***
Someone: Regarding girls, beyond the usual discourse we have about girls being evil or silly, I think that finding the correct girl is like finding the right wand in Harry Potter; the wand chooses you as much as you choose the wand. The concept of gestalt also applies; that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Think of it as the Senagal football team: individually, each player is not outstanding, but the team as a whole is surely superior than England, which has the opposite phenomenon.
Me: not everyone has a wand for them - there're muggles and squibs also
Someone else: yeah ive been trying to find pple to add
so sad i only have 60+ friends only
Me: haha
don't worry. it'll grow in time
you can import your address book
Someone else: i noe, i did it accidentally
i hope the invites went into my profs' junk folders
Someone on another person's comment on Brown Sugar: think most of your friends are fuckers aren't they
i'm the only one who isn't :)
Me: hahahahahahahaha you wish
maybe most of them are not and you are ;)
Someone: no i meant literally
hahah
Me: ....
Someone else: i think girls who want to get married so they can have a romantic photoshoot and white fluffy things
should just pay $1000 for a photoshoot and not get married
MFTTW: NUS engin vs NTU engin
that's like comparing rotten apple vs rotten banana
Someone on HCAP: anw, u missed the women's panel man
it's so boring
too pc
panel on women/gender equality stuffs
Me: hahahahaha
I'll get thrown out of harvard man
Someone: hahah.. yeah.. like summers
but still, it's boring
):
Someone else: [harpists are all girls] because guys think harps are gay?
HAHA
i dunno, i mean shouldnt u know better as a guy
do you think playing the harp is gay
would you play?
haha i know what u mean la
i played the bass guitar & all the guys got freaked out
they were like WHY IS A GIRL PLAYING BASS
there are girl drummers more than girl bassists even i think
i think most guitars are girls cuz they're curvy (:
my friend sleeps with it hahaa
Someone: hahaha
you la
took her shoes and put it on a pillar some more
Me: she was acting cute
so I act cute also lor
Someone: haha that is not the way to score marks with a girl
i think "cute" is something defined by girls
hurhur
Me: haha
I'm not tryig to chase her so it's ok
Someone: haha yeah i was about to add that
Someone else: my boob popped and *** told me it was "awesome" the first time we met
damn lame
aiyah a gal knows perfectly well the "effects" of wearing a dress
consequential or not
or direct
hahaha
LDPVTP: do you study irrational agents in general?
Me: yes, I study women
LDPVTP: i knew something like that was coming even before i began this conv. :P thus, no count.
JB: just very annoyed at *** in general
they're so brainless
like the people in my class. don't get how they can be so intelligent and brainless at the same time
also i don't understand how so many philo teachers in my school can be religious
Me: well you have to understand that people don't believe in religion because of logic and reason
but despite it
JB: but they're philo teachers!
surely there's something wrong there
Me: let me dig up something from the god delusion:
"The saddest example I know is that of the American geologist Kurt Wise, who now directs the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee... Wise could have fulfilled his boyhood ambition to become a professor of geology at a real university, a university whose motto might have been "Think critically" rather than the oxymoronic one displayed on the Bryan website: "Think critically and biblically." Indeed, he obtained a real degree in geology at the University of Chicago, followed by two higher degrees in geology and paleontology at Harvard (no less) where he studied under Stephen Jay Gould (no less). He was a highly qualified and genuinely promising young scientist, well on his way to achieving his dream of teaching science and doing research at a proper university.
Then tragedy struck. It came, not from outside but from within his own mind, a mind fatally subverted and weakened by a fundamentalist religious upbringing that required him to believe that the Earth--the subject of his Chicago and Harvard geological education--was less than ten thousand years old. He was too intelligent not to recognize the head-on collision between his religion and his science, and the conflict in his mind made him increasingly uneasy. One day, he could hear the strain no more, and he clinched the matter with a pair of scissors. He took a bible and went right through it, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific world-view were true. At the end of this ruthlessly honest labor-intensive exercise, there was so little left of his bible that
try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible pick up the Bible without it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science."
Postscript: A friend of mine is right - it’s more useful to understand the psychology of the religious than to convince them using reason.
But then, to try to save people’s souls through more subtle (insidious, even) methods smacks of the dishonest way religion expands its mindshare in the first place.
Which means this is a classic Catch-22 situation, full of contradictions and paradoxes, just like the human condition.