Memento Moroni

[Tailsteak]

memento mori - "Remember, thou art mortal."
memento moroni - "Remember, thou art a dumbass."

A few weeks ago, I was going through a training class at work, and, as the class ran later than the buses, I had to bug one of my classmates for rides home.

Said classmate shall remain nameless, but he was friendly, generous, pleasant to talk to, and seemingly rather intelligent.

I say "seemingly" because on one ride he was making a sharp left, and I happened to glance at his wrist at the top of the steering wheel, and saw he was wearing a Power Balance holographic bracelet.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Power Balance (and who are too lazy to click that link and skim the Wikipedia article), it's basically a scam placebo that two minutes' research or common sense would reveal as a waste of money.

It got me thinking - are there any Power Balances in my life? Have I been displaying any particularly moronic behaviours that people are too polite or I'm too dense to have pointed out to me?

[Chaos_Descending]

No, we point them all out, and you do them anyway.

[typhon]

Maybe he's just wearing it because he thinks it looks cool. Maybe it's a gift. Who knows ?

Anyway, my favourite memento stultus es is probably this.

Typhon

[wearelibrarian]

Hm. You're religious, which some may say would count. In fact, any kind of conviction or belief will be considered infantile by someone.

I guess power balance bands come out of differing epistemology. Very intelligent people can believe very wrong things if they form truth in a mistaken way. This sounds like the typical alternative medicine thing: science can't be trusted and the results of this treatment cannot be scientifically measured, therefore this device is better than science based alternatives. Ifind the whole of alternative medicine a bit suspect.

[Chaos_Descending]

I once watched a video by a man who actually sold the alternative medicine thing to me. He did so by making the alternative medicine seem unappealing. His pitch was that modern medicine was based on diagnosis and prognosis. Diagnosis was the method of finding what was wrong with you based on your symptoms, while prognosis was what was to happen to you and what treatment would work based on the average person. He then went on to say that the average person was not a very healthy person. Trotted out a bunch of stats and so forth. He then mentioned that most people who use alternative medicine did it to escape unpleasantness, which is why it often doesn't work. On one end we are irradiating a woman so much that when she takes a crap it comes out of her vagina, and on the other we have a person dancing around a black light. His deal was to take the intensity of Western medicine and apply it to alternative.

I have to admit, I have tried some of his products, and they have done quite a bit of good for me. All in all his theory makes sense. He also noted that there are things that are better left to western medicine, and that it had it's place. Just never accept the "this is the only way" thing.

[kais]

I've got to go with your religion. I haven't brought it up in anything other than a neutral-ish manner just because it never seemed like doing so would result in positive results. In the Bang! thread you said that "Hell is dumb. It is a bad idea." which i found quite odd. That same thought is one of the primary reasons I am an atheist. It seems illogical to me that you would take this statement and come to the conclusion that you did, rather than the human construction of Christianity.

Now i don't want to turn this into a religious argument, there are other places from that, but from my point of view, this is similar to the power balance bracelets.

[Tailsteak]

In my experience, ceasing to believe in bad things does not cause the bad things to go away. This is true of diseases, natural disasters, personal tragedies and minor inconveniences alike. I do not see why the same would not be true of the afterlife.

I'll grant you, there are innumerable logical objections to Christianity, but "I don't like it" doesn't count.

[kais]

For me, its less "i don't like it" and more "it doesn't make sense that a benevolent, omnipotent ruler would allow such a thing"

[Chaos_Descending]

I need to start updating my blog again. I would love to link you to a three page rant about "If he is perfect, then it must be right" rant, but I've never wrote it...

[Globus]

I also have a long, as-of-yet unwritten rant about the topic but 1.) I'm not quite known enough here to start ranting (and have an own opinion), I felt my post tangentially touching WWIII too much this early, and 2.) I am a lazy, lazy person, and typing that much takes effort which could be just as effectively invested in nothing.