In Continuum.

This is a picture that I found on the internet a few days ago that got my attention, somehow. We all know the story of Pinocchio and how his nose grows longer whenever he lies about something. It was probably a cautionary tale to warn children about lying, that it is something really really bad. You know, to scare children by telling them that if you lie, your face is going to be horribly deformed or something. That will scare the children for sure, because the thought of them turning into some Disney villain is probably the scariest thing at that age, ever. Imagine growing tentacles and turning into Ursula from The Little Mermaid. Yeah, run child, run! And while you are at it, remember never to lie to your parents! A little thing that the children learn only in their later life is probably the fact that parents lie a lot to their children as well, and the Pinocchio rule really only applies to the children and never the adults. Everything is unfair in this world, as they'd soon learn, and one of them is that their parents always going to lie "for their own good", or so they'd explain. Anyway, Pinocchio, a harmless wooden puppet. He cannot lie, which is as sad as Jim Carry from Liar, Liar, so it's great that Pinocchio isn't a lawyer or something like that. However, there is a certain paradox in that story that most people usually miss. 

You see, if he says something like "My nose will grow now", then it becomes a paradox by itself. If his nose doesn't grow after that statement has been made, then it makes the statement a lie. Therefore, his nose will immediately start to grow because he made a lie. However, if his nose begins to grow, then it'd make his initial statement a valid statement, which then makes it the truth. Thus, since he was actually speaking the truth, his nose can't grow, and will thus remain the same. Of course, upon further studying, you'd find that this paradox is a little shaky by itself. I mean, it all depends on Pinocchio's definition of the word "now", because there really isn't a "now" if you think about it. "Right now" could be the moment you said "Right now", right now, or the "right now" that just passed you by. As George Carlin famously described in one of his stand-ups, he talked about how strange it is a question when someone asks you "What is the time right now?" It is a strange question if you think about it, because the terms "right now" is all relative, and it could be any moment in time. Besides, Pinocchio may not have said a lie, but merely made a wrong prediction of the future - which isn't a lie. So, let's move on to more substantial paradoxes. 

We move back to the most classic paradoxes known to most people out there, and it is also a "theory" why time travel is not possible. Consider the possibility of time travel in our time, and that your grandfather was a horrible person to your father when he was still alive. For some reason, you really want to kill your grandfather, but he isn't around any longer for you to kill, so you want to go back in time to plant a knife into his back or something like that. I am not encouraging anything like that or anything, I am speaking purely hypothetically. Anyway, so you hop onto your time machine and you travel back in time to when your grandfather was still alive, and you jump onto his back and put a knife into it. He collapses onto the ground, he gasps for his breath, and you just stood there and watched as he slowly died. The problem is, if you kill your grandfather, then he'd never have given birth to your father, in which case you'd never have been born in the future. Which means, that your existence was a contradiction to the act of killing your grandfather in the first place. This paradox, then, proves that time travel is impossible, and that either your grandfather will not die, or you will miraculously disappear from the spot, or something. 

Consider another scenario: You are this adventurer captured by a tribe of cannibals, and the whole village kinda want to eat you alive. So they tie you up, and then they ask you to make a statement about, well, anything. If the statement is true, you get hanged to death. If the statement is false, you get boiled and eventually eaten. Not a lot of options here for you, but there is a way for you to get out of this situation. Understand the power of the paradox and it'd probably get you out of tight corners such as this one. There is a statement that you could make that will set you free, and that is to say, "I will be boiled and eaten". Here's the thing, the statement will only be true if it is not true, because you have to give a false statement for you to be boiled and eaten. If the statement is not false, then it has to be true - right? However, if it is true, or not false, then you'd have to be hanged instead of being boiled and eaten, which is against the initial rule, because you can't be hanged if the statement is false. Therefore, seeing that your statement is a paradox by itself, you will be set free by the villagers. Of course, that is considering the fact that they do not get confused by your explanation and kill you first before you get to the bottom of things. 

I like to do experiment on things, putting A and B together and to see what happens to them when they react. I like chemistry laboratory sessions, but not exactly the theory behind things. Just put two explosives together and I will be a happy chemistry student. At any rate, wouldn't it be interesting to combine that love for experiments with paradoxes? I was reading up on PETA, you know, the crazy people who are against anything related to animals. Animal testing, fur coats, meat, whatever. As long as it has got something to do with animals, they don't like it. The problem with PETA people is that they are growing more and more to resemble an underground cult of some kind, and they are certainly a very rich cult. They do not pray to a certain God, but they certainly fight for what they believe, sometimes violently. There have been cases whereby PETA members would burn down science laboratories because they use lab rats, or instances whereby they'd storm a fashion runway with red paint just to smear the models with them. I just read an article about how they are demanding Ben & Jerry's to use human milk for their ice creams, and how some of them dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan while giving out their flyers. Way to make the general public hate you even more than we already do. 

So, I wonder what'd happen when these people are forced with a moral dilemma to kill animals. Lets say we capture one of these PETA nuts and put him into a cage. In this cage, we throw in a knife, a stove to cook something, water, and a pot. Periodically, we will let a pig into the cage and let it wander around the cage while the PETA member sits there, starved. Water will be provided to this PETA member, but not food. The only way to eat would be to kill the pig, which is fed on a daily basis in a separate cage. Let's see what happens when their lives hang on the balance, and if they'd give up their morals just to satisfy their hunger. On one hand, they'd live and continue to preach about how horrible it is to eat chickens in fast food joints. On the other hand, however, if she decides to let the pig live, she'd probably starve to death in the cage. Consider another scenario: imagine the leader of PETA contracting a rare disease, and she is certain that she is going to die in a few months. A few days later, however, scientists from halfway around the world discovers a cure, and this cure was done through lab testing with rats and chimpanzees. No animals were harmed in the process, but then animal testing was certainly involved. Is she going to take that cure and then continue to serve the animals, or just let herself rot and die. How very interesting, indeed. 

Now, you cannot have an entry like that without mentioning religion, so I am going to present a paradoxical situation for you. We mentioned time travel, so let's just say that it is possible, and killing your grandfather isn't going to cause your existence to go "poof". So, you travel back in time, and it just so happens that you appear at the very moment when Jesus Christ is being nailed onto the crucifix - what are you going to do? You are standing amongst the crowd, and you are witnessing the son of God being nailed to a damn cross, with blood all over the place, and his friends were also nailed to their own crosses. It is a bloody sight, and even more unbearable considering the fact that you are a Christian yourself. However, here's the problem: if you are a Christian, wouldn't it defeat the purpose of your entire religion to save Jesus Christ from his misery? I mean, he was up there on the cross to rid us of our sins, and he is supposed to come back to life in a couple of days, right. That is supposedly what makes him so awesome, and the foundation of many religions out there are based around this very story. So, what if you have a chance to go back in time and witness this - would you save him? 

To me, the answer is pretty easy. When I see a human being being tortured like that, knowing that he is a good man, I'd definitely help him. Why? Because I am a human being too, and I certainly don't want to know how it feels like to be nailed to a damn cross. If I have a choice, I'd probably come back to real time on my time machine, grab a machine gun, then go back to that moment in time and shoot all those bastards on the spot just to save Jesus Christ. I mean, he was probably a cool dude and all, saved people and rescued the poor. The bad guys probably just wanted to sacrifice somebody, and thought it'd be neat to nail a bunch of people on a bunch of crosses. When I see that being done to somebody else, why wouldn't I try to help him? Given another ordinary man being nailed to a cross, I'd definitely put him out of his misery somehow - so why not Jesus Christ? I'd so totally help him get out of his misery by killing everybody on the spot and then letting him down. Even if he gets stubborn and tells me that he has to die for the sins of all mankind, I'd probably do it anyway, because that's plain suicide, and that's just not the way to go to save people.

So yes, as a Christian, if you are witnessing Jesus' execution, would you save him? I asked a few people this question before, and most of them would tell me that they won't - SERIOUSLY? You see a good person, supposedly the greatest of all person, being whipped and nailed to a damn cross, and you are just going to stand there and do nothing? There is a serious moral lapse here, and somebody seriously needs to rethink their priorities. Does religion really come before morals, or should you abandon your religion to realize that it is wrong to just stand by and do nothing. There is a reason why we learn about why it is good to help people in need, to give people a helping hand, that laughing along is as bad as being the perpetrator. If you do nothing to help, you are as good as being the bad guy in this case - so what the hell is the matter with you? Besides, wouldn't it be fun to kill all the bad guys and let Jesus Christ live just to see what happens? You know, to observe how the world would be like two thousand years from then, without Jesus Christ ever dying on the cross. Then again, he'd probably go piss off the bad guys again and make it happen, who knows. The point is, when faced with a moral judgment like that, I am surprised that people would just STAND THERE. Seriously, what's the matter with you people.

So yes, the beauty of paradox. Sometimes, it is fun to just figure out the paradox and to solve it, while sometimes it really forces you to question your morals. There's also the paradox about drowning in the fountain of eternal life, though I highly doubt if that'd happen. Anyway, it's just fun to consider these possibilities, and not to mention how fun it'd be to ask Christians about it. You know, just to see how they'd react to such a hypothetical situation, just to see what they are truly made of.