A Need

Some people need a god and some people don’t. This basic need (or lack of it) determines the existence of faith. We can argue about it philosophically forever but I think the bottomline is this: if you feel the need to believe in something greater than yourself, in salvation, in life after death, then you will be faithful. It wouldn’t matter if the facts are contrary to your needs, or even if they don’t exist at all. Faith would be the only thing that can give your life meaning.

Some people don’t need god. Some people may worship the cold, harsh beauty of logic while others may worship the perfection of man. The meaning of existence for them would be the constant and relentless drive for both perfection and knowledge.

Six Years Ago I Looked Like A Guy

At random times in my life, I feel like poking myself with an object that is good for poking (poetically of course) so that I would remember how bad things were for me back then. I’m not saying things are absolutely peachy now—no. I still have trouble with how I look, with Marco, with school, with money (I’m too magastos grawr), with my writing, parents, one and only brother, a lot of things. Let’s just say, however, that things are better now. Consider:

YAY!

 
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Pata Pata Pata PON!

 This Liz, what an emo.

You know what? As soon as I get a job after graduation, I’ll move out of the house and stay out of the house. A lot of people say that it’s hard to live on your own—there’s no TV, no fridge,  there’s lots of laundry, rent, and too much take-out pseudo-food. But I can take that, as long as I’m free to come and go in my place.

 
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Zomgz No Sleep

I only do this when I’m really cramming. I’ve been up up up since twelve and I’m still feeling go go go. MIght be the cake I ate. Or the Chamyto. Or the overall bowel discomfort. I don’t know. But I don’t feel sleepy at all. I feel chipper too!

Nothing like some Spartan gore!

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Human Rights?

Man, I’m screwed. I have to pass a paper on applied ethics tomorrow and I still have no idea on what topic to tackle. I intended to write about humans eating each other, but I reckon it’s hard to write about. It should be fun but I couldn’t figure out how to tackle it. For me, it’s okay for human beings to eat other human beings if they really have to, and this is quite possible if everyone agreed to eat each other—human rights, for me, are not inalienable, self-evident, or natural, but rather as social constructs—but at this point in human civilization, I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to eat YOU. 

So I went for second best. I’d write about human rights and why I think they’re just an invention of men and women. Hobbes, Locke and Rosseau believed that our society is organized by social contracts—basically, an agreement to do this instead of this and giving the power to enforce such rules to a government. However, they seem to base it on natural rights, or rights inherent to human beings (if I’m not mistaken). 

 
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The Good: Utilitarianism

The utilitarians believe that what is good is something that advances the maximum number of people’s happiness. Rule-utilitarians hold that an action is good if it is executed according to a society’s given conventions, or rules. Act-utilitarians, on the other hand, say that a good action is something that produced a positive consequence, that is, to advance happiness and to diminish misery. However, according to De Castro, these two views on how to know the good is fundamentally the same.

Consider: a pregnant seventeen-year old Filipina wants to know if aborting her baby is the right (or good) thing to do. Rule-utilitarians would tell her not to abort the baby, because it is illegal and socially unacceptable in the Philippines. If she follows this maxim, the baby will live—and being alive is generally considered to be a good thing in most philosophies as well as most societies. Therefore, if the girl follows the conventions, the consequences will be good, i.e., she does not become a murderess and one person is given life. In this case, rule-and act-utilitarianism are mutually inclusive.

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The Government Is Weird

Have you ever downloaded stuff from websites, Limewire, Bearshare and torrent sites? Stuff that you most probably shouldn’t be downloading, stuff like albums, movies and copyrighted software? if yes, then you should be in jail now and you owe the government P100, 000. Yay!

 
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A Summarized Summary

It’s been two days since I last saw this blog. When the tab said "Loading…" I held my breath until it said "Lizette" and I was like, My god, finally, all over my head. And you won’t believe how many times I’ve held my breath over this tiny thing.

Anyway, my week can be summarized in the following words: academics, eyebags, fat, and God of War. 

Liz’s Movie—In Music!

I think we all believe that we’re the heroes of this one big movie with the whole world as the setting and everybody else as supporting actors. In our eyes, we can never be that dude who got the minor part of playing, I don’t know, the janitor who got killed early because he knew too much. We’d always be the hero who saves the world, or at least knows how to, in theory. The start may be a little sleepy but we hope the movie gets better in the end to get our money’s worth. 

But a movie is not complete without the OST! So heres’s mine. In shuffle. Yeah, meme.

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Ang Problema Natin

This has been said before, and said better. But I feel that in the midst of rallies and calls for political renewal, this piece of crucial information has been grossly overlooked. We shout our throats sore in demanding Gloria to resign. We give eloquent speeches and write insightful articles denouncing corruption and aspiring for change. But what "change"? At what cost?

Loosely, when we say change, we mean food on the table, homes for everyone, more affordable commodities, a sustainable wage, fulfilling jobs, high-quality pulic school education, and a low crime rate, among other things. Did you notice that these factors of favorable change are fundamentally related to economic conditions? If the government has more money to fund them then we would be one step nearer to achieving the change we want. Therefore, less or no corruption means more money. More money channeled into pro-people projects means positive change. Everybody happy.

 
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The Good: Introduction

"Good” is such a terribly vague and ambiguous word. From birth, we are taught to be good and to do good by the agents of socialization: our family, peers, school, church, workplace, the government and the media. If someone asks an average person what is good, he or she would have an answer: it is good if you don’t kill people. It is good if you don’t steal. But the problem with the word is that its meaning is constantly evolving through the different eras of human development, while also evolving in separate locations at the same time.

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