Bookshelves

Traditionally the first thing you do when you visit a friend of yours (or any person) is to check their bookshelves. Unfortunately it seems that nowadays more people decide not to invest in their library. And more often people forget to check what other people are reading. At least I have to admit that I seldom check bookshelves anymore. And if I do check, I don't bother acting on the information later. I guess it would be wise to actually understand what people are reading. It gives quite a bit of insight on how people think and act and why they think and act like they do.

Most people, myself included, typically absorb most of the stuff they read in one way or another. This leads to another possibly problematic thing. Just as people can be manipulated by other people, I guess people can fairly easily also be manipulated by the writings of other people. Pseudo-sciences come to mind right up front. Just because it's in the form of a book doesn't mean that you shouldn't take it with a grain of salt. If school teaches you that you can learn things from books, I guess at some point people should be taught to critique what they read. The university taught me this important lesson. Try to look behind the text and try to understand why the person is writing what they are writing. I guess as an exercise you can try to figure out why I'm writing what I'm writing. Trying to maintain an objective and analytically rigorous approach at all times, again, seems to be the key to success here too. It's too easy, especially with text that is intuitively appealing, to automatically assume that it provides answers to everything. The situation is familiar from a situation where another person is attempting to sway your opinion with rhetorics, or even blatant manipulation.

I guess this leads me to religion, as it is something that people often readily accept or totally disregard offhand. I'm not in a position pass judgement, but far too often people don't take that small grain of salt with what they are fed. I would classify myself as an agnostic and I typically steer clear of these discussions. I feel that various holy books shouldn't be taken word for word. But at the same time I guess defining God as the force that got things moving in the first place is fair. Be it the laws of physics or devine intervention or anything from between. I also think that holy books may have a slight bit of truth in them, but it might as well be that the books and the stories in them were just developed as means to convey rules and guidelines to live by and to get a herd of people to survive in a primitive and hostile environment. The rules and guidelines might of course be taught using metaphores and stories that are in turn interpreted further and when the origin is forgotten, they are interpreted as factual situations. Who knows. Miracles may happen, but then again, statistically improbable situations also occur occasionally. And when unexpected things happen, they might happen in twos or threes. Or it might just be that they spawn copycats and "me too" events which are just fabrications.

But too often when you are feeling like the world is kicking you in the head, it's just easier to seek comfort from stories and discard rationality. I'm of course sort of biased when I say this, considering my branch of studies and the overall mindset that a typical aspiring engineer has. In a way I guess I like to be in control of things, or at least understand why things happen as they do and see the mechanisms behind them. And in light of this, accepting parts of Nietzsche's writings is natural for me. I don't agree with everything, but there are parts which I can take and with the help of a pragmatic nature apply to my personal life and use them as tools to continue onwards. And this is why I will not and cannot overtly criticize different religions and people who believe in their teachings offhand; the religions may just be tools for them to achieve movement. But this doesn't mean that I can or will subscribe to all teachings. And this is why I consider myself an agnostic on this topic.