The one thing that hit me after writing the previous piece, "Why are you so angry?" was that there was one big issue that I should have finished with.

Because the whole piece made it seem like I was mostly angry that people didn't get why I was angry, and that's actually wrong. There are more irritating things than being simply misunderstood.

I'm not angry if you are ignorant of these issues, I'm disappointed.

I'm not angry if I think you're mislead.

I'm not angry if you disagree with me.

I'm not angry if you are passionate for things I don't believe in.

So then, what is the answer to the question?
Why am I so angry?

I guess the main reason is that I am angry because you are not.

If you are asking the question, "Why am I angry" that means you either do not know of the things that I listed before, in which case, you should learn about them, or you do not understand that those are things to get angry about.

It means that the entirety of the previous post was not news to you; you just didn't care.

Recently at work, I had the privilege of working the bar at the commitment ceremony of a lesbian couple. It was really nice, the decking area all decked out in reds and black, with an Asiatic theme. The DJ perhaps left something to be desired. Choosing "I kissed a girl" may have been in poor taste, especially as the song to play when the couple entered the room, but all in all it was a lovely service. In spite of all this, however, I spent most of the time where I wasn't serving and instead spent my energies on polishing glasses thinking about how either of these two women could more easily marry me, who they don't know, than each other, who they love, and how deplorable a situation that really was.

Recently in California, Proposition 8, an amendment to the Californian state constitution was passed, repealing the previously held right of same sex couples to marry.

Recent protests against the Mormon and Catholic churches in California in the wake of the passing of proposition 8 have been labeled as religiously motivated hatred and bigotry prompting many pot/kettle allusions. But the accusation of bigotry is the one that astounds me the most. If these people were bigots it would be a group of people being angry at the Mormon church because they're Mormons. The protesters aren't angry with the Mormon Church because they're Mormons. They're angry with the Mormon church because the Mormon Church raised millions of dollars and countless hours of grass roots campaigning for the sole purpose of removing the right these people had to marry the ones they loved.

The most irritating part of the question "Why are you so angry?" be it directed at gays, atheists, or any group, is the automatic assumption that losing your temper makes you lose the argument. That there is something wrong with justified anger and passionate condemnation.

There isn't.

What's wrong is when unjustified harm is inflicted on people, and people aware of such things remain indifferent. It's not enough to say "I am moral because I don't do bad." To be moral, one must not only refrain from committing evil, but one must stand against it whenever one sees it.

So yeah, I'm angry because of the blocking of stem cell research, abortions and same-sex marriage.
I'm angry about the abuse of children and the current situation where the pursuit of knowledge is under attack.

But I'm mostly angry that more people aren't angry, because when such things can slip by in the foreground and people don't pick up on the fact that it's a bad thing?

Well that's something to be angry about.

Instead of asking "Why are you atheists so angry?" Next time you find yourself about to ask it, ask yourself a question instead:

"Why aren't I?"

Yes, I know, I suck at regular updating. The agnosticism article is taking longer than expected, and I got sidetracked. But here we go, I have another essay of sorts to present. This is quite a big one though, prepare yourself.

Again, regular disclaimer... actually, scrap that, I'm doing away with the regular disclaimer for religously themed articles. I have a new stance, which I hope to elaborate on in this essay/rant, but it basically boils down to "These are merely words. Get over them."

With that out of the way, I present yet another soapboxy, atheism-themed thingumy, entitled "Why are you so angry?"

( Essay below cut )

So I was actually going to have a podcast and post links to the mp3s from here, but that fell through due to uploading/hosting issues.

Instead, I'll post a transcript of the second part of the first podcast, wherein I review the season finale of Doctor Who and ask your opinion on whether I should also post the first, possibly offensive to catholics, part on the recent eucharist desecration saga in Florida.

Aaaaanyway. You know the drill. Contains spoilers for the end of Donna Noble's season on DW, so if you are Australian, like me, but haven't downloaded/watched the finale, this may spoil. That said...

And with that comes the end of my first podcast-that-wasn't. Let me know if you want to hear my musings on transubstantiation, death-threats and celebrity toenail clippings. Otherwise, I'll be back next week with a review of what I've seen of Q.I., and a small piece on the intellectual poverty of agnosticism entitled "Agnosticism and puppy killling: an exercise in Godwin's Law Avoidance"


 

So it turns out that I'm VERY prone to exaggerating things beyond the point of metaphor. So much so that after what must be fifty seperate MSN messages on such topics as apocalyptic battles, tentacle beasts from an eldritch realm, the possibility of David Attenborough multiclassing to druid (Pshaw... he's totally an epic level sorceror.) in order to defend the new British Empire (As advanced my yours truly, after being promoted to director general of the BBC, a position that coincidentally happens to have more to do with World Domination than it does making quality television) , from French rebels who'd been hiding in the (magnificent) Parisian sewer system, using a humungous helium balloon to travel back in time and force my old schoolmates to act out the entire works of Shakespeare in T-shirts with embarrassingly un-funny slogans on (that'll teach them) by way of psychic posession and a teleprompter, etc. etc. I tend to miss the point I was going for by so much I land in another galaxy entirely where the bobble-headed aliens mistake me for their god.

At this point, the bobble-headed aliens mistake the works of nietzsche for prophecy and find myself chased by pitchfork weilding bobble-heads who think that "God is dead" is an instruction, either that or they think that if the prophecy doesn't come to pass terrible things will happen. Either way, my life is threatened most horribly by errors of translation. So I hop in my time machine and head back to Earth where, after a long and brutal struggle involving six sherpas, a grizzly bear, a panther, five tubs of yoghurt and a small wooden hamster, I finally reach the point I had been laboriously trying to get to for the last paragraph of hyperbole.

Of course half the time I end up thinking the scenarios I paint are less dissuasive and more ROCKING AWESOME. Example: after explaining to a friend that intimate relations between the two of us would likely result in the apocalypse, I suddenly realised that such a scenario gave me a fifty/fifty chance of riding a six-headed dragon into battle against a cthuloid monstrosity from beyond the edges of reason, and as if that weren't enough, after causing the breakdown of the universe, in the timeless void I wouldn't have to wait for a week before getting the next episode of Doctor Who. I mean sure, everyone I would have ever known and/or loved/been friends with/talked to would be dead by dragon fire (Save my friend who would instead be posessed by a cthuloid monstrosity) but you've got to look on the bright side.

So yeah, I guess what I've been trying to say with this post is "THE LATEST EPISODE OF DOCTOR WHO WAS THE MOST AWESOME THING THAT EVER AWESOMED AND I WANT IT TO BE NEXT SUNDAY ALREADY!"

EDIT: I would also like to take this opportunity to apologise to the English Language for using 'Awesome' as a verb.

EDIT the second: I would like to retract that previous apology. The English Language is a bitch that deserves everything it gets/got.

EDIT the third: Except Finnegan's Wake. Nothing deserves Finnegan's Wake.

Or are videogames really, REALLY, stupid…

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching/playing them immensely, I am a fanboy at heart. Cut me and I bleed pixels, but I really wish that script writers would please realise that the people watching their product want characters that have intelligence above that of a gnat…

 

Not content with forcing you to figure out that ‘oh I needed to take a photo of the random bystander and take it to the swamp where the tour guide would give me the special important quest item. But then I need to swap it for the letter to mama, and I can only do it while wearing the frog mask and hopping on one foot.’ This all from the fact that an irritating little bitch of a fairy floating above your head has said “HEY LISTEN I THINK YOU SHOULD LOOK FOR SOMETHING green”... No, not content with springing such stuff on us, they then proceed to teach us a song in an impossibly long cutscene, tell us that it invokes the protection of the magical goddess, then go on to have the irritating bitch say “HEY! LISTEN! I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO! WE NEED THE HELP OF THE MAGICAL GODDESS!” “GEE WHAT SHOULD WE DO? WE NEED TO SAY OUR PRAYERS BECAUSE ONLY THE GODDESS CAN HELP US NOW!” “HEY LISTEN!” All the while you are realising that the fairy cannot hear you yelling “LISTEN YOU STUPID BITCH! I REALISED I HAD TO PLAY THE SONG WHEN YOU TAUGHT IT TO ME DURING THE MAJOR PLOTPOINT! I DON’T NEED YOU TO TELL ME IT AFTERWARDS! I JUST SAT THROUGH 5 HOURS OF CUTSCENE! THE LEAST YOU COULD DO IS SHUT UP AFTERWARDS!” All the while getting funny looks from your parents for using foul language at a bunch of pixels.

We then get past this important opening five seconds of gameplay followed by seventeen hours of angsty cutscene in which some pop-psychology is invoked in telling you that blondie has an Oedipus complex and hates his father, while black mage is a slut and the summoner is a frigid bitch. We got that already… But no… on EXACTLY midnight, you need to give the letter to mama only to realise that the bitch has gone senile and thinks you’re her son, then proceeds to tell you a story that lasts a whole 24 hours.

I mean really… the Alzheimer’s sufferer can’t remember what her own son looks like but can remember 24 hours worth of boring story about giant imps and other magic mushroom dreams.

Okay, so these irritating side-quests are done with now… you think you’re safe. WRONG!

You finally defeat the final boss and it turns out he’s the semi-penultimate boss and there’s really a ‘power behind the throne’ or he was possessed by a demon, that’s always a popular one, or he actually sent himself back in time in order to become generic villain X who you haven’t seen for 5 discs of gameplay. So you go back in time, or through the vortex to another world or some shit like that and you arrive on, not a primitive setting, not a dungeon, but apparently the inside of people’s memories, which surprisingly look like a ruined city, full of powerful monsters, fallen clocktowers, chests with powerful items and a magic crystal that holds the source of all life on earth… sorry, ‘Terra’… You reach the final boss and it turns out he’s actually the embodiment of all evil, or the darkness within the human psyche and defeating him makes everything right with the world. Can I at least ONCE have a video game where there is an evil person who is responsible for his actions and defeating him only has the effect of removing him from the situation instead of turning everything into a promised land where everyone is happy and gaily skipping through the meadow?

Thought not…

Okay I suck at keeping a journal, that much is clear. I'd create a sockpuppet but then I'd get depressed because he'd have a much more exciting time than me.

eh.

Also I'm nineteen. (and can kill you with my brain)

I said this journal would be a soapbox for my own personal views, thoughts on philosophical things and chapters of novels, I have decided to include three more sections:
Reviews, Fanfiction, and Fantheories

Yes, I know, probably very boring stuff. But hey, I'm a nerd. What can I say?

Look forward to new things coming within:

"Rudd, Abbott and the Lesbian Witches of Southern Queensland: Faith in Politics and The Politics of Faith" - A philosophy essay on the politics of Australia, religion and why Tony Abbott knows not of what he speaks. (Also fleshed out in my mind somewhat, but probably not going to be written any time soon)

Just to finish up with a little epilogue...

"Aha!" cried the bible literalist. "But doesn't that mean that Satan was tricked into doing God's work? Doesn't that mean that God had a great victory over Satan by having him introduce philanthropy into the world?"
"If that were so, why would God have decided to punish humanity with pain and death then if he intended it?" James replied.
"Uh... God works in mysterious ways?" the bible literalist said
"That is SUCH a cop out..."

some time later, James runs into a different religious person

"Aha! I've got it!" The very reverend says. "Genesis is a cautionary tale telling us to follow God's word or we will all get ZOMGSPLOSION!"
"Really... so God intended us to think that if we didn't follow his instructions, we would be punished, even if we thought it was the right thing to do, and that comitting a deadly sin and being hypocritical is alright for a deity but not for anyone else?"
"Um... I guess..."
"And if it is a cautionary tale telling us to obey God, why didn't they have the disobediant act be something that is obviously morally reprehensible so we would be left with no doubt that God was trying to get us to be nice to each other and that he doesn't play dice with the universe?"
"Uh... God works in mysterious ways?"

Welcome again to Why We should all be Satanists The usual disclaimer to my religiously themed articles applies here. you read at your own risk, this is meant to spark interesting discussion, not to promote anti-theism. It is ENTIRELY tongue in cheek when I say things that are anti-theist. I'm merely trying to be philosophcal about the Christian, Jewish and Qu'uran dogma here.

Section 2: Human Morality
Ain't religion a wonderful thing.

Religion can spur people into doing great things. 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' is a great rule to follow, even if you, like me, don't believe in the big bearded bloke in the sky. The threat of hellfire also stops many people from doing bad things. In short, the fear of God and the love of God working together are a powerful force for good.

The distinction we must draw here, is what the bible tells us was INTENDED by God and what we have come up with ourselves and ATTRIBUTED to God.

Let's review the last section shall we? God does not intend to give us knowlege of the difference between good and evil.
Lucifer does.
Something cannot be called a mortal sin deserving of everlasting punishment if it is not known to be a sin, especially not one that you can inherit, in that case it is a minor, venial sin.

Okay, given this information, what can we extrapolate about the above.

Based on the following premises:
1: People do acts of good based upon the morals they follow.
2: One cannot be 'moral' without knowledge of good and evil.
and 3: Satan gave us the knowledge of good and evil

We can extrapolate the following:
All acts of good are attributable to morals
All morals are attributable to Satan
Therefore, all acts of good are attributable to not God, but... Satan?

Well don't those two have egg on their faces...

Hello and welcome to my second soapbox article.

This one may be considered offensive to Jews, Muslims, and Christians if you're easily offended. But if your faith can be rocked by my little LJ post, then perhaps that's a good thing. I use the Christian version of Genesis but as the Torah practically IS the OT, and the Qu'uran is the Torah with one extra prophet and arranged by length of verse instead of chronological date there shouldn't be much difference in the application of this article.
Yes my slightly tongue in cheek article is targeting this particular god, whatever you want to call him, Jehova, YHWH, Allah, whatever. That is because you guys represent the majority, and as such are the ones with the most to answer for. Take note that it tackles only the dogma, and not the people, if you choose to take the bible/torah/Qu'uran literally that is your prerogative, but equally so I have the prerogative to post this.

but that little disclaimer out of the way, without further ado, I present:
Why We Should All Be Satanists! (I did say read at own risk.)

Section one: Original Sin
Having gone to a Catholic primary school, I consider myself to know a little bit about this subject, but I will present it in a very irreverent script for those that need to catch up.

Scene 1: int 'Garden of Eden'

God: Oh, aren't I happy and joyful. I just created the world! Here, Adam, have a girlfriend*.
Adam: Oh, pretty! ^_^
God: Now behave you two... All that you see is yours, except that easily accessible and conspicuous tree over there with the big neon sign saying DO NOT TOUCH! Yes I am that naive.
Adam and Eve: TRALALALALA! *Skip merrily*

Scene two: by tree
Eve: Tralalala... I am naive of all things moral.
Adam: As am I... ooh! a flower! {exit}
Satan, he who is called Lucifer, spawn of the very darkness itself, prince of lies, king of all that is evil: What a brilliant idea I just had! I'll turn myself into a snake.
Eve: I am lazing under a pretty tree which I'm not allowed to eat, oh what fun.
Satan, spawn of whatever (in snake form): Hey Eve, you know what would be REALLY cool?
Eve: No...
Lucifer: Eating that fruit thingy.
Eve: But God said not to.
Lucifer: Hey, you guys don't know the difference between good and evil anyway, or at least you won't until you eat the fruit, so how do you know disobeying God is a bad thing?
Eve: Point *eats*
Adam: ZOMG!
Eve: Eat up! It's nice!
Adam: *Shugs* whatever.
Eve: I feel funny, I have a feeling that we've just done something bad.
Adam: Too late now... maybe if we say we're really sorry...
Eve: We shouldn't even be sorry, because we shouldn't know the difference between good and evil!
Adam: Point... HIDE!
they hide

Scene three: Also by tree
Adam: Uh... God, we're really sorry, but we ate from your tree thingy.
God:...
Adam: Uh... God?
Eve: I think we broke him...
God:...
Adam:...
Lucifer: XD
God: ZOMGSPLOSION! WRATH**! PAINOFCHILDBIRTH! BANISHMENT FOREVER!

Scene four: Outside Eden
Angel: Um... isn't sending them out into the wilderness as mortals and making me guard this gate thingy with a flaming sword a bit too much like overkill?
God:...
Angel: Shutting up...

Pan to Adam and Eve. Eve is trying, unsuccessfully, to start a fire.

Adam: Well this sucks...

*I choose not to address apocryphal stories about Lillith at this point, because of its irrelevance to the article. THAT's a subject for another time.
**isn't that a deadly sin anyway?
Fin

*Waits for applause*
Okay, so that was the slightly condensed version.
Anyway.
A couple of points need to be addressed here.

You would not punish a small child for something they didn't know was wrong, would you?
Of course not, you would explain to them first that it was wrong and you shouldn't kick daddy there because it hurts quite a bit. Then you punish them if they re-offend.
So by extension, can you call something a sinful act if the person doesn't know it's sinful?
Wikipedia has the following to say on sin:
"any willful disregard for the norms revealed by God is a sin." Any willful disregard. So really, the name of 'original sin' does not stand here.
Catholocism also states the following about the different types of sin:
According to Catholicism, a venial sin is a sin which meets at least one of the following criteria:

1. it does not concern a "grave matter",
2. it is not committed with full knowledge, or
3. it is not committed with both deliberate and complete consent.

Such a sin involves a "temporary loss of grace" from God.

Temporary loss of grace. Does "ZOMGSPLOSION! WRATH! EVENTUALDEATH! PAINOFCHILDBIRTH! ETERNALBANISHMENT!" sound temporary to you?

I didn't think so.

So to recap:
God creates people who don't know that disobeying him is a Bad Thing. When they eventually do, as newly created curious beings with no concept of morality are eventually going to do, he blows up in their face and curses them with, among other things, mortality, childbirth pain and eternal banishment for paradise on Earth.
God is Love

first soapbox-ey type article.
And, like my MSNSpace blog says, entirely due to V for Vendetta.
I highly reccomend watching that if you haven't
Without further ado...

Morals, Who Needs 'Em?

After watching the movie 'V for Vendetta' my sister and I were driving back home, chatting about the various philosophical issues relevant to the movie. One was pertinent to the question "Who were the 'good guys' of the film. Our discussion went something like this.
Is a man judged by his motives or his actions. If it is by his actions, then is it by their reasoning or their consequences.
It can't be by their consequences, Would you call a man who leaps in front of a bus to save his 5 year old daughter, but who in doing so accidentally sends the bus careening into a wall, killing all inside, a 'bad man'? you cannot. The man, while responsible for the deaths of those people, did not intend to kill them. We do not punish people who commit manslaughter the same as we do murderers, and this is because of the distinction we draw between consequence and intent.
Yet it cannot be their reasoning for the same reason. If we will admit that mistakes are less morally reprehensible, then we must also say that reasoning based on a flawed premise must also fall under this umbrella, because people do not know they are reasoning under a flawed premise, if they knew it was flawed, then it would not be reason, it would be emotion.
Yet also it cannot be someone's motives. Hitler is the epitome of a 'Very Bad Man' in western culture, yet if you look at his motives, he wanted to 'make the world a better place' admittedly, by removing the Jews, the homosexuals, the disabled and the gypsies from it.
One cannot say that trying to 'make the world a better place' is a *bad* thing, now can they? We regard Hitler's actions as morally reprehensible and thus regard him as a Very Bad Man. Yet we have just seen that neither someone's actions, nor the reasoning behind it can be what a man is judged on.
So what is it that defines a person as good and bad?
It must be the opinion of the judge. For without a judge, how can someone be judged?
Yet there seems to be something very wrong with saying that Hitler was a bad man just because people think he is. Does that mean that if everyone thought killing the Jews was a good idea then it *would* be?

At this point we decided not to continue this line of philisophical thought, and move onto the topic of how silly it is to blow up a building surrounded by innocent civillians and your supporters.
What with the debris, and the schrapnel and the death and the GLAVEN!

Okay, sorry about that bad link. I've changed the permissions to public so anyone can see it now.

Hey! a lot has happened since my last update.
In fact, four months have happened.
Rowing is over, and for PAC rowing, over forever, at least from the viewpoint of an oarsman, I may come back to coach.
HMS Pinnafore is coming along well... I've been cast as the evil one yet again. Methinks Mr Hopkins is trying to tell me something there...
I've started a new novel, and this time... SHOCK HORROR! It's not fantasy! Look out for "Death of a Dowager" my new murder mystery, 1920's style, to be posted chapter by chapter in this journal.

Year twelve is going swimmingly.
I didn't get too drunk at the HOR afterparty, or at least not as much as Ed Stollery who spent the night shirtless and hanging from the ceiling.

Methinks I need to spice up this livejournal a bit so I will be using this as a soapbox and novel chapter posting centre from now on. If you want to find stuff to do with my day to day life, go here: http://spaces.msn.com/le-moff-jeune/

50,343 / 50,000 (100.7%)

That is all I have to say.

NaNoWriMo update

20,573 / 50,000 (41.1%)

30,000 words with fifteen days remaining (including today) makes 2,000 words a day. I can handle that...

I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month. Huzzah.

5,226 / 50,000 (10.5%)

</update>

I saw Howl's Moving Castle with my Girlfriend on Tuesday. It's an excellent movie. Doesn't live up to Diana Wynne Jones' book, but it's a really good film in its own right. All Miyazaki films are, I also saw another one, Laputa - Castle in the Sky. Methinks I'm going to have to look more into this Miyazaki fellow, he's a very good director.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I had a girlfriend before this post. I really should be going squee over that onstead of a movie... *Sheepish grin*

Her name's Beth Forest and she's about my shoulder height with dark-blondish/lightish-brown hair. Really nice, incredibly insane. Her friend Ellen is even freakier though... scary people this girl has for friends. We catch the train together after school and she's a former rower as well so we have a lot in common. (If you did rowing you'd understand why that one thing is a LOT in common.)

Speaking of which, rowing season has started, as has my new writing project that I mentioned earlier (See entry from April 7th). I have the plot all planned out finally and I'm ready to start writing chapters. It's called Siren Song and is based in a generic city with a generic boarding school and generic teachers, except for three who happen to be amzing magical people who fight the forces of evil.

Click here.
Take the quiz.
Post your results.
( See Guestyperson's results. )

REAL reasons Americans/Australians/bigoted idiots are opposed to gay marriage...

1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans/Australians/bigoted idiots always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

2) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

3) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

4) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

5) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britney Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

6) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

8) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America/Australia.

9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

</sarcasm>

I laughed so hard when I saw that on Hikaness' journal. So true.