Religion

I've made a promise to myself that I'm going to use this blog more, and post more than just angry rants about stuff that pisses me off. So, this is one of them. On the heals of my last post, where I was bitching about the crap pulled by some fundamentalist Christian idiots, I figured I could use this as an opportunity to wax philosophical on religion and faith and spirituality. I'm an agnostic, bordering on atheist. I am agnostic because it is, to me, the most logical position. A higher power is something ultimately unknowable. Something humanity could never hope to truly know or understand. And it is arrogance to presume we know.

I border on atheist because, I look around me and I see so much. I see humanity killing each other over the most trivial of things. I see humanity's ignorance. Ignorance that leads to such killing, ignorance that leads to hatred based on the most superficial of differences, a desire to discriminate, to inflict harm upon another group because of those differences.

I see suffering. I see pain. I see children being beaten. Neglected. Molested. Abused. I see women being raped, being beaten by their husbands. I see people living on the streets, begging for money, barely making it.

And through it all, I see and I hear them cry out, to ask for someone to make it stop, to help them. But it never does.

I understand religion. I understand the desire to wrap yourself in a blanket. The comfort it brings you, to believe that there is someone watching out for you, protecting you. I understand the desire to surrender the process of thinking to someone else. I understand the pain of just living, and need to find comfort, a brief respite of in this world.

And I understand the futility of it all. The emptiness it causes when you truly look into yourself, and realize that all you hold dear, all you want to believe, does not seem real.

I had been baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church, although my family was never that spiritual. But, growing up, I struggled with faith, struggled with the pain of my family life. And I struggled with my spirituality. With my faith. As a teenager, I became involved with counseling, helping other kids around my age deal with there experiences. And I saw pain and suffering. Without telling too much, I can tell you that as part of it, I befriended a girl who came from an extremely abusive home, who had been raped by someone she trusted. I saw a guy who’d had three people he cared about kill themselves, all within a year or so. I saw a girl who had, due to a mistake she made and her use of drugs, caused the death of a friend. And I heard of other horrors, other instance of pain and suffering. And I saw absence. The absence of any higher power, of the loving God of Judeo-Christianity shielding them from these horrors. I saw people. Mortal, flawed human beings who did everything they could to pull these people back, to try to fixed the damage caused while god turned a deaf ear to their suffering, ignoring their cries to make it stop.
And I asked myself, why? Why would the supposedly loving god ignore these people? Why would he let this happening. And then I’d get some cop-out answer of humans having free will, which really meant that it makes no sense and people need to justify that absence. For if God exists, free will cannot. And if free will exists, God cannot. Because the two are mutually exclusive, as omnipotence means knowing something is going to happen. Which means that what happens becomes predestination, and the choice to do something is removed from the equation. For knowing something will happen ensures it does happen. A sort of predestination paradox. A type of self-fulfilling prophecy. Which means that God, if he exists, let it happen.

One cannot stare into the world around them, look at the pain and suffering indicative of humanity, and not walk away jaded and cynical.

Fundimentalist idiots are suing for the right to be bigots.

I find bigotry and intollerance of any kind to be repulsive. Racism, sexism, homophobia. It's all the same, and one is no different than the other. In my mind, bigotry is bigotry is bigotry. So this story got my blood boiling.

Okay. I equate this with racism. Why? Because all bigots are cut from the same cloth. These are people who need someone, anyone, to hate, to attack, to discriminate against. If racism were still acceptable, black Americans would be their target of choice. If anti-Semitism were, they'd be going after Jews. Since homophobia is the last socially-acceptable form of bigotry, it's where they've turned their hatred.

Plus, their is the fact that such serious homophobia is nothing more than repressed homosexuality anyway.

However, this comment in particular drew my attention, and is what prompted this entry.

But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different — a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.

If these idiots and brainwashed sheep want to ignore the mountains of evidence showing that sexual orientation is, at least partially, determined before birth, I can't help them. They are using the same approach they use on the Bible. Ignoring everything that they find 'inconvienient' (such as all that 'Love thy Neighbor', 'Turn the Other Cheek' stuff Jesus spoke of) and only using what best reinforces their bigotry.

However, that comment makes the idea of them winning almost ammusing.

What they convieniantly ignore, in the argument that sexual orientation is a 'choice', is the fact that Christianity, like all religions, is a 'choice' too. No one is born into a religion, you have to CHOOSE to follow it. So, if a 'choice', like sexual orientation, cannot be protected, neither can be religion.

If they succeed in their attempt, if they remove discrimination protection from gay and lesbian individuals, then what other people, those like me who believe in equality, need to do is turn their arguments against them, and seek to remove protections from religions like Christianity, on the grounds that religion cannot be protected because it's a choice. Just to make a statement.

Somehow, I think you'll have the Fundies screaming to try to stop it, to protect their own choice, while attempting to destroy anothers choice.

It'll reveal the Fundimentalist Christians as the two-faced hypocrites we already know they are.

Bad news for the Republicans...

So, my first comment since the election. I don't really have much to say most of the time. I'm mostly an introspective guy. Deal with it.

CBS Poll: Bush Ratings Hit New Low


Hehehe. Watching the Republican party implode is fun.

I really must say that I found this comment rather amusing:

"The far right is starting to be very open about their claim that
[Bush]'s not a real conservative."

The far right decrying Bush as 'not a real conservative' is hysterical, considering the fact that the far right isn't really conservative either. Today's NeoConservative, fascist-wannabes have pissed upon the very foundation of conservative principle, abandoning practically everything that conservatism once stood for, such as non-interventionist foreign policy, small unobtrusive government, fiscal responsibility and so on. This is the pot calling the kettle black.

Anyhoo, it strikes me as an interesting trend that I seem to be observing.

See, it seems that we could be looking at the begining of the end for the American political parties.

The Democratic Party arguably reached it's height with the Clinton Administration, but it's been on the decline ever since.

The Republican Party has arguably reached it's height with Bush II, and now it's begining to decline as well. I don't think either party is going to survive without some radical changes.

Re-evaluation of their positions and policies will have to happen. For starters, the Repubs are going to have to get rid of the Religious Reich...erm, I mean Right, who are poisoning the party, before they can really regain any relevance to the American people.

The Dems will need to move more to the center I think, and away from the far-left fringe. They need to take on more Moderate policies that will appeal to the most people.

This would be the perfect time for a viable third-party to really rise to power and pull away the disillusioned members of both parties.

Too bad all the third parties right now are jokes, (capital "L") Libertarians included. The current Libertarian Party is a laugh, comprised of lunatic fringe people who really scare normal people, as well as not-so-normal, small government advocating, borderline-(small "l")libertarian people like myself. We really need a non-sucky, moderate third party that appeals to the majority of people. Not gonna happen as long as the combined Democratic-Republican machine controls the debate process, though.

Oh well. I have utter contempt for the whole system. I still wanna move to Canada.

Election.

One of those election things finally came here in the US. And the results are depressingly predictable.

As usual, I never failed to be baffled by the shear ignorance of Americans.

Bush is being called the victor so far. I guess his divisive fear mongering over the last few months has been just potent enough to fool the uninformed and gullible sheep that make up so much of the American public into thinking that his particular brand of fascism is in any way 'conservative'.

George W. Bush is the epitome of everything that is wrong with the Republican Party today. He and his administration have so wholeheartedly adopted the NeoConservative agenda that is poisoning American politics that he has alienated and frightened many traditional conservative and fellow libertarian friends and acquaintances of mine.

It find it hypocritical to the extreme when Bush followers claim to be in support of small government, particularly given how the government has become larger, more complex, and more intrusive in our lives under the Bush Administration than it has at any point previously in American history.

It's laughable when I hear GOParrots squawking about fiscal responsibility while supporting a party that has become the biggest money waster in America.

What really sickens me is that these same people, when out of power, have the audacity to get upon their high horses and claim to be libertarians, believers in Jeffersonian ideals like personal freedom and fiscal responsibilities, yet like the hypocrites they are, they throw away all those things when they attain power.

It came down to a fight between Kerry and Bush, and I weep that Kerry lost.

Of course, Kerry and the Democrats weren't much better. But, at least I would be less fearful for the future of our country with him in power.

A Democratic Presidency and a Republican-controlled Congress would serve to balance each other, to prevent the government from getting more intrusive and larger. They'd spend their time trying to hurt each other, kill each other's legislation and pet programs, slandering each other at every turn. This would serve to keep their attentions away from us, and would thus result in more freedom, as fewer restrictive laws would have been passed. There would probably have been more deregulation of businesses, thus allowing for more competition and lower prices for us. Less protectionist legislation would be passed that would enable companies to get away with price inflation and other illegal activities. The stock market would have been better, there would have been more freedom, and all in the country would have more prosperous, as has been the case every time we've had a Democratic President and a Republican controlled congress. What could have been the most beneficial arrangement in American history for the American people is not going to happen now. Here is to four more years of decreasing social freedoms, divisive rhetoric, and endless war. Yippee!!!

So, thank you, American public. Thank you for showing yourselves to be the uninformed sheep you are. Thank you for more neo-fascism masking itself as conservatism. I hope you are happy now. With luck, by this time next year I'll be sitting somewhere else in the world, looking out and laughing at you as the country you've built for yourselves goes even more to hell.