Micah Redding

Solipsism is the belief that you can never truly know if anyone else is real.

This is a common endpoint for philosophy, the reductio ad absurdum at the end of long chains of reasoning. It's what Descartes was trying to get around when he wrote "I think therefore I am", though that may in fact be the purest expression of solipsism ever.

I'm writing this for my atheist friends who see no reason or justification for believing in God - not to convince them, but to give them a window into my own thought processes, and an alternative to many of the things they've probably encountered.

Most arguments for theism end up suggesting something along the lines of a first cause - that all events come from other events, and following these lines of causation, everything must ultimately come from a single point somewhere. This argument is vividly borne out in the modern picture of the big bang.

In Insurrection, Peter Rollins critiques the Deus Ex Machina.

This is the god that, in ancient Greek plays, was lowered on a rope into the middle of the stage, in order to resolve the story. It's a terrible contrivance, and we've probably all seen bad movies that make use of just this sort of device. Perhaps it comes in the form of a fairy godmother, or someone winning the lottery, or someone waking up to discover that the whole episode was a dream.

The Skulls is a fictitious movie based on Yale's notorious secret Skull and Bones society. It follows the path of a new initiate through the process of getting picked, going to clandestine meetings, engaging in rituals and tests of dedication, until finally being ushered into membership, complete with all its lucrative privileges.

I need wisdom.

More than anything in my life, I need to be able to see my way forward, to evaluate the choices ahead of me. I've always been a consumer of knowledge, someone who couldn't leave well enough alone, who had to tease apart the inner workings of things. That process leaves me with a huge gap - the gap between what is and what could be. And that gap requires wisdom.