Poor Mormons

I hate being Devil's Advocate sometimes, but...

I was recently visited by door-to-door Mormons. And while I realize they prefer to be called Latter Day Saints or Saints, I prefer to call them Mormons because calling them "Saints" sounds like they're a street gang in a karate movie from the 1980s.

Anyway, we had a nice, long chat wherein I got to use phrases like 'intrinsically self-assigned' and 'geologic column' and 'principle of falsifiability' and feel very smart and proud of myself. And I updated my Facebook status accordingly, mentioning that I felt bad for Mormons. Twelve people liked that post, as opposed to the normal one or two whenever I post anything negative about any other subject.

Here's what I don't understand, and also why I feel bad for LDS's: At least some of the people that liked that post about Mormon missionaries are Christians. Or claim to be. Or just really like lower-case 't's and falling for logical fallacies. Now, I've read the book of Mormon. And the Bible. Repeatedly. And I can definitively say that the claims made in the Book of Mormon and the claims made in the Bible are statistically identical, since they agree with and reinforce each other like 99% of the time. Particularly about the general depiction of the Almighty as a capricious, cruel, genocidal, vindictive, racist, sexist, insecure, psychotic monster that tortures his children to fulfill unknowable perversions. It's a new New Testament. Written by and for 'mericans. So from my perspective these Protestants mocking the LDS church is like arguing over what color dragon poop is in August during a drought. Until somebody establishes the existence of a dragon you're only going to succeed in looking ridiculous.

Oh, but those poor, misguided Mormons for believing that Ghost Jesus visited the Americas and turned some of them white, when everyone knows he didn't make any pit-stops on his way back to an invisible paradise that used to be a real place until telescopes turned it into a metaphor. Can anyone prove either of those accounts are accurate? Or at least offer a compelling case in favor of one or the other? Considering all of our current understanding indicates that neither bodily resurrection nor eternal, extra-dimensional paradises exist, I'm inclined to believe both parties are just arguing in favor of different kinds of wrong.

Oh, those poor Mormons and their corrupt church that robs them blind to build shopping malls and wage political campaigns. Isn't it nice that all other Christian pastors preach in the wilderness, wear rags, and eat bugs? Especially since they don't claim that they're in the metaphorical wilderness of upper-middle class income brackets. I'm pretty sure "Go and sell all that you have" and "you cannot serve both God and Mammon" are meant to be applied to the entire hierarchy, not just the parishioners. I have never, ever, ever, in my entire life, met a Christian that chose to give his or her fortune to the poor and mooch off the goodwill of strangers in exchange for vapid platitudes and groundbreaking insights into the human condition like "Don't kill people." I sure have met a fuckload of Christians that think that kind of thinking is socialism, though. Well, what idiots think socialism is, anyway.

Oh, those poor Mormons and their widely publicized sex crimes. Which church, then, is blameless? If the metric to be used is gender equality and lack of child rape, then I would imagine that Scientology is clearly the least worst choice, if only for its relative newness and exclusivity. And having been invented in an age and place that has largely figured out that human sacrifice, infant genital mutilation, slave trafficking, murdering dissenters, stoning disobedient children, arranged marriages, and outlawing blended fabrics are not, all things considered, wholesome activities.

And I'm not saying this out of anger towards the people that liked that status, so please don't take it that way. They can believe an albino goblin wants them to build a house out of prosthetic limbs so long as they don't hurt anyone and recognize that not everyone will share that belief.

I just wish that occasionally one of them would read a few webpages on cognitive bias, perform a few experiments, and do some opposition-research on what they believe before they point out that, yes, sometimes people get together in groups to believe different insane fairy tales than themselves. I mean, obviously they have functioning bullshit detectors. It would be so great if they would just point those detectors at their own belief systems.

But they don't.

Thou Shalt Not Pick Up Snakes, Idiot

There's a reality TV show coming out about snake-handling Pentecostals. People will watch and laugh at how ridiculous it is that they chose to ignore or reinterpret different parts of the Bible differently than them.

When do we, as a society of caring, empathic human beings, step in and say "Hey, you are too fucking impressionable and dumb to be allowed to make all your own decisions. Here are some picture books about finding an adult when you see a snake and why you shouldn't pick up poisonous animals because someone told you to."

The Bible is a book with a talking snake and a zombie wizard as central figures. One of its heroes offers his daughters up to a rape mob just before the lead murders two cities, animals included, in cold blood. It outlaws shellfish and mixed fabrics and sentences first-time offenders to eternal torture. It belongs in the mythology section. Or whatever section they keep Gacy's creepy fucking clown drawings in.

"If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out. Do it, sinner. I'm watching. Forever."

I mean, there's charitable interpretation, and then there's fucking flat out ignoring shit and pretending it isn't there. Every person that's ever told me the Bible is the most important book ever written also told me to ignore 3/4 of it. Why is that? Why can God not communicate effectively? Why would God ghostwrite a book that's 50% wrong, 40% debatable, 10% accurate given several dozen caveats, and allows fan-fiction to be treated as canon? That doesn't make any sense. Parents start coming up with stories like that when their kid's "Why? Why? Why?" game goes on two rounds too many.

God didn't grant anyone magical insight into how it's metaphorically true, or spiritually true, or can only be experienced emotionally and never explained rationally, or requires special interpretative rules that apply only to it or whatever horseshit people delude themselves with to shut the cognitive dissonance up.

This is not a good book to use to find answers. Specifically on questions of morality and acceptable behavior. I could come up with a better moral framework than the Bible, and I'm a dick.

So could you. So could anyone. Look:

Is human slavery wrong?

Congratulations, you have a better moral framework than the Bible. You have a better grasp of right and wrong than god. You either figured that out on your own, had it explained to you by another human, or your infallible god was kind enough to explain how your infallible god was wrong about fucking everything. It doesn't matter. The end result is the same: the Bible is wrong about enough things that it shouldn't be treated as a reliable source for anything. You can now quit pretending that the word translates to "prisoner of war" or "happy employee enjoying the fruits of capitalism" or whatever made-up sounding bullshit helps you defend your ridiculous position and move on with your life, joyously free of invisible totalitarian police states and weird sexual hangups.

Because seriously, when I point out that stoning children for back-talking or symbolically drinking the blood of a dead god to attain life eternal is unequivocally, furniture-made-out-of-dead-cheerleader-skin, eating-hair-out-of-other-people's-shower-drains crazy, whatever rationalization you offer is going to do nothing but cause me to wonder if you maybe shouldn't be left alone with sharp objects.

This book should not be taken seriously by anyone. It's an old book of tribal myths and fairy stories. That is all that it is. I'm sorry, but at some point we need to collectively acknowledge that. I had to, and you know what? I haven't eaten any babies or blown up any preschools. I'm the same as I was, just slightly less wrong about how everything works. And believe me, if I can admit when I'm wrong about something that important then so can you.

We especially should not be filming people that were tricked into believing that the book was to be taken seriously after a lifetime of being told to take the book seriously. We should be setting up an intervention for these poor fucks.

My X-Man Power. For Real.

I must have this weird energy I put off that ensures I can watch a TV show on occasion over a period of years and somehow only see the same three episodes. Or some kind of internal clock that keeps time by using the programming schedules of whatever I have on in the background.

It's uncanny.

I can tell you, for example, that the guest star in the Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode where Dennis winds up in a mental hospital was walking 1990's stereotype Sinbad, and that the guys name is Dennis because it stands for Demonstrate value, Engage physically, Nurture dependence, Neglect emotionally, Inspire hope, Separate entirely. This fucking show comes on every goddamn day during the three hours that Comedy Central isn't showing infomercials or teen comedies and accidentally lets programming on the air that isn't universally hated. My TV is on that channel for all three of those hours with me in the room at least once every two weeks. Which means, mathematically, that I have watched at least 26 episodes of Always Sunny in the past year. And it's ALWAYS THOSE TWO EPISODES!

Part of me thinks "This looks like the low-brow, lowest-common-denominator trash that gets pushed out the door to keep the studio's bills paid. Fuck it, I'm watching Charlie Brooker or Tim Minchin on YouTube." And part of me thinks "This looks like a subversive look into the dark realities of urban small-business ownership, abusive patriarchal family dynamics, and human sexuality disguised as low-brow comedy. It is entirely possible that this show is my generation's A Modest Proposal."

I will probably never know if either of those two thoughts is true.

Because if it comes on TV it will be either of those two episodes and I will never have a large enough sample size. If I see it on Netflix I'm damn sure not gonna watch it because I FUCKING HATE those two episodes.

House is the same way. Sliders. Battlestar Gallactica. Dr. Who before David Tennant descended from the heavens and proved that, yes, there is indeed a dick I would willingly pay to suck. Any Simpsons episode made after 1996. Big Bang Theory.


How. does. this. happen?

Music, Which is Important

"He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain."

-Mark Twain

I haven't updated in a while. I've been trying to get a music career off the ground. Like everything else, it seems like the universe has some fundamental law against me being allowed to make a subsidence-level wage out of something I'm both good at and enjoy doing.

Music should work like the movies. Not like every album would cost 60 million to make and half that again to publicize, but just a huge community of musicians swapping out to make new music. Like sports teams maybe. Only without the fucking contract disputes but with way more drug and sex scandals.

I'm fucking burned out on it. But I've been burned out on it for three years.

You have any idea how many musicians are burnt out with the job by the time they release their first record?

Fuck, imagine a world where any 18 year old could send in an Audacity recording, a three page essay on the foundations of music theory and how it applies to them, and an explanation of what they want to accomplish musically and be told to come to X rehearsal space and sit in on a few jams to see how they do.

Imagine a world where bands don't have retirement tours every ten years because they're so fucking sick of doing this they can't imagine ever wanting to again only to realize two years later that "Yeah, I had to go do a jazz or country album, but this is something I enjoy. Fetch the media circus!"

Imagine getting paid for hauling your gear 50 miles in the rain on a weeknight to play for 20 drunk assholes and not being treated like you personally insulted the owner's dead mother at the end of the night.

My point is, musicians have to figure out how to look at sleeping indoors and doing what you're good at professionally and not see an unsolvable equation.

The irony is that music, in some ways, figured out how to adapt to the new market far quicker than movies or video games did. Video games are still selling 60 dollar discs and movies are spending more and more money for fewer and fewer returns. That's insane.
Music got smart fast because it had to.Music went from CDs to MP3s fucking overnight. Napster was an extinction-level event. Our old strategy did not work. Film studios can spend the money on lawyers and games are hard to pirate. But music had to turn a hard-copy $20 single into a $1 download overnight because that is what the market demanded.

And we should be applauded for that.

Except somewhere along the way musicians were written out of the bottom line. We became unpaid interns in our own industry. And that's because we're using the same marketing strategy as games and film. Focusing on individual trending artists instead of the artists as a whole. Making bland, homogenous crap just edgy enough to make teenagers feel rebellious and just safe enough to get a pass from the censorship committee.

That's why Spider-man, a ten year old film, gets a gritty, sexy reboot when there's a perfectly good Moon Night just lying there. That's why games like Resident Evil 6 and Call of Battlefield 4: Saber-Rattling Racist Idiot get made and Tim Schaffer makes games on Kickstarter. And that is why the VMAs look like a science-fiction adaptation of the Senate during the fall of Rome while the best guitarist in your town is selling tickets to his own show out of pocket because the dickhead that owns the club convinced him that doing the club's promotion work for them was in everyone's best interest.

Why, yes, Tom. We'll give you all of our apple if you just let us whitewash that fence.

There are a lot of solutions out there. Government subsidies, demanding of legislators that we be included in general wage  or contract law. Fuck, there's a music union, just nobody knows about it and most of the ones that do don't know why they should care.

Fuck, new guitars should be sold with a union pamphlet stuck in the strings.

Anyway, it has to happen soon or there won't be any music. Not as anything other than a bland math problem created to appease the most people with the least maintenance.

Fair Trade Music (link) is doing something. I mean literally doing something, not writing resentful blog updates about how I didn't want to be a nuclear physicist in the military like I should have done. It's a grassroots campaign based in Portland, I think, with Union support. It's a brilliantly simple idea: talk to all the musicians, promoters, managers, friends, and venue owners you know about a fair wage for musicians.

I know most people think "musician's wages" and immediately get a visual of Guns 'n Roses in their heyday, but the fact is: most musicians work way fucking hard. I can't speak to electronic music or country or whatever, but for a modern rock or metal musician, describing them as "on a budget" is far too charitable. Trying to record an album, while simultaneously starting a delivery marketing business with three other equally broke friends, and finding a stage-worthy drumset on a paycheck scientifically proven to be below the poverty line is not "on a budget."

Get involved.