I have been thinking a lot lately about where I came from, and I realized there is a huge problem with Christianity. Where do people come from? I mean, our ’souls’? The obvious reason for the lack of explanation is that religion is entirely a construction of man, and men are far more preoccupied with where they are going when they die than where they were before they were born, but let’s just humor the idea for a moment.

It’s possible, I’m sure, to come up with some half-baked explanation that fits with the bible, but the fact remains that it just doesn’t say. That’s right, the book of infinite wisdom, and everything you would ever need to know, provides no answer. I think that we should let that sink in.

We could imagine, as I am sure Christians do, that souls are created at the moment of conception, but then where do all the spontaneously aborted fetuses go? Heaven, or hell? They surely haven’t had the chance to sin yet, so they must go to heaven, right? If so, abortion should be OK, right? Christian women should be happy to abort their babies if it guarantees that they will go to heaven. One sin, for which they can be forgiven, can be their child’s ticket to everlasting bliss. Seems like a worthy sacrifice to me.

The alternative to this is of course that the soul is created the body some time later in the pregnancy, but then their whole ‘moment of conception’ pro-life stand is bullshit.

The other explanation is that we exist before, and that god assigns us a body. If that is so, then our souls have to be somewhere, heaven or hell, before conception. Nothing leaves hell, and unless you are a Catholic, heaven is the only alternative, so we have all experienced heaven before. Following that line of logic, since god is omniscient, he knows before we are born if, at conception, he is sentencing a sinless being to hell. Which makes him a pretty cruel motherfucker to go through with it. If we all stop having kids, however, then they can’t go to hell, and when we die, every family member we would ever have would meet us graciously at the gates of heaven. We could forgo the apocalypse, and all join god’s army, and single-handedly destroy sin. You may argue that that would be tampering with the will of god, but if anything ever happens at all, it must be the will of god. God allowed Hitler. In fact, me saying this right now is the will of god.

Shit! How easy it is to slip into this nonsense.

The point is, where we come from says a lot more about metaphysics than where we are going, and we are left to imagine. The bible explains nothing — not like we didn’t already know that — , but the only explanations we have are sheer fantasy, concocted on the spot to fill in the gaps that the religion has left, and if you are religious, you know damn good and well that, as you were reading this, you were trying desperately to fill in the gaps.

I have the answer for you though: religion is fake. There is no reason to believe in any of it, other than being indoctrinated at a young age, and having a mind so weak that you cannot cope with death, so that you have to make believe you are going to live forever. Where do we come from? Nowhere. And we are soon to be going back. If you can’t wrap your head around the impermanence and inconsequentiality of your life, then you are arrogant indeed.

Merry Christmas.

I don’t normally consider my colorblindness a handicap, because there are far more serious disabilities, but from time to time it really gets to me that I can’t tell when meat is done, or what color a highlighter is.

One recent incident that really got on my nerves was at a dinner for an SFSU orientation. When we signed in, they gave us survey cards to fill out. Since there were so many people, they had to split the dinner service between two floors, and guess how we were supposed to tell which floor we got to eat on? That’s right, the color of our survey cards. Problem was, the cards were fluorescent pink and purple: two of the colors I can’t easily distinguish. So, I was left with a choice between potentially showing up at the wrong dinner line, and asking a complete stranger what color my card was. I went with the latter because I thought it would be less embarassing.

Again, I know that this isn’t that serious of a disability, but it is really frustrating sometimes. One of the worst things is color-coded topographical features. Like this map of France, which supposedly shows a geographical feature called the ‘Massif Central.’ Not like I could ever tell.

(Keep in mind that I have the most difficulty with orange, red, green, and yellow, because I see them all as the same color: your yellow)

It’s true that it isn’t colorblindness per se, rather a color deficiency in the warm end of the spectrum, so I can usually tell what is going on if I look hard enough, but for some reason, neon colors are near impossible. This means that for all these color-keyed things, like maps and diagrams, I usually have to resign myself to not getting it.

I just wish people could be a little more sensitive to my kind. I feel bad comparing colorblindness to a real disability, but there are surely more of us than, let’s say, wheelchair bound people, and they seem to get accommodated at great expense. All it would take for us is using different colors for color coding. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of them.

I keep getting these terrible headaches lately. I don’t know where they come from, because there is no common denominator between their occurrences. They happen when I drink, or when I abstain from drinking; when I am stressed or relaxed; tired or awake; when I have had coffee, and when I haven’t; when I am dehydrated, or not. It’s really bothersome.

Usually I don’t tell anyone about it, because they go away on their own, and I already have a bit of a reputation as a hypochondriac, but twice in the last couple months they have been so bad that I thought I was going to die. The last time I went to the emergency room, and I thought it was a reaction to some medicine I was taking. They gave me a Cat Scan, and sent me home, and I felt better.

Last night I had another bad one though. It set in around 9 PM, and I tried to sleep it off, but I woke up within an hour of going to bed, and I was really disoriented. It felt a little like being high on pot, you know, that fractured reality feeling. The best way I can describe it is like my whole world was cardboard cutouts, like the ocean waves they use in theater. Plus there was this tickly feeling like the one you get in your throat when you are eating a cold hot dog. The whole world felt tickly that way. The pain was only on the left side of my head, radiating down into my left ear and neck.

Anyway, it eventually went away, but only after I wandered around in the street for an hour at 2 AM. I didn’t get back to sleep until probably 330 or 4, so naturally I am a little tired today.

I don’t really worry about them because I had that brain scan, but it is still disruptive to my routine, and a little unnerving.

When I first read this headline, I had to do a doubletake to make sure it was December 1st and not April.

I mean seriously, this president is leaving office with the second lowest approval rating of all time, the nation at war(s), a failed economy, and having drastically lowered America’s world standing, but there are still people willing to give him awards? Oh, right, Christians.

Rick Warren, mega-pastor and master of irony, invented this award specifically for the occasion. I guess we should expect nothing less from a man whose claim to fame is as a leader of self-described “sheep,” who consider it a virtue to ignore reason.

The medal is to be awarded for

“alleviating…pandemic diseases, extreme poverty, illiteracy, self-centered leadership and spiritual emptiness”

Well, I sure as hell can’t speak for everyone, but here on the home front diseases are up, poverty is skyrocketing, literacy is down, I am feeling pretty ignored by my leadership, and lack of spirituality is at a lifetime high.

Great news! They killed the guy who masterminded the assemble-a-bomb-on-the-plane scheme.

Now that we have gotten rid of the bad apple, we bunch can once again have toothpaste and lotion on planes, right? What’s that you say? Never again?

You know, if inconvenience can be ranked with death on the scale of “Things That Ruin Your American Lifestyle,” then the terrorists have already won a million times over.

You cannot convince me that this woman is pro-life. Not because she eats turkey, but because she, and the people she hires for PR, obviously have an irreverent attitude towards killing.

She just cackles with that shit-eating grin all the while…

I have been meaning to write about this for a while, but am just now getting around to it.

At my work, I used to have two trash cans. One of them was the big blue one with the triangle of arrows that I am sure you have seen, and it was for recycling, while the other one was just a plain black bin, and it was for all other garbage.

Only after separating my trash faithfully like a good little recycler for three months did I find out that the janitor had been instructed to throw both bins into the garbage.

I was pissed! I mean I was even pulling the staples out of paper to go in that bin! Hell, I even meticulously removed the little plastic windows from of envelopes before tossing them in. Come to find out that all my recycling had been in vain. What a joke.

Anyway, the firm decided at some point that it was going to institute a real recycling policy, and so they made this big huzzah about how we were going to get new bins, and so that offered at least some consolation. Until I saw the bins…

They took away my blue bin (don’t even ask me why I had it in my office in the first place if there was no recycling policy in effect), leaving the black bin, which would be now relegated to recycling, and got us this stupid little hang on bin that is supposed to be for non-recyclable trash:

One problem is that the black can is actually smaller than the original blue bin, and seeing as most of my job consists of pushing paper, it fills up way too fast. Not to mention, the hang on bin is, as you can see, absurdly small.

It basically only holds a grande size Starbucks drink, so if I want to fit anything else in there, I have to crush all my trash. I usually cook my lunch on paper plates, so I have to fold them in half and then arrange all the small bits in the space between them. It ends up looking like a sidways garbage taco. (I would like to recycle the plates, but they refuse to take anything that has even touched food.)

And, finally, if you put anything heavy in it, has a tendency to tip over, which is a huge pain in the ass if there is anything liquid in it.

I really just don’t understand why the janitor can’t cope with two cans.

This whole affair would have been a nice aside in the movie Office Space.

After reading this story this morning, in which a woman was allegedly mugged, and had a “B” carved into her face by a crazed Obama supporter, I considered writing a blog about how she was probably making it up. It seemed unlikely to me that she would be mugged, beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, an mutilated with a “B” in her face, all in one go, as some sources claimed. I mean, come on, what kind of fish story is that?

First off, I wouldn’t credit a criminal with being that well organized to make such a coordinated multi-prong monetary/political/sexual attack.

Second off, the so-called “B” was FREAKING BACKWARDS!

This just screams “I’m too dumb to realize things are reverse when I am looking in a mirror.”

Anyway, I felt pretty bad after making these judgments against someone who was probably genuinely hurt, so I decided to keep my mouth shut. Come to find out later, she made it up.

What an idiot.

“And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”

     Genesis 4:8-10

“And he answered me saying: ‘This is the spirit which went forth from Abel, whom his brother Cain slew, and he makes his suit against him till his seed is destroyed from the face of the earth, and his seed is annihilated from amongst the seed of men.”

     Book of Enoch 22:7 (Non-canonical book of the old testament removed by the Jews ^[1])

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In Gaelic tradition, surnames are derived by adding Mac (meaning “son of”) to the name of one’s father, or Ó (meaning “grandson of”) to the name of one’s grandfather. However, Mac is often shortened to Mc. ^[2]

–

Given that John Sidney is, by his own name, a “son of Cain”, and that since Abel’s murder it has been his charge to eradicate the progeny of Cain, I think it is a little risky to vote in a president whom God might smite at any time.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch
2. http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/surname/index.htm

Sarah Palin doesn’t consider people who bomb abortion clinics to be terrorists.

What happened to the unswerving dedication to “life”? Aren’t you pro-life?

Oh, there is that whole business about you killing moose, and then killing wolves so they don’t kill the moose that you want to kill. And supporting war. And supporting the death penalty.

Yeah, I guess you’re pro-life…