Ontology

This is a drunken ramble.  Let’s just point that out immediately.

I like to read Conservapedia.  A lot.  It’s one of my pastimes, really.  I like to look up articles I know will be horribly written and inadequately researched.  A good example is the recent job on US Presidential candidate (in case you live in a cave) Barack Obama.  The article is absolutely laughable.  Now, for some real fun, swing by any article pertaining to dinosaurs or American history.  The academic rigor of your typical Christian school must be fairly lacking, judging by the lack of references, dubious references, or the blatant use of marginal propaganda.  It is amazing.  Anyway, I took a gander at one of their top posts.  It happened to be Atheism.

Now, as a semidevoted atheistic spiritualist, I find the tone of the article intriguing.  It’s as if someone wrote it as a joke.  Now, i don’t mean a joke on atheists, who more or less come out looking significantly less than retarded, but on anyone who reads Conservapedia (except as a joke).  Seriously, the Onion must be a regular contributor to this wiki.

So, I perused the proofs that there is a God.  Ontology makes an appearance, somewhat predictably.  It is predictable because people are morons.  However, ontology, as a flawed and moronic human pretense, got me thinking.

See, humans, though completely unreasonable in general and in a few select cases I have dealt with in the last year completely lacking a shred of intellectual acountability, are very vulnerable to a reasonable argument.  As i said, your typical human has no ability or experience in reason whatsoever, so their vulnerability is hidden at first.  To me, and I have no proof outside of my own circumstance, this lack of reasoning ability makes them more vulnerable to a reasoned argument (even if the argument is bullshit).

So, in a bout of conscience, I will tell you this much.  I spent a goodly chunk of my existence being an outright whorish individual.  And it was easy.  The sample size in my years long improvised and poorly conducted experiment isn’t at the accepted levels for a finding to be statistically significant, but it’s close to the magical number where regressions becomes the rule.  The most effective method I had for what can only be called seducing (and I feel dirty saying it), was an appeal to reason.  Not that it was reasonable to sleep with me, but that it was unreasonable not to.

This is why taken women were the easiest targets.  I’m an average looking guy, on the attractive side, but nothing special.  Obviously, the reason to sin with me had nothing to do with me.  So, with taken women it is easier.  Instead of me arguing that it is unreasonable not to sleep with me versus thousands of other guys or simply going home alone, I only had to make the case for it being unreasonable to sleep with me versus a boyfriend.  At any one time, women are at least 40% unhappy with their shared lives.  On random occasions, or when he did something that was not that big a deal, or when he said something vulgar, etc., suddenly that number raises up around 75%, especially if that man is their life.  At that point, a new person can make a valid argument, with completely veiled intention of course, that it is unreasonable to go home to that upsetting person and that upsetting life when the new guy offers strangeness (in a good way) and adventure, and not much else.  Now, I stumbled upon all this by accident, but I have seen myself and other men do it flawlessly without even realizing they do this.

If you are a woman, and you are with someone who supported you through a breakup, or you are with someone who might have talked you through a tough decision to break it off, he was doing exactly what I used to do in bars to get laid.  And it worked.  You wouldn’t give him a chance normally, but he used his substandard means to finagle you into putting out.  The magic is that he doesn’t even realize he did it.  Neither do you.  Until now.  Have fun with that one.

Likewise, if you are a man and you had a woman help you reach a similar conclusion, and she got you, then feel equally stupid.  We all do it.  Shit, I have been on every possible side of this equation.  The thief, the stolen from, and the stolen.

I didn’t say people were reasonable, I said they would listen to arguments based in reason, even faulty, terrible reason.

So, Ontology. And how it applies to making bad decisions.

The basic premise behind Ontology is that God must exist because he is the super-duperest.  You cannot imagine anything greater than god, therefore, God must be extant.  I oversimplified the argument, but that really is it.  Think of the superest thing you can.  Now thing of something better.  That is the Superest, now.  At some point, you get to the super-duperest of all things possible, or not even plausible.  And you wind up believing in God.  Not for the belief, but because of the line of reasoning that got you there,  you are a fucking moron, like most of humanity.  So, relationship ontology.

Take the person you want.  Imagine them.  Now imagine someone better (spare me the Halmark Channel “he’s already the superest!” crap).  Now imagine them even better.  Now you’re spending your life alone.  Because now you’re looking for The One.  The super-duperest mate you will ever find for yourself.  Ok, so you’re with someone, married, etc.  Imagine that person without a few qualities you hate.  Now you see why a stranger can show up and argue that your mate is in fact, not the ontological ultimate.  You are going to make a bad decision.  Based on a reasonable argument.

I remember one time reading an Asimov essay.  He mentioned that people say all the time that one thing or another stands to reason.  Such as, a person cannot have their back to the north and their face to the north at the same time.  That does stand to reason, unless the person was at the South Pole.

Ontology stands to reason, I know, I have used it as a reason, but it fails to make you feel any better about that shit.  Or feel any better when you’re on the other end of someone making the argument that you are not the super-duperest for someone.  Then not even God can help you.