Moons are cool. Happy New Year's Eve and Happy National Hangover Day.

Three problems with Pascal's Wager:

1) It is logical, too logical, as it turns out. If the idea is to prove by compelling logic that you would do well to believe in god, a positive hypothetical, then you should believe in every positive hypothetical similarly formulated. Such as the Evil Easter Bunny, who will chew you to bits for eternity if you don't believe in him. Might as well believe in him too, right? Along with wizards, lawn gnomes, Apollo, etc. You've got the same to lose if you don't.

2) Which god or gods do I wager on?

3) Most of the gods I know of allegedly want you to believe in him because he loves you and you love him, not because you solved an elementary problem of logic.

I'm an analogy whore, but I think this one I came up with is pretty good and worth sharing. The analogy demonstrates the problem of the modern day faithful. Religion is the Titanic, modern day faithful are the crew, enthusiastic passengers, and admirers, and Science is the iceberg.

For years leading up to its first outing at sea people spoke of the unsinkable ship, the Titanic. Ooohs and Aaaahs, it was the greatest thing imaginable. An engineering masterpiece, another of humanity's milestones. The ship was touted as not only improbable of sinking but impossible of sinking. Enough engineers, mariners, captains, and sea-know-whos repeated this doe-eyed idea enough times until invariably everyone accepted it as gospel truth.

When the ship first hit the iceberg hardly any of the passengers knew what was happening, just as essentially nobody in the 1500s knew that Copernicus was happening. The news leaked slowly (pun intended); the widespread response - laughter. The ship is not sinking, this is an unsinkable ship. The sun is not the center of the universe, the Earth is, as we all know from repeating the Bible.

As water began to fill the lower compartments and the ship began to lean more people were convinced of the truth. This was a slow process. It took just under three hours for the ship to sink. That's a pretty healthy allotment of time to convince another human that the metallic structure they are standing on is in fact headed to the bottom of the ocean in the near future, especially if they have retained all five sensory modalities of which to accept and interpret empirical evidence. However, it is estimated that the hesitation, confusion, and general reluctance to act contributed to hundreds of the ensuing deaths.

Even so, there were still reports of crewmen and the enthusiastic onboard insisting that the ship was not sinking, as it was unsinkable, they tenaciously reminded all. That's when a frantic passenger pulled such a deranged person to the side of the ship, pointed to the crack in the hull, pointed to the angle the ship made with the water horizontal, pointed out the cries below, pointed to the water in the lower compartments, maybe even stuck their foot in it (in short, appealed to physics, not an idea, as insight to capital T, and readily pertinent, truth). And that's when the deranged person repeated, wide-eyed, "this is an unsinkable ship."

Science VS. Religion is wrong, and Science AND Religion is wrong. The correct format is Religion THEN Science. Science is not an alternative to Religion, nor an explanatory comrade. It is a successor. It doesn't facilitate, or help, or do anything in conjunction. It outdates, it nullifies, it is an entirely different approach to attaining truth altogether, period. It is a realization that repeated mantras and abstract, feel-good ideas give way to empirical, physical, inductive evidence.

It took about three hours to realize that the Titanic could, in fact, sink, and there were undoubtedly a few people drowning in the ocean after the ship had gone under, thinking bewilderdly, "that was an unsinkable ship." I think the transistion stage for Science to become fully accepted and Religion fully understood as backward will be somewhere on the order of 1,000 years. Copernicus was about 1550 so I'll give it till 2550. Of course Science's congregation is always growing, Religion's always dwindling, just as more and more people decide to scramble for a lifeboat when they discover water rising.

Ask yourself this question - what is the value of remaining on a sinking ship, once you realize it's sinking?

Now everyone have a very merry and un-delusional Christmas!

COLD SNOWY, MA. It's so incredibly cold and the snow is so incredibly snowy and piled high. Just watched the Incredibles. Fourteen degrees.

COLD SNOWY, MA. Help! Stop. Impending blizzard! Stop. Trapped with disarmingly cute little brother and sister! Stop. Much World of Goo playing....find on internet, $20. Stop. Down to very last blanket! Stop. Will signal again soon. Stop.

The 27 phenomenon has reached new heights. I can't see or hear or look at the number without feeling a surge of joy. 27 brings all the memories, events, and people associated to the fore, and makes me happy. It is a semantic network completely saturated with positives. A sizeable number of people are insisting that they will get 27 tattoos; the 27th of this month marks the two year anniversary of ours.

On Saturday Matthew, Jason, Antonio, and I played in a beer pong tourney along with many others. M's team won and we continued playing afterwards, culminating in the 4:30 a.m. no shirt challenge game, which M and I won. T's girl interest's brother was there. He ran Boston representing the BAHston fire depAHtment. He is cool.

On Monday a guy walked into the Steiner Ranch Steakhouse and shot the manager point blank, killing him. He left immediately and was last seen abandoning his Chevy Blazer on Bullick Hollow road and disappearing into the woods! They closed off Bullick Hollow that night, a road I drive the entire length of just about every single day. I was at the White's house when I heard the news, about a mile from the spot where he vanished. He is still at large.

Last night, a cold rainy night, I was driving Bullick Hollow and after I crested the big hill, just before 2222, I saw two to three KVUE Austin news vans on the side of the road. I wish I had slowed down more, but all I saw in passing was about two or three raincoat-adorned people in a semi-circle shining flashlights onto....SOMETHING! Gracious me! What did I miss?!?! At 2222 I came upon another news van heading away, and at that point had a sudden sensation that I had just barely missed something. I opted to take 620 returning home later that night instead of the usual Bullick Hollow.

Met a police car on my run today...on the cross country course! Looking for pot smokers, no doubt. My beloved course - overrun by druggies!

I've been reading novels lately. Reading is truly great, it's life in print. A person can experience a lot by just reading. Like in Anton Chekhov's short story The Bet, a guy agrees to voluntarily imprison himself for fifteen years for a sum of money. After fifteen years of thinking, reading, and writing, but never leaving his confinement, he no longer desires the money because his life expereience has been so enriched in the interim.

The mark of a truly great novel is when you think about the characters not as characters in a book, but as real people that you have come to know. They influence your life. You have conversations with them, you find yourself asking, "What would ______ do, say in this situation?" The best execution of this I have encountered so far is Tolstoy's Konstantin Levin.

Do we run because we are afraid of the bear or are we afraid of the bear because we run, or, alternatively, do we cry because we are sad or are we sad because we cry? I've thought about this problem since my Religion and the Emotions class sophmore year at Davidson and I've always been partial to James-Lange (we are afraid because we run, we are sad because we cry) because it makes more logical sense - we are evolved animals that arose from other evolved animals that didn't and don't need a therapy session to figure out whether we are afraid enough to run from predators, we just do, i.e., action, motion precedes feeling. Instinct and overt communicable signals (crying) comes first.

But humans are complicated as fuck, and now I think that this controversial question has no meaningful answer, bogged down by cumbersome convolutions scientific, semantic, and philosophical. Neither James-Lange nor Cannon-Bard are fully correct. Schacter and Singer offer little: "cognitions are used to interpret the meaning of physiological reactions to outside events." Thanks guys. Cognitions are used for everything.

The answer is that the question itself is simply beyond our capacity to answer precisely. But William James wins for having the coolest and most logical, aesthetically pleasing theory.