I received the following two emails. I was uncertain at first whether or not they were spam, but I noticed they were both from a "Bill MacDonald" and I thought they seemed interesting. The worst they could be would be insulting advertisements insinuating that I’m insecure with my breast size. They are required reading for this course.

This is important!!!!!!!!! Everyone needs to see this:

PLEASE PASS THIS ON...

Now that you have read those you have some idea on how I came to the mood I am now in. Let us begin.

There is no God. There is no Devil. There are no angels. There are no demons. There is no Heaven. There is no Hell. When you die you rot in the ground. There is no Power that can wrest control of human destiny away from humans themselves.

These emails are both amusing and disturbing to me. First off, I’m still uncertain whether these are some sort of spam or if this guy has just confused my name with someone else. The chances that it is spam are compounded when you consider the fact that whenever I receive emails proclaiming that I can "Meet Christian Singles in your area!" I immediately respond with "fuck you and fuck your undead zombie god." They probably singled my email out for special treatment when they saw I had responded.

The most disturbing part of this is the fact that it is a viable marketing technique to place overt references to a single religion in the subject lines of mass emails sent to random strangers. What if you’re only into Jewish singles? What if the emphasis on a potential date’s religion is off-putting? What if you’re into married Christians? What if you think that Christian singles who use dating services are usually whores, and that’s a bad thing? Christianity is the largest religion in the world (for now), is it really that hard to find a date? In the American South limiting yourself to Christians is akin to limiting yourself to warm bodies.

Another thing that I found amusing about these is the alarmist tone that the first one takes (akin to the whole "Disney’s The Lion King is an allegory for sun worship and promotes sex between unwed teenagers" paranoia). Oh gods, they made a movie with anti-Christian themes! As if the "we can’t let our kids watch The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe because it has Christian themes and will make our Pagan, dancing-naked-at-equinox, goat’s-anus-kissing kids want to worship some dead Jew on a stick" crowd gets all upset and starts sending alarmist emails. There are lots of themes out there that we may not agree with. I disagree with the dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori theme, but I wouldn’t prevent kids from watching CNN for fear that they might internalize it. In fact, I think one should be exposed to as many different themes as possible as neutrally as possible to help facilitate rationality and the ability to think for oneself. In my formative years I took this so far as to watch The O’Reily Factor for quite some time. I did this to cement my sense of self as philosophically opposed to the themes and attitudes I had absorbed. I was verbally opposed because I had taken the themes in. Just like homophobes have taken dick in (the ass).

The passivity of the first email belies the nature of the "even if you’re not a Christian" qualifier, lending it an almost sarcastic tone. I object to the way it puts words in my mouth with the "even if the bible is a collection of interesting stories" line. I don’t think it’s interesting, I think it’s mostly monstrous (and not in a good, baby-eating way. In a bad, "seriously, let’s eat babies" way) and, compared to the shear volume of stories present, has very little that’s interesting except as an anthropological oddity. The video is interesting as an oddity also. First, YouTube isn’t really the best source of information. It’s like using this blog in your doctoral thesis on superstring theory. Secondly, people have been predicting the second coming of Jesus for 2,000 years. (Aside: why the fuck does Word have a squiggly line under "second coming" that tries to make me capitalize it? "Second coming" is a perfectly valid phrase that could be used without needing the capitalization appropriate to using it in a Christian religious context. Also, I lower-cased it as a sign of disrespect and because it’s not a specific event anymore. "Well, it’s the Second Coming of Jesus. Must be Thursday.") Thirdly, St. John the Revelator was a notorious mushroom-head who did time in the pen and had bad credit. You shouldn’t believe what he said. Fourthly, even if he was being prophetic it was in regards to the Roman Empire. It’s not as impressive to make an accurate prophecy about what’s going to happen next week. If it is, I predict Iraq will be a nightmare without end for the next few months at least. There, I’m a prophet. Make a YouTube video about me. Fifthly, I hate the idea of globalization as much as the next anti-capitalist but I don’t think blathering about the coming of the Great Beast (666!) is going to change things. Try getting involved in a grassroots protest group, such as the Yes Men, and see how much more that’ll do for your cause (while still being unable to stop the juggernaut that is globalization). There are enough problems with this email, and enough things that piss me off, that I am going to have to add Bill Macdonald to the list, right after Scott Bakula.

I recently watched a special on the History channel about some "lost book" of Nostradamus. The older I get the more I realize that the History Channel is staffed by complete loonies who will run a story on just about any nonsense that pops into their heads. Apparently they found a book by Nostradamus that had been given to the cardinal in charge of the Vatican Library who immediately hid it away. This book was recently released to some experts who are working to restore the folio, which also contains some simple watercolors (probably by his son, as he had no artistic talent), which is unique in his work. The "experts" (read: crackpots) were busy making interpretations on these "prophecies," which looked suspiciously like those coloring books where you dip your brush in water and the color magically appears. Anyway, the drawings, which were very symbolic, kept showing snakes and crescent moons. Obviously the crescent moon is talking about Islam, and the snake is obviously Osama bin Ladin, because there have never been any other bad Muslims, nor have there been problems between Muslims and Christians.

So these supposed experts are ignoring the fact that, even if the basic symbols are referring to what they think (and most of the symbolic interpretation is fairly head-on from what I can tell- a pope holding a staff with a double-cross is indicative of Gnostic or kabalistic thought, the crescent moon is a symbol for Islam, etc. It is just infuriating to me that these people are so self-absorbed that they ignore the 500 years of bad blood between the Christian west and the Islamic middle-east to focus on the fact that, well, if the book is talking about Muslims and Christians fighting it must be referring to today! Never mind the fact that it's been happening for a while and will probably continue for hundreds of years yet.

Another thing that bothers me is that the interpretations is basically the same system used to read the tarot cards, which is just a huge scam if you believe that it accurately depicts the future. The tarot cards all contain symbols that have happened to you hundreds of times in the past and are almost guaranteed to happen to you several times in the future. I could take a certain card showing a woman pierced with a sword through her abdomen and inform you that you will soon feel a pain in your belly. Knowing you have acid reflux, and that you will most likely eat something that doesn't agree with you at some point, this could be interpreted (by an idiot) as a prophecy. Really it's just my using what I know to stress a certain aspect of a certain symbol in a card (a woman with a sword in her gut) over all the other symbols and interpretations thereof. It's fun because it can't be wrong. That is, you can't be wrong as long as you don't get too specific unless you have some inside knowledge or are willing to make certain your prediction comes true. If I wanted to be really messy I'd give you the reading about the fire in your belly and then put too much pepper in your food.

These people wind up making these wild, speculative "predictions" based on the fact that "the book wanted to be found at this time." It's a book! It didn't decide to waltz out of its isolation in the Vatican Archives! Somebody found it, realized what it was, and took it to a company that specializes in restoring old manuscripts! The inked skin of dead animals does not think! Nor does it have magic powers (oooooooo!), nor can it manipulate the world around it! And the people who think it does should not be able to present their ludicrous ideas as fact on the History Channel! I guess I shouldn't have such high expectations of a channel that's doing a show about Bigfoot.

And that is why you shouldn’t do a speedball made with unusually pure cocaine.