aaron

Banter...not opinion stating, this was defenatly a brawl
Byron is my friend. He's an atheist who sits around and reads books like Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and makes fun of religion. I'm the kid who sits there with "The Neuroscience of Human Relationships" in one hand and "Mere Christianity" in the other.

We clash. A lot.

People are often offended, it seems, by the fact that we sit there in the SUB lounge like a couple of college hipsters and duke out the finer points of evolutionary gene drifts and doctrinal interpretation, arguing about the church and it's values, the logical or illogical elements of theism and atheism. So we battle on the usual abortion, and then revert to something more ambient like, oh say, the role of genetic copying in evolution, pouring over pentahybrid crosses to see if there is an exponential flaw.

Monday (I think) we were at it again and things were getting pretty fiery. It was a genuinely good debate. And Oriana comes trotting in and sits next to us and says, "What are you guys arguing about".

"Just some friendly banter over the secrets of the Universe regarding God versus Science." Yeah, I was a little sarcastic.

"Oh! So you guys are just stating your opinions, got it."

No, it's definitely an argument. Don't dilute it. We both have very powerful, well versed minds and we're using them. And it's both fun and enlightening. And while one minute were tackling the answer to the balance between morals and practical application in the realm of abortion, and how it pertains to the greater good of humanity versus the moral institution, the next minute we might find ourselves concocting ideas for fatshaft or something of the like.

Maybe people really are that selfish, but I think there might be something else to it.

Byron and I both have a lot of brain power and as a result we spend a lot of time bored by the monotony of school. Not to say it's too easy, but more that it's an exercise in will power, not brains. Most things taught are relatively easy if we apply any effort. This is to say we don't get a chance to really flex our brains that frequently.

Thus finding someone else of high intellect who thoughts are the antithesis of your own is a rare treat. We get to use our minds and push them to the limit. We refine our arguments, and we never agree to disagree. Why? Because we're true to our art.

"Agreeing to disagree", as it were, is really just a cop-out to avoid doing the work necessary to develop a solid and founded belief system that can withstand trial. It's for people who want happiness, not truth. Which in our culture is regarded as acceptable. The analytical mind, however, finds that the men and women who found truth and used it to better the world seldom stumbled across it while seeking happiness.

A group of people can argue about the true color of an object, some saying it is more blue than green, and others saying it's more green than blue. But in the end, it's something. Even if it's neither, it certainly can't be both. Relative truth is another witty phrase some complete moron came up with to protect him self from the disappointment of being proven wrong. With thought comes the potential for mistakes. And in our human insecurity, we run from things that expose those mistakes. We don't want to look weak, so we form this idea that all truth is relative and we should just believe whatever makes sense to us. The concept of the world being flat makes a ton of sense to a guy by the name of James Hallam. That doesn't make it true.

This is probably the one thing Byron and I agree on: there is truth. Truth being the non-perspective oriented reality superseding all other realities, which in turn become perspective oriented. It is the way things really are, which is not controlled by how we would like them to be. And there are ways by which this can be found out. It's a matter of taking a step back and looking at the whole picture, and having the courage to gamble our beliefs with the chance of them being shattered.

Honestly, I have no idea why I was so inclined to write this out. Those who should be concerned with this won't change their minds and those who shouldn't already knew what I said and probably didn't even read this for sake of boredom wrought of redundancy.

Well, I wrote it. I might as well put it out there.

8 you constantly make it impossible to | make conversation