For the most part i’m a pretty normal American girl; i graduated from public high school and a four-year university, i work my nine-to-five every weekday, i drive an SUV and i eat a largely unrestricted diet. I like shopping for clothes and watching reality TV. I’m an enthusiastic sci-fi fan so one might label me a geek, but any label like that rings more of conformity than anomaly. George Lucas would cheerfully tell you that i’m not the only one who has ever grown to love Star Wars.

Some of the things i’m most passionate about, however, are fairly unpopular and do set me somewhat apart. Indie music, atheism and the desire to remove myself from the gene pool are the big ones that come to mind, although i’d be willing to bet that those things tend to go hand-in-hand in people (i.e. there are probably proportionally a lot more atheists who don’t want babies than Christians who feel the same way). Music aside, this point of view does tend to color the whole world in a slightly different hue for me. I’m a skeptic. I question things. I take the world at face value, and for the most part i’m totally enchanted by it anyway.

So if i see things from such a different point of view, why is this whole materialistic wedding thing still so important to me? What do the gown and the flowers and the cake all have to do with my commitment to my husband-to-be?

First of all, i love my family. I have family all over the country, and a wedding is a great way to get all of them together for an evening. We don’t really do family reunions, so weddings and funerals are the way it happens. This gathering is also a way of officially welcoming Nathan into the family, because to me that’s what marriage essentially is: becoming family. Besides, i want a celebration, and what could possibly make a single day better than gathering all the people i love together to share in the joy? I’m going to need some of my dearest friends to be there, too, and Nathan will of course have his closest friends and relatives there as well. Say, about 100 people.

This necessitates food, because Nathan and i love to feed people and family gatherings are almost never without a meal of some sort. I don’t want to do the cheaper cocktail hour thing; we’re doing dinner. And drinks. And we’re gong to need a dessert, so why not a cake? While we’re at it, let’s make everything look beautiful and taste delicious so that everyone will really enjoy themselves. Food. Flowers. Music. Linens. Candles. That’s probably 75% of the cost of the whole wedding, right there.

More importantly, i’m going to be taking a vow which i want all of those people i love to witnesses. Getting married is practical in its own way, but it’s also symbolic. I’m pledging my love and loyalty to Nathan, and i’m taking it very seriously. I want people to see my sincerity – not because their observation will make me more sincere, but because each of them is a part of my life and i want them to see firsthand this terribly important moment.

And this, of course, necessitates that i wear a really fabulous dress when all of those eyes are falling on me. And my hands can’t just be empty, so i’ll need some beautiful flowers to carry. And petals to walk on, so that i’m not just shuffling across the grass. And [Science!] knows i need professional help with my hair, because i’m absolutely impaired when it comes to hairdos.

I’m a designer. I value aesthetic beauty, and i’m willing to pay other designers to create a visually – and delectably – fantastic day for us. I’m not saying i’m spending top-dollar for everything (otherwise i’d be getting married in some sort of castle, right?) and i highly doubt that “traditional” will be the word people use to describe this wedding after it happens. But to me a wedding should involve plenty of people, food, drink, flowers, candles, music, and one very flattering, stunningly beautiful white dress.

Despite all the buzz that’s been filling the media of all sorts for years about Eat, Pray, Love, i never had any interest in the book solely because of that ominous middle word, pray. A book like this is meant for entertainment and when you see the world one way and the author sees it another, it’s just hard to get anything out of it. However, having read and enjoyed the sequel Committed (which contained very little mention of religion or spirituality) and seeing that the movie was set to come out on my birthday, i decided to give Eat, Pray, Love a shot anyway.

First of all, i was hoping to learn more about why Elizabeth Gilbert decided to leave her marriage. The book does a good job of illustrating how completely incapacitated she was by the unhappiness she felt with her marriage and suggests that there was definitely a very good reason for all that misery, but fails to actually disclose what exactly the problem was. Gilbert says the reasons are “too sad and too personal” to write about, and so she doesn’t. And so i still can’t feel for her at all.

Here’s my problem with this: she chose to write this book. She disclosed a lot of personal stuff in the book (like the page about masturbation that made me want to go bury my head deep in a sand dune). She didn’t want to tell her ex-husband’s secrets, but he hates her anyway so why not go ahead and write about it and maybe help someone else’s marriage in so doing? Her divorce made her miserable, which made her have to go on a spiritual journey, which ended when she forgave herself for destroying her marriage. I see some sort of animal eating its own tail here. And the weirdest part is that she ends up getting married again. I’m sure that all of this is more complicated than i’m making it out to be and i definitely agree that marriages just need to end sometimes, but Elizabeth Gilbert has told me everything about these five years of her life except for what sparked it all and i’m left just wishing to know WHY.

Whatever it was that happened, it made her decide to pursue pleasure, spirituality, and a balance between the two. So she goes to Italy and that’s all fun and good. And then she goes to India and subjects herself to little sleep, little social interaction, a lot of hard work and a ton of chanting and meditation. This is the part i couldn’t relate to at all. Except maybe the beginning of it when she’s all whiny about the whole thing, ’cause that’s what i would feel like, too, in a place like that. But then it gets pretty mystical and i couldn’t help thinking “of course you’re going to start seeing electric snakes and stuff when you do that sort of thing to your brain.”

By the way – i’m going to excuse myself if i’ve used tenses incorrectly here because this is a blog and nobody is paying me for it, but Elizabeth Gilbert bounces from one tense to another in this book with a truly distracting frequency that to me just makes no sense. I think someone needs to go back and edit it one more time.

In Bali she meets a lot of interesting people and falls in love and seems to be a normal person again. Elizabeth Gilbert certainly is good at making friends with people, and i can imagine that traveling the world eating delicious food and talking to interesting people would be pretty great. I didn’t get the whole spiritual bit though, and i think the book was hyped way beyond its actual value. Overall, i’d say it was an okay book.

I did go see the movie on my birthday, and i thought the beginning where she just up and leaves her husband was even sadder on screen than in the book. I felt really sorry for her ex-husband. The spirituality was down-played and some plot elements were added for effect, but i think for the most part the movie was true to the story and, much like the book, all-in-all it was pretty alright. Save your $5.50-9 and get it at the Red Box some day.

How do you people sleep at night?

(Mom has become a recurring theme in my end-of-year posts. Maybe i should continue referring to what i think she thinks of me in the two to follow.)

Early this year i became sort of fascinated with pregnancy. Since my latter two years of college, i’ve had quite a few dreams in which i am pregnant or have a very tiny baby, so that’s probably what got me interested. That and reading dooce and subsequently watching videos on momversation, and also just being at that age where a lot of people i know are starting their adventures in procreation.

So i read a couple of tales of pregnancy; Accidentally On Purpose and It Sucked and then I Cried (dooce’s book). I learned all kinds of things, like what an episiotomy is and what post-partum depression is like and how very, very little sleep new parents get – and good stuff, like that giving birth can be an almost spiritual experience that may make you feel even more deeply connected to your husband. And guess what? I’m never, ever having a baby. EVER. I got really tired of hearing about the whole thing, especially what’s coming out of either end of a baby at any given moment. I’m definitely over it.

The other topic that my reading this year covered was, of course, atheism. For a while there i was really passionate about it and i enjoyed writing about it until my writings garnered what i maintain were some really unfair accusations. And i noticed that i was really pissing off some of my close friends and relatives, and i was forced to realize that i don’t have the power to change the way people think about things. I decided that it just isn’t worth damaging personal relationships to keep trying. Religion is a topic i really wish people could discuss and talk freely about, but the world isn’t ready yet. I’ve given up on being passionate about this, just like i gave up on being passionate about liberalism and vegetarianism and environmentalism in the past because i realized that it was not making me happy, it was making me miserable. Wanting to change the world is a miserable thing, so this year i want to focus on what i love about it, and read more on that.

On Friday we saw The Invention of Lying. I was really excited to see this film because i came up with the idea of an alternate universe where people haven’t evolved the ability to lie a couple of years ago. I contemplated writing some sort of script or book about it, but that sort of thing takes far too much patience for me and it never happened. Thankfully, someone else had the very same idea and turned it into a movie.

I loved the part about religion, of course. Surprisingly, i hadn’t even thought of that aspect of a world without lying. In the movie, there is no religion until the main character invents the lie, and subsequently tells a big fib about what happens after death. Everyone is overjoyed to hear that you go to the most wonderful place you can think of after death. It makes plenty of sense that they would be. But when the main character goes on to describe the “man in the sky” who decides whether we go to that good place or instead to a bad place, the headlines read “finally, a reason to be good.”

I don’t understand this bit. In a world with no lying, everyone would have to own up to the bad things they did immediately, and face the consequences right away as well. Wouldn’t there be plenty of reasons to be good in a world like that?

Anyway. Onward.

The characters were terribly flat. Apparently “no lying” also means “disclose everything” and nobody really has a personality to speak of. The chemistry between the two main characters wasn’t believable at all. The complete lack of graphic design in this universe rather confused me, considering that the fashion was plenty imaginative, and the characters are able to dream up images and talk about them. I decided back when i came up with this idea that there would still be acting and art if there was no lying. I feel like the movie hinted at the fact that life without lies would just be colorless and unhappy, but i think they could have explored the possibilities so much more deeply. The Invention of Lying is ultimately just another romantic comedy, and i think it could have been so much more.

On Saturday we watched Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which is one of Hayao Miyazaki’s oldest films. It’s older than i am, in fact. I think i first saw Princess Mononoke almost exactly ten years ago, which makes me feel slightly old. I read a few of the Nausicaa graphic novels not long after that, so the film has been a long time coming for me – especially since i never got to the end of the story. This movie was more similar to PM than Miyazaki’s other works, and i enjoyed it immensely. I think it’s now my second-favorite. If you like Miyazaki, post-apocalyptic stuff and/or really imaginative stories, watch this one for sure.

Finally, last night we saw Where The Wild Things Are. Knowing that the book is very short, i expected a lot of embellishment on the story. There was indeed much added action, and yet the plot was almost as simple as that of the original book. I thought it was funny at times and spectacular at others and imaginative through and through, but the wild things had strangely human personalities – and stupid ones at that. I felt like i was watching a childish drama play out among a group of trashy white people. Nothing was resolved at the end. Really, the movie took the book and added a bunch of loose ends to it. The most important thing was the way Max learned and changed while he was away from home – or at least, we can assume that he changed his ways upon returning. The film felt awkward at times, but it was definitely entertaining and somewhat thought-provoking, so i give it a thumbs-up.

And i believe that brings the total number of movies i’ve seen so far this year to forty-seven.

Two weeks after purchasing the book, i found myself unenthusiastically getting through the last forty pages of The Lost Symbol. Up until that point it was a regular Dan Brown page-turner; formulaic but entertaining with a nice little twist toward the end that i didn’t see coming. The one thing that really bothered me was the usual heroine scientist’s discussions of her research in the field of Noetic Science which would, once published, prove beyond a doubt that people are more than just flesh and blood. People have souls and can use their mind-power to alter matter outside of the body, and God most definitely exists. I asked myself why that pissed me off, and i decided that if such research was actually published, i would learn about it and grant it whatever it did in fact prove, but at this point i can’t conceive of any science that could do any such thing. The mere idea is a little aggravating.

The last forty pages of The Lost Symbol really drove the metaphysical point home, though. Apparently the thesis of this action-packed work of fiction is that God is within all of us, and our belief in him is what has always unified people and will bring peace to the world (never mind the fact that there are very peaceful people – and whole cultures, in fact – who don’t believe in any god).

My first thought was, okay, whatever, this little fiction book, like many other things, was not created with people like me in mind. Perhaps Dan Brown is trying to smooth the ruffled feathers of believers with this book by emphasizing the importance of religious belief in general and no particular church (especially not the Catholic church) in particular. But, then again, i know a lot of religious people who might be put off by the idea, maniacally pursued by several of the book’s main characters, that God is literally in us; that we people are all gods or can become gods. Not that i think anyone will ban the book from their libraries for that reason, nor that atheists, who are perhaps the latest victims of Brown’s feather-ruffling novels, ought to. I’ve come to realize that there’s nothing Dan Brown could have written about religion or God without rubbing somebody out there the wrong way. And after all, it’s only a novel.

As far as the book goes, i wasn’t as enamored with it as i was with Angels and Demons, partly because i’m not familiar with Washington, D.C., whereas i had enjoyed the memory-lane tour of Rome in the latter book. The Lost Symbol seemed to drag a little at first. Robert Langdon was tricked into solving the puzzles this time, and dragged his feet for half the plot line accordingly. Once things got cooking, it was fun to read. I’d say it’s definitely worth a week of your time, especially if you’re patriotic and have your own particular brand of faith.

At the risk of igniting a new string of impassioned comments, i’d like to just point out a couple of things i saw in the text:

1. Albert Einstein called belief in a personal god “childish”.

2. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychology, called people who believe in a god “illusioned”, and suggested that they could also be referred to as delusional.

Now that everyone has gotten all pissed off about my last post, my bitching has once again been vindicated by a reversal of the bad idea at hand (see also: the Tropicana redesign and subsequent reversal after my complaint). The Des Moines Register reported today that DART will replace the Iowa Atheists & Freethinkers’ ad campaign on their buses as a result of meeting with the group earlier this week, getting a lot of complaints from people like me and being pestered by the The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa about the legality of removing the signs.

So Iowa is still a pretty cool place i guess, except for our governor Culver, who unfortunately sided with the people who were “disturbed” by the ads. That’s probably the most disappointing part of this whole controversy.

The Des Moines Register reported yesterday that some signs which had been commissioned by the Iowa Atheists & Freethinkers to appear on local DART buses were taken down on Tuesday after being up for only three days because so many people were calling DART to complain about them. The signs simply read, “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.”

I want someone to tell me how that message is offensive in any way. It’s as if believers are tortured by the mere notion that non-believers exist and might have the HUMAN emotion of loneliness, or the desire to identify with other people who feel the same way. Do you just want to think of us as inhuman or deny our existence altogether? Because that’s the only explanation i can fathom for someone wanting these signs to be taken down.

I see the “-God” billboards all the time. I see the “Babies are a gift from God!” signs all over the place. There are church marquees and hand-made “Jesus Loves You!” signs by the Iowa roadsides and bible verses on my shopping bags and cross necklaces on everyone and “In God We Trust” on my money, but i don’t have the audacity to demand that it all be removed from my sight. It’s obvious that i’m a member of a minority, and i think it’s sad that atheists can’t even reach out to one another and talk amongst ourselves because believers see that sort of public communication as an attempt to convert EVERYONE to our way of thinking. As if believers weren’t trying to do just that!

Look, i would love to be able to express the way i see things clearly enough to open someone’s eyes to it, but that is something i don’t really attempt because i feel it’s beyond my reach. Atheists aren’t trying to convert people, we are merely standing up to be counted, mainly to feel a little less alienated and alone. We just want to know that other people like us exist and let them know that they are accepted, if only by the others like us. Some groups in other states have attempted to also let the general public know that “atheist” does not necessarily mean “immoral person” (see photo above), and their efforts have been met with an identical outpouring of fear and blindness. It’s not an anti-Christian or anti-God or anti-anything message. It’s just a statement! “You don’t have to believe in God to be a good person” – how is that threatening?? Most people don’t even believe it, so why can’t they just laugh it off and go about their charmed, eternal lives?

Shortly after we had walked through the door, put our things down, taken a short tour of the lower levels of the house and taken a seat in the living room to discuss weather and fishing conditions, Nathan’s grandmother decided to share with us a newspaper article about a veteran of the Vietnam war who lived in their small town and was apparently related to them somehow. She read the story of how he’d been shot at close range by an enemy soldier, the bullet ripping up through his leg and into his torso. His fellow soldiers left him for the medics to find, but more than a day passed before that happened and still he managed to survive. He was so glad that he’d been raised in a Christian home, he was quoted as saying, because his faith in God meant that he was not alone, lying there in that field.

Oh fuck, i thought. First his aunt’s complete disregard for me while we visited them at the pond an hour hence, reminiscent exactly of the treatment her sister (Nathan’s mother) had given me for a month or so after she found out about my atheism. Now an oral reading of this Christian tale. I was in for it. They’d been told.

His grandmother turned to me, sitting a couple cushions away from her on the couch, hands on my crossed knees. “I’d like to ask you something,” she said, and my blood started to run cold. “What church do you go to, honey?”

I glanced over her shoulder at Nathan, who mouthed the word “sorry” as he grimaced. I knew that with a single assertion, “I don’t believe in God and probably never will,” i could have opened a great truthful chasm between us, but i couldn’t do that to Nathan. I knew he’d take my side in the ensuing battle, and his relationship with his family would never be the same. It wasn’t my decision to make. “I don’t go to church.” I said with a smile, anticipating the onslaught of further questions.

“Did you ever go to church, maybe when you were younger, with your family or something?”

“Yes, when i was young i went to church.”

“What church was it?”

“I believe it was a baptist church.”

“And did you stop going when your family stopped?”

“They didn’t go with me, actually.”

“You went all alone? Well, that was very brave of you to go to church without your family.”

“I went with a friend. I wanted to sing in the choir.” I smiled again, trying to keep the mood as casual as possible. Nathan sat quietly, giving me a steady apologetic look.

“Is singing something that you’ve always wanted to do?” She inquired, and i thought maybe there was a chance of diverting her if only i could keep the conversation going in this new direction.

“Yes, i was in a chamber choir in high school, and, uh, i auditioned for the choir in college but i had never learned to sight-read music, so they rejected me.” My heart was pounding and i imagine my face was flushed a bright red, and i was scrambling for anything relevant to say.

She asked Nathan about his ability to read music, and we discussed guitar tablature briefly, but we were just procrastinating.

Finally she said what she actually had to say. She told me a story about how she used to teach a rhyme to her students and to the sunday school children about being baptized and forgiven of one’s sins, and that finally one day she’d realized that what she had taught these children was completely wrong, because no human action can save a person. The holy spirit must enter a person and give her faith, and only in this way can one be saved. She was so ashamed for teaching this little rhyme that she withdrew her family from the Lutheran church, and now they no longer attend church, but are still faithful people.

She discussed why salvation is of such great import, and at some point she made a reference to the man in the article and i had to bite my tongue not to say aloud “yeah, well, there are no atheists in foxholes.”

She told me that i should start a conversation with Nathan’s mother, and answer her questions in the same sweet and direct way that i just had, and that she could help me to pray for the holy spirit to enter me. She told Nathan that she hoped he would read the bible she had given to him every day, and that he and i would read it together and that he would pray for my salvation. Because she wants the two of us to join her in the hereafter some day, and because faith is the most important thing, forever.

I wanted to explain to her that i would never even consider starting such a dialogue, because to me it’s as good as fact that there is no hereafter, there is no supernatural soul housed within my material being and there is certainly no great creator who holds me dangling on a string above eternal hellfire. But i knew that to say any such thing would be like speaking Greek to a person like this. I had struggled to make sense of what she preached, and i knew that she would probably have an even harder time trying to understand that, from my perspective, holy entities and my own “immortal soul” simply do not exist, just as Zeus, unicorns, Santa Claus and personal auras do not exist.

So i just sat there, smiling a half-smile. Not nodding, because of course i do not agree in any way. She said that she hoped i wasn’t mad at her for saying these things and touched my hand, and i smiled and said i wasn’t mad. I didn’t burden her with the fact that she’d made me feel completely uncomfortable in her home within the hour that i’d arrived. Clearly she already carries the burden of worrying about the souls of people she barely knows, and takes it as her responsibility to see to it that we are saved. She has willfully taken the heavy and dismal delusion upon her shoulders, and in a way i wish i could save her just as she wishes to save me. But my verbal weaponry against the foe of delusion is reason, and faith has a way of evading such ammunition, especially that wielded by such an unskilled marksman as myself.

The visit went on and religion was not mentioned to me directly again. Nathan’s aunt continued to deny my existence except for perhaps four words at most. We ate in different rooms or at different times. The two dogs at least did not discriminate – one hates everyone, the other simply wants attention. His grandmother was always polite and kind, but as we four visitors left the next day my alienation was undeniably spelled out. The two grandchildren got warm hugs and kisses goodbye. Nathan’s sister’s jewish boyfriend also got hugs, and everyone began to exit through the front door. I offered a weak “thanks” and a little wave of the hand as Nathan’s aunt became engrossed in holding the dog’s collar and his grandmother clutched her sweater around her with a smile. I exited the old house knowing that they were glad to be rid of me, though they know nothing whatsoever about who i am or what i have to offer. I am human, you know, i thought. I can feel your rejection and – look! – i can even cry.

www.qwantz.com

I’m curious as to why you have [been reading so many books about religion] and what you’ve come up with.

Well, i guess it started because i began reading the atheist blog Unreasonable Faith, which led me to watch some YouTube videos featuring Richard Dawkins, and the stuff he had to say gave me a lot of hope that maybe other people see things the way i do. So i read The God Delusion, and i got a lot of flack for it, since Dawkins is apparently “arrogant” and his ideas are “illogical.” Thus, i’ve picked up other Atheist books in order to broaden my knowledge on the subject, though i’m still getting through the big NY Times bestsellers, and some might argue that they’re more sensational then sensible.

I think they’re brilliant. But at the same time i’m getting tired of hearing the parts about how the Bible features all sorts of cruelty and contradicts itself anyway. I’m not really interested in the Bible. I’m interested in God and why people cling to the idea of his existence despite a complete lack of evidence.

People will look at some little coincidence in their own life as “evidence” for God’s existence, and overlook all the times they’ve prayed for stuff that didn’t happen or – what i think is the biggest point of all – the question of why God would have made us at all, just to jump through his little hoops and heap praise upon him and join him in the playground of Heaven after our trial-run on Earth. People just want existence to have meaning and death not to be final. But they don’t consider that life might be just as stunningly beautiful without a divine plan, and that death might be just as easy to deal with if we realize that we’ll be only as aware of our state after death as we were before we were born.

Also, people think that without God there’s no reason to be good. But first of all, there are millions of people who have committed atrocities in the name of God throughout history, and millions who continue to do so to this day; bombing abortion clinics, toppling the Twin Towers, genitally mutilating girls and baby boys, burning women alive for the crimes of their brothers. Teaching their children to feel guilt and shame. And those who choose to be more like Jesus have done just that – made a choice. If you can choose to follow Jesus rather than the God of the Old Testament, you can figure out for yourself that it’s not okay to cheat and steal and kill.

I’ve gotten pretty passionate about all this, because 1. i’ve been judged negatively and held at arm’s length by certain people just for standing up and owning up to being an atheist. I agree with Dawkins that atheists need to speak up and come out of the closet so that people can put their stigmas to rest, as we’ve all made strides toward doing with respect to gays. There’s something wrong with the fact that atheists pretty much cannot get elected to the highest offices in this nation. And 2. i really think that people are missing out on some important stuff in life by deluding themselves with the idea of the importance of God. We can be good people and stop fearing death and enjoy life to the fullest and connect deeply with one another without attributing everything to some imaginary entity watching over us like Santa Claus. We’re not children anymore, so why cling to such a juvenile point of view?

It’s largely about the language, and the culture that influences it. The Pirahã have no words for numbers or colors, and the author and his family failed to teach them how to count to ten in Portuguese in eight months of instruction. There are other absurdities about the language which undermine Noam Chomsky’s theories about linguistics. The second half of the book goes on about this a bit much, but it was interesting nonetheless.

While only a small portion of the book is dedicated to the discussion of religion, the final sentence of the book suggests that what he observed about the lack of religion among the Pirahã may be the most important thing he learned from them over the decades spent among the tribe. I neglected to write it down, but it goes something like, “The Pirahã are happier and more stable than any Christian or other religious person that i have ever known.” What little Everett does say about religion and the objectives of missionaries is eye-opening, and terribly interesting.

I also finished The End of Faith by Sam Harris this month. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Dawkins’s The God Delusion. It made its own good points, but i felt that the discussion of “spirituality” (which is really an allusion to extreme concentration achieved through meditation and altered states of perception from drugs, but nothing having to do with a metaphysical spirit) was rather irrelevant and confusing. I think Harris should have left that for another book on so-called atheist spirituality. I’m trying to read such a book right now, and it seems so far to just be a defense of certain aspects of religion.

I’m also reading God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I was hesitant to pick it up, since Hitchens seems rather arrogant in the videos i’ve checked out on YouTube, but i figured i’ve read two books by the so-called Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse, so i might as well keep going. The book is well written and illustrates with jaw-dropping fact after fact how religion really does poison everything. (And that’s the subtitle, not my own assertion. Though i’m beginning to agree whole-heartedly.) And we’re talking present-day stuff, not just the Crusades and Inquisition and all that.

I was hoping to post my own actual x-ray here, but the medical records department hasn’t gotten back to me yet. I went to a podiatrist on Tuesday, and they took x-rays of my feet and told me what i pretty much already knew: that the only solution to my bunion problem is surgery. The pain went away as soon as i’d made my appointment, however, so i don’t plan to have surgery until it becomes a chronic issue.

I’ve started back up with running and i’ve been set back a little for not running in three weeks, which is only a little disappointing since the weather has been cold and crappy in that time anyway. Now, hopefully, spring is here to stay and i’ll be taking some real strides in getting back up to running three+ miles at a go.

In other news: VEISHEA is this weekend – let’s hope it’s not as rainy and cold as it was last year. The painting class is almost over and i have a long way to go on my last painting. I’m not loving it quite as much as i’d hoped i would.

I’m more than halfway through The God Delusion and i absolutely loved the first three chapters. The fourth chapter is the central argument of the book, and it goes something like this: If you believe that the complexity of the things found in nature implies that there had to have been an intelligent designer, then you must also ask ‘who designed that designer,’ because such a designer would necessarily have to have been an even more complex entity. I think it makes perfect sense, but the whole idea of God is metaphysical, magical – it has nothing to do with reason, and that’s exactly why – unfortunately – it can’t really be argued with.

I think there are plenty of great arguments for Atheism, and all of them are thoroughly covered in the book, i’m just not sure why Dawkins chose this one as his cornerstone. I’m reading currently about why morality and ‘goodness’ are inherent in human understanding and not reliant upon religious convictions, and that’s one point i really wish more religious people could understand. That, along with why the atheistic life is just as meaningful and worth living as one dictated by religion.

Sorry about this post going completely from one topic to another. These are just the things that have been rolling around in my head lately, i guess.

Seeing each other every-other day just isn’t cutting it for us anymore, so Nathan and i went out again last night. We went to see Religulous, which was nothing if not entertaining.

Commedian Bill Maher says it’s time for we who doubt to speak up about it, so i suppose i’ll go ahead and voice my opinion on the film.

First of all, I’m pretty certain this film isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about what they believe. Religion is deep-seated, and I haven’t come across any particular creative work yet that i think could single-handedly change a person’s entire outlook on life. Atheists and Agnostics generally seem to think that the way they see things is so obviously correct that they fail to open anyone’s eyes by really exploring and working out the questions. Secular works tend instead to tout a certain point of view as fact the same way religion does.

This particular documentary, being conducted by a commedian, is certainly entertaining for those of us who already understand where he’s coming from, but i think the way the questions were asked was moreso poking fun at people than really trying to understand what they believe and why. He interviewed people who seem to take their religion to the extreme–Televangelists, the self-proclaimed reincarnation of Christ, a man who helps homosexuals become heterosexual (and although he was himself gay once does not believe that anyone is inherently gay), a man who portrays Jesus at a theme park in Israel, etc. I’d be interested in hearing more from the theologians and the average people on the street.

I’d love to see this movie turned into a television series, because i think that Maher made a good point in the end–that religion is really the cause of most of the death and destruction in the world–but didn’t illustrate that point thoroughly enough. It was a fun film that came to a sobering conclusion, and it seemed slightly disjointed. I see the connection, but it wasn’t really shown to me. The idea that people must be skeptical of religious ideas because of the tragedy that we really create or allow to be created in the name of God reminded me of Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith, of which i’ve only read a couple chapters. It’s a heavy topic, but horribly important.

Interesting points raised by the movie:

• Most people agree that the gospels of Mormonism and Scientology are ridiculous. God is a human being who lives on another planet..? There are aliens inside all of us called Thetans?? But we accept the stories of Christianity whole-heartedly: A virgin birth. Rising from the dead. Talking snakes and burning bushes. Aren’t those equally ridiculous?
• The story of Christ is older than Christ. It bears striking similarity to the stories of prophets of older religions. I’d never heard this before. A carpenter born on the 25th of December to a virgin performed miracles, had twelve apostles, was killed and then rose from the dead. Nope, not Jesus Christ, but an ancient Egyptian myth.
• Atheism is a luxury. When you’re in real peril–hiding in a foxhole, for example–you reach out for whatever gives you comfort, and in almost all cases that is God, in one form or another. A higher power. We who have little to fear may have the luxury of not clinging to something greater than ourselves. I’ve noticed this lately, but never heard it put quite this way. It makes sense.

Personally, i’ve seen and heard plenty that paints religion in general as being pretty much ridiculous. I agree with it, and apparently about 16% of people now agree with it. But i still feel like part of a very small minority that thinks that the idea of God or a great spirit or a higher power of any sort is probably also ridiculous. I want to hear people talk about the root of this thing, which is God. Is it really only fear that drives people to believe?