Yesterday, when I wrote about that Insane Clown Posse song, I said “you can’t deny that they’re right about this one.” Now, obviously that’s not right¹. These guys, and this song, are wrong in many ways about many things. They have a line expressing anger about scientists lying to them about how magnets work²!

But despite their horrible music, and bizarre stances, they got it right that nature is pretty great. Law of averages, I guess.

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Footnotes

1. And the over-the-top title was little more than a lame reference to an awesome show. [↩]
2. Really, I think the line is supposed to invoke some Creationist anger against the scientifically valid theory of Evolution, but if you didn’t know the members of Insane Clown Posse were devout Christians — and who could blame you for not knowing that based on their profuse profanity and bizarre clown make-up — it’s easy to just imagine them hearing a scientist describe the way magnets work and getting super pissed because they the explanation was lame and/or confusing. [↩]

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.

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.