Breathless and Pale

What I’m most afraid of:

Currently, my biggest fear is the Tea Party movement. But, it isn’t because of crack-pots like Glenn Beck and this O’Donnell chick. What makes me fear the Tea Party movement is that ignoring their batshit crazy ideologies and misinformed hellspeak, the organization is hugely impressive. The concept of a unified, yet leaderless, organization having major success in a political realm as rigid as ours and in a country as large as ours is downright impressive. It remains to be seen how long it will be before people’s natural tendency to grab for power ruins it for them, but if they manage to have any sort of long term sustainability, it might be time for the liberals among us to start our own Tea Party movement.

The Holy Spirit

I was at a church thing last week listening to my friend (the youth minister there) speak, and he said something that stuck with me a little bit. He said something along the lines of: We are like a sunken ship, with God being the ocean. The idea is that while we are immersed in God, he is also immersed in us.

Now for anyone who knows me, you know that I’m not really much for Jesus talk. I don’t really buy into the not-so-logical, not-so-rational things people say. But if you can give me something to work with, and I can find something realistic and reasonable that can apply, well, that’s a new ballgame.

Now let’s talk about this sunken ship thing.

If you’ve ever read about or taken courses on quantum physics, you might have heard of something called the Vacuum State, or the Zero Point Field. What this is, essentially, is the absence of any kind of matter. Basically, nothing. BUT “nothing” isn’t really a thing, it’s really just a concept. There isn’t really such a thing as nothing. In a Vacuum state, there is still a whole hell of a lot going on. Energy is constantly exploding into and out of existence, completely filling up the Vacuum state, like an ocean of energy. See what I’m getting at here?

The Vacuum state is noted as explaining the cosmological constant, which means that is is everywhere. We are inside it, it flows through and around us and everything within our physical universe. So like a sunken ship and the ocean, we are immersed in it, and it is immersed in us. 

If you’re open to the idea that God isn’t so much a physical thing, like an old dude with a big white beard, but perhaps something else entirely, then perhaps the sunken ship metaphor isn’t actually a metaphor.

Anonymity and the Internet

Are you scared of posting your actual identity on the internet?  You should be. You could end up like this girl, and no one wants that. Anyone who has ever read any comments section on youtube, 4chan, cracked.com, etc, knows that anonymity brings out the worst in people, and it does so at a horrifying level. If someone gets hold of your email address, your real address, your phone number, or anything of that sort, and they don’t fear any repercussions for posting it, then you can very easily become the target of millions of vicious, anonymous attackers. These people are savages. Where normal taboos like racism, sexism, homophobia, religious prejudice, or blatant slander would bring on a serious wrath in the real world, the internet provides an easy way for one to throw them around with reckless abandon. If a scrawny little skin head decides he wants to drop the N bomb a few times during a public rant about minorities being a scourge on society, but he does so in a forum where his identity is known and accessible, he risks feeling the full force of the inevitable backlash. It’s likely then, that he will keep his mouth shut for fear of retribution. On the internet, however, he can feel relatively safe saying whatever he wants to say.

But it’s a two way problem. While you may want to be noble, and post under your real identity, hoping to start a trend of people with the guts to do so with you, you risk the wrath of the ignorant trolls you’re trying to combat. If I write this post about how I think 4Chan users are collectively a terrible group of people, and I post all of my contact information for them to tell me how they feel about it, they will most certainly do so. They’ll also prank call me literally 24/7, attack my personal life in any way they can, start horrible rumors about me, and probably actually drive me to suicide (a skill that they’ve damn near perfected). See, not only are these people savages, but to them, my existence isn’t anything more than words and colors and shapes on their monitor. I’m not a person, and thus, if they caused me to kill myself, that’s just the end of words on the internet to them. I doubt one single person that drove than 11 year old girl into police protection feels even the smallest shard of guilt about it, because she isn’t a person to them, she’s a viral video.

So how do you stop the trolls? Well, in South Korea, they’ve implemented a requirement that everyone must use their actual identities on the internet. Is this something that we could see here in the U.S.? Honestly, I kind of hope so.

The Atheist’s Problem

I found a video on youtube uploaded by a guy who calls himself “The Thinking Atheist” which, quite honestly, isn’t worth linking here. However, as I expected, the comments section was loads and loads of fun.

I noticed a lot of atheists demanding answers of religious posters like, “Why can’t your God heal people who’ve lost limbs?”

Has it never occurred to these folks that they’re asking the wrong questions?

Let’s look at the people they’re targeting: they’re latching onto your typical Christian types, which makes sense because that’s about as easy a target as you can find. These Christians focus entirely on how to get to heaven and how to avoid hell. They focus on this “loving, caring God” idea and they focus on “witnessing” to people who generally have already heard all they need to hear. The typical atheist counter attack to these rather insufferable Christians is to attack the faith, and not the people rampantly misusing and abusing it. (Don’t get me wrong, I think over time while the bad practices and rhetoric remain in modern Christians, the majority now is well intentioned, but that’s for another post.)

What atheists generally fail to acknowledge, though, is that they themselves aren’t addressing the same fundamental questions that Christians tend to ignore: Where did we come from?

I know it seems so ingrained in the idea of religion that it’s hard to see how much this question is being ignored, but it is.The problem is that there is this weird, widely accepted notion of what God actually is that both Christians and atheists seem to subscribe to and focus all of their worship and venom, respectively, on. Apparently, God is this humanoid creature that lives in the sky and has all of these human characteristics that makes us think we can apply our collective personality to God. He controls everything in existence and loves us, his “children” more than anything else. And this image is both the one that Christians are overly eager to shout about, and atheists use as a focus point of criticism. And this is where we get to the atheist’s biggest problem.

When atheists attack the religious ideologies, they ask questions like the one asked earlier, or they ask why we can’t see God or hear it, or hold conversations with it, etc. They ask why we never see miracles, and they take the lack of a solid answer as proof that there is no God. They shout from the hilltops about how Darwin’s evolution proves there is no God, and it was all just science and nature. But they completely and totally ignore the fact that there is a whole lot of science that suggests the existence of a much different and more reasonable kind of “God.”

Because we can’t really expect to comprehend a being we can’t actually physically observe, we can’t rule out the possibility of a God that while sentient, isn’t a physical body with human emotional characteristics and philosophies. Consider one of the leading Big Bang theories: two intense energies collided, condensed, and then exploded outward, creating matter, and in turn, Earth and it’s residents. We can’t really grasp an energy that existed prior to our universe, so I can’t come up with a single reasonable argument against this energy being sentient. If that were the case, the energy would have combined with the other during the Big Bang, and constantly flowing through our own universe. This theory (note, it’s a theory-pure speculation) allows for a God to coincide with Darwin’s evolution, it explains WHERE God is (another particularly arbitrary question atheists tend to ask), and it helps answer questions about God’s attitude toward us; if God is an energy that flows through, and creates the massive universe in which we live, why would he BOTHER healing a person’s amputated arm? In the big picture, that arm is incomprehensibly irrelevant.

What Christians do is try to use God as more than what it is, and try to use it to fulfill their longing for love, guidance, and acceptance. Atheists attack God for being an inadequate source to fulfill those needs. No one seems to be willing to delve deeper into the idea of God as creator.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Remember when I talked about crazy people calling Obama Hitler? Well, I guess alleged human and certain lunatic Glenn Beck heard me chastise him, and decided on another angle:

This, children, is what we call mindless babble.

Glenn’s first dive into the pool of crazy juice comes at 0:38, when he first drops the Caesar Augustus bomb. Apparently, one branch of government has been “eaten” already, and I’m assuming he means the judicial, as he goes on to say that the next is about to be “eaten,” with the clear implication that he’s referring to congress. Unfortunately for Becksypoo, both Congress and the Supreme Court seem to be alive and kicking.

I looked into his little spiel about the 1099 form, as well. From what I could tell, it’s not any more complicated than all the other fucking tax forms we have to fill out. It’s not like this is some radical new intrusion on the American people. Like, say, you know, wire tapping.

Now, we get to the good stuff. Around 2:24, Glenn takes lunatic fear mongering and batshit insanity to whole new levels of holy-shit-fuck-how-did-you-make-it-on-tv?!-ness. That’s right, in about two minutes, Glenn goes from concern over why the President isn’t going nuts over the democrats looking bad in the polls (oh, I don’t know. There’s that oil spill thing he’s dealing with. And all those weird wars from the last dude’s term. And the North Korea thing. And Fidel Castro mouthing off. but you know, sure Glenn) to the President having the “absolute power to kill” and some shit about assassinating American citizens.

The sheer crazy that this guy preaches is just too, too much.

Obama is kind of like Hitler, if you don’t know anything about Obama. Or, you know, Hitler.

There are really, genuinely, fucking insane lunatics on TV that say crazy things, often involving President Obama and one Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, there are also these idiots in Iowa who listen to them. All of this comes from all the socialism claims flying around all the time, mostly from the aforementioned crazy person on TV. People keep calling Obama a socialist, I guess because he’s the first president to suggest government intervention in social issues.

As you may or may not have noticed, most things associated with Hitler or Nazi Germany get a pretty bad rap. Another thing you may have noticed is that another name for Nazism is National Socialism.

Uh-oh.

So when I shout, “My buddy Craig, he’s a fucking socialist” around a bunch of misinformed citizens, then what those folks will hear is “My buddy Craig, he sure is fucking Hitler.”

Let’s get it straight, republicans trying to throw Obama and Hitler into the same boat all the time, National Socialism is in fact considered a far right political ideology. Let’s compare, shall we?

First off, let’s understand what exactly Conservatism is the United States is. Generally, what we see in the USA is Social Conservatism. They don’t support gay marriage, they fiercely and unconditionally support the military and it’s endeavors, they support a strong patriotism that can often even prove divisive, they fiercely oppose Liberalism and Communism, and if we’re being honest, race tends to have an affect on their politics. 

Now for the Nazis: The Nazis hated the gays, fiercely and unconditionally supported their military, even when they did things like invade Poland and that whole genocide thing, their patriotism was very divisive and still draws a shudder from most Germans, they were very much opposed to Liberalism and Communism, and I hear race played a pretty big part in their politics.

So let’s think really hard about it before we start accusing our ultra liberal president of being Hitler, huh?

The BBC knows what makes a good news story.

Hey, did you guys know that deep sea squids have gigantic dongs? I don’t know whether I think the photo captions or the part about the dead squid getting a hard on while biologists cut it’s mantle open is funnier.

Did anyone click “like” on their baby-rape albums? Can they also be prosecuted?

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE! 

When you log onto your facebook, you notice that a lot of your friends have changed their profile pictures lately. You decide you want to take a new picture, but you really want something special. As you ponder your options and search for inspiration, you hear your kid crying in the other room. Suddenly, you know what you have to do.

If you choose to choose to feed your hungry child and take a picture of yourself in a mirror or something, please click here.

If you choose to molest your kid and have your boyfriend take pictures of it on his phone so you can have a seriously incriminating facebook picture? Well, you’re fucking awful. Just like these people.