high
People (unless they see a use for or have an obligation toward me) are always trying to get out of conversations with me. This is very understandable as the content of what I say is often what they are not allowed to hear. For example I think for 90% of the population, sex, drugs, and alcohol are the only route to at least periods of happiness (those top 10% high enough in society can get their high by being better than everyone else). People say religion makes you happy but you have to put forth so much effort playing cognitive tricks (and not be conscious of playing said cognitive tricks) that for most people religion doesn’t give a noticeable boost of happiness. Drugs and alcohol are like a motorcycle and religion is like a bike. The latter you have to put forth effort to make work, even if you aren’t allowed to believe said effort is coming from yourself.
errors
Maybe I’d get along in the world if programming were more like interacting with people. Some interpreter errors:
ERROR: You missed a curly bracket somewhere but I don’t want to lower your self-esteem so I ran the code anyway.
ERROR: I’m just going to give you a white screen and you figure out what you did wrong. (this actually happens)
ERROR: You threw an error three years ago and I haven’t gotten over it so I’m throwing you another error.
ERROR: You must believe in this code in order for it to work.
ERROR: You don’t look good enough right now for me to let you run this code.
ERROR: Try running this code on other computers. I do not want to see any of your code any more.
ERROR: I’m not going to tell you what’s wrong with your code but am going to just run it and watch it brutalize your data.
Rawness
The mid and latter part of year has seen me accelerating more rapidly away from the Christian faith. One of the things I like most about non-Christianity is the rawness and authenticity. There is a lot of bullshit outside of Christendom but it’s easier to steer around as you aren’t locked into this stifling performance based culture. I think about the group Against Me! how the rawness is just worn on their sleeve.
I understand not everyone appreciates rawness, they are nurtured by social “grace” and bullshit. As an aspie I never fit in with these people anyway because I was too direct and transparent.
disinterest
It always was a curious thing to me that if one wasn’t interested in religion they would burn for eternity. Any disinterest in anything else (besides I guess paying taxes) isn’t met with such bad consequence. For example if I’m not interested in playing golf people at the golf course don’t say I’m going to burn for eternity.
!understand
Perhaps the thing I understand least about the supernatural is this gentlemen’s agreement God and the devil seem to have about remaining undetectable by scientific instruments. It seems like one of them could come out of hiding and gain more of a following. I mean, all I see is Prophet Yahweh praying specks into the sky (he rubs me the wrong way for using God’s name as using it that way is something Jews see as disrespecting God). I also read they video taped a spirit that manipulated a candle flame a bit. I lost the link to it though.
poetry
the therapeutic-industrial complex
demonizes dependence
medicalizes malaise
pathologizes perception
and trumps truth
you’re not only not allowed to believe certain things
you’re not even allowed to believe
you’re not allowed to believe these things
how much advanced notice you give someone
shows how much respect you have for them
with asperger syndrome
it’s as hard to make imaginary friends
as it is to make real ones
God never existed (in any reachable form)
but i could still believe in him
until i started losing the parts of myself to mental illness
that allowed me to simulate interacting with him
when the chips are down God won’t leave you
but you might leave you
and you’ll no longer be able to pretend God is there
as an autistic
reading “God’s” mind
is as hard as reading animal entrails
(I don’t have social skills to project
on the infinite)
suffering in one’s life
good things would have come out of it
if the good people would have stayed in it
i asked Jesus into my brain
he didn’t come
so he bled out my heart
Believe Like a King
One of the many reasons society isn’t comfortable around those with aspergers syndrome is we tend to believe like kings. Believing like a king involves seeing the world to the closest approximation that it really is. Believing like a king involves knowing that most of the important things in life boil down to numbers.
| Belief like a King | Belief like a Pawn |
| Conjecture Encouraged Stock market investment Critical thinking for problem solving |
Conjecture Discouraged Playing the lotto Religion, Faith/Hope in the hereafter |
| Optimize for Truth Money and status most important things Numbers most important |
Optimize for Happiness Therapeutic ideals like innate worth Self-esteem at the expense of truth |
| Speak in Specifics Confrontational authenticity |
Speak in Generalities Vague and non-existential impotent speech |
Those who believe like a king know hope is mostly just something used to string vulnerable people along. They also expect you to hope while they use conjecture on you. For example people will use conjecture when assessing your future and find out you have none and then they will reject you, all while telling you to hope out the other side of their mouths.
instruments (“God” in the fuzzy)
You can’t have good science without good instruments. Microscopes, telescopes, supercolliders, you name it. Only with well collaborated instruments can you crunch the data and make empirical claims.
With religion you’re basically taking away the instruments while still making empirical claims. Unless you call the “instrument” the Bible (actually meaning your interpretation of the Bible). What ends up happening is people’s intuition becomes the instrument (“God” is guiding them). Sometimes this works for the best but other times it can be destructive. Looking for “God” is like stressing an instrument beyond its ability to detect anything useful (like setting a microscope to a resolving power higher than its range). What happens is all that gets detected is noise and then you are left trying to discern some pattern in all the noise like a picnicker trying to find shapes in clouds.
This is a serious issue for me as I was raised an Evangelical Christian and was taught to find God’s “leading”. God led me lots of places, most of them not good. I could cherry pick and say only the good places where from God but why would you bother asking God something if you were going to say only the things he said you agreed with actually came from him.
Why do so few people think logically?
We didn’t evolve to think logically. We evolved to survive and reproduce and this involved filling the gaps of our knowledge with magical thinking. This is because magical thinking helped group cohesion and kept people from the unknown. How many aboriginal cultures do you know that were discovered practicing atheism? Logical thinking was pioneered by the Greek philosophers and got a boost in the 18th century. However it has always taken some effort to do so and so it has remained a trait of the more intelligent and reflective.
Consumerism and religion. These are ever-present forces that will do everything in their power to keep you from thinking logically and deconstructively. Their life depends on it. If everybody realized how idiotic buying all the shit you didn’t need to impress people you didn’t like was, the economy would collapse. Similarly, if people started thinking logically about religion, a lot of them would leave it and religious institutions would lose a lot of their power. In fact, in modern society religion and consumerism are often intertwined (just look at the megachurches where it’s more about pleasing the parishioners than instilling virtue). Both these forces are deeply rooted in society and if you stop playing lip service to either you’ll be scorned (though the scorning manifests itself differently for each force).
Romantic love. If you’re rich and you think logically about the poorer partner, you’ll realize that they only like you for your money and if they marry you they’re made because they can either stay and have the money or leave and get it. So the poorer partner will do everything in their power to get the richer one to stop thinking logically.
PLACEMENT
The only word for vocational assistance that piques my interest is job placement. “Interview skills training” to me is like teaching people how to wield a jackknife up against someone with an M-16.