Keptquisling’s Weblog

I sacrificed sleep for two days just to be able to read all the materials covered for the midterms later. I guess the question is, will I be able to remember enough? If I fail, it certainly wouldn’t be because of any lack of effort on my part, I simply don’t have enough time. It doesn’t really matter, as I can just always take the subjects again. Of course I don’t plan on failing later though.

I’ve never really seriously reviewed for an exam before, but stock knowledge simply won’t cut it this time. I guess this must be how regular highschool kids feel before taking an exam they didn’t prepare for.

How can you prove a negative? There’s a little green intangible Leprechaun behind you that only I can see. Obviously my statement is not true. If you say that how can we know it’s not true, then, we can answer that with a reasonable amount of certainty, as there has never been a case where the existence of Leprechauns were ever proven, and that there are no little green Leprechauns behind you.

The burden of proof is often associated with the Latin maxim semper necessitas probandi incumbit ei qui agit, the best translation of which seems to be: “the necessity of proof always lies with the person who lays charges.” A person charged with a crime is always presumed innocent until proven guilty. We have very little laws punishing people for “being” because of the inherent difficulty of proving the absence of anything. To prove that someone was not at the scene of a crime, an alibi is provided that requires evidence that suspect was somewhere else, not evidences of his absence at the crime scene.

So if with “reasonable doubt” we can conclude someone is innocent after trials, and if with experiments and mathematical equations we have enough faith in our calculations to build skyscrapers, why won’t we use the same logic and reason with religion? Why do we insist on turning a blind-eye to the absurdity of the claims of a sect or a denomination?

With facts that we have observed within our lifetimes, we can work, build, bring criminals to justice, and heal people. Would you drink medicine that has not been proven to work and is more likely to kill you? Would you send a person to jail because he couldn’t “prove” that he did not do a crime as opposed to the prosecution proving that he did? What kind of justice system would we have if we didn’t use logic and reason in evaluating evidence?

For all the years of the existence of the world’s major religions, there has been no concrete proof of the validity of the various deities that they claim to exist. Of course, there’s always this minute possibility that, somehow, someway, one of their gods might be real, and is just doing a really good job of hiding himself, but what are the chances of that? We can say for a reasonable human certainty that, their gods aren’t real.

It is so much easier to just claim ignorance and to stop thinking. People seem to think leaving open questions in debates and discussions is profound, when it is so much more difficult to see the questions through and actually try to answer them.