Busy
Life is too busy, so here's a collection of thoughts, check out the Archives since I moved some stuff there to make the site faster, and play the new games and explore the new links!:
I want to thank everyone for giving me such an awesome 21st birthday. All day everywhere I went people wished me a happy birthday, and it was so great to feel such a response from everyone I know. Also, thanks to everyone for something that means a lot, everyone respected my decision to not drink alcohol, and the only people who teased me about it meant it in good humor. It's really a great feeling to know I'm surrounded by so many people that respect me and my decisions, and my heart goes out to all of you!
"Beliefs do not work because they are true; they are true because they work. If, for a particular person, a belief in God works - that is, if it produces practical benefits in terms of happiness, personal adjustment, and psychological health - then for that person, the existence of God is a pragmatic truth. If a person believes that bathing in a particular mineral bath - something [William] James did - will relieve back pain, and it does, then that is a truth for that person. However, such beliefs or truths are not absolute and should not be imposed on others. Because each person's system of beliefs must be established using pragmatic criteria, pragmatic philosophy is an individual and relative system. The pragmatist judges all beliefs by their consequences in action: the statement that John is six feet tall means nothing more than that a one-foot rule can be turned end over end six times alongside John; the statement can be defined operationally. James beleived that pragmatic criteria can resolve the seemingly eternal clash between rationalism and empiricism. James believed rationalists to be intellectual, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willed - in summary, "tender-minded," and empiricists to be sensationalistic, naturalistic, scribing to a personality typology." - David Hothersall, summarizing the beliefs of Psychologist and Philosopher William James.
I got a baby turtle, it's a False Map Turtle and it's ferocious, it attached the turtle Jenn's roommate got right away so we had to separate them, I named it The Baron Von Deutchenheim The Second since he needs a royal sounding name, but he's "The Baron" for short. He's neat, and the size of a golf ball.