Jan. 31, 2008
I finally finished Sophie's world. It is just a philosophical book. It's dragging and it isn't that spectacular as what everybody says, and what the reviews says, but we are all entitled to our own opinions and how we perceive things, besides it cannot be all true. It is a good philosophical book, but I am not in the position to say that because I don't know and I haven't read a real philosophical book yet, but it did give some powerful insights and somehow it lights a spark of a new kind of curiosity (for those who haven't have that kind yet) or fire up your mind into asking existentialist questions.
Somehow, that book made me question religion and spirituality even more. Before reading the book I am already questioning the religion I was born into and after reading the book I questioned spirituality even more.
I have always(well not always, but since I have learned about Christian faith and dogma and life) been skeptical about priests preaching heaven and hell and all that after life showcase. How can they know about it? Have they seen it? Has anybody really came back from that after life and confirm its existence?
Another thing about my skepticism that until after reading Sophie's World, I thought was stupid. Father Ben the president of the Loyola Schools, gave a lecture about the beginning of life. He gave all these images of how the world was before man. And it made me ask (my seat mate at that time because I wouldn't dare ask him myself), "How did they know that that's how the world look like 4 million years ago? Did they see it? And if it is based on their calculations, how sure are they that those calculations are the correct ones? It all starts with a hypothesis, and then the experimentation and the observation, but history or the beginning of the earth cannot be observed, at some point they have to start with an assumption and work their way through it. But how can they really prove that that assumption is really the beginning?" so on and so on. It's a never ending question, so I don't think that those scientists shouldn't be awarded for their findings and "discoveries" but rather for their attempt to know our origin and for their search for it. On the other hand, those who thought of them as the great discoveries of mankind should be crucified because it makes student's life hard with all those shit that teachers make their students memorize when it cannot be the absolute truth about our beginnings, and even though there are a lot of theories about where the earth sprouted from, they still force students to memorize the names and the theories to get that really bright star on their papers.
Instead schools should change their curriculums to equip the students for their own search of the truth about their origins then maybe we'd know by now how the universe came to life.