Them Birds by illustrators Dan Eijah Fajardo (aka Dandingeroz) and Pedro Kramer (aka Badbasilisk) who collaborated on this awesome pop culture mashup wherein Alfred Hitchcock encounters a gang of Angry Birds.
This design is currently up on Threadless as a t-shirt design candidate.
[via My Modern Metropolis]
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
Henry Miller, Sexus (via howfreeitis)
If only some people would stop deleting their blogs… 😉
http://howfreeitis.tumblr.com/
http://vendemiaire.tumblr.com/
http://surferdude182.tumblr.com/
http://dontakeitforgranted.tumblr.com/
This is a subject that has fascinated me for a long time, and will continue to do so for an even longer time. So when I came across this in a book that I’m reading (which is extremely rare for me, to read a book that is), I just couldn’t help myself but share it because of the eloquence in how it explains my perspective on the subject.
“…the parable of the feeble-minded person who thinks that the light of the sun is the result of its rising, is like the parable of an ant which as it happened upon the surface of a sheet of paper, was endowed with reason and thereupon watched the movement in the process of writing, only to think that it was the work of the pen, but would not go beyond that to see the fingers, and behind the fingers the hand, and behind the hand the will which moves it, and behind the will a deliberate and an able scribe, and behind all, the Creator of the hand, and the ability, and the will. Most people do not look beyond the nearby and earthly causes and never arrive at the Cause of all causes.” ~ Imam Al-Ghazzali (The Book of Knowledge)
The reason I’m so positively incensed about this is because recently I’ve been plagued with the arguments of science and religion on so many blogs. And the one thought that always lingers in my mind is that science will always be on the back foot because it is always an observation of what has been. Never will it be able to advise on what is to be, or why, only how. It will always be an observation after the fact, and never before, since it is aimed at establishing the knowledge of how everything relates to everything else.
Anything before the fact is considered mere theory and therefore subject to change, interpretation or perspective. This does not imply that our ability to predict future events based on established relationships between different events or forces is not part of science. It is, but it is also entirely dependent on what is known, and will therefore always be a work in progress. Weather forecasting is a typical example of this.
Therefore, in my mind at least, the belief in science as the ultimate pursuit of knowledge to define the purpose of our existence is inherently flawed. But this is just my opinion, and I suspect that I may be blissfully unaware of numerous refutations that have already been compiled in defense of science and atheism, of which I have no knowledge because of my aversion to read lengthy discourses about the philosophies of others.
Am I naive, or perhaps ignorant? Am I over-simplifying a complex issue? Or does this perspective hold some merit?
Someone recently accused me of making it easy for people to leave me. They were right. I do that because I can’t bear the thought of people doing anything for me out of obligation. It must be sincere or not at all. Otherwise I feel pathetic because it seems as if they’re doing something for me out of pity for the supposed state I’m in. I’d rather be alone than be surrounded by people that view me pitifully.
Incidentally, the very same person that accused me of this also promised never to stop the ‘friendship’. It’s been a while since they felt like a friend, or even bothered to reach out and see if I’m ok. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) I’ve been through this cycle enough times to see it coming a mile away. No, it’s not a self-fulfilled prophecy. I’d rather make it easy for people to leave because that way, at least I have the comfort of knowing that anyone who sticks around is there either because they genuinely give a damn, or because they need something from me. And it’s quite easy to tell the difference. Isn’t it?