i think i need to qualify my friday night speed-post a little bit. it was typed in haste, and i think that a few offhand comments made people think that i'm concentrating on the spirit of the offhand comments and not the meat of what i had to say.

firstly, i don't believe god exists. i'm usually open to being proved wrong, so if someone shows me something, i'll believe it. it's not something i haven't put thought into, i was just saying that if he/she/it did exist, there'd be some sort of intuition, some form of connection, and it'd give me some sort of security. any manifestation of "god" in any of the books written about him/her/it can be tidily explained away by mental illness, bad weather, weird plate tectonics, charismatic religious figures... and masses of marginally educated folk viewing these four phenomena.

but that's not what i'm focused on. and don't go thinking that i'm gonna start up a new religion - i'm far too lazy - i'm just more into thinking that there's other things that we should be concerned about.

my post wasn't about good christians/muslims/bahai/jews. i know many, and i respect their faith. it was also not about science.

josh said:

"For instance, on some scientific, cellular, fertilization level reincarnation is completely 100% real, just don't expect to come back as an elephant ... maybe a head of lettuce, perhaps. I basically just think that everyone from the Greeks to the Indians to Jesus and Mohammad were all pretty much communicating the same idea -- it's your responsibility to understand your place in the universe and to choose the path of righteousness and good."

and he said it a bit more articulately than i did. this is what i'm thinking of, after years of questioning/dismissing spirituality. and i even feel icky calling it spirituality since breaking it down to pure organics is hardly spiritual.

what would be a good word for it? envirobiotics? bioeconomy? i really feel like it's an economic equation, where ethics, good and evil are measured in how you affect our biosphere.

spiritual experiences are one thing. you can have them anywhere. a group of people singing together, working to build a hospice or doing missionary work in some hole in the ground in africa. they all bring about a feeling of community and security... a human reaction not to the religiousness of it all, but to the fact that you're doing something with other people. your brain releases a chemical, your body feels a bit different, you have an emotional reaction. so why attribute it to religion? it's you who is causing it, not god. so mom, when you said all that stuff about christian groups doing good, i agree - it's just disappointing that they're usually the most organized.

how often do you see a planeload of people landing in a poor village in africa, approaching local leaders and saying "hi! we're atheists! i hear you have no running water and a cholera epidemic! let's see what we can do!"

fuck. can you imagine it? organized religion has fucked up the world so much... what about ORGANIZED ATHEISM? can you imagine going down to the YMAA/YWAA to work out? how would the village people feel? it'd make the dance a whole lot easier, for sure, but i think the tone of the song would change, in that a bunch of gay dudes engaging in illicit gayness seems less shocking if the place is run by atheists... can you imagine atheist missionaries? "hi, we've come here with a whole bunch of aid for your village... now all you have to do is ditch your tribal gods and read the works of nietzsche and hegel" the AWL - atheist women's league... youth group... saturday school... atheist bake sales...

imagine that - organized atheism. i think it'd become more annoying than christianity ever could. and christianity is fuuuuuuucking annoying.

i'm talking out my ass, of course.

perhaps i pay too much attention to the news, or not enough. or perhaps i'm paying too much attention to koreans, whose religiosity is annoying in its "case closed" way of pushing religion on you. "it's there on paper, in this book we got from those missionaries so long ago, so why wouldn't it be 100% true?"

it just seems that so much of what annoys me lately seems to be working closely with organized religion to stop life from being 100% fun. not the chicken, but the egg. annoying things seem tied to religion. religion doesn't cause the annoying things, the annoying things embrace religion, and religion becomes... guilty by association (?).

more later, i'm sure.