the things we learn

Today I went to part of church (made a deal with God), and I'm really glad I did if only for the observations I made on the bus.

First, there was a man with some kind of mental disability. He sat down next to these kids, appeared to have some kind of panic attack, started freaking out, took out a stress ball, and started squeezing it. Then he asked the kids (my age), completely out of the blue, if they were getting married, and the boy said "no sir, we're not" (I think they were just friends). Then the man started asking them all these questions (seemingly to distract himself from whatever was giving him the panic attack), including what the boy was majoring in, and the boy was majoring in philosophy. So then the guy started asking the boy all these questions about different philosophers and political philosophy. It was a very interesting conversation.

I realize that I grew up with a lot of powerful stigmas that I really want to get rid of, including a lot of judgmental ways of looking at people with severe mental illness and homelessness. Because in my hometown I saw very little of either and all depictions were radicalized descriptions fed to me through the media (not an excuse, but still), I developed a very negative view of either class of people. Not a consciously negative view... I mean, I was always taught to be sympathetic to people in those situations. But more of a visceral rejection of those people as being *different* from me, an automatic judgment that I have nothing to learn from them. As I came to Boston and started volunteering at homeless shelters, and as I started working with severely mentally ill people back home, I realize what an error in judgment this is. I have *so* much to learn from people that I used to just dismiss without a conscious thought.

I guess what I'm saying isn't that I judged them, because I never viewed them as bad or not as good as me or anything, but that I otherized them. I made them the class into two divisions, people like me and people not like me, and homeless people and "crazy" people got lumped into people not like me. But now I'm realizing that dividing the world into two classes of people is very idiotic because we're all the same inside, and we all have so much to learn from each other. Assuming that we have some privileged knowledge a mentally ill person doesn't is a huge mistake. There's always something to learn from someone else.

Anyway, it is difficult, at the age of 20, to change this about myself, but I am glad I have finally recognized it and addressed it as the serious problem that it is. Because I think that in order to be a successful psychiatrist, I have to be the kind of doctor that relates to my patients on a personal level rather than adopting a separatist, holier-than-thou attitude (who wants to believe they're broken? everyone has fixed and broken parts inside of them).

So that was just one observation on the bus, and it's one complicated, semi-selfish goal of my volunteer work in homeless shelters. I guess it's both selfish and unselfish. I mean, I want to quit otherize people and improve myself as a person, which is selfish, but I want to do this so I can relate to people and help them more when I'm eventually in a position to do so, which I think is unselfish. So like everything, it's a bit of both.

Other interesting bus observations: a woman wearing sweatpants carrying a very expensive-looking camera and a very hairy dog, occasionally taking pictures of it (she even gave it its own seat on the bus until the bus became too busy).

And, the one conversation I am always sick of having: so I was somehow squashed on the way home from church between this girl who smelled like cigarette smoke which was giving me allergies and this man who smelled like alcohol (or maybe I was imagining that? But I swear he did, and he was practically sitting on top of me even though he could have had way more room if he'd sat in the seat adjacent to the one next to me). When I pressed the stop for MIT, he said,
"So, you go to MIT?"
"Yes,"
"You must be very smart."
Why is this everyone's first reaction???? I mean, I know it's a good school, but please people, give a little thought for the sake of conversation. What is the other person supposed to say to this? I mean, I don't think I'm very smart. But even if I did, what am I supposed to say, "Yes, thank you, why yes, actually I am"? No of course not! So anyone is cornered into responding, as I did, with some variant of,
"Ha, not really..." which just sounds like false modesty even if it's (as in my case) true.
I've just had this conversation so many times. I'm sure anyone going to a decent school has to deal with it. But it's just ridiculous. People don't think before they open their mouths. I mean, there are some conventions to polite conversation, are there not? One does not give complements that so effectively trap the conversation partner into such flimsy modesty. It's not considerate. Sigh.

Also, the truth is, nothing makes a kid feel dumb like MIT. We might have felt smart in high school, but here, almost all of us feel dumb. So it doesn't really make us feel better to have the whole smart card pulled on us. Usually.

I don't know. Now I sound ungrateful. I really am not ungrateful. I'm not, I swear.

centuries of catholicism destroyed by pedophilia?

Not that this pedophilia thing is anything new (reports have been surfacing on Catholic etc clerical leaders for years), but CNN seems to have just caught on, and all the lawsuits are starting to become critical. Anyway, the cumulative effect is that I think the church can no longer keep it under the wraps, at least not in countries like the US or the UK.

I think that to say this is the death of catholicism, as one Irish priest said in an interview, is a really Ad-hominem thing to say... I mean, maybe it's the death for the time being of organized Catholicism in Ireland, but if people really believe in the church, then the moral qualms of its leaders shouldn't affect the veracity of the church's teachings, should it? I think that in a perfect world, it shouldn't. Of course, we don't live in a perfect world.

My argument against Catholicism is that celibacy was just never the greatest idea, and it's their own fault if it's backfired. It's not doctrinal. It says nowhere in the Bible that priests need be celibate. It was never spoken by Christ or a prophet. It's probably another one of those Nicaen doctrines they decided at one of their medieval conferences (sorry I know I sound slightly disrespectful... please consider these words with all due respect to Catholicism). But anyway, sex is a biological need. It's driven by *hormones.* And no matter how much people try, they can't really control their hormones. While I think I would be capable of living my life without it, that's not for everyone. If becoming a priest was an entirely self-selective process, it might be okay. But there's a ton of selective environmental pressure put on those guys, so sometimes people become priests who maybe shouldn't have. And then we get issues of people abusing those in our society who are small enough and vulnerable enough to keep quiet (since if anyone found out about the infidelity, that would be the end of that priest's priesthood... or so we hoped until CNN told us that actually wasn't the case in the Catholic church; apparently the priests just got moved when they were found out). Anyway, it led to child abuse is what I'm saying. And really, that makes a lot of sense, all things considered. It certainly doesn't excuse it, but it's just as much an organizational issue of the Catholic church as it is a serious issue of the child molesters in the church who have been getting away with this for years (and who need to be removed from office right away).

I don't know. I just don't think God would ask someone to do something so distinctly anti-human that made him so... unhappy, unless that person really wanted to do it. Which is why I don't believe in the Catholic brand of celibacy. Of course my Mormon brand isn't extremely improved (aka if a Mormon doesn't get married, his shots aren't great either), but it's less restrictive I think and the view of sex is a lot more healthy anyway.

If the reason priests are supposed to be celibate is to keep them from thinking about sex, I really don't think it's working. Look at CNN for evidence.

As for whether this is the death of the Catholic church? I hope not. I mean, if real Catholics do exist, the church will go on even if it's leaders do not. That's the way a real religion should operate. If religions are only dependently true, they can't really be true. They have to have independent truth. That's the point of religion. It stands beyond all human logic. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it, religion hears it.

:-)

That made sense to me anyway.

my own kind of tsunami

Yes, this does feel selfish when people out there are facing some things so much larger... but I am a spoiled rich white kid... even if I get out of my bubble, volunteer at homeless shelters, want to crack the the shell, I'm still me.

Interesting thought (rather personal for this blog, but the other blog has become a bit caustic so here it goes):

So if you are a quantum physicist, you believe that reality actually doesn't have a certain state until you measure it. Schroedinger's quantum cat actually is in a probabilistic haze of life and death; he isn't alive or dead until the box is opened. It isn't simple that we as people standing around outside the box don't *know* whether he is alive or dead inside the box; he actually isn't either until we ourselves somehow make him one or the other by observing his state. It sounds like fantasy, but it's actually physics.

So I am a scientist, I truly am. I know a lot about neuroscience and biology and organic chemistry, and I know more than the average Joe about physics and most other topics in science. But, being the odd one that I am, I am in the anomaly: I believe in God. I believe He is all-powerful. This leads me to do something which most people would probably view as highly strange and irrational; most people, that is, except the quantum physicists, which is perhaps why I don't view it as so irrational because quantum physics doesn't seem so weird to me after all these years of books about it.

Namely, I took the MCAT a little over four weeks ago. As soon as I left that testing center, my score was arguably determined. The computer had already scored my multiple choice questions, and by now some lady named Edna from Atlanta who likes cats or whoever it is has scored my essays. Arguably, this is a fatalistic venture and really there hasn't been anything I could do for the past month of agonizing waiting. And yet, I haven't just been inert. I've been doing what I always do while waiting for test results: praying madly. And why? Because I don't believe the wave has collapsed yet.

See, very small things have this principle that arises from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which is that we can't know their position and momentum simultaneously, and once we measure one we lose the other. The larger something gets, the more it loses its wave-like properties, and the less applicable Heisenberg's principle becomes. Thus although it's technically true that I exist as a probabilistic wave function, it's much more correct to say that I'm laying on my bed right now, mostly stationary. The error is much, much, much ^ trillion smaller for me than for some tiny particle. But for Schroedinger's tiny cat, as long as the box is closed, he exists as a probability wave of all of his possible states of momentum and position (a superposition wave) rather than a single position or momentum. When we open the box, we with our eyes (we actually ourselves, somehow) change things by seeing the cat; isn't that crazy! We change an electron just by observing it! That's insane! Anyway, so that's the quantum theory.

So why can't this apply to my spirituality? My idea is that if God is all-powerful, he probably has a handle on quantum principles. Thus perhaps he can somehow extend them to my test. Then until I view my test with my own eyes, it exists as a probability wave. Edna may have graded the essays; the computer may have graded my test; but in my mind, I have no score. It is still possible, until I see the score, break the uncertainty principle, and collapse the probability wave, for God to change things. And I actually do believe that He could (much to my atheist and agnostic friend's consternation).

It actually has some doctrinal justification too. I mean, according to scripture, we're destined to do something, but we have the choice to do it or not. Thus it must be kind of like a probability wave that we can choose to collapse in some fashion. God must know the probabilities, but we must have the observational powers that collapse the waves.

And you thought people that prayed about things like that were just being stupid. See, there's a rationality to everything.