Friday, June 1, 2007

Overview: Philosophy and Personal Musings

I have been writing opinions and describing my personal research since 2003. I began with my personal Web site, and then continued on this blog. After 100 entries here, I feel it would be useful to provide some perspective on what I've been writing about.

There are several common threads to both the opinions and the research: philosophy and personal musings; politics and current events; sustainability; and space exploration.

After spending most of my life accepting the religious and political views of my parents, peers, and friends, I began questioning everything. This was triggered by the death of my father, whose experiences and insights were unusually broad and deep. Until then, I had regarded people (such as my mother) who didn’t aspire to an objective, rational approach to life as being immature and hardly worth emulating. I discovered in a very short time just how wrong I had been: about him, about other people (especially women), and about myself.

As a result of my questioning, I discovered several things, among them:

  • Most religions depend on having faith in other people rather than in a divine creator, since none of us, individually or collectively, has enough awareness or understanding to be able to even recognize a divinity.
  • I have a profound sense of concern for others and humanity as a whole, which identifies me more with liberal Democrats than the conservative Republicans whose promotion of the individual above the group I had accepted as obviously right.
  • People fall within a spectrum of feelings, experiences, and personalities, and everyone is deserving of respect so long as they do not willingly hurt others.
  • Evil is the result of thinking of other people as objects with less value than oneself.

No comments: