I Need To Vent
The world in general is pissing me off and stressing me out lately. I feel the need to vent, so I’m going to write a little bit about a bunch of different things.
It still amazes me how people just can’t and won’t handle the idea that atheism is a valid position. Wacky Christians get so unbelievably smarmy and self-assured about it that they make want to go full atheist rather than merely being agnostic. And that’s without bullshit apocalypticism coming into the fray and legitimately endangering us for no good reason.
I really need to look into it more, but I read a thing the other day that said that making abortion illegal doesn’t significantly reduce the number of abortions that happen, only the number of women who survive them. Making stuff illegal doesn’t magically make stuff vanish, and sometimes it does more harm than good. (What exactly has the “War on Drugs” accomplished? Drugs certainly aren’t harder to come by). No one in their right mind wants more abortions to happen, but criminalizing the procedure is basically a way to kill women. If you want less abortions to happen, help create a world where fewer women feel they need them. Provide proper sex education, make contraception freely available, treat people better, help families come together, and so on. Treat the causes and not the symptoms. Fucking help people.
Conservative Californians (and there are more of them than people think) want to pass Prop. 8 and make gay marriage illegal. This basically comes from the Bible and questionable science. The government is supposed to protect the rights of individuals, regardless of whether or not the populace is too bigoted to handle it.
If God has such a problem with things, He, being the supreme being and possessed of omnipotence and omniscience, ought to be able to handle them himself. If He disapproves of gay marriage or abortions or atheists, or (with His Allah hat on) He doesn’t care for people not showing perfect decorum towards the Prophet Mohammed, you would think he’d have done something about it by now. I submit to you that a being capable of creating this world and everything in it would unquestionably be a bit more thick-skinned than that.
The Bible is full of allegory and metaphor. If you read Genesis and you think the most important thing in it is that the world was made in 7 days, you’re a fucking idiot. People are special and have value, free will means accepting consequences, and murder is bad. That’s what matters. The creation story is a fairy tale for nomads who wouldn’t understand the real thing, and there are hundreds or thousands like it all over the world.
I feel a little better now.
