BLASPHEMY - APPROBATION

I hate the fact that I'm publishing so little original content lately, though I assure you I'm still generating it (mostly on post-it notes) regularly enough. Some day, I'll kick out another SATIETY, just... not in the foreseeable future. I worked for about 30 consecutive days last month, which makes a handy excuse for why I'm not blogging much.

The biggest contributor to my delinquency, however, is my recent decision to sign up for a Twitter account.

Keeping true to my past tendencies, I was plenty late to this latest incarnation of the social networking game... but once I tried it on for size, I found it to be a wonderous utility. Much like how I praised this very blog for encouraging me to improve my own creative writing, Twitter has reinvigorated this languishing hobby of mine. And it does so in a more accessible way. The problem with blogging is that it requires a pretty significant chunk of my time to write up an essay or article that I'm willing to unleash upon the public. It requires a good bit of revision and an even better bit of staring at my monitor like an idiot while I wait for yet-unspoken sentence fragments to clink into place.

Twitter, microblogging in essence, at once minimizes this time requirement and also introduces a new challenge by imposing its 140-character limit. It is much easier to write a 140-character tweet than a 500 word post, and yet it is much harder to get something entertaining and worth reading to fit into 140 characters than it is to barf out 500 words, hoping a few stick in the mind of the casual reader.

Twitter has made blogging fun again. It's encouraged me to share more of the dozens of interesting and weird things I encounter every day, and coupled with the raw communicative capabilities of my new jesusPhone 3GS, it's never been easier to share those experiences with a sentence, a picture, or a sound bite.

Follow me at @RITmusic2k Wink.

To take a more blasphemous turn, I just wanted to give a shout out to the wonderful Evolution 101 podcast, by Dr. Zack Moore. Newly liberated by my jesusPhone 3GS, I've taken to listening to music and podcasts at work, and I'm making my way through the archives of Evolution 101 again; I never forgot how informative and accessible the material was, but I knew that I'd forgotten much of the material itself, so it was a good time to listen to them once more.

It's easily found on iTunes, and also has a presence on the web:

Evolution 101

If you want to learn more about evolution and molecular biology than you ever thought you'd enjoy learning, try Dr. Zack on for size and thank me later for the recommendation. You'll find me over at #robotpickuplines.

BLASPHEMY - REJOINDER II

Hemant Mehta asks:

How serious do you take your atheism?

Let’s find out.

Copy and paste the list below on your own site, boldfacing the things you’ve done. (Feel free to add your own elaboration and commentary to each item!)

My comments are in that burnt-orange color that's such a favorite of mine.

1. Participated in the Blasphemy Challenge.
2. Met at least one of the “Four Horsemen” (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris) in person.
3. Created an atheist blog. Duh.
4. Used the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a religious debate with someone.
5. Gotten offended when someone called you an agnostic. Not offended, per se, but I corrected them.
6. Been unable to watch Growing Pains reruns because of Kirk Cameron.
7. Own more Bibles than most Christians you know.
8. Have at least one Bible with your personal annotations regarding contradictions, disturbing parts, etc. I don't have a hard copy, simply because I use the skeptic's annotated bible.
9. Have come out as an atheist to your family.
10. Attended a campus or off-campus atheist gathering.
11. Are a member of an organized atheist/Humanist/etc. organization.
12. Had a Humanist wedding ceremony.
13. Donated money to an atheist organization.
14. Have a bookshelf dedicated solely to Richard Dawkins. Not solely to Dawkins.  There's room for Sam and Chris (haven't gotten around to buying Dennet yet).
15. Lost the friendship of someone you know because of your non-theism.
16. Tried to argue or have a discussion with someone who stopped you on the street to proselytize.
17. Hid your atheist beliefs on a first date because you didn’t want to scare him/her away.
18. Own a stockpile of atheist paraphernalia (bumper stickers, buttons, shirts, etc).
19. Attended a protest that involved religion.
20. Attended an atheist conference.
21. Subscribe to Pat Condell’s YouTube channel.
22. Started an atheist group in your area or school.
23. Successfully “de-converted” someone to atheism.
24. Have already made plans to donate your body to science after you die.
25. Told someone you’re an atheist only because you wanted to see the person’s reaction.
26. Had to think twice before screaming “Oh God!” during sex. Or you said something else in its place.
27. Lost a job because of your atheism.
28. Formed a bond with someone specifically because of your mutual atheism (meeting this person at a local gathering or conference doesn’t count).
29. Have crossed “In God We Trust” off of — or put a pro-church-state-separation stamp on — dollar bills.
30. Refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. 
31. Said “Gesundheit!” (or nothing at all) after someone sneezed because you didn’t want to say “Bless you!”
32. Have ever chosen not to clasp your hands together out of fear someone might think you’re praying.
33. Have turned on Christian TV because you need something entertaining to watch.
34. Are a 2^nd or 3^rd (or more) generation atheist.
35. Have “atheism” listed on your Facebook or dating profile — and not a euphemistic variant.
36. Attended an atheist’s funeral (i.e. a non-religious service).
37. Subscribe to an freethought magazine (e.g. Free Inquiry, Skeptic)
38. Have been interviewed by a reporter because of your atheism.
39. Written a letter-to-the-editor about an issue related to your non-belief in God.
40. Gave a friend or acquaintance a New Atheist book as a gift.
41. Wear pro-atheist clothing in public.
42. Have invited Mormons/Jehovah’s Witnesses into your house specifically becauseyou wanted to argue with them.
43. Have been physically threatened (or beaten up) because you didn’t believe in God.
44. Receive Google Alerts on “atheism” (or variants).
45. Received fewer Christmas presents than expected because people assumed you didn’t celebrate it.
46. Visited The Creation Museum or saw Ben Stein’s Expelled just so you could keep tabs on the “enemy.”
47. Refuse to tell anyone what your “sign” is… because it doesn’t matter at all.
48. Are on a mailing list for a Christian organization just so you can see what they’re up to…
49. Have kept your eyes open while you watched others around you pray.
50. Avoid even Unitarian churches because they’re too close to religion for you.

So I'm a solid 22.  There are more that were kinda... 'close to target' but not quite, so I left them off.  Some items I left off, and having done so could be considered more hardcore atheist than doing the thing listed.  Anyway, it's all good in the 'hood.

Catch you guys again next month!

BLASPHEMY - ASSEVERATION

Still here.

Still don't believe in God.

Just been incredibly busy at work, which is the only time I blog. Incredibly busier outside of work.

But I'm not done writing, and I'm certainly not done philosophizing my way across the vast landscape of modern American atheism.

Still here...

ERSATZ

Google is kinda my new religion, in a Church of Google sort of way.

Anything they do, I'm all over. The recently unrolled Lively, which is sort of a mashup of Instant Messenger and Second Life.

If you want to make a chatroom, you literally create a room which avatars can then populate. They perform animations, and do all your 'talking' for you in the form of cartoonish speech bubbles.

This post is little more* than a test to see if I can embed my room into a webpage.











* - because it's kind of also to tell you guys about it.

BLASPHEMY - ONUS

I consider myself a privileged individual for many reasons, not the least of which being the fact that I get to live in Southern California.

A small part of that privilege is having access to some excellent radio stations. I am a daily listener to 95.5 KLOS, the classic rock station in these parts,* and I am a rabid fan of the Mark and Brian show, their daily morning talk/variety show. These guys are smart and funny, and responsible for some wonderful events and charities in these parts.**

This morning, the hot topic was the recent court ruling in favor of gay marriage. The call-in response was largely in support of the movement (it is a liberal-leaning show and listenership, after all), but in the midst of it one obviously Christian lady called in and presented the idiotic 'slippery-slope' argument: "Well if a man can choose to marry another man today, what will he be allowed to choose tomorrow? What if he chooses to marry a little boy tomorrow?"

I'm not going to spend any time refuting Pedophile Lady's argument; my issue is with the way her comment was handled. Brian (1/2 of the show's namesake) quite appropriately dispatched her with a rebuttal and an "I'm ashamed and disappointed that this is your opinion", but he qualified it first with, "this is your opinion and I cannot tell you to change it."





...pardon me while I wrestle this soapbox into position...





Okay. Well, I have an opinion about this, and I most definitely wish I could change his.


Right after I heard the exchange, I sent the show a quick TXT message (a great feature, by the way), something to the effect of, "Brian, maybe some of these people SHOULDN'T be entitled to their opinion when it's based on bad/damaging information."


Well, the coolest thing happened shortly afterward: during a commercial break, Brian called me to talk about my message!*** He was really curious and wanted me to elaborate on my message, so he could get a better feel for the point I was trying to make. He admitted that he personally agrees with me (Another atheist! WOOHOO!), but insisted that he couldn't tell her she was wrong because it would make him a hypocrite. I tried to give an argument against that, but didn't have my thinking cap on (read: coffee in my stomach) and didn't give him the most effective one.

So... he had to get back to the show; we exchanged our gratitudes and compliments, and hung up.

But right after we concluded our session, the brilliance started pouring out. Of course. I went to the show's website to take advantage of the extended format of an e-mail response, and penned this follow-up, which I'd like to share with you all:

This is a follow-up to a TXT message I sent earlier today; Brian called me back and we talked briefly about my statement that some peoples' opinions shouldn't be honored if they're based on bad information:

Brian, I (of course) couldn't think of the best language to convey my point right away when you asked me to clarify... but I want to take another stab at it.

My point is that you are *not* automatically a hypocrite when you present a firm opposition to someone else's opinion... because in some cases their opinion can be objectively incorrect.

To object to an uninformed opinion with an equally uninformed counter-opinion would be hypocritical, sure... but just because an idea is wrapped up in the context of 'Opinion' doesn't mean it should be afforded automatic protection from scrutiny.

It is possible to objectively measure the quality or validity of an opinion - It could be my opinion that Mark is a moron (sorry, Mark), and all you'd have to do is show me the results of his IQ test to prove that my opinion is completely incorrect. I appreciate your compassion if you don't want to offend me by pointing out that I'm wrong (and I think that's a big part of your stance - I won't argue with your being courteous to callers), but this is a relatively harmless example.

But what if there were such a thing as a harmful example? Pedophile Lady makes a claim that is founded by what she believes to be an irrefutable and perfectly correct source - her church, clergy and bible. When the bible was written, it was correct according to the best info we had at the time. But today, we know objectively that there are physiological explanations for the occurrence of homosexuality. We actually know better, now, than to think that homosexuality is a choice. It has been confirmed time and again with the same scientific rigor that has successfully given us 80-year life expectancies, air travel, radio talk shows, and every other miraculous achievement of modern society.

But, Pedophile Lady's opinion is incredibly prevalent right now...

...and simply because these incorrect ideas about homosexuality are encapsulated in the Protection of Opinion, we're allowing countless real people to suffer lives of forced compliance, and relegating them to a form of second-class restricted citizenship.

All for the sake of politeness.

At some point we need to see that we're allowing a greater evil to thrive, because we're unwilling to perpetrate the evil of telling people when they're wrong.

~Kevin

It's about civic duty. We should be able and willing to stamp out harmful ideas and the acts they promote, especially when the cost of doing so (offending christians) is so feeble compared to the cost of doing nothing. It's time to bring a little obligatory rudeness into our arsenal.



* - I'm not going to tell you, but here's a hint: KLOS is named for Los (something).
** - See footnote above.
*** - This dude is a bonafide CELEBRITY. Of course I'm excited.

IDIOSYNCRATIC III

Oh yeah, I never followed up on my most recent jury duty experience!

I have revised my conclusions. Jury duty is not actually answering machine practice,* it's Government-mandated Surfing On The Internet Via Government-Provided Wireless Access.

I sat in a large lobby known as the Jury Assembly Room,** and spent five hours of an unpaid workday reading web pages. Go Justice!



In other news, I got a new car. I'm in love with it. 2001 Saab 9-3. Five doors, five gears, black on black:



Her name's Carla. There's a story behind that... maybe later.

* - sometimes it still is.
** - that was remarkably similar to an airline terminal, but with way less security, and way cheaper snacks.

IDIOSYNCRATIC II

I talked about jury duty before. Here. I didn't have many kind things to say at the time, mainly because my service consisted of listening to answering machine messages for a few weeks, then being thanked for my service.

Well, It's a couple years later, and I'm typing this from the Jury Assembly Room in the Orange County West Courthouse. Maybe now I'll have something to type about.

It occurred to me in the shower* this morning that our only two civic responsibilities as U.S. citizens consist of selecting people from the middle masses and relegating them to opposite ends of the demographical spectrum... voting leaders to one side and criminals to the other**.

Of course, it helps to be close to one of those ends in the first place. Either way, I'm finally*** going to perform the second sacred duty of citizenship, and maybe I'll have something exciting to report once I'm looking back from the other side.

I wonder if they're going to try to make me put my hand on a bible?

* - as it almost always does.
** - maybe we're all criminals, and we're deciding which ones get carte blanche and the task of figuring out how to pay for everything, and which get a cinderblock studio apartment with everything paid for.
*** - well, maybe not.

BLASPHEMY - INEQUITY

I learned today that I do not like being discriminated against.

After hearing some good words about Blogrush, a relatively new traffic-generating widget, I signed myself up in an attempt to generate traffic*. It worked remarkably well, to an extent**. I did get a few new readers (which brought my total readership up to 'a few'), a couple of whom left positive commentary on my work; I was indeed performing up to Blogrush's standards by actively contributing materials deemed valuable to the service's readership.

This morning, however, I received an email from the Blogrush staff indicating that my blog has been removed from rotation. The full text of the email appears here, but the critical elements are replicated below:

We regret to inform you that your BlogRush Account has been made INACTIVE because your blog did not pass our Quality Review criteria. You will find instructions below for making your account active again.

...

We determined that your blog did not meet our strict quality guidelines. Please do not take this personally but realize that we must abide by a very strict set of quality guidelines. (They are listed below.)

...

The primary reason(s) your blog(s) did not meet our guidelines: Inappropriate Content Or Advertising: Hate Speech or Anti-Racial (emphasis mine)

Hate Speech or Anti-Racial*** content...


...wow.


I guarantee you will not find one racist idea in all of the 127 posts that appear on this blog, for the same reason you wouldn't expect someone blind since birth to speak of a mental image; thoughts of that nature simply don't occur to me. So it must be hate speech they found.

Have I perpetrated an act of hate speech on any of these pages? I certainly don't think I have, but maybe 'hate speech' has swelled into such a broadly-defined word that 'criticism' falls within its blanket definition.

I have no illusions about this blog's critical views on organized religion, but I don't believe there is anything truly hateful spoken about any person or group of people, with the exception of Ann Coulter****, of course. To be clear, I passionately detest organized religion due its direct cause of so many personal and societal ills. I do indeed hate all the bad things religion causes, and I hate their cause equally. It is not wrong for people to have hated Hitler and Nazism; he caused tremendous undue human suffering. We should hate things that actively harm people.

Most importantly, though, is that when I speak out against religion I am not perpetrating hate speech. True hate speech is directed toward a person or group of people, not toward an institution. If you scour the pages of Prose Justice, the worst you will find... the thoughts that are as close to hateful as can be found here, will all be directed toward institutions, not toward people. It is not hate speech; it is just editorial opinion and information.



Just for fun, I myself looked for instances of hate speech. Using the search bar at the top of Prose Justice, keyword 'hate', Here's what I found:

"I love the English language for being so flexible and organic, but I hate when those attributes are exploited to supplement the argument being presented." - BLASPHEMY - EXACTITUDE

"Phones are as natural to gens X and Y as are toilets, and toilets are as natural as butts in this part of the world. We understand phones already. We understand their associated technologies as easily. Even the complicated ones like automated customer service. We hate that one, but we certainly understand it." - IDIOSYNCRATIC

"My roommate Tom's mugging - Tom was attacked by a handful of kids as he was riding home on a bicycle. They ran off the porch and chased him down, attacking him and taking the ten dollars he had on his person. I hate Brooks Ave...

...the massive standoff in my neighborhood, complete with lunatics holed up in a house with shotguns, and thirty-odd cops on the scene throwing around terms like 'kill zone'. I hate Brooks Ave." - PERTURBATION

"You may like foreign cars. You may like small cars. You may hate either, as a matter of fact, but with complete disregard to the preceding, you will love this commercial for this small foreign car. The Citroen C4. That is all...

...It's kinda like a gentlemen's club, really: Those who know about it love it, and everyone else hates them for being involved with it." - JOCOSE

"I HATE seeing great musicians wasting their talent playing other peoples' music." - INTERREGNUM

"I HATE the word 'holla' but will knowingly and willingly use it in jest to promote the disrespect of the word. I suggest you all do the same." - ORATORY 1

Any hate speech in there? Didn't think so.


But to be fair, let's try to look for instances where I actually have a chance to slip into hate speech. First we're going to use the term 'Christian', then we're going to use my frequent catch-all phrase, 'the religious'. If I'm going to say anything hateful about a person or group, those words will be there. So here we go:

"An example of this phenomenon is that Muslims are less likely than Christians to be killed in automobile accidents. When worded this way, it implies that Islam makes one a better driver than does Christianity. But it's much more likely that since Muslims generally don't drink, Muslims drive drunk far less frequently than Christians do, resulting in fewer enough drunk-driving fatalities to skew the results" - BLASPHEMY - ESPIAL

"This one goes out to all the good Christian people out there who mistakenly believe atheism is nihilism...

...I know that you're expecting to be tricked, but honestly pretending that you weren't... would you have been compelled to say 'Christian'? Well, the fact is, I left one item off the bottom of that list. If that last item was "Believing that the character of Jesus Christ was the son of God and died for our sins," then and only then would you be correct in describing him as Christian." - BLASPHEMY - ALTERITY

"And in case there was any misunderstanding about the context of Mark 3:29, let me unambiguously state that the acts performed by Christians to spread Christianity represents the absolute worst of human nature. If any of our human behaviors deserve to be called demonic, it's the fear-mongering critical to successful religious indoctrination.
" - BLASPHEMY - COVENANT

"The 'Family Values' ticket, which you can find on your garden variety voters' ballot, really means 'Undercover Christian'." - EPHEMERAL

"Any sufficiently radical scientific study engenders passionate outcries from the religious: 'We must stop playing God before it's too late!' 'Playing God' to them is inherently bad; my guess is because of its violation of some deadly sin or another. Pride, vanity, hubris. Whatever it is... we can't puff ourselves up and presume to know what we're doing. We can't take God's place. We're violating natural order...

...It wasn't until our technology began yielding godlike capabilities that the religious got squeamish about it all." - BLASPHEMY - DESIDERATUM

"Blind faith removes the verification process something has to endure before you can have faith in it. This is the kind of faith the religious have; the problem is that they mistakenly believe that their faith is the unblind kind." - BLASPHEMY - EXACTITUDE

"We've been labeled that way by the religious for so long that we've gotten used to it. It's probably our own fault that we haven't done so much to correct the misinterpretations of what it means to be atheist." - BLASPHEMY - ATTESTATION

"Interestingly, the fact that the universe exists is a source of unspeakable awe and 'reverence' to me. It drives me to never stop learning. This is the kind of awe the religious could only dream of experiencing." - BLASPHEMY - REJOINDER

"The religious and the agnostics draw a circle, within which is the natural and explainable, outside of which lies the supernatural. The religious populate this external region with God...

...Because if it was worth it to you to ask about the universe's complexity, wouldn't it be more worth it to ask about God's greater complexity? That's only a rhetorical question because the religious would never dare to ask that...

...The pyramids were, with the obvious exception of their geometry, pointless. How many hours, how much raw material, how many lives were consumed in the building of these religious monuments? They serve well as a poignant example of the resource-sapping by the religious that occurs even today, though to a thankfully less drastic extent." - BLASPHEMY - SATIETY

"When the religious organizations lobby for teaching of intelligent design in schools, they often accompany this with a statement encouraging students to be cautionary in their thoughts toward evolution...

...If the proponents of ID want to be skeptical about evolution because it is just a 'theory', they should be raising as much opposition to relativity as well. But the religious community has no quarrel with relativity, because they do not believe support of relativity is equal to a renunciation of God." - BLASPHEMY - MODICUM

I left out instances in which the search term yielded hits for phrases like 'Christian organization' or 'the religious organization', again because regardless of what I say afterward, it is not true hate speech. If you want to look for them yourself, you'll see that what I say falls far short of hateful anyway.

Looking through all that, there is only one passage that comes close to denigrating Christian people, and even then I explicitly aim my attack at the specific practice of fear-mongering for the purpose of indoctrination. Everything else there is statement of fact or constructive critiquing. Nowhere else will you see even a hint of bile or spite or flat-out insult*****.

After spending only a short while following links via the blogrush widget, I came across several websites with far more caustic language and direct attacks on groups and individuals, from atheistic blogs, from religious blogs, and from blogs that have no theological slant whatsoever.

So I guess this post is both a cry for help from my fellow atheist bloggers, and also a caution to my fellow atheist bloggers who use Blogrush. Their website indicates that they manually inspect every blog that signs up... I'd really like to know if this has happened to anybody else.

I realize this is a very modest instance of discrimination; nothing has happened to me, only to one avenue of distribution of my digital presence. But it's validation just the same that a blog about positive atheism and about religious criticism is viewed as hate speech, at least in the eyes of the constituents of Blogrush. Thank you, Blogrush, for proving to me that we atheists still have work to do.

* - and to win the lottery; well, one out of two ain't bad...
** - See footnote #1.
*** - which I think, etymologically speaking, means 'against differentiation by race'... so maybe all those people using the term 'anti-racial' should use a correct and unambiguous word like 'racist' instead. Because I'd like to be able to use the term 'anti-racial' for what it really means without having to stop and explain myself like I did here.
**** - about whom I didn't even speak hatefully... only critically, and I did so within the framework of stand-up comedy (which is ALL ABOUT exaggeration), which wasn't even that funny. OK, fine, you want to drag it out of me? I HATE ANN COULTER BECAUSE SHE IS A HATEWORTHY PERSON, WHO LIVES QUITE WELL OFF PROFITS THAT COME DIRECTLY FROM THE PROPAGATION OF HATE SPEECH. YOU LISTENING, BLOGRUSH? READ ONE OF ANN COULTER'S BOOKS, TAKE NOTES, AND THEN COME BACK TO ME AND TELL ME THAT MY BLOG CONTAINS HATE SPEECH. I fucking dare you.
***** - See footnote #4

BLASPHEMY - SODALITY

And the hits just keep on comin'!

Prose Justice has just been added to the Atheist Blogroll. This is a big step for me, since, well... other people will be visiting this page. That hasn't happened for a long time.

In preparation for the potential influx of readers, I've done a little upkeep here to make the site more manageable for people that are here to read what interests them. This site will still be my personal journal, and my archives consist of the better part of a hundred posts that have nothing to do with atheism, and due to my inconvenient post-titling scheme it'd be tough to discern which of my posts have anything interesting to say at all... so if you want the good stuff about my new favorite A-word, click the link at the top of the page.

That's all for now. I'll finish with a link to post-previous, the one that represents the bulk of my creative outpourings of the last eight months, and the post that got me on the blogroll in the first place.

Okay, really finishing this time. Thanks to Mojoey for creating the blogroll. You're putting your money where your mouth is. Thanks for setting the example and providing a platform for the rest of us to follow suit!

BLASPHEMY - SATIETY

Started 11/3/06, completed 8/8/07

SATIETY

I read an interesting theory about life, in which it is hypothetically supposed that humans are not so much a lifeform, but a byproduct of a lifeform... that DNA itself is the real animal, the defined living being. The means by which it found the solution to its survival is clumping together in a massive swarm that spends a period of time advancing through stages which ultimately allow it to combine with another swarm of DNA which will allow the new generation to propagate...

Life itself is, when conceptually condensed for the sake of the argument, simply the persistence of information: the significant pattern arranged in a (relatively or even arbitrarily) meaningful way. In the case of humans, it is their DNA and all its associated emergent attributes.

When viewing a homologous sample population of a particular sect of any organized religion, the same type of pattern is identifiable in the higher-order philosophical arguments and belief systems... to that end, some have called religion a 'virus of the mind'.

In recent years, I found myself coming to that realization on my own. Seeing religion itself as a 3rd order sociological lifeform: Self-sustaining, reproducing, and adaptive; whereas humans are constructed in a tangible medium of molecules... religion is a swarm entity literally made of the intangible stuff of mob mentality, cemented together by vestigial fight-or-flight instincts. Fear. Anger. What's especially interesting to me is that this 3rd order lifeform exhibits evolutionary footprints itself. It conforms to the broad definition of life, and even follows rules out of the same playbook we do. A virus of the mind. There is a pointedness to that description... not many viruses are known to benefit their hosts.

A Roman Catholic born and raised, I believed in what I was taught from the beginning. I didn't always have the presence of mind, however, to be aware that I never felt the presence of God. Eventually, I grew more self-aware, and noticed at least in the background, that I never felt this thing I believed in. But time passes, and experience hones the ability to process data like these. Inevitably my Catholicism fell by the wayside. If you asked me about religion, I'd likely reply, "I'm not into organized religion, but I'm one of the most spiritual people you'll ever meet." And yet, I wasn't done with organized religion. I was compelled to study it. Not just Christianity, either. I had developed a ravenous appetite for theological materials. I would study it and get into deep conversations about it. Something in me wouldn't let me leave religion alone.

For a long time, I studied it. For a long time, I exhausted myself trying to define my place along the spectrum of faith. For a long time I firmly planted myself within the boundary of agnosticism, but something still wasn't right. Agnostic. It really worked well publicly, but it didn't describe me. There was something truer than that, but it was a scary word indeed. It was another A-word. Luckily, a matter of semantics reconcile an inadequacy of a definition...

The religious and the agnostics draw a circle, within which is the natural and explainable, outside of which lies the supernatural. The religious populate this external region with God. The agnostics don't populate it with anything, but they make sure the space is reserved in case anything does occupy it. The problem with this is that they've fixed the proportions. I draw my circle, and if something comes into my experience that falls outside that circle, I have the liberty of drawing a larger circle to accommodate it. The religious drew their circle and it has a fixed area. More accurately, someone drew the circle for them, in a time when there was not much known about the universe. The circle was very small indeed. They managed to cram most of our modern knowledge into that fixed space, which only makes it easier for them to imagine the 'rest of it/the undiscovered' in the supernatural space outside the circle. The circle to them is a point-of-no-further-investigation. But I can just keep drawing my circle bigger and bigger. There is no limit to the canvas of a scientific mind.

Something new became apparent to me here. Not only am I not religious, I am not agnostic. The larger and larger my circle gets, the more magnificent the entire universe becomes to me. The larger circle has no stigma attached, no dogma applied, no means to induce fear or doubt. The larger circle is that of an atheist. My current assessment then, is that the term 'atheism' accounts for this sense of wonderment quite adequately.

More concisely: if something is proven/explained that was previously regarded in terms of the supernatural, then by the fact of its discovery it is obviously a part of this universe, and is therefore part of nature. This is consistent through all of recorded history. Thus, something as of yet unexplained is likely to be a part of nature that we haven't yet mastered... but a part of nature nonetheless.

I'd take this perspective so far as to say if the anthropomorphic God of ethical monotheism walked out of a cloud and announced his existence irrefutably to the world, then the only logical conclusion I could make is that there is this 'god aspect' of nature heretofore undiscovered, with its own fundamental properties. There'd be a whole new category of physics to learn about: God physics. How he reads minds and can be everywhere at once and how he exists on his (or apart from all) timescales. Those would be exciting times for scientists!

Going back to my 'circle' analogy, it seems rather arbitrary and unnecessary to draw the circle once we realize that there are things yet to be discovered in the natural universe. Why then do we feel that we need to draw a line that separates the unknown of the natural universe and the 'supernatural'? What value is a border if the things on either side of it are identical? That's all we're doing: going into the already unknown (which is obviously the worst place to start concocting firm assertations) and draw a line, saying, "...and past this line is the more unknown." If it's even more unknown than the unknown, how can we possibly know enough about it to conclude that it is definitely unknowable? In truth, the only responsible position is to avail oneself to the idea that time is a powerful tool and say, "it is not yet understood." No deadlines, no goals. Just the humility to admit that we cannot understand it, but someday, somebody better might come along.

It's a paradox, or perhaps is ironic, to consider that the hardiest argument for god is the "incalculable complexity" of the world we live in. They look at what science has presented and call it too cumbersome to be taken seriously. They say that it's foolish to try to explain it with intricate theories. They say the simplest answer is usually the correct answer. In that statement, I agree with them completely. To shake a leaf out of their own tree for a moment: You know what's the most complex thing in the universe? God. Their 'simple answer', by their own definition, is in fact something so complex as to be considered unknowable.

Whereas evolution is about simple beginnings that lead to more developed ends, looking back from the religious perspective means you end up looking at something more complicated than what you're struggling to justify here and now. What makes more logical sense: tracing back from today's complexity to ever simpler iterations the further back you go, or tracing back to something that gets more complicated the further back you look, all the way to the conceptual limits of an infinitely complex god who's been around an infinitely long time? And let's say that the latter strikes you, for some reason, as the more logical of the two. Then I shall ask a better question. Which of those two scenarios does a better job of addressing the actual question: how do I explain the complexity around us now? If your answer is "it was more complex in the past", then you've shot yourself in the foot with a rather large bullet. Because if it was worth it to you to ask about the universe's complexity, wouldn't it be more worth it to ask about God's greater complexity? That's only a rhetorical question because the religious would never dare to ask that. In the meantime, Remember that simple beginnings are easy to explain. Unfathomable complexity, on the other hand, should have no part in any sentence with the word 'answer' in it. The complexity of the world around us was slightly simpler yesterday. It was simpler still the day before. And you know what? There are enough yesterdays to follow that progression back to the very beginning. And a trillion or so to spare.


But the faithful want to save me. They say, "All you have to do is obey God's rules and you will be rewarded with entrance into heaven." So, you want me to take part in an experiment that will occupy me for the REST OF MY LIFE, and it turns out that I'm right, I won't know until I'm dead, which is another way of saying I'll never get to know. Those are awfully high stakes to play with. Awfully high stakes for a pretty peculiar reward: my sincere difficulty with this is that their intentions are based upon the notion that there is the magnificent gift of heaven ahead of us all. But that argument would only seem to hold water if there wasn't this massively rewarding life I'm living right here and now. Even to tally up all the joy I've experienced in my relatively short 26 years of life is a tremendous amount of evidence for this life being rewarding enough - that they fail to notice this is what astounds me. Their tunnel vision is incomparable; it's something akin to using a microscope to view the room you're sitting in.


This also brings about stunning implications: I spoke of the apparent invalidity of the heavenly-reward concept as evidenced by how rewarding life on earth was. That sentence may have sounded to you as subjective and terribly shortsighted. I could have worded my statement more precisely, instead saying that there were examples of how rewarding life on earth could be. I admit that I have had a fortunate life, and I therefore represent a painfully small fraction of the human population. There are hundreds of millions (and I sadly suspect more than a billion) of people alive today who will not be alive for long. Their short lives will have consisted of only hardship, suffering, and despair. While I was, in a way, 'for' the end of religion as we know it, I had previously decided that I would not be militantly so. I understood that there are people out there (like those I described above), a great many, in fact, for whom religious belief is a wholly positive influence on their lives; a refuge from a life of physical and emotional starvation. But it's simply not good enough to let them have their faith at the cost of letting them die tragic deaths for lack of intervention. As such I now realize that I am militantly 'for' the end of organized religion. I say so without remorse because I acknowledge a very real problem that invalidates the "But what about all the good things the Church does for people?" argument. No church spends all their money for good works. They may spend a large portion, but there is ALWAYS a portion that is spent on sustaining itself and on gaining new members. That money spent harvesting believers represents a significant opportunity cost. With equal funding, a nonreligious organization will always have the capacity to care for and to improve the lives of more people than the religious one whose true intent is to make people religious before making them well. If we reach the understanding that this life is indeed the only one we are privileged enough to experience, and we also see that not all of us (and in fact most of us) desperately need more help than even the most dedicated and capable can provide, then there is only one conclusion: it is in our hands; we must decide to make this Earth into our collective heaven or let it be hell for them. We have to stop wasting money on organizations that cannibalize our good will.

Consider that. The pyramids were, with the obvious exception of their geometry, pointless. How many hours, how much raw material, how many lives were consumed in the building of these religious monuments? They serve well as a poignant example of the resource-sapping by the religious that occurs even today, though to a thankfully less drastic extent.

For the record, I used the term 'militantly' tongue-in-cheek. I don't want to firebomb a church or support the violent overthrow of any religious organization. I could never advocate sacrificing them for the benefit of the rest of mankind, even if there would be a morbid symmetry to the whole thing. I suppose the more accurate term would be 'vigorously'. That's it.

I am vigorously advocating the end of organized religion as we know it.

So that leaves me with few options. The best one I can fathom is to be a part of the grassroots effort to show a public and unafraid face to the world. There are more atheists out there than have been counted, and the best thing for them to see is that it's getting easier to admit it. The only way to topple the tower is to weaken the foundation, and that means that we have to spread the word bottom-up. Don't think that I don't realize that I'm describing a Mission. It pains me that we have to play that same game with the same people. Spiritual ping pong. But it's the only tool we have and if we're serious about wanting to change the world for the better, it's a tool we must use.

Why am I so confident that theism is incorrect? Because I can satisfactorily explain why 95% of the world's population can be wrong about their belief.

Yahweh, for example, was a small and petty tribal god. In his ten commandments (of which there are more like 20-30, most of which are grotesque, unethical, or just plain obtuse), he identifies himself as 'the one true god', which is not to say that he is the only supernatural being in the universe. Rather, it serves to validate the idea that other gods did exist, but Yahweh's own people would get into some serious trouble if they were to take any time to worship them. He says, 'do not honor other gods than me'... now why would he say that unless there were other gods vying for their reverence? He should've said 'there are no other gods than me'.

...but I digress.

So what was the value in a tribe believing in their tribal god? Survival value. Small tribes get into wars with other small tribes. Survival then was a luxury, not a right as it is becoming in present times. You'd better believe there was a value to a tribal warrior about to go into battle, knowing that there was a power greater than his own who was going into battle with him. Who is the more effective warrior, the one who knows only of his own muscle and agility, or the one who has a divine protection? Which one is more aggressive? Which one, statistically speaking, is more likely to deal a crippling blow to an adversary? Which of the two, at the end of the day, is more likely not just to have survived, but to have survived as a member of the victorious tribe, the one to whom all the land is now bestowed? Those who found a resourcefulness in supernatural belief survived and populated the planet.


One thing I want to address: I've been reading some books lately by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and have been scouring countless atheist web pages... but nobody "taught" me atheism. It was a conclusion I came to along the way while growing up. But that is not to say that there was a defining moment in which a switch was flipped and I said, "okay, I'm atheist now." It's a description that I gradually came closer and closer to resembling as I matured and resolved my ideologies with greater and greater precision. The closest I could come to pointing out the defining moment was the reconciled definition I spoke of earlier in this essay. Not a single thing about who I was or what I believed changed in the slightest. Only the language I used to describe it was eschewed in lieu of something more accurate, and if I may go so far as to say, more 'confident'.

People claim to use the god concept to answer fundamental questions. But there is a difference between answers and excuses. Especially considering that it's always only one excuse. "This thing we don't understand? Well, it's because of God." Pardon me for preferring answers. I don't need to know everything right now. Is that the only reason we need a be-all-end-all answer? Because we're not comfy unless we can account for everything? Is that why people need God so much? To be a shortcut to the comfort of having everything accounted for? I promise that I will get to know much, much more, by pacing myself... by accepting that I don't need to have an answer for everything right now... the answers will come as soon as we become 'enough' to be capable of understanding them. Meanwhile, I'm not sweating. I'm just busy learning more. And I could not be more fulfilled.

This essay is my public affirmation of rationality. I am atheist. Society isn't content to let that go by so quietly the way they would if I were to say "I am left-handed". They want it to be my title, like it defines me as opposed to defining one of my attributes. They label me an atheist.

Fine. If you give me a badge, then I'm going to wear it. I am an atheist. I'm joining the ranks of those who will speak out in defense of those who are misunderstood and persecuted for their lack of religious beliefs. I am just about finished with the word 'supernatural'.

For me, from now on, the word supernatural will only have one purpose. It will define an empty-set. It is a reminder to me that, according to my rules, nothing shall ever occupy that space. It's a rather dualistic thing in itself, really. It is the hard-line boundary I have set to the universe, and it is by being so, the thing that enables the borders of the 'natural' to expand indefinitely so long as we find new things to put there. It reminds me that there is not a single shred of evidence uncovered in the collective history of mankind that would suggest that we cannot eventually understand a mysterious thing we've encountered. There is no reason to think any less of ourselves.

---------------------------------------------
Thanks for bearing with me on that; I know that was a long read.


And, thus begins the new incarnation of Prose Justice. While there will still appear the occasional 'personal journal' entry, the primary purpose of this blog will be to share my thoughts on the atheists' uphill battle to carve out a safe space to exist in the United States and on the internet. My dream is to help make that place a place from which we may concert our efforts toward making the world a safer and better place for all humankind. There is a lot more to come.

**
This essay was, believe it or not, much longer at one point. A byproduct of the fact that I spent eight months writing it was that the piece jumped around from topic to topic. Before publishing it, I pruned it down until it focused mainly on my deconversion and my justification of atheism. The rest of the chunks have been kept as individually-packaged snippets, and will be published here at a rate of one every couple days or so. At present there are about thirty of these posts waiting in the wings. I am continuing to write new ones on a pretty regular basis as well. So, this blog will become much more active than it has ever been.
**
I will also point out, tongue in cheek, that I made good on my promise to stop using a one-word post-titling scheme in order to make it easier for readers to find articles of interest to them. I am now using (for all atheism-related posts) a two-word titling scheme, the first word always being 'BLASPHEMY'.

I crack myself up.

EVOLUTION

It had to happen eventually.

I've been blogging to myself ever since I brought this page out of hibernation; my readership has dwindled to, well... me, and I have had trouble finding things I could write passionately about.

That is, with one exception. I've mentioned a couple times now that I've been working on an essay that was very important to me. I couldn't blog, but I could add to the essay. The overwhelming majority of my creative energies have been directed into it. It's been eight months now that I've been revising and editing the piece. The time has just about arrived for me to reveal it. With the posting of this document, there are bound to be changes to the blog itself. That's what this post is announcing.

I'm going to start with my essay, then continue expounding on the ideas essential to its theme. I'm expecting to observe a general drift toward relevance in the blogosphere as I make my presence more accessible.


It had to happen eventually: I finally figured out what this blog, what blogging, is for.


I'll add that this is a very precisely named post. It's not only a description of the changes happening at Prose Justice, but it also alludes to a good chunk of the content that's coming in the days ahead. Incidentally, due to the changes occurring, it will be the last post (for a long time, at least) to follow my 'single million-dollar-word' naming scheme.

There will be interesting times ahead, my friends.

ABEYANCE

Hello hello!

I've made mention a couple times now of this essay I'm writing. I'm very proud of it. But it's not coming yet.

You see, I've been tapped by a good buddy and aspiring filmmaker to write a screenplay for a short film about espionage.

Seriously, who doesn't like spy movies? AND I GET TO MAKE ONE?? Sign me up twice! What this means is, however, that all my creative energies have to go into this script. So no more work on the essay for a while.

Rest assured, I'll certainly be posting the script once it's finished.

So, yeah... I felt the need to announce the justification for not writing here for a little bit... which is weird, since in the past I've had no compunction with just leaving for months at a time without the slightest hint or excuse. Oh well, new leaf.

DUTY

I believe in our system.

By 'our' I'm referring to the citizens of the United States. By 'system' I mean our government as a whole. By 'believe in', I mean that there was once a pure and honest intention central to that government, which was the source of our greatest ideals as a nation; I believe that if we dig (or poke, if need be) deeply enough, we will discover that it is still there, and with concerted effort we can motivate it to bring about a positive change for the future. It happened with emancipation. It happened with womens' suffrage.

It needs to happen to the I.R.S.

My responsibility as a citizen is to make my voice heard if I have a strong and politically relevant opinion on a matter. It's not a huge responsibility, but it's one I've been given and I intend to use it. Every time I need to.

What follows is a letter I wrote to my Senators and my state Representative - an indulgent expansion of a form letter sourced from the 'Americans for Fair Taxation' organization, of which I am a fervent supporter:


Dear [Rep. Sanchez / Sen. Boxer / Sen. Feinstein],

Every April, American taxpayers dread the federal income tax filing
process; the endless forms and paperwork, the cumbersome rules and
byzantine changes. It's time to say, "Enough already!"

As a voting constituent of yours, I support a viable and smart
alternative, the FairTax, and would suggest you consider this proposal
as well. The FairTax is better for everyone: Citizens, businesses, and
most of all our economy, which would be unshackled from the endless
volumes of regulations and rules that comprise our federal tax code
today.

In the time I have had to study the FairTax debate from both sides, I
have seen overwhelming evidence that it is a far superior taxation
scheme than the runaway train our current system has become. I have
determined that this is a far more advantageous plan not just for
selfish or personal reasons, but for the greater good of the nation we
live in.

A truly progressive tax like the one FairTax implements would improve
not only the financial standing of a great majority that are currently
unable to climb out of the hole of debt and financial dependence, but
would also improve the government's efficiency in keeping track of its
due revenue. I will point out, in case you are not aware, that the
FairTax in no way attempts to reduce the amount of money the
government receives; instead it is designed to redistribute the tax
burden in a manner that is logically fair, and mutually beneficial to
all taxpayers.

If you have heard of the FairTax but are skeptical of the claims I'm
making in this statement, I strongly encourage you to obtain a copy of
'The FairTax Book' by Neal Boortz and John Linder. Read it cover to
cover. I wouldn't doubt there's a copy floating around nearby
already... but if there is not, it is an inexpensive book, is a quick
read, and is widely available.

In all honesty, the only opposition to this plan will come from (1)
the great many people who have been misled to believe that the FairTax
is something entirely different and (2) those in government who source
their power and influence from the endless intricacies and loopholes
in the current tax code.

Our current taxation system is one that has grown into a
self-sustaining, cannibalistic entity that is depriving all of us from
a simpler and more prosperous life. It is time to recognize this and
bravely look inward and realize there is much, much room for
improvement.

There is a greater good in the FairTax; and I am one of a consistently
growing body who realizes it. We won't be able to be ignored for
long.

I strongly urge those in whose hands the decision rests to take a
critical look at the elements of HR 25. Any person looking
objectively *will* discover the significant merits of the FairTax
plan.

It will take maturity and courage to voluntarily subject the machine
of government, of which he is a part, to the scrutiny provided by this
bill. If passed, this will be a show of good faith on the part of the
governing body that will do much to restore the faith of the voting
population

A paradigm shift is ahead of you. There will be those who wish to
cling to the familiar despite the obvious damage that course of action
has taken. But there will also be those who have the spirit to
carefully but confidently move forward into territories ripe with
opportunity. I sincerely hope you will count yourself among the
latter.

As April 17th draws near, I urge you to consider a tax change for the
better of all Americans: The FairTax. This tax reform plan is embodied
in H.R. 25 and already has 57 co-sponsors. The taxpaying public -
individuals, farmers, schoolteachers, seniors, small business owners,
and others - will thank you for it.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Mr. Kevin Savino-Riker



...




If you read this and are at all curious about the FairTax, please visit Americans for Fair Taxation, and consider purchasing The FairTax Book.

To take part in the "100,000 Faxes" campaign and send a letter to your representatives like I did mine, Get Started! No fax machine required!

Let's see if grassroots movements 'still got it.'

REVIVISCENCE

Hey kids! I seem to have skipped the month of December completely, as did I fail to recognize the significant event of January 1st, 2007, in which we all made it another year away from Jesus.

Mea culpa.

I've been tending to my own affairs over this period (read: indulged heavily in celebratory tasks that accompany the season); highlights include:

• Getting an HD DVD player.
  
• Making it back to Rochester and Elmira (both New York) to see friends and family.
• Getting laid by a hot flight attendant*, who happens to be my girlfriend.
• Revisiting the Green Field Churrascaria (imagine dying of meat-poisoning, but in a happy way).
• Taking my first California winery tour.
• Miles sold a boat and bought a four-wheeler (which we're taking to the dunes, along with some dirt bikes, in about 8 hours).
• Did I mention I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND?
  

Yeah, all's great right now. And on top of that, ING Direct bank finally offers checking accounts! Like normal checking, but all ING'd up! It's called 'Electric Orange' and you need it. Stop reading. GO.




Still here, huh? Perhaps you'll be as amused as I was that wikipedia has a very detailed and (the part that really surprises me) straight-faced article about Rock Paper Scissors. For reals. Don't believe me? Click here for your punishment.


Oh, we had a Christmas party over at Jay Brian and Tony's place in Huntington Harbor. It was a very nice dinner party held on the night of the Christmas boat parade. And it was Dr. Seuss-themed. I personally spent 30 hours of my evenings the week before the party fabricating a cardboard overlay that turned their TV into a Seussian cottage. Don't believe me? Click here for your punishment. Among the rest of the venue's extensive decorations was a 14-foot-tall Grinch Mountain that dispensed a delicious microbrew. Don't believe me? You know what to do.

There'll surely be more to talk about after this weekend, so I'll be back on pace for regular blogging, so long as the boss doesn't catch me doing all this typing when work is so busy this time of year.

* - no, not while flying... but one can dream.

ADUMBRATION

As promised here and here, I'm delivering the goods:

This is our finished submission to the Insomniac Film Festival: "Give us a fighting chance..."

Unfortunately, I'm not just asking you to watch this film for your own entertainment... what I'd really appreciate is your vote.

If you already have an apple account, you can rate our video and help us move up the ranks. If you don't have one, it's free and quick to sign up, and having one will not affect you or your e-mail inbox in any way that you don't want it to.

While I personally appreciate honest feedback (which you can feel free to leave me directly in the comments section of this post), if you have anything less than stellar to say when rating the video, I strongly encourage you to lie. We're in the running for some great software and a handful of ipods, and most importantly I'd do it for you if you asked me to help you win a contest.

While I don't yet have access to our original garbage submission mentioned in one of the earlier posts linked above, I will have it soon, and will display it in all it's embarrassingly funny splendor.

Meanwhile, you've got some voting to do.

NOTE: Some people are reporting to me that their browsers aren't able to play the embedded quicktime clip on the voting page. In that case, you should just go ahead and give us an 'excellent' rating while you're there. If you still want to see the video, you can try your luck watching it off our local server. You still need quicktime. But hey, it's not like I'm asking you to download RealPlayer...

DISCOMFITURE

Wow.

As mentioned in post-previous, I took part in a filmmaking contest this past weekend, and promised to blog again upon completion of the project.

It didn't go so well.

A quick recap - Apple Computer revealed a set of criteria that each participating five-member team must incorporate into a three-minute short film that was to be submitted within 24 hours of said criteria being revealed. The obvious goal (and just in case it wasn't obvious enough, they named it the 'Insomnia Film Festival') was to get teams to stay up all night producing the film.

It didn't go so well.

The problem is that we got too ambitious with the direction of the project. We had narrowed our path down to two potential concepts: one which was pretty basic with potential for humor (if done correctly), and one that was unique and novel, and had the potential for a hysterically funny climax, but was also complicated and would be very demanding to film. We chose to attempt the latter. I'm proud of this because the latter idea was of my own devising, but I am disappointed, because choosing to film it ultimately led to the team's demise.

The synopsis of the storyline is as follows:

A girl receives three different singing telegrams from three different people for three different reasons, all of whom arrive at her house at the same time.

The contest criteria we'd chosen to include were numerous... all you need to know is that one of them included a sidekick monkey.

To pull this off, we needed to film four sets of backstory footage for the characters, each in different settings. Plot elements critical to the story involved indoor and outdoor scenes in daylight and at night - which meant we had to plan our shooting schedule very carefully to work with the timeframe we were given. On top of all this, our film was going to be narrated and needed to feature a soundtrack. I'll remind you that it's illegal to include copyrighted material in our production; we had to compose and record the music ourselves. We needed to put together a wardrobe that included several garage mechanics, a tuxedo, and a gorilla suit.

Things kept stacking up.

The critical shot of the film is when the three singing telegrams arrive at the girls house, and, seeing the competition, engage in a full-on brawl in her front yard as each tries to be the first one to get to the door. By the time we finished shooting, we only had two hours left to edit the footage and to record the narrations/overdubs.

Where we really shot ourselves in the foot was forgetting that the raw footage had to upload into the editor in realtime, which meant we had to wait an hour before we could even start working on putting the film together.

Loren, the director/editor, started out methodically, selecting the best takes for each scene and started building the story as it was originally written... but as the deadline drew closer, we realized that we were not going to finish in time. Rather than finish the film as planned and be unable to submit it for judging, Loren instead chose to lose his goddamn mind and just started grabbing footage at random and throwing it in in awkward chunks. He threw in narration, again at random, and never over the appropriate scene. Almost half the scenes we shot were left completely out of the film. Still others appeared three or more times each.

What came out of the frenzy was three minutes of garbage. There was no story to follow, the narration appeared out of order and would only serve to further confuse the viewer, and we'd omitted the requisite title page entirely. But we got that fucker in on time.

At this point, our only hope is that some Hollywood hipster on the judging panel sees our work as an avant-garde visionary masterpiece and grants us the grand prize on the spot. It could happen...

Meanwhile, the five of us who got together for the project still want to see what we would have come up with. We know that if we'd managed to submit the film we wanted to, we'd have had gold on our hands. So, we're going to finish post-production, even though we cannot enter it into the contest. Once that is up, I will post a link here. And afterward, I'll post a link to the film we ended up submitting to Apple.

What's ironic, is that when we watched the garbage submission, we all thought it was funnier than the actual story we'd written - it came together in that haphazard way that was too absurd to be intentional, and therefore was hilarious. Of course, the problem is, it can only be that funny when you knew what it was supposed to be in the first place. Soon enough I'll have links to both versions up here, and I'll let you decide for yourselves.

Meanwhile, I'll be spending my time online, looking for contests with later deadlines.

ACCESSION

Let the record show that I promised to post pictures of our recent Halloween party. Even though I want to talk about something else in this entry, I must yield those pictures for fear of losing my capacity for follow-through. I will not, however expend any more effort in hosting and presenting the pictures myself; others have already done so, and I'm more than ready to change topics. In light of that, I present:

Halloween pics, via Tony Lau

Halloween pics, via Darren Miles


Okay. Had enough? Me too*.

Some of you know that I was one of a group of six friends/roommates/co-workers who entered a Microsoft-sponsored contest last fall and won a massive-prize package consisting of pre-public-release Xbox 360's and VIP tickets to the Xbox 360 'Zero Hour' release party. We won with this video submission**.

Since that time, we've all had an itch to enter another video project (working on the last one was sooo fun), and the added allure of another prize package augmented our desires. Loren Prendergast, the filmmaker extraordinaire*** who discovered the xbox contest last year, has finally found another contest worthy of entering: The Insomnia Film Festival, by Apple Computer.

The rough idea is as follows: They announce the required submission elements, and the participant filmmaking teams have one day to submit a three-minute video conforming to the guidelines.

This means we have to pick our artistic direction (we are allowed to choose any three of the twelve or so required elements to incorporate into our entry), write a compatible script, cast and film the entire sequence, then complete all editing and post-production in less than 24 hours.

That may sound less-than-challenging, but only if you have no idea what goes into making a professional-quality video. To provide a frame of reference, the xbox video linked above is 30 seconds long. To make that film, we shot ten minutes of raw footage, which took fourteen hours alone. Creating a soundtrack took another day, and Loren spent at least a day in post-production, combining all the elements we created and editing the entire piece to run in the time allotted.

Now we have to create something six times as long, in one third of the time. Oh, and did I mention the clock is already ticking? They released the details at 2pm today. As I write this sentence it is 3:05. Five percent of our time has already elapsed.

......

It's now 3:17. The team has gathered, so we're gonna ditch on the rest of the work day and get cracking. Here's the list of criteria for the video.... we have selections to make. Wish us luck!

• Required character name: Alex Kona
• Required dialog line: "No, you don't understand what it's like growing up here."
• Required costume: leather jacket and dark sunglasses
• Required prop: ice
• Required side kick: pet monkey
• Required setting: abandoned building
• Required shot: clock with 4:11 on face
• Required makeup: fake eyelashes and blue eye shadow
• Required genre: sci-fi/fantasy
• Required camera effect: crane or boom shot
• Required editing device: musical montage

Once we have our submission created, I'll post a link for your critiquing pleasure :)


* - Implicitly introduces new topic. I'm not in an explicit kind of mood.
** - which makes absolutely no sense to you unless you know the back story of the contest and its associated submission criteria. Rest assured that our video was an awesome representation of what they asked for.
*** - guy who owns the camera

METANOIA

When a band gains popularity, change is inevitable. The list of venues expands, the groupies get hotter, the tips fill bigger jars, the beer gets colder, and most importantly, the band gets new equipment.

Shelby Three and The Harmony*, however, is more efficient than your typical band. We skipped all those steps of getting popular and such, and went straight for the new gear.

Of course, we justified it. "We're going to be getting bigger, playing all these new gigs, making all this good money. Well, to do that we've got to be prepared." We got the stuff before we needed it, because we knew that someday... we would. Might as well take all this time to get familiar with it. And on Tuesday I'm getting fitted for my tux. You know, for Grammy night.

The biggest change is definitely the IEM setup. IEMs (or In-Ear-Monitors for short) take the place of those angled cabinet speakers** that sit on the ground facing the band members. When a band plays a gig, typically their loudspeakers are positioned in front of them, which is great for the sound in the listening area, but wretched for the sound on stage itself. Monitors allow you to "monitor" your own sound clearly while performing. I just don't know why they call them that.

Since our band skipped the 'get popular' process, we don't have roadies. Rather than spend the money on big heavy floor cabinet monitors that we don't have room for anyways, we decided to go with a personal monitor system. Easy fix, right? borrow your fashionable white iPod ear buds, get an extension cord, and plug in!

Unfortunately, that ain't the ticket. Stages are loud. iPod earbuds have to be cranked up dangerously loud just so you can hear their output over the rest of the noise around you. IEMs, on the other hand, have a dual functionality. They are designed for safety first, acting as protective earplugs that isolate the performer from loud and distracting sounds, thereby preventing hearing loss and embarrassing mistakes. They also have small accurately tuned speakers embedded within, but they don't have to be turned up nearly as loud because of all the sound isolation.

Just so we're on the same page here, the IEM industry uses the above paragraph the way you or I would use the words "stupidly expensive."

But really now, can I put a price on saving my hearing and improving my performance on stage? Well, yes, but that's beside the point.

The point, for those of you keeping tabs, is that wearing IEMs is a strange and wonderful experience. This is what my monitors look like:


They go deep inside your ear canal... so deep that they actually touch each other right behind your eyes; when you wear them, you lose auditory contact with the outside world. connect them to an audio source and the sound seems to be piped directly into your brain. It's amazing. But, as you might imagine, those silicone umbrellas are not the most comfortable thing to jam into any orifice. But, there is a solution, which is actually what prompted me to write today: custom-fit earmolds***. When custom sleeves are used, they look like this:


Now, in order for the manufacturer to know what shape to make these things, they need to know what shape your ear is. Which means you (well, I actually mean "I", don't I?) have to visit an audiologist and they have to take 'full-shell ear impressions'. What follows is my account of the process.

Joe Farnsworth (who is also getting this procedure done for his IEMs) and I sat down in the examination room. The audiologist placed what I can best describe as ear-tampons, these little sponges on a string, up against our eardrums, then she brought out a little caulk-gun of a device with two tubes of hot pink silicone gel. She attached a long nozzle and injected the cold, gummy sludge into our ears. Immediately the world got quiet and disgusting. She worked her way around the helix of my ear like a cake decorator might apply frosting to, well, an ear. While the procedure was completely painless, it was uncomfortably awkward. In order for the impressions to be taken correctly, I had to move my jaw the way I would when using the earmolds. Simply put, I had to sit in the chair and sing for five minutes without being able to hear myself. After the material set, she grabbed the tampon string and pulled, twisting the solidified material in order to ease its passage out of my body. I will never come closer to understanding what it's like to be an uncorked bottle of wine. It was... wierd.

The whole appointment was over in twenty minutes, and when Joe and I walked out that door to the car, we walked in silence, wearing on our faces the expression you'd wear if you and your friend just saw each other get head-raped. But while we felt confused and addled, we were also happy, because they didn't charge us for the impressions and in about three weeks we're going to have a really nice add-on to our gear that will simultaneously improve their performance and make them much more comfortable to wear for extended periods. Which is why we also stole a handful of ear-tampons.

* - Joe Farnsworth performing solo: 'Joe Unglued'.
Add Kevin Savino-Riker on guitar/vocals: still 'Joe Unglued'.
Add Brian Douglas on guitar: 'Veneer'
Add Shelby Prendergast on percussion, Chris Newbold on bass guitar, and swap Brian's guitar for a keyboard: 'Shelby Three and The Harmony'

** - Out-Ear-Monitors, I guess you could call them. If you really wanted to.

*** - Not like a spore colony growing due to lack of hygeine, but like a cast. Ask an artist.

ACQUIESCENT

Ahem...

I've always been a late-adopter when it comes to joining social networks that have anything to do with the words cyber, virtual, online, or face.

Whether it was signing up for Instant Messenger, joining Hot-or-Not, or creating this blog, I went through the exact same process every time - feeling like in doing so I would lose my soul, downgrading 'soul' to 'dignity', downgrading 'dignity' to 'pocket change', then finally accepting that *probably* nothing bad will come from it.

Well, I've given in once again. I've accepted my social responsibility to everyone in the world that I've ever met, and joined up with Facebook. Emma Kiele Fry is to blame.

Until she invited me yesterday, I had a good thing going - I didn't want to be a part of Facebook when I was in college, and then after I left school it was out of my hands. I couldn't join if I wanted to, since I no longer had a valid RIT e-mail address. The blame rested squarely on Facebook's own digital shoulders for catering exclusively to students. But then in a surprise move, they opened the gates to the entire internet population. I was no longer safe, and I forgot to look for cover. Emma's e-mail looked innocent enough. And besides, I was tired of running from the inevitable.

So here I am. The reason I'm blogging about this is because I have chosen to link Prose Justice's RSS feed into the 'Notes' section of my facebook profile. As evidenced by a flurry of friend activity in my first 24 hours as a member, I'm expecting that a bunch of people are going to poke around a little bit and eventually find the blog. People might actually start reading this damn thing again. I'd better be ready.

Which means greetings are due again.

So, I've gone on long enough explaining this post. Now let me get to what I intended to do:

To all you out there who found this blog via my Facebook profile, Welcome to Prose Justice!

This blog is a hybrid personal journal/creative media repository that I started just over two years ago, left completely unattended for the last year, and very recently broke back into and began contributing to again. There are something on the order of 90 posts in the body of this collection, some of which are a worthwhile read, some of which are not.

I do not encourage you to read through my old posts unless you are a stalker. I believe there are a couple really good entries in there, but since I adopted a post-titling scheme of summing the entire entry up with one million-dollar word, it's almost useless to search through my archives for an entry that stands out as significant; they all sound like they'd be important, even if they're one sentence explaining that I don't have anything to say.

Having said that, I highly encourage you to read through all my old posts, as I often refer to topics from previous posts and use certain acronyms that won't make sense unless you see the posts in which they originated. I use asterisks* often to annotate my thoughts. I find them to be a fun way to draw a reader around a page. Annotations appear at the bottom of the entry in smaller italicized text.

Oh, and another thing for you 'bookers - It seems that imported blog entries do not transfer embedded pictures. If you find yourself reading a note of mine and it sounds like I'm referring to a photo of something, click the 'View original post' link at the bottom to be redirected to the original page at Prose Justice. The pictures will be there.

9/28/06 - EDIT: The above paragraph is apparently false... embedded pictures just started showing up in my facebook notes. But text formatting doesn't seem to translate at all. Until tomorrow, maybe.

Okay, I think that's a good crash course and set of guidelines for the budding Prose Justice reader. I'm not going to be so arrogant as to believe that I'm going to start seeing a ton of traffic here, but I'm the kind of guy who likes to plan for every contingency. With any luck, this post didn't just scare off any of the potential new readers who had the courage to make it this far.

'Till next time, POFN**

~Riker

*This is an example of me using asterisks to annotate my thoughts.
**Peace Out For Now

DALLIANCE

Okay, okay, I know.

Burst of activity followed by a month-and-a-half hiatus. Like every time I get back into working out. At least I'm still eating right.

This post be naught but a queueing up of ideas for future blog entries. I shall elaborate in the future:

BUMP KEYS

THE FAIRTAX

SHELBY THREE AND THE HARMONY

YOUTUBE

NEW BLOGGER INTERFACE/FORMAT

To the zero of you who know that I'm blogging again, Stay tuned...