August 24th - John Green and God

Good evening solar system, once again I have two separate things to share with you.

First of all, a few hours ago, when I got up to go to the bathroom and get my ration of food for the morning, I found this outside my bedroom door.

I was pretty sure that I knew what it was, cuz a friend of mine had ordered some anime for me for my birthday and that hadn't arrived yet. So I brought it into my room and opened it up, and... surprise!

It wasn't anime. It was Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines, which I had ordered from chapters.indigo.ca (note the "Indigo" part) and they just shipped out yesterday! That's really exciting!

However, this also made me realize something kind of frightening and moronic regarding the anime, and so I will have to check with my friend about that and if my suspicion is true then I will feel very stupid and have to re-order it for myself. But I'm not going to tell you what that suspicion is, though I might if I find out I was right. Or wrong.

Part two, religion!

So yesterday (or possibly earlier today? Or both. I don't remember.) commenter "Steve" left me a couple very helpful comments regarding the writing woes I expressed in my last post. I was curious, like I am with all of my commenters, so I clicked on his name and I got taken to his blog which I browsed a little bit, and found it quite nice, and joined the forum, and typed out a couple comments but ended up deleting them all and not leaving any in the end... sorry!
Anyhoo, I clicked on one of the tags and ended up reading a post from November 2009. Now, the post by Steve itself wasn't what got me into the mood to write this, but trust me that's a good thing. There was an article that his post linked to, and that is the main source of my current frustration, thought it certainly has other sources as well.

Recently I was in a chatroom at a forum, and I was feeling kind of iffy about how things were going. I'm not very good at integrating myself into mass chats to start with, but there was also a lot of people snapping at each other or making offhand offensive remarks and stuff like that, and that was bugging me. A lot about forums bugs me, but I will talk about that some other time.
The point in the conversation where I decided I had to leave was when the topic of religion came up. There were a couple people early on who stated that they were religious, but this got ignored. I would not have been angered by a civil discussion of different opinions, but this conversation contained not even the faintest hint of that.
What it did contain though, was a lot of people ganging up to rag on religion with complete disregard for anyone who might have been religious. And that's what also bugged me about the article above. It wasn't saying that what SOME people were doing were wrong. It was saying, with absolute certainty, that *anyone* who believed in God was wrong. The article never stated this outright, but I found there to be very strong implications.
What really really bugs me though is when people whine about Christians acting like they have been victimized. In the article, there was a video in which a man said that children can't pray in school anymore, to which everyone replied "You're full of crap, of course they can, stop acting like people are judging you because of your religion, etc". Well, I am not Christian I assure you but if I was I would certainly not feel comfortable praying in school.
There are a lot of extremists on tv, especially since the big battle of gay rights began, but it has given people this idea that all Christians are evil, everyone who believes in God is some insane extremist that will claw out your throat if you don't believe what they do. People act like Christianity is this massive force that still has the same influence over everyone that it had 100 years ago and that's simply not true. Look at how many more atheists and agnostics and people of a hundred other religions we have now than we had back then. Look at how laws are being changed, made, removed because decisions are being made based on human rights and not religious beliefs.
I can understand why some Christians are afraid that their beliefs are being lost, that the world is "slipping away" so to speak. I'm not saying Christians are perfect and I'm not advocating for the religion but in a way, I am advocating for Christians in general (and note there is not a single religious group in the world that I would advocate for entirely).
My basic point here, is that I want people to stop being hypocrites. I want them to stop assuming people of a certain religion, or of ANY religion are all bigots, or all extremists, or all terrorists (in reference to the recent news of the mosque in New York) or whatever. If you want people to be tolerant of your beliefs then it doesn't help you to go around calling them all insane and telling them that they are morons for believing on God, or whatever.

Also, one last little point - the crusades, the Spanish inquisition, the witch hunts or whatever. Yes they were terrible but I can pretty much assure you that no Christians alive today had anything to do with it. Please stop using them as an excuse to hate on Christians, because it's exactly the same as those people who will use one line in a bible to justify their hatred for homosexuals. Generally, those two distinct groups of people aren't on the same side, so it's amusing how they act so similar.

That's all I have to say for today... I will see you all tomorrow.