Category: Thoughts & Scribbles

Human Nature / Animal Instinct

A thought that crossed my mind a while ago is: Where is the thin line between what’s human nature and what is actually animal instinct drawn in us people?

Even though I do believe in some aspects of the theory of evolution, especially when it comes to the evolution of some creatures into different breeds of the same creature depending on different factors such as the environment they’re in, and even though I do believe that we humans have actually evolved over time, I don’t really believe that we humans evolved from monkeys.

Anyway, I also believe that a lot of the things we regard as human nature can be classified as animal instinct too. For example, the need to exist in groups, the bond between a mother and her children, the attraction to the opposite sex, self defense and preservation …etc. These are all things that are in every living creature.

What I’m saying is that what we call human nature isn’t in fact just that, a lot of it is animal instinct, that we share with all members of the animal kingdom. And what comes on top of that is what is really human nature and what actually makes us special.

So my question is where does animal instinct end and human nature begin?
Is it just at the brain level and how we process things in a more advanced way?
Is it in our ability to follow logic?
Or is there this whole set of feelings that only we feel?
Where exactly is it?

A lot of people, when frustrated, describe others as animals. And sometimes others say it when they’re disgusted by something someone is doing.
How true are their accusations?
Is there really something that, if lost in a person, strips them of their superiority to animals?
I wonder…

Groupism

Something that really annoys me in the world today is how people just have to think of themselves in terms of belonging to very specific seperate groups and how they get too obsessed with it all.

Not only that, but this seperation also results in ethnocentrism, where everyone thinks their group is superior to others, thus creating this ugly stupid form of racism.

It comes in many forms, from belonging to religious groups and their subgroups to belonging to geographical areas, countries in those areas, cities in those countries, towns in those cities, neighbourhoods in those towns, families…etc.

I understand the need to associate oneself to a group, it’s in our nature, but this is mad.
Why can’t we all in the end associate ourselves to the group of mankind and accept our differences as enriching factors for this group?
And if we absolutely have to break the group down to billions of seperated subgroups based on borders, religion or whatever else, why do we have to get so mad and fanatic about it, making it into racism and letting it create these deep fractures between us?

Patriotism is a great concept, but why can’t we apply it to our whole world?
Why can’t we open our eyes to the fact that we have more things that unite us all than things that divide us?

People I Respect…

I respect:

– Poor strong-willed people who work really hard to make their lives better.
– People who take their jobs seriously and do them with a lot of passion and dedication.
– Self-built rich people who never forget their beginnings and always stay down to earth.
– People who stand up for themselves and stick to their principles no matter what.
– People who choose brains over power, peace over war.
– People who live in the present yet never forget their origins.
– Parents who understand how big and important an investment it is to love and raise their children in the right way.
– People who always keep their word.
– People who are always honest.
– People who have a just cause and are whole-heartedly dedicated to it.

Truth…

Is there such a thing as absolute truth?

People always seem to have different perceptions of what the truth is. There are always different sides and versions of every story, different points of view, and every version is further interpreted in various ways by the people learning of it.
So how can there be one absolute truth? How can anyone ever be sure which version is the true one? How can anyone be sure that their intrepretation of the truth is true?

I guess the only things we can be sure are absolutely true are things that are fixed, invariable, unalterable facts that can be unquestionably proven one way or the other.

Other than that, truth is pretty relative, as it depends on how you look at things, which strips it of its right to be called truth and makes it more of a belief.

People mostly just believe that some things are true or right without them having to be.

Mannequin Nipples

The other day while walking by some store windows, the question hit me:
“When the hell did they start putting nipples on mannequins?!”

Is it that the stores are really cold?
Are the mannequins excited by the fact that people are staring at them?
Are they implying that the clothes are made for chilly days only?
Or maybe they’re saying that whatever the weather, nipples will show through these clothes?

I don’t know who came up with the idea or why they thought it necessary to do so.

It’s not like you see that many women on the street with their nipples perceptible through their clothes. So what’s the point?

Then again maybe it’s just another marketing idea. By adding nipples to the mannequins, maybe the clothes will seem sexier, and sex always sells.

Update: It seems men mannequins have nipples now too. What next? Nippled Children mannequins?!

Indecision

I think one of the most annoying things in life is indecision.
That yucky feeling of not knowing what to do exactly, where you’re gonna go, how you’re going to handle it, what’s going to happen…

You sit down, telling yourself that today and right now you’re going to come up with a solution and find your big decision. You focus, try to forget everything and think clearly, you push yourself into the sea of little details and circumstances.
And then?
Nothing, you simply drown…

The sea becomes an ocean and the ocean becomes a galaxy of probabilities, ideas and what-ifs. Your mind starts racing trying to order all these thoughts, trying to make its way through them all, adding here, multiplying there, subtracting sometimes, dividing into more and more endless factors and possibilities.

In the end you get lost all over again and all this is added to your indecision.
As if what you had wasn’t enough, now it’s bigger and now it comes with a greater load of stress and instability.

You miss those easy decisions where you just put everything in front of you, make your pick and just live your life happily ever after.
You wonder why all decisions can’t be like that. And then you try to follow the same path, hoping it will work, only to find that there are a lot of missing facts on your table.

Different people have different approaches and solutions for getting out of these indecision gridlocks.
I personally tend to try to get as much detail as possible and put as many facts as possible on the table, then I try to put those facts together and build different scenarios for different decisions and I pursue them in my mind as much as I can before deciding.
My choice in the end has always come down to the option with the least risk.
Although I’m realizing more and more that it’s not always the best thing to do, so I’ll most probably be taking more risk with my future decisions.

Defending Islam

“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I couldn’t agree more.

Applying this to the case of Islam in the world, I think one of the things harming it these days is the number of clueless people who think they are qualified to defend it.

These people who go on and try to portray themselves as scholars of Islam when they basically don’t have the necessary background or knowledge for it are just making things worse everytime they open their mouths.

People should be really careful about the arguments they use, the sensitive points they touch upon and the details they try to get into because what started as them trying to defend a cause or a belief could turn into them doing the complete opposite.

It’s great that people are passionate about their religion and want to defend it, but standing up and talking for a religion is a great responsability and before they do that they should learn as much as they can about it and only talk about issues they have researched very well so they can be able to get into more detail, answer questions and deny false claims.

The same applies to every other cause or belief.
Believing isn’t enough. You have to know the history of it, the why, the when, the where, the circumstances, the details, everything to be able to strongly defend it and stand up for it.

Our Advice & Us

It’s amazing how easy it is to give people the right advice, and how hard it is to follow that advice yourself.

How many times do you find yourself giving people advice you wish in the bottom of your heart that you could follow but just don’t have enough courage to.

If we believe so much in the advice that we give and are so certain that it is the road to ultimate happiness, how come we can’t force ourselves to go down that road too?!

Continue reading Our Advice & Us

Space Imaging

One of the sites I love passing by every once in a while is Space Imaging.

Their gallery section is just awesome, the satellite images they’ve got in there are so beautiful.
They give you a perfect bird’s eye view of the places and so much detail to enjoy.

It’s truly amazing what kind of high quality photos they can shoot from outer space and how much they can zoom in on a place.

I mean, here I am looking at a photo of Dubai and I can see the “Burj Al Arab” hotel, houses, highways, small streets, cars and more.
Or this other picture of Zimbabwe’s Victoria falls and the region around it. I can even see the Victoria Falls hotel that we used to stay at and the swimming pool I used to swim in.

It always makes me wonder that if these photos they just put up for free on their site are that good and give so much detail, then what they actually sell commercially or what the military has access to is certainly of higher and better resolution, giving way to even more detail.

Now that thought reminds me of the movie Enemy Of The State. I wonder if they’ve gotten that far though, technologically speaking.
But it’s pretty scary even if they haven’t reached that level of real-time satellite surveillance.

Anyway, next time you look up to the sky you might as well smile. You don’t want to look bad on your satellite photo 😛

On a slightly different note. With this kind of technology, how the hell couldn’t they find Osama Bin Laden and his people for such a long time?!