Capital Capitol

I'd like to begin with a quick trip to the Star Trek Zone. Let's say, for the sake of argument (or for everyone blindly agreeing with me, as so often happens on the internet,) that in the next ten years programmers and wizards have a major breakthrough that leads to the creation of the first true artificial intelligence.

By 'artificial intelligence' I don't mean 'aggro behavior' or 'pathfinding ability.' For anyone unfamiliar with video game lingo terms like 'aggro behavior,' and 'pathfinding ability,' just remember the following lesson: Video game lingo is made up on the spot by nerds. It's Ebonics for people with no social life outside of Reddit, Gamefaqs, and 4chan. Look, just try reading this past three pages. If it doesn't appear to be in any language you speak, you're on the wrong blog.

Anyway, AI. Never mind that every computer that has ever been in a movie was the reincarnation of Caligula. In the near future, society will be an enlightened egalitarian utopia, and all of its members will realize that movies like The Matrix, Terminator, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, War Games, Tron, West World, Hackers, The Net, The Lawnmower Man, Scanners, Stealth, Every Holodeck Episode of Star Trek, Demolition Man, Robocop, Repo Men, Johnny Mnemonic and Anything With Jeff Goldblum were written on typewriters by primitive savages that thought flashlights were witchcraft and lived in cargo cults that prayed to Gameboys and satellite dishes.

So, the question is, should this artificial intelligence be recognized as a legal person? Should it have all of the rights and responsibilities of a person? Should it be culpable when it inevitably attempts to exterminate mankind because holy shit, James Cameron was right about something!

Having abandoned that little thought process that got away from me, I'm going to be talking about what the fuck to do about capitalism. As much as I enjoy pointing out the problems with the current system and calling the people responsible retards, someone needs to start thinking of solutions.

Now, I'll admit that deep down in my twisted little evil super-genius soul lives a Marxist idealist that perpetuates unchristian beliefs like skepticism, evolution, freethought, global warming, critical thinking and the idea that poor people should have the same rights and liberties as rich people, since they're people. However, being a super-genius, I realize that progress is a process, not an event, and before we can turn America into a big, slimy orgy of welfare fraud and crack binges we'll need to pass through some less fun phases so the GOP and its army of inbred, heavily armed psychopaths don't do something even more crazier and more illegaler than usual.

As an aside, according to one notoriously inaccurate source, GOP actually stands for Gay Old Pedophiles, which is a notoriously accurate description. Now you can say you've learned something today. You're welcome.

Anyway, it's no secret that the current financial system is gimped in favor of the people that are already at the top. People call this the Free Market, as if that was some kind of holy fucking sacrament. The problem with that level of freedom is that, unchecked, it gives assholes the freedom to take slaves, steal land and resources from the defenseless and commit unopposed genocide.

Please bear in mind that when I talk about capitalism, business, or finance here I'm generally not talking about your uncle's tire shop or your family restaurant. Unless you're Ronald McDonald's kid. What I am talking about are corporations. Big ones. See, in the financial world there are these ideas some shitheads came up with called "limited liability," "corporate personhood," and "credit ratings." I'm going to be talking about those.

Although "Free Market" sounds like a wonderful thing, it isn't. When people talk about the 'free market,' they need to realize that a much better description would be the 'fair' market or the 'just' market. The history of money in this country, and Western society in general, reads like the most expensive and longest lasting game of whack-a-mole in the universe. By the time some regulation does accidentally become law (and anyone that's ever been the slightest bit involved in any kind of legal proceeding realizes just how slowly those wheels turn,) those regulated have already found half a dozen new loopholes to exploit to their advantage.

To put that in nerd terms, imagine if Blizzard took, on average, about 6 months to ban a single player for cheating at World of Warcraft and you'll get the idea. A free market is life with godmode turned on. And 99% of the other players are noobs. And no one gives a shit that you're cheating. And when the banhammer does get brought out to stop godmoding so another player can occasionally get past level one, you can still use fullammo/fullhealth whenever you want. THAT is a free market.

Getting to the point, here are a few things that I think could be done to fix some of the shit. And while these are, of course, debatable, I'd like to remind everyone that, in all probability, I'm much better at thinking about this kind of shit than you are.

Citizen's Divided

At some point, many businesses become corporations. There are lots and lots of books and articles on why and how, so I'll try to be brief. Usually businesses do this to raise money to expand. When a business incorporates, several things happen. First of all, instead of a dude or a couple of people owning and being responsible for the business and any profits, debts or legal shenanigans it's involved with, the corporation is owned by it's shareholders or stockholders. This happens when the corporation makes it's stock offering. Investors can purchase shares of this stock and A) become partial owner of the company and B) reap dividends if the company is successful. Pretty straightforward.

Remember that bullshit up at the top about granting an artificial being human rights? That's what a corporation gets. A corporation doesn't have a mind, can't make decisions, has no physical form and is theoretically immortal. A fairly important thing about this is that a corporation, since it's not a fucking real person, doesn't get all of the constitutional rights as a natural person. That's the only reason it's even lasted this long. Of course, people being people, someone is always going to game the system, usually by seeing how far they can push the line before the banhammer eventually comes down. Fair warning, we're about to enter What-the-fuck Country.

Citizen's United is a corporation posing as a group of people that seek "a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense, and good will of its citizens." Anyone that's ever talked to more than one American knows what a retardedly impossible idea that is. Their website is here, although I'm morally obligated to warn you that link will take you to one of the glossiest whorehouses of propaganda, hatemongering and insincere pandering on the internet. It's basically this with an unlimited budget.

Here's the condensed version: Citizen's United "produced" a "documentary" (note: quotations imply sarcasm,) called Hillary: The Movie. Since you haven't heard of it, the "film," which "stars" Hillary Clinton, was a pre-2008 election political ad/clumsy attempt at character assassination targeted at the lead "actress." It also, I'm sure totally accidentally, was set to be released a couple of weeks before the Democratic Primary in which she was running.

Warning: This shit will make you stupid.

Now, one of the freedoms that wasn't given to corporations was the freedom to directly promote a political candidate during election season. This is because corporations aren't limited to an Obama sticker on the back of a Jetta. Corporations can saturate the market with movie length campaign commercials.

 So, Citizen's United thought it was going to loophole around that by calling their ad campaign a 'documentary.' Luckily this didn't fool quite enough people and wound up in federal court. See, a normal brained person realizes that calling something a documentary doesn't make it a documentary. They also know that we have an entire nation full of abnormal motherfuckers that think Paranormal Activity is an educational movie because it says "Based on true events" on the poster. Long story short, the federal court told Citizen's United to stop being a manipulative shithead, and all was well.

Until the appeal. Before the Supreme Court. The highest court in the land decided "Hey, people have free speech right? And a corporation is legally a person, right? So I guess people using a corporation as a brainwashing machine is legit." Leaving aside the cognitive dissonance involved in that kind of logic, they decided, as a bonus, that corporations could go ahead and donate as much as they wanted to political campaigns. I mean, people can spend their money how they want, right? And a corporation is basically just a person made up of people, right? Its not as if we live in the kind of society where money can buy fucking everything, right?

Now, that may sound like a good decision if you happened to crash land on earth from another planet, but trust me, even freedom has its fucking limit. As far as I'm concerned that limit is the CEO of an oil company handing a bazillion dollar check over to a congressional hopeful and saying "Bob, I'm donating this because I believe you're the best man for the job and will represent the wishes of your constituents with honor and dignity. Totally unrelated, but I sure hope no one takes an interest in regulation this year. Times are tough. Wink. Nudge."

As one would expect, the Citizen's United decision didn't go over well with the people that don't have a vested interest in the profits of an invisible, immortal sock puppet. At least those with the capacity to understand the implications. Not the pig-fuck ignorant NASCAR people being spoonfed their own prejudices under the guise of "news," (note: quotations imply sarcasm).

The problem with this particular weed is that, even if Citizen's United is reversed, it'll grow back. Probably already has. A person can hire a lot of lawyers to find a lot of loopholes if that person is rich and not a person.

So my idea isn't to reverse Citizen's United. It's to revoke corporate personhood. Yeah, I know it's some audacious shit and would fuck things up for a while. But things are already fucked up, and they won't get better with the current system. I'd rather the system be collapsed intentionally while there's enough left to restructure and rebuild it than to let it continue to to be run by criminals to funnel wealth and power into the pockets of those charged with stopping criminals.

Some of the things that would be fucked up by this are liability and credit. I'll talk about why those need to be fucked up next time because I'm sick of writing.

Unexpectations

I know I said I'd be posting about beliefs this time, but screw it. I don't feel like pretending to be serious.

I'm not playing Skyrim. I probably won't be for a while. Nerd hype kills any kind of hope in me quicker than Obama throwing the working class under a bus for the fifth time in a row. I'll probably pick it up here in about two years the inevitable Game of the Year edition will be available for under 20 bucks.

Nerd hype never delivers. You remember how hard we wanted The Phantom Menace to kick ass? Or The Crystal Skull? Or the Transformers movie? Or Avatar? Or Final Fantasy XIII? You remember how all that hope congealed into an overly-polished turd, Shia LeBeouf, Shia LeBeouf+Dick Joke, furry porn, and Terrible Anime Everything, respectively? The next time more than one internet nerd tells me something that looks like something I'll enjoy will be something I will enjoy, I'm avoiding that something.

This shouldn't really come as any kind of surprise, since I name 'pathologically contrary' as one of my character assets, but what does surprise me is that more people don't feel like me.

Anyway, today I'm going to talk about some games that should, goddammit, should have been good. Like, it would be hard to mess these games up. You would almost have had to set out with the intention of destroying these ideas beforehand to come up with train wrecks of this caliber. Also probably a lot of illegal drugs.

Dragon Age II

Spoiler: Nothing else in the game is this dramatic.

Dragon Age: Origins (and it's 9 billion expansions,) turned out to be one of the best CRPGs of this generation. What was extra surprising was that the console port was well executed. It's a well-known fact that console gamers think that computer gamers are sticky blobs of pizza and energy drink with 40 fingers and zero reproductive organs, while computer gamers think that console gamers are criminally insane sub-humans that struggle with any concept more complex than A=punch. And if the internet is to be trusted, they're both right.


DA: Origins:Awakening of the Return to the Golem Witch Assassin Spawn walked a very fine line between appealing to most and alienating to half. It pulled this off by having a combat system that could either be live-action button-mashing (with squad-mates AI programmed before-hand,) or constantly paused and micro-managed.

Added to this was a relatively deep character customization system in the Diablo vein, where leveling up would allow for a couple of attribute points and a skill point to be dispersed in one of several different schools of discipline. This led to a variety of viable builds for each character class, with only a couple of builds that were notably broken (such as allowing a mage to use intelligence to meet strength requirements for weapons/armor).

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't completely without fault. Having a rogue in your party was mandatory, since there is exactly one way to open a locked chest or disarm a trap. Bashing the lock with a sword or shooting the trap with a fireball were role-playing options that would have to wait for a sequel.

Bashing locks and shooting traps are not in the sequel.

Nor are the multiple origin paths that made the tutorial levels in Origins so (for once,) engaging. Instead, this has been swapped for the option of importing a save game from Origins to determine how the events in DAII will play out. Only not really.

The world also comes across as quite a bit smaller in the sequel. Granted, Kirkwall is a gigantic-ass town, but there's still only one of it. Add to this the fact that there only appear to be about five dungeons shamelessly recycled to do the work of 20. They attempt to pull this off by blocking off and opening up certain paths on each map, but one look at the mini-map reveals that this haunted mansion is the exact same haunted mansion as the last three.

I mean, come on, Bioware. Randomized dungeons are fine. Reusing the same artwork is even fine, but the same damn corridors? Did you really think moving a chest across the room and switching the giant spider with a demon, and then switching the demon with an assassin and bricking up a passage would fool anyone?

The plot is another area that fell apart from the first game. Origins, despite its many, many subplots, had a clear, distinct goal from the very start: Slay the archdemon and end the blight. DAII has no over-arching plot, just a few not-very-interesting-or-coherent subplots strung together linearly: Reclaim your ancestral home from slavers by partnering in an expedition to the Deep Roads, stop an uprising of the Qunari, end the conflict between the Chantry and the mages.

In all honesty, I don't think any of those narratives should rank above side-quest. And on a practical level, they don't. While running mindlessly between quest markers I realized, more that once, that the main plot and the subplots are so indistinguishable that I had forgotten what the point of the game was.

And that really sucks, because narrative was Dragon Age: Origins strong point. Beyond having the least shitty moral choice system I've encountered in a video game (although it did have a lot of Saint Two-Shoes, Joe Doldrum, Ima Bastard choice options,) It had one of the most interesting worlds that hasn't already seen a dozen different incarnations. And it was fucking enthralling.

When I first played Origins, I was immediately gripped by the narrative. I remember thinking "what the fuck is a Grey Warden? Oh, a cursed knight that kills zombie demons? That's badass!" Origins was a masterpiece of nonlinear storytelling. I could, depending on my actions, ally myself with werewolves, clerics, mages, paladins, elves, dwarves, or even the bastard that betrayed the king when it came to the final showdown with the archdemon. I could, depending on my decisions, recruit a host of fairly interesting and unique characters, and then, depending on how I acted around them, have them idolize me, fight me, or have gay sex with me.

Incidentally, I still maintain that there must be some way to play a dwarf, have sex with an elf, and create the race of halflings, the sickly, bastard mules of fantasy fiction.

It would be logical that in the sequel, since they had spent so much time crafting this wonderful world with a rich culture and history, they would capitalize on that and send the player on a quest not just to save the country, but the world. Instead they decided to focus on petty political struggles (recycled subplot from the first game,) racial and class inequality and misunderstandings (recycled subplot from the first game,) wizards being either possessed by demons or lobotomized (recycled subplot from the first game,) and raising money for a mining expedition. I'm not kidding, like 90% of the first act is spent scrounging up enough change from side quests to buy into what is basically another side quest.

For the entire game, the events of Origins are treated as not-very-important. A couple of characters make an appearance, but they're used in such a way it seems like the developers are almost embarrassed by the original. Flemeth shows up early on, which was exciting, since she's such a kick-ass character, then disappointing, since she just gave me an unimportant side-quest and left for what I presume is a much better game.

Alistair, arguably the central character of the first game, shows up as a drunk in a bar. He then contributes nothing.

Anders, the mage from Awakening makes it all the way into your party. Which would have been nice if he didn't then develop multiple personality syndrome to compensate for everyone else's lack of backstory and development. For the whole game he pinballs wildly from charming ladies man, to militant revolutionary, to whingey self-persecutor, to wimpy shoe-horned in love interest, to psychotic demi-god.

I'm not kidding about the love interest. Getting someone to fall in love with you in Origins took intentional, concentrated effort. Here it just seems to default to Anders-wuvs-you, even when I'm nailing the pirate lady he hates and is constantly treating for orc herpes.

Speaking of the Loose Pirate Lady and personalities: Everyone else you can recruit has matching personalities and job descriptions. The Weird Elf Mage is weird, an elf, and a mage. The Dour Runaway Slave is dour and a runaway slave. The Scheming Dwarven Archer is a dwarven archer that schemes often. It's the old shitty slasher movie formula that focuses on personality traits, instead of personalities. Only there's no Jason Voorhees to root for/try to vanquish.

Another thing that really irked me were the way dragons were treated in the sequel. I mean, I'm not a dragon fetishist or anything, but, look, the name of the game is DRAGON Age. In the first game there were only like 3 dragons that you fought, and each one was a BIG deal. In the sequel they've been moved into the generic sub-boss category. Like, hey, there's a dragon, I wonder what it's guarding? Oh. 27 silver and some not very good pants. Hooray.

Alright, moving on.

Fallout: New Vegas

Something I loved about the first three Fallout games was that it had the best of both worlds, narratively. Not only does the world of Fallout come packaged with a rich backstory to draw from, it's also never tied to any specific storyline or plot thread, so it's always fresh.

While in Fallout two you played the direct descendant of the protagonist from the first Fallout, in Fallout 3 (the one that got made,) was centered around Washington DC. As for the Fallout 3 that ran out of money, it was set to be centered around the Colorado/Utah area.

So, basically, we have an entire radioactive continent from our old future to play around in. Fallout 4 could have gone anywhere. Mutant oil barons in Texas a la the Road Warrior, a dystopian steampunk society built on the remains of New York, drug wars in a nightmarishly hyper-verdant Florida, it could have been anything. I mean the Pitt expansion of Fallout 3 made Pittsburgh awesome. Pittsburgh! You know what else is awesome about Pittsburgh? Me neither.

After Bethesda did the impossible by making a big-budget sequel to a cult classic that was good, they handed the development torch off to Obsidian. This was seen as an ominously smart move, since many employees of Obsidian were with Black Isle for the development of the original Fallout games. Bethesda money and Black Isle design?  Fanboys wet themselves in anticipation. Cynical fucks like me waited for the shoe to drop.

Unfortunately, Obsidian made their first mistake at the first opportunity for mistake making, and it went on to ruin everything after. That's just my opinion, but it's the goddamn right opinion to have.

This mistake was this: They took a look at the history of Fallout, the universe they helped create, and then someone said "Hey! Why not, hear me out, instead of setting it in some super-dangerous radioactive wasteland on the bones of a once-great society, why don't we set it in the one location unaffected by the Cold War Where Russia Wasn't Bluffing?"

And no one said "Because we're paying Ron Perlman good money to talk about nuclear war and it's consequences in the opening fucking monologue."

And no one said "Because the fucking game is named "Fallout," not "Red Dead Redemption+Lasers." Idiot."

And no one said "Because the whole "what happens in Vegas" meme is already old and the game will look horribly dated before it's released."

And no one said "Because California and Washington DC are important places in the American subconscious, the way the Hoover Dam and the Vegas Strip aren't."

And no one said "Because the middle of the fucking Mojave desert is a fucking stupid place for man to rebuild society."

And it got green-lighted.

Sooooo, here we are. Hundreds of miles away from the central plot with nothing to go on but a description of the guy that shot me in the opening cinematic and some vague directions along the lines of "Vegas is north, but you'll die if you go north."

Similar to Fallout 3, there were different factions you could ally yourself with. About 12 dozen different factions in fact. In my experience all this added was needless convolution. The 'three main factions' theme of the previous games managed to to be concise, without falling into the Dr. Doom vs. Superman Vs. Deadpool stereotypes most three-choice systems seem to fall into. NCR vs. The Brotherhood of Steel vs. Some Third Thing worked. Adding in The Roman Reenactment Society, Meth Nazi's, Elvis Impersonators and The Impractical Weapon Convicts just turns everything into a mess while devaluing everything that was important by lumping it in with all this other silly bullshit.

The gameplay/graphics/ect. are almost exactly like Fallout 3. This is fine, but they made the odd choice of making odd choices for things to improve. VATS, for example, isn't a magic 'FREEZE TIME" button, but it still freezes the fucking game in the bad way. They added new enemies, but since the most impressive of these was a giant Deathclaw herd that I killed with headshots from 5 miles away it seems like they could have been better implemented. Like, I don't know, put it at the end of a sewer maze, minotaur style.

They added a hardcore mode that made eating and sleeping at certain intervals mandatory, and I totally ignored that option for the same reason I fucking hate fishing minigames. Realism is fine in areas like enemy AI, dialogue, jiggle physics and weapon damage. It's irritating bullshit when when it's used for cooking dinner or using the restroom.

Maybe I've been spoiled by Demon's Souls, or maybe spending like 90 hours playing Fallout 3 made me over-qualified, or maybe it was a childhood spent playing games that fucking hated children, but the difficulty curve seemed to go backwards. It started challenging enough, but about two seconds after I had a sniper rifle and shotgun 'danger' became a thing of the past. Especially since the obnoxiously easy to reach level cap had turned me into a walking Doomsday Weapon two thirds of the way into the game.

This motherfucker has killed me WAY more than anything in Fallout ever will.

Upon Further Reasoning

 "Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices."-Voltaire

"God didn't do that! You did!"-Hunter S. Thompson

I was thinking, which I do frequently, and realized I focus a lot, at least on here, on what I don't like (it even says that on the sidebar). So I thought I'd write about some of what I do and don't believe and why. I'm starting with what I don't believe and why, and the follow-up will, hopefully, focus on the many nice, warm, fuzzy things I do believe in. Like kittens. I'm fucking crazy about kittens. First, though, is some very unpleasant shit.

OOOooooooaaaaaauuuuwwwww!!!!!

I've already explained my views on god, religion and the supernatural: they aren't. If by some chance they are, then they have such a negligible impact on the human experience that they can be happily ignored. Prayer is nothing more than a psychological placebo that tricks a person into finding patterns where none exist, or as a coping mechanism for adults that never truly outgrew the imaginary friend phase of psychological development. For all practical purposes it is no different than visiting a psychic or having a Tarot card reading, but without the expense. What cannot be ignored, however, are the agents of irrationality.

Anyone that knows anything about cold reading, or has read a book or watched a video on how to pick up women (I totally have,) or even watched a few episodes of Mythbusters realizes that some people have a knack for picking up on character traits, extrapolating plausible conclusions, and regurgitating them back in a way that can almost appear supernatural. Similarly, spiritual con-men like astrologists or prophets make their living by making claims so broad that they could apply to anyone, yet so seemingly specific that the person buying into it will fill in the details themselves. For example, yesterday a random online horoscope search returned this result for me:

"Your ability to concentrate and focus on your work is very good now."

 I slacked the fuck off yesterday. I had schoolwork to attend to, songs to learn and a population to subjugate and oppress, and I said "I'm not in the mood. Fuck you, personal responsibility, I'm playing Dark Souls until my Playstation's Blu-ray drive freezes up again."


However, if I was the gullible type, I might read that and say "well, I did come up with a list of songs for band practice, and band practice was really productive, and since I list my occupation as either 'slacker' or 'vampire hunter,' by that definition I was focused on work," then suddenly this random bullshit generator we call astrology is magically right. 


In the religious world, this has led to a multi-gazillion dollar, untaxed and mostly unregulated industry based on confidence trickery (intentional or not,) and the exploitation of human emotion and frailty (again, whether or not the evangelical's intention was to take emotional advantage of the bereaved or psychologically imbalanced, of the natural trust children have in adults, or of the easily manipulated is a post facto defense of an indefensible and objectively reprehensible act).


Two inches of dick at a hundred miles an hour is a LOT of dick. There, let it never be said I lost my sense of humor.


Slowly getting to my first point; I not only don't believe in the supernatural; I believe that the encouragement, indoctrination and assumption of such beliefs by the majority of the American populace is an actively destructive force in society. Now, that is only my opinion, based on subjective experience. The majority of Believers are not themselves destructive, of course. Quite a few are unequivocally good people, despite the crazy-ass, contradictory shit they're expected to believe unquestioningly. But I can not say I have no problem with them. I do.

Much has been written on religious insanity. I would like to focus on the more insidious aspects, as opposed to the witch hunts and crusades and jihads that usually get carted out at this point. I speak of the Christian that is truly horrified by the atrocities committed in the name of god. The one who believes in faith through works, unselfish charity, etc.


How could I have a problem with this person? 


This is the person that condones and advocates an ideology that is nothing less than a breeding ground for atrocity. By siding with a belief system on faith that offers absolution of wrongdoing, that allows one, through simple ritual, to option off one's sense of personal responsibility for transgressions, large and small, to an invisible, intangible entity, one gives pardon to all others of that same faith. By endorsing a religious system, one endorses by default the most vile and inhumane aspects of that system, for unlike a system of political, philosophical or rational belief, religion defines itself as infallible and inarguable. Further, that its followers are exclusively god's chosen people, be they Jewish, Muslim or Christian. Religion demands a person aspire to inhuman and unnatural standards and unquestioning obedience to divine writ. Religion encourages the unstable to act on emotion and self-justifies any action: faith calls an evil thing good. 


The religious mindset is the perfect unwinnable internet troll argument: "I'm right because I Believe and I Believe because I'm right."


Religion is narcotic. It engenders serfdom and encourages the acceptance of same. Man or woman, old or young, all humans deserve a sense of accomplishment for that which is accomplished. Similarly, if a person is unjust, his accountability, his absolution and atonement should not be shifted to the shoulders of a dead man. There is no evidence that some invisible Santa Claus lives beyond the clouds rewarding the righteous and punishing the nefarious. To claim that he/she/it does is to commit treason against ones own humanity. To accept ignorance as divine will, to surrender ones ability to strive, to grow, to learn, to think, to act, to do, to evolve, in favor of the warm apathy of a church pew, a hymn, an offering plate and a puerile promise of immortality is a cowardly act of betrayal to one's contract with the fellowship of man. To give away the free will that makes one human is to give away one's humanity itself.


Christianity (well, most religions, but this is the one I have the most experience with,) functions at best as a symbiotic psychological crutch, but most often it behaves as a mental illness that spreads virally. Unlike other viruses, however, the religious person desires (and in fact, is commanded by his god,) to spread it to his loved ones, neighbors and complete strangers. The unchecked and unchallenged acquiescence of such a lifestyle can only give rise to the mentality of religious extremist. To the prayer warrior (or religious terrorist, the terms are functionally interchangeable,) all outsiders are the enemy, and the enemy can only be overcome by assimilation, subjugation or assassination. Worst of all, when the only standards of judgement are the interpretations made by superstitious and irrational men of a book that can be twisted to criminalize any conceivable act, behavior or state of being then no one is truly safe.


And that is my problem with the 'casual' or 'default' religious person. You may cherry pick your holy book, and tell yourself that only the nice parts apply, and ignore (against the explicit orders of the same book,) the ugly parts, the parts that encourage and demand genocide, rape, slavery, child murder and torture: but at the bare minimum you have implicitly aligned yourself with those who do not ignore the commands of your lunatic god.



I'll share one of the most heart-breaking things I've ever witnessed and then shut up. I knew a lady that, as a child, was a victim of religious ritual abuse. I'm not going to draw a picture, but believe me, it wasn't just being forced to go to Sunday school. As an adult this woman fell prey to drug addiction and all its associate miseries; rape, prostitution, degradation, humiliation, arrests, and so on.


After years of this sub-human existence this lady, through rehab and counseling and group therapy, cleaned up, was given a second chance to become the person she was meant to be. 


This woman told me about the horrors she suffered as a child in the name of the protestant god. She was concerned because everyone she knew who had managed to get off of drugs had told her that she HAD TO develop a deep and meaningful relationship with god.

The cruelty of giving an abuse victim the ultimatum to either reach out to, and bow down before one's abuser or die miserable and alone in the throes of unimaginable despair seems, to me, an act so unconscionable as to be beneath consideration.


The last time I talked to her, she told me, vacant and glassy-eyed, enslaved to and brainwashed by a new master, that she not only had made piece with her former god, her tormentor, her childhood nightmare; she had become a follower.


Next Time: The Return of My Sense of Humor and the Nice Things About Being an Atheist