My trivial thinking

It has been four months since I began this blog. In the beginning, I often wondered whether my English was correct. Although I’ve managed to write every post in English, I can’t say my English has improved much. For many Japanese learners, articles and prepositions are particularly challenging, largely because they don’t exist in the same way in Japanese.    My younger daughter took this photo in Shanghai. The Japanese on the sign is a little odd, but perhaps it’s still better than my English. Writing in English can be frustrating. Yet at the same time, I sometimes feel an indescribable sense of freedom—as if, by writing in English, I’m momentarily released from the Japanese language and culture that shaped me for so many years.  

    I hesitate to call it a book; it’s more like a spectrum. In it, Richard Dawkins lays out seven milestones ranging from a fully committed theist to a fully committed atheist — a progression now known as the Dawkins Scale . 1. Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C.G. Jung: "I do not believe, I know." 2. De facto theist. Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. "I don't know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there." 3. Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. "I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God." 4. Completely impartial. Exactly 50 per cent. "God's existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable." 5. Leaning towards atheism. Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. "I do not know whether God exists but I'm inclined to be skeptical." 6. De facto atheist. Very lo...

Edward O. Wilson is widely respected as a leading researcher on ants, biology, and biodiversity. He is also known as an ecologist and the father of sociobiology. I haven’t read Sociobiology , but I have read several of his other books— On Human Nature , Biophilia , and Naturalist . This book is difficult to read in a second language, but it is worth the effort, even if it takes time. At the beginning, reflecting on Einstein’s attempt to unify the physics of the micro and the macro, Wilson writes:   I found it a wonderful feeling not just to taste the unification metaphysics but also to be released from the confinement of fundamentalist religion. ･･･ science is religion liberated and writ large. ･･･Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger. 　(Chapter 1)   These words remind me of Spinoza . Later he writes: The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the scienc...

  My friend recommended this video to me yesterday. Over the past ten years, 300,000 people in Japan have taken their own lives. Japan’s suicide rate is twice that of the United States, three times that of Thailand, nine times that of Greece, and twelve times that of the Philippines. As far as I know, two of my classmates from elementary school and two from junior high school died by suicide when they were around twenty. I never learned the reasons. Another friend took his life at the age of twenty‑eight, and in his case it was said to be because of a relationship problem.   

ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. It is also known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease". This is an incurable disease for now. ALS has affected many famous people including Lou Gehrig, Stephen Hawking, Mao Zedong, and also Torao Tokuda, Hideo Shinozawa in Japan. There are more than 8,000 patients in Japan. By the end, if you are still alive, you are breathing through a tube in a hole in your throat, while your soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk, perhaps able to blink, or cluck a tongue, like something from a science fiction movie, the man frozen inside his own flesh. This takes no more than five years from the day you contract the disease. (page 10 in this book) One day, Mitch Albom happens to know it on a TV news show, that his mentor, Morrie Schwartz, contracted ALS and is dying. He decided to pay a visit soon. They meet for the first time in sixteen...