Friday night I totally compensated for a lack of a Christmas by spending the evening with three of my good friends. We had a extravagant dinner with expensive wine and exchanged gifts. I got a whole new winter wardrobe. I felt exceptionally blessed in the non-religious sense.
Saturday night and the entire day today, I watched nothing but true crime dramas on MSNBC. Stories of abduction, kidnapping, and rape. Sometimes I can get very absorbed in criminology cases. I broadened my search of crime oddities on the Internet and stumbled upon the story of politician Bud Dwyer, who chose to commit suicide at a public news conference in 1987, rather than face corruption charges he was then being indited with.
This is a rather graphic video of the news conference suicide, but nonetheless I still found it fascinating to watch in a way I can't quite elucidate on. It just seems beyond reality...
There were also other videos on this site of actual beheadings. There was one of six Russian soldiers that were captured and graphically decapitated by 19 Chechen Mujahideen terrorists through a long, revolting display of sequences. I couldn't get through the entire video because it was just too intense. Although the explicitness made me want to better understand these stories that often only make the brief headline news. To comprehend that slayings like these are routine in some parts of the world. I empathise very deeply sometimes. I feel arbitrarily lucky.
I feel selfish for admitting that without being able to offer anything other than a fortuitous sentiment .
In lighter news, I have brown hair again.
Monday, December 22, 2008
I had some difficulty falling asleep last night. I rationalise myself as an Atheist because of science and because of the cultural divides it invokes throughout the masses. My understanding of science has aided me in intellectualizing my resolve for concepts of unexplained, universal life forces at works. However, with that discernment being self-evident, I had never really considered and allowed myself to altogether comprehend what this exactly explicates - that this is the only life I will have - materially and transcendentally.
We often distort the factual world we live in due to the adoration our society reveres for spirituality and private belief, whether it be religious or new age in interpretation. Human beings are innately delicate and often inclined in believing that we are entitled to another life besides the tangible one we embody. Nowadays we can't to see to be able to escape from superstition in the literary world, the entertainment industry,health industry that causes us to distance ourselves from reality because it's enlightening in the prospects of 'something else to come'. Nonetheless, we all know that just something is consoling doesn't make it true. Science fiction in film on the subject of the paranormal can prove engaging with respect to its thematic elements. When I was a teenager I wasn't interested much in paranormal oddities. I was rather fond of comic book superheros because I was engaged by their anatomical structures. Primarily with the mutants of the Marvel Universe; reason being that they were genetic byproducts, just as we are, in a more farfetched imaginative sense. I will say I was particularly fond of Stephen King's 'The Shining'. The scene with the creepy ghost twins whom were bludgeoned by their father by means of an ax left an impressionable mark on my conscious. Though I was able to distinguish all the entertainment value of it from reality. Some suscepitable people however are just enticed too far with their imagination, and then can make preposterous assertions that they deem as valid. Which seems harmless in regards to one individuals tailoured delusion, but when numerous people make a claim aware, it has the trend for it to gain ground and reverence. Unlike the concept of ghosts and spirits, the religious convert their assertions into anabridged convictions - initiated by a legion of devoted followers. Consequentially, this should raise questions in how we perceive the methodical differences between isolated hallucinogenic behaviour in contrast to systematic mass illusion. Think about it - if one person has the delusion that they speak in telepathic transmissions to a metaphysical being that resides on the surface of the Earth's moon, one could say this would be a fairly lonely feeling; particularly because no one else would believe this and he or she would be omitted as mad bonkers. Ones faith would need a lot of suring up to be absolutely convinced that the supernatural entity that's communicating to them via moon is irrefutably real. Now if millions upon millions of people shared this exact same strong belief, this would give tremendous reinforcement to the faith of the idea that there is a celestial being on our moon. Group solidarity is remarkably seductive.
Getting back to what I originally intended to say with respect to now being fully self aware that after my life is lived. There will be no departing soul, no reincarnation, no said afterlife that will be selected for me based upon what kind of moral life I led - which is elucidated differently by dozens of disparate religions and denominations. When I die, there will be blackness and nothing more. I laid awake in my bed last night and pondered that very thought, and I admit, I was overcome with angst for a few moments. Then clarity - I saw just how precious my life is, and how far more liberating to free myself from believing there are beneficial and dire consequences at stake based on the accordance of how I live.
I want compatible monogamous love, professional fulfillment, all intertwined into a encouraging environment. It is said that Sweden and the Czech Republic are the most Atheistic countries to live in. Having lived in one them already I think Sweden would be more progressive change of pace one day.
I guess we'll see.
"We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. ...In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Here's another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I."
I watched this witty lecture by Richard Dawkins tonight, one I hadn't seen, and it made me reflect upon my understandings of myself and the affect science, religion, and politics have had on me for the past 24 years.
I felt inclined to pay homage to science with a little commentary because well, I don't have much else to do tonight. :)
Around second grade, I took a vested interest in primates by the sheerest accident. I read about Dian Fossey, the late anthropologist, in a children's book and saw the film, 'Gorillas in the Mist'. What particularly drew my attention to primates was the likeness they were to humans in relation to their subtle mannerisms, nurturing capabilities, the fact that they were able to learn sign language. At a young age I was rather awe struck by our intellectual similarities that they were able to grasp like us, and I steadidly became more engrossed in areas of zoology (all before I even understood evolution). In elementary school, I created a diorama of a habitual environments for Mountain Gorillas, in which I also gave a little presentation/lecture on how the largest of the great apes make use of their habitat. I won second prize.
I was first introduced to Richard Dawkins at a early age on PBS. I saw his Christmas lectures 'Growing up in the Universe'. He eagerly opened up my acquisitiveness for an array of explanations that I had previously only pondered in my own private thought as nothing than meager trivialities; daydreaming if you will.
I was given a sensible understanding of how organisms have evolved from bacteria to mammals in a slow, gradual, incremental process, such as that of the human eye.
During this, I still attended Catechism and had a workbook in which I still memorized Catholic assertions pertaining to how God created the Earth, and why Jesus makes me moral. I very much understood the contradictions I was seeing with both of my after school activities, but I didn't dare question it. I didn't know I was allowed to ask a question, and if I did so at a young age it probably would of disconcerted my parents, or made me the subject of ridicule amongst my peers. Though as I gradually got older, my understanding of science cultivated, just as the creationist movement became more strident, revolutionary, and absurd.
The truth is I care very deeply about the truth. I care about consequences that arise when the truth is defiled and distorted. I care about the truth of my genetic disposition and how Christians are manipulating it. (This was one reason why I felt compelled to leave the US for some time.) It effects me as it should effect most homosexuals. The raging argument amongst the three Abrahamic religions today criticize and construe homosexuality as a free willed choice, and not that of a biological disposition. Obama's invocation speaker says he doesn't really care if in fact being a homosexual is a matter of biology, but tries to rationalise in this perspective:
Aside from him proclaiming that he actually has gay friends, I'm troubled by his outlandish paradox that he is equating anger, promiscuity, or any other unhealthy forms of counter-propitious acts of human conduct in the same understanding as being a homosexual. This is now become a common strategic argument the Christian right implement. Instead of using the words 'temptation' and 'sinful', because it immediately implies religious dogmas; they now have found a new tactic to conceal their contempt for 'un-Christian virtues'. They use social scientific analyses in the same regards a therapist would feem compelled to remark that it's time one might need to have an intervention due to a spouses obsessive compulsive antics that's causing tension in his or her marriage, or perhaps a young girls addiction to sniffing aerosol cans. We would all concur these are matters that could and should require a call for legitimate interference and mediation. However, the way one could articulate this mentally to a vulnerable, young gay person in respect to coming to terms with his or her sexuality is a disgraceful infringement on the practise of remedial treatment, and an abuse of power of psychology. Like drug addicts, they believe homosexuals should be subjects for rigorous rehabilitation. This is a travesty and what's most worrying is that people actually believe and postulate this concept of synthetic psychology as right mind, when in actuality it's nothing more than rudimentary proselytizing in disguise.
When former Evangelical head of the New Life Church Pastor Ted Haggard admitted to soliciting a gay prostitute for sex and methamphetamine for a duration of a few years, he was removed from his leadership position, and then underwent three weeks of comprehensive counseling, overseen by four ministers. Three months after the scandal first broke, one of those ministers stated that Haggard
"is completely heterosexual".
The minister said he meant to say that therapy
"gave Ted the tools to help to embrace his heterosexual side."
Dawkins had a interview with Ted shortly before his scandal broke:
Religion is huge threat to my genetic disposition, just as important, it narcissisticly perverts the truth of science. I wouldn't object to devoting myself to a career, which I will likely do, that would advocate science and reason over contriving methods of religious entrapment, which are hell-bent on keeping societies from progressing naturally and maturely.
