Watching Lost come to an end was a spectacular event. This show has rocked me each season with its complex storytelling, bizarre mythology, and emotional heft.

The very first episode I saw — I ignored the show at first because ABC’s early marketing made it look really really stupid — was “…In Translation” and I watched it totally unaware of what show it was or any past relations for the character. The episode focused on Sun and Jin, and when it ended I thought it was one of the best hours of television I’d seen in a long time. Following that I went back and watched Lost from the beginning, quickly becoming a die-hard acolyte.

During those early years, I was one of those guys that theorized all the time, I’d discuss with friends my thoughts about what The Dharma Initiative was all about, why there were Egyptian hieroglyphs, and why it was that you couldn’t find the Island.

I don’t know when it happened, though, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could answer most of those questions myself, and it was probably more fun to not get definitive answers. What I really ended up caring about was the characters. I actually don’t really remember caring about characters all that much before Lost; I’m sure I had some understanding of it before Lost, but it was certainly during the time Lost was airing that I grew more and more interested in how characters grow, and how a show can service them rather than the other way around. It’s entirely possible that Lost was the thing that made me realize that television was about more than filling a half-hour with jokes or constructing a clever murder mystery to be unraveled.

And so, Lost ended tonight. And it’s final moments were about — what else? — the characters.

I think it’s easy to criticize Lost for not giving enough answers to its mythology, but it’s also pointless. Those sorts of answers will always be, in some very important ways, arbitrary. We’ve seen this throughout Lost’s run when big questions are answered, two from this season in particular are the explanations for The Rules and The Numbers. This is absolutely intentional on the writers part.

What could possibly be a rational answer for the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 constantly showing up in the characters lives? There is none, it’s just something to signify that these people are connected in important ways.

So much of the mythology of Lost is ultimately unimportant; all that matters is that these people were brought to the Island for a reason — to protect it — and the Island is a very special place. Anything else is merely an extension of those two fundamental principles.

It’s less important what these people do than why they do it. Watching Lost, you learn who these people are, and you come to see each of them as a flawed person seeking resolution, seeking redemption, seeking some meaning. Basically, they’re real people.

I think that almost every action a character has performed during the run of this remarkable series had come from them, not from some need from the writer¹, and the show has been much stronger for that reason.

Trying to talk about the finale that just aired is essentially impossible. People who haven’t watched the show before will be baffled, and the people who have watched it for years are mostly trapped between two positions: the finale didn’t answer anything, and the finale gave us all the answers we need. These two positions are surprisingly not actually mutually exclusive, they’re just the expression of two different types of fans. Some people are here for the mythology and others are here for the characters.

People are absolutely right that the finale didn’t answer anything. Nobody was sat down and told the history of the Island, nor where the mechanics or the Donkey Wheel explained or the power of The Source. There were no long drawn-out scenes explaining why the Island needs protecting, who created it, why it was special, where it came from or anything even approaching that.

But a lot of us really didn’t care about that. We were much more interested in knowing if Kate will ever declare her love for one of her two lovers², or what will Jack do now that he’s the new Jacob, or if all the pain and suffering the survivors have gone through really had meaning.

To that second group, we were inundated by answers. Kate finally fessed up to loving Jack, just as they part ways for the rest of their lives. Jack risked the Island in order to finally kill the Man in Black and then heroically sacrificed himself to save the Island, and by implication the world. And yes, all the hardship and pain these people went through, it was worth it; completely ignoring the flashes sideways, which I’ll discuss in a few moments, those people grew from the shallow self-serving people they started as into fully realized people who were part of a community. They all came to be part of a larger whole, and that community is what ultimately gave Jack the strength to sacrifice himself for them, for their memory, and for the world they all left behind when they crashed on that Island.

Aside from that long-term schism, the finale has opened a new idea for fans to be divided on: the flashes sideways³. I’m not entirely sure what people were looking for out of the flashes sideways, I’m not sure what I was looking for. My basic metric was that I wanted them to mean something, I wanted them to matter in some way. I think that the flashes sideways being an ethereal staging ground for the survivors to find each other so they could go off to some sort of afterlife together probably works. Going over the season with that knowledge at hand is probably necessary to really see if everything that happened needed to be there.

For the moment, I’m gobsmacked. I wept through the closing scenes where all the castaways reunited across time and space to essentially die together. I don’t know if it will really work in the long term, but right now I’m more than satisfied. I can’t wait to watch it all again.

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1. Obviously, the layer above that is that these characters were given these traits and character arcs precisely because the writer’s needed those characteristics for future plot points, but that doesn’t negate that their actions, in and of themselves, were internally consistent. [↩]
2. I know a lot of Lost fans hate Kate fervently, but I like her character a lot and I think her open declaration of Love in tonight’s episode was one of her bravest moments in the series. [↩]
3. I pluralize that shit like a classy motherfucker. [↩]

All the discussion over on The Daily Dish about religion and atheism has led to some premature ejaculations on my part. I’ve meant to write about the various forms of atheism and the ones to which I ascribe for a long time now¹ but I never got around to it until these discussions reinvigorated me on the subject.

In particular, the form of atheism I most often identify with, apatheism, is described quite well by one of Andrew’s readers:

Maybe there is a god. Maybe there are many gods. Maybe there’s no god at all. Maybe I could drive myself crazy second-guessing myself and every theologian and pastor and religious friend out there. Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter, and I’ve just got to lead the best life I can, as I see it, and if that’s not good enough in the end — if there be an end instead of a simple fading away — then as far as I’m concerned, any god that would condemn me for doing my best to be the best person I can isn’t a god I’d want to believe in, in the first place.

Dedicated readers out there might recall that I was once a very passionate christian. Well, I called myself christian but I didn’t believe in the holy trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus Christ, so really I was just a guy that strongly believed that God existed. I had debated with myself about the nature of God for so long and in such detail that I had come to the conclusion that God is so far beyond human comprehension that any attempt by us to understand his wishes or obey his will would be a terrible distortion.

Eventually, I argued myself down to seeing it as this apatheist does: I’m going to live my life the way I think is right and good. The god that deems my sincere efforts unacceptable while leaving his criteria ambiguous is not a god I want to worship.

At the time this moved me deeply and I can remember understanding the significance of this shift. I had gone from a mostly-Anglican Christian to an I-don’t-know-what², and I felt great relief at finally overcoming some of my deepest issues with my faith.

Naturally, not long after that I stopped believing in God. Not necessarily as a result of this religious shift, rather I suspect that this shift was merely a stepping stone my psyche deemed necessary as I weaned my mind off the belief in deities. Nonetheless, I had become a full-bore apatheist.

Apatheism can appear deceptively like a form of lazy religion³, but what I believed then and what I believe now are very different. What I believed then was that a god that will ultimately judge my life, but I accepted the impossibility of knowing its criteria and simply lived a life I thought was right.

But to the apatheist, God is not unknowable, God is irrelevant. God, even if he did exist, doesn’t matter.

If everyone but me believed in God, but they didn’t let that belief affect politics, or science, or education, I’d be content. But what I see instead is the vilification of atheism and the slow creep of church into state. And that’s when I’m not an apatheist anymore.

I’d love to not have to care about religion, but quite frankly that’s irresponsible given the growing atmosphere of religiosity in our culture.

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1. With numerous drafts broaching the topic from slightly different angles sitting on this blog from two years ago [↩]
2. I later realized that it was strikingly similar to a view known as ignosticism, though I contend there are still vital, though subtle, differences mostly borrowed from apatheism [↩]
3. Or conversely, lazy religion can be seen as a form of apatheism [↩]

There’s been a really great ongoing debate happening over at The Daily Dish surrounding atheism. It started when one of Andrew’s temporary replacements likened atheists such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins to fundamentalists and religious extremists.

As it’s developed, I’ve read many intelligent arguments on both sides. But the truth is most of the religious side of the debate presumes a level of deference to religion. Atheists, it seems, are not allowed to compare religion to belief in Santa Claus or similar fanciful beliefs. At first it was attacked for being glib, but that does little to alter the fundamental similarities in the belief in Santa Claus and the belief in God.

Subsequently, the argument was made that people spend a great deal of time developing their religious stance, whether it’s through thorough readings of the philosophies of theologians across the ages or merely an internal conflict, and so the comparison is unfair. Admittedly, there are people who examine their beliefs thoroughly, break down all the preconditions of life that their parents instilled in them to arrive at a self-determined philosophy, one which includes God, but those people are a far and away minority. For many people, religion is a part of their life because they’ve never thought about it¹.

Similarly, following an atheist argument that religion can undermine the “development of logical thinking” in children, a religious reader responded with:

I have an 18 year-old and a 15 year-old which my wife and I have raised in the church. They are both at the stage where they are questioning and challenging everything. The idea that I could possibly “brainwash” them into believing anything is specious.

Which isn’t wrong so much as it is unsophistcated. The fact is that the reader almost certainly could “brainwash” their children if they wanted to. We always read of the children who escape from a cult they were born into, but we ignore the fact that many children remain in the cult, contented and certain that their way of life is the true path to salvation.

I use cults as an example, but parents with enough religious zeal can just as easily cause many problems for their children. Home schooling children that the Earth is the centre of the universe and that it’s only 6000 years old and evolution is a lie — all things that Christian parents do² — absolutely affect the child for years to come. No one is claiming that the damage is irreparable — after all, there are atheists out there — but to ignore it because it lacks 100% efficacy is exceedingly naive³.

The problem with having a religious debate is that when atheists argue with fundamentalists nothing is accomplished, but when they argue with reasonable, temperate theists like those reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, we get nice nuanced arguments which describe God in a manner very different than the norm. The theists seems to forget that atheists are mostly arguing against the edge cases.

I’m staunchly atheist, and confident that there is no God. But when I attack religion, I don’t attack the muted and temperate version that intellectuals believe in, the kind where God is a passive observer, or where he sets the pieces up and has spent the past 12 billion or so years watching them all fall around him like a massive set of dominoes. I attack the religion that forces genital mutilation, stonings, oppression of women, ignorance of science, and all the stuff that the brainy version of religion has eschewed in its development.

Often, atheists (and theists) are accused of ignoring the moderates of the debate, instead focusing on the fringes of their debate, but one thing I’ve noticed as time goes on is that even the extreme atheists, so far as I know, do not argue for the abolition of religion. What they argue is that religion is irrational and that the world would be a better place without religion. The first half of that argument is absolutely true. Religion is the belief in something for which there is absolutely no evidence, an inherently irrational stance. The second half is much more contentious and an argument that I personally don’t accept. That said, the “atheist fringe” is much less extreme than the religious fundamentalists, so to act as though they are equal criticisms seems disingenuous to me.

The edge cases matter⁴. So don’t call upon the “civility” of atheists to sit down and shut up when it comes to the pernicious ills of religion.

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1. I speak from experience; many members of my family have no actual philosophy with respect to their religion, they merely accept it as what they’ve always “believed.” [↩]
2. Obviously not all Christian parents, but these extremes do exist [↩]
3. I’m not advocating the abolition of religion here, nor would anyone suggest state-enforced atheism, but ignoring the problems of religion accomplishes nothing. [↩]
4. On both sides of the discussion [↩]

There was a recent article about Scientology, focusing on the bullying and domineering attitude that Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige, injects into the religion. Here’s what I have to say about Scientology: whatever.

I maintain that the things Scientology have done, ranging from domestic espionage to extreme litigation to the death of church members due to negligence, are not acceptable. But I also maintain that they are not unexpected. Religions in their growth pangs often commit horrific acts in an attempt to establish themselves. You need only look at the violence, corruption, and manipulation of the Catholic church in the middle ages to see evidence of that. And the holy wars of expansion of early Islam are just as telling; no religion has a monopoly on such offenses.

Similarly, Scientology’s “wacky” beliefs, like the multi-trillion-year-old universe and Thetans and the like are no more bizarre than the base beliefs of the Abrahamic religions. The difference is that we’ve grown up in a civilization centred around Moses carrying divinely inscribed tablets dictating the rules of the faith, around Noah building an Ark that carried his family and every single species on the planet for 40 days and 40 nights, around Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt for the sin of looking back upon Gomorrah, around a man who was a god who was martyred and resurrected and ascended to heaven. These stories are not less outlandish, they are more familiar. They don’t carry the stigma of the Space Opera.

None of what I’ve written defends Scientology in any way, but I don’t attack it for doing exactly what countless other churches has done in our history. It’s a double standard that makes no sense.

I know you’re thinking right now that the crimes of other religions are in the past and that because they happened in the past either a) it was ok because it was moderate for the time or b) it’s useless to chastise them for acts they no longer commit.

The first point is wrong, in my opinion. Morals are morals. I don’t care if it was done in exceptional circumstances. Wrong is wrong.

The second point is more valid, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. But Scientology hasn’t committed domestic espionage in the recent history, so to attack them for it is equivalent to attacking the modern Catholic church for the Inquisition or the Crusades.

In the end, I think that, if Scientology survives this initial growth to become an actual religion, it will become less hard line, but that won’t happen due to external pressure. If anything, the continual attacks on the religion from the outside will allow the church to establish a line of defence, just as Iran’s Supreme Leader has for decades by invoking the spectre of American Imperialism. Over time, Scientology’s member will force the church to change. Or it will collapse on itself. And the rest of the world isn’t going to do anything to affect the outcome or its time of arrival.

John Cole, someone I generally agree with, has been getting a little snippy with the blogosphere over its impassioned response to the stolen election and subsequent rallies for justice currently taking place in Iran.

My thoughts are with the folks in Iran risking it all fighting for democracy, but this can not be said enough- this is not about us, it is about them. I love the coverage of events, but please stop with this narcissistic nonsense.

Most of this is targeted at Andrew Sullivan, who has been working with a great level of dedication to get the news about Iran out while the mainstream media did little to cover the story. I agree with John that changing the colour scheme of a website does nothing to contribute to the Iranian people’s fight for a fair democracy, but that doesn’t mean it’s a meaningless gesture.

I’ve followed this story from its early stages, unable to look away, desperate for any new photo or bit of news out of Tehran. I feel the pain of the Iranian people, and I wish I could do something to solve their problems. But I can’t. Their problems are theirs. All I can do is watch and hope that they win the freedoms every man, woman, and child deserves. Quite frankly, writing about their bravery — these people who are fighting battles our forefathers fought for us, so that we could live in a world with the tacit understanding of legitimacy — is all we can do. To lift up our voices and echo the cries for freedom. We need to let them know that while this is their fight, they do not stand alone. The world is watching.

Andrew Sullivan offered a suggestion to the pro-gay marriage camp, inspired by New Hampshire’s recently signed legislation, that they explicitly allow clergy to refuse to perform a marriage which is against their religious convictions. He ended the post with this:

I propose that any initiative wording in a future California ballot specifically include a religious exemption. It shows we are serious about religious freedom and a church-state divide.

I have an idea that would show that people are serious about a church-state divide: don’t let clergy marry people at all.

Obviously, they can perform ceremonies which are respected and honoured within the confines of their faith. But if you’d prefer to be married in the eyes of the law, and not the Lord, have it done by government officials. Then go have your religious ceremony, should your preacher condone the type of personal relationship you’ve committed yourself to. To have a situation where religious leaders are explicitly involved in a government process seems to me a much greater disregard for the division of church and state.

Andrew Sullivan recently pondered the question “Is psychiatry a religion?” In that post, he quoted a retort to the accusation, and the key idea in it that he latched onto was that “the single common feature of all religious is a preoccupation with unseen sentient beings, of which psychiatry says nothing” which Sullivan drying countered with “Two words: Sigmund Freud.”

The only problem with that is that Freud’s stances are outrageously outdated and naive. It is no longer the predominant stance of psychiatrists, nor is it taught as anything more than a historical curiosity in psychiatry classes any longer. Granted, all of this is from my personal experience while working towards a cognitive neuropsychology minor in university (which I sadly abandoned for brevity’s sake), but nearly every aspect of Freud’s work was taught minimally and then a superseding work was introduced that explained all of the things Freud’s work did but better.

Say what you will about the subjectivity of psychiatry and psycho-analysis, but when it comes to Sigmund Freud, neither the man nor his work is sacrosanct.

There’s a lot of complaining about Dollhouse going on out there in the interwebs. People on my twitter feed incessantly talk about giving up on the show, but I just don’t understand at all. The show is not bad. It might not be as amazing as Firefly was, though most people didn’t really know that until after the show was canceled because nobody watched the freaking thing, but to pretend like it is some arduous task to watch the show is absurd. Buffy wasn’t great in its first season, nor was Angel. Joss Whedon, from my experience, usually gives you good before you get great. And this show is good.

If anything, the problem with this show is that it’s too eager to explore the possibilities of this show. It’s too ambitious. The first episode explored the concept of delayed catharsis by proxy, when Echo’s imprint finally stood up to the man that had haunted her for years. The second episode examined the history of the Dollhouse while furthering the ongoing story of Echo’s awakening. The third episode discussed the way in which our society constructs and controls people just as much as the Dollhouse does its Actives. The fourth episode waxed poetically about art and what it is to be human, ideas entirely foreign to Echo, offering up the leading question “are the Actives even human at all anymore?” All of the ideas being examined are interesting and could have an entire series devoted to them, but Dollhouse has only begun. Perhaps its the seemingly haphazard exploration of these ideas that jars people, but it’s not the show’s fault that people had underwhelming expectations.

Nevertheless, this week’s episode continues to ask these sorts of questions. It opens with a group of cult members entering a store on a shopping excursion singing and smiling all the while. After a brief kerfuffle with a local yokel — where he hilariously responds to their continual singing and ignoring of him with “are you deaf, or you just tone deaf?” and offers up helpful nicknames like “Osama Bin Gandhi” — they leave, but their shopping list is left behind with an ominous “Save Me” message scrawled on the back.

Because of the rumours of what happens on the compound, the senator of the state where this cult resides is being pressured by his constituents and he wants a Dollhouse Active to help with the situation. Because of the note, they’ve obtained a short-term “sneak and peek” warrant but they wouldn’t be able to infiltrate the compound with an undercover agent that quickly; what they need is a true believer. And so Echo is imprinted with the personality of an extremely religious person, Ester Carpenter, who has been blind since she was nine. Both to facilitate the retrieval of surveillance of the compound and to reinforce the imprint’s belief that she is blind, Topher and Dr Saunders implant cameras into her eyes which redirect the eyes’ signals to the ATF leaving Echo blind.

Echo quickly gains the trust of the cult, primarily because she truly believes in the faith they espouse. And this is an idea that is mostly glossed over but is most definitely put out there to chew on: they program religiosity. Faith is often seen as something people have or don’t have, so this is another sacred cow the show is willing to challenge with the imprinting of the Actives on the show.

Though the trust of the cult is gained, their leader is more doubtful. He takes Echo to a dark room and shines bright lights in her eyes, looking for some sign of false blindness, but her pupils neither dilate nor retract. Then he suddenly aims a gun at her head but she is blissfully unaware of this and continues to praise him while the gun is pointed right between her eyes. He walks away mostly convinced that she’s the real deal, leaving Echo in the room to be walked out by Seth, the second-in-command. Unlucky for him and lucky for the ATF, the room he leaves her in is also where he stores his massive weapons cache.

The ATF has seen enough and is ready to go in guns blazing, but Boyd wants Echo extracted first seeing as her mission has been completed and it’d be dangerous to leave her in place during the raid. Of course, the head ATF agent is a huge dick — as they always are — denies the request and begins his breach. As Echo is being officially becoming a sister of the church, the ATF agents trip an alarm along the perimeter and have to fall back. But Jonas, the head of the church, is on alert now and begins accusing Echo of leading the ATF there. He bangs her around, disabling the cameras in her eyes, thus returning Echo’s vision. “It’s a miracle.”

The siege on the compound continues until Jonas decides that Echo truly was a miracle and a message to him: he’s not going to fight back with his arsenal. The church members head into a different building. I don’t like where this is going.

As this is happening, Boyd is trying to figure out who wrote the message, hoping for some inside help. After looking at the security footage in the store, he discovers that it was the ATF agent who manufactured the yokel’s conflict so that he could put that note there and further his investigation. “Nobody ever asked to be saved. Not by you.” Boyd says, in yet another little moment that opens up a world of ideas. Something that I noticed after I’d watched this episode was that, really, this cult didn’t actually do anything wrong. The members lived a pastoral life so there was no money to bilk from the members. There was no sexual abuse, no children being married off, no harem of women for the leader. Instead, this cult is just a bunch of people who believed a certain thing and wanted to extirpate modern society from their lives. They had weapons, but I think to complain about that is equivalent to complaining about the right for individuals to bear arms. I don’t know if this is meant to be a commentary on how society is discriminatory to people who are merely different, or an attempt to show how evil can be hidden in seemingly innocent environments, or something else entirely, but I thought it was interesting that little was done to demonize the cult.

So, now that I’ve praised the show for being measured in its treatment of cults, it’s time to disprove my entire argument. Echo is asked to recite a story about people being sent into a furnace to die and not being harmed by the flames because of their faith. Meanwhile, Seth heads off to do… something.  I really don’t like where this is going.

When Seth returns from setting fire to the building, some members decide enough is enough and start to leave but ultimately Jonas convinces them to remain in the building as it burns, relying on their faith to pressure them into staying. But Echo argues against him saying “You can’t force a miracle.” When Jonas remains steadfast in his faith, she knocks him out with a honking big candle holder and gets the rest of the church to finally flee the fire. All but one, that is, who asks “Where will we go?” and further asks “How can you doubt after God restored your sight?” to which she replies “I don’t think God let me see again so I could just watch.” Which is a wonderful skewering of the general mindset of a lot of fundamentalists. And so he spits in her face. She knocks him out, a useful problem solver in any situation, and Seth carries him out. But as she’s leaving Jonas awakens and cocks his gun. Before he can shoot Echo dead, someone in ATF gear walks in and shoots him dead. Too bad it’s Laurence Dominic, head of Dollhouse security, who’s had enough of Echo’s shenanigans and thinks this situation is a great opportunity to solve that problem. He knocks her out leaving her in the flames.

Shortly thereafter,  Boyd comes in in similar gear and rescues her, carrying her out of the fire as the ATF Agent-in-Charge tells reporters that they’re not hopeful for any more survivors. Oops.

So Echo returns to her peaceful life in the Dollhouse, but as she’s returning Dr Saunders asks her if her vision is ok. And after Echo looks around she looks intently at Dominic and ominously replies “I see perfectly.”

The two B plots of this episode revolve around Topher and Saunders, and Ballard and his lovelorn neighbour. Topher noticed that Victor had a “man-reaction” while in the shower. He noticed this while having a conversation about the Valsava Mechanism and he stutters after noticing it, which I’m pretty sure is a joke that nobody but the writer, Tim Minear, got; until I looked up the Valsava Mechanism. Be brings this up to Dr Saunders who cites her reports expressing concern over “residual imprinting” and then suggests they examine the shower videos from the recent past to see how long these “man-reactions” have been occurring.

Ultimately, they find out that Victor’s “man-reactions” aren”t a side-effect of repeated imprinting, because he only gets them when Sierra is in the shower as well. Turns out he’s just got a crush. DeWitt tells them that the purity of the Dollhouse must be preserved — immediately after Jonas had said something similar to Seth, to really drive home the comparison of the Dollhouse to the cult — and orders that Victor be scrubbed. Not sure what that means, but I am sure Victor won’t like it.

Ballard, on the other hand, is continuing his search to find any record of Caroline, Echo’s original identity, by going to someone with access to more government databases to search. Unfortunately, there’s no record of her anywhere. His neighbour brings him his pain medication and some “leftover” manicotti, even though it’s enough to feed a family of four, and she also has another mysterious package that somebody left with her down in the lobby of the building. It has the video of Caroline that Alpha was watching in the pilot on it, which only further intesifies his investigation, leaving his neighbour to be even more jealous and more lovelorn. There’s also a scene of Ballard watching the events at the cult unfold on TV and briefly seeing Echo. After the fallout, he tries to find her but is shot down by the ATF Agent-in-charge who’s a dick to everyone it seems.

There are a few really good beats here. Ballard trying to flirt and admitting it’s been a while. The man who gave the package to Ballard’s neighbour simply being a lazy mailboy was also a funny red herring. Neither of the B plots offer anything of real significance, but they both fill the episode with real humour while continuing to fill out the Dollhouse universe.

There are so many good things happening in this episode, that the complaints of others become even more baffling to me. This is an adventurous show that manages to examine TV-unfriendly ideas while remaining TV-friendly overall.  The people that are complaining about this show increasingly seem like people complaining because they think it’s the cool thing to do. Next week’s episode apparently is a big episode in the mythology of Dollhouse, so hopefully, it will shortly become cool to like this show.

On a meta note, this review/recap is around 2000 words, and the previous one was around 3500. Both of those numbers seem far too large. As this progresses, I think I’m going to find myself really paring down the descriptions of the plot and of specific scenes, however much I may enjoy them, and focusing on the philosophical questions and mythology the show introduces. But be warned. Sometimes I just don’t know when to shut up.

Andrew Sullivan, a much more prolific blogger and — let’s be honest here — generally better writer, wrote today about the damaging effects of civil unions.

France created a civil unions law in 1999 for gays but failed to designate gender and now about a third of straight couples getting married in France opt for civil unions because they are easier to get out of. Don George points out the obvious:

…it is terribly humorous and ironic that the French created civil unions to protect the institution of marriage…and now civil unions are undermining marriage because people are opting for them instead of marriage. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. So possibly the lesson for our country is that the best way to protect the institution of marriage is not to deny people marriage by creating a separate but equal system, but to allow gays to marry.

Er: yes. If you read my first ever essay on the topic, in 1989, you will find it was exactly this possibility that led me to back full marriage equality over marriage-lite options such as domestic partnership and civil unions. It was a way to integrate gay people and protect marriage.

What I don’t understand about the conservative viewpoint on marriage is their view that it is an inherent good. That somehow marriage is necessary for society to flourish and freedom to ring through the streets of the world.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Atlantic blogger generally found on the other side of the political spectrum, has a different view of marriage:

As much as I can recall, there were basically three reasons for us to get married. 1.) I might leave. Marriage would force me to do the right thing. 2.) To declare our commitment to each other before a community of people whom we loved. 3.) The business reasons–the legalities of your estate and guardianship. I found–and still find–the first two reasons were utterly unconvincing. The third held some sway, but with the help of a lawyer we’ve managed to take care of that. The first turned marriage into a kind of insurance policy, and I just believed that if you felt you needed insurance for the person you were having kids by to stick out, you needed to reconsider the whole proposition. The commitment and community reason held some appeal. But I believed, and still believe, that long-term romantic partnerships are between the two people entering into it.

I hated the idea of public declarations, because the life blood of the relationship–what bills to pay, how to raise your child, your love life–all of that happened when no one else was around. Kenyatta knows more about me than any human being walking the earth–and this is as it should be. No one knows more about my strengths and my weaknesses, my failings and my successes. I trust her to the end. But that trust was worked for–it was not declared or conjured by the presence of other people.

I’ve had similar views on marriage for a while now, but so rarely has the argument not against marriage, but against the necessity of marriage been so succinctly put. Some people might have a different idea of what a long-term relationship requires. I know that my ex did. But to imply that marriage is an inherent good is misleading.

Well, seeing as I’ve been re-examining past views recently, I thought I’d go through my archives and read up on the naive simplistic opinions I had lo those many… months ago. I came across a post where I discuss atheists who get offended by people who say “God Bless You” and want to remove “under God” from the pledge of allegiance.

The atheist who refuses “God bless you” or tries to remove “under God” from the pledge of allegiance is just being an asshole who thinks his personal beliefs should be enforced on the rest of the world. I do understand that the pledge was modified early in the 20^th century to include the God statement and it has no place in a pledge to a nation which claims to have a separation of church and state, but the net effect it has on you is nil. No child, sitting in class as they recite the pledge, is seriously examining it to make sure they follow it religiously: they’re droning on by rote.

Once again, I’m not completely disgusted or surprised by what I once said (I save that sort of self-disgust for opinions I held four to five years ago) but it’s not really right, either. Obviously, the pledge shouldn’t contain religious symbols. It is a pledge for a secular nation! A nation which explicitly separates church and state. The insertion of “under God” was done to reinforce the evils of atheism during the Red Scare and the Cold War. It didn’t belong there in the first place and removing it is the right thing to do. It’s true that most children repeat the pledge blindly without really caring about its content, but that doesn’t mean the kids who do listen to the words have to be subjected to theism as a de facto mindset.

The impetus for this shift in opinion came when I underwent the iron ring ceremony for graduating from Engineering. It’s supposed to be a secret ceremony (mainly so we can act like we’re cool) so I won’t betray the trust of my fellow engineers, but it’s safe to say that some of the required oaths of that ceremony are fairly strongly tied not only to theistic belief but to Christian belief. As I read the oaths I noted the explicit religiosity but continued to read, silently swearing to uphold the core principles of engineering while ignoring the religiosity. But a fellow classmate — or so I was told later on while hammered at the after-party — refused to read the oath because it was too religious. Much later, most likely due to the alcohol, I realized that this was what I should have done as well. Most especially because I was swearing an oath with my peers and it should be something I remember and uphold diligently, but also because I had spent far too long being a “fair weather” atheist, keeping quiet about my beliefs because I didn’t want to evoke any controversy. Since then I’ve tried to be more open about my atheism which brings me to “God bless you.”

Ever since I’ve been at my current job, the co-worker to my immediate right has said “God bless you” when I sneeze (which is surprisingly frequent). Again, at first I would mumble something or pretend I didn’t hear it simply because I didn’t want to cause any trouble. But this act of evasion was just another way to hide my beliefs. Now, I still think it’s kind of a dick move to go out of your way to shoot someone down for saying “God bless you” but I no longer feign approval of it. And if you’re my co-worker who always very politely says “God bless you” I’m sorry if I seem like a dick because I don’t thank you for it; I’m just trying to be slightly less of a dick than if I were to “correct” you.

As you all know, I Love TV. Which is why I was neither surprised nor quite expecting a new study that says that unhappy people watch more TV. It wasn’t particularly surprising to me because when you have a series of posts dedicated to how depressed you are, it’s kind of implied you’re at least slightly unhappy. But I didn’t really expect it because TV is actually one of the things in my life that gives me happiness.

This study talks about how TV is escapism — which is true of any entertainment media, even though the same study says that happier people read more books — but in many ways, good television holds a mirror up to you and examines the various aspects of humanity. A few years ago, I was at a (cliche alert) crossroads in my life. I was around half way through a university degree which was promising but didn’t hold the appeal it did when I first applied. Beyond that, my faith was dwindling. For years, I had a constantly evolving understanding of God and religion. When I first had my religious re-awakening in high school, a lot of people thought it was because I had a crush on one of the girls that went to my church, but the fact is that I simply wanted to understand God better. I was experiencing teenage angst and wanted to figure what “all this” is about.

My faith grew over those years but ultimately I found myself having an understanding of God that differed and contradicted the one that both the Bible taught and that my church taught. Because of my growing skepticism of psychics, ESP, and other paranormal phenomenon and my growing understanding of how science explained the universe, I no longer thought that Jesus was actually the son of God. I still believed that he was a wise man likely sent by God to teach people a newer better way to live and worship, but I could no longer consider myself a Christian.

So, I was confused about life, the meaning of it all, and a few other things. Around that time, I started rewatching Babylon 5, a show that I hadn’t watched in quite some time, and I think it’s safe to say that it changed my life. I went from a mass of self-doubt and uncertainty about pretty much everything to having a very solid understanding of myself and the way I wanted to live in this world. I still consider Babylon 5 one of the best shows ever made, and almost certainly the best sci-fi show ever made.

There are a lot of times throughout my life that TV has helped me. Not because it let me forget about my sadness for a few minutes, but because I discovered new things. The long, drawn out character development that happens in television allows you to connect more intimately with their lives and in turn make discoveries about yourself.

Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.

Christian Rock sucks. It does. You shouldn’t try to defend it, you should be more worried about why you listen to such shitty music¹.

It’s shitty half of the time because it’s cloying and cliche and the other half of the time because it’s deceitful. The first half is the stuff you see in one minute mini-infomercials late at night. The second half is the stuff that makes it out of the core Christian Rock culture and into mainstream rock.

Switchfoot. POD. Seventh Day Slumber. This Beautiful Republic. Christian Rock bands generally have really lame names. And if you run across the music of any of the bands that “pass” as regular rock, you’d probably like it enough to listen but not enough to love it. It becomes a part of the din of songs that get played on your local rock radio station. But, for me at least, when you find out they are a Christian Rock band, suddenly every time their songs come on you can hear nothing beyond their hidden evangelizing.

It’s not that I dislike that they infuse their music with their religious beliefs; the best music comes from your most strongly felt emotions. But those bands go about it in a deceitful way. When interviewed they claim they’re not “Christian Rock” even when they began their career in the highly accessible Christian Rock tours that can really raise the profile of up and coming bands. I understand that the label of “Christian Rock” has a dirty connotation to it, but it has that because of bands like those that deny the meanings behind their songs. Rather than admit that they’re praising God, they pretend the song is about a girl.

The less notable segment of Christian Rock isn’t much better. With their over-the-top references to Jesus and God, they go beyond simply expressing their feelings and thoughts and head into the world of evangelizing. And when your songs are little more than evangelical chants wrapped in rhythm, you not only lock yourself into the Christian base, a base which doesn’t need evangelizing in the first place, but you reduce your credibility as an artist.

I’m an atheist but that doesn’t mean I detest religion; I simply have no need or desire for it in my personal life. But many of my favourite shows and movies have religious and mystical concepts at their very heart. So don’t think I hate Christian Rock simply because it involves God. I hate it because it involves God poorly.

An example of a band which is not Christian Rock but has lyrics which discuss God and Jesus very openly (and earnestly) is Page France. I’ve listened to most of Page France’s “Hello, Dear Wind” and overall the album’s a little weak, but the tracks that I find myself returning to since the initial listen — the opening two tracks (Chariot, and Jesus) and the closing track (Feather) — all contain various levels of religious and Christian symbols. But the key is that those songs talk about Jesus and God in novel ways, and they appear to be not an active part of their music. Their songs don’t include God because they think their songs should include God, but merely because the songs they end up writing include him.

I said Christian Rock sucks, but the truth is that Christian Rock shouldn’t even exist. Like the “Pro-American” parts of America Sarah Palin talks about, Rock music isn’t something to be chopped up and spread among ideologies. Music which contains religious references isn’t Religious Music. Categorizing music is fine, in fact I Love it, but there’s a difference between an adjective and a noun. A noun is what you are, but an adjective is simply a modifier. Much like the difference between calling a gay person “a gay” and “a gay person” it seem nominal at best, but the difference is staggering in its connotations. And far too many people don’t treat “Christian Rock” as an adjective followed by a noun.

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1. With apologies to Daniel Tosh [↩]

The problem with free will is that it means humans can do shitty stuff. The bigger problem with free will is that when there’s an after-life or there’s reincarnation or something beyond what little time we have here, there isn’t a pressing need to improve the world around you or be a positive member of the community around you; this isn’t universal, many religions teach you to cherish the earth, but with any promise of some form of afterlife there will be people who will just not give a damn.

Enter Religion. Now we’ve got a bunch of guys claiming to know how God wants you to act and most of the time it’s decent but some of the time it’s horrific. Of course, the problem with religion is that most of the big ones are pretty loose about their moral restrictions; Christianity, in particular, allows complete forgiveness and acceptance to heaven for simply asking forgiveness on your death bed. It’s supposed to be sincere, but the priest providing the last rites has no special ability to discern sincerity. So you can do whatever the fuck you want to as long as you feign sincerity long enough to ask forgiveness.

The reason you can do whatever you want is this ephemeral promise of eternity. So what’s a benevolent God to do? Convince people he doesn’t exist! Without the supernatural crutch of God, people would have to get their act together, do unto others and all that good stuff; you’ve only got one life, so you better not fuck it up. So you wanna know my theory? I think that if God existed, he would be working towards an atheist world where they follow his principles because they think it’s best, not because He thinks it’s best.

You want to know the really insidious thing about this? This means, that religion is a creation of the devil. Yeah. I know. It’s fucked. By creating religion, the devil co-opted God’s kick-ass plan. And the best thing about it (that devil is really tricky) is that God can’t interfere. He can’t come down and say “No! There is no God! Do not follow these religions which the devil has created!” because he would then be co-opting his own plan. Some people say that “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn’t exist” but that’s wrong; the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that God does.