Its been a bit of a strange night

[meridannight]

"if coincidences didn't exist we would not have a word for them" < one of the Roman skeptics.

In spite of all the bizarre coincidences that has happened in my life -- I always avoid the temptation to call them signs. Human minds are hard-wired to try to make sense out of the chaos they encounter in life. Our species has been obsessed with finding, naming, analyzing and explaining everything. That's what makes us great.

well naming things something that they are not, and assigning some hidden meaning to them when there's none, isn't exactly greatness. it's being delusional. greatness is to have the clarity of mind to understand which happenings need an explanation, and which are just you assigning/inventing explanation where there isn't any.

nowadays it's the harmless 'oh,-that-song-on-the-radio-came-on-just-the-right-moment-and-it-was-universe's-way-to-tell-me-i-need-to-do-x'. but in history exactly the same type of interpretation of coincidence existed in the form of assigning climatic disasters, floods, storms, etc a reason from human behavior and that human behavior was often homosexuality (there were other examples too, but this one should hit home for most people on this site). Girolamo Savonarola was one of the most vocal and maybe best known historic figures to have preached so, repeatedly.

so, whether you think homosexuality caused hurricane Katrina, or that the universe is telling you to make a move on some guy because of a song you heard somewhere at some time, it's the same type of delusionism in the end. the latter one is just a little more harmless because you're not deluding anybody but yourself with it.

and, other thing to keep in mind --- we only know the coincidences that materialize into reality. think of all the potential coincidences that never happen! ever day, every moment of time is full of countless permutations of coincidences that, if they happened, they would change someone's life more or less drastically. they don't happen. and there's no higher power guiding the selection of these things. due to the way our life is arranged, some rate of coincidence is bound to exist at all times. it's just a fact of life. you do not need an existence of some supernatural being, or aliens, or whatever, for the coincidences to take place. they take place as a result of having so many people live on this planet at the same time. case closed.

[Virge]

[MENTION=21405]meridannight[/MENTION] I like everything you said but that last paragraph ROCKS, man! There's a GREAT idea for a book or movie in that! But I'm not going to write out the idea in here but I'll PM you about it later!

When I wrote what i did in my comment I thought about you because if I'd been home I would have pulled out some history books and given some trivia about how godawful superstitious and obsessed with signs from the gods, portents and foretelling the future the Romans were... and I knew only you and I would have really appreciated all that.