Father, help me! SOS, kill me!

I'm not being alarmist/sensationalist. The post title is just a selection of some monologues from the movie Johnny got his gun by Dalton Trumbo. I'll talk about this later, but first...

I haven't blogged in the recent past because I've been relatively content. Lots of things have been happening in the world which can be dissected and blame can be apportioned to somebody for making them happen. But I find it bit taxing to employ logic to comment on illogical and even logical events.

This is because logic fails at the elementary, atomic level. Logic can provide a reason for almost everything but it cannot serve as a reason for its own deductions. For example logic can satisfactorily give a reason for a father's avowal that "This child is mine because I saw him emerge from his mother's, my wife's, womb". But why should this logic be accepted as a fait accompli cannot be explained by another logical statement, if somebody did doubt it and wanted further logical reasoning. Such doubt would be met by an incredulous stare and some choice words being used by the father. So, the first reaction to a logical explanation being sought might be an illogical rebuff.

You might think that such a doubt as I have raised is incongruous with the direct sensory perception of the birth that the father had and on which he based his assertion of the kid's parentage. But how do you know it was this man's pollen that had fertilised the mother's ovum? Or further still, how can you be sure that it is not immaculate conception that has bypassed the need of the male and female agents altogether for its origin?

You can say that it can be settled by DNA testing? But how can you be sure that the results would be the "truth" and not be based on contaminated samples or have not been inadvertently the product of a 'mix-up' with the DNA test results of a poor carpenter's son submitted to the laboratory by three contemporary 'wise' men?

What I am saying is that at some point in our quest we have to suspend logic and attach ourselves to trust or faith.

We, for all our scientific ways have similarily suspended logic at its farthest reach and placed our doubts in the lap of trust and faith. There is no original thought or discovery in the scientific repertoire of humans. What is considered scientific and logical is just some baffled mind stopping in their quest well before the origin of the entity that created their doubt because logic failed to proceed beyond its territory and what it found on its farthest edges was accepted as the "truth" by the baffled mind and similarily stymied seekers.

Thats one of the reasons why reason (logic) hasn't been able to comprehend the true unalloyed reality because that is elementary and non-relative and logic is a compound structure that is composed of inter-dependent elementary units to give meaning. Logic then cannot expose the true nature of an elementary, atomic, non-relative entity because it would pollute its nature by employing other relative elementary building blocks to build the corpus delicti, if you like.

Another example: Logic can explain what is number 3 or any other number for that matter because they exist in an inter-dependent set of numbers. Number 3 is three positive shifts from zero. But note that another 'three' and 'zero' have crept in to explain the '3' of the original question. If '3' was the only number that existed, would it be able to be explained by logic? In my opinion, most certainly not. To accept and explain '3' then, we would make it a God if we were so inclined in our hearts (read, having faith) or we would deny its existence vehemently if we were not so inclined in our hearts.

Returning to my post title, I find it strangely linked to what Omar Khayyam said:

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

If you have a chance, see this good movie.

Reason drives men to war, faith to liberation.