Was Shakespeare an Atheist? (2)

In this excerpt, we get more of Marlowe's colorful background and unconventional way of mind. Segueing into Shakespeare, we see that we do not have any real evidence that uncovers a heretical mind, and that we must look at the plays - the play is always the thing. Though, what one draws from a work of fiction to gauge the actual beliefs of the writer is necessarily questionable. Yet, it is always fun to speculate, especially when you are dealing with a great writer, especially one who we tend to revere as being somewhat godlike himself.

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Thumbsucking

I wonder if masturbation may be fairly likened to sucking one’s thumb.

Laura Frost is discussing ‘tickling’ and ‘thumbsucking’. Tickling apparently requires at least two to play but thumbsucking is self-soothing. It got me thinking. Am I like a child sucking his thumb?

[Laura Frost, “The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents”]

Watering

I remembered to water this morning. The trees got a good drink, finally. I hope I remember to water this evening.

There is supposed to be a 50% chance of thunderstorms at the end of the week. They actually raised the chances this morning to 80%. But even at 80%, I couldn’t bet on that. We’re so dry. In fact, we’re so dry that even if it rains hard and long, it would only prove a good thing to have primed the ground a little. If it doesn’t rain, we are so fucked.

Celebrities and Stuff

"Sia - Chandelier (Official Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

ONTD

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Three Journal

I decided to tackle some of my spiral notebooks, from my school days, for the Three Journal. After all, it cannot be much worse than my journal entries for the nineties. One might think it should be better and richer, since I presumably still had some hope of making something of myself. The truth, however, is that I was struggling and failing, practically from the beginning, whereas in the 90s, I at least knew myself better, and I was not living and working with a crowd of people that I could never be a part of.

Victor

Pop is doing some cleaning in the kitchen. Since I was there, I pressed him about Victor’s visit. It turns out that he is not coming over, after all. I guess that is a bit of a relief for me. As for Pop, he has enough of a social life, as does Victor. And I can always use a break.

The Morality of Babies

We have an interesting study that seems to demonstrate that a strong sense of substantive morality comes to us early, in our infanthood, before we are even one year old.

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In Bloom’s laboratory, a one-year-old baby watched puppets enact a morality play. One puppet rolled a ball to a second puppet, who passed the ball back. The first puppet then rolled the ball to a different puppet, who ran off with the ball. The baby was next given a choice between taking a treat away from the “nice” puppet or the “naughty” one. As Bloom predicted, the infant removed the treat from the naughty puppet—which is what most babies do in this experiment. But for this little moralist, removing a positive reinforcement (the treat) was not enough. “The boy then leaned over and smacked this puppet on the head,” Bloom recounts. In his inchoate moral mind, punishment was called for.

There are numerous permutations on this research paradigm—such as a puppet trying to roll a ball up a ramp, for which another puppet either helps or hinders it. Time and again, the moral sense of right (preferring helping puppets) and wrong (abjuring hurting puppets) emerges in people between three and 10 months of age, far too early to attribute to learning and culture. Morality, Bloom concludes, “entails certain feelings and motivations, such as a desire to help others in need, compassion for those in pain, anger toward the cruel, and guilt and pride about our own shameful and kind actions….” Society’s laws and customs can turn the moral dials up or down, of course, but nature endowed us with the dials in the first place.

-- Michael Shermer at Scientific American

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Whitey

Whitey is back, fuck! I was just getter freer, too, about leaving food on the patio overnight for the cats.

Well, that’s got to stop now. They are going to be so hungry, poor babies.