It’s been on of those strange days. I go home after work really tired and all I want to do is shower and take a nap. I wake up and its 1AM. Can’t sleep as I’ve already slept through the evening. It’s dark and I feel my way to my PC and switch it on. The only light comes from my monitor and this awful blue LED light in front of my CPU. Why do they build in LED lights in CPU’s?

I started downloading songs so I guess I’ll blog a little while waiting for some of the songs to download. This Vista isn’t working out as well as I hoped. I think I royally screwed it up. My premiere pro doesn’t work. I got all the codecs screwed up. Quicktime doesn’t work. This damn thing is basically good only for gaming and blogging. Other than that, I can’t edit on it.
I’m bloodly gonna format this C drive and reinstall Vista again... or better yet, go back to my pirated version of XP. So much for buying original software. Screw you Windows for promoting an OS that doesn’t work!

I’ve been listening to Lily Allen. Interesting lyrics. Very London pop. So different from the studio generated stuff from America. She’s got cynical lyrics. Something in me finds it very amusing. Yes, I have a cynical streak in me. Quite a mean one at that.
Anyway, so what does one do when you’re wide awake at 1AM? Well, there’s my own little world in Medieval 2. You know how in children’s story such as Alice in Wonderland , the hero escapes to a wonderful strange world? Well, that’s what Medieval 2 is like to me. It’s a strangely wonderful little world that lives in my PC. It means nothing to the real world but once you’re in it, it’s so engrossing.

However, not something I’m going to touch tonight. The other option, so to download some music of course. Something I can plug into my car stereo and listen to the next day .
Sometimes strange thoughts come floating into my head when I sit idly doing nothing. It’s either stuck in traffic or at 2AM in the morning lying in my bed in the dark.

Strangely, I think about evolution and religion a lot. I think about how the human race has come along and how religion has sprung up from their minds. We’re the only living creatures that has created a religion. I don’t see other animals believing an afterlife. I don’t know, maybe they do, they just can’t communicate it with us. Maybe, the vegetables we eat believe in reincarnation. Somewhere deep within the seeds of the apple we eat is a sentient being that believes its going to be reincarnated and slowly approaching Nirvana.

The Buddha says humans are the only creatures smart enough to learn the Dharma and you’ll need that to get to Nirvana. Escape rebirth and death. I wonder how does a lower life form, lets say... a cabbage transition from its present stage to a higher life form. How does it go about cultivating enough good karma to get to the stage of being a human being? The only thing a cabbage can do is grow , reproduce and get eaten. Okay, maybe that’s our perspective of the cabbage from a human’s point of view. Maybe from the cabbage’s point of view, it sees itself as something totally different. I don’t know, I can’t communicate with cabbages.

The example of the cabbage reminds me of this ethical question about vegetarianism. What if there was a genetically engineered animal that is engineered to want to die so that you can just eat them? Its sole purpose in existence is to get all plump and juice and die just so you can stick a fork in them and pop a piece of them into your mouth? Sounds morally objectable doesn’t it? Lets think back to why people become vegetarians in the first place. Most say so that they don’t want the animal to suffer and animals have toxins. Okay, what if genetic engineering solves that? The animal doesn’t suffer at all and in fact has only a short life span of 30 days. It has a huge growth spurt from the moment of its creation and suddenly, when it’s a full grown adult at 30 days, it dies peacefully... just like clockwork. It’s carcass is full of the nutrients you need without the toxins.

Still find it objectable? Maybe because we’re horrified that such an animal exist but think about it, we’re coming closer to that than we think. The farm animals that we eat are already been genetically modified to produce more meat and have faster growth. Scarry isn’t it? We don’t think about it because our fried chicken doesn’t look like a chicken with feathers on it. It looks like a desirable piece of food that makes us hungry.

As humans, we impose our perception of reality and reasoning on everything around us. It’s because we have a brain that we also create things such as morality, religion and social norms. Okay, other animals have social norms too, that’s why we study primates. However, humans so far are the only life form on this planet to so greatly effect the whole planet, and maybe one day, the whole universe. We would impose our believes and morality throughout the cosmos until the universe collapse on itself into nothing again.

We like to think that we’re the most superior life form. However, maybe on another planet there’s another life form with just the exact same thought. Maybe they’re already on the way here and they’ll impose their believes on us. For my own selfish sake, I hope we beat everyone else to gain mastery of the universe.

From a life form that evolved from hunched over two legged walking creatures to the cosmos. Interesting thought isn’ t it? Where along the way did religion evolve in our head? We know of what religion tells us, the word of God came down through messengers but religion has been around much longer before Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and Jews thought of it. The Greeks already had their gods, so did the Babylonians and the Egyptians. From archaeological digs we’ve found stone carvings of fertility statues of women with big hips and breast. How did we move from a simplistic animistic religion to the believe system we have today? I wonder how religions would evolve 10,000 years from now. Would our believe system be much more complex or become simpler or would we by evolution, evolve out of the need to have a need to believe in a power greater than us.

So far, most scientist theorize that humans created God to explain things that they could not understand. For example, the rising of the sun and the animals they hunt. So, let’s say 10,000 years from now we basically know everything there is to know about our universe already. That’s it, we’ve reached the age of enlightenment. We know what causes everything, the masters of science. Would we still need religion? What would moral code stand on? Most of our moral code and social norms come from religious teachings.

What if we find one day, that religion is irrelevant one day and science is and logic is the final determination of our conduct? What if one day, we find ourselves in a situation where dying is better for the greater good? Logic dictates that we have to ‘take one for the team’ so to say. Sounds objectable now doesn’t it? It’s already happening with suicide bombings and people who die heroic deaths. However, most of them have a different reasoning system that is based on religion or military valour. What if logic dictates that purely because we’re using up too much oxygen and that we’re passed our usefulness, we have to end our own lives one day? For efficiency sake, there’s a large chemical vat that we walk ourselves into that would dissolve us into other useful components. Before we do that, our thoughts are recorded for future references.

Sounds disgusting doesn’t it? So... soulless? Well, isn’t blogging sort of like that? We’re already heading towards impending death... rather slowly (I hope!) and we’re just recording our thoughts for future references.