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Are you an Optimist?
March 24, 2014 at 11:55 am
I try to be an optimist but sometimes I get depressed if not suicidal. I try to focus on goodness, beauty, music, peace, love, etc but there is a lot of negative crap. If life isn't hard enough there are theists trying to drive me psychotic preaching Hell if not saying “Logic is Evil!”
I think it was Brahmagupta who thought 1/0=infinity then later Einstein made a similar mistake, if these geniuses can get confused with a concept as basic as Zero then what hope do average idiots like me have to understand Math and Science?
Meanwhile Heraclitus and Buddha said life is fire, I sort of agree.
I kneel before the gay crippled man who is the dancing black goddess inside.
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RE: Are you an Optimist?
March 24, 2014 at 12:04 pm
I am an eternally pessimistic individual who always, pardon the cliche, sees the glass half empty. My pessimism does not make me unhappy, however. Rather the opposite, in fact. I am perfectly content in my pessimism and I view it as me being more realistic in a world where happiness is ninety percent perfection and only ten percent reality. I would rather not lie to myself by plastering a false smile on my face and announcing to the world that "I'm good" to people's ever inane question of how I am doing when the strangers truly do not care about me in the slightest. As far as I am concerned, false smiles and questions of a mundane and unneeded societal nature are signs of an unhealthy person.
"Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat."
~ Erin Hunter
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RE: Are you an Optimist?
March 24, 2014 at 11:44 pm
(This post was last modified: March 24, 2014 at 11:45 pm by *Deidre*.)
Oddly enough, during my Christian days, I was the most pessimistic. Not a glass half empty type of thinker, but, I worried a lot. I think religion breeds worry. It sometimes bred peace, but it often bred worry. After abandoning it, I guess I had to start thinking on my own, for myself--using logic and reasoning. Not that religious people are completely void of that capability, but when you rely on a higher power to seize the day, you don't rely on yourself as much.
Now, I would say I'm much less worrisome, and more optimistic, as I see the future as being the sum total of my decisions, and not an abstract whim of a deity.
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RE: Are you an Optimist?
March 24, 2014 at 11:48 pm
I am a hopeless optimist. I have a hard time not trusting people, I always think the best of people, I can be pretty naive in that way sometimes. I truly think that people are basically good. I haven't experienced too much disappointment even with this outlook, so it works for me, I guess.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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RE: Are you an Optimist?
March 24, 2014 at 11:49 pm
Both in my personal life and in the world at large, I see more reason to think that the general situation trends towards (what I personally view as) the positive, than the other way around.
