h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Of late (as in the past ten years), solidifying my philosophical beliefs has been a subject of constant concern. I just don't know what to believe anymore.

That's not entirely true . . . I've given up on institutionalized religion. Maybe not the whole thing, but I have given up relying on someone else to tell me what to do, and how to act. I was a sophomore in college when I came to the sudden realization that no one ELSE really knows what's going on, either. It was a lot like the first time you saw your elementary-school teacher at the grocery store, and you realized that they actually have a life -- that they don't, in fact, actually live at the school. It was a very liberating, but also a very scary, thought. It was liberating because I was no longer bound by the precepts and misconceptions and prejudices of others. But it was scary, because it really meant I was out there all alone looking for the answer.

In college I discovered and ate up Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It made a lot of sense to me. Since then, now that I have placed some distance between her and me, I have seen some of the flaws. Objectivism doesn't leave a lot of room for compassion. It also doesn't leave a lot of room for instinct or intuition. So, for a while, I considered myself a quasi-Objectivist.

Since then I have been going back and forth on the whole God question. I was a firm atheist when I graduated from college. Then I realized that for every philosopher, some other philosopher always comes along and finds the holes. Applying that to atheism, I decided that I was an atheist, but left open the possibility that I was wrong. So, I wasn't a very devout atheist.

Then it hit me (epiphanies always sneak up on me and then pounce when I'm in the middle of doing something else) -- a single sentence that I had never actually heard before, at least that I could remember, that summed it all up: Our relationship with some supernatural being is much less important than our relationships with each other. It really stemmed from the fact that, to paraphrase something I believe Kurt Vonnegut said, whether God exists or he doesn't, how does that affect how I should act?

I wonder if there is already a philosophical theory that delves more deeply into this idea?

now you've gone and done it-- got me interested. i was an atheist for 42 years, punctuated by several incidents where i was so stoned, ossified, demolished, blasted, (just love to do this) blitzed, sh*t-faced, smashed, wrecked, flying (hmmm), fractured, gassed, sloshed, wasted, whacked, zooted, looped... anyway, i was so drugged and/or drunk that i could see God, knew who He was, and gave Him a good piece of my plowed mind. otherwise, i knew there was no God.

and people were what i worshipped. the general Human Race. my hero! etc. you think it was enlightening when you found your teacher in a grocery store? imagine finding him in bed with your mom, while dad was off in the city, slaving his butt off to pay the mortgage. yeah, nobody knows what they're doin' all righty all right.

believe it or dont, i'm even older than 42, and found out that unless i get real honest and straight with God, i cant really HAVE a relationship with humans that makes any sense. oh yeah, there's a God, for sure. trust me. i know. i'm His last great prophet, see? and i'm gettin' a lotta guys from the hood with semi-a's to shoot 'em up in texas somewhere, set some oil wells on fire, whatever.

okay, it's a scary, confused, angry world we have here these days. why? because. thats why. civilizations rise and fall. just dont wanna be on this side of the cycle, do we? tough. this is where we came into the picture. seems unfair; ya come into the world in the middle of the story, spend yer pitiful life tryin to make sense of it, study anthropology, maybe THOSE guys will get it figured out, but then you get old, discover no one has the whole picture, then ya die, never finding out what was the point of it all.

tell you what, andy. one man's opin? you can lead a horse to water and if you get to watch it drink, then that was a good ride. i dont want to get "there" anymore. i'm just digging the journey. i find major players like you and the butcher to shoot the sh*t with, find some foxy women in town here, forget all about any thought whatsoever, for a full 8 seconds, and i'm good to go another day. if my first novel ever gets published, great. if any of the movies i wrote and co-wrote ever see celluloid, great. if i ever learn to juggle 5 balls, great. if the dentist ever finishes f*cking with my teeth and if i ever pay the millions he's charging me, great. if not, well, it was a good ride trying.

YankMe,

You seem to have a very defeatist attitude about life in general. I don't have time to try to dissect what you wrote and respond to it all, though. I just hope that, 42 years from now, I still have a clear head. I didn't reach atheism through chemical means...there just seems like so much to say in response, but I can't seem to do it diplomatically.

I'll bring up one idea, though, which may not actually contradict what you said, I'm not sure. You mentioned "worshipping the human race. . . my hero! etc." I don't worship the human race. It's almost logically impossible to do so, since to worship something is to raise it to a higher level, and since I'm a member of the human race. . . . there's a fallacy in there somewhere.

But the "my hero!" part bugs me. I don't believe in hero worship. It makes me sick when I see people fawning over some famous person or other (I wonder if anyone ever threw their panties at Einstein). But there are certain redemptive qualities in the human race, that are by no means universal, but they are there as potentialities. I like to believe that those redemptive qualities will be just that in the end: redemptive.

Gotta go.

interestingly enough, i thought YOU were defeatist! funny, how that happens, eh? about being diplomatic, dont sweat the details, friend. we're all in this Classic GOO together...

"I came to the sudden realization that no one ELSE really knows what's going on, either". there's an old expression: those who think they know everything really annoy those of us who do. the world was a very depressing place for me during my atheist years. there's really no way i can compare my emotional/spiritual life today with those years i spent in fear, not knowing i was afraid; years in confusion, not knowing i was confused; years in anger, not knowing my own fury.

all that came to an end when i gave the slimmest chance to the idea that there MIGHT be a God. i'd entertained so many other beliefs, in psychology, the grandma's knee theory, nihilism, ubermensch, aliens created life on earth, etc.-- so why was i dead set against there being a God? probably for the same reason you gave up on organized religion. they are all wonderfully the same-- deluded, sometimes to the point of psychosis.

so i gave it a shot. when friends told me that coincidence is the manifestation of God's movement and purpose, i began tallying all the coincidences in my life's history. then i began noticing uncanny coincidences in the present. then the coincidences became simply too bizarre to chalk up to coincidence!

for this atheist, there could only be one explanation: something else was going on, something or someone was doing these... things... setting up situations in which only someone who was following me around would know i needed to be. things i had needed for years, car parts, a motorcycle jacket, etc. I WAS FINDING IN THE STREET! i should have written them all down.

so is this rubbishism? i dunno. what i do know, is that every aspect of my life changed when i came to believe there certainly was a power much greater than my own mind. do i know it all? nahh, not sure i'd want to. did i ever know it all? well, i thought i did... and if i didnt, then no one else did either. sound familiar?

anyways, a little something i heard somewhere: the atheist can appreciate all the wonders of life and feel supreme joy. the believer can do exactly the same, but he has someone to thank for it.

That's all fine and good, and I'm glad you found a way to make your life more bearable, even, it sounds, enjoyable. But I'm not going to believe in God just because it makes life easier. Though I've never put it in writing before (until now), I prefer truth over happiness.

And yes, there is a whole branch of philosophy in constant debate about what truth is, if it really exists, and whether or not it can be known. I know I don't have all the answers, and I know I never will. It's the search that's important.

The main problem I have with institutionalized religion is that it always involves the giving up of free will. In churches, someone else reads the Bible, tells me what it means, and tells me how it should affect my life. I don't need or want some old man telling me what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, what I should and shouldn't do. Those answers I believe I either know or can find out for myself.

It may be too optimistic of me, but I believe that a human can know the difference between right and wrong.

I also think that, if there were a God up there, It wouldn't be as vain and spiteful and lacking in self-confidence as religions make him out to be. If there is a God up there, It doesn't really CARE about what I specifically am up to.

i'm with you: i prefer the truth over happiness also. in some ways, "finding" God hasnt made my life more bearable at all. whether the knot that developes in my stomach when i know i've done something wrong, is God or my own conscience, is irrelevant-they are one and the same thing for me now. what changed in me was my willingness to look inside for what is right and wrong, instead of looking at what was (obviously) wrong with the world.

which touches on the question of right and wrong, subjective and objective reality, the individual and the group. for me, it's the relationship between the sides of each of these pairs that's crucial. when my personal reality conflicts with everyone i talk to, instead of screaming Ayn Rand! or relying on the superiority of my thinking, my logic, my whatever... i stop and look in the mirror. maybe i am only partially right, others partially wrong. the mitigating factor is that each arising situation in my life needs individual consideration.

i dont deal with the immensities anymore, largely because i dont see the efficacy of doing so! will my life change if i solve the riddle of which came first, chick or egg? it's like looking at a map of Wales and trying to figure out if i should make a left at the next light or go straight.

it matters little to me now, the how, why, what and who of my new-found belief in an omni-God, that caused me to change my ways. i know that i am different; the world looks different to me. perhaps it was the natural outcome of taking myself out of the driver's seat, accepting the suggestions of people more spiritually advanced than i, trusting the evidence of my instincts over that of my thought processes. i try to do the next right thing, knowing that some higher power is guiding my step.

but why didnt i have that knowledge before? why doesnt everyone know? what kind of God is this, that doesnt just tear a hole in the sky every now and then, stick his head out and remind us puny humans that we better shape up if we want his almighty blessing? sh*t, wouldnt that just solve soooo many problems, like who should die because they arent worshipping the "right" God? millions have died over this little detail...

some lame answers i've gotten: God doesnt work that way; we were given free will, to CHOOSE to believe in order to "see" God, blah blah blah. the answer that DID make sense, one that you might have heard before, was this:

when you trust only in the evidence of your (5) senses, you are limited by those senses, by the material world. if God stuck his head out of the clouds, he would have an identifiable, finite quality and quantity, like some kind of omniscient genie or something. given my level of non-conformity, my hatred of the mundane, my disdain for the sheep of the world, it wouldnt take long before i'd be marching against the tyranny of oppression that Big Head In The Sky was wreaking on us, claiming It had given us freedom while secretly taking it away! lies! all lies, i tell ya! etc. etc.

i read somewhere that the only reason two lovers trust in the fidelity of each other is because they want to. Dorothy couldnt find her way back to Kansas until she believed she could. Dumbo couldnt fly until he had a magic feather, then couldnt fly without it until he found out there was no magic. but there is no Oz and elephants cant fly and for those who are limited by the evidence of their five senses, there is no God.

which is not to say it takes imagination for a man to find his God. no quid pro quo there at all. i am just at a loss to EXPLAIN my imagination to myself without considering the infinitude of it! in my wildest dreams, i could not have created my own imagination. it must have come from somewhere else. for me, that place is where God lives, and the one who gave me this wondrous gift is He, She, whatever...

the Hebrew mystics believe that everything has life, from the smallest pebble to the most complex thing on earth- man's brain. there might be more complex things, but that's a can of worms i'd rather save for fishing. the Hindus believe that the immortal spark of Krishna exists in all living things. extending the idea of "smallest pebble" to the smallest particle of matter (which it seems doesnt exist in this dimension, or moves sideways in what we call 'time', or is somewhere in between matter and energy...) and merging this with that, God must be in the details, in the macro and the micro and all manifestations of order in between... which of course, would include living human beings-- every one of us and every atom within every molecule within every cell within each and all.

all this do i believe. but how can Man have a personal relationship with this entity? as i've said, the how what why and who matters little to me. what matters only is that the God of my understanding does respond to my prayers and meditations, is everywhere, all the time and not only cares for me but loves me unconditionally. i've heard many others state similar dynamics of their relationship with what i think is the same God, which leads me to believe that there is probably only one, although of this i am not certain.

is there a possibility there's no God or Gods at all? given the complexity of even the simplest hydrogen atom, well, when you look at a painting done by monet, van gogh, dufy, even a bison on the walls of the lascaux caves, you know there was a painter. as far as i know, Mother Nature has never painted anything like the Sistine Chapel, although She does a marvelous job on the forests every Fall.

the fact that nothing is simple and in fact, Man still hasnt figured out what exactly matter/energy) is, indicates to me that there must've been a creator with a mind more complex than Man's. either this, or Man is complicating the sh*t out of a basically simple reality, bringing his own complexity to the inquiry into the Nature of Things.

hmmm, my cup runneth over. good luck... :o)

That's a good argument.

But there are some things that I would like you to consider.

The problem in arguing god (for or against) is that language always gets in the way. One of your arguments toward a proof of God was to look at how complex natural things are. But what does it mean to be complex? That really is just a word to describe something that cannot be easily understood by man. So to say that God must have created (for instance) stars because stars are so complex is really just saying I believe God created stars because I don't understand them and couldn't make them myself.

To an astrophysicist, a star is a simple thing.

Language is also a problem because God is not human, but we can only describe him in human terms. We don't have words for emotions that we cannot feel. That's one of my biggest problems with Christianity, the conferring on a non-human God all of these human traits.

(GRRR I'm running out of time.)

You reminded me of something Douglas Adams wrote, which I can only paraphrase because I don't have the book in front of me. He went snorkeling in Australia (I believe) and saw the coral reef and all of the beautifully colored fish. When he came out of this adventure he said that if he weren't an atheist, he would have to be Catholic, because if natural selection didn't create all of those beautifully colored fish, it must have been an Italian.

I'll try to do more a bit later.

You also confuse me on your use of imagination. You say that a man who relies only on his 5 senses can never find God (I think there are 6 -- thought being the last). That means that one must rely on something ELSE to find God. It seems like it would have to be your imagination. Or else some other "sense" that isn't globally recognized. Could it be instinct? Is it instinctual to believe in God?

But then you blatantly state that it isn't your imagination that led you to God. You said it began when you, what was it, "got out of the driver's seat"? Essentially, when you stopped trying.

This is what I meant way way back when I said you sounded like you had a defeatist attitude. It's as if you couldn't stand living in a world with no God, so you gave up and believed in Him. Now you're happier.

That isn't desiring truth over happiness. It's the other way around. Instead of continuing to put forth the effort to look for truth, you latched on to something that cannot be proven and "got out of the driver's seat."

The belief in God has led to a lot of good. It has also caused a lot of evil. One does not outweigh the other; they must be considered separately. After all, no one would believe that, say, Mother Teresa should be entitled to murder somebody because the good that she has done would outweigh that evil.

I don't hate religion. It just isn't for me. Religion for a lot of people is a substitute for the family that they really don't have. Religion is one of Kurt Vonnegut's extended families. People can (and will ) continue believing what they want, and doing what they want based on that belief.

But just imagine a world in which everyone acted as if there were no God and no heaven, regardless of what they actually believed! How much more sacred would life suddenly become? How much more importance would we place on the happiness of all IN THIS LIFE? How much more would people be willing to help others out of suffering? How would the definition of FAMILY change?

Who would be willing to go to war? Especially to "defend" a religious belief?

we have much in common, my friend. i have a similar problem, when the rabbis attempt to explain G-d's motives and behavior, then argue amongst themselves as to who is right, or worse, that they are ALL right, even when there are contradictory interpretations!

well, to be honest, the complexity issue i borrowed from (of all things) a tiny pamphlet put out by the Jehovah's Witnesses, whom i consider just this side of a looney cult. i am, however, shamefully drawn to their visions of the days when the "lion shall lay down with the lamb" etc. etc. like the garden of eden will ever be restored... but i digress. you ask what it means to be complex. in mathematics, a simple equation has only one variable. a complex equation has more variables. reducing that, 2 is more complex than 1. extending that, the more details, the more complex. but is the science of mathematics as objective as we think? how's THAT for a complex oxymoron? ha! but again, i digress.

it is a very good point you raise. i'm not sure of the relevance of whether Man can make a star, or create original DNA in a test tube. what matters (to some people) is that someone, or something DID create these things. why couldnt they have happened by accident? reminds me of an ancient (1950s) sci-fi tale i read, wherein this guy travels to the really distant future and asks the people where the library is. he gets directed to a single building where all knowledge has been reduced to two sentences, which are written on the wall. they are, loosely: 1- there is no reason for the universe; it just is, and 2- life has no purpose; it was an accident.

"To an astrophysicist, a star is a simple thing." then to a God, the universe (or the infinite complexity of nature) is a simple thing. not a stretch, to claim the reason it's simple is because God designed and created the complexity. whether Man will ever "grok in fullness" that complexity is debatable.

i do associate the concept of infinite complexity with evidence of God's existence, not only because complexity indicates a designer and creator, but because the complexity is infinite. a biologist might understand the totality of a one-celled plant down to the minutest detail of its gene code, but would probably not say it was simple. he might maintain that it evolved from something in a warm amino acid soupy ocean puddle along a sandy shore, while the earth was still cooling, but does this sound simple or complex? either way, does it prove or disprove God?

maybe you're right. arguing God with human words may be folly. but words dont get in the way unless they are the wrong words. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." i'm not familiar with Christian doctrine, but having majored in linguistic anthro, John's revision of the Old Testament's first few sentences has always fascinated me. reading further, "the Word was made flesh". as a writer, i hold human communication through words as a sacred thing. ideally there is an exchange between two people. but even when talking to the wall, you hear your own words. when writing, you see your words. what's my point here? that once again, the complexity suggests a designer.

but you are right, complexity does not prove God. neither does simplicity, nor the presence of both, in nature and in human thought. yep, this confusion proves to me that God is Italian all right...

more later, i'm shot. thanx for visiting "poisonal".

one quick reply to your other entry-- you wrote: You say that a man who relies only on his 5 senses can never find God

no, i never said that. scroll up. what i meant was that the spiritual realm is not detected by our five senses (traditionally, there's only 5 physical senses-- thought would be a psychic sense, but even that is a stretch for me). if one is limited by the evidence of his/her physical senses, how can he/she find God? cant be done.

more later.

I don't see the difference. "If one is limited by the evidence of his/her (5) physical senses, then he/she" cannot find God. Isn't that the same thing as saying that if you use only your 5 senses, you can't find God? I don't see the difference.

But my question is, if you can't use your 5 senses, what are you to use? Your imagination? (I believe that it was Ignatius of Loyala who actually used a system of meditation that relied on concentrated use of the imagination to put oneself in the midst of a Biblical situation. Was it Ignatius, I'm not for sure. That's what I get for proofreading a book about Catholicism.)

I posit that most institutionalized religions stem from just that: the imagination of Man. That and his need to understand (i.e., to explain) what is happening around him. That's what Greek mythology is all about, right? Well, where does Christian mythology come from? Or Jewish mythology (from which stems Christian mythology)?

And to bypass one possible argument, I would like to point out that many people have claimed to be descendants of Hercules, or of Amen-hotep, etc.


You know, I had a very difficult time proofreading this book about Catholicism. Mostly because it was so badly edited. But also because of the content itself. Like most reports about the dangers of second-hand smoke, the "wrong" details were left out. Case in point, the author pointed out that, after Napoleon was deposed for the last time (but not because of it), the Catholic church in France was in turmoil. The church, along with the aristocracy, tried to return France to the religious hierarchy that was pre-Napoleonic. What they fail to mention was how the attempted return to the old ways involved the suppression of the poor, which ultimately led to the French Revolution. They left out that little bit of information.

And in proofreading this book, one thing kept bugging me: If it didn't have a billion adherents world-wide, Catholicism would lok just like one of those crazy religions. I mean, really...when the priest says a few words, the bread and wine turn literally into the living flesh and blood of Christ, but they RETAIN the taste, texture, and smell of bread and wine so that the people partaking of the bread can stomach it.
It reminds me of a picture I once saw by Allen Ginsberg. It was a picture of some old famous man pouring a glass of milk. The caption read something like, "John Doe, turning milk into water, and then back into milk again."

I should probably stop here before I violate some BBC usage rules. Catholicism is the one thing that, the more I learn about it, the less I understand it.


And to any Catholics out there who might be reading this: I think the tenets of Catholicism are crazy. People believe crazy things all the time, and I respect your right to believe what you will. I also retain the right to be wrong. I have been wrong before, I will be wrong again, and I recognize the possibility that what I believe could be so far off that, 50 years from now, people will be calling ME crazy.

For instance: I don't believe in pi.

But that's for another time.

this is getting good! once again, i cannot do justice to most of this, but the 5 senses thing-- dead horse? ok, "limited by the evidence of" and "rely only on"-- 2 different things? dunno. my point? that the language my God uses to communicate with me is not heard, tasted, felt through the nerves of my skin, smelled, nor seen. God uses the "language of the heart"-- love, if you will, limitless, unconditional, unending. it is something like what we get from a mother, if we have that kind of mother... ok, this isnt working. for 42 years, i kept hollering "show me God and i'll believe". the idea that God couldnt be detected by my senses proved (to me) that God didnt exist. i had very little use for ANY bible, qur'an, baghvad gita, or tao-- not as a pathway to any god, at least. the ideas in those books, the philosophies might be interesting, but there was no proof there. so the pillar of fire, the appearance of the seventeen headed Shiva or blue-skinned Krishna, none of that was going to materialize in front of me, so this wonderful super deity that was getting people stoned out of their skull with good feeling was something psychosomatic, i thought, like faith healing and such like.

there must be a God-sense, associated with no physiological organ, but somewhere between the sinovial fluid in the brain and the pericardial fluid around the heart. it's da woids, i tell ya! ok, on to---> ta da! PI! no such thing? how dare you, sir!

the way i remember it, it is the ratio between the length of the circumference of a circle to the radius, approximately 22/7... but not exactly that, right? if youre gonna go there, a point has no dimension, and a line, if it is a series of points, has no dimension either. likewise for a line that moves in one plane, no areal dimension either, and a plane that moves in any direction other than in that plane, no voluminal dimension. so actually, nothing exists.

did you see that movie "pi"? whacked out! saw a cult movie, "curdled"-- really whacked out! couldnt hear the last two words-- really annoying. but i digress...

thing about Catholicism, there is a holiday celebrating the Divine Conception-- dec. 8. then the babe of bethlehem is born 17 days later? i dont get it... thats why they call it a mystery, right?

okay, its bedtime for bonzo. later dude.

It's not that I don't believe in pi specifically, but that I don't believe that irrational numbers (of which pi is one) actually represent anything in reality. I find it disturbing that it is impossible for a circle to have both a rational diameter and a rational circumference. It also seems just plain wrong to me.

Irrational numbers, of course, are infinitely long non-repeating decimals.

Why do we have numbers in the first place? At first it was just to count things. That's easy enough. We aren't going to have an irrational number of cattle. Then they were used to measure things for the purposes of comparison. Out of that we came up with whole systems of measurement.

Here's what gets me: It seems to me that any length, take a foot for instance, can be infinitely evenly broken down. Basically, what I mean is that a foot can be broken into halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, hundred and sixths, etc. essentially to infinity. (There's still the problem of whether or not there is a smallest unit possible, but that's something else.) If this is so, it seems that any length should be represented by some combination of these broken-down measurements. If you start with half a foot, then you start adding little bits to it, the measurement should never delve into irrational numbers.

If this is true, then what does an irrational number represent in reality? Nothing. There is no point on my ruler that equals an irrational number. To put it another way, EVERY point on my ruler can be associated with a RATIONAL number.

A circle has a definite circumference which, if it could be made into a straight line, would correspond with a particular length on my ruler, regardless of the diameter. Therefore, that circumference would be a rational number. So pi can't exist (at least using MY ruler).

Here's some fun with numbers: Assuming the theoretical existence of irrational numbers, it has been proven that there are an infinite number of them. Start making a list of, say, ten irrational numbers, up through the first ten decimal places. You end up with a ten by ten list of numbers. Assume that the numbers extend infinitely to the right, and infinitely down. Now, if you take the number that is formed by the diagonal, starting with the first numeral on your list, and raise every numeral by 1 (9 becomes 0), you have a brand spankin new irrational number. And then you can do it again starting with the second numeral in the first number.

So this proves that, from any infinite list of irrational numbers, you can produce another infinite list of irrational numbers without repeating ANY of the numbers from your first list. It's really a scream.

Also, it doesn't take long to figure out that, between any two rational numbers, there are an infinite number of irrational numbers. This means that, if you were able to randomly choose one number from the number line that consists of ALL rational and irrational numbers, the likelihood of choosing a RATIONAL number would be so small (after all, there is an infinite number of irrational numbers between any two) that it would essentially be zero.

Want some more fun? Check out this book: The mystery of the Aleph, by Amir Aczel. It's all about a guy who went crazy trying to figure out infinity.

Basically, this points out something I've only recently discovered: our math isn't perfect. For instance, take the decimal equivalent of one-third, then multiply it by three. If our math were perfect, that would equal one. But it actually equals point-nine repeating. The problem is that point-nine repeating actually equals one. Why, then, does point-nine repeating exist? And how many other repeating decimals actually equal a non-repeating decimal?

i got a book for you too-- basic calculus. dont mean to be hoity toity here-- but the basic principle of integral calculus states that every given line has a mid-point. between one end and that midpoint is another mid-point. so on and so on, until youve reached the smallest possible mid-point between zero... in other words, we can break anything down by cutting it up into thinner and thinner slices, then add them all up and get the whole again. for some reason, this principle is very important to mathematicians.

i used to try to make the leap between the algebraic way of stating the theory, to the calculus way, but never could do it. something always seemed to be missing, like the point you make about .999999ad infinitum. irrational number of cattle? lightning strikes one steer and chops him into a third and two-thirds. buzzards eat the third, but the two-third piece gets eaten by a mutant strain of carnivorous steer. there you have it! an irrational number of.. of.. man, i think i need sleep...

this "war" thing is burning me bad. have you seen what's going on in that other thing, with butcher, the "love" line? have to talk at ya later. gotta re-read that last entry. not sure about adding one to irrational numbers and getting a whole new set... oh. of course. hahahaa-- 1.3+ 1= 2.3-- etc. the limit as x goes from 0 to infinity, of the function y = x+1, where x represents any irrational number, is... damifino (damn if i know)

I agree whole-heartedly about the dividing of midpoints. Eseentially, you cut a line in halfm then cut that line in half, then that line, ad nauseum, to reach the smallest possible division. I totally agree with that. But, by definition, that number will be rational. It will be 1/2^n (one over (two to the nth)).

Of course, there is the argument about whether or not there actually IS a smallest piece.

Oh, and if a cow is divided in half by lightning, you now have zero cows and two big pieces of meat. (Just as if you cut a piece of string in half, you have two strings, not half a string.)