Cynic

I was called a cynic the other day. There was a time this wouldn't have bothered me, when I would have shouted it from the rooftops and considered having t-shirts made that declared me cynic to passersby and gentry. I suppose it is a thing one could take pride in.

The thing is, I'm not a cynic, not in the original sense of the word and not in the updated.  Nor do I happen to think that believing the concept of justice to be purely an invention of the human mind, having no representation in the natural world, is a particularly cynical view. What else could justice possibly be, after all? At no point did I say it was bad or wrong or even nonexistent; I merely said it was something that, much like fiction, would not exist without the human mind to conceive of it. 

Personally, I think that's a pretty neat thing for a human mind TO conceive of. It's one of the very many things that makes the human species endlessly fascinating, that we sit around and think up things like this. Perhaps the problem arose when the person I was talking to assumed that I was saying that because it was a human invention, that somehow discounted the concept, made it less worthy because it was dreamed up by a human mind rather than being some kind of basic universal precept.

Which was rather cynical of her, I feel. Whoever said that we as thinking, reasoning beings can't come up with better universal precepts? 

At the time, I didn't bother giving the Consensual Reality Lecture a brush and a polish and bringing it out into the light of the conversation. People tend to look at me strangely after I've gone consensual realist on them. 

I've been thinking a lot about my philosophical/religious stances on things lately. It can't seem to be helped; I keep getting roped into conversations, and they're interesting conversations, about god and God and gods and the Universe and the universe and our place in it and although a goodly chunk of these conversations take place with people who are younger and more pretentious than I am, they can't help but make you think. 

"D'you think there's a plan to it all?" the Insomniac asked me the other day, when we were waiting for a bus and I was up a tree. 

"No!" I called back, then paused. Huh. I'd not expected that answer. Tentatively, I expanded on it, and we talked for a bit about sentient universal forces and the theory that we were, in fact, created, then abandoned. It was interesting, and never mind that the Insomniac has on occasion had mental breakdowns over the premise that the Thinker isn't thinking...he made me, at least, think for a bit. 

Oops, lost track of time. More on this later.