I can only speak for myself, but it feels that creativity takes significantly more effort than other mental processes. Writing a 25 page paper on the literary, historical, theological impacts of a given topic comes more easily than writing a 25 page story about any other given topic. I have to force myself to want to create, whereas other types of mental activity seem to just come on their own. When I sit in front of a computer, I immediately begin taking in information, processing it, comparing it to whatever I read yesterday, and evaluating its merits. Sitting down to produce something creative is like pulling teeth.

I don’t know whether I could blame age as the cause, but I’ve certainly noticed a correlation. Life has seemed to get tougher and more exhausting as I’ve aged and I’ve tended to gravitate toward activities (mental or otherwise) that require less energy.

I do find it a bit depressing.
chris barr recently posted..Aging causes lack of creativity?

“Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don’t have to make the case for what you believe.”
“the presumptuousness whereby religious people know, without evidence, that the faith of their birth is the one true faith, all others being aberrations or downright false”
It does not make something true just because you believe it to be true. We are all familiar with the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” and “The Tooth Fairy” and “Santa Claus” but we don’t actually believe, beyond childhood, that these creatures actually exist.
I believe that the atoms that make up my body are actually infinitesimally small solar systems on which there is a small life that is contemplating the other atoms of my body as “stars” and wondering if there is something out there looking back. This belief, albeit an imagined one, does not make it so.
I am reminded of the old woman who said that a giant turtle held up the world. When asked what held up the turtle she replied “Why, another turtle.” Ad infinitum turtles all the way down. But believing this doesn’t, quite obviously, make it so.
George Carlin:
“Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man – living in the sky – who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time…But He loves you!”
4:29pm (27 minutes ago) · LikeReply

Hippy Randall:
From Dawkins’ The God Delusion:
Kurt Wise on Intelligent Design/Creationism:
One day, he could bear the strain no more, and he clinched the matter with a pair of scissors. He took a bible and went right through it, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific world-view were true. At the end of this ruthlessly honest and labour-intensive exercise, there was so little left of his bible that,
“…try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible…It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.”
How terrible. This would be considered psychotic were it not such a widely held belief.
4:33pm (23 minutes ago) · LikeReply