What are you reading?

Books have been around a long time. It is widely believed or understood that books have a lot to give or impart to us or somwe how to be good for us.This is pretty universal. Also the people who write a book are somehow exceptionaland supposedly ‘know’ about some thing. Also they are immediately clled ‘authors’ or writers and carry or are supposed a lot of influence ans power. Somehow a person that wrote somekind of book becomes somekind of and authority.

This is not to say that a wrter probably did do some hard thinking about th topic and is offering somekin dof an explanaionof something and then may be is offering some kind of a solution or atlest some suggestion for the betterment of something.

You may have noticed that I am using some very general and allencompassing approach to the ‘habit’ of reading. This is because I do intend to cover all books.

Ofcourse ther is some literature out there or will bw out there we can put beyond the scope of this article. This includes but is not limited to boks tha neither intend or do not even attempt to discuss any problem or offer a solution or suggestion of anykind or shpe. These may be books that are written for some purely bleak or non-positive or lurid reason and have no otherfunction. We will be putting these kinds of books beyond the scope of this article.

But now the problem is that ther are so many books already out there and more are being written atall tmes. It appears that the current opinion seems to be that if you are going to learn anything or get better in way or shape and defined in the broadest way possible, then you are ging to have to read up on the subject.

But we do want to eal witht the question of all books. The reson is that therea re so many and will be so many more that we cannot possibly even skim somany of these let alone all of them. The view that we must be ‘well read’ must be examined.Does one have to be well read? If so wy ? How many books one should read and which ones?These are troubling questions and of course we are point ing to the fact that something is wron somewere . Inthis articale  I shall attempt to ‘show’ what is wrong and what we need to do or shoukd be doing or not doing.

I will approach this problem in several stages. Each stage will eliminate a whole class of books that you can skip. I will show that ultimately after several iterations of this process that there isw hardly anything worth reading. I will then arrive at the frightening consequence that there is nothing to know or at least nothing you did not know already!

But before  I bring you to my conclusion let me give you and abstract argument to bring yu to my conclusion directly. The argument is quite abstact and recondite. You may not be able to or willing to think like that. It requires a lot of independence and courage on your part. If you cannot, I understand. Thn you can skip the whole articale and ‘READ’ something else, if you know what I mean.

This abstract argument is going to take a while to develop. Here goes.

In all cultures, religions and faiths, there is extant a concept of a Supreme Force or Being that is the author of all all creation and all processes and attribute many abstract properties. Since this occurs with such regularity an such vehemence in all societies and with such unfailing force, we will accept such existence as valid for the sake of this part of our argument. Later on we can reject this propensity and follow an alternative line of reasoning, see infra, ‘what if there is nothing …’.

This ‘Extant Force’ is supposed to have supposedly created all processes and entities and since it is “all love” (remember this Force is assigned all worth attributes, see Supra at xxx) IT has tried to various ways to help humanity by sending various ‘messengers’ that tried t help us. The messages brought by the messengers refered to are in various command formats or ‘books’ some of wqhich e the subject matter of this aticle. This immediately posses a whole bunch of problems. For instance, if one has never seen heard of the ‘Torah’ is the Force going to hold them accountable for not doing the “right thing”? this is ofcourse only one of the many problems. Let’s deal with it. By the same token, if peole have no way to find out what was or is in the Koran or the Bible, are they going to be held accountable for what they had no way of knowing? There are some clumsy ways to deal with this sort of an argument. For instance, ‘those great messengers or people with messages wer always there or they are with you or something or that you did hear about yhose  and their messges and that that is enough’. I am sure you have heard a lot of these and many similar arguments to explain away this problem of not knowin. The problem is even worse since ther have been people for thousands of years that had no knowledge of reading or writing let alone knowing anything as complex as the bible or the Koran or the Bhagvad Gits. Please remember these books are in complex classical languageses and have thousands of interpretationsand and then interpretation of the interpretations ad infintim. I really have not seen or heard a better way or argument on the part of any shool of thought or belief for the probem I posed above. Have you?

So I have no choice but to deal with this problempurely analytically using only that what we ‘know’ or is safe to assume. Pleasehold your hat now.

Let us assume that You are that “Supreme Force” refered to above. ( Please do not panic. We are just discussing something here and moreover we are constructing something here and we are not destrying anything! So hang loose and take a deep breath!) We saw earliert that this “Force” is assigned or has all inds of attributes or properties. In particular, the attribute of ‘Fairness’ will be or should be Spreme  with you