Never been one to let the carrier drop

Okay. I get it. Many people aren’t capable of considering any ideas about religion that aren’t the ones already programmed into them, and are programmed to speak scornfully about any ideas that aren’t theirs. I probably fall under that umbrella.

I genuinely gave Christianity a chance. I read sizable chunks of the bible. I tried to wrap my head around the concepts. I see that there is in fact a implementation – not the majority one – of Christianity that isn’t particularly evil. It still isn’t my religion.

I decided I’m not going to debate it any more. Hopefully that will help me move on, because thinking about it all the time isn’t doing me or anyone else any good. There are better and more positive things for me to spend my energy on.

I do have a couple of criticisms that I feel the need to mention, though.

1) Many Christians speak of how, if there was no God, there would be no reason for being good and not evil. People, this is pathetic. If you’re only being good because you’re afraid of the superuser, you must have a awful lot of trouble respecting yourself. I’m not good because I think God will come stomp on me, I’m good because I want to be.

2) Many Christians speak of God’s “divine plan”. I’m here to say that if the universe is running on a plan, the planning entity is more than a little bit evil. Look around – all life lives at the expense of other life, people and kittens starve to death all the time, there’s a host of horrible and painful diseases, and we all get to go through a horribly painful process as our bodies shut down.. one could come up with a whole lot of criticism to the Divine Plan theory – I’m pretty sure *I* could design a much better universe – at least for life on earth – given infinite time.  What we’ve got here, by all indications, isn’t so much a plan as a whole bunch of ‘we hacked it together, added some duct tape, and this is what worked’.

3) The only scenereo that makes sense to me is that we all, aggregated together, form God. As in, there’s not this superuser out there in left field running things – *we* are running things. When we pretend we aren’t, bad things are going to happen. One of the things that makes me angry about Christianity is that the Christians aren’t taking responsibility for their actions.  They are claiming, for example, that it is ‘God’s Will’ that people die of AIDS or in stupid wars over resources or whatever rather than admitting that they, the Christians, are partially responsable *. I could go on a long list here – for example, I suspect many Christians feel more okay about recent wars because they’re making war on non-Christian nations – but I hope that if you don’t take anything else away from this long and meandering blog post, you take away this: ultimately, comforting as it might be to abdicate your responsability as Part Of God, you can’t. Your actions directly impact the other people in this world. 

4) I’m not so sure that preaching uninhibited forgiveness of sins is a good thing. I’m still working my way through this one, but I think that while it’s a good idea for everyone’s mental health for them to forgive each other, it’s not such a good thing if said forgiveness means none of us ever grow and we all keep hurting each other in the same ways over and over and over again.

5) Parents: Don’t force your kids to go to church. It’s brainwashing, and it’s wrong, and I wish it were illegal.  Churches should have a non-brainwashing area for minors who happen to be nonbelievers to hang out in while their parents get their sermons. This ought to be legally required, but would anyone like to talk about the odds of *that* happening?

6) God: Feel free to email me. Or call. Or write. Or send smoke signals. However, given that voices popping into one’s head are a sign of mental illness, expect me to be somewhat skeptical and require you to do a fair amount of authenticating before I believe you. Also, just because you’re more powerful than me, doesn’t mean you’re better than me. I could probably be convinced that this whole huge mess is in fact a brilliant strategy that will ultimately lead to everyone’s wishes coming true and sex on a stick for a nickel- but you may have to talk for a while. I also completely understand if you don’t feel the need to convince me, or have better and bigger things to do. But I do hope that if you torment me for eternity for not believing what you want me to – despite having made me so that I won’t – you’ll at least have the decency to feel guilty about it.

Hopefully that wraps up the religion topic for a few years. It’s been fun, but, really, there are some things that are just unknowable – and people pretending to know them anyway and then being all snooty about how wrong my opinions are – using the same old tired arguments, and openly ignoring my answers and challenges to their tired arguments – really piss me off.

Grateful *that’s* over – I hope –

Sheer

* = at least, by quantum causaility. If you deny funding to sexual health organizations because they support gay rights or abortions or whatever acts the Christians have decided are immoral, and people die of aids because the lack of funding means that no condoms were given out, then I’d say the Christians are responsable.

<Brak voice> Happy new year, everybody.. </Brak voice>

The problem with the HDTV people is that they just didn’t go quite far enough.

We need a multichannel video format.

Why?

Well, first of all, how cool would it be to watch concert videos that displayed several displays – instead of being limited to the videographer’s choice of edits, you could choose for yourself what to look at, either by feeding several monitors or by using some kind of keyboard-driven switching system.

Second of all, and it’s silly for me to talk about this, since it wouldn’t do much for me, but, um, 3d? We can make 3d LCD panels – have been able to for quite some time now. So where’s my 3d video delivery format?

I really should be astounded and happy about what we’ve got – and irritated that not everyone on the planet has access – instead of perpetually wanting more features..

I now have my very own subversion server, for keeping track of my very own collection of code. For any who would like to peruse, it’s at http://qm.sheer.us/svn. I can’t imagine there’s much of interest there, but, heh heh, you never know..

Kayti has challenged me to find where in the bible it says that those who are not Christians are damned – and to discover whether it was the words of Jesus, or the words of others.

I will conduct my own search.. (using e-sword, which is, by the way, a free and nifty way to peruse the bible in all kinds of handy ways, including symbol numbers for the original Hebrew and Aramiac (sp?) words, a compare mode for looking at multiple translations side by side) but if anyone happens to know addresses – or addresses of any particular bits I should look at in general..  please comment.

It’s not that I don’t think Jesus had some good messages – it’s just that I don’t think he had enough of them, and I don’t think that they’re clear enough. If Jesus really was the son of God, I’d think he’d stop by occasionally to update us with the latest suggestions based on the changes that have happened – you know, things like, um, birth control, and, um, there being too many humans on the planet?

There are lots of religions, all claiming to be the ‘one true path’. Christianity actually claims you’ll be tormented for eternity if you don’t believe in their stripe. I know I’m repeating myself here, but, it’s stupid. It’s wrong. And every generation forces it on their children anyway. As far as I can tell, Christianity leads to some sort of strange insanity which makes some of the pure evil of the so-called God in the o.t. invisible to its followers – in fact, makes any data that might lead to concluding that the American Christian Way is in any way less than perfection invisible to Christians… and it certainly seems to make Chrisitans feel that they should be allowed to dictate policy for non-Christians on moral issues which are, at best, unclear.

I really loathe it. Most of all I loathe the absolute certainty with which Christians respond.. oh, yes, we know we’re right. We absolutely should be allowed to control you, and to take away your rights because we think your behavior is immoral or the color of your skin happens to be wrong or we disagree on at what point life becomes life. Why? God told us. Never mind that he won’t talk to you, and that our religion strikes you as sick and wrong. Clearly, you’re the broken ones here because we’ve been saved, it says so in this book here..

And from their standpoint, I’m going to hell – and you think that this is *right* – and nothing I can say will open their eyes, and nothing they can say will close mine. I guess the only solution is to not talk about it – but we live in a country run by Christians, and as a non-Christian I kind of resent that, and on holidays which are mysteriously Christ-centered despite seperation of church and state, that resentment occasionally leaks out a bit and remaining silent is difficult.

I just had the strangest craving for Fayetteville, AR, of all places. Probably brought about by trying to remember John’s area code so I could call him (they changed it after I left – sneaky, sneaky – and yes, I found it, via Google Local).

Fayetteville – where my rent was 1/4th what it is now for a bigger house. (Granted, it was majorly lacking in things like right angles.. but…) – I also miss John’s house.. it was very, hm, homey.

Kayti wants  to move to Denver – I’m wondering if it would have Fayetteville-esque charm. It seems like a very similar sort of city (albiet a bit bigger and more cosmopolitan). Part of me is convinced that SoCal must be my True Home because I keep returning here, but part of me is also getting very sick of the down sides – enviornmentally unsustainable, extremely expensive, entirely too plastic.

I always feel a little out of place no matter where I move. One amusing thing – if I lived in Fayetteville, I could pay the bills by working four months a year…

Affirmative action was mentioned recently by Clint. It’s not something that I have a fixed opinion on, but I do think that it is a band-aid solution that attempts to make the universe more fair. Now, the ultimate solution is to make infinite resources and infinite knowledge available to everyone equally, but that’s going to require some restructuring of reality.

Failing that, I don’t think that affirmative action *should be* about the sins of our fathers – I suspect, based on the advantages to being native american, that it probably is, but really it should be about the dispairity of wealth and information between the races – once we all have access to the same amount of wealth and knowledge growing up, AA won’t be needed, but until then, something has to make up for the inbalance or we will be perpetually locked in our current, rather broken situation.

I suspect that talking about issues like this on my journal probably risks offending somebody, and I feel kind of *sigh*, or maybe meh, about that.

I still want a president who isn’t another old white man.

One of my mom’s favorite songs is ‘Take me home, country roads’.. this afternoon, I was messing around with it and decided to record it to give to her as a Christmas present.. this is the first thing I’ve recorded for many, many months so I thought I’d mention it here. In addition, and noteworthy, this is the first recorded track (with the possible exception of a performance with Kayti’s voice class on the 12th that was videotaped) in which both me and Kayti appear – she is the flute solo at the end.

The URL is: http://www.sheer.us/stuff/SheernKayti-CountryRoads-2007-ForMomXmas.mp3

Yes, my singing is less than perfect. I also really need to buy some of those foam balls that go over the heads of microphones – I’ve tried the clamp-on-pop-filters, and they are *way* more trouble than they’re worth when you’re at my somewhat amatuar singing level.

Well, Jcurious rightly observed that I’m being both racist and sexist by not wanting another old white male in the white house.

Okay,  I get that he’s correct, but it is how I feel. I don’t really even know that I think that how I feel is wrong, even though it is plainly both racist and sexist. We’re supposed to be a representative government but throughout our history, we don’t seem to represent anyone who doesn’t happen to be both white and male.. and lately we’ve added wealthy to the list of requirements for government officials.

What to do? I guess I just come to terms with being a racist asshole and move on.

Speaking of racism – or something – I recently learned about the seven principles of Kwanzaa, and I must say, I approve. Since all our holidays are made up anyway, let’s make *good* made up holidays 😉 Unfortunately, apparently Kwanzaa is supposed to be a black thing and therefore I would get some very strange looks for trying to participate and anyway I’m missing all of the neccesary cultural heratige. But perhaps I’ll celebrate it anyway.

We were discussing the possibility of shifting our major gift-giving holiday from Christmas to some other date – right now, because everyone gives gifts at the same time, the gift-giving infrastructure gets seriously stressed this time of year – it seems like it’d be better for everyone for people to agree to have different dates for gift-giving – days we were toying with included but were not limited to beltane, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Ghandi’s birthday, and candlemas. I don’t know that we actually decided on anything – I do suspect that next year we will be giving our gifts on a day other than Christmas. It also underscores my lack of support of Christianity as it is implimented in the U.S., which is always worth doing..

.. so, friends, if you don’t get a Christmas card or gift from us in 2008, don’t dispair. 😉