Things That Don't Matter

The War on Christmas is the phrase coined by Christians to make the efforts of those living in the 21st century and trying to make the world a fair and even playing field sound evil and mean spirited. The war on Christmas is not so sinister at all, it is simply trying to tone down the in your face attitude that Christmas takes every year, taking over commercials and pushing its way into supposedly non secular public schools. I do not at all mind a holiday where the point is to buy stuff for people, it’s great economic stimulus, and you get stuff! I’m not one of those people who thinks that we need to change the name, that’s never going to happen, but I like it when commercials refer to it as “the holidays” rather than Christmas, which for some reason has people up in arms. The American Family Association or something sickening like that which is really just a front for white christian supremacy started petitions to get big chain stores like Target and Walmart to call it Christmas in their commercials, which is stupid, stores can call it what they want, and I’m glad that they went with the non secular one. The sad thing is, the stores caved. Maybe I could start my own petition to get it back the way it was… If you want to sign, start your comment with “Petition” and then go back to writing about how awesome I am. Anyways, I don’t think we should stop celebrating Christmas, I love the holiday, but I think it would be great to get rid of some of the icky religious stuff attached to it. It was just recently proved that the birth of the “savior” couldn’t have happened in December because there wouldn’t have been a bright star in the sky at that time, it would have happened in July, so there, Christmas isn’t about the birth of Christ anymore. Face it, you’ve lost control of Christmas, Santa Claus and the free market have taken it away from you and you can’t get it back, it’s ours now. I’m officially declaring that Christmas no longer has any religious associations. You may say, “Hey, you can’t just declare that!” but I say, “Well, you just “declared” that there’s a god.”

So my last post got me thinking, (Death, not the stupid update one), if death isn’t so bad, why do we keep on with life? Life can get pretty bad sometimes, I don’t think anyone will disagree with that statement, so why do we still trudge on? The easiest answer is because it might get better, but that depends heavily on your definition of “better”, and even if your life does get “better” which I take to mean as having more stuff and not having to work very hard, whats the difference? This is the point where someone will invariably bring up god. They’ll say the reason we live is because god wants us to. So why does god want us to? Just because. That’s what religion always comes down to, “just because” which reminds me of being a little kid and getting annoyed at my parents whenever I had to do something I didn’t want to do and they said “just because”. But my rant against religion, (believe me, it’s coming), is not for right now. So that’s religion down, what else could there be? Now someone will say the point of life is love, soppy sap that they are. This I also disagree with. Now, I’m not one of those people who is all out against the concept of love, I believe that there is love, but that really it’s just another human emotion and stems either from a parents protective instincts over their children or one person’s sexual attraction to another, it’s not this all powerful force that’s holding the universe together, it’s just another thing, albeit a nice thing. So now we’ve also eliminated love as the driving force that keeps us going. Next on the list I guess is just plain science, my favorite of the explanations. Science would say that we are here because of all that sciency stuff that’s happened up until now and that we keep living just because it’s a part of our brains. We’re programmed to keep ourselves alive so that we can reproduce, no two ways about it. This is probably the most reasonable of all explanations but it’s still a little unsatisfying. Generally what people are looking for when they ask why we’re alive is some sort of instruction on how to fulfill this great purpose. I guess with science you could say the instruction is to go have a lot of sex, which is a pretty great instruction, but we unfortunately live in a world where you can’t just go around having sex with everyone. So we’re pretty much back to where we started, clueless. I guess the reason we live and keep on living can be different for everyone. Some people live for god, others will say they live for love, and others will say they’re alive because of chance and math. I say we live to do whatever the hell we want. The world is your playground, play in it.

Also, today is the one week anniversary of my blog, so hooray me!

Also also, I realize I have started to call this a blog, but that’s just because writing out online journal of whatever the hell I feel like writing about would get tiring. Whenever I say blog, online journal is what I mean, so every time you see me say blog, think to your self, online journal of whatever the hell I feel like writing about.

If you were given the option to know the exact date of your death, would you? Supposedly most people say no, and I don’t get that. I think that the people who say no are fooling themselves into a false reality in which there is the possibility of living forever, which there is not. You’re going to die someday, so why not know when? People fear death way more than I think it deserves to be feared. I actually find it comforting to know that I’m not going to be around forever, someday I’m gonna be dead and nothing I’ve ever done will matter. It might matter to people who are still alive, but what do I care? I’m dead. I don’t understand this feeling of responsibility people have leading up to their deaths, when you’re dead, you don’t care, it’s someone else’s problem, so why not spend your last moments not worrying about it? A big problem here is all this afterlife B.S., people who feel that if they don’t do well in life up till the last moment they’ll spend eternity feeling guilty about it. Religion is a huge topic I’ll get to some other time, but that is just total nonsense. I don’t want to be around forever, in any form. I want to live it up while I can, and then get the hell out, no heaven, no hell, just nothing. (Unless heaven has video games… and sex, which always seems mysteriously absent from everyone’s beliefs of what heaven is). Whenever I have something that’s weighing on my conscience, I often think to myself, oh well, I’ll be dead some day and this won’t matter at all, (works great with school assignments) I don’t want to be stuck in some afterlife with all those things still weighing on me. Now, don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not suicidal or anything, I’m not looking forward to death, I’m just not fearful to the point of giving up reason in the hopes that some “god” will take mercy on my everlasting “soul” so I may live forever in bliss, if it even would be bliss.

Update: Someone pointed out to me the other day (because this is all my friends and I ever talk about) that I negelected to consider the category of people who don’t fear death, but wouldn’t want to know when they want to die so they could live normally right up to the last minute, which I guess is a valid point. There probably are people who think that, and I can understand why, but it doesn’t change my position. If you know your death is coming, then it might motivate you to get out there and do all the stuff you’ve always wanted to do, where as if not, then you’ll just keep on living your daily life putting those things off right up until you’re dead and it’s too late.

So far I’ve only done posts that fall into the things that annoy me category. It’s time to write about something that’s awesome. It being December, I thought writing about one of my favorite bands, The Decemberists, would be appropriate. The Decemerists’ music falls into category often referred to as “indie”, but that doesn’t make much sense, because their latest album was released on Capitol Records, a subdivision of EMI, but I really don’t care. Yeah, EMI is a part of the big four and is in on all that RIAA stuff, but that doesn’t stop me liking the music. One of the things I love about The Decemberists is that while being modern, they don’t act like it at all. Their music is heavily influenced by bands like Pink Floyd and R.E.M.. The lyrics to their songs are inventive and most of the time actually form a narrative rather than some phrase repeated over and over again. Most of their music tends to have a very strong message. Take for instance, the music video to their song 16 Military Wives, which I find quite hilarious as well as very true:

Funny story about The Decemberists, they got into a fight with Stephen Colbert after he accused them of riding on his coat tails when they produced a music video in front of a green screen and asked people to fill it in. (Stephen had recently performed a similar act on his show). The feud culminated in a “shred off” in which Stephen “injured” himself and had Peter Frampton fill in for him. The winner was decided by audience applause which of course went to Frampton, but the closing statement came from Henry Kissinger who declared “Tonight, I think the American people won.” There’s alot that’s funny about the Decemberists, their bio says they met in a Turkish bath and a footnote claims that “The Decemberists travel exclusively by Dr. Herring’s Brand Dirigible Balloons.” The Decemberists clearly have a lot of fun with their music, and thus is it fun to listen to.

Up until recently I was of the opinion that most music released post 2000 is crap (Rap, hip hop, all that stuff). However, The Decemberists stand out from the rest, thus I am adding them as the first entry on my things that are awesome list.

Yesterday on The Daily Show the guest was well known religious fanatic Mike Huckabee. Now, up until a little while ago I liked Mike Huckebee, he seemed nice, and when he lost the race he went on SNL and made jokes about it. But a few weeks ago I saw him on TV debating religion with Bill Maher (god on earth, as ironic as that may be) and I found Mike to be pretty obnoxious about his beliefs (Baptist). Then yesterday he was on The Daily Show and Jon Stewart cornered him on the issue of gay marriage, which Huckabee is very strongly against. It was quite the slaughtering, I recommend you watch it here. Now, let me clear something up here, whenever someone brings up the issue of gay marriage and there are people who support it, there’s always some idiot who says “Oh, you support gay marriage so you must be gay dur dur dur dur dur”. No, I’m not gay, I just don’t support the pointless oppression of a people by a bunch of single minded idiots. Supporting equality between blacks and whites doesn’t make you black does it? So why on earth would supporting gay marriage make you gay? Anyways, Huckabee proceeds to bring up the tried and failed argument that giving gays the right to marry somehow hurts the sanctity of marriage, which is total bullshit, I’m not even gonna abbreviate that for the sake of tastefulness, it’s bullshit. How does a gay couple getting married affect what you have with your wife? It doesn’t. Not at all. It doesn’t somehow decrease your love for each other, which is what marriage is supposed to be about, love, not legal contracts and definitions. Jon Stewart of course does an excellent job of bringing this up and all Huckabee can do is fumble and blurt out the same stupid arguments again and again. At some point, he loses his resolve and goes to the Bible for help, which if anything hurts his case. Religion has no place any where near this whole mess. What ever happened to separation of church and state? The arguments against gay marriage are almost all religious, so it should automatically be legalized based on constitutional grounds. Near the end of the debate Huckabee says something along the lines of “Well I’m not going to change your mind (because you’re right) and you’re not going to change mine (because I’m stubborn)” which is just about the biggest cop out ever. He’s essentially saying “Ok, I’m losing this, (at this point the audience is applauding Jon Stewart’s every word) so I’m gonna back out before this gets any worse for me. But I’m still right!” Let me clue you in on something Mike, when you can’t come up with a valid argument, and the crowd is on the verge of heaving rocks at you, you’re wrong.

I was very disappointed with California voters back on election day when they banned gay marriage. I was mostly mad at the mormon church, who funded xx millions to the cause. I’ve always had some respect for mormons as being one of the (slightly) less offensive sects of christianity. This totally changed that for me, mormons are now on my list as being just as bad as catholicism, the “holy grail” if you will, of offensive religions. I was, however, proud of my own state (Connecticut) for voting against a constitutional convention that could have led to the overturning of our supreme court’s recent decision to legalize gay marriage. There is hope. I normally like to think that America today is pretty accepting, but it’s issues like this that I think are still holding us back from being the great nation that we have the potential to be.