Re: The golden compass

Stop me if you've heard this before but why, when christians release films based on the christian message, is it a good moral thing to show children, but when athiests realease films based on athiems, it's a threat to the moral values of our children and probably post of some evil plot?

Just curious.

I am not militant

I tried to construct an elegant post about athiesm but I keep failing (and nobody reads this blog anyway) and it comes down to this - I'm sick of being told I'm closed minded, ignorant, or forcing my beliefe on others in the order of a religious extremist for making a definitive statement on my beliefe in the non-existance of diety and not being afraid to discuss it with people, reguardless of those people's faith or lack of it. I also get angry when the one widely known piece of athiest writing (the god delusion) is so widely attacked on no more solid basis then "I don't like Dawkins tone". How he says it isn't the point, it's what he says. I'm not particularly fond of the tone of the bible, does that mean I get to dismiss it out of hand and insist that others do to becasue hey, you know, that could be problem solved.

My normal approach is useless here

I wish emotions were like a biochemical pathway and we could disect them. You see, as well as being hit over the head with Buddha this weekend, I had a small crisis of sexuality. This has been going on for a while, it will probably continue to do so. Life sucks, what can you do? The thing is, emotions aren't discrete units. I find myself trying to seperate them out, like I would a bipchemical pathway, and that doesn't work here. I can't go and research the "mothers opinion" gene, or run some expreiments to see how, it at all, it's interacting with the sexuality complex. I can't remove societal expectations of lesbianism from the system and see if it still works. I can't take my emotions appart and I can act on just my emotion at all. As complicated as molecular systems are, at least we can disect them and thus come across some understanding of them. I only wish emotions worked like that.

Of course, to run with the analogy, it's always possible that in this system there's a block at "he likes me back" so I'm just freerunning, trying to work it out, but none of the output I'm generating is doing anyone any good.

Life is too hard.

It had to happen eventually

I think I've reached a critical phase in my life as an athiest. It has to happen to us all sooner or later. I got hit over the head by a buddha. There was blood everywhere and we put my poor medic student friend on the spot with a gushing head wound and no first aid kit in the house, but we had the paramedics out and they've assured me that despite my friends worst fears, Buddha only struck me, no bits of him god stuck in there, so we're all good. A lucky escape, I feel.

A short break

Well, I've just had my first weekend of in forever (not literally, of course). I handed my placement report in on Friday and declared myself free for the weekend. I spent it very productivley not moving from the sofa and watching a lot of bad TV, so now I'm refreshed and ready to go again.

The layout of this year has surprised me, really. Maybe I'm used to working too hard at work but the sheer amount of time we have with nothing scheduled in. I have no lectures today, no meetings, and I can't start my lab work. Tomorow I have one tutorial session, an hour long. I know I'm meant to be reading for my project, and that's why I'm in, but surely we don't need all this time just to write up an introduction? Oh well, I'm sure when tutorials kick in later this week I'll be a lot more busy. I should stop complaining and enjoy some low-stress time.