have a greater expectation of the kid that is bigger. He would be by virtue of his natural advantage endowed with an expectation that he wasn't to press this natural advantage and exploit the situation.
So I would have supposed that if someone was so much bigger, and stronger and more powerful as to be omnipotent, then they would be required above all others to conduct themselves morally. Particularly if they then made the claim that they were the very teacher of morality.
Why then would God in the Judeo tradition make women property, if it is not moral? nor have an objection to slavery? nor indeed selling one's own daughter into sexual slavery? nor have a problem with gambling in the form of Job, a bet with the devil weather an abused follower would remain faithful in defiance of reason.
Just like the Cardinal sins, or seven deadly sins are the path to damnation for a mere mortal such as myself, so too should God's treatment of job be his own sentance. But this raises other ethical questions that I can't answer, I believe but am not too familiar, that god used somewhat of his omnipotence to restore Job to a good condition, if his omnipotence removes all consequence to his action, simply because the power is such that he can merely remake any wrongdoing, what insentive does god have to behave. And coming back to Uncle Axle's question of yesterday's post, why is it observable in the world that suffering is so distributed. If God can 'undo' suffering, why does it exist in the first place? again are we experiencing the beta version of existance, were God isn't anywhere near as omnipotent as believed (and once you conclude god is not omnipotent you may as well be an athiest) and is struglling with natural disasters. That happen to wipe out mayhaps sinful populations, but also believers (in the form of Hurricane Katrina, or if you are islamic just look at Indonesia) and innocent children.
If god is omnipotent then we must assume we all exist in some breathing space before God remakes the universe to be perfect at some time of omnipotent convenience.
But then their are the accounts were God deliberately set about killing people, such as in Exodus when the Judeo god killed the first born sons of the Egyptian capital (not sure if it was also Cairo back then), even his warning shots in the forms of the proceeding plagues where the equivalent to the sawing off of the ear, before dousing in petrol of the cop in Reservoir dogs, namely cruel and excessive.
Firstly Moses could have called on God to perform one specific miracle as a warning shot. Then set clear and definite terms and consequences that would reach only those whom were responsible.
Furthermore God entrusting such power to the judgement of Moses, is by rights the same as handing a child a handgun, unless one presoposes that god created Moses specific for the task. Without returning to the question of why he created the Egyptians to thus serve as adversaries for his chosen people, why would he have created the suffering of slavery for his own chosen people.
Whatever which way you look at it, God was pretty slow to liberating the slaves.
Furthermore the bible whilst used for the inspiration for the emancipation of slaves, has more often much like all other religions been employed to overcome the inate sense of morality in all of us. That is, the bible was much more instrumental in the administration of slavery than it was in its destruction.
Nor is one of the ten commandments 'though shalt not enslave' one notes, but rather 'though shalt not kill' and the extensive commandment on 'not covet thy neighbours wife, nor ass, nor cattle...' which I can see that if you reduce a cast of people to property status weather they be women or african slaves, it infact endorses slavery and damns emancipation.
Something put powerfully clear by Huckleberry Finn when he decides: I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, "All right, then, I'll GO to hell."
What he is talking about is defying his upbringing, which teaches that black people are property and that freeing a black man is stealing, his own personal conviction is that Jim 'the runaway nigger' is the most ethical person he meets in his journeys.
Frankly Huck's dilemma should be the fundamental moral choice we all take.
Moral experiments consist largely of choice exercises.
The best known one is the train tracks, that is that you are standing by the switch lever for some tracks and you notice some kids are playing on the tracks, a train is coming and won't have time to either warn the kids nor stop in time to save their lives, you can switch the tracks, but you notice a cleaner is there who may be killed as well. Decision for most people is to switch the tracks and kill the old cleaner thereby doing the greatest good by the greatest number (a number of children) though I still fill bad about this, as the cleaner gets no say in his own fate nor has he done anything wrong. Sometimes to be honest I kind of lean towards killing the kids, because they shouldn't be there. However sense and experience tells me the cleaner and most people would probably put themselves in the line of fire to stop a tragedy.
There's other variations such as when you can drop yourself onto the tracks, which I'd do, or whether you drop your fat friend onto the tracks which is a surprise to him. And still other situations, such as when you are the doctor who has one perfectly healthy patient and five terminal ones that could be cured if they recieved your patients excellent organs. Which in essence is the same as the train tracks but gets the opposite response, most people say the ethical thing is not to steal the healthy patients organs.
Then if you really want to get unsavory, there's the smother the baby questions aswell. If you want to take the 'moral sense' test then click on this link.
The point of the fact of the matter is that it seems according to research, and the ability to judge future performance by past behaviour, something religion doesn't fully embrace, that most people have a good sense of morality without being exposed to a particular religion nor any.
So the question being, to an omnipotent entity, one who passes judgement and yet is not judged, who is more likely to have taught morality? One not beholden to ones own rules is also not internally consistent? Should God be moral?
Aha, but then I neglect the one trump card, God was ultimately moral by giving humans a choice (though not all, elst why create heathens, then make being a heathen the greatest sin there is but thats yesterdays news).
Anyway cybernetics is in favor of choice as well, one central concept of cybernetics is that the component with the most choice is what controls the system.
If God is in control of everything, or omnipotent it suggests he also has a lot of choice in what he does, for most moral experiments, the things with no choice, we make no moral judgement on.
For example, the runaway train, or the cleaner of the tracks, or the patients don't have any choices in the matter therefore we can't evaluate them morally.
So God gave us the choice, to choose to be moral or not. However firstly, it is clear that not all retribution is directly related to moral choices we make. Except maybe if you are watching the news in Vanuatu or Indonesia I'm told.
Nor would I consider it moral, for someone all knowing, all powerful, and all seeing to make preemptive strikes on a general population such as the Boxing day Tsunamis even if it was the entities knowledge that 'down the track' it was for the best.
Omnipotence to me implies that such unsubtle measures aren't very omnipotent at all. Like a really bad surgeon removing an arm instead of just removing a suspicious mole.
Furthermore again, why nothing to wipe out the nazi movement? or Ghenghis Kahn, a heathen? or Stalinism, Maoism or British Imperialism?
These are the questions that build up, which all fall down because of God's ultimate retribution.
That is, becase of the moral choices (among others) we make in life, god will treat us to one of two outcomes, eternal bliss, or eternal damnation.
Catholicism offers some grey area, no doubt reflexively. At any rate though let's see exactly what that choice is, and alas all I have is questions.
Dogs don't have moral choice do they? Do dogs go to heaven? do dogs have a soul? if not what is the purpose of their existence, in God's scheme? why create such natural phenomena if it is irrelevant to the afterlife? is the afterlife of more or less consequence than the 'hear and now'? If so why create a test? if not so why create a test?
Overwhelmingly, compared to animals, or anything else in the universe (possibly including heathens) that is not presented with the opportunity to choose or subsequently not choose god, how are humans better off?
Before the existence of choice, what awaited human beings? oblivion or eternal bliss, or eternal damnation.
I'll look at all three, oblivion, if entry into the afterlife and not simply, death everlasting is contingent on sentience and choice in faith then on the balance of things, we would be better off to enjoy a limited engagement trying to make the most out of life, and dying into oblivion. Furthermore without sentience we'd be part of the scenery in essence, thus unable to value eternal bliss or damnation so it wouldn't matter. Oblivion is preferable to the choice god offered. Second, if eternal bliss is what awaits a mechanical worshiper, one deprived the opportunity to deviate then this is the free ride, giving such a worshipper choice is of no benifit to the worshipper and only serves to the god's ego. At best because the god loses out on population in paradise it is mutually detrimental and may become some kind of masochism, at worst it is immoral.
Lastly, if damnation is what remains for the mechanical worshippers because they cannot choose (heathens again) then ultimately, this is immoral, because they are being punished for something they didn't have a choice in. So whichever way you look at it, giving people a chioce to obey, rather than just forcing them to obey, is immoral. Oblivion doesn't care because it cant value bliss over damnation, bliss means one is only given an opportunity to fail, not succeed and damnation is cruel on its premis not its result.
Why give people choice to believe in God? and if they choose wrong be damned for it?
George Orwells 1984 explains quite nicely

Blind obedience is not enough, for unless someone is suffering, how do you know they are obeying your will and not their own?

the moral choice for an omnipotent god is to as far as I can suppose, bring the greatest good to the greatest number.
Judeo god falls down easy, for it is unquestionable that he is not omnipotent, otherwise there would be no Satan, no hell, no damnation. What moral purpose could they serve what does God gain by incarcerating Satan rather than obliterating him? what is to be gained by having some evil demi god wanting to win over the population. Why account for souls either side of the line, what would an omnipotent entity gain? And without them you get the Batavia thing happening that is that nothing is bad, as all things originate from god, and thus all desires.
My belief that morality is inherent probably means less evil would be done under such a system anyway.
But alas, then there's the ultimate moral imperative on God spoken by Bertrand Russell: I can't seem to find the response but it was when asked by an interviewer what he would ask god if he died and found himself at the pearly gates 'why God did you not make yourself apparent?' and that's as much needs saying. Why does god make it so necessary to take him on faith, what sick twisted immoral test, to provide no evidence that one exists, no evidence whatsoever, but at the same time to place a requirement of faith upon each's salvation. There is no good reason why one should acto one way or another, and thus in the absense of any satisfactory proof, which even were it to be covered up by some middle person would create the same moral issues as the creation of heathens in the first place. Why possess us of reason in which to choose or not choose god, then possess us of senses that tell us the world is not what any religion says, that the nature of the universe cannot be percieved by our senses and taught from the same book that teaches us God? in any case, in any religion both cannot be satisfied. Unless our reason possesses us of the ability to pick and choose from a holy book.
So fundamentally, my questions lean me towards concluding that an omnipotent god is immoral, and that a god that is not omnipotent is simply powerful, and if we get to relative power questions I think we all agree, morality is to be expected of power.
For example, George Bush has a lot more power (definition ability to do or change) over a lot more people than me, and people certainly expect morality of Bush more so than me. Indeed just about everyone more powerful than me is raised or damned on their morality by public sentiment.
God can only gain exception from such judgement by virtue of omnipotence, in that he is so powerful he can define what morality is.
But by reason that means that either there is morality for god, and different morality for me, or an omnipotent being is immoral. and if we can't follow god's moral example, what value is he to us? what purpose or value does he bring?
How can we be saved? If god's own morality is inscrutible, or his power limited does he not become just another force of nature?
Bertrand Russell again 'To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.'
Of course theres another explanation or answer to this question, can you think of it? 'Is God moral?'

God Question 1.

I decided I don't know maybe a few weeks ago, to go serious on being an athiest, and that isn't to stop having friends who are religious or spiritual, after all sometimes I will believe something for which I have no evidence for. So really the question is by degrees, and as Dawkins puts it so well 'fact is most of us are athiests for 99% of religions, its just athiests go one religion more'.

Also please forgive me, since I started reading 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' I've been finding Huck's writing style creep in to my writing, which I now am paranoid about. I can't even be sure If that last sentance was something I would say or Huck would say, which is paranoia, a Huck sentance would be more like 'I was afeared it weren't 'posed to be like that.'

Anyway Mark Twain is a fine example, described as Humanist, though without much supporting evidence I would surmise he was an athiest for truth. I've been reading him, and then there's Abe Lincoln who I love through and through and even in most business books I read is still extolled as the finest leader the world has ever produced whilst having something inconvenient to account for his religious standings as this quote 'I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.' or 'In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book.'
I think the heart of the matter for Lincoln is this 'When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.' and the fact that whilst he did certainly plough through the bible and look up to the sky and imagine a god, he didn't go to church, nor believe that matters of spirituality were that of community.
Thomas Jefferson's atheism is as near as possible to undisputable, when one adopts the relatively simple pretext that one wouldn't announce oneself an athiest when it was immensely unfavorable.
What upsets me is that now being a 'believer' is more of a prerequisite than it was 200 years ago if you want political success, and certainly the quality of world leaders has been in decline given recent years not ascention.
But of all I read over, for some reason this quote stuck in my mind from the Chrysalids by John Wyndham, better known author of 'day of the triffids' it is as follows as said by the character Uncle Axle

"Now, as I see it, some way or another you and Rosalind and the others have got a new quality of mind. To pray God to take it away is wrong; it's like asking Him to strike you blind, or make you deaf... You have to come to terms with it. You'll have to face it and decide that, since that's the way things are with you, what is the best use you can make of it and still keep yourselves safe?"

For me, the amount of energy required through the activity called 'faith' perplexes me, I would argue that being an athiest is the most relaxing state of being, except I seem to poor so much energy into talking about it. Uncle Axel highlights a good question of God, one of which I will try to handle each day for a while. For if I have learnt anything in my life it is that questions are far more powerful, far more fruitful and far more valuable than answers. If I were rich I might put a cash prize up for a decent answer but that's the thing, if Uncle Axle's statement is really the question: 'Why would God create something he hates and wants destroyed?' the easy and oft used faith answer is something along the lines of 'God is inscrutible' this is the finding that most makes an athiest of me. If God is inscrutible, he is untrustable, random and unable to offer guidance. His word can never be accepted because it has no basis, his terms deliverable are also inscrutible and thus any contract written by god is also inscrutible and thus cannot be entered upon by one such as I. Therefore God may aswell not exist at all if he is to be so unpredictable and to no account to someone with a vested interest such as I. The belief that god does what he wants, without reason makes him not a god, but a random force of nature, so hard to scrutinise or even see, that I may as well just see benign old nature where most see god, and pretty soon it is easiest just to drop the notion of god at all.
Uncle Axle probably puts it better again:

"What can it have been - this terrible thing that must have happened? And why? I can almost understand that God, made angry, might destroy all living things, or the world itself; but I don't understand this instability, this mess of deviations - it makes no sense."
I did not see his real difficulty. After all, God, being omnipotent, could cause anything He liked.I tried to explain this to Uncle Axel, but he shook his head.
"We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that. But whatever happened out there... was not sane at all - not sane at all. It was something vast, yet something beneath the wisdom of God."

Its that, if God being omnipotent can just do as he pleases then there is no point, its the basic exercise, that circle of control.
Maybe it's worth sidetracking a bit about the circle of control. When I got dumped and was having an unpleasant time of it, my councillor told me to write down all the things I was in control of, and all that I wasn't. At the time I'd gone a bit crazy and was putting all kinds of effort into superstitions like what underwear to wear and which side of the bed to get out of. Superstition is ultimately a lusting for control, the belief that things are connected when they are not, like my choice of underwear somehow effected someone else's decission making process.
The circle of control helped me save a lot of energy if nothing else. Rather than two lists I just put a circle on a piece of paper and as things crossed my mind I would put them inside or out of the circle.
Turns out just about the only things I control are my behaviour, my own conduct.
So by consciously accepting that my underwear had no bearing on someone else's disposition to me, I no longer stressed about which days to wear which underwear, and when to do my washing cycle so as not to be left in a lurch.
Other people may have looked 'kindly' on me and said 'the poor thing is just using his underwear as a coping mechanism to survive some unbearable trauma.' but again, one of the prevelant themes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is that Tom and Huck have a complex superstitious belief system, so complex that it is infallible.
For example at one point Tom is concerned because he buried a marble in a place known only to him and it was known that if somebody did such then all their lost marbles would gather around it, but when he digs up his marble and finds that none have returned it causes much grief because something happened which faith in the superstition said couldn't. Then Tom resolves to ask a tick if a witch had interfered with the magic. When the tick doesn't say anything Tom concludes that the tick is scared and therefore it is scared of a witch which in turn proves the superstition true.
Both my underwear dilemma which is arguably tragic, and Tom Sawyer's beliefs which being a child are arguably cute are just as ridiculous as the mass of religions populating the world.
Except when something that faith prescribes like 'good things happening to good people' is controverted it is instead economically brushed off as part of god's inscrutable plans.
Hence my first question as to God's seeming inscrutability is

'why did God create Heathens?'


For me the reasonable thing to have happened was that when the Persians came across the Greeks they would have been all like 'well both of us can't be right, and all things being equal, probably neither of us are' for example, if a god, anyone is omnipotent and created everything why oh why, did he choose such a small sample of the entire population he created to vest his religion in?
The answer in the Persian, and Mongol times was probably simpler and more sophisticated than anything any fucking religion has come up with since. They simply made a character based judgement on God that wasn't God is insance or inscrutable, but that God was racist. That is 'the chosen people arguement' the true world players, like Xerxes and Ghenghis even would humour other religious beliefs in a case of good diplomacy that being the religions of the Babylonians and Catholics respectively.
But what does this then imply? here is where questions are really powerful, first resting assumption is A) that god made a mistake with all the other types of people and picked his favorite to reveal himself to. This assumption formed an easily testable hypothesis in the early days. God's favorites where the dominant races. Therefore, if one is the most powerful in the world, their religious beliefs are invariably the right ones.
This works kind of like getting millions of people into a square and getting them all to flip a coin, and the one who flips the most heads in a million times obviously has the correct religious beliefs.
More accurately, with respect to the passage of time, it is like giving godhead to whoever has the longest streak of heads at any given time. Because whilst the Persians were the first truly 'world empire' and Ghenghis still holds the record for conquering most of the known world, Mongolia and Persia ain't shit in terms of world power these days.
Thus the superiority of the 'chosen peoples' religious beliefs seems to flit around a bit, and have all the longevity of most reigns of power, which is less than a couple of generations at most.
So the question stands, 'why did god create heathans?' the second resting point of the best chosen people arguement would be that there seems to be B) A god per people.
Thus this was more paganistic in belief, there was the god of the greeks and then the god of the persians.
But most beliefs stumble down in the whole opt-in, opt-out part. There is but one religion and such. Infact the ones best at surviving seem to be the ones least tolerant of other belief systems, or multiple belief systems.
With exceptions to the later religious families such as the Judeo religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Since people can only poke at where Judaism came about, it becomes the likely contender as being enduring, which the 'chosen people' arguement doesn't seem to be. Although in my experience there isn't a chosen people more proud of the fact than the underacheiving members of the Jewish people.
Apart from maybe southern baptists.
But then if there is this inconvenient fact that God was selective in who he chose to reveal himself to, why then did he pick some people, way way back when they also believed the world was flat (eventually accepted by the simple observation that the top of ship masts were visable before the main body, which wouldn't happen if the world was flat, which was more effective than the movements of astral bodies) decidedly ignorant people, and reveal this truth to them. Because there seemed to be Jews before the events of Exodus, meaning before then, the bible consisted of the book of Genisis, and that's that. So despite existing for time immemorial, Judaism seems to, before Moses came along and led what was essentially a civil movement, it was just a creationist belief with a few customs attached but nothing more, and this creation belief told through written or spoken word has proved far less reliable way of god revealing the creation story than through what science can read from the earth and stars themselves.
But those are other questions, why did God pick so isolated a people in the middle of a continent, to reveal his true self too, and leave the vast majority of the worlds population, largely ignorant of his specific existence.
This please note is still true today, where Communism beat god in China, North Korea and a lot of the Soviet, Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam compete in India, the south east asian peninsula is a bit of a mix, despite the relative low income of these nations Christianity is still strongest in Africa and SOuth America, the poorest countries in the world.
Whilst the material benifits of religious belief are slim, we all know that's not what spirituality is about, it is about getting into a club so good all material needs are taken care of. It is not concerned with the material needs of this life, but the material needs of eternity.
Pascal's wager explains this crux of religion quite succinctly. John's wager probably explains away the fallacies of this.
But its an interesting point, if strict adherance to God's will is required for entry into paradise, why did he deny the majority of the world the opportunity to even enter? what a cruel act, that some kid in Asia would never hear the truth of the most important thing in the world and thus be damned to hell and brimstone forever.
Unless because they never had prior opportunity to do right, they automatically gain entry to paradise? In which case, one is better off never to have knowledge of the rules than to have knowledge of the rules and be tested in adherance to them for the rest of their lives. One requires no effort and living as you please the other finds the constant energy of facing down temptation.
So not believing god's rules and teachings to be cruel and unnecessary and the fact that the majority of the world doesn't adhere to them, meaning that God doesn't gain much by their observance, I would opt for the favorable explanation that God simply hates the heathen's and without giving them a chance, sends them right to hell.
This isn't the choice option, because God by not revealing himself on a universal level, and thus creating heathens by omission, never gave them a choice to believe in God. He created parents that whilst he knew in his omnipotence would ultimately burn in hell, would teach their children the very same damnation.
But the question is why? why? does I presume that God only has a specific quota of faith that he needs only a certain number of people to adhere to? then qhy create any more, is the object of religion to create sinners not the saved? is that what is valued more?
What of missionary work then? what about religions where the compulsion is to pursue and convert the heathen masses. Or in some cases ethnically cleanse them. These pose other uncomfortable questions, such as 'did god make a mistake?' or did God in his omnipotence pick a poor means of communication.
Maybe its best to reflect on the definition of communication 'a shared understanding of meaning' that follows that successful communication must be measured in terms of the recipient. In this case, if God did indeed send Gabriel to talk to Mohammed in a cave, or Jesus as his son down from heaven and sacrificed him for my sins and such, then God would have to be rated as the single worst communicator in history.
Why for example would he reveal himself to one messenger, rather than every single person? can we quantify the energy of god? does god have such limitations. If god has to get some poor illieterate to spread his message, or some son of a carpenter.
Such questions were posed by Judas in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical 'Jesus Christ Superstar' in the lyrics 'if you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation, instead you chose a time with no mass communication'
So then, if the necessity of missionary work is the answer to why God created heathens, then why was God so lazy? is god lazy?
Do you see why I have such a hard time believing that your god is likely? Becuase the existence of heathens. Or at base, an existence in truth as to what religion offers you, poses these questions, that fall out of it like dangerous coconuts. Is god cruel? is god lazy? is god racist? the only thing that could possibly stand in the way of calling God's character into question (which mustn't happen because then we would have to evaluate whether we like such character or not, and what example the omnipotent being sets for us, seems to me a god can't have character flaws if he is to be the teacher of morality) if reeligion is to be the source of morality, God's character must be set as the ultimate example.
The only way around this is to say that God need not be internally consistent with the truth he taught us, that he is inscrutible and thus, insane.
By the definition of insanity, if God expects universal belief in him through the efforts he has used thus far, he must be insane.
There is of course a simple alternative answer to 'why did god create heathens?' see if you can think of it.