Antsy

I've firmly decided to head back down to the other hemisphere the moment I finish school (alas, still 10 months away...).  I'm not exactly sure what my plans will be once arriving, but I do intend to cover the south and east of Oz, Tasmania, and hit New Zealand all over again.  I can't even put into words how excited I am to go back to New Zealand; I admit that I'm quite stoked to see more of Australia, but to be completely honest the animals there scare me.  New Zealand and Tasmania are almost entirely safe (animal wise), which makes trekking alone a lot more appealing.  I'm so excited to spend time in a rain forest again (especially temperate) that I'm already having trouble concentrating on everything before my trip.

Hey Aquinas! Fuck you!

I've had my head buried in much of Thomas Aquinas's work over the last two weeks, and I have to say, he was a moron.  Any reasonable person knows you cannot base a theory off of an assumption, as doing so will render the argument circular.  Aquinas seems to have a problem dealing with circularity in arguments.  One cannot simply state that there is natural, divine, or eternal law and go from there; one must prove that these things exist before basing theorems around them.  Aquinas's second faux-pas is equating human behavior and human instinct as fact.  Human's are not inherently good, nor are they inherently bad, nor are they inherently anything; human behavior is extremely dynamic is cannot be used as a fixed point in any sort of theorem.  Aquinas's last, but most major error is assuming the existence of god.  I understand (to a certain degree) that persecution for heresy was an extremely serious matter in the 13th century and feigning religious faith was a fairly common practice (Hobbes did it, hell, even Einstein did it).  This religious equivalent of playing dead is understandable, but a Christian ethical/political theorist certainly is not.  If the bible or the idea of god were to be removed from Aquinas's work it wouldn't even have enough fiber to stay together.  My point is that basing an entire academic framework on a foundation of religion is about as foolish as it gets; at least find something reasonably truthful to work from.