“Next Generations“: Rumor has it the “next generation” of iPhone and rock band are coming out. Don’t get me wrong, I think the iPhone is super sexy and rock band is as fun as the iPhone is sexy - but what pisses me off is that there isn’t really anything wrong with the old ones… If it’s not broke, why fix it?

I’m all about technological advancements… b ut ones that are beneficial to our lives… like solar energy and cool cars that take like nothing to run them but children’s laughter (wouldn’t THAT be a breakthrough!). Hopefully people are at least recycling the old ones or trading it locally. …The iPhone is bad enough as it is, being a bit of an energy sucker. (Who am I kidding? I have a blackberry…)

I hate captialism. If we weren’t all slaves to the dollar we wouldn’t have to use up our minds and our physical resources just to make more money and keep the technophiles of the world occupied with new and cool things. I’ll be the first to admit that I fall victim to all the clever inventions… but that doesn’t make it alright. It just makes me stupid.

“Support Our Troop“: My company is doing a new initiative… They’re doing a “support the troops” dealy where we are supposed to send post cards to troops in the navy or where ever to show that we heart them.

The only issue? I don’t support our troops and I think displaying such biased and icky positions in the workplace is horrible. Not to mention people are rewarded if they send a post card - so those of us who don’t support the troops? We don’t get anything, because we refuse to support something that takes money away from real social services and allows us to get up in things that are none of our fucking business.

I’m not sending a post card. I don’t care if I don’t get a stupid word ribbon or pizza. >_<

“Pussycat Dolls“: that new one, Asia, yeah. the stupid bitch has the same face piercing as me. she’s so annoying!

1. Mountain Dew - Did you know, that in America Mountain Dew as caffeine in it? And not like, the amount that coke has in it -but slightly more than coke and slightly less than something like jolt. When I was in Buffalo a couple weeks ago I drank one of them and was off the wall. I rarely drink caffeine, and I thought to myself “there can’t be that much more caffeine in this thing” and the BAM. It was scary. So why can’t Canadian Mountain Dew have caffeine in it? I love the taste of the stuff, I think I’d love it even more if it had caffeine.

2. My labret piercing - I have a piece of metal stuck in my face, just above my chin, just below my lip. I got it done when I still lived in Mississauga and lived at home… so it was probably early grade 11… like, at least 5 years ago. It cost me something like $70 to get done, which isn’t a huge deal… most piercings cost that much. But since then I’ve swallowed the things 4 times and had to replace it, each time costing an additional $45. And I bought a gold one to match my Christmas Party outfit last year, and a black one to look more emo. (ha!) And I had to get 2 clear ones for different jobs at different times. So that’s 8 additional studs putting me at about $360 before tax, add the initial cost and we’re at $430. Simply to maintain a nail in my face. (This isn’t including having to buy sea salt to wash the things in.)

The other day I’m waiting for the bus and I wander into one of those stupid little kid jewelry stores and see studs for $6! !!!! Not only that but you can get 2 for $10! … I asked if that’s how they had always been priced and what the difference was between those studs and the ones I had been buying. The girl at the counter told me that they had indeed always been that price and that they’re all stainless steel. Just like my $45 studs. … It was then that I hung my head in shame for wasting so much money on facial piercing things. \

…So I bought a $6 stud. Instead of just taking the stupid thing out.

3. Cell Phones - My cell phone story history is a tad bit ridiculous. I got my first one when I was like 17 with Telus… and ended up giving that contract and phone to my mom so I could sign up for another contract with Bell. A year or so later I ended up giving that contract to my mom because the first one had finally expired and I wanted to get yet another one back with Telus. I ended up giving that contract along with my HTC P4000 to my brother in exchange for no contract on rogers and his blackberry pearl. Unsatisfied with the pearl I sold it to my friend Lars and bought a Blackberry Curve and signed up for a contract with Rogers - which is where I am now. I still have contracts in my name with Bell, Telus and Rogers. My mom uses one, my brother uses the other and I use the rogers one.

My brother has a sweet ass plan where he pays like $30 a month and gets a bunch of shit (texting, 4mb data, unlimited calling, some long distance) plus the HTC has wireless. My mom pays like $35 a month with long distance calling, 250 text messages, caller id, voice mail…. And then there is me. I pay anywhere from $90 - 140 a month… and i basically get nothing. I don’t have and texting, I have to pay extra for my caller ID, I don’t have voice mail, I have very little data and my minutes are super limited.

All because I have a blackberry. The lowest data package you can get is $25… and that has to be on top of an already existing plan… where the lowest is $20, so no matter what - for a SHITTY plan I have to pay at least $45, for anything decent I’m up to $70 before taxes. Stupid blackberry. If I didn’t have a blackberry and still had an HTC I could get a $20 package with unlimited texting, voice mail, caller id, unlimited browser and 3 free games. Blackberries are pretty, but they’re a f%^#ing rip off.

4. Secular groups. I’d expand on this - but I don’t want to piss anyone off. But TRUST. So much time is given. SO MUCH. Yet nothing ever seems to get done, no one seems to care and no one seems interested. I can give give give but when I need to take a little, it’s not available. I’m stopping.

5. Clothes - seriously if I can get a 50% discount while working there - why can’t you just sell the clothes to EVERYONE at 50% off… people can’t afford $50 shirts that are barely even shirts. So now that I’ve quit that job, I’ll be back to getting ripped off for clothing.

I’d like to keep going but I have to be at the radio station in an hour - and this could go on forever…. video games, cable internet, cars, working in America, boys, CDs, XBOX Live, camping gear, renting canoes, camp sites, bus passes, tuition, OSAP, maps, most books, webhosting………….

I think the only time I don’t get ripped off is when I buy alcohol. HA.

I was glad to see that Moran had caught wind of Chris Hedges’ new book “I Don’t Believe in Atheism” He took away from it a different aggravation than I, but good points - none the less.

I woke up this morning to my mother rushing me to a radio to listen to the Sunday Edition where Michael Enright was doing an interview with Hedges’ about his book.

The podcast isn’t online yet - but when it is I will most definitely link where you can download the show from today. …Turns out Chris Hedges’ is a total whack job that just makes people like my mom and step-dad think they’re right about atheists not actually being able to exist.

What bothered me the most after listening to this guy go on about nothing for so long was that my mom came out saying “no! he’s right! he’s SO right!” …mostly about the fact that atheists don’t actually oppose “god” or “religion” but organized religion. Hedges claims that most atheists don’t even know the different between institutionalized religion and faithful religion.

This really upsets me quite a bit as someone who rejects both institutionalized religion and faith based religion. Hedges’ in right in the fact that I don’t like churches and how they gain so much power and money. He’s right in saying that as an atheist I am deeply opposed to institutions. But he is absolutely wrong in his “definition” of an atheist.

My step dad is another person who claims that atheists can’t exist. He says the very definition of them is contradictory to our existence. He backs this up by saying two things;

“What is my god? You don’t know, so you can’t deny it.” and “For you not to believe in god you are already stating that there is something for you to deny.”

So I proceed in asking him what his god is, and as I’ve written about before - it is “goodness”, and atheism is a cop out because it is easier to deny everything than to formulate into words what you actually support. God, for him is … all that is “good” in the world. This is his “god”… and because goodness has always been here, and because different groups of people have turned this “goodness” and “morality” into god - then no one, by definition of god, can be an atheist, because we all believe in goodness. …and as my friend out in McGill said “If I define “god” as a crêpe, then I am not an atheist. For sure.”

This whole idea of “wrong definition” is really starting to boil my blood. I am told almost every day of my life that I’m not “really” an atheist or that I don’t “understand” what god is or that I’m just “angry” because I have my definitions wrong. But here’s the kicker - I don’t attempt to define god, because there is nothing to define. I think it is naive and simply irrational to start defining god as whatever you happen to feel like, such as “goodness”.

My step dad takes on the idea that whatever you hold highest is your “god”. Well no, I don’t hold anything particularly higher than anything else except for my education - so is my education my god? Should I thank my education every day for giving me life? Should I consider my profs disciples of my god and bow down to their feet? It’s ludicrous to affirm that whatever you want to define god as, is what god is. That totally illegitimates everything. It makes it all pointless.

Go ahead and think that my lack of belief is really just my lack of understanding, that’s fine. But I also think it’s down right wrong. I don’t believe “god” to be goodness, I believe goodness to be goodness. I don’t believe “god” to be morality. I believe morality to be morality.  I used to think that the worst kinds of christians were those that didn’t listen to facts, now I’m starting to think the worst kinds of christians are those who tell me that it is literally impossible for me to have no beliefs.

And you know what THAT means, right? … I’m getting his book from the library and not buying it! Take THAT Chris Hedges!

Stuart Kauffman, Ron Brown and Larry Moran at the Center For Inquiry - Ontario, Feb. 8 2008 (click to inflate)

Event synopsis:

REINVENTING THE SACRED: How the Paradigm of Emergence Offers New Scientific Views on the Origin of Life and Biodiversity, Economics, Ethics, and Spirituality

Stuart Kauffman, Institute for Biochemplexity and Informatics, University of Calgary

“I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view - beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.”

I was excited for this one! Really, I was… I had the option of leaving slightly early and catching a bus to get home at a decent time, or catching the 11:30 bus and getting home super late and getting no sleep. I was going to catch the late bus… because I wanted to hear this speaker sooo badly.

I left early. …And Pamela followed me out.

Alright, the guy is a great public speaker. His voice is fantastic, he is very eloquent and over all really well spoken. But his talk was just flat out bad and boring. He was so redundant. His main point that went on for over an hour - “biology can not be reduced by physics” … Well no. shit.

He went on with a million and a half examples about why biology couldn’t be reduced by physics… Why physics can’t explain life, basically. He went on. and on. and on. and on about it. And all I could think was “well, no shit buddy - that’s why they are totally different departments.” Physics doesn’t explain why we socialize, or why we decide to get together to have discussion, or why we decide to have complex relationships that ruin our lives or why boys blow up at you and go crazy when you can’t keep plans because you have a life that doesn’t involve them. It just doesn’t explain those things. Because that’s not what physics is the study of.

It would be like me getting up and giving an hour and a half lecture about how photography can’t be reduced by urban planning. Well no shit! Photography has nothing to do with urban planning! (alright, sometimes you take pictures of urban areas to compare, but you get what I’m saying…)

To make matters worse the guy’s ego was taking up all the extra space in the room. Every chance he got he’d drop one of his books or a name like Richard Dawkins, Al Gore or whoever. He was telling a “joke” that involved him saying his “best line” to “Mr. Vice President” … and no one laughed. It was clearly an attempt to show who he had conversed with in his time. The worst part was when he claimed to have found the biological definition for life…… okay.

Kate and I are pretty good at paying attention during these lectures at CFI. No matter how boring everyone else (aka Allen) thinks they are we always pay attention and have a comment or two to share at the end. …But we ended up text messaging each other back and forth through the talk. Pamela and I spent the entire walk to the bus station talking about how horrible the talk had been.

Seriously. I rarely give a bad review of lectures. I think anyone with the intelligence to talk to a room of extremely intelligent people deserves my respect, for sure. I think that most lectures have an ounce of reason to them and I can usually find one or two things to take away from it. But this guy. Oh, this guy. Nothing, I got absolutely nothing.

It wasn’t all horrible. I saw Ron, Kate, Joe, Pamela, Justin… etc, all the CFI people who I wish I got to see more often. Next time I’ll look a little more into the speaker and make sure he isn’t going to be totally horrible.

Change is based on the people, the culture and the processes. All three of these things are being altered as a new generation of skeptics and questioners enter into the world - if religion doesn’t accommodate, where will it end up?

It’s no secret that I’m not religious. I don’t hide it, and am usually actually quite loud about it. My mom says that one day “You’ll Learn” and I’ll change my mind and ideas about it all - and honestly… I’m trying. I’m not an atheist because I have actively decided to talk out against religion or whatever god there may or may not be. It’s because I’ve looked, and haven’t found.

Believe me, I gave christianity a good run for it’s money. I did the whole church-every-week thing (being a minister’s daughter, I didn’t have a lot of options) and then even as a teenager, when my parents gave me a choice, I stuck with it. I went to Acquire The Fire, fell to my knees, threw my hands in the air and gave myself to whatever power was taking over me. And it was fantastic. I was happy. I had friends surrounding me, I had a god that loved me and I had something to turn to when I was scared or lonely. I never lost any friends while being a Christian.

Not only have I lost friends over being an atheist - I’ve lost jobs, been told I can’t listen to some musicians because they’re “Godly” and I’m not, and most recently been pushed off Facebook. (I’m back kicking strong, but keeping a lower profile.) One of the things I was trying to tell people on Facebook during this little escapade was that Islam HAS to change, or it’s going to die.

I’ve recently read the book “Why Christianity Must Change Or Die” by John Spong. The title (and the majority of the book its self) fits in really well with what I’ve spent the last week arguing with people about. There are two different ideas that I’m going to dive into here - the first is that Christianity does need to change - it has before, but it needs to again… and the point that I actually want to get across is that Islam has to change too (at least once).

Christianity went through a bit split, as did Judaism in the 18th century. During the enlightenment and post-enlightenment both religions had to make room for secularist thought and progressive behaviors in the religions.  And just like the pressure and denial that we hear from Islamist extremists today, you would hear from the Catholics and Orthodox Jews then. The Christianity that the protestants were claiming was not Christianity in the eyes of the Catholics. It maintained the core and fundamental beliefs (say - the 10 commandments…) and applied them to a much more progressive and modern religion. But it wasn’t (and sometimes still isn’t) recognized by the Catholics.

Christianity had to change. It has to change again now, to a different extent. (This is what the book I was reading looked at.) I talk about this sort of change with my step dad quite often (who is often sort of shunned at church for taking this view…) - Churches are killing themselves. They don’t appeal to the younger generation. Even if I wanted to go to church - there isn’t one that I would go to. They are either full of old, out dated traditions and hymns that put me to sleep or corny rock and roll that I can’t relate to on any level. There is no church that allows you to come in and ask questions, while maintaining that you’re christian.  I remember in my Sunday School class when I went to Sheridan United Church in Mississauga I asked my teacher “But how are we certain that there is a god, and that we are in the right religion?” His answer was “Because the bible says so…”

What kind of answer is that to give to a 14 year old questioning youth? I have yet to find a church that allows for this type of discussion, and that actually caters to youth and more importantly 20 - 40 year olds. At a university I went to there was an Inter-Faith Chapel. Every sunday they gathered, and it was for all faiths. Islam - Christianity - Buddhism - Baha’i - all of them. They would use the first 40 minutes to do a type of service that was more or less inclusive. There was no minister or leader, each week someone else led the service in a way that felt right and spiritual to them. Following the service there was a discussion - you could ask what ever you wanted, and there would be open discussion about it.

People who firmly believed in god would sit there and humor you while you discussed the possibility of there not being one. I went every week… It was interesting, and if I were to become a Christian, that is the “church” that I would want to worship in. (There were “regular” worship services on sunday nights too…)

Islam needs to make BOTH of these changes. It needs to accept, just as christians and jews accepted that not everyone in their religion is going to be a fundamentalist and follow every single word that has been written in that little book. They all need to grow up and see that worshiping a god - is worshiping a god. You don’t have to stone homosexuals to be the best muslim. You don’t have to stay the hell away from a beer to show god that you are a true follower.

Kenya is in a horrible position right now because the yonger generations want a new leader, where as the old fuds want to stay in power - so there is violence breaking out. It needs to change.

Islam extremists are living in a world that existed a thousand years ago. It needs to change.

People who sit and say religion is a waste of time, and throw slander at religious people need to realize that not everyone in this world thinks the same. It needs to change.

I’m sick of everyone bickering back and forth about who is right and who is wrong.  More than that I’m sick of all the liberals out there who say they are progressive and for all kinds of religion. … Because it’s always “all religions except that one… and that one… and that one…” because they’re too ‘extreme’ or don’t follow their western liberalized values. It’s like saying you’re all for freedom of speech! And then wanting someone to take down an anti-abortion ad. … That’s saying you’re all for your OWN freedom of speech, not anyone else’s.

Let adults be religious. Educate everyone. Don’t be an extreme jerk that for some reasons feels more holier than thou to tell other muslims that they’re “not muslim enough” or not “doing a good enough job”. Worry about yourself.

If you don’t change, then you’re not going to last. We are living in a new world that is only going to get more and more different as the years go by. Islam might be growing, but so are the number of people who think for themselves, not straight out of a book. If you’re not going to start accommodating people who want to talk, and question - then there is going to be less and less room for that religion in the future.