Ground

Nothing much to update really, except that it's now my holidays, almost a little surreal. Life is proceeding at speed and I am much unprepared for its haste. I fear I may just fall short of my plans. Perhaps on to what I came to talk about then.

I've realised, only just, that I've been making statements that are dark, and dare I say realist? I guess I know I've been making such statements, but never really gave much thought to it. I'm afraid I'm articulating myself rather poorly, so I must apologise, but I hope you get the idea. And when I say "dare I say realist", I mean that it is real based on my perception, which is not necessarily someone else's or true of the world. I'm not actually sure why I'm doing this though, perhaps it's just my pessimistic realist self spilling out of bounds. I'd actually like to think I'm just the opposite side of a coin, where one is happy, facing the sky and able to dream while there's the other side which faces the ground and is all too aware of the realities of life.

It really does make me a wet blanket, as it does ruin other people's joy when I do such things. Perhaps it would be good for me to tone it down. Focusing on a problem doesn't really solve it anyway. Thing is, my problems in life cannot be solved, I'm certain that they can't even be solved, which leaves me with nothing to do but fixate on them. It's a self-defeating cycle, because I adopt this point of view for everything else in life. I can see the good in things but I am more drawn to the bad and the real. I am less able to appreciate when something good happens but at the same time if something bad does happen, it was after all, inevitable or the will of nature/humanity. Talking about it makes me realise it's actually just my apathy after all, coupled with my propensity to focus on flaws and where things can go wrong.

I guess that's all, a short nonsensical post to talk about how I like to take things that make people feel good then ruin it by exposing something that they conveniently chose to ignore or had not thought about. At least that's the way I see it. Also, I have all these ideas floating around in my head, snippets of stories that aren't quite a full story but more of particular scenes and settings/worlds. Not sure if I might one day start posting them here. I'd like to perhaps churn them out into a fleshed out story, but all I have are just bits of tissue here and there, no real skeleton to really hold the thing down for me to fill it out as I flesh out the story.

Ark

This will be a rant. Be warned. Those who know me well will know that I'm a godless heathen who will rot in hell for not being "saved". Mini rant before I start my rant on almost the same topic, I don't get how getting baptised is considered being "saved" by Jesus, as a schoolmate told me some 4-6 years ago on Facebook where he, a Christian, was arguing with another Catholic schoolmate (Seriously, you guys read from the same fucking book and you're shitting on each other? It's not a fucking dictionary, people. It's a story book and you can interpret it any which way you like.) and he kept going on and on about how he was saved by Jesus, which I thoroughly did not understand. Did he materialise in between you and a speeding cement truck and stopped it dead in its tracks with one hand? Were you drowning when he walked over to you and pulled you out of the water? Did he cure your terminal stage cancer with a few kind words? The answer to all of those, is no. So no, Jesus didn't save you, you weren't dying before you got momentarily drowned by while saying a few quotes from your favourite book. And I guess the fundamental difference here is that they believe that unless you were baptised, you will go to hell (which not all Christians believe so seriously like you guys can't even read the same book the same way among yourselves, even within the denomination a different church has a different understanding) rather than heaven so in that way you are "saved". But how do you know that baptising isn't actually washing your pure soul away so that you won't be accepted into the real heaven which is "hell"? Did God personally tell you that? Before I go on about this baptising nonsense, let me get to the real meat and potatoes.

How can people realistically believe in Noah's Ark even if God is real. Just think about it. The dude is some herder or farmer or some shit who lives in the middle of a desert. Dude has probably never seen a ship in his whole life. How does he know how to build a seaworthy ship when he's never seen one? Suppose then, that by God's grace he is granted the knowledge of how to do it. He lives in a fucking desert. The closest coast is probably at least 300 km away. You want to know why I mention the coast? Because guess what, trees don't grow in the fucking desert, much less trees that are shipbuilding timber. Even for a small ark, one that was actually seaworthy and won't twist apart in gentle waters, there wouldn't be enough wood for miles around. It would all have to be traded from other regions, namely India or East Africa and dragged for 300km to where Noah was. Noah had to be fucking rolling in gold to be able to afford this kind of shit, no way a herder or farmer in a resourceless desert could afford it. If God mysteriously just gave Noah the wood in the form of a forest, we would know about it and there is absolutely no way a family of 7 could chop down enough wood to build a ship within 10 years while doing whatever they do for food. Mind you, just chopping, not even processing, which probably includes drying and separating into planks and all that shit, which requires tools that Noah probably didn't have, given that he was probably still in the Bronze age (most likely before, actually, which makes it even more unlikely), these things were expensive and hard to come by.

You don't just need wood to build a ship though, you need pitch, or black tar, to seal them seams and other nooks and crannies. Which again, is hard to come by and probably really expensive, where is Noah getting all his money from? The good grace of other people through the will of God? Unlikely. No way you'd bring timber or pitch 4 months across the ocean from your homeland just to donate it to some hick with delusions that a higher being is asking him to build an ark (Also, now that I think about it, ships were around in that period, why are we building an ark again?) and return penniless for all your troubles. And who's helping him bring the timber to his home? An army of donkeys from the will of God? What are the hundreds of donkeys necessary for such a feat eating in a desert?

So let's just say that through the will of the Holy Spirit, all those things were brought to Noah. How could a family of 7 build an ark and still have time to do whatever they do for food? Same thing with the magic forest and tree chopping again. It takes hundreds of skilled workers to build a ship in a few years, even in the 1800s, when they've been at it for the past 500 years at least. How long are 7 unskilled workers who have to make their own food while they're at it going to need? They're lucky if they finish half of it before one of them dies, which let me remind you is very early, at most 60. It's just unfeasible.

So in conclusion, even if God truly existed and asked a prehistoric man by the name of Noah to try and build an ark, he couldn't have done it even if he tried literally his whole life. The lives of his children too, for the matter.