Sunday, October 23
The best thing about my day was being in my house with my flatmates.
Friday October 21
I've just walked away and realised that I'm a lot older than when I came up with all that and that there's actually a lot more to it. However, I still think it's a good place to start.
Friday October 21
I have come through my crisis of faith! And I only had to read twenty-five pages of the bible. I totally remember why I became a not-Christian now.
So when I was a kid I was quite the Catholic - gross!
I believed in god unquestioningly, but I didn't really have some kind of a "relationship" with god or anything, it's just that all of the adults in my world had told me this all of my life and why was I to question it any more than snow or the moon-landing?
But now that I look at it I believed in god like you believe that people are starving: it's something you can accept as a fact without really being able to know in yourself that it's true. It's not something that relates to any part of your experience.
So when my older sister's friend said to me "I don't believe in God" when I was thirteen it turned my head for a couple of weeks trying to figure it out, but eventually it made a lot of sense. Not to say that I don't believe in a god all out, it's just the way I have to look at things for now to reconcile with my experiences so far. If something happens I will willingly re-evaluate my beliefs on this matter, but for now this hypothesis seems to make the most sense.
At this point (over the next couple of years) I came to believe strongly in making my own decisions based on my own judgement (even though I knew I wouldn't always get it right) and then taking responsibility for the consequences of these decisions. I had forgotten this rather important point, even though I mostly live like that (I think..? Actually I'm not sure that I do). Anyway, I hope it's something I'll think about more now, because it seems important. I did a lot of thinking in this time to try to figure out what I believe in. It was an important and interesting time of my life. I had a lot of good friends who were, I think, sort of going through the same thing, so that was really good. An awesome thing to come of that is that now that I look at it we all sort of ended up believing quite different things. I would laugh so hard if my friend Claire from this time read this because I can imagine her spitting with rage at my current philosophising. She's had to hear a lot of this before, in the context of me thinking I was awesome for figuring it out. I am aware now how simplistic this all is and that smarter people have probably figured out stuff that's heaps better, but... all I'm explaining is early thinking that shaped how I act now, the alternative I found to Christian moralism.
To continue, if it turned out that there was a god and I was wrong, then I figured that the way humanity was set up (with free will etc.) that this god probably wanted you to think about things and figure stuff out for yourself and as such would probably have more respect for you than people who don't think about things so much.
And if it turned out that that was incorrect and this god really did want you to just do what it said and free will was some kind of a test or something, then that was the decision I had made and the consequence would be that I would burn in hell for all of eternity. On my own grounds.
Also I strongly believe in being good to other people. That's another thing that I'm not amazing at, but it's something I try really hard to do. I believe that given all we know, this world is the thing we have to work with and we are the ones responsible for the way it turns out. While it's a valid choice to not care or even actively make it a worse place, there seems to be more point to making it a better place. I can't really figure out any other point to life, except for art, experience and your relationships with other people. OK, so there's a lot. I don't feel I have the answer to the point of life at all, but for now those things seem like good things to live for.
I am so glad I remembered all of that, because it really affirms who I am and what I believe in. I feel good.
And I realise that that's quite a simplistic view of things, but it's not like some set of rules that I follow no matter what the situation because then I'd be no better than the sort of people I hate (ie: a lot of Christians. I actively prejudge Christians because it seems like a lot of them don't take responsibility for what they do yet somehow they still think they're on some kind of moral high ground because of some "relationship with god" though if I were their god I would hate them anyway because they're jerks. I'm sure he didn't set up all those rules to take away people's responsibility for being mean to each other. If it turns out that the Christians I meet are nice, then that's excellent. Most of them are.). Also I believe in a lot of other stuff but it's irrelevant to this current topic. Not a total worldview.
I feel good.
Sunday 16 October
(As I was saying to Colin):
Bible study so far: I'm up to page ten. The world's been created and destroyed already. A good start. The creation of the world bit seems a little unbelievable.
They've already had one of those chapters where they list who was the son of who and how long the lived for. I hope there aren't many more of those.
God seems like a real dick. All into punishment, when really it was him who made a system with the probable outcome of the aforementioned screw-ups. Not into taking personal responsibility or is he punishing himself?
My favourite part so far was that Adam and Eve were chucked out of the Garden of Eden because once they had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and knew the difference between right or wrong, God didn't want them to eat from the Tree of Life and become immortal. That was cool.
My least favourite part so far was when as part of his punishment for eating from the Tree of Life he gave all women painful reproductive cycles and painful births. I hate it when authority figures punish you for something someone else has done.
God's just promised not to interfere with human affairs ever again (Noah's ark) but if I remember correctly he does this all through the Old Testament. Perhaps it's not in chronological order. Perhaps the continuity artist on the set was crap. Perhaps God isn't tied down by our laws of time. Whatever it is, I look around me and all I see are lies, lies, lies.
The whole thing's making me rather angry actually, but not for any tangible reason. I'm very tempted to cut my losses at this point and just give up.
1683 pages to go.
Thursday October 13
Stolen from Grace's journal - http://www.livejournal.com/users/thegoldfishpool
Google your name with the word 'needs' after and find the first 10 decent things you need.
1. Chloe needs break. Chloe Heffernan chloeheffernan at
2. Chloe needs someone who can really spend some time with her to work on an issue. She needs a child-free home and a single woman would be ideal though any ...
3. ... exchange for the drug Chloe needs, while Chloe had yet another cryptic dream,
4. ... the formula in Helena�s possession is indeed the one that Chloe needs. ...
5. Mistress Chloe needs a slave who knows the fine art of foot worship, but her slave can not make her happy. She punishes him by slapping him across the face. ...
6. Chloe needs to keep nibble to keep after the mouse. Chloe stretches out. Chloe goes swinging on a...mouse? You can go swing on your star
7. I honestly don't think Chloe needs more screen time. ...
8. Chloe needs to learn how to fight dirty. ...
9. Chloe needs completing
10. CHLOE NEEDS TO BE STOPPED!
Thursday October 13, 2005
I'm getting sick of Christians getting all up in my face and not having any answers, so I have decided to re-read both "the Bible" and "Stephen Hawking's Universe - The Cosmos Explained." Just to be fair I think I might also read the Dao De Jing, the Koran, the Hindu equivalent of these books and whatever my Buddhist flatmate recommends. But it's Christians who are pissing me off the most right now, so their book first along with my book explaining modern physics. The latter is very interesting. I'm almost at the end of it for the first time and it's just been so enjoyable. I love having a vague idea of the modern theories of physics. It's so very interesting.
The whole Christian thing has become a bit too much. I am living with a Christian, I briefly dated one, I recently had to go to a wacko Christian funeral and I also recently had to spend an entire bus ride with folk who were trying to convert me.
Living with a Christian is OK. Actually it's very good, I really like him. He knows I hate Christians on principle and he is very not up in your face about his faith. He knows I like him as an exception to my prejudice and we have pretty good discussions on our differing viewpoints. Dating a Christian was OK. He was deeply saddened that some people hadn't read the bible, but that's more of a lack of perspective than anything.
The Christian funeral was fucked. It was actually the scattering of the ashes ceremony thing that was really fucked, but the funeral was screwed too. Or maybe weird makes a better explanation. The priest kept going on about how jealous she was that my Grandfather had died. She seemed unusually happy all the time, like she was trying to prove just how happy she was that she knew god and we could all be just as happy if we knew him too. The rest of the funeral was weird in other ways including how very Australian it was and the very tenuous links that had to be made to mention my two famous relatives. The scattering of the ashes ceremony was beyond stupid. It made me quite angry that while I was trying to say goodbye to my Grandfather, because he's dead it's time to say goodbye, this hyperactive priest (same one) was all like "No no, he's not really dead, he's just gone to heaven. He's quite alright. Don't worry about it." Those are the kind of lies you tell to children and I've always thought the practice of lying to children was a bit off anyway. So all these adults are standing about trying to believe that my Grandpa's not really dead because they're too scared to face up to that particular liklihood and all these kids are crying and looking kind of confused like they were wondering if they were meant to be crying after all and did this mean that Grandpa would visit next weekend but Mummy told me he was dead. And how was this woman to presume that she knew what happened after death? Had her god personally come down and told her? Or was it all based on the central tenet of an ancient and contradictory belief system? I am going to know what happens after death when I die. I think if there was a god this being would probably respect that I was looking for my own answers and not blindly accepting the trash coming out of the mouth of another member of its creation. If this god really wanted people to blindly believe in itself then it would have just made them that way. I'm sure that would have been a lot easier than coming up with the whole concept of free will. Unless of course it's a test. Which would make this god a jerk. Who wants to hang out with some jerk and testing god for all of eternity? The god would be the kind of person who left its diary open to see if you'd read it or told you a horrible to secret to see if you'd pass it on. Sounds manipulative. Doesn't sound like my idea of heaven.
The people who tried to convert me on the bus... very ineffective. Their English was so bad that they didn't get that I'd been raised a Christian and that I hadn't really liked it. They then kept forgetting important parts of their spiel and I had to keep prompting them. All up it was pretty piss-poor and funny. I got some good propaganda out of them too, so it wasn't a wasted bus ride at all.
So I'm going to re-read the bible as well as that book on the universe so next time I am confronted with a Christian I have some good answers. Note: It seems wrong to dismiss something on a lack of knowledge, so I am just confirming that when I dismissed Christianity I thought about it a lot beforehand. The only problem is that it was a long time ago now and I can't really remember why.
Postscript: I just realised that I have committed an act of bifurcation, ie. saying that there are only two possible explanations for a phenomenon, when in fact there could be more. I hope I got the right word for that. I am just making it clear that I know my mistake. I have marked the offending passage in blue.
Sunday 09 October 2005
-It was held in a shed which, thanks to recent extensions, was actually bigger than their house
-All but two of the main dishes had meat in them: the salad and the bean salad. And it wasn't the kind of party where there were like four dishes, there was heaps of food. Even the potato salad had bits of bacon in it.
-The blatant homophobia of my cousins
-Everyone's accents
September 05
Things that made my cousin's eighteenth more Australian than most:
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