Traditional Marriage and the Cycle of Religious Suppression of Women

Understanding the reason why our culture needs to move on from the idea of “Traditional” marriage :

What does “Traditional Marriage” mean to you? Does it evoke ideas of the supposed ideal family of Man+Woman and 1.5 children? Does it mean to you a heterosexual pairing tied together spiritually by God in front of a community of like minded individuals?
Regardless of whatever ideals you cling to, if you go far enough back in history you’ll find examples that defy your “Traditional” definitions. Marriage and family has ever been a changing thing with our species and it continues to grow and change. For instance, the idea of a “white wedding” is a rather novel part of our culture, dating back from early 20th century. Before then, a white dress was thought to be a stupid thing to have, and a symbol of wealth since it invariably would get dirty and look like crap faster than any other color.
There are those who claim Marriage is dead, or should die, or that it’s a bad deal for men, or women but yet people keep wanting it don’t they? Unfortunately there isn’t any one simple fix for any problems with marriage but one thing we can do is objectively look at where we came from with religion in the mix, since the idea of “Traditional Marriage” is tied up so intimately with religion.
Note however, religion is only part of the problem as I see it, much of the rest is the promotion of unhealthy masculine gender identity as emphasized by a heterosexual norm biased culture. Religion only reinforces these ideals but it doesn’t have to, and it’s time that it was changed, whether by individual choice or our society developing beyond these archaic beliefs.

So good it makes me cry

http://www.theonion.com/video/report-leading-cause-of-death-in-us-is-god-needing,35522/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-know-heaven-is-real-because-i-saw-it-and-abducte,38449/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/christ-converts-to-islam,754/

Yes, Atheism = Optimism

smiling-atheist.blogspot.com
http://thesmilingskeptic.wordpress.com/

Pessimism and or Atheism? (spoiler alert! - yes, Atheists are actually optimists usually)

I don’t believe in “isms” – as words they’re useful but otherwise they’re just buckets of terminology that our lazy minds like to shove things into.

So yeah, a lot of Atheists are colored in a negative light, for obvious reasons by the religious, but I’m only interested in discussing the less obvious right now: the association of the atheist with negativity. Atheists might use the word “no” when asked about their belief in God, they might negate or belittle pathetic evidence supporting the existence of a god, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that all Atheists are negative nannys full of active hatred for the religious and religious things. Many Atheists don’t even call themselves “Atheist” because it has a pejorative flavor to it, and they don’t wish to evoke that reaction in the people around them.

Most Atheists live out their lives the same way the religious do except they avoid the time sucking waste of going to services in church or other religious time sucking nonsense. Some of these Atheists don’t even think to use the word Atheist to describe themselves – but even those who do won’t necessarily do anything a religious person needs to be afraid of, like violence or criminal acts. Atheists won’t come a knocking on your door to try to push their ideas down your throat. If they gather in large groups, they’ll probably be very civil about it and only engage religious who engage them first in some manner, such as making ridiculous claims about hell or some such other BS.

http://cdn.inquisitr.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/
Westboro-Baptist-Church-e1331914082519.jpg

There are no Atheist brain washing boot camps for troubled teenagers, but there are for religion. There are no cults of Atheists. (No Cult of Dusty https://www.youtube.com/user/CultOfDusty

In Memory of George Carlin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Carlin

http://youtu.be/vAj6cXHrWdQ

I love stories

Ok so something you ought to know about me: I like to create stories in my head. It’s mostly just for me, I don’t expect other people to give a damn, but I’ve been doing it since I was a child so I’ve become pretty practiced at it, and super aware when I’m doing it too. 

I’ve always loved stories as well as creating stories. In RPGs’ as well as fiction – in fact I remember remarking on my love for the gods in the role playing game D&D, because they were actually worth worshipping and had real power (in game only of course!) You pray for healing and it can actually happen in game. This seemed to both amuse and annoy one of my friends but my point is I’m well aware that I sometimes enjoy and wish fantastic stories were true. What a weird and interesting world it would be if say ghosts were real? Or vampires. I love to play the what if game, but well a part of me knows the improbabilities, knows the difference between reality and fantasy and it just won’t shut up.

So the other day I heard strange noises in the kitchen, like sounds as if the kittens were messing with the dishes, except I saw the kittens right in front of me and they were lazing about as cats are inclined to do. 

Me,(mental voice #1 –MV1): Ha! they’ve developed an out of body method of searching for food! Those adorable scamps.. .

Me, (mental voice#2-MV2): Yeah right, that’s silly! Might as well say it’s a ghost cat.

MV1: Ooooh! Ghost cat, now that’s fun, but Cat’s already can walk through walls right!?

MV2: mm well yeah there was that bit about Schröedinger’s cat but that’s a thought experiment about quantum mechanics, not really the same thing. You’re thinking of the Heinlein novel The Cat who walks through walls – but that’s not necessarily what’s happening here. In fact it might as well be time travelers from the future spying on you and using their superior tech to keep out of sight but every once in while you perceive them in some small way anyhow, so those sounds were them accidentally knocking the dishes, not our cats or your ghost cat. That’s just as likely and just as improbable. . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Walks_Through_Walls

One year ago

Made my first post one year ago, wazoo!

Anyway, what if we had a church of chocolate and a church of bacon?  The devout members of the Chocolate church would in discussion with the faithful Bacon church goers get into such fights over who's chosen flaver was best, right?  But wait, then some do-gooder would get the idea of putting chocolate and bacon together to try and make peace. . . oh the evil, delicious, blasphemy.

http://www.vosgeschocolate.com/category/all_bacon_chocolate?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=bing&utm_campaign=Bacon%20+%20Chocolate|Bacon%20and%20Chocolate&utm_keyword=bacon%20and%20chocolate&utm_content=bacon%20and%20chocolate

and this may be why peace will never be kosher for some folks.

Kingsman: a review b/c it blows my mind

 

Kingsman movie poster at IMDB site

So Kingsman – I guess this is sort of a film review, so spoiler alert!  I understand that it’s based on a comic, but I haven’t read the comic so I’m only going to respond to the film and leave it to someone else to comment on how accurate to the comic it was and whether any of the observations I have track to print as well.

                First, for some reason the violence in this film really took me by surprise.  I knew it was an action picture and yet both the close up depictions and the implicit violence seemed way over the top to me.  I’m not usually one to care for a having a kill count or statistics on what I’m watching, but this film made me want to know.  Yes, it’s that violent.  And yet but for it being a plot point for one of the characters, there’s very little blood, very little gore.  I’m thinking of the first 10 minutes when a character is sliced in half from top to bottom and the two halves are each covered with a sheet, and yet there’s no blood pool or other obvious person bits lying on the floor between the two halves (and no it wasn’t a slice by a light saber, WRONG FILM!)  So right there you get the message: live action cartoon.

                The message that the violence in the film is going to be neat, denying the messiness of life and death, continues with the corrolary message that you only need to make a cursory attempt at diplomacy before resorting to violence, because well, it’s expected by all the characters involved that “we’re going to fight now” – which is admittedly not an exact quote, but