Born again? No, I am not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time

This must be some conspiracy at work.

Two days ago I met a religious nut on the train to work. Today, a small, unassuming man came up to me on the train home and handed me what appeared to be a yellow business card. Now, would I have written this post if it was a business card? Hell, no. Which, it turns out, is a very appropriate word here. Hell.

I can't take a good picture of the thing, so I'll paraphrase here. It said:

“Jesus loves people. All have sinned. You have sinned and the penalty for sin is eternal death. Only Jesus can save you from hell to heaven. God's gift to you through Jesus Christ is fellowship with God and eternal life. Welcome Jesus Christ into your life!”

I'm not kidding. I'm looking at the damn thing right now. What the hell is going on? Have the religious nutters of Sweden decided to band together and convert me? Has there been some secret meeting where members of various Christian churches sat down and said, “that bearded, black-clad must be brought into the light of the God-Emperor...I mean Christ!” I'd like to think they said God-Emperor. That's so much cooler than Christ. But maybe not.

Seriously. What the hell is going on? Are we experiencing a tsunami of religion through what is a pretty secular country? Will I be accosted frequently by morons that believe I need to be “saved”? If it continues, I will snap at some point, that's for sure.

Now, from the headline of this post and previous posts you might get the idea that I'm prejudiced towards religious people. And you would be right. I'm a fairly open-minded guy when it comes to most things, but I've yet to come across someone that has been able to explain “faith” to me in a way that makes me understand why someone else can believe. I think I've mentioned before that I have some very intelligent friends that believe, that would describe themselves as Christians, and even one that works as a priest. I need to talk to them. And soon. If this madness continues it may be too late to pull me back from my prejudices.

The presence unfound comes to me now

This is Neurosis, performing "Through Silver In Blood" and "Times of Grace" at the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands, in April of this year. Fantastic.

Oh. And Steve von Till has a pretty cool beard.

Isn't it interesting... religious behavior is so close to being crazy that we can't tell them apart

I've had two religious experiences over the last few days. As in “brushes with religion”, not actual religious experiences. I only have those at live gigs.

The first was a few days back, as I was getting on the bus. Further back, at the middle door, what appeared to be an old imam got on. He had a great white beard, a shaved upper lip, a knitted white cap and a walker. I walked by him as he was settling in, and as I passed him be looked up. Nodded slowly. Sagely. Like a mentor to his student. Like Obi-Wan to Luke. I nodded back. Slowly. Sat down. Smiled.

So the guy thought I was Muslim. If I shaved my upper lip too, which I've done before, I would probably get a very interesting experience the next time I try to go to the US. When I went the last two times I made sure to braid my beard, to avoid being mistaken for a Taliban. Plastic gloves and lubricant ain't my idea of a good time.

The second one was on the train this morning. Picture this. Me sitting on the train, wearing a black Neurosis tee and baggy gray cargo pants, reading Cormac McCarthy's “Blood Meridian”, headphones on, probably leaking some Neurosis noise (yes, I'm currently seriously in love with that band. Again). A woman sits down next to me. Sits still for a while, maybe one station, and I feel her looking at me.

Then she taps my shoulder, I remove my headphones and she says, and I'm so not kidding, “Have you accepted Jesus as your savior?”. What. The. Hell.

Religion and I aren't friends. We're barely on speaking terms. And this is why. Nut cases on the train that want to “save me”.

My response then? “Eh...no”. Eloquent, eh? It was 07:15 in the morning. Give me a break. My brain wasn't up to warp speed yet. Then she goes off on this rant how Satan is in music, in books, in movies. I guess the word “Blood” on the cover was a dead giveaway. Me and Cormac, worshiping the Great Old Ones together. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!

There were two things I could do.
1. Explode and rant back at the misguided fool. I was tired from a weekend of uneven sleep patterns, and cranky. A recipe for disaster, but oh so rewarding.
2. Get up and walk away.

Wisely, I chose number 2. I am The Bigger Man. When she got off at the Central Station she looked over at me with a look like “I pity you that you cannot see the way to avoid burning in hell, you poor man”. Again, the temptation was great to back up and go with item number 1 above. Instead, I took a few deep breaths and went back to the book. Don't let the fuckers get you down.

Ignorance is lack of knowledge, whereas faith is rejection of it

My dear friend the Pope managed to say that condoms will make the AIDS epidemic in Africa worse, not better. Well done, you Palpatine clone you. Yet another reason to carpet bomb the Vatican.

No energy to keep on ranting, so I'll let someone else do it for me.

Thou shalt not kill. Murder. The fifth commandment. But if you think about it … if you think about it, religion has never really had a problem with murder. Not really. No, more people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason. All you have to do … all you have to do is look at slavery, the Middle East, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the World Trade Center, and you'll see how seriously the religious folks take "Thou Shalt Not Kill". The more devout they are … the more devout they are, the more they see murder as negotiable … it's negotiable. It depends, you know? It depends, it depends on who's doing the killing and who's getting killed.
- George Carlin

You talk to God, you're religious. God talks to you, you're psychotic

Nothing can piss me off faster than religion. And I do mean nothing. My guess is I was seething visibly as I sat on the subway after I read Metro's short article referencing this story this morning.

So "the abortion, the elimination of an innocent life, was more serious" than the repeated rape of a nine year-old girl? Fuck you. Fuck you and the pathetic excuse for a world view you call religion.

I know, I know, I should be making detailed arguments here, not resorting to cursing, but I can't help myself. This is the kind of asinine bullshit that renders rational arguments obsolete. To quote Doctor House:

Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise there would be no religious people.

I can understand the fascination with religion, I really can. The need to find some sense and order in the world is easily satisfied that way, and you can go to sleep with a smile on your face, safe in the knowledge that if something bad happens to you or someone you love, you can always rationalize it with “'twas God's will”. I call it the easy way out.

Some people I know, rational, intelligent, fantastic people, are religious. I have yet to discuss the intricacies of their faith with them, because I know I'm running a very real risk of escalating the discussion to a level where I'll say something I shouldn't. But I will have to, at some point. I need to understand. I need to understand why these rational, intelligent, fantastic people have chosen religion.

For now, I remain upset. Angry. Unable to understand how someone can still let standards set in the Dark Ages dictate the way they should tell others to live their lives. If there's anywhere in the civilized world (which is a stretch, considering the subject matter) that is in need of a bloody revolution, it's the Vatican. Let them taste a bit of that fire and brimstone, and see how they feel.

Let me help you tie the rope around your neck

So I wrote this post about useless people and nurture vs. nature and inner darkness vs. the goodness of mankind, etc. Basically I’d had a bad day and needed to vent.

I’ve calmed down now (yeah, right), and figured I would continue that train of thought, especially since Joel went to such great lengths to comment.

I don’t believe that the inner core of humans is evil. Neither do I believe that it’s good. Beneath the veneer of civilization, we’re still animals, still the creatures that either hid in the shadows when the predators stalked by or planted our feet and fought, tooth and nail. That fight or flight reflex is still there, and it wakes up when we’re put in a situation that pushes us beyond the limits that we, and society, have set for ourselves.

Because of that, I remain convinced that every human being is capable of lethal violence. It doesn’t matter how much of a non-violent person you are, that primal reflex remains there, dormant.

That aside, I also believe some people are inherently evil. There are some atrocities that people commit that I simply cannot attribute to a messed-up childhood, or to the instinct for violence at our core. There are things that humans simply don’t do. And yes, I acknowledge that abuse or childhood trauma or whatever can make things worse, and probably shape someone who otherwise would have stopped at ripping the wings of insects into something far worse, and I even acknowledge that video games or movies or whatever intense experience there is out there, can act as something of a trigger, though not as a root cause. That, however, is a discussion for another day.

In Western society, we choose to meet such atrocities with prison time, and in some states in the US with the death penalty. I’m not an avid proponent of ending someone’s life, but in some cases, I actually see no other way out. This is not out of any biblical sense of an eye for an eye and all that nonsense. It’s simply because some people, that can no longer be called humans, simply don’t deserve to live.

Case in point: Andrei Chikatilo. This pathetic excuse of a man wanted the death penalty and got it. Can anyone argue that incarcerating him would have made more sense, or that therapy could ever have rehabilitated a man who murdered 52 people over 12 years? And ate some of them?

I claim to be an agnostic of some sort, but I sincerely hope that there’s some deep dark Hell where sadists like Chikatilo endure everlasting pain, or that nothing awaits them beyond death other than a cold lonely grave.

So yes. I’m in favor of killing people occasionally. Please argue with me.

Oh how far the mighty have fallen

On many occasions, I have been able to look beyond certain aspects of an artist’s personality or opinions and just enjoy what they’re good at.

Alice In Chains vocalist Layne Staley was very pro-drugs and let it show in his lyrics:

You can't understand a user's mind
But try, with your books and degrees
If you let yourself go and opened your mind
I'll bet you'd be doing like me
And it ain't so bad

I still worship that band. “Dirt” remains one of my favorite albums.

Woven Hand prophet David Eugene Edwards is very religious, though he has a somewhat damaged relationship with his god, and lets it show in his lyrics as well. Somehow that’s an even bigger problem for me at times than the drugs, but there’s no denying the power or feeling in his music and words.

David Eugene Edwards at Peace and Love. Pic by Mah Girl

But then someone goes and does something that I can’t ignore or get around. “Just don’t let it bother you”, some people say. Impossible. Choosing to be bothered by such things is what I do. It’s part of my bearded charm.

So. Orson Scott Card has some opinions about gay marriage. He seems to be the kind of religious nut that needs a good talking to. In a dark alley. With a Louisville Slugger. Yeah, sure, a lot of science fiction writers find inspiration in religion and as such a lot of them are probably religious, but this takes the cake. And that’s just insulting to cake.

And the idiot parade continues. Frank Miller is, without a doubt, one of the most influential comic artists and creators of the past 30 years. He reinvented Daredevil, which I read over and over in my teens (watch the POS movie at your peril – it’s one of the first signs of the Apocalypse), wrote and drew what is undeniably the greatest Batman story ever, and created the Sin City series (also made into a movie, which while not as eye-gougingly horrible as Daredevil still is flawed in many ways).

Violent Marv silhouetted in a Sin City alley, in "The Hard Goodbye"

Then a friend told me about this. Batman vs Al-Qaeda? Come on. That’s so stupid I don’t even know where to begin. And the realization just hit me that the worst thing about it isn’t even his dumbass opinions about the war, but the fact that he will tarnish the memory of “The Dark Knight Returns”. I won’t be able to even look at that graphic novel for quite some time, let alone read it. I hope DC Comics see some sense and don’t even publish the new one.

iGod

Talk to God. It's quite entertaining. Post comments here if you get any particularly interesting responses. It (or is that He? *cue suspenseful music*) accused me of being René Descartes.

And I'm thankful that it's been done by someone with a sense of humor, and not some religious fanatic. Though the idea of God being the sum of human consciousness as represented by the Internet is quite an interesting idea for a sci-fi novel...