First Sermon: Symmetry

Symmetry is the basis of human beauty. Proper proportion and balance. It can also make a strange design look captivating when mirrored to form a whole. This is to say, when asymmetry is evenly mirrored, it becomes part of a larger symmetry.

Of course, the example in this image is one of truly infinite and equal examples. We have all been so thoroughly familiar with the concept, really since birth, that discussing it seems as vacuous as contemplating the color of the sky. But the reason it is so intuitive is what interests me--not for the pure sake of intuition, but how and why it is intuitive. A better way to express this follows how we perceive it: balance.

Fox News compulsively (and usually emptily) trademarks every report of theirs as "fair and balanced". Third party observers in general are supposed to bring a balanced perspective. When a unicycle is perfectly balanced, it has no velocity. The rider has to carefully apply biased weight to one direction in order to move, and it is the same for any arena in life. This is why Republicans of today scoff at negotiations with terrorists, because in principle it is an attempt to balance what they perceive to be an inherently, morally asymmetrical situation. That is to say, if we are to say that God and Satan are equals, it brings religion and the "good" to a standstill in much the same way that a biker does not want to remain in the same place with equal attachment to his origin as that of his destination. If forward is no better than backward, relativism and balance seem to make everything grey.

Of course, this is a much calmer portrait than what conservatives would paint of this situation. If we forget (the story goes) the "sacrifices" of our men in uniform, if we trivialize 9-11 as equivalent to the Iraqi civilian deaths which followed, then it takes the wind out of our sails and allows evil to take over. The logic behind this is essentially "eat or be eaten, kill or be killed". One can't deny this is an ultimately utilitarian principle most animals have to live by to some extent, but we have to remember that we invented language and slogans and we are the only animal which applies them religiously. If an animal kills without the influence of physical need or psychological illness, we would nevertheless describe it as insane and ripe for euthanasia. Even so, one would be hard pressed to find an animal who came up with a theory about people or their pets and decided to apply it by avenging their desecration of nature. This is what the Nazis, Soviets, and Catholic Church have done historically, out of isolated "pet" theories. ...But weren't they just following the rule of symmetry? Socialism, after all, is based in equalizing the classes.

The problem with this has historically been blamed on the concepts of socialism as a perverse symmetry. To live with God is to accept asymmetry in this world, the sacred wall between divine and profane. To mix the two would certainly taint and fritter the sacred, right? My reaction to this has always instinctually been that it is a paranoid philosophical position, but it is an extraordinarily fundamental assumption for our species and this is where we begin the exodus: what if they are wrong?

Doubt is similarly an asymmetrical position. You have conceptual assertions such as "good" and "evil", and society naturally gives birth to the complementary argumentative position of doubting these assertions. It's science, literally. That is what science is, hypothesis and applied doubt. Where the hypotheses come from nobody knows, but there are infinitely more where the last one came from so there is no need to search.

By writing this blog--exploring the relationships of ideas, having a conversation (mostly with myself) while faith in categories ends discussion of their meaning--I am already trespassing the meaning of those solid categories. If the world is rigidly separated into illusion and reality, evil and good, where do I stand? To ask the question is implicitly to call the categories into question, yet we normally don't know where to take the conversation from there and so we fall back onto the categories like an inarticulate, battered but dependent girlfriend would. Would God ever doubt what made him the ultimate good? Would Satan ever call himself a moral crusader and actually believe it himself? "Conservatives" have to rely on the concept of illusions and immaturity for this latter question because the majority of their public opposition (pro-choice and anti-war activists, etc) does just this.

Well, people can be deluded, but Satan is a spirit and thus he doesn't have the same problems of confusion we do. He lies all the time and knows it, they might say. But who are "they" and who is "he"? Corner any theologian and he will confess that he can't say anything specific about what God thinks or what his role with Satan is...yet the two characters are concrete ideas for people and have a definitive, unambiguous influence on how people behave in this world. Freedom of interpretation, at this level of the discussion, is cited. To which I respond that a non-believer is the only person in a position to have a truly un-influenced interpretation of good and evil. That is, if the top officials of any religion have no answer but to say that God reveals himself to people individually and not in communicable, arguable terms, we truly have a feudal system of belief. Those who are able to acquire power over language and cultural ideas best own psychological real-estate which people must share-hold in order to satisfy their vague concern for religious matters. Those who spend enough time thinking about it realize it's open terrain while those who have no time to sit around and chit chat philosophy never reach that point of transcendence.

As Tolkien writes through his character Elrond, "Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."

Stay tuned for the punchline!

What this blog has become

So I started a long while back with no better outlet for my frustrations and pride as a razor-wielding critic of popular culture. Journals don't have soil for ideas to grow, it's all sand you're casting your seeds onto, but the fortunate thing for people like me is we have the internet these days and I can change the ground I sow. These "breadcrumbs" have sprouted into a garden this Spring in my school work, but more on that later.

"I also take the position that contemporary history is going to be retained on [music] records more accurately than it is going to be within history books," said Frank Zappa in a 1972 interview with Martin Perlich. When I remembered this today, it struck some kind of mental bell that sympathetically vibrated another cluster of neurons which tossed back this quote from Stephen A. Tyler in an essay he wrote for Writing Culture: Poetics and Politics of Ethnography in 1986, entitled "From Document of the Occult to Occult Document":

The model for postmodern ethnography is not the newspaper, but that original ethnography--the Bible.

Correlation doesn't mean similar causation, but these two quotes crested a wave building for over a century in what we religion scholars and theologians call the Social Gospel movement. The idea is that Jesus' teachings were counterintuitive--for people whose notion of the divine was objectified and lifeless. Oral histories and musical ritual are at the core of our human ingenuity, and the pants we started to put on this ability is in my opinion what started our estrangement from what we already know, what Lao Tzu and Socrates both knew before Jesus put it into language the drone could barely start to understand.

Of course, the best way to get to the total layman is Hegelian dialectical talk, and this has been a struggle for Marx critics who have to stomp out his fans like multiplying roaches. Marx was inspired by Hegel, the kind of literary philosophy he founded, to use Richard Rorty's terms. I'm throwing names at you because an oral tradition is equal parts performer and subject matter. If you're not interested, go away. Zappa continually told critics the same.

So here we have the danger of translation. Nietzsche hated the message of Christianity. I try not to judge the message or the messenger (arguably indistinguishable if they are true to its content), but hate the sin of misinterpretation so long as it is rigid.

By "the danger of translation" I mean that if people don't get a consistent grapevine, one that is living and intact through all the hands that pass it down to you, then what they get at the end of the vine is rotten grapes. You have to tell the whole story, and the story has always been bigger than any format can contain, so we hold rituals to continue the story and then after the section is over we all go back to work or bed. Not telling the whole story is what people call "heresy." For ages, the extended format of our oral storytelling has left people of the finite book to think we are babbling with no plot, just entertaining...whatever that would mean. Have you ever tried to get up in front of people without material or some emotion to communicate?

Anyway, heresy has thus become associated with those who spend their lives fighting against it. One book can never tell the whole story, but those who hide behind the book sound a lot more authoritative (performers don't author anything).

What does this have to do with rock music? Modern music in general has both been extraordinarily marketable and liberating in the West for the past century for the same reason. Blues and folk music blossomed with live translation from white boys, but that arena is luckily enough of a conversation space for the translators not to be confused with the ones who carried the message through slavery. In the 1970s and '80s, white people got a little carried away with the liberation their own open-mindedness brought, and the cohesiveness of utopian vision in the '60s died. But it rose again, according to disciples like me, in the sensibilities of '90s rock. Now the second wave has left most people just tired of the old and completely estranged from the present and future. What to do?

Well all I can say is there's a tsunami of prophetic artwork coming our way. I might write a book about it. Someone else might make a musical career out of it. We're all just telling stories and reconnecting (re-ligio: "re-attach"). Meditation doesn't just happen among neurons, it can happen in a social setting--that's what the brain is anyway. Am I calling myself a prophet? Only insofar as "prophetic" is a word most aptly used to describe things which are not profitable.

Keep yer nose clean!

What does this phrase mean? Well, now that I have returned to this blog from hiatus, I can assure you I've done my best to keep a clean nose.

Some picking was involved, some scratching at other times, rubbing...so is this piece of advice a reminder to be hygenic in your compulsive picking and scratching?

As we usually do, when a bit of cultural information seems to be vague, we end up out of necessity inventing or stitching together ideas that give it meaning. Our perception of "God" is the most obvious answer, which for me personally is onomatopoeia, but in order to explain that I'll have to postpone for another post.

How do I make sense of the phrase? First of all, it's not especially important that we know or attribute exact meaning to anything. Naturally, some words or phrases are only appropriate figuratively and as expressions. "Break a leg" refers to the abstract sense of good performance that is evoked better by this phrase than the director saying, "Now, I want you to go out there and do A, B, and C..." or "Don't screw up!" The vagueness both puts trust in the performer's own intuitive skills as well as calling attention to them.

Keep your nose clean. My interpretation of this dawned on me in relation to a ritual I participate in within my culture. Smoking the "peace-pipe," as pot smokers like me enjoy ironically referring to it, has two commonly reported effects: hyper self-consciousness and a distinct smell to the smoke. These two factors feed off of eachother within my consciousness whenever I'm in public because it is an illegal and somewhat taboo substance. So, having just coated my airways with THC vapor, airborne ash, and tar, the smell of pot not only sticks to my hair and clothes but the airways inside of my body. What happens then is that if I'm in public, my hyper-self-consciousness focuses much of my attention on how blatantly stoned I am to the outside observer. Am I walking funny? Are my eyes glowing red? Most importantly, do I reek of pot?

Stay with me here. In order to figure out how much I smell like pot, I have to do things like smell my clothing. But I'm sure you've had the experience as well, of smelling everything you can think to check for the source of a smell, not finding it, but nevertheless still smelling it coming from somewhere when you stop sniffing. Sometimes it's an unknown source, maybe the chair your sitting in already smelled like methane when you sat in it.

...But sometimes it's hard to place a smell because you're the source. This doesn't make you a bad person. There are many times that I'm sober and people think I'm stoned. Also many times I'm stoned and people don't realize until I say something wacky. But sometimes I'll be stoned in public and smell myself as reeking of pot while others don't seem to smell it...so what's going on and what does this have to do with the title?

All that smoke coats your breathing pathways, and I mostly breathe through my nose so most of it passes in and out of my nasal cavity--and gets stuck there. Now I usually blow my nose if I can before going out stoned, to eliminate this problem. This is my own parable equivalent to "removing the beam" from your eye before reaching to help another with the splinter in theirs. So now I'll contribute to the chaos of meaningless adages and declare "He who smelt it probably smoked it!"

Carpet Diem: advice and political correctness

I would like to acknowledge anyone who has glimpsed at this blog and quickly hit the "back" button because I came off as extremist. I make an effort to genuinely provide understanding instead of negativity. It can be a fine line when making an attempt to make some sort of progress, though. I can slap on a "C0exi$t" sticker and let my mind blow like prayer flags in the wind, but being passive causes just as many problems as misguided action does. I choose to ask questions and shoot, then negotiate.
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I am a strange kid. When I was very little, I'd spend a lot of time listening to people, listening, and trying to make sense of things around me. Whenever you do this, you start to realize that lots of things in the world don't make sense.

For me and lots of people, it is a rough process realizing the people they look up to are full of shit. I grew up being very conservative with my family, and I bought into the "common sense" kind of arguments by modern Catholics. I have walked the path to meet the liberal views of the smart people around me, and seen the same naivety in different ways. This blog is very unfocused because there is really no one side to fight for anymore.

So, do you seize the day? Do you live every moment as if it were your last? It always could be. This blog is for varying audiences, but another one is those who are as pissed off as I am about all the bad advice out there. Your role model might spit out something like "Just be yourself!" Then when someone puts this into practice, they might indulge in all the bad habits they've accumulated and expect things to work out.

No advice should be taken on its own. It's like eating only oatmeal all week because you heard it's healthy, and then spending hours on the toilet with agonizing constipation. THE main problem with the world is human beings running around, assuming they are more wise than anyone else because they follow that one good peice of advice grandpa gave.

Carpe Diem is the one that saturates my environment the most. I'm not the most social person, because what tends to happen is I'm observing people instead of engaging. The reason I have a hard time socializing is hardly anyone can carry a conversation. Occasionally I'll get lucky and talk about something viably interesting for ten minutes with someone at a party, but then it's soon interrupted by something as trivial, insidious, and distracting as a cigarette break. One possible explanation for this is that they started living for the moment under the wrong impression. Too many people see this as embracing addictions or not setting goals. Too many people around me are still behaving a lot like carpet-crawling infants who decided to forget learning how to walk because "fuck that, I'm going to live for the moment." Having an eclectic taste or lifestyle simply means containing parts from different sources. This doesn't mean you have to find a new band every day to add to your iTunes library. Similarly, living in the moment doesn't mean you have to be doing something different from second to second. It means you indulge and expand each moment, which includes consecutive moments. I am living for the moment when I watch my favorite films, paying close attention to what's going on and enjoying it without interruption.

Liberals suck. I blogged before about how the liberal mindset stands for progress and conservativism holds us back for nostalgia. I apologize for not expressing the other end at the same time. Being open to change does not create change. The saying "so open-minded your brain falls out" goes a long way here. If all you do is listen to everyone and give them a pat on the back, you've programmed yourself as a robot. You're the air-freshener in the toilet that makes people feel better about what they did. What is the use of being all-inclusive? Whenever I see a "Coexist" sticker, I see a variety of interchangeable symbols.



Diversity does not equal positivity. Hell, we have a very diverse selection of diseases to choose from, yet we descriminate and try to limit these. Read some of the Greek Epictetus's philosophy. He resembled Lao Tzu, saying all things here are part of a whole and we shouldn't try to change things out of our control. For example, Epictetus would advise parents to love their children in an abstract, Platonic essence kind of way. When you say "I love children" or "I love women," it takes the place of the individual so that if they were to die, you would not waste time mourning over the loss. It's the same as loving pottery, but when your bowl breaks it's fine because there's more in the cupboard.
There may be some logic to this, but if you regard all things as equal, you set yourself up for problems. This is an obvious point in this narrow context, but so few people apply the same standards to all things in life.

Not all advice is worth the breath used to tell it. Some can effectively aid you through life. To fully exploit this soapbox, the best peice of advice someone has ever given me came from a head chef at a restaurant where I worked. Speaking of my work ethic, he said:

"Whatever you are here is whatever you will be at any other place."

People maintain their personalities, but the world changes because it is indifferent and unconsciously manipulated by life forms. Especially if you are now a young adult, the way you spend your day mirrors on some level what kind of life you will live.
But over all, wisdom is flexibility and a capacity to assess things on their own terms. I argue that it is dangerous to trust a religion to dictate your approach to life. More specifically, no single peice of advice should be your personal motto.

Sarah Palin

"I didn't hesitate." Those are the words that came from Sarah Palin's lips when Charles Gibson asked for her reaction to McCain's choice. In this first national interview, covered by ABC News, we finally get to see what goes on in her skull...which is apparently not very much. As with most of the questions, he had to ask this three times just to get a straight answer and confirm that the responses were not just a slip of the tongue.

WATCH THIS INTERVIEW. In fact, I hope everyone is paying attention to everything about this woman, because McCain is rising in the polls and quite possibly going to drag this clown into the oval office. She's a perfect symbol of what the United States has become: superficial and in power (as opposed to the downtrodden Enlightenment experiment we used to be).

Let me go over this again. She explains that she had no qualms about whether she was qualified to be the vice president. "You can't blink. You have to be wired in a way of being so commited to the mission...so I didn't blink then, even." How do I put this into words? I thought we could view the Bush administration as a vaccine against electing unfit leaders, but I stand corrected. Apparently the majority of Americans prefer personality over intelligence.

I'll leave the rest of the interview to you, but this first minute of the interview spells it out. Anyone who knows anything about her understands she is a Pentecostal (fundamentalist) Christian, was head of the FCA (not SGA) in school, and pageant winner, including third place in the Miss Alaska competition (we know how smart you have to be to win such an election--i.e. Miss South Carolina). She's a regular starry-eyed, attractive, Christian girl who wants to spread her message of the church with an iron fist. She stands for family values (like pregnancy avoidance through abstinence only) and fulfilling our manifest destiny as a "Free" nation to spread freedom and squash anyone who opposes what we think. Like she said, "You can't blink."

I'd imagine that's a good paraphrase of what Al-Qaeda leaders repeat to recruits. The same goes for Japanese imperial soldiers during WWII, CIA investigative torturers, and--most notably--THE CHURCH.

This is why we have seperation of Church and State. Religion is an indulgence of the mind. We don't have all the answers of how and why we exist, but there are about as many seductive, nearsighted ideologies out there as there are types of alchoholic drinks (including cocktails). If someone who believes their brand of ancient mythology has all the wisdom needed to run the most powerful nation on the planet, there is little seperation of church and state when they move into office. I continue to make this point until I'm proven wrong: faith tends to be the number one virtue in Christianity, indeed in all Abrahamic religion. The emphasis is not on the teachings, but on the teacher--Jesus. This is an authoritarian system. The only religions I'm aware of that are sympathetic to democracy are Buddhism, Taoism, and maybe Hinduism. Barack seems the closest we have ever come to a politician who bothers to understand Eastern philosophy, so that's my opinion plug.

To make this more clear, Sarah Palin is a proud Pentecostal Christian. Pentecostalism is explicitly distinct from other sects, or "denominations," for the notion that salvation is only recieved through total faith. The idea is you can be a benevolent person, get baptized, and still go to hell if you don't fully believe what the Gospels say. This means the Ghandi, most of the "founding fathers," and Mother Theresa are probably starting to mix as they melt in the eternal flames. The Dalai Lama will be joining them within the century, I suppose...

It actually hurts to say that. Quite possibly, no one is a better living example of Christ than His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso. Whatever the implications, the point is that Sarah needs to understand that going to war isn't like going moose-hunting with her dad. People die, families are destroyed, and nothing is accomplished. Questions are pointless and she wants to get this point across that she is fixed on her course if elected. She is a beauty contest winner who follows a two-thousand-year-old cult. We all know it, but not everyone bothers to see the severe problem with this picture.
The crusades are back, and it' not just the fault of the Islamic world. Palin is incapable of making decisions outside of her religious world-view, and this terrifies me.

If the anti-Christ is coming after all, it will be someone who calls themself a Christian.

Moderation: blaming the messenger

I really do take religion out of context, don’t I? I pick and choose bits of the Bible (or any other “holy” text) that are barbaric and point at the radicals who take them literally. There are three ways you could be interpreting my blogs here:

1) Dismissing my claims because I’m a filthy atheist and your holy book is “divinely inspired.”
2) Agreeing with what I just said above because you are a moderate who hates extremists on any side.
3) You are a fellow irreligious reader, ravenous for knowledge and seeing if there is anything valuable in what I have to say.

In any debate where atheists take on religious people, the religious side inevitably is moderate (at least in a two-faced way to appeal to a different audience). The conversation usually starts to slip down into the pit of abstract vagueness where they aren’t even arguing for anything at all. Shocking statements crop up like “…well, these ancient writings aren’t meant to be taken literally, they were written in a period where slavery, etc… were a common part of life…” Essentially, the argument is that the Bible or Qur’an could not have been written in a way that would be morally relevant throughout all time.
This does make some slight sense, but you have to finish the sentence on all the stunted logic in these arguments. I can understand the idea that if the prophets had told everyone in the Bronze and Iron Ages to embrace homosexuals, abstain from animal/human sacrifice or slavery, and promote equal rights for women there would have been less worship and more chuckling. But if you continue on this point, it means that God compromised for his favorite species like an infatuated teen.
The writers of the Bible or Qur’an were either divinely inspired or not. If not, then both are simply philosophical texts illustrated with imaginative writing that has been misinterpreted by a staggering amount of people. This is my position. If all the holy texts are divinely inspired, then God is definitely a twisted character who likes confusing his most advanced Earthlings with dangerous contradictions. I’ll assume you don’t believe that, but if some conscious divinity did inspire one of these books, then we are back to the compromise but I wanted to make that point.
If all of those moderates out there consider atheists to be radicals in the same sense that overzealous creationists or suicide bombers are radical then I would hope they listen to this: Why do you spend all of your time fighting the ones who are calling out the suicide bombers?? When a child is complaining that his brother gave him a black eye, the mother usually listens to what he has to say, assesses the situation, and deals with the violent sibling. Moderates want to pretend that fundamentalists are like a retarded brother who can’t be blamed.
We all have our own obsessions, areas of study, or drive to just have fun. All are just different places to invest our time. Moderates are the religious people who balance life with something unrelated (like a business career, etc…). Some people devote all of their interests in religion, and feel fulfilled only in their religion. It’s starting to sound like I’ll accept religion is a subjective thing but it is not because it directly makes fundamental claims about existence that are incompatible with rationality. Those who have nothing better to do are not any less intelligent, but have succumb to the notion that humans cannot and will not ever be able to fully understand everything and so we should give up and believe primitive mythology.


So my plea to religious moderates is not to turn your back on literalists and only debate with atheists—as far as I can see you’re not gaining any ground on that anyway. The most important thing for us to do now is face the radicals who are actually dangerous. You can write your slander about Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the rest, but in the end we will still have different religions and followers in those religions who are deeply, violently opposed to one another. If the Bible is not meant to be taken literally, then PLEASE do your best to write books, and make documentaries to clarify and explain your point so that we can all understand the logic behind religion. If you do this well enough and you really do have a point, then atheists and religious fanatics may finally understand what you mean.

This change would only be possible by reason and not by dogmatically holding on to old beliefs. This is the definition of scientific inquiry and therefore presenting your God hypothesis could be proven if anyone took the time to refine and come up with a solid, clear explanation for why people can rationally believe in God. I’m actually working on this myself because it’s not enough to say that the Bibl is contradictory and so on, but I want to know the explanation for character, love, and things like musical inspiration. In this respect, I think most irreligious writers don’t complete the argument. Finding out what is the magic element of art, love, and subjective consciousness seems to be the last front of the search for God. Most of us agree he isn’t in Greek mythology, many realize he isn’t in Genesis, and now a growing number of moderates accept he isn’t directly present in much of the Bible. The question will not be answered until we figure out these abstract cracks that God hides in. I hope that someday we will finally get rid of the shadow of doubt and have a full explanation for the mystical things in life. Frankly, I’m sick of being complacent and giving up on discovery to let divinity cover up the mystery. It doesn’t solve anything, but sweeps the problem under the carpet.
Hopefully, if you keep reading I will someday be able to give a good answer to these questions. They are more important to me than publicity, but having ideas out in the open gives the opportunity for discussion and bouncing ideas off of one another. I only know what I know because of the experts in different fields who are backed with evidence. Who are you trusting your facts to?

What is God?

God is supposed to be the "way, the truth, and the light." Well...he's led us down some dark paths, hasn't always been right (or at least is heavily misinterpreted), and provided a means for the Dark Ages to be even darker with religiously inspired violence. Why is he so passive? A lot of people would say it's because he doens't exist, but I actually do believe he exists in other ways.

So...who/what is God? Most of the humans living on Earth say they believe in a god of some sort. All believe they are right without evidence, even though just about everyone looks at religion in a different way. Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in a single God who fulfills the role of a universal father, mother, judge, puppeteer, and anything else you want him to be. Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Baha’is accept that he may not follow the rules of Western religions, but there is still a definite divine force out there. Of course, any time you repeat back to people what they believe, it sounds dumb and they get offended and say you misinterpreted but these are the general views as they go by the books. Deists, pantheists, agnostics, and Buddhists don’t really believe in God but don’t completely rule him out. And of course, atheists completely reject the notion that some conscious being is responsible for existence and what goes on inside. Where does this belief come from? People have different ideas of what God is, but in all cases he exists to explain the unexplained. You ready for my explanation?
There is no other way to define God other than he is the mortar of understanding. He is the caulking we squirt into cracks to make us feel we have an air-tight understanding of existence. I believe in God, but he is something different than what we assume. He is the shadow in the corner of the room that we can characterize as the unknown. God once ruled the world, but is slowly being eaten away by the light of our understanding. He only exists in the cracks, and when we fully understand something, the crack is sealed and religious people shift their attention to a new spot with holes. He has no form of power, but summarizes the chain of events that have taken place in order for something to occur. There are lots of thigs we don't understand, but science carefully takes a closer look to map that chain of events, filling out the picture instead of taking leaps and jumping to conclusions.

Religion is nothing short of relishing in ignorance. Science doesn’t have a definite answer for everything yet, but you don’t win just because you throw out a hypothesis. People on Jeopardy don’t win because they are the first to answer, but because they give the right answer. Unfortunately, there is no Alex Trebek here to judge if we’re right, so we have to take our time in figuring it all out for ourselves.