Can I call myself a non-conformist?

I used to call myself a non-conformist in high school, yet one of the largest things I claimed to not conform to was high school. I called high school out on all of its bullshit but I stayed and completed my diploma. I did not even want to go to university just because of credentialism and conforming to society's requirements of me. But I am at university.

So now I ask myself, am I even a non-conformist? I kind of dropped this description for myself a while ago.

I don't think it is necessary to declare oneself as practicing a certain philosophy like non-conformity, but I like to be sure of myself. I like to be able to find myself to be easily defined. I don't know. I am precise and weird like that.

So am I a non-conformist?

I am following all of society's conformities but I recognize that I am doing so. The difference between a university student attending university passively because they were told to go and myself is that I made the choice to attend an institution recognized in society as a credible way to get an education.

I do think that most people that are able to recognize the words conformity and non-conformity automatically drift towards non-conformity just because it seems like the more creative... that's not the word I'm looking for... it seems like the more liberal way to go. Not even liberal. It just seems like the choice one should make, I suppose.

Conformity does have its place. Chaos can occur in a non-conformist society but, I don't necessarily fear chaos, although, my character and background do suggest that I do like order. It is nice, but that is because I am in a structured society so I think it is expected.

I don't know. It's a hard call to diagnose myself as a non-conformist. I know that it is weird diction to call this a "diagnosis" but it feels like that is all I am really doing anymore. Trying to find what is wrong with me and what is right. I am just trying to figure out myself, still. I always am.

Whether or not I am a non-conformist is actually pretty irrelevant considering the fact that I consider myself a skeptic. I think. Maybe I am not a skeptic? Any philosopher/skeptic will get that joke. I hope. Please? Come on! That was solid.

Okay now I am just being dorky.

In general I would lean towards saying I am a non-conformist over being a conformist, although I feel like I obviously do not exude the qualities of a non-conformist. I don't refuse to do everything in society but I am aware of conformities in society and have a tendency to avoid them. I think that being a non-conformist is horrible for myself since I am still choosing to live in society. I hate doing assignments and studying in university because I don't think I am learning what I personally want to learn from it. Sure, I am studying subjects I like but I am not studying exactly what I want and not learning what I want either because university is structured learning. What I learn is dictated to me, which I hate. Therefore, my grades have a tendency to suffer since I am not enjoying myself as much and it takes me longer to get around to doing things I don't want to do.

It is not overly crucial for me to analyze whether or not I am a non-conformist, I just thought it was an interesting thought I had and went with it in this blog post. As I said, I just really like figuring myself out. I feel super dorky writing this post because I feel like it was what I blogged about close to a year ago. Not that I was dorkier then (well I was), I just feel like I have moved past a few things in my life and so it feels weird writing this post. I don't know. Here's me, just analyzing and over-analyzing every little detail of what I am writing and my life.

Views on Atheism + Reflection on "The Trouble With Atheism" documentary

A continuing post on my views on atheism and theism.

I watched a documentary called The Trouble With Atheism (watch here), which essentially criticizes atheism. I was reluctant to watch it when I first came across it, because of my strong views on atheism. I decided to suck it up and watch it anyways.

I like documentaries because you can easily follow a storyline, with a distinct voice. You follow a person's real perspective. It is so hard to be a un-biased watcher of any documentary because of the power of the voice, and how convincing it can get. But this is also why I hate documentaries.

This documentary, in my mind, was horrible. It didn't come up with too many arguments actually against atheism. First, it talks about how atheists criticize other religions for being hateful, when atheists are hateful themselves.

Let me point out for the first time; atheism doesn't mean "I hate religion" it means "I don't believe in god" therefore the voice of the documentary, Liddle's, argument is invalid.

It goes on to look at scientific reasons as to why we are here, and then Liddle will say "What happened before the big bang theory?" and what happened before all of these scientific things.

The end truth is; we don't know. It is like Schrodinger's cat, you don't know whether the cat is dead or not until you open the box. You don't know if god is real or not... but there is no box to open, you just can't tell. This is why agnosticism is more supported in this documentary than theism. We don't know how earth was created. We just don't.

At least twice in the documentary, Liddle asks/tells atheists that they are being "rather arrogant" about their views. Some atheists call the belief in religion "stupid". I agree, but that is not my point here. My point here is why the hell is Liddle calling atheists arrogant when he himself is being arrogant, even if simply by asking the atheists why they are arrogant?

What?

The one scientist responded something like (paraphrasing) "I don't care if I am being arrogant, because I am right". Way to go.

The funny thing about the atheism vs theism debate is it doesn't matter what side has more solid evidence than the other because in the end, even if atheism has 1,000,000 pieces of evidence that supports there is no god, and theism has 500,000, that evidence doesn't actually make it more real... we still don't know for 100% CERTAIN. The amount of evidence either side has, doesn't matter.

I am an agnostic atheist, and I think that god doesn't exist. Logic makes more sense to me than a human creator.

Actually, the documentary did put one thing in my head, into words. It went something like: "Religion hasn't been passed on because it is logical or because people believe in it, but because it gives a sense of comfort and structure to society". 

I've been trying to say that the reason why religion has survived this long is because of a psychological way of making someone feel better about them self or more "moral". The word "comfort" is what I was looking for! Aha! Thank-you documentary.


My final points always seem to come to two things, every time.
1. Our fear of chaos
2. Us not wanting to be wrong

1. Towards the end of the documentary, it made the point I hate the most: that atheists are not always moral beings. It was said that by taking god out of the equation, that a magical utopia won't just happen, because of human nature. We still do bad, even without god, and even with god, within our belief system in society. Maybe some theists just believe in god in fear of chaos, and want these religious moral values instilled in society, still just so we don't have chaos everywhere. To many people, without a god, we don't have morals. Without an afterlife, we have nothing to act good for. I am not a moral person, well I am, but not always. I just think that we should act upon our natural instincts. Sure, I don't want to be killed, but technically within nature, killing is natural. I don't fear chaos. Maybe this is why I don't fear labelling myself as an atheist.

2. People naturally hate being wrong. We may bring up a point, argue it with another, halfway believe we are wrong, and continue arguing it anyways because we don't want to lose our pride. We don't want to lose our pride.  Losing our pride and losing an argument means we are wrong. So if a person believes for decades in their life that god exists, and suddenly believe god doesn't exist, that would mean admitting they are wrong. It is a much easier choice to make to keep on believing in god. This is one of the reasons why I value Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote from Self-Reliance so much "Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though in contradict every thing you said today".

Have you watched the documentary? What did you think?

The 7 Sins and Psychological Disorders

Why is a psychological "disorder" is classified as a bad thing?

It's looked upon like some piece of a person that is unfortunate, yet must be destroyed. Sure, quite often psychological disorders impair the person from being able to function in society, or be happy with themself.

But what about the person that doesn't care about that stuff?

Society is built around the christian religion, a lot of our laws are similar to things written in the Old and New testament, other scriptures, and our morals are very close to those of the christian church.
Also, the christian religion has 7 sins:
greed, sloth, pride, gluttony, wrath, lust and envy.

My point is that in this society, we are based a lot off of the christian religion, and in this society, we have psychological disorders. The connection between these two points is that the 7 sins all reflect certain psychological disorders. I just made this connection a few weeks ago.

A christian might try to avoid the 7 sins and so naturally it makes sense that these sins correlate with psychological disorders--- because people with psychological disorders, although are supported more nowadays, have been looked down upon.

This just makes me wonder how credible psychological disorders actually are, if they are just historically based off of the 7 sins, which come from the bible.

Here is specifically how each connect:

Pride can easily be connected to narcissitic or histrionic personality disorder.
Greed is associated  with narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders.
Sloth means being lazy, slow, so technically any disorder associated with slow brain functioning, or being a vegetative state, is associated with the sin of "sloth". So even ADHD would apply here.
Gluttony is obsessive eating, so any over-eating disorder qualifies here.
Wrath is being angry, and excessive anger is a symptom of disorders such as PTSD and PMDD.
Lust can be associated easily with histrionic personality disorder.
Envy is actually one of the big symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder.

This just makes me question the credibility of psychological disorders. Why is it considered a disorder? Why if a person is acting schizophrenic, is it considered bad? Why should the person be treated to function within society?

Oh right, structure. We fear chaos.

Every conclusion I ever come to, is the fact that Western culture fears chaos. Even right now with Kim Jong-Un. Whether or not he has the technology, is irrelevant. Some people are just shrugging it off, others are not, but either way, people are afraid of chaos.

Eastern culture doesn't seem to be as afraid.

For all of you who are not history geeks, the term chaos comes from the Greek term kaos/kos/khaos which was from one of their creation myths, that earth was birthed from Kaos.

Throughout Greek history, and maybe a bit in Roman, their myths frequently surrounded the fear of chaos (not really Kaos, but chaos).

Since a lot of who we are is derived from Greek and Roman times, we also now, fear chaos.

At least this is my theory.

Some final questions I am going to leave unanswered by myself:

Should psychological disorders be looked at again, every few years, decades, etc., to see their credibility to the society today? Do psychological disorders outdate themselves? Think of the fact that being gay used to be a psychological disorder of sorts. Should the 7 sins be qualifications in the diagnosis or factors of any psychological disorders?