Love of Lights

I've just been tipped onto an idea by something my favourite poet said on his podcast recently. The idea is that whenever you are faced with the sense of being overwhelmed or whenever the Fear rises up in you, and threatens to make you and your life small, combat it in the following way: isolate the cause of the fear and describe how you can alleviate it. The key thing to remember, however, is that your natural instinct will be to simply get rid of the problem in the easiest way, which will probably mean avoiding rather than engaging with it. But you never improve at problem-solving by avoidance; you don't up your skill-level in that area. If anything, every time you get rid of a problem by avoiding it, you probably lose skill points in that area. You legitimise the fear, and you'll be even more scared of it the next time it comes around. This is why, as I've written on this blog before, it's important to embrace the fear, because fear is pointing you in the direc...

I wish I could be religious. Anybody that knows me knows I can't be religious -- I'm too philosophical, too invested in the truth to believe things on faith, to believe things without evidence. That sounds self-aggrandising, but really I just mean I withhold belief unless there're good reasons to believe. Religious people will argue that there are plenty of good reasons to have faith, and I don't deny them that, but in order for me to believe anything, the reason that "it is probably true" is a kind of necessary condition. I can't get myself to believe something if I simply think "it might be true" or "I can't prove otherwise". When I can only believe something to those latter degrees, I withhold belief until I have further reasons to strengthen my credulity. A lot of things in religious texts I don't believe because I think about them in relation to the work being done in the sciences, so I believe a mixture of, "it's ...