Saturday, June 28, 2008
(Late) Friday Frivolity with Terry & Jed
I'm sitting on a beach earning twenty percent so I've been lax in my duties (as if anyone's actually noticed yet but hey, I only blog so I don't bore the sweet chocolate-coated christ out of my friends with my rambling diatribal bollocks).
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
World Youth Day protest
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
Awesome. Especially the part where religious, heathen and gay people are all out there together, sending a message to the Nu-Roman Emperor.
Good and double-good. The last thing we need is more religious paranoia about the evil atheist/gay conspiracy trying to destroy them. I truly think most Catholics (in the modern, educated world anyway) do not agree with the ridiculous anti-contraception stance of the Vatican and would welcome this protest. However, sadly, I think quite a few would only do it secretly, such is the grip the Empire has on peoples' minds.
Apart from being an inherently misogynistic and homophobic organisation, the Catholic Empire's continuing stance against contraception condemns countless numbers of people every year to death or illness from preventable diseases (especially in parts of the third world where the Vatican knows it can always count on peoples' susceptibility to superstition and faith-based authority) and removes from every person of the faith the choice of whether to conceive during sex. To me, this is a gross violation of the most basic human right! Why should a group of elderly robed virgin bachelors be telling millions of people how to manage their own bodies? You wouldn't take dietary advice from someone who weighed 200kg and ate creme brulee for breakfast, would you?
So, do the mafiosi of Jesus really get their authority to make these peculiar demands on their following from the bible? Where in the book does it say "you must only have sex to make babies"? Sure, Genesis says "be fruitful and multiply" and Judah's son Onan was killed by God for spilling his seed (it would seem that God does indeed get quite irate when a sperm is wasted). But it seems to require quite a bit of interpretation to make these few passages imlpy a strict ban on contraception or sex for fun. Christian opposition to contraception does have a long history (it was associated, along with abortion, with heretics such as the Gnostic or Cathars) but it would seem the ban is only really supported papal encyclicals (I guess it's a fancy way of saying "orders") and not explicitly commanded by scripture.
Whatever the actual source for this claimed authority to tell people, it just seems like yet another example of the church seeming happy to remain stuck in ancient times, not recognising that the world has changed considerably since the period leading up to the Renaissance, when the Vatican held most of the kings and princes of Europe in its palm (until Henry VIII decided he wanted a divorce and started his own church which had much more relaxed rules, which really just goes to show the worth of organised religion in general). It's still one of the richest landowners in the world (the Inquisition was quite a successful land-grab), but without tenants to pay the rent you'll be in a bit of a hole. Hence, I'm happy to assume, the need for fruitful multiplication.
Every so often, though, the Vatican makes some small concession to reality. After 400 or so years, Galileo was eventually pardoned for his "crime" of disagreeing with the Vatican and subscribing to (and basically proving) the Copernican theory that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. Eventually, they also recognised, long, long after the rest of the world, things like gravity, germ theory, atomic theory, the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and even that great faith-killer, the theory of evolution. Every so often, they magnanimously admit to having noticed certain aspects of the real world and the gaps in scientific knowledge that their god used to fill in all his grandeur become slightly smaller. Given this slow but sure lapping away by reality at the shores of their superstition, it's little wonder that they cling so tightly to subjective things which reality doesn't have much of a say in, like sexual morality & practice. Homosexuality, abortion, contraception and so forth, these are things that the Vatican can quite happily still claim moral authority on. As long as they stay on the course of issuing behavioural edicts and telling people what they should think and do and how they should make love, science won't be able to disprove any of it. It'll be up to the Catholics themselves to eventually cast off the centuries-old shackles of papal despotism and say "Enough!"
One thing about this article has me a bit suss though. I'm not sure I welcome every group on this list with open arms...
I don't actually know anything the first three listed there. But the Raelians? Come on, this is giving any Papist mush-heads a golden ticket to discredit the entire protest as the usual "aw, poor old picked-on Catholics" paranois! Couldn't the various gay/atheist groups have said a polite "thanks but no thanks"? The last thing any pro-rights movement needs is to be associated with a cult of self-proclaimed (but unproven) human-cloners, especially given the touchiness surrounding topics such as stem cells and embryonic cloning.
However, there is some semblance of a point there. Rael, obvious wacko cult leader, is denied entry to the country because he's obviously the leader of a wacko cult. The pope, however, gets a red carpet all the way to his holy bidet. One cult leader is denied because he's the new kid and clearly a bit nutso, but the leader of a more popular cult with better robes which is built on centuries of murder, torture and enriched to an unholy extent by outright theft, that continues to cover for paedophiles, that believes wafers turn into Jewish zombie flesh at the incantation of a magic spell and continues to exert unreasonable moral influence in what should be the private lives of its millions of followers gets more attention & honour than Led Zeppelin.
Well, perhaps in a thousand years, once they've managed to gain considerable influence over several million people through missionary work, inquisitions, crusades and centuries of sexual oppression (and gross sexual misconduct, all swept under the rug until you can't cross the room without a step-ladder, of course), that generation's Rael-clone may be invited to The Lodge to have a cup of tea with the cybernetically-preserved head of Kevin Rudd.
Watch this space!
Condoms will be handed out to pilgrims en route to a papal Mass at Randwick Racecourse on World Youth Day as part of a protest against the Catholic Church's attitude to homosexuality, contraception and abortion.
A coalition of religious, atheist, gay and lesbian groups will stage the rally in Taylor Square from midday on Saturday July 19 before marching to the main event of the week-long World Youth Day celebrations.
Awesome. Especially the part where religious, heathen and gay people are all out there together, sending a message to the Nu-Roman Emperor.
"We will say to them, 'Take up the campaign within the Catholic Church to promote condoms.' We're not planning to get into any trouble. We don't want to condemn Catholic youth for being Catholics. We want to condemn the Pope for being homophobic and anti-condom."
Good and double-good. The last thing we need is more religious paranoia about the evil atheist/gay conspiracy trying to destroy them. I truly think most Catholics (in the modern, educated world anyway) do not agree with the ridiculous anti-contraception stance of the Vatican and would welcome this protest. However, sadly, I think quite a few would only do it secretly, such is the grip the Empire has on peoples' minds.
Apart from being an inherently misogynistic and homophobic organisation, the Catholic Empire's continuing stance against contraception condemns countless numbers of people every year to death or illness from preventable diseases (especially in parts of the third world where the Vatican knows it can always count on peoples' susceptibility to superstition and faith-based authority) and removes from every person of the faith the choice of whether to conceive during sex. To me, this is a gross violation of the most basic human right! Why should a group of elderly robed virgin bachelors be telling millions of people how to manage their own bodies? You wouldn't take dietary advice from someone who weighed 200kg and ate creme brulee for breakfast, would you?
So, do the mafiosi of Jesus really get their authority to make these peculiar demands on their following from the bible? Where in the book does it say "you must only have sex to make babies"? Sure, Genesis says "be fruitful and multiply" and Judah's son Onan was killed by God for spilling his seed (it would seem that God does indeed get quite irate when a sperm is wasted). But it seems to require quite a bit of interpretation to make these few passages imlpy a strict ban on contraception or sex for fun. Christian opposition to contraception does have a long history (it was associated, along with abortion, with heretics such as the Gnostic or Cathars) but it would seem the ban is only really supported papal encyclicals (I guess it's a fancy way of saying "orders") and not explicitly commanded by scripture.
Whatever the actual source for this claimed authority to tell people, it just seems like yet another example of the church seeming happy to remain stuck in ancient times, not recognising that the world has changed considerably since the period leading up to the Renaissance, when the Vatican held most of the kings and princes of Europe in its palm (until Henry VIII decided he wanted a divorce and started his own church which had much more relaxed rules, which really just goes to show the worth of organised religion in general). It's still one of the richest landowners in the world (the Inquisition was quite a successful land-grab), but without tenants to pay the rent you'll be in a bit of a hole. Hence, I'm happy to assume, the need for fruitful multiplication.
Every so often, though, the Vatican makes some small concession to reality. After 400 or so years, Galileo was eventually pardoned for his "crime" of disagreeing with the Vatican and subscribing to (and basically proving) the Copernican theory that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. Eventually, they also recognised, long, long after the rest of the world, things like gravity, germ theory, atomic theory, the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and even that great faith-killer, the theory of evolution. Every so often, they magnanimously admit to having noticed certain aspects of the real world and the gaps in scientific knowledge that their god used to fill in all his grandeur become slightly smaller. Given this slow but sure lapping away by reality at the shores of their superstition, it's little wonder that they cling so tightly to subjective things which reality doesn't have much of a say in, like sexual morality & practice. Homosexuality, abortion, contraception and so forth, these are things that the Vatican can quite happily still claim moral authority on. As long as they stay on the course of issuing behavioural edicts and telling people what they should think and do and how they should make love, science won't be able to disprove any of it. It'll be up to the Catholics themselves to eventually cast off the centuries-old shackles of papal despotism and say "Enough!"
One thing about this article has me a bit suss though. I'm not sure I welcome every group on this list with open arms...
Other groups in the NoToPope Coalition are the Socialist Alliance, Resistance, Atheists Sydney and the Raelians, a religious sect that has claimed to have cloned the world's first human being.
Raelian members Eden Bates and Gerry Texeira said it was unfair that their leader, Claude Vorilhon, known as Rael, was denied a visa upon application while the Pope was being feted by Australian governments.
I don't actually know anything the first three listed there. But the Raelians? Come on, this is giving any Papist mush-heads a golden ticket to discredit the entire protest as the usual "aw, poor old picked-on Catholics" paranois! Couldn't the various gay/atheist groups have said a polite "thanks but no thanks"? The last thing any pro-rights movement needs is to be associated with a cult of self-proclaimed (but unproven) human-cloners, especially given the touchiness surrounding topics such as stem cells and embryonic cloning.
However, there is some semblance of a point there. Rael, obvious wacko cult leader, is denied entry to the country because he's obviously the leader of a wacko cult. The pope, however, gets a red carpet all the way to his holy bidet. One cult leader is denied because he's the new kid and clearly a bit nutso, but the leader of a more popular cult with better robes which is built on centuries of murder, torture and enriched to an unholy extent by outright theft, that continues to cover for paedophiles, that believes wafers turn into Jewish zombie flesh at the incantation of a magic spell and continues to exert unreasonable moral influence in what should be the private lives of its millions of followers gets more attention & honour than Led Zeppelin.
Well, perhaps in a thousand years, once they've managed to gain considerable influence over several million people through missionary work, inquisitions, crusades and centuries of sexual oppression (and gross sexual misconduct, all swept under the rug until you can't cross the room without a step-ladder, of course), that generation's Rael-clone may be invited to The Lodge to have a cup of tea with the cybernetically-preserved head of Kevin Rudd.
Watch this space!
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Carnival of the Godless #94
Hell yeah! That time of the month again.
Hank Fox is hosting the 94th heathen bloglomerate over at Earthman's Notebook.
Enjoy it! As always, I have faith that I will.
Faith that's based on repeated prior experience and a reasonable expectation that the quality of the submissions will remain high, mais naturellement ...
Hank Fox is hosting the 94th heathen bloglomerate over at Earthman's Notebook.
Enjoy it! As always, I have faith that I will.
Faith that's based on repeated prior experience and a reasonable expectation that the quality of the submissions will remain high, mais naturellement ...
How to use a call centre in three easy steps
A slight deviation from my normal content. Be advised this is going to be a thinly-disguised bitch on the topic of call centres, but not the usual kind, i.e. a blogwhine/standup routine/sitcom dialogue regarding often subcontinentally located call centres with incompetent, apathetic or incoherent staff who have no idea what to do if a caller gets them off-script. No, this is a whine about people who call call centres and have no goddam idea what they're doing and some suggestions about how to make everybody's lives easier. Because it's the interblarg and people have either very short attention spans or very short windows of opportunity to read time-wasting shit like this before they have to frantically start bosspamming again, I shall make a list in no particular order.
1. Be realistic.
The person who answers your call is most likely not intimate with every aspect of the company they work for!
There's a reason there are so many people working in so many call centres: usually, such jobs are entry level, relatively easy and often require no prior experience. Because of that, they're great for a first-time worker, someone returning to work after a long absence, part-time/casual workers or someone whose real job is playing keyboards and they're just waiting for the right person to hear their demo. Expecting the first person you talk to to be able to give you deep insight into the company's every operation or address your every query in detail is somewhat unrealistic. Of course, you have every right to expect the operator to be helpful! Just don't expect that the first person you speak to can answer your every question. Don't start with a huge spiel/complaint/query/suggestion and then get huffy when they're flustered and have no idea how to respond to you and want to refer your call on. A good first step to avoid this kind of frustration is to ask if the operator if they're the right person to ask about your specific issue - you don't go to the doctor's office and ask their receptionist about your itchy genitals, do you? You do? Well, perhaps you should be on some kind of government watch-list ... ok, moving on!
2. Don't hold the operator personally for the company's mistake (perceived or otherwise).
So, the bank/phone company/charity/whatever has screwed up in a massive way. You've been overcharged/double-charged/charged for the wrong thing/charged for something you didn't get and you're shat. You want blood. Fair enough! Noone likes being shafted so you have every right to be on a Spartan-style warpath. But give the operator a break: it's very unlikely that they're personally responsible for whatever mistake has given you the royal shits. Also, you're more than likely not the only customer who's experienced a mistake at the hands of the company. Abusing the operator isn't going to earn you any respect and won't inspire them to help you. The worse you treat them, the more likely they're just going to fob you off, handball the call to someone else who won't give a shit, or kick your call upstairs to a manager who they know is on holidays so you get their voicemail. On the other hand, if you're at least calm about it (noone said you had to be all peaches n' cream), they'll sympathise with you (and possibly empathise - we all have to deal with large companies who inevitably screw shit up) and will be more than happy to assist you or at least steer you in the direction of someone they know will help.
3. Get organised!
You might not be pressed for time, but you can almost guarantee your operator is - and so are the other callers waiting to speak to them.
So, you're calling to have a query answered or a complaint addressed, just looking for some vague, general information. Is it too much to ask that you have a pen handy? Or your last correspondence from the company so the operator can find your record quickly? Your operator might not be timed like some outbound callers are but they'll still have things to do, even if it's just answering other calls. Not to mention the fact that the other callers sitting in the queue listening to shitty hold music have better things to do than sit in phone queues listening to shitty hold music while operators wait for yet other callers to get organised. Sure, it might only take thirty seconds to grab a pen or your last statement/letter ... so why not sort that out before you even dial? If not for the hapless operator, do it for all the other people like you who want answers.
Sure, you might have had some bad experiences with call centre operators. They might have been apathetic, unhelpful or even downright rude in some cases. If that's the case then sure, maybe they should be working elsewhere. But it's pure common sense to realise that that's no reason to hold the next operator or the entire company responsible.
And maybe, just maybe, you just caught the nicest person in the world on the worst day of their life. This person might have just got off the phone from talking to the rudest, most offensive person they'd ever spoken to in their whole lives and not had any time to process their annoyance and take a break before talking to you. Hell, if nothing else, treat that person on the other end of the line with decency and respect because they're another human being! If you're so glad to be released from the queue or to have navigated through the menu maze and finally talk to a human, act like it and treat them as such.
So, in closing: you've got a question? Great! I want to answer it but if I can't, please understand when I try to find someone who can - and please make sure you have something to record the answer ahead of time. If not for me, for the others waiting in the damn phone queue and being told that their call is important by a recorded message every two minutes. You've got a legitimate whinge and you want the company to pay up? Fine - just make sure you're whinging to the right person. But hey, don't hold me responsible - if I was in any position of responsibility do you really think I'd be front-line in a bloody call centre and not upstairs somewhere, sitting on my nice chair and thanking Dionysius that I don't work front-line in a bloody call centre?
1. Be realistic.
The person who answers your call is most likely not intimate with every aspect of the company they work for!
There's a reason there are so many people working in so many call centres: usually, such jobs are entry level, relatively easy and often require no prior experience. Because of that, they're great for a first-time worker, someone returning to work after a long absence, part-time/casual workers or someone whose real job is playing keyboards and they're just waiting for the right person to hear their demo. Expecting the first person you talk to to be able to give you deep insight into the company's every operation or address your every query in detail is somewhat unrealistic. Of course, you have every right to expect the operator to be helpful! Just don't expect that the first person you speak to can answer your every question. Don't start with a huge spiel/complaint/query/suggestion and then get huffy when they're flustered and have no idea how to respond to you and want to refer your call on. A good first step to avoid this kind of frustration is to ask if the operator if they're the right person to ask about your specific issue - you don't go to the doctor's office and ask their receptionist about your itchy genitals, do you? You do? Well, perhaps you should be on some kind of government watch-list ... ok, moving on!
2. Don't hold the operator personally for the company's mistake (perceived or otherwise).
So, the bank/phone company/charity/whatever has screwed up in a massive way. You've been overcharged/double-charged/charged for the wrong thing/charged for something you didn't get and you're shat. You want blood. Fair enough! Noone likes being shafted so you have every right to be on a Spartan-style warpath. But give the operator a break: it's very unlikely that they're personally responsible for whatever mistake has given you the royal shits. Also, you're more than likely not the only customer who's experienced a mistake at the hands of the company. Abusing the operator isn't going to earn you any respect and won't inspire them to help you. The worse you treat them, the more likely they're just going to fob you off, handball the call to someone else who won't give a shit, or kick your call upstairs to a manager who they know is on holidays so you get their voicemail. On the other hand, if you're at least calm about it (noone said you had to be all peaches n' cream), they'll sympathise with you (and possibly empathise - we all have to deal with large companies who inevitably screw shit up) and will be more than happy to assist you or at least steer you in the direction of someone they know will help.
3. Get organised!
You might not be pressed for time, but you can almost guarantee your operator is - and so are the other callers waiting to speak to them.
So, you're calling to have a query answered or a complaint addressed, just looking for some vague, general information. Is it too much to ask that you have a pen handy? Or your last correspondence from the company so the operator can find your record quickly? Your operator might not be timed like some outbound callers are but they'll still have things to do, even if it's just answering other calls. Not to mention the fact that the other callers sitting in the queue listening to shitty hold music have better things to do than sit in phone queues listening to shitty hold music while operators wait for yet other callers to get organised. Sure, it might only take thirty seconds to grab a pen or your last statement/letter ... so why not sort that out before you even dial? If not for the hapless operator, do it for all the other people like you who want answers.
Sure, you might have had some bad experiences with call centre operators. They might have been apathetic, unhelpful or even downright rude in some cases. If that's the case then sure, maybe they should be working elsewhere. But it's pure common sense to realise that that's no reason to hold the next operator or the entire company responsible.
And maybe, just maybe, you just caught the nicest person in the world on the worst day of their life. This person might have just got off the phone from talking to the rudest, most offensive person they'd ever spoken to in their whole lives and not had any time to process their annoyance and take a break before talking to you. Hell, if nothing else, treat that person on the other end of the line with decency and respect because they're another human being! If you're so glad to be released from the queue or to have navigated through the menu maze and finally talk to a human, act like it and treat them as such.
So, in closing: you've got a question? Great! I want to answer it but if I can't, please understand when I try to find someone who can - and please make sure you have something to record the answer ahead of time. If not for me, for the others waiting in the damn phone queue and being told that their call is important by a recorded message every two minutes. You've got a legitimate whinge and you want the company to pay up? Fine - just make sure you're whinging to the right person. But hey, don't hold me responsible - if I was in any position of responsibility do you really think I'd be front-line in a bloody call centre and not upstairs somewhere, sitting on my nice chair and thanking Dionysius that I don't work front-line in a bloody call centre?
R I P George Carlin
Everyone's favourite heathen comedian, George Carlin, has passed away, aged 71. In place of me crapping on I'll just link you to this obituary, containing a great Youtube collection of George's rants. It's both a beginner's guide to George and a bit of a greatest hits compilation as well. Enjoy!
If George was wrong and he's facing either a white-robed (presumably enraged) grampa or a cackling, cloven-hoofed miscreant, you can bet your godless arse he'd be giving them a righteous earful and not taking any shit. Hell, he probably would've talked himself into Hendrix's penthouse by now.
Goodnight George.
If George was wrong and he's facing either a white-robed (presumably enraged) grampa or a cackling, cloven-hoofed miscreant, you can bet your godless arse he'd be giving them a righteous earful and not taking any shit. Hell, he probably would've talked himself into Hendrix's penthouse by now.
Goodnight George.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Another song to ease you through the weekend ...
This should make you tap your feet. If not, you probably don't have feet. Sucks to be you!
Friday, June 20, 2008
*sigh* gay marriage - it's the 21st century, but still ...
A post over at Chez Greta got me thinking (and got me formulating this post in the comments section). Yes, thinking! That thing where you say things, but only with your brain and only to yourself.
Specifically, it got me thinking about my own marriage, which is now two and a half years old, and marriage rights for gay people. You may have noticed that there was a recent decision in the state of California which finally dragged the state into the 21st century, legalising gay marriage and conferring upon gay couples all the rights everyone else takes for granted. Of course, it's now facing stiff opposition, more than likely, I'll wager, from the usual gang of conservative/religious/"Family" groups who always seem to be pushing against the tide of progress while most reasonable people are going "sure, why not?" or "about freaking time" (by the way: why does any group containing "Family" in the name automatically seem to mean "white middle class straight married Christian people with some sort of perverted interest in telling other people what they should be doing in the privacy of their own bodies and minds" instead of people actually concerned for peoples' welfare regardless of their orientation, beliefs or particular combination of ages, genders or degree of genetic similarity?).
So, who exactly takes these rights for granted? Well, just about everybody. Dear Mrs M and I included. Obviously, anyone can plan a wedding. Anyone can arrange flowers, suits, dresses, food, entertainment for a single day of the year. Anyone can arrange their own personal "Love Day" and invite anyone they want. Anyone can get drunk and break a heel or lose a new Italian shoe, requiring them to pad around barefoot all evening (and not caring because it's 30 degrees Celsius in February here in Australia). But, unfortunately, not everyone can get legally married and in turn enjoy the benefits of being legally linked to the one they love. Not everyone can be recognised as a spouse and make crucial decisions affecting their shared life, the lives of any children in the relationship, the fate of their loved one's assets should the unthinkable yet inevitable happen, be legally protected from implicating their partner in a crime (if it should come to that, Dionysius forfend) and any number of other facets of married life we hetero types don't even think about because they're conferred on us from birth and last until death (provided we don't "catch the gay" at any point before we die).
But I always think to myself, baffled "why?" Apart from referring to some passage in Leviticus (or is it Deuteronomy? I can't remember, they're both pretty retarded when it comes to questions of morality and I confuse them easily) I don't think I've ever actually heard a proper, coherent, even partially convincing argument why a gay couple shouldn't get married like any man & woman can, as easily as signing a form in an office, if that's what they wish. Sure, in some parts of our post space-age world, Bibles, Qurans and other ancient stories still seem to take precedence over actual, rationally-based laws. Leaving aside the obvious examples of various Muslim countries, either theocracies like Saudi Arabia or Iran or supposedly secular nations like Turkey who still expect people to behave according to Mohammed's dictates, the United States seems to be experiencing a sort of Christian Fundamentalist renaissance at the moment. There are creationist Biblical literalists being installed at all levels of government. As members county or state school boards, they push for the inclusion of Intelligent Design/creationism in science classes (Louisiana, Florida, Texas and many other states are currently or have been battling initiatives launched by such people). As state representatives, they push for or instigate laughable "abstinence-only" sex education programs in high schools (which amount to "well, if you don't do it you won't need to know how to do it or what happens when you do do it, so just don't do it, now shut yer yap". The Pentagon, invites (ashamedly Australian) creationist Ken Ham in for a prayer breakfast. The US armed forces seems to be littered with evangelists who see no problem in discriminating against non-religious soldiers. The Whitehouse itself is led by a born-again fundamentalist (who seemingly swapped his alcohol DT's for a Jesus jones) who's been reported as saying God told him to strike at Iraq! Hmmm, God told him to break every applicable international and domestic law and kill a million people for a massive pile of bullshit. Sure. But that's another thread. Suffice it to say, given America's long history of unfortunately being the home of particularly vicious forms of religious extremists from Benny Hinn to the *ugh* Westboro Baptist Church, it's no real surprise to me that gay people are still getting a raw deal at the hands of the white Protestant majority.
But this is Australia and we still treat gay people like shit. We don't have nearly the amount of religious whackos that seem to fill every possible niche in the States. We have our share (the Exclusive Brethren, various Pentecostal sects of which a beloved cousin of mine is one, much to my dismay and of course we have Mormons and the Jehovahs' Witless, a.k.a. "The Bloody Johos"). This is Australia and I bloody well expect better. I at least expect a bit more than the usual shit like "it threatens the sanctity of marriage"; "marriage is defined as a union between a man and a woman [insert optional phrase about being for the purpose of procreation]"; "we are founded on Christian values" and yada yada, I don't want to finish that sentence. We are, mostly, progressive when it comes to civil rights. We never participated in the slave trade (we didn't buy and import Africans but convict labourers and captured Aborigines could easily have met the definition of a slave). My home state of South Australia, as just one example, blazed a mighty trail and gave women the right to vote in 1894, long before many other parts of the former Empire. Out of half a dozen disconnected colonies we became a properly Federated Nation in 1901 - through a vote, not through violence. Why, then, must this still be an issue? Can someone tell me why two men or two women getting married is going to, for example, threaten the sanctity of my own marriage? If anything, allowing gay people to marry will make the act of marriage more sacred and more honourable and more beautiful, by no longer excluding a large proportion of our society from this tradition for no good goddamned reason.
When my wife and I were planning our wedding, it often occurred to me that our gay friends had less rights than your average convicted criminal. Even multiple rapists and murderers doing life without parole can get married! But not your average, decent, tax-paying, law-abiding person of homosexual orientation. And while in some states or territories (as in the US) gay people can enter into "civil unions", it isn't the same thing. They can sign a legal document, sure, but they only get some shared rights. They can have a big shindig with their family & friends, but it just isn't getting married. How can you possibly enjoy the pure, silly, romantic joy of a huge, public love-party without feeling a pang of "this is nice, but it's only 90% perfect".
Sad thing is, I don't see and end to it any time soon. We may have finally rid ourselves of God-bothering Bush-buddy John Howard, but his replacement Kevin Rudd seems almost as pious if not more. And I've noticed if there's one thing that pretty much guarantees discrimination against gay people, it's a "close personal realtionship" with the Prince of Peace.
Sad thing is, I don't see and end to it any time soon. We may have finally rid ourselves of God-bothering Bush-buddy John Howard, but his replacement Kevin Rudd seems almost as pious if not more. And I've noticed if there's one thing that pretty much guarantees discrimination against gay people, it's a "close personal realtionship" with the Prince of Peace.
Friday Frivolity: Terry & Jed and the unconscious subconscious
EFFECT A CLICKING ACTION UPON THE ABOVE IMAGE
IN ORDER TO ACTIVATE THE IN-PAGE EMBIGGENATRIX
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
You go, Vatican
Just to prove they're not a bunch of paranoid, reactionary, elderly virgins with no real connection to the world that the rest of us live in, the Catholic Church has banned the filming of certain bits of the Da Vinci Code prequel Angels & Demons, based on Dan Brown's book, in certain parts of their Roman strongholds.
Well, actually, fair enough. I suppose I wouldn't want someone filming anything featuring an account of my life in my home town, especially if it was depicting me as a sinister hypocritical control freak who attempts to dictate what people do in the privacy of their own thoughts through bribery, fear and threats of eternal retribution. And, double-plus especially, if that account happened to be accurate.
The real golden godly moments of this situation, however, are the following quotes from a couple of Vatican ubermenschen:
Well, sure. Brown's a hack. A populist airport-novelist (the kind where the author's name all but eclipses the actual title of the book) who's about as close to literary greatness as, well, me actually, but I don't think that's what the good padre was getting at. He continues:
He says, after just admitting he didn't even read the facking script.
As to the second point: I don't imagine then, father, that your religious beliefs are all that strong or divinely-inspired or unshakeable if something as innocuous as an admittedly fictional story could do any actual damage to them whatsoever. Did Stone's The Last Temptation Of Christ actually have any discernible effect on the bums on pews numbers following its release (and, presumably, strident Vatican over-reaction)? What about the Ministry song Jesus Built My Hotrod? More to the point, did The Da Vinci Code itself do anything even approaching the kind of damage you're getting so worked up about? And did you miss the insane irony of calling Brown a peddler of fantasy? Of course you did.
That's not all though. Next, we get this gem:
A nonsensical cocktail of phantasmogorical inventions! It seems that, like any Catholic stormtrooper, Cardinal Bertone's had his irony gland removed. Although, at least he seems to have read the story. Partial credit!
As always, the Vatican's quicker to create some controversy for itself than Dr Phil is to trot out home-fried pop-psych like "Whut wur you thenkin'? She's signallin' for a fastball and you're throwin' a knuckler! Hyuk hyuk hyuk!" I think the Vatican loves this kind of thing, actually. It allows them to thrust themselves into the public arena, cry persecution or bias or some such tripe and remind people they're still here, still pissed off about lots of stuff and still want to recognised as the moral authority of the entire fucking universe. I guess the predictable, yawn-inducing Vatican hysteria not going to stop any time soon, as long as reports like this one, which cites the continuing and even accelerating decline of people joining religious order, keep being released. The Vatican knows its Empire is shrinking, slowly but surely, and it will continue to attempt to elicit sympathy and attract new foot soldiers until its death throes. Herr Ratzinger won't care though - he's got tenure and won't, lucky for him, live to see its eventual fall. I hope I do, then we might see its fabled archives opened up. I'd love to see what those bastards have been hiding from the world for so long. A hand-written note from Emperor Constantine, maybe, which says "If you want to get rich, you start a religion."
Well, actually, fair enough. I suppose I wouldn't want someone filming anything featuring an account of my life in my home town, especially if it was depicting me as a sinister hypocritical control freak who attempts to dictate what people do in the privacy of their own thoughts through bribery, fear and threats of eternal retribution. And, double-plus especially, if that account happened to be accurate.
The real golden godly moments of this situation, however, are the following quotes from a couple of Vatican ubermenschen:
'Usually we read the script but in this case it wasn't necessary. Just the name Dan Brown was enough,' the Telegraph quoted Father Marco Fibbi, a spokesman, as saying.
Well, sure. Brown's a hack. A populist airport-novelist (the kind where the author's name all but eclipses the actual title of the book) who's about as close to literary greatness as, well, me actually, but I don't think that's what the good padre was getting at. He continues:
'Angels and Demons peddles a type of fantasy that damages our common religious beliefs, just like The Da Vinci Code did.'
He says, after just admitting he didn't even read the facking script.
As to the second point: I don't imagine then, father, that your religious beliefs are all that strong or divinely-inspired or unshakeable if something as innocuous as an admittedly fictional story could do any actual damage to them whatsoever. Did Stone's The Last Temptation Of Christ actually have any discernible effect on the bums on pews numbers following its release (and, presumably, strident Vatican over-reaction)? What about the Ministry song Jesus Built My Hotrod? More to the point, did The Da Vinci Code itself do anything even approaching the kind of damage you're getting so worked up about? And did you miss the insane irony of calling Brown a peddler of fantasy? Of course you did.
That's not all though. Next, we get this gem:
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, added: 'Boycotting this film is the least we can do. The book and the film are a pot pourri of nonsense, a phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions.'
A nonsensical cocktail of phantasmogorical inventions! It seems that, like any Catholic stormtrooper, Cardinal Bertone's had his irony gland removed. Although, at least he seems to have read the story. Partial credit!
As always, the Vatican's quicker to create some controversy for itself than Dr Phil is to trot out home-fried pop-psych like "Whut wur you thenkin'? She's signallin' for a fastball and you're throwin' a knuckler! Hyuk hyuk hyuk!" I think the Vatican loves this kind of thing, actually. It allows them to thrust themselves into the public arena, cry persecution or bias or some such tripe and remind people they're still here, still pissed off about lots of stuff and still want to recognised as the moral authority of the entire fucking universe. I guess the predictable, yawn-inducing Vatican hysteria not going to stop any time soon, as long as reports like this one, which cites the continuing and even accelerating decline of people joining religious order, keep being released. The Vatican knows its Empire is shrinking, slowly but surely, and it will continue to attempt to elicit sympathy and attract new foot soldiers until its death throes. Herr Ratzinger won't care though - he's got tenure and won't, lucky for him, live to see its eventual fall. I hope I do, then we might see its fabled archives opened up. I'd love to see what those bastards have been hiding from the world for so long. A hand-written note from Emperor Constantine, maybe, which says "If you want to get rich, you start a religion."
Monday, June 16, 2008
Speedbumps on the road through theism
When reading heathen blogs or forum discussions between heathens and a-heathens, I often observe remarks from the godly like this (paraphrased) example, in response to an atheist's description of negative experiences at the hands of religious people:
Well, it's actually quite understandable (in a first-year Freudian analysis kind of way) that a religious person would think that a bad religious experience would drive someone to rejection of the church and, ultimately, to atheism.
Naturally, the road to atheism is a lot deeper & more complex than that. Human minds are a lot more resilient than to completely abandon anything that gives them a shock. I'm sure a lot of victims of paedophile priests still believe in God, pray to Jesus and still expect to enter heaven. A true believer isn't going to abandon their faith just because an agent of their Lord betrayed their trust. An intelligent person realises that a single bad experience isn't enough of a reason to turn their back on the source of that experience, or avoid the context of the experience for the rest of their lives. Look at the number of divorcees who remarry, car accident victims who drive again, people who complain about Pop Idol but watch it every year without fail, forum members who repeatedly find themselves involved in the same retarded arguments with creationists, refuting the same old canards with the same old refutations, metaphorically (& occasionally literally) beating their heads against a brick wall. Imagine if you avoided everything that had ever caused you pain, discomfort, annoyance or even agony? You'd never love anyone - or anything, be it a band, pet, movie or TV show - again for fear they'd leave you, break up, have terrible sequels or prequels made (I'm not mentioning any names, George Lucas & the Wachowski brothers), be cancelled or die. You may never even leave the house if you'd had a car accident or even just experienced frightening ineptitude or road rage at the hands of another driver. No, humans don't just abandon something because it's hurt or betrayed them. It can often take quite a lot for a rational person to abandon something they once loved.
I have indeed personally experienced many negative things about religion, but they were far from the things that drove me from it (although they most certainly sped up the thought processes which culminated in "No god. No worries"). For the record, in my mid-teens and following a brief, well-meant but in hindsight sort of half-arsed foray into being a good Christian, I was already suspicious of organised religion (particularly Catholicism) - it seemed that it existed more to enrich and empower itself than to actually attend to peoples' needs. How else to explain the Vatican's reprehensible, dogmatic, dictatorial attitude to just about every decision most people are allowed make for themselves, the oft-cited (and oft-used as stand-up comedy material) lifetime of guilt, the constant refusal to let laypeople see vast sections of church archives, the Catholic emperor (sorry, "Pope") living in a virtual golden palace while the vast majority of his subjects live in abject, over-populated, ignorant (yet pious) poverty? Even if I'd never had a direct bad experience with religious people I still would have felt suspicious of their motives.
But I have had experiences which merely served to reinforce my suspicion of the whole religious enterprise: Jehovah's Witnesses have woken me up on a Saturday morning more times than is polite and they've never taken the suggestion to put my address on a "don't bother" list seriously. Once in my late teens, a couple of years after my unceremonious and unremarkable exit from school, when I was looking for work, Miniplenty (Centrelink, the government unemployment services provider or "dole office" to locals) put me onto what was innocuously called a "printing course". It was located in the offices of an inner-city church - this didn't ring any alarm bells though, as I still thought that most religious civilians had their hearts in the right place and genuinely wanted to help people, regardless of the ultimate motivation. Ostensibly, this course was meant to teach us poor unemployable scruffs how to use printing press equipment and then set up some sort of a mini-business, teaching us skills, fiscal responsibility and other useful stuff about modern business. "Teen Challenge" was the name of the organisation - again, something pretty innocuous. So I thought.
So, there we were learning how to make a printing plate and run it through the press and make a gazillion copies of something. I even ended up drawing a little comic strip to be included in the handouts we ended up printing (if I can find it I'll scan it & share it with the class). By this stage I'd realised the printouts we were making were religious in nature, but I made sure to make the comic strip as secular in nature as possible (my teen counselor hero, "TC" was a big muscly duck and never once mentioned the Jeebus). In retrospect, that was probably exactly what they wanted in order to appeal to the kids - can't believe I was doing their dirty work!
That wasn't the end of it though. Soon, the time came to send these things out. After a couple of small, token-ish efforts at some business skills, word processor skills and a visit from a real printer to talk about inks & paper, all print-related work ceased. All efforts were turned toward folding and labelling our printed work for a massive mailout to the faithful. I'd estimate the first week of this six-week course was about printing and the rest was all about us urchins folding their mailouts. Well, the rest that I did, anyway. After I'd realised we weren't going to be doing any more printing and I'd read a headline of one the articles in the mailout (I can't believe it took me so long to actually read the stuff we were printing!), entitled "How To Be An Effective Soul Winner", I realised we'd all pretty much been duped into being this church's mail-slaves. Turns out this inner-city church was run by the Assemblies Of God, a pentecostal evangelical ministry whose mission is to win souls. Around the same time, my father had heard a radio interview with the leader of the course, a pastor named Morrie, and warned me to be careful of "those people". Turns out he was right! They'd lured us poor unemployed youths in, got some government subsidies because they were "training" young people, taught us how to use 30-year old printing presses for a week (which would've raised an eyebrow to anyone older than about 18 - this was 1996 or thereabouts and noone was using that kind of gear anymore, except maybe evangelical churches. Obviously it wasn't paying off like it does in the states!) and then shifted the entire focus to folding and labelling their mailouts to the faithful for six hours a day. Thanks. I could've actually been looking for a proper job you bastards!
But, ridiculous waste of time (and slight case of egregious dishonesty on the part of the AOG) as that was, it was about the worst thing that's happened to me from a religious point of view. It coloured my perception somewhat, but really only toward evangelicals. In Australia, moderately religious people are really quite inoffensive and there's very little of the brand of insanity our US cousins frequently have to endure (the Creation Museum in Kentucky is my favourite example: run by an Aussie called Ken Ham who clearly realised that kind of bullshit wouldn't fly in Australia even if had an anti-gravity boots).
It wasn't any combination of bad experiences at the hands of churchies that turned me off religion - it was religion itself. Not just the unsupportable belief in a supernatural deity, not just the concept of eternal damnation for most but eternal free beer and porno bushes for very few, not just the unwavering devotion to ancient fables, not just the endless dodginess of so many religious people claiming to do God's work or hear his word, but a combination of all of those things.
It didn't happen in that order, though. The realisation that belief in a god was completely irrational and unsupportable by any standard of evidence came pretty much last of all. My suspicion of organised religion came first. I thought to myself "if God is infinite, he doesn't need my prayers or hymns or any other of that lip-service! I believe that as long as I do more good than harm I'll end up in Heaven". Then came my realisation that we'd made God in our own image much as the ancient Greeks had done with their Pantheon - insecure, spiteful, wrathful, a god who plays favourites, a god who seems as privy to the extremes of human emotion as any carbon-based sentient biped - and not the other way round. It really wasn't until a couple of years ago that I read a number of books which outlined exactly what I had been thinking for years and I realised that all my thoughts, words, concepts, feelings toward religion all added up to "I'm an atheist". There were a few recent years when I read Neale Donald Walsch's "Conversations With God" series and wholeheartedly embraced deism, but once they'd more or less faded from memory, I started reading Dawkins & Dennett, who aided the coalescing of my thoughts into a coherent position. Which is probably another thread in itself.
Poor atheist. You have had some really negative experiences that
turned you away from the Church! If only you could see the positives of belief and of belonging to the Christian community!
Well, it's actually quite understandable (in a first-year Freudian analysis kind of way) that a religious person would think that a bad religious experience would drive someone to rejection of the church and, ultimately, to atheism.
Naturally, the road to atheism is a lot deeper & more complex than that. Human minds are a lot more resilient than to completely abandon anything that gives them a shock. I'm sure a lot of victims of paedophile priests still believe in God, pray to Jesus and still expect to enter heaven. A true believer isn't going to abandon their faith just because an agent of their Lord betrayed their trust. An intelligent person realises that a single bad experience isn't enough of a reason to turn their back on the source of that experience, or avoid the context of the experience for the rest of their lives. Look at the number of divorcees who remarry, car accident victims who drive again, people who complain about Pop Idol but watch it every year without fail, forum members who repeatedly find themselves involved in the same retarded arguments with creationists, refuting the same old canards with the same old refutations, metaphorically (& occasionally literally) beating their heads against a brick wall. Imagine if you avoided everything that had ever caused you pain, discomfort, annoyance or even agony? You'd never love anyone - or anything, be it a band, pet, movie or TV show - again for fear they'd leave you, break up, have terrible sequels or prequels made (I'm not mentioning any names, George Lucas & the Wachowski brothers), be cancelled or die. You may never even leave the house if you'd had a car accident or even just experienced frightening ineptitude or road rage at the hands of another driver. No, humans don't just abandon something because it's hurt or betrayed them. It can often take quite a lot for a rational person to abandon something they once loved.
I have indeed personally experienced many negative things about religion, but they were far from the things that drove me from it (although they most certainly sped up the thought processes which culminated in "No god. No worries"). For the record, in my mid-teens and following a brief, well-meant but in hindsight sort of half-arsed foray into being a good Christian, I was already suspicious of organised religion (particularly Catholicism) - it seemed that it existed more to enrich and empower itself than to actually attend to peoples' needs. How else to explain the Vatican's reprehensible, dogmatic, dictatorial attitude to just about every decision most people are allowed make for themselves, the oft-cited (and oft-used as stand-up comedy material) lifetime of guilt, the constant refusal to let laypeople see vast sections of church archives, the Catholic emperor (sorry, "Pope") living in a virtual golden palace while the vast majority of his subjects live in abject, over-populated, ignorant (yet pious) poverty? Even if I'd never had a direct bad experience with religious people I still would have felt suspicious of their motives.
But I have had experiences which merely served to reinforce my suspicion of the whole religious enterprise: Jehovah's Witnesses have woken me up on a Saturday morning more times than is polite and they've never taken the suggestion to put my address on a "don't bother" list seriously. Once in my late teens, a couple of years after my unceremonious and unremarkable exit from school, when I was looking for work, Miniplenty (Centrelink, the government unemployment services provider or "dole office" to locals) put me onto what was innocuously called a "printing course". It was located in the offices of an inner-city church - this didn't ring any alarm bells though, as I still thought that most religious civilians had their hearts in the right place and genuinely wanted to help people, regardless of the ultimate motivation. Ostensibly, this course was meant to teach us poor unemployable scruffs how to use printing press equipment and then set up some sort of a mini-business, teaching us skills, fiscal responsibility and other useful stuff about modern business. "Teen Challenge" was the name of the organisation - again, something pretty innocuous. So I thought.
So, there we were learning how to make a printing plate and run it through the press and make a gazillion copies of something. I even ended up drawing a little comic strip to be included in the handouts we ended up printing (if I can find it I'll scan it & share it with the class). By this stage I'd realised the printouts we were making were religious in nature, but I made sure to make the comic strip as secular in nature as possible (my teen counselor hero, "TC" was a big muscly duck and never once mentioned the Jeebus). In retrospect, that was probably exactly what they wanted in order to appeal to the kids - can't believe I was doing their dirty work!
That wasn't the end of it though. Soon, the time came to send these things out. After a couple of small, token-ish efforts at some business skills, word processor skills and a visit from a real printer to talk about inks & paper, all print-related work ceased. All efforts were turned toward folding and labelling our printed work for a massive mailout to the faithful. I'd estimate the first week of this six-week course was about printing and the rest was all about us urchins folding their mailouts. Well, the rest that I did, anyway. After I'd realised we weren't going to be doing any more printing and I'd read a headline of one the articles in the mailout (I can't believe it took me so long to actually read the stuff we were printing!), entitled "How To Be An Effective Soul Winner", I realised we'd all pretty much been duped into being this church's mail-slaves. Turns out this inner-city church was run by the Assemblies Of God, a pentecostal evangelical ministry whose mission is to win souls. Around the same time, my father had heard a radio interview with the leader of the course, a pastor named Morrie, and warned me to be careful of "those people". Turns out he was right! They'd lured us poor unemployed youths in, got some government subsidies because they were "training" young people, taught us how to use 30-year old printing presses for a week (which would've raised an eyebrow to anyone older than about 18 - this was 1996 or thereabouts and noone was using that kind of gear anymore, except maybe evangelical churches. Obviously it wasn't paying off like it does in the states!) and then shifted the entire focus to folding and labelling their mailouts to the faithful for six hours a day. Thanks. I could've actually been looking for a proper job you bastards!
But, ridiculous waste of time (and slight case of egregious dishonesty on the part of the AOG) as that was, it was about the worst thing that's happened to me from a religious point of view. It coloured my perception somewhat, but really only toward evangelicals. In Australia, moderately religious people are really quite inoffensive and there's very little of the brand of insanity our US cousins frequently have to endure (the Creation Museum in Kentucky is my favourite example: run by an Aussie called Ken Ham who clearly realised that kind of bullshit wouldn't fly in Australia even if had an anti-gravity boots).
It wasn't any combination of bad experiences at the hands of churchies that turned me off religion - it was religion itself. Not just the unsupportable belief in a supernatural deity, not just the concept of eternal damnation for most but eternal free beer and porno bushes for very few, not just the unwavering devotion to ancient fables, not just the endless dodginess of so many religious people claiming to do God's work or hear his word, but a combination of all of those things.
It didn't happen in that order, though. The realisation that belief in a god was completely irrational and unsupportable by any standard of evidence came pretty much last of all. My suspicion of organised religion came first. I thought to myself "if God is infinite, he doesn't need my prayers or hymns or any other of that lip-service! I believe that as long as I do more good than harm I'll end up in Heaven". Then came my realisation that we'd made God in our own image much as the ancient Greeks had done with their Pantheon - insecure, spiteful, wrathful, a god who plays favourites, a god who seems as privy to the extremes of human emotion as any carbon-based sentient biped - and not the other way round. It really wasn't until a couple of years ago that I read a number of books which outlined exactly what I had been thinking for years and I realised that all my thoughts, words, concepts, feelings toward religion all added up to "I'm an atheist". There were a few recent years when I read Neale Donald Walsch's "Conversations With God" series and wholeheartedly embraced deism, but once they'd more or less faded from memory, I started reading Dawkins & Dennett, who aided the coalescing of my thoughts into a coherent position. Which is probably another thread in itself.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Thursday, June 12, 2008
The Santa Delusion
I wondered a lot as a kid. I wondered about stuff as much my mind wandered when I was meant to be fixating (still something of a liability actually, I talk to myself when I walk my dog - which is handy, as it looks as though I'm talking to her which probably makes me appear less crazy - but I can't stick to a topic and end up berating myself verbally, which would make me appear more crazy, were I not careful to conceal it). There were always questions swimming around in my pint-sized mind and these were always splitting off and spawning new questions, almost mitotically, like so many prokaryotes flagellating around aimlessly in a cerebral primordium. Yes, I realise I probably just made up a few words there.
One conundrum that I can distinctly remember spending a fair amount of time contemplating was the omnipotence of Santa Claus. Of course, to a 32-year old it's a no-brainer, but to my 7-year old brain a jolly man from the Arctic who not only had super powers but also delivered fantastic gifts to everyone in the world on the same night for no reason at all was something very important that needed investigation, if for no other reason than to discover what it might take to secure me more presents than I was currently used to receiving.
Now, I wasn't some kind of gifted or overly anal kid, but I did tend to analyse things a little bit (and still do - this post will most likely undergo a minimum of six proofreads with quite a few extra sentences inserted after the fact, like this one). Accordingly, I had a list of questions prepared in my head were I ever to meet Santa (I also had several prepared for Batman, the Dukes of Hazzard and BJ Hunnicutt from M*A*SH*) . The first were logistical questions: exactly how fast do you & the reindeer have to travel in order to deliver six billion gifts all in one night and still have time to eat billions of snacks and drink billions of beers (Christmas happens in summer Down Here, not really the climate for sherry - and I didn't even realise the impact six billion beers would have on one's ability to fly a reindeer-powered sleigh)? Also, where do you even find room for those six billion gifts? All in your sack? It'd need to be the size of a jumbo jet (which is the largest thing I could think of back then) and it wouldn't fit down the chimney! I supposed he had a smaller sack for going down chimneys...which raised another question: we don't have a fireplace, but we do have two chimneys. They're very narrow, but assuming you could squeeze down, one chimney would lead you straight into the wood-stove (which is still the primary heating & cooking device at my parents' house) and the other is blocked because there's a gas heater where the fireplace used to be. I supposed he would just come in through the back door, which was never locked unless we went out somewhere (ah, bless country living). Either that or - and this would explain every other question I had, such as: how do you hear everyone's wishes; is it true that the elves make brand-name appliances at the North Pole because mum's new blender was a Breville; if you do hear everyone's wishes why is it that I never get anything even close to what I want unless my mum hears my wish as well; where exactly is the line between naughty & nice; can all reindeer fly or just yours and why use reindeer when dogs are lighter - Santa was totally magic!
The old "it's magic" answer! Mental polyfilla ("spackle" to you Northern Hemispherians), designed to fill gaps in understanding in immature minds until such time as the actual explanation can be comprehended & fit snugly. Being 7, and questioning everything in sight, "it's magic" as an answer-all was losing its lustre pretty rapidly. Just like the old chestnut "because I said so", which my parents kept using into my teens. I must give them credit though, because they never explained anything to me with "it's magic", even when I believed magic was possible. It was usually teachers or friends that were pro-magic. Of course, I eventually realised that magic wasn't an explanation for anything and some old man living in the North Pole couldn't possibly hear everyone's thoughts, check up on everyone's behaviour and deliver billions of gifts in just a few hours. Santa was merely a cute fairy-story designed to entertain children (and possibly bribe them into behaving during the cold northern winter, when everyone would have been cooped up inside for days on end) and which subsequently evolved over the years as it spread around the globe. Eventually I would learn that it's okay not to know how stuff happens because at least that's better than making something up to make yourself feel better for not having a clue. Once you know that you don't know, you can start finding out how to find out!
It wasn't until a little later that I realised my discovery of the Santa Delusion (of which I was quite proud - I'd busted open a global racket of grownup dishonesty!) was just a practice run for all the questions I would eventually ask myself about God, Jesus, Lazarus, Adam, Eve, Genesis & everything else I was being told in the weekly Religious Instruction lessons at our local, 80-student public primary school. Note that I asked myself - I didn't ask Mr Pedlar, our theologist (a thoroughly nice man who doubled as the music teacher), or our Sunday School teacher, whose name escapes me (probably because my brothers and I were removed from Sunday School when I was about 6 years old, once my mother found out we were being taught about Hell. I'm very glad that teaching this concept to children horrified her as it does me). I'm unsure why I didn't ask people who would probably know. Perhaps it simply didn't occur to me. Perhaps, instinctively, I knew I wouldn't get an objective answer. Perhaps, again, I'm giving my younger self too much credit for insight there.
So, I would go over the various Biblical miracles in my young mind (just as I went over this post in my mind last night when I couldn't sleep, and have probably forgotten heaps of cool shit I was going to include and I really should keep a pad next to my bed, or the laptop, but there's no interwang in the bedroom and the unknown neighbours' wireless account that we were leaching off for six months has been secured - bastards!) and, more often than not, my brain would come up against the brick wall of "that's impossible! Noone can walk on water, come back to life, make people from dirt, turn people into salt, smash a whole army by themselves, kill a giant with a pebble ... oh, unless they're magic ... " And so, CLICK! It clicked. Well, it sort of clicked. Because it was God, and because God had made everything, then it was okay if he wanted to do a Superman. For the record, I never liked Superman. The dude had it way too easy - the only thing that can even hurt him is a space-rock that's exceedingly rare because his planet was vapourised. Batman, now there's a hero. He might have lots of money but he's an orphan. He's mortal so he needs streetsmarts, his keen mind and plenty of sweet gear and to fight crime - the best part is he makes all his own toys!
So, anyway, Batman aside (I just love Batman), that's about where my questioning of religion ended until I was in my early teens (which is a separate post, as would be the bits about my occasional forays into prayer, Bible-reading and Christian guilt every time I did something I thought Jesus wouldn't dig). At 7, I had satisfied myself that magic, while totally not on for people, was just fine as long as God was doing it. God was in his Batcave, all was right with the world.
One conundrum that I can distinctly remember spending a fair amount of time contemplating was the omnipotence of Santa Claus. Of course, to a 32-year old it's a no-brainer, but to my 7-year old brain a jolly man from the Arctic who not only had super powers but also delivered fantastic gifts to everyone in the world on the same night for no reason at all was something very important that needed investigation, if for no other reason than to discover what it might take to secure me more presents than I was currently used to receiving.
Now, I wasn't some kind of gifted or overly anal kid, but I did tend to analyse things a little bit (and still do - this post will most likely undergo a minimum of six proofreads with quite a few extra sentences inserted after the fact, like this one). Accordingly, I had a list of questions prepared in my head were I ever to meet Santa (I also had several prepared for Batman, the Dukes of Hazzard and BJ Hunnicutt from M*A*SH*) . The first were logistical questions: exactly how fast do you & the reindeer have to travel in order to deliver six billion gifts all in one night and still have time to eat billions of snacks and drink billions of beers (Christmas happens in summer Down Here, not really the climate for sherry - and I didn't even realise the impact six billion beers would have on one's ability to fly a reindeer-powered sleigh)? Also, where do you even find room for those six billion gifts? All in your sack? It'd need to be the size of a jumbo jet (which is the largest thing I could think of back then) and it wouldn't fit down the chimney! I supposed he had a smaller sack for going down chimneys...which raised another question: we don't have a fireplace, but we do have two chimneys. They're very narrow, but assuming you could squeeze down, one chimney would lead you straight into the wood-stove (which is still the primary heating & cooking device at my parents' house) and the other is blocked because there's a gas heater where the fireplace used to be. I supposed he would just come in through the back door, which was never locked unless we went out somewhere (ah, bless country living). Either that or - and this would explain every other question I had, such as: how do you hear everyone's wishes; is it true that the elves make brand-name appliances at the North Pole because mum's new blender was a Breville; if you do hear everyone's wishes why is it that I never get anything even close to what I want unless my mum hears my wish as well; where exactly is the line between naughty & nice; can all reindeer fly or just yours and why use reindeer when dogs are lighter - Santa was totally magic!
The old "it's magic" answer! Mental polyfilla ("spackle" to you Northern Hemispherians), designed to fill gaps in understanding in immature minds until such time as the actual explanation can be comprehended & fit snugly. Being 7, and questioning everything in sight, "it's magic" as an answer-all was losing its lustre pretty rapidly. Just like the old chestnut "because I said so", which my parents kept using into my teens. I must give them credit though, because they never explained anything to me with "it's magic", even when I believed magic was possible. It was usually teachers or friends that were pro-magic. Of course, I eventually realised that magic wasn't an explanation for anything and some old man living in the North Pole couldn't possibly hear everyone's thoughts, check up on everyone's behaviour and deliver billions of gifts in just a few hours. Santa was merely a cute fairy-story designed to entertain children (and possibly bribe them into behaving during the cold northern winter, when everyone would have been cooped up inside for days on end) and which subsequently evolved over the years as it spread around the globe. Eventually I would learn that it's okay not to know how stuff happens because at least that's better than making something up to make yourself feel better for not having a clue. Once you know that you don't know, you can start finding out how to find out!
It wasn't until a little later that I realised my discovery of the Santa Delusion (of which I was quite proud - I'd busted open a global racket of grownup dishonesty!) was just a practice run for all the questions I would eventually ask myself about God, Jesus, Lazarus, Adam, Eve, Genesis & everything else I was being told in the weekly Religious Instruction lessons at our local, 80-student public primary school. Note that I asked myself - I didn't ask Mr Pedlar, our theologist (a thoroughly nice man who doubled as the music teacher), or our Sunday School teacher, whose name escapes me (probably because my brothers and I were removed from Sunday School when I was about 6 years old, once my mother found out we were being taught about Hell. I'm very glad that teaching this concept to children horrified her as it does me). I'm unsure why I didn't ask people who would probably know. Perhaps it simply didn't occur to me. Perhaps, instinctively, I knew I wouldn't get an objective answer. Perhaps, again, I'm giving my younger self too much credit for insight there.
So, I would go over the various Biblical miracles in my young mind (just as I went over this post in my mind last night when I couldn't sleep, and have probably forgotten heaps of cool shit I was going to include and I really should keep a pad next to my bed, or the laptop, but there's no interwang in the bedroom and the unknown neighbours' wireless account that we were leaching off for six months has been secured - bastards!) and, more often than not, my brain would come up against the brick wall of "that's impossible! Noone can walk on water, come back to life, make people from dirt, turn people into salt, smash a whole army by themselves, kill a giant with a pebble ... oh, unless they're magic ... " And so, CLICK! It clicked. Well, it sort of clicked. Because it was God, and because God had made everything, then it was okay if he wanted to do a Superman. For the record, I never liked Superman. The dude had it way too easy - the only thing that can even hurt him is a space-rock that's exceedingly rare because his planet was vapourised. Batman, now there's a hero. He might have lots of money but he's an orphan. He's mortal so he needs streetsmarts, his keen mind and plenty of sweet gear and to fight crime - the best part is he makes all his own toys!
So, anyway, Batman aside (I just love Batman), that's about where my questioning of religion ended until I was in my early teens (which is a separate post, as would be the bits about my occasional forays into prayer, Bible-reading and Christian guilt every time I did something I thought Jesus wouldn't dig). At 7, I had satisfied myself that magic, while totally not on for people, was just fine as long as God was doing it. God was in his Batcave, all was right with the world.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Carnival of the Godless #93
That's right! It's that time of the month again and everyone's favourite heathen blogfest is over at Disillusioned Words.
Enjoy. I know I will - COTG is without a doubt the bi-monthly highlight of my interblag browsing.
Enjoy. I know I will - COTG is without a doubt the bi-monthly highlight of my interblag browsing.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Back from Darwin with a quick & lazy one...
Got back from Darwin yesterday at about 7am after a 4-hour flight and no sleep since the night before. I managed to then sleep from 8 to 11, then from 12 to 3, then 7 to 9pm. A good effort, I thought, until I then managed to score another 11 hours last night! Not bad, but I think I need more practice if I'm to compete with my dog, seen above attacking my sock shortly before sleeping through most of an Easter weekend.
Anyway, this is all I can manage before hitting the sack yet again. I need some decent rest as I'm not looking forward to going back to work-camp in the morning. Jeez, I miss Darwin already - the glorious tropical heat (but sans the oppressive humidity of the wet season), the proximity to enormous, dangerous reptiles, spectacular natural beauty, fascinating yet endangered 40,000 year-old indigenous culture (sorry creationists, that does say forty thousand) and the freshest seafood anywhere, the constant flights of F-18 Hornets from the nearby RAAF base (now playing host to some US F-16 Falcons too - air-nerd heaven!), the ability to wear thongs (flip-flops) all day, every day and everywhere except the casino (which I care nothing for anyway), the shiny sheen of sweat on the bronzed bodies of the many, many lightly-dressed & nationally varied young women on holidays (yes, including my wife, who's still up there having a ball, confound her!) ... hey - I suppose my new-found love for the capital of the Top End makes me a godless, immoral, Holocaust-causing Darwinist!
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Heading for the Top End!
Yes, that's right, it's mid-year holiday time, so no new posts until about Sunday of this week. I'm heading to Darwin for a week of tropical bliss while my friends in Melbourne lay awake in the dark, icy mornings, trying to decide if their paycheque is actually worth leaving the bed and freezing their rectums off. Until then, I present a small sample of some stuff I cooked up & scanned a few years ago when I should have been studying. I may end up drawing some more Terry & Jed adventures - I might even clean up the ones I've got a little bit. But then they'd lose their street cred.
Or something.
If you have trouble reading it (I sure do on this shitty work monitor - 15 inches? 800x600? Hint: don't work for a charity if you want good toys!), click it for a larger version.
Have a decent week, wherever you are and whatever you're slacking off from.
Monday, June 2, 2008
That's me rooted then
Earlier today, I saw on the computerweb (here, in fact) a photo of a placard with "Hell's Most Wanted" written at the top, followed by quite a comprehensive two-column list of serious trangressions that would have you sent to hell (many of which I'm repeatedly guilty of, as would just about human being in history). It had the usual suspects on it: liars, thieves, lesbians, homosexuals (apparently lesbians are different to homosexuals, somehow), gamblers, drunkards, pagans, witches, hypocrites, psychics, pot-smokers, child molesters and, um...sports fans. Yes, apparently god disapproves of organised competitive activities (so the Crusades would have been somewhat out of bounds, one would think, wouldn't one? Eh? God?). But more on sport later in the bulletin.
So, anyway, there I was, naively thinking that being a non-murdering, non-thieving, non-raping, generally honest employee of a respected humanitarian organisation as well as a faithful husband, caring beagle & tree-frog keeper and loving son, brother, friend, bandmate and tax payer with a good credit rating, paid-up private health insurance and spotless driving record was going to be enough to keep me from being double-teamed by well-hung (and most likely barbed) Hitler & Stalin robots, in a furnace, for all eternity. Silly me. Shows how much I know, with me fancy book-smarts and such-like.
But wait...isn't wrath a deadly sin? That sign (complete with a flame job at the bottom) looked to have been marinated in rich, spicy wrath for at least a week - but I guess it's okay because it's god's wrath, faithfully interpreted by the faithful and imposed on unsuspecting viewer's eyeballs in a place prominent enough to be snapped by a passer-by. As Chief Wiggum might say: "That's some good wrath, boys. Wah."
Interesting list there, though. I'll take it as given that noone likes child-molesters (except the Nu-Roman Empire - they seem happy to let paedophiles colonise an area & deplete its resources before re-deploying them to continue their work elsewhere) and that most people would happily see the bastards roast, at least for a little bit anyway - but (small "l" liberal alert) even regarding unconscionable acts like child rape, I'm still opposed to the idea of infinite punishment for a finite crime. But child molestation aside, the rest of that list is pretty innocuous - for a reasonable person anyway & so long as the transgressions aren't purposely intended to hurt people. Lying (illegal under oath) and thieving (illegal pretty much all the time), certainly aren't admirable but can be excused in desperate circumstances. Shit, even if you are lying to a lawyer (oh the humanity!) or nicking someone's car, I'm not quite sure you deserve eternal prison-love...
A lot of those other supposedly hell-worthy crimes are understandable, if only from a Christian fundie nutjob point of view (because they generally seem to involve adults doing what they want with their own time and not harming anyone else - and non-biblical enjoyment of any kind is clear-cut blasphemy in the eyes of your average bible-bashing wowser), but there's one bunch of heinous sinners that struck me as a little out of place: sports fans.
Yup, sports fans! I presume this means any & all people who enjoy particular sports and like watching them. People who go to (or watch broadcasts of) games or races or events and cheer their favourite performer or boo their opponents. People who wrap their whole lives up in their home team and name their kids after their favourite full-forward, or just people like me who like to watch a particular thing whenever it's on and they have the time (MotoGP & Red Bull Air Race for the ultimate in winningness!). People who play for a living or just weekend warriors who like to have a kick with mates on a lazy afternoon. For some reason, enjoying a healthy outdoor activity, either by doing it or just watching it is going to get you sent to hell for an eternity of lordy knows what, but it's possibly hot and probably invasive, at the hands of Satan's little minions. But seriously, what the holy stinking fuck are these people thinking? Sport is evil now? The same vigorous physical activity fundies recommend to their kids to stop them masturbating?
What is it about sport that's so damn nasty anyway? At first I thought it would have something to do with gambling, but gamblers have their own line on that placard. It occurred to me that the signwriters are probably going to alienate a lot of their key demographic with that sports fan line: imagine how many white southern Christian fundies roll up to NASCAR events each season! A lot of those people may well agree with most of that sign: consigning to hell all homosexuals, pagans, evolutionists, psychics and all those other unforgivable criminals seems almost second nature to southern US citizens (to me anyway, but I don't live there and please correct me if there are some people south of the Mason-Dixon who would prefer to read & comprehend books instead of burning them or using them to prop up the short leg on their moonshine stills), but tarring every single NASCAR fan - not to mention the gazillions of hunters, anglers and devotees of other sports that involve killing god's unarmed creatures (don't get me wrong, bring on the surf n' turf, but "sporting shooter" is a the biggest oxymoron ever - it's only sporting if the duck you're aiming at has cluster bombs) - with the hell-bound brush would be counter-productive, one would think. I mean, sure, go string up a faggot or burn a witch or beat Jake Gyllenhall to death with a tyre iron if that's what gets you off, but try and stop me shootin' some food with my M-60 and you can kiss my well-fed ass and suck lead! But hey, when did a fundie actually stop to think with his brain before parrotting whatever evil garbage his pastor told him about atheists, scientists or just everyday relatively moderate Christians?
By the way, don't think my irony alarm didn't almost bust when I saw "money-lovers" and "hypocrites" on that board. If you can line up sanctimonious, shit-eating grinners like Haggard, Hinn, Hagee, Huckabee and any other holy-high huckster starting with H (or not) who runs a tithe-funded mega-church and/or has their own TV show and doesn't pay a got-durned cent to the revenooers, and somehow convince me they're not just cynical, money-grubbing snake-oil selling bastards, fleecing their feeble-minded flock to fund their multi-million dollar mansions, limo fleets and Lear jets, I'll eat not only my hat, but your hat and the hat of the man next to you.
Alien video guy Part 2 - turns out ET is Curious Yellow.
Our mate Jeff Peckman from a couple of posts ago, it turns out, is more than likely a time-wasting attention-seeker. Or, perhaps equally likely, deluded. Well, colour me Grey and remove my nostrils!
He showed his alleged alien video today, under much secrecy: no live transmissions, no recording allowed. The true believers, of course, lapped it up. Most other people seemed to remain unconvinced (Rocky Mountain News blog - Bill Scanlon reports) - rightly so in my not-exactly-humble opinion. I think quite a few people are justifiably suspicious any time anyone presents a short sequence of grainy footage as proof of anything. The fact only the people in the room at the presentation were allowed to see this particular two-minute clip speaks volumes to me. Peckman wants to establish an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission to prepare Colorado to deal with ETs, yet only shows his proof to a small roomfull and not the Oval Office (although, we don't really need yet another war based on non-evidence, which is highly likely if this video gets shown in the Whitehouse). If this tape's so important, why not shriek from the hills? Anyway, noone actually got a recording of this world-changing two-minute video, but here's a hoaxy one which purports to mimic the action in Peckman's:
Apparently the Peckman footage was captured in this way because the owner of the house has two daughters and was concerned about a serial peeping tom.
So, lil' ET rocks up, has a squiz in some girl's window, blinks, buggers off. An alien life form, with sufficient techonolgy to travel to our planet completely undetected from The Great Galactic Squid (hallowed be his beak) knows where in the universe, needs to get so close to a building to see what's in it that he gets himself caught on a handicam setup by a paranoid father. Maybe the little bugger gets off on the danger! Maybe, amongst his kind, he's a bit of a Lethal Weapon-style maverick, a loose phaser, a psychologically scarred veteran of the war with Proxima Centauri (& who still feels betrayed by Uncle Zlorg for sending him to that hell-hole), very likely to fly off the tractor-beam handle, constantly endandering his species' covert anus-probing program here on Sol-Planet Three with his careless cocking about and intense interest in inter-species erotica.
So...humbug. Peckman's following the UFO crank playbook. I was really hoping this was some kind of marketing campaign for a product or service that would turn out to be a real let-down (as so many things marketed in interesting ways turn out to be), but no. It wasn't even that good. Just common/garden "I want to believe" bollocks.
Not that I'm a total nay-sayer on this topic though, or part of The Government Conspiracy To Hide The Aliens And Annoy UFO Nerds (or maybe that's just what I'd want you to believe if I was!). The universe is 13.7 billion years old and unimaginably vast, with much, much more still be learned about its composition and nature so it's not completely out of the question to think we're not the only life in it. I mean, we evolved, so obviously the popular (usually religiously-inspired, in that charmingly naive "we're god's favourite pet" sort of way) idea that the universe is hostile to life is somewhat flawed. Life happened at this tiny corner of the universe, it's been happening here for over four billion years and the entire universe is made of the same 130 or so elements and follows the same, um, universal rules, so why not anywhere else? Put into perspective, this part of the universe is no less hostile than any other. Hell, some parts of this very planet itself are extremely hostile to life, such as the near-lifeless deserts of the Sahara and Antarctica (yes, you can have a cold desert) and the boiling blackness of thermal vents in the ocean floor. That's not to say that nothing lives in these environments (proof that life is as tenacious as it is varied) but most animals & plants cannot survive them and humans can only live in such places with major modifications to our living arrangements.
I'd love it if we were visited by space aliens from outer space, I really would, (unless they were the Giger variety, all hissing and acid-blooded and stomach-bursty - hell, even someone innocuous like ET would be a bust - I want Vulcans!). but two minutes of dark, grainy footage that could so easily have been thrown together by a university drama department or one kid with a camera isn't going to convince me that we have been already. Especially, it seems somewhat clearer to me now, when it's held back from public viewing in order to gain that all-important exclusive media deal from whatever corporate advertising-space outlet wants to scoop the others and wave their willies around for five seconds because of the extra couple of Nielsen points. I just would've thought that something this potentially Earth-shattering (possibly quite literally - we don't know how many Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulators might be in the hands/claws/psychic maniple fields of the Freedom-Hating Alien Scum) would be above & beyond the normal, typically human crapulence of secrecy & media exclusivity.
He showed his alleged alien video today, under much secrecy: no live transmissions, no recording allowed. The true believers, of course, lapped it up. Most other people seemed to remain unconvinced (Rocky Mountain News blog - Bill Scanlon reports) - rightly so in my not-exactly-humble opinion. I think quite a few people are justifiably suspicious any time anyone presents a short sequence of grainy footage as proof of anything. The fact only the people in the room at the presentation were allowed to see this particular two-minute clip speaks volumes to me. Peckman wants to establish an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission to prepare Colorado to deal with ETs, yet only shows his proof to a small roomfull and not the Oval Office (although, we don't really need yet another war based on non-evidence, which is highly likely if this video gets shown in the Whitehouse). If this tape's so important, why not shriek from the hills? Anyway, noone actually got a recording of this world-changing two-minute video, but here's a hoaxy one which purports to mimic the action in Peckman's:
Apparently the Peckman footage was captured in this way because the owner of the house has two daughters and was concerned about a serial peeping tom.
So, lil' ET rocks up, has a squiz in some girl's window, blinks, buggers off. An alien life form, with sufficient techonolgy to travel to our planet completely undetected from The Great Galactic Squid (hallowed be his beak) knows where in the universe, needs to get so close to a building to see what's in it that he gets himself caught on a handicam setup by a paranoid father. Maybe the little bugger gets off on the danger! Maybe, amongst his kind, he's a bit of a Lethal Weapon-style maverick, a loose phaser, a psychologically scarred veteran of the war with Proxima Centauri (& who still feels betrayed by Uncle Zlorg for sending him to that hell-hole), very likely to fly off the tractor-beam handle, constantly endandering his species' covert anus-probing program here on Sol-Planet Three with his careless cocking about and intense interest in inter-species erotica.
So...humbug. Peckman's following the UFO crank playbook. I was really hoping this was some kind of marketing campaign for a product or service that would turn out to be a real let-down (as so many things marketed in interesting ways turn out to be), but no. It wasn't even that good. Just common/garden "I want to believe" bollocks.
Not that I'm a total nay-sayer on this topic though, or part of The Government Conspiracy To Hide The Aliens And Annoy UFO Nerds (or maybe that's just what I'd want you to believe if I was!). The universe is 13.7 billion years old and unimaginably vast, with much, much more still be learned about its composition and nature so it's not completely out of the question to think we're not the only life in it. I mean, we evolved, so obviously the popular (usually religiously-inspired, in that charmingly naive "we're god's favourite pet" sort of way) idea that the universe is hostile to life is somewhat flawed. Life happened at this tiny corner of the universe, it's been happening here for over four billion years and the entire universe is made of the same 130 or so elements and follows the same, um, universal rules, so why not anywhere else? Put into perspective, this part of the universe is no less hostile than any other. Hell, some parts of this very planet itself are extremely hostile to life, such as the near-lifeless deserts of the Sahara and Antarctica (yes, you can have a cold desert) and the boiling blackness of thermal vents in the ocean floor. That's not to say that nothing lives in these environments (proof that life is as tenacious as it is varied) but most animals & plants cannot survive them and humans can only live in such places with major modifications to our living arrangements.
I'd love it if we were visited by space aliens from outer space, I really would, (unless they were the Giger variety, all hissing and acid-blooded and stomach-bursty - hell, even someone innocuous like ET would be a bust - I want Vulcans!). but two minutes of dark, grainy footage that could so easily have been thrown together by a university drama department or one kid with a camera isn't going to convince me that we have been already. Especially, it seems somewhat clearer to me now, when it's held back from public viewing in order to gain that all-important exclusive media deal from whatever corporate advertising-space outlet wants to scoop the others and wave their willies around for five seconds because of the extra couple of Nielsen points. I just would've thought that something this potentially Earth-shattering (possibly quite literally - we don't know how many Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulators might be in the hands/claws/psychic maniple fields of the Freedom-Hating Alien Scum) would be above & beyond the normal, typically human crapulence of secrecy & media exclusivity.
Atheist Blogroll
To the right of this main page you'll see the magic interweb button for the Atheist Blogroll - do get stuck into them as there are many talented & interesting writers discussing faith, reason and everything in between (which is, really, pretty much everything). Membership of the AB is creeping ever closer to the 700 mark and I'm glad to be a part of the ever-growing heathen presence on the webs. Cheers to Mojoey over at Deep Thoughts, who has proven you can herd cats, to an extent :)
Happy reading!
Happy reading!
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