It's Been a Brain-Busy Week...

-People who get energized by overcast days disgust me.

-I kinda miss the days when I actually watched TV.

-My memories of my paternal grandparents are happily unhampered by politics/religion/all of the other things that have separated me from my relatives as I've grown up.

-Everyone has that one friend/coworker who serves as a stress-test for the group by being happy and bubbly by default. When the bubble pops, brace yourself.

-I miss having work-friends. I'm friendLY, and I know people in the building, but it's not the same as what I was spoiled to have at the library for all those years.

-I apparently need to take the time to get into The West Wing.

-Okay seriously, in what world is speaking someone's name in their general direction constitute a "greeting"?

-You know you're building up a tolerance to energy drinks when the taste no longer turns your face inside-out.

-Apparently, when I'm sufficiently exhausted/frustrated, I turn into a little kid inside my head.

-I would probably feel worse about not hanging out with my family if anyone was reaching out to me trying to make plans. Especially since I don't have kids and am a totally free agent every Saturday.

-Some days, I feel like a lactose-intolerant cheesemaker when it comes to expressing affection via words.

-I feel truly incapable of thinking about gender (mine or anyone's) in anything BUT a detached, objective manner. All I know about my own is that it is a set of barbaric impulses to dominate and control against which I must constantly struggle.

-I can't imagine treating "I have a bachelor's degree in [X]" as a legitimate point in a debate, much less USING it as such. If your education confers greater knowledge of the subject, DEMONSTRATE IT THROUGH YOUR ARGUMENT.

-Do not flee from the limitations and conventions of your art when first you lay your hand to the canvass. It's possible to build a house with one's bare hands, but using all of the tools at one's disposal is much more likely to build something which will do what you want and need it to do.

-That sad moment when you want to introduce a coworker to a favorite comedian, but their best material is not safe for work.

-Only in America is "Please drink responsibly" needed for alcohol commercials.

-It's discouraging when friends who rely on medication for mental well-being suddenly lashes out and you can't tell if it's you, them, their meds, or the reason for their meds.

-A lack of training on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

-Few management actions hurt team morale like drafting the responsible employees to fill ini the gaps left by irresponsible employees who are still employed for some reason.

My Brain Was Active Today...

Thoughts of Today:

1) "Logan" has forever changed the way I pronounce "North Dakota" in my head forever.

2) I'm still waiting for an economic downturn large enough to cause a mass layoff of professional athletes and film actors.

3) I need a right-brain job in which I work with project/assignment deadlines rather than customers.

4) It's amazing how much veggies can leave one feeling dehydrated.

5) Every time a self-identifying Christian quotes "an eye for an eye," I want to hit them over the head with a large slab of marble etched with "BUT I SAY UNTO YOU".

6) The Marvel logo gets cooler with each succeeding film.

7) Whenever I start to introspect about my personal psychological development, I become incapable of being productive at work.

8) You know you shouldn't work customer service when the phone rings and you want to answer it with "LEAVE ME ALONE ALREADY!"

9) You will never be [X-quality] enough for someone in your life.

10) Anime theme songs are like musical meth.

11) "You're a/an [X], so your opinion doesn't count" is why we need feminism.

12) Apparently, there is an organization in California dedicated to protecting the rights of retirees. Their slogan? "Protect Our Pensions"

13) New content addition for a high school Life Skills class: How to end a phone conversation in a non-awkward manner.

14) Rest in peace, Joan Lee. May you watch over your husband for all the years we have left with him.
In other news, does anyone else think Stan Lee will be the last surviving World War II veteran? The dude is 94, and gets around like he's in his 60s.

15) The Who's "Baba O'Reilly" heard through a single earbud is TRIPPY.

16) When you work in a call center but don't want to interact with people, butt-dials are your best friend.

17) I learned the hard way from an early age that I was not in control, and I don't think I've ever truly gained it.

18) Never underestimate the potential impact of an offhand ad hominem.

The Ten American Commandments

1) Thou shalt serve the Market thy God with all they money, all thy labor, and all thy vote. Yea, though thy children go hungry and thou dost waste away beneath the grindstone, thou shalt shake thy fist at government while thy High Priest drinks the blood of thy sacrifices.

2) Thou shalt eat terrible food while feeling terrible, and shalt proclaim that thou hast earned it whene'er a loving friend doth protest.

3) Thou shalt kill, frequently, at the whim of thy trigger finger or at the behest of the paranoia provided to thee by the Market thy God.

4) Thou shalt not elect women to positions of power unless they swear themselves to the Market thy God, and to the leadership of their husbands/fathers/brothers/sons.

5) Thou shalt hate and fear the different, the exceptional, and the new.

6) Honor thy father, mother, grandfathers, grandmothers, and ancestors unto the seventh generation. Thou shalt honor thy children until they reach the Age of Educated Opinions.

7) Though shalt treat thy community solely as a truncheon with which to enforce thy grandparents' morality, especially wielded against the sins of "equal treatment under the law" and "taking care of everyone".

8) Thou shalt not exercise, sleep, or change thy diet enough to actually improve thy health, but thou shalt blame government for thy lack of it.

9) Thou shalt not admit that anyone anywhere might have anything better than thee, whether quality of life or life expectancy or education. Thou art American, and therefore superior.

10) Thou shalt not break from the herd, even as thou proclaimest the herd to be the Father of Lies.

When Your Parents Become Your In-Laws

Get your head out of your ass, there is no squickyness here.

My wife and I have been together for about ten and a half years (holy shit), and in that time my relationship with my family has taken several plunges.

Especially as I've grown and surrounded myself with growing people, and realized that most of my relatives do not fit this description, having stagnated either before I was born or at some point in my childhood or adolescence.

This is especially true of my parents, whose old-time-small-town religion has grated on me more and more as I've grown and bonded with people who are the opposite (whether still spiritual, agnostic, or decidedly atheist) and who demonstrate much greater empathy and intelligence.

While I always knew of my parents' proclivities regarding those who are different, it wasn't until I married my then-girlfriend, and proceeded to live an adult life vastly different from theirs, that it truly hit home.
Moreso since they apparently feel carte blanche to take spiritual potshots at my wife as not only their right, but their duty.

Even though I had made it as clear as I could very early on that she had not been raised in church, and had not been taught to treat church membership as a fundamental need.

I'm not sure how they interpreted my efforts at specificity and clarity, but one unsuccessful game of Bible Trivia at their house after we had been married for a little while threw them into a moral panic, peppered with phrasing like "You gotta get that girl in her Bible!" or "Is she just riding your coattails?"
A storm which we rode out, got home, high-fived, fucked, and went on living OUR life as WE saw fit.

It wouldn't be as deep or as frequent an irritation if my parents were gradually settling down to permanently occupy a set of comfy chairs in front of the TV like good little elderly bigots.
They live seven hours away, and typically don't harass us over the phone.
Unfortunately, they apparently suffer from the Baby Boomer deathly fear of growing old, and the subsequent inability to be content in one spot.
Thus, they are, to quote my or a later generation, "all up in our bizz," assuming that our residence is available as a place to stay when they are in town (almost every month, sometimes multiple times per month), questioning everything we do (and questioning several things we avoid doing specifically because they want us to do them), and generally demonstrating every stereotype associated with invasive in-laws, but inflicting the stereotype upon BOTH of us.

To the point that I've almost stopped referring to them as "my parents" when in pleasant company, instead calling them "my wife's in-laws".

How did I get to this point?

Well, old-time-small-town religion doesn't really have much for a boy to bond with his father aside from the typical redneck pursuits.
Which my dad wasn't into anyway, so that whole book was never even opened.
He was a raging alcoholic without any need for alcohol (plus my hometown was a dry county up until a few years ago), with nowhere to throw his random fits of fury except outward, at whomever happened to be in range.
There wasn't much physical violence, but for a child a parent who randomly flies into a screaming rage doesn't inspire trust or confidence.
That he also seemed in a constant state of at at least annoyance with someone somewhere didn't help, as I was quickly Pavlov'd into thinking he would fly off the proverbial handle at any moment, and kept my distance.
Which pissed him off, of course.
I wasn't able to stand up under the screaming until I was in high school, by which point I had been in enough fights to shout right back at him to bring it on (perhaps hoping a knockdown drag-out would finally settle it and let me move on).
He never took me up on that offer, of course.
Now he's in his seventies, and beating the living shit out of him probably wouldn't help anyway.
Plus he's a broken record since having a stroke and being reduced to spouting Bible verses constantly, likely due to that part of his memory being much more concrete than math or music and thus less subject to loss via brain damage (thanks to my wife for pointing that out after years of irritation).

As for my mother, old-time-small-town religion gives plenty of opportunities for a son and mother to bond, especially when the latter is a musician.
I studied voice and piano, and eventually trombone, and had many performance opportunities through our church.
And given that both of us were subject to the above random fits of rage, I would cling to her most of the time.
She enjoyed my confidence much longer than my father (if the latter EVER enjoyed it), and I even married a woman similar to her in many ways (favorite color, sung voice part, chosen profession, etc.).
But as I've grown and have experienced the world, my filter for what I can and cannot discuss with my mother has broadened and thickened.
And she too became a broken record eventually, based on her assumption (being a preacher's kid) that one NEEDS to attend church in order to have a community, or that one NEEDS to memorize the Bible to empathize with others and treat others as one wants to be treated.



I have friends whose parents were similar when we were children, but who have grown (along with their children) into people who actually live in the real world, and thus my friends can enjoy intimate relationships with them, with little or no filtering and little or no fear of judgment or moral panic.


I cannot express the depth of my envy for them.

Star Wars

Far too many fans devote far too much time, energy, and YouTube bandwidth to complaining that everyone in the Star Wars Universe is either a Solo or a Skywalker, but reading the first offerings of Disney's Official Expanded Universe just drives the point home that that's exactly how it should be.

The Legends stories were all Skywalker/Solo stories precisely because those were the characters we'd already invested in. All of the world-building was done through the framework of "New stories, old characters," and any new characters were introduced via their connection to the old (Luke's new Jedi, Han and Leia's children, etc.).

The Legends authors didn't bother with "Let's spend a day on Ithor."
Instead they would write such a story as "Luke/Leia/Han/someone connected with them goes to Ithor, and we explore it through their interactions".
Choosing this technique means that the audience CARES about the new people they meet and the new places they go.

Even the X-Wing books, which focus on side-character Wedge Antilles and barely mention Luke at all, develop their new cast of characters through the one we already know.
Wedge personally recruits his team in the initial effort to reform Rogue Squadron, and we experience each person's individuality and backstory through the lens of Wedge's interactions with them.
Then, once the characters have been sufficiently developed in the existing framework and readers connect with them independent of the older characters, they can be let loose in their own stories like I, Jedi without the risk of a disconnect.


The Disney-approved EU books seem so focused on being Not-Skywalker/Solo stories that they're losing the original human connections to this universe that Lucas, Leigh Brackett, and Lawrence Kasdan poured so many years and so much effort into building.

I compare it to the more recently developed martial arts.
One can receive a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but if one cannot trace the line of masters back to the Gracie Family, one cannot be certified to teach the art in one's own gym.

An author can write a book and say "This is set in the Star Wars Universe," but even if he/she uses all the right jargon and references/visits familiar places, it will require much more effort to form a connection between audience and characters if the established cast is never mentioned.

Not to say it is impossible, but Star Wars in particular is infamous for overloading readers and audiences with planets, technology, and politics (an infamy the new set of EU authors seem set to continue), instead of the kind of character studies that "realistic" fiction authors do all the time.

The new trilogy is following the same basic format as pretty much all of the Legends stories, which has been proven to work over and over again, but fans still complain that "There's just Skywalkers and Solos everywhere! We want a bigger experience of this universe!"

Well how did you supreme intellects experience this universe in the first place?
Especially given that Finn's character is basically an answer to "What is Stormtrooper #3's story?" so branching out IS happening.
It's just happening, again, in the framework of new characters introduced via how they relate to characters we know, have already connected with, and are already following.

In my opinion, we need more Skywalkers and Solos, not less.
We need more of that original sense of adventure instead of getting bogged down in worldbuilding.

If you want Skywalker/Solo-free exploration of the Star Wars Universe, WRITE SOME!
And then edit in some known characters so we know what the hell you're talking about.

Agency and the Quarter-Life Crisis

It seems strange to think that the time of greatest agency in my life was when I was in school.
Agency here meaning feeling in control, of having the reigns of life.
I haven't had that feeling over the past four years.
So many of my peers couldn't wait to finish school because they felt trapped, slaving away for someone else and pining for graduation because it meant freedom.
But I never felt trapped or enslaved while in high school or college.

I've felt trapped and/or enslaved SINCE college.

Perhaps this is due to my knowing and thriving within the relative stability of my high school and college experience.
Knowing that the system is operating under a specific set of guidelines, and knowing that it will ALWAYS follow those guidelines, allows one to relax into the groove and find a niche.

That the adult world keeps changing the maps every time I hit a milestone is, by comparison, paralyzing.

Maybe I was trapped in school, but like Brooks Hatlen I knew how things worked and was comfortable with, even proud of, my place in the system.
Having been forced out of the system into a nebulous world which demands so much and offers so little, how else am I supposed to feel?

It's interesting that each generation reaches a point at which the world seems to have spun out of control.
For the World War II generation, it was the '60s. Yay hippies.
For the Baby Boomers, it was the '90s. Yay mass censorship.
For Generation X, we'll see.
For my generation, though, it's here and now.

It seems ironic that the youngest generation of adults (maybe second-youngest given that we have adults who barely or don't remember the '90s) has hit their X-life crisis so much earlier.
But it's because we grew up and went to high school and went to college and graduated from college in at least two different worlds.

Each generation, upon reaching their x-life crisis, pines for the time at which they felt the most in control, when the world seemed to be the most stable.
Our grandparents pined for the years immediately after WW2 (thank you, Archie Bunker).
Our parents seem to pine for the '70s.
Our older siblings pine for the '90s.
....we also pine for the '90s, or maybe the early '00s, but because our time of greatest control and stability was CHILDHOOD or ADOLESCENCE.
Thus the current market boom in '90s nostalgia.

Of course, the worst part of this for me personally is that there doesn't seem to be an end to it, unlike the trials and tribulations of childhood and adolescence and early adulthood.
The game is no longer "work hard and you will see the light at the end of the tunnel, and eventually you will emerge into the life you want".

It now seems to be simply "work hard and at some point you will die, and be glad of it".

I've had people point out many examples of individuals who weren't able to start doing what they loved until later in life, but in every case the person was MAKING MONEY and living in relative financial stability up until they had greatness thrust upon them, because they were living in a time when business was at least a little more lax in rampantly exploiting employees.

That fact makes the situation even more frustrating and increases the feelings of confusion and impotence.

A White People PSA

The following is a public service announcement for white people:

When speaking of social trends, such crime or mental or physical health, treating individual persons as autonomous social units is a very, very white idea. It's what started "the American dream" in the first place, and has in many ways always stood in the way of racial unity in America. Among educated white people, far too many are unable to see anyone as anything BUT individuals.

The positive of this practice is that it can stem from a desire to avoid generalizations and labeling based on stereotypes.
The negative is that it leaves those who hold with it unable to understand anyone who does not hold this viewpoint.

Other American racial and ethnic groups, in what started perhaps as a backlash against that idea, see any crime committed by or injustice inflicted upon or massive success attained by anyone of their race as an infliction of harm against their entire community.

A black woman who commits a vicious crime tends to be derided not just for making a personal choice to do harm, but for the harm that action causes for the black community as a whole.
Tiger Woods' golf successes were treated as a victory for the entire black community.

A Latino who is killed while in police custody is mourned not as an individual victim of a single tragedy, but as a surrogate for every son, brother, father, uncle, cousin, and husband in the community, and the outrage at his death derives from this surrogate status as well.

Meanwhile, a white man who commits a crime is derided by other whites as a single, isolated incident, whether it is a crime of passion, a crime of malice, or a crime resulting from mental illness (the last of these is an entire racial argument all its own regarding the unequal enforcement of the law and its reporting in news media).

Similarly, a white person having financial success is treated as a success for him/her only, and instead of being treated as a mark of progress for the white community (which isn't really a thing thanks to this very viewpoint) is treated with envy or disdain by other white people because he/she is not them.

If we as a country are ever going to shake off nearly two centuries of American (nearly six of North American) white-first race wars, we who are white and would be more educated and enlightened must recognize this tendency in ourselves and recognize that it is not the default for everyone, and in many cases has been hurtful to ourselves (see my generation's cynicism regarding "the American Dream") and to other racial and ethnic groups seeking true justice and equality in our nation.

It is not racist nor bigoted nor unrealistic to seek understanding, to seek to see people as they see themselves and to better see ourselves through their eyes.
Only through such sharing of sight can we move forward together into building a better and brighter world.

My Practice Essay: A Through F

I've been trying to gear up for my certification tests lately, taking many practice tests and trying to fill in the cracks in my academic knowledge which have developed (primarily in MATH) since I graduated.

In an attempt to create as realistic a testing scenario as possible, I wrote this essay for the practice test today.

PROMPT:
“Because the traditional grading scale of A through F fosters needless competition and pressure, colleges and universities should use a simple pass/fail system.”

ESSAY:
As the American school system struggles to regain a foothold as a top-rated educational system among the developed nations, it can be tempting to try brash tactics that attempt to wipe out the status quo rather than repair it and improve its productivity. Removing the traditional A through F grading scale would in the long run be detrimental to American students, and fails to address the larger issues which cause needless competition and pressure: lack of individual attention, compounded by an obsession with knowledge assessment over learning skills.

Removing the grading system will not increase the number of teachers per student, a ratio which other countries have raised each year and which the United States continues to drop each year as state education departments treat local school districts as an easy source of funding, pinching teacher pay and instituting hiring freezes to allow administrators at the district and state level to continue to receive raises and/or hire new administrators for positions which seem conjured out of thin air as teachers on the ground are forced to seek employment elsewhere. In this rigged system, students aren’t so much competing with each other for higher grades as they are competing for attention by their instructors, and our educational system favors those whose natural learning styles are reading, writing, and verbal, to the exclusion of all other learning styles, especially kinetic. And their teachers have zero freedom to attempt to reach out with other styles of instruction because they are so hampered by standardized assessments.

Which leads to the other cause of needless student pressure: our system’s obsession with standardized testing. A written test only allows those students who naturally learn best through reading and writing to excel, though in our current system of too-much-too-early, even those rare individuals struggle to vomit the massive load of information that has been crammed into their skulls. Standardized testing paralyzes our underpaid, overworked educators from being able to experiment with teaching or content, or to creatively engage their students. If they want their students to pass, they and their students must conform to the standardized system, and far too many cannot. By basing our entire educational system around standardized testing, we are stifling the best resources an education should provide: critical thinking and creativity. Both in our teachers and our students.

Thus, the A through F grading system is not the problem, nor has it led to our current set of problems. Not enough teachers and too many tests has led us here, and we cannot move on as a nation and join the rest of the developed world until we do so.

My Sunday School Class

I'm starting to think I would enjoy leading a Sunday School class, provided anyone else showed up.
Especially after having many good and many terrible experiences with different styles of leadership and facilitation over the years.

Here are a few classroom rules I would put into effect from day 1.

1) No pressure to pray aloud.
Starting with this one because my wife and many of my more spiritually sensitive friends are introverts and or/suffer from social anxiety. Christian churches are notorious for applauding long, eloquent prayers as if prayer is an oration before a crowd instead of an intimate moment with God. Part of my goal in forming a class is to attempt to undo some of the long-term effects of this policy upon the community and upon its perception of Christianity by, insofar as I am able, removing the peer-pressure to pray loud and long and loquaciously. I will not take the go-around-the-circle approach to taking prayer requests, taking the responsibility of praying aloud upon myself and letting those who wish me to address their anxieties or concerns specifically mention them of their own volition.


2) No lectures.
As anyone who has read my blog in the past can attest, I have sufficient struggle dealing with the typical church service's sing-then-lecture format, and thus have no reason to extend that struggle to Sunday School. A Sunday School class is a small, more intimate setting, designed not for a single speaker to stand above everyone else and assume they all agree with him/her, but for everyone present to be able to voice concerns and make contributions to the discussion. Having only one person speak and everyone else just nod or stare at the wall is counterintuitive to the small-group setting, and counterproductive overall.


3) No rhetorical questions.
As an extension of #2, I will take special care to never ask a question without expecting an answer from the class. Rhetorical questions in a small-group setting just fill up the time with unnecessary and awkward silence that could have been filled with discussion and opportunities for growth.

4) No one-word answers.
A step up from #3, I will also take special care to either design my lesson plans to ask deeper questions than can't be answered with "God" or "Jesus" or "faith" or "sin," or push anyone who answers thusly to further elaborate, in order to challenge the class to think more profoundly and delve more deeply into the concepts we discuss.

5) Controversial topics welcome.
I fully expect to have disagreements among and with members of my class. How we handle disagreement among ourselves as Christians demonstrates our Christianity so much more deeply than how we behave sitting in church. Especially since many of the topics which would arise in class discussion are those which directly affect our perception of the world and/or our daily lives. I hope to ask the kind of armor-piercing questions that lead to major, long-term shifts in thought and spiritual perspective.

6) No platitudes. Ever.
This one gets a little gray for the locked-down church-kids in the class, but anyone who has left the church and/or left Christianity can see platitudes coming a mile away. This rule will likely step on more than a few hidebound toes because it will require a change in word choice, in an environment (the church building) which encourages using the same words over and over again until we're saying them in our sleep and are totally numb to them.

7) Cliches will be avoided whenever possible.
I differentiate semantically between platitudes and cliches because platitudes are used in place of genuine sentiments, while cliches can be genuine sentiments expressed in a repetitive manner. As the class leader, I would also differentiate in my approach to pointing out cliches vs. platitudes. Cliches can be addressed without confrontation, because in many cases the person is using an overused phrase or term without realizing that it is overused. Platitudes need to be shot on sight whenever they rear their ugly heads because their use only drives people away from the church and away from Christianity, and reinforces the negative stereotypes associated with American Christianity.

8) All Bible study will involve a holistic approach.
Too often, church Bible studies involve one person spoon-feeding a preselected set of dogma and the scriptural interpretations which support them to a group of blank-faced acolytes who can only sit there and nod.
Expanding one's understanding of the Bible requires its examination from literary, historical, and cultural perspectives, in addition to examining translation conventions and denotation/connotation (for ourselves in this place and time and for those who wrote it at their place and time).



Obviously, it's entirely possible that more items would be added to this list overall, but this seems to be a strong starting point, especially for anyone who has become disillusioned with Sunday School classes in general.

I don't want to say "There is no such thing as the devil," but...

I've apparently been very motivated theologically lately.


The character called "the adversary/the accuser" ("ha-satan," not capitalized and not a proper noun) doesn't show up until Chronicles, which were written after the conquest of Babylon by the Medes and the Persians.

Which resulted in the introduction of Zoroastrianism to Judaism.
Prior to that, Judaism was strictly and utterly monotheistic.
Meaning they treated God as the only force in the universe.
EVERYTHING, good and bad, was attributed to God.
A key doctrine of Zoroastrianism is that the universe is held in constant tension between two equal and opposing forces, one good and one evil.

The introduction of this doctrine influenced monotheistic Judaism to adopt the idea of an opposite-yet-not-equal number for YHWH/Adonai.

Compare 1 and 2 Samuel/1 and 2 Kings with accounts of the exact same events in 1 and 2 Chronicles.

2 Samuel 24 vs. 1 Chronicles 21 is a good example of this.

"Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, 'Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.' So the king said to Joab and the army commanders with him, 'Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are.'"
-2 Samuel 24:1-2

"Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel. So David said to Joab and the commanders of the troops, “Go and count the Israelites from Beersheba to Dan. Then report back to me so that I may know how many there are.” So the king said to Joab and the army commanders with him, 'Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are.'"
-1 Chronicles 21:1-2

Events attributed to God in the former writings are attributed to "the accuser/adversary" in the latter.
Apparently, it was only the need for a named spiritual bogeyman upon which to cast all blame which created the tradition of capitalizing "ha-satan."

As well as the tradition of assuming that the serpent in the Genesis creation myth is also "ha-satan," even though there is zero evidence that "the serpent" was given any such negative deification until after the Persian conquest.
Moses made a statue of a bronze snake in Numbers (in response to an invasion of venomous snakes which like everything else pre-Zoroastrian Judaism is attributed to God), and none of the Hebrews are recorded crying "Ha-Satan is here!" or referencing the story recorded in Genesis at all in response to the real snakes or the bronze snake.

Even the accounts of Jesus interacting with "the devil" (in Matthew "ha-satan," in Luke "diabolos," Greek for "slanderer") are from JEWISH sources, who had inherited the centuries-old Zoroastrian-influenced Judaism.

And notice the lack of Jesus-adversary interactions in Mark and John, especially the latter, who in every other way devoted his account to the deeper truths of Christ's life and ministry.


The tradition of treating "ha-satan" as a proper noun was in full force by the time the English language rolled around and needed translations of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.

So it's no surprise that Jesus' rebuke of Peter in Matthew 16:23 / Mark 8:33 is read as "Get behind me, Prince of Darkness/King of Hell/Supreme Demon!" instead of "Get behind me, adversary! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Merely human concerns.
Not hellish concerns, not demonic concerns, not even overtly malicious concerns.
Decide for yourself which interpretation makes more sense.


And this doesn't even get into the fact that there are MEN referred to as "ha-satan" in the Old Testament as well.
Hadad the Edomite in 1 Kings 11:14 and Rezon the Syrian in 1 Kings 11:23 are just a few examples.


We keep ourselves in the dark age of enforced ignorance as long as we continue to pass on cultural myopia, blind adherence to tradition, and refusal to examine the texts we hold sacred with their original writers and readers in mind.

Sunday School for Introverts

For once, I'm posting more questions than opinions.
So bear with me.


As my wife and I have been trying to get back into regular church attendance, and have had vastly different experiences at the same churches, I've become more aware of just how anti-introvert/anti-social anxiety the typical Sunday School class is.

Especially for anyone not raised in church.

The pressure to pray aloud usually means the prayer will be the most forced and rushed affair ever.

The pressure to read Scripture aloud tends to lead to completely ignoring the meaning of the text in an effort to get out of the spotlight as quickly as possible.

And then there's the pressure to take part in the class discussion.
A discussion which, depending upon the individuals in the class, can go into spiritual deep water (meaning, tons of theological jargon and assumption that everyone is deeply familiar with the minutiae of Scripture) within seconds.
And which requires that each person interrupt someone else just to contribute.

All of these contribute to an environment which leaves introverts and/or the socially anxious huddled in the corner waiting for the ordeal to end so they can vanish into the crowd for the main church service......at least until "Pass the Peace," in which tons of strangers invade their personal space again and again and make them want to run screaming from the room, but that's for another discussion.

The above are all impressions and experiences conveyed to me over the years by my wife, who is very much an introvert, and generally suffers from a large degree of social anxiety in everyday situations, which is ramped up in church services, in large part due to the above and due to her not attending church regularly until adulthood.

Being an extrovert who doesn't tend to feel socially anxious, and having been raised in church, I never noticed these issues until my wife and I got married and started looking for a church to call home together.

The three sources of anxiety for my wife seem to eliminate the entirety of every Sunday School class I've ever been in (group prayer, group Scripture reading, and group discussion), so it seems that an entirely new set of activities would be required, unless the peer pressure inherent in the three could be lessened.

How do we minimize and eventually eliminate the above peer pressures, which seem so ingrained in American mainline church practices, so that we can create an environment which does not alienate introverts and those who suffer from social anxiety (a specification I make because extroverts can suffer from it as well)?

I just don't see how it could be done, aside from the class leader doing the praying and the reading and making a lecture of it instead of a discussion.
But we already have that in the form of the pastor's sermon during the regular service.

Should we just recommend that introverted/socially anxious churchgoers avoid small-group meetings and stick to the main church service?

This Might Be a Sermon Someday...

Why do church people assume that everything recorded as the spoken words of Jesus were meant to be taken as stand-alone, pithy sayings?

That's what PROVERBS is for!

Aside from the Sermon on the Mount (which only occurs in that form in Matthew's account of Jesus' life, but that's a different discussion), Jesus is seen constantly speaking in CONVERSATION, answering specific questions or rebuking/encouraging specific acts of his disciples or others.

For example, John 14:6 - "Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'"
Why is it the traditional practice to not mention those first two words when quoting this verse?
Because we might actually need to read the whole chapter, and thus find out what specific QUESTION he was ANSWERING?
That we might need to read the whole conversation, instead of taking a single sentence out of context to justify whatever whenever?

It was in fact a very specific question.
14:5 - "Thomas said to him, 'Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?'"

Which of course was the result of another statement of Jesus', which has also been stripped of its conversational context and thrown around to justify a whole lot of random dogma and doctrines over the centuries.
14:1-4 - “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”

This little chunk of text has been misinterpreted to mean:
"I'm going to Heaven, and you'll be coming with me!"
And of course the 14:6 verse has been chained to that interpretation as well to lock Christ down into the us vs. them Greco-Roman version of Christianity which post-dates Christ and everything else included in the Bible by centuries.
The word "house" here is the exact same word Christ uses when running the money-changers out of the temple (John 2:16 - "To those who sold doves he said, 'Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!'"), yet no one interprets that verse to mean some existential point about the afterlife.

When we only grind individual verses into our children's heads instead of encouraging them to read the surrounding text, examine the person or persons believed to have been responsible for writing the particular book included in the Bible, and so on and so forth in exploring the context, we reduce them to spiritual parrots, or worse, set them up to be platitude-spewing hypocrites later in life.

Especially when we take a one-to-one approach in justifying dogma and doctrine and public policy with verses of scripture.
Which of course is the time-honored tradition of American evangelical leaders, just as it was with European Roman Catholic leaders, just as it is with Middle Eastern Fundamentalist Muslim leaders.

In the words of Dr. Donald A. Carson:
"A text without a context is just a pretext for a proof-text."

Bible Stuff

Part 1 - Lost in Translation
One of the most insidious tactics of the American church money-machine is to inflict modern vernacular upon ancient texts via "new translations".
Idioms, gender-neutral pronouns, definition-inserted-in-place-of-term...these are forcibly inserted in a seeming attempt to make overquoted Bible verses feel less overquoted, and more relatable or relevant to an audience which has heard them all before.

But this is not only semantically dishonest, it removes, or attempts to remove, the cultural context of the writing and skew its literary context.
The various texts chosen to be included in the Bible each have a rhythm to them, especially the more poetic works.
The word choice in these only seems trite to modern American audiences because most Americans were raised in or around a church, especially in the Bible Belt, and most mainline denominations defend their doctrines and dogma with a relatively small number of Bible verses to serve as "spiritual pillars".

This small group of verses are thrown around again and again in sermons and Bible studies across the country, to the point that elder church members treat them like mantras of the good ol' days, and younger church members get sick of hearing them (and generally yearn for leaders and teachers to convey spiritual concepts in their own words instead).

Thus, we see attempts by Bible publishers and church leaders to modernize the ancient words, but in so doing remove the sense that they are in fact ancient.

This attempt at modernization, by removing the cultural context of the texts, blurs the Old Testament's progressive discovery of God's character by the ancient Hebrews, and dumbs down the radical nature of the New Testament's "HERE HE IS" message.

Ironically, instead of being perceived as an overquoted authority, this tactic makes the Bible seem petulant and pedantic, subject to the whims of fickle vernacular rather than being the rock-steady divine Word which fundamentalists proclaim it to be.


Part 2 - Lost in Interpretation
Any Bible verse which seems cut-and-dry in favor of a fundamentalist position must, like any single line of text used to support any opinion, be delved into much deeper than "face-value".
Its cultural, historical, and literary context must be thrown open like the doors of an ancient ruin to discern whether ancient, tribal Hebrews with no concept of astronomy or biology or psychology REALLY meant that disrespectful children should be executed.

...and then decide if we REALLY want to emulate them if they REALLY believed that.

Of course, the very practice of reinforcing our dogma with handpicked lines of text without any cultural understanding was not the practice when the texts selected for including in the Bible were written...but don't tell the fundies that.

Reading the Bible Backwards

So much of our current mode of thought is the result of a combination of Greco-Roman philosophy and Enlightenment philosophy/theology.
There's nothing inherently wrong with either, and each generation is naturally the rhetorical, intellectual, and spiritual offspring of its forbears.

But it becomes an issue when we apply our modern sensibilities on ancient texts.

Many of our "traditional" doctrines are not the result of some great movement of the Spirit, but the application of Plato, Aristotle, or John Edwards to texts which predate them.

For example, the traditional doctrine of "The Fall" is basically Plato's descent into the cave of illusion.
The original tellers of the story (remember, it was passed down orally for generations) did not think in terms of perfect "forms," or more precisely, changeless states.
Especially since most of the first four chapters of Genesis were originally POEMS, meant to reflect on higher truths in figurative language rather than portray hard facts of reality.


Another negative effect of this application is that we tend to read the Bible backwards, for example reading the Old Testament with Jesus in mind, instead of forwards with the contexts of the individual writers in mind.

We fail to understand the cultural context in which each book of the Old Testament (or in the case of Genesis, in which each section of each book) was created, because we operate under the flawed unconscious assumption that the Bible is essentially a legal constitution.

We assume cohesiveness and continuity from cover to cover because our current philosophical context demands such, even though a basic reading of each book demonstrates a vast variety of literary, cultural, and historical contexts across the anthology.
Up to and including many contradictions, internally and with our present spirituality.

But the storytellers and writers whose works are included in the current canon obviously did not think of themselves as "Biblical authors", and the historically earlier authors had no notion of the historically later authors' existence or ideas or cultural context.

Thus if we are truly to apply our present standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants philosophical methods, we must abandon the legal-constitution assumption which has driven so much of the church's methodology for generations, and re-examine the Bible as a cultural exploration of an evolving understanding of God.

Too many people have been driven away by the church's iron-fisted approach to "divine inspiration" (to say nothing of "inerrancy") for us to continue to pound the pulpit with unrelenting tradition which fears doubt and curiosity and basic questions from anyone, especially those already in its grip.

Sermons and Shepherds

The older and/or more informed I become, the more trouble I have with the idea of the "sermon".
I understand and embrace the "worship" portion of church services, because it brings the congregation together in a communal experience of emotion and music.

But then instead of sending us on our way at the peak of that communal experience, we're jarred out of it to be lectured at as individuals for the remainder of the service (in some cases taking up half or 3/4 of the total service time).

This would be fine on its own, if structured like a college class, which focused only on the individual intellect, at a separate time and/or place from communal worship.

But jarring us out of our communal emotional experience just to be talked at, and then sending us out after THAT, makes the joys of the communal experience seem wasted and trod under.

Especially since a sermon, unlike a college lecture, doesn't even allow anyone being lectured to to raise a hand and ask questions.
A sermon is the antithesis of a conversation, and too many pastors use the captivity of their audiences to spew some truly awful drivel.

What confuses me is that most churches HAVE a separate activity to invoke the individual intellect.
It usually happens pre-service in Sunday School classes, or throughout the week in small-group Bible studies or discussion groups.

Why can't that be enough?

Why do we still need the authority figure from on high passing supposedly-irrefutable wisdom down to us lowly sheep?

Especially in our current age of unlimited information.

We should be having the best conversations about God and spirituality in the history of humanity!

Not sitting quietly and pretending to listen to someone else talk at us while drawing or playing on our phones.
Just a thought.


On an unrelated note, having left the image of the "good shepherd" at least a couple centuries behind us in the developed world, we need a new metaphor for God and really really REALLY need a new metaphor for Jesus.

But having made the mistake of literalizing our metaphors about a thousand years ago, and at some point between then and now turned that mistake into a multibillion-dollar business and lobbying empire, I doubt any new metaphors would really take.

It's a mark of how weak metaphor and symbolism are in our current American culture that churches STILL feel the need to explain the imagery of the baptism EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. IT. HAPPENS.

Explanations of imagery are what anthropologists do when examining another culture.
Those WITHIN the culture don't ever need an explanation because everyone knows the ritual's purpose.

But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised, given that we have taken imagery, symbolism, and metaphor which are supposed to fill a niche in the human psyche, and transformed them quite against all sense into "inerrant Word of God", and given them the same level of gravitas we give plain facts.

This move to make literal what should have remained figurative has naturally and tragically caused an intellectual backlash against any and all imagery ever associated with religion.

Too many have thrown out baby and bathwater, assuming that spiritual matters which psychologists have found we NEED to remain SANE and remain coherent as a society, are not only unnecessary, but are either a plague to be cured or the quaint/barbaric practices of a less-enlightened age to be outgrown on our way to utopia.

Instead of each society subscribing to its own rites and rituals and STORIES to fill the niche in their collective psyche, somewhere along the way a few of them became convinced that their stories were the only "real" ones, their deity/ies the only "real" ones.

Even though their fathers and grandfathers had never stopped to decry anyone else's stories unless at war, usually over something actually-real like food or land or resources, and that defamation was mostly a formality.

Societies such as the Greeks and Egyptians and African tribes and Native Americans were content with an unspoken, "It's real to use in our circumstances," and content (or rather, constrained by a harsh life and low life-expectancy) with letting others worship who, what, and how they would.

From a certain perspective, we in the infinitely-connected-to-infinite-information seem less able to deal with the part of our psyche which needs spirituality for communal bonding and communal action than our barbaric ancestors.

We know more about the universe and the human body and the human psyche than any generation before us, but having turned their metaphors into "facts," and caused the backlash which resulted when reason was attacked by irrationality, we seem unable to truly recover.
We are thus compartmentalized by our more recent ancestors' mistakes, with too many elders clinging to that mistake as if by divine command, and too many youngers abandoning spirituality wholesale because some are willing to kill to defend the mistake.


There doesn't seem to be any solution to our fragmented state.
Having shed the rituals and rites of our ancestors, which helped us process the greater truths of the universe, in the fight against the literalization of metaphor, we find ourselves naked before the terrifying cosmos, unable to go back into our shell and unable to truly strike out on our own.

We shed the rites and rituals, but we could not change the fundamental nature of our psyche, and thus we lack one of the first tools for comprehending the universe which our distant ancestors developed in the darkness of pre-history.


Time will tell if we have truly taken ourselves out of the evolutionary pool, or if this is simply the next evolutionary hurdle we must overcome.

Sunday Morning Thoughts

1) Had my first good church experience in way too long this morning. It's always nice to have three strangers engage you in conversation within five minutes of walking in the door. And have seven more do so before you leave.

2) It is a sad testament to the state of the American cultural consciousness that we extend altruism suspiciously, and treat any altruism extended in our direction with suspicion. We have become so accustomed to being exploited that we can't handle genuine selflessness.

3) I'm really not accustomed to only needing five to ten minutes to get places.

4) When it doubt, picardy third. When not in doubt, picardy third.

5) The principles of Affirmative Action should also be applied to relationships. Don't have many black/Hispanic/gay/transgender/atheist/agnostic/Muslim/liberal/nerdy friends? Get some. It'll improve and expand your perception of the world and the people in it.

6) Never underestimate the emotional impact of singing the fifth over a picardy third in progress.

7) It's interesting to notice the ragtime roots of Southern Gospel piano music.

8) Too many of the atrocities suffered by the Hebrews in the Old Testament are treated by the writers therein as their own fault. No wonder centuries later the Pharisees wanted to know whose fault it was that the man Jesus healed was born blind. Also no wonder that we've had centuries of Christians trying to blame the victims of oppression, poverty, and injustice since then.

9) In my experience, a person whose mind is entirely undivided, who does not struggle with difficult questions, is either a fanatic or apathetic.

10) We assume that everyone needs unfettered access to information, that information is the key to a more educated society and thus a more enlightened society. But we also need guides to help interpret, extrapolate from, and apply that information. Otherwise we're just dumping an ocean into a bucket and hoping it will fit.

11) It's amazing how big a gap exists between "peace on earth, good will toward men" and "peace to those on whom his favor rests." This is why studying Biblical Interpretation is necessary for intellectual honesty.

12) Rituals take us out of our routines, bringing us into a communal experience away from our complicated lives as individuals. Thus, faith communities who omit or minimize their rituals set themselves on a path to splintering into factions based on dogma. Not because individual thought and study and opinion naturally leads to such, but because they have removed and/or made impotent their shared experiences and demonstrations of faith. Removing rituals removes symbolism from religious communities, and without symbolism, a religion is just a philosophy with some divine salad dressing sprinkled on top.

Thoughts, Mostly Regarding Indoctrination and its Effects

I need to come up with a simile that involves explaining the scientific method to a creationist for the hundredth time.
Something really witty that I can bring up in mixed company to vent just a little of my frustration.

Maybe...
-Starting your car with no gas in it? You can go through the steps over and over, but you won't get anywhere.
-Taking a bath in a lake? You can be as thorough as you want, but you'll still feel dirty when it's all over.

...eh. Work in progress.


It's difficult to form a straw man of religious fundamentalism.
Just like it's difficult to satirize American rightwing politics nowadays.
Attempting to skirt ahead of reality and depict it as MORE ludicrous than you think it could ever be is an exercise in eventual futility in both cases, since both appear to be hurtling away from "comprehensible, decent, and rational" territory at the speed of light.

That there are people operating the accelerator pedals in both camps simultaneously isn't a coincidence.
It makes me wish there really WAS a leftist conspiracy to institute communism or that there really WAS a plot by the scientific community to oppress religious groups into oblivion.

At least then the ranting and raving would have SOME basis in reality.
Instead of simply being violent delusions spewed forth by victims of generations of indoctrination.

And they continue to spew, even as many their children turn back on them with fact and cited sources to counter their indoctrination.
Many, sadly not all.
Though the Internet and the free and infinite availability of information has put a dent in the age-old cycle of ideological repression and worship of the irrational, there are still families who manage to squelch their offspring's intellect beneath the weight of dogma, and send them out into the world to make another generation of mental midgets who think themselves giants-by-divine-appointment.
These families are mainly of the Duggar or Duggar-fandom variety who REPRESS *irony* their children and keep them away from any and all sources of actual-not-dogmatic information.


While there have been a few voices expressly against religion in the scientific community (Carl Sagan comes to mind), most researchers, experts, and students, if they acknowledge religion at all, express at least some level of devoutness to a religious tradition.
Which, to the rational people in the peanut gallery, demonstrates perfectly that there isn't some cosmic chessgame between Science and Religion.

Science does its work and mostly keeps to itself.
Religion, at least in the fundamentalist circles, can't seem to comprehend that, much less do it themselves.


And just to clarify my terms, here's a nice breakdown:
1) Religious people say, "This is what I believe."
2) Evangelical religious people say, "This is what I believe, and it would probably do you good to believe it as well."
3) Fundamentalist evangelical religious people say, "This is what I believe, and you really believe it too, which you would realize if you STOPPED LYING TO YOURSELF AND SENDING YOUR KIDS TO HELLRAAAAAAAR!"


What I think the more rational and/or altruistic religious and evangelical religious people are afraid of is that a point made by the Agnostic and Atheist communities is in fact true, or coming true.
That being that all the altruistic efforts motivated by religion over the centuries cannot counterbalance the atrocities committed in its name, and that by this stage in our societal development, we shouldn't NEED the proddings of a Sky Father to get us to take care of each other.

That we will eventually outgrow religion, having finally learned to take care of each other because "It's the right thing to do," not because Heaven or Hell depends upon it.

Even as a Christian, I hope this is true, that we will one day take care of each other simply because we should, not because of morality or bribes or threats.
Notice I separate "should" from "morality".
Every other communal species on this planet has a biological imperative to care for and protect all individuals within a particular group.
Whether it's a single family or a group of families which interbreed.

Yet for some reason we humans need some abstract-made-physical thing to focus on in order to get us to do what every other communal animal does naturally.

Read Warren Ellis' Supergods for a larger breakdown of that concept.


On an unrelated note, it's nice to post a conservative-run discussion board, and get three "likes" from members and an infraction from the site admin.

Some Thoughts From Today

1) Sometimes I find myself truly torn between a personal need for rituals, and a desire to deconstruct them.

2) It seems counterproductive for churches to devote so much energy to eliciting an emotional response via music, only to cut it off and try to swerve into the intellectual just before the sermon. Maybe that's why the homily is so short during Mass. Perhaps Protestant and Nondenominational churches and university chapel services should cultivate the intellectual response in small-group settings, and reserve corporate worship for exactly that, the emotionally ecstatic state which results from the combination of prayer and music.

3) How sad is it that humans consider ourselves to be the peak of evolution, yet we require rites and rituals involving inanimate objects or anthropomorphized abstract concepts in order to take care of each other as members of a society? No other animal on this planet requires such. Each member of a community cares for each other member of the community for the sake of the community. The group must survive, moreso than any one of its members. Yet humans seem to have left that basic instinct behind with our attainment of "sentience".

4) Too many religious people try to oversimplify too many complex concepts, to their detriment and the detriment of their testimony. Seemingly in an attempt to avoid truly dealing with hard questions, avoiding the complexity of real life and the real universe, they cling to one-liners, and a very small pool of simplistic cliches and platitudes to throw at every question and concern which crosses their path. The world, with its unlimited access to information, is no longer impressed with simplistic answers or simplistic attitudes. Oversimplification in the face of honest complexity leads to outright rejection of one's beliefs and principles. People would rather know we struggle than be handed the illusion of confidence.

5) The word is "sure," people. You can't be "for sure". At all. You can do something "for sure". Such as, "I know for sure that I locked the front door." The expression is an adverb, not an adjective. On an unrelated note, the word is "regularly". "On the regular" is MEANINGLESS. "Regular" is not a noun, and thus cannot be the object of a preposition. YOU KEEP DOING THIS, AUTHORITY FIGURES AND TEACHERS, AND YOU WILL ONLY CONTINUE THE LANGUAGE'S DOWNWARD SPIRAL INTO VAGUENESS AND MISUNDERSTANDING.

6) Having no direct day-to-day experience of persecution, far too many American Christians assign the term flippantly. "That man said the Founders didn't write the Pledge of Allegiance to say 'under God'! He's persecuting meeee!"

7) I haven't needed to use the word "mezzanine" since I was last in Herrick Auditorium in 2007.

8) It's always nice to see an alto standing proud in a crowd of loud sopranos.

9) I can't imagine how frustrating it would be for an adult who leaves home right after high school, works and pays bills and taxes for a couple of years before starting college, only to be forced into High School 2.0 because of the way his/her institution of choice is run.

10) Why is it seemingly only the colleges which force religion or force a militaristic attitude via obsession with athletics upon students who are willing or able to have an intimate, caring environment on-campus?
Why can't academia and the arts bring people together without the trappings of religion or sports mania?

11) We continue to celebrate 1st-year college students, but I have a feeling that once my generation (aka the most-educated, least-employed generation) has kids of college age, it won't be something to celebrate anymore. It will either be an unspoken expectation, or a questionable decision due to the mountain of debt required.

12) Getting to hear Dr. Mark Reighard play for the first time in years was an awesome unexpected birthday present.

13) It's weird having a new phone that's lighter than the old one. Makes me think I'm going to break it every few seconds.

Some Things Aren't Up For Debate

For several months now, I've avoided getting into debates in the anonymous corners of the Internet.
Mainly because I have standards regarding any arguments I make, such as proper grammar, cited sources, as few (trying for none) logical fallacies as possible, treating all participants with respect as people even if their argument is bunk, etc.

And other people just....don't.

I've lost track of the number of times I've written or started writing a well-organized, well-researched, well-thought response to a post online, and then thrown the whole thing out instead of posting it because the person would likely not even read the thing, and only respond with cliches, platitudes, or the always-popular "I will enjoy watching you burn in hell".

So for your reading pleasure today, I'd like to post a few issues which at this point shouldn't even be up for debate anymore.
By that I mean issues which do NOT have two equally logical positions which can be taken regarding them.

These are not "just your opinion" issues, like who should be president or whether there should be a monument to Satan next to the Ten Commandments.

These are issues which should have been resolved, accepted as truth, and built up from DECADES ago, but our society continues to stagnate because delusional sheeple continue to argue them.


1) Evolution is not "just a theory".
Stop spewing nonscience regarding this subject.
That goes doubly for church people who seem to think that if anything in the Bible is scientifically explainable, it somehow insults and diminishes God.....even though many of the pioneers of the modern scientific method were CHRISTIANS who looked up at the universe they believed God made in such wonder that they believed the study and greater understanding of it was an act of worship.

Evolution Via Natural Selection is, in view of the evidence currently available, the most plausible explanation for the state of life on this planet.
"Most plausible" is the key phrase here.

Religious people are so obsessed with "certainty," having been indoctrinated to think of their particular beliefs in absolutist terms, that when a scientist tells them the obvious, that science doesn't deal in certainties and absolutes, they lose their minds.
And immediately start screaming in the public forum that science and everything ever discovered or developed by the scientific method is anti-God.
...while posting about it on the Internet using a smartphone while standing under an electric light.


2) Vaccines are necessary for the protection of society, not an optional medical treatment.
See those words "most plausible"?
Read them again.
Because science works in probabilities, not absolutes, the discoveries and developments which result from it work, based on a set of evidence, in the majority of cases.
That one child with a particular genetic makeup somewhere still got sick after getting a vaccine doesn't even come CLOSE to counterbalancing the MILLIONS who have been and are saved by them, by being treated individually AND by preventing a mass outbreak.

That we are seeing outbreaks of diseases which medicine filed under "tamed" years ago, demonstrates that the completely artificial paranoia of anti-vaxxers is a threat to society as a whole via their paranoid-delusional practices.


3) Religion has no place in the education of children.
Ever.
If your beliefs are self-evident in their veracity, let your children discover them as adults.
Shoving texts and doctrines and dogma down their throats before they've even started cognitive development is nothing but forced indoctrination.
It does not lead to greater intelligence, curiosity, or creativity, but in too many cases leads to the stunting of all three.
The more and more deeply you indoctrinate them, the longer it will take them to develop a sense of self, because everything they attempt to make of themselves will be weighed down by your indoctrination.
In addition to placing pressure upon them from day 1 to live up to an unrealistic standard that completely ignores and in some cases subverts their individual personality.


4) Religion has no place in the government of adults.
Ever.
Forced indoctrination is the opposite of a free society, and thus should be prevented at all points from infringing upon the workings of it at all levels.

A pastor who pressures his congregation to vote a certain way has crossed the Wall of Separation, and should have his organization treated as a Party promoter rather than a charitable organization, and taxed to the full extent of the law.
A politician who attempts to use religious beliefs to justify an unjust law or unjust enforcement of a law should be removed from office immediately for the same reason.


People who try to force religion into government and education seem unwilling to be honest with themselves and just shout from the rooftops that they want a theocracy built around their particular dogma, but they continue to attempt to employ theocratic methods in their political maneuvering and PTA protests.



We tout ourselves as a nation of laws, as a nation of freedoms, as a nation of progress.
It is an ideal we routinely fail to reach, in great part because too many people refuse to accept anything as true which counters their own dogma, regardless of the evidence presented.
If we cannot move beyond this, we will continue to stagnate and rot from the inside out.

Goals?

It's 2:15 AM, and I'm in this weird limbo-state between reeally sleepy and reeeally trying to process all the sugar in my system so I don't crash.
So it's time to get existential:
So many motivational books/speeches tend to focus on you getting "what you've always wanted" or your "dream job," but they all seem to assume that you know what those are going in, that you have and have had a clear idea of where you want to be or what you want to be doing, and the difference between that idea and your current circumstances indicates that you aren't there yet.

But what if you don't have the clear idea necessary for partaking in their advice?

I read awhile back that "there's nothing stopping you from throwing pragmatic caution to the wind and taking a chance on what you really want," which is a nice image, and I'm sure somebody somewhere could take it to heart and take that first step.

But for myself, it's just that much more frustrating.
Even little cliches like "Dream big!" seem to have a big "N/A" over them for me.

The future is completely unknown territory, and the past just keeps piling up with seemingly zero progress made.
This perception isn't helped by the fact that I'm turning thirty in nine days and just finished filling out yet another job application for yet another minimum-wage retail job.

I don't think I would feel as hampered if I had some clear-cut goal, that I wanted with the fullness of my being and that was only kept from me by my own anxiety.

Every time I've attempted to explore the dark recesses of my own psyche, searching for some shining bit of passion that could become the above goal, the question of "HOW?" shoots it down every time.

Specifically "How are you going to pay for crap while attempting to achieve that goal?"
Especially since pretty much every search ends at either music or writing, and the question of money-in-the-meantime-as-a-married-man kills both.

So no progress is made, nothing new happens day to day, and I feel more and more worthless.
I have zero goals, zero motivation, and in my more introspective moments (like now), I feel on the verge of depression.

Even teaching seems like something I want to do for all the wrong reasons.
Not because I feel called to teach or because I love working with kids, but just so that I can feel like I'm using my education to get hired somewhere that provides health insurance.
Which I call "bringing more voices into the discussion," as if that would ever happen below the college level, and maybe not even then.

I feel like there's just nothing for me out there, nothing that can make use of my years of training while challenging me while providing greater financial stability.
And the stronger that feeling becomes the more I feel like a failure as a human being and a husband, especially as my wife pours more and more of herself into her dream-job, and takes on greater and greater stress trying to deal with our finances.