And I thought her previous cards were confusing…

March 27th, 2007 • confusion, indexed, web

I love reading indexed. It’s fun seeing how Jessica Hagy can so easily reproduce popular media in the most simplistic of forms. Well, it’s usually pretty simplistic but not today. She went crazy again and made a complex and lovely representation of different emotions and made another web. This one’s full of some good puns (see EF as mentioned in the comments) and overall good fun.

Subscribe to her feed, you’ll laugh with each new one, I guarantee it.

Purity Balls without the dirty sex

March 25th, 2007 • 15 comments christianity, oddity

Growing up in the Southern United States, I was amidst a bunch of Bible thumpers and evangelical nuts. I never really thought much of it since I was smack dab in the middle of all the craziness. Things like promising chastity till marriage was not uncommon and most people proclaimed this in private or amongst a small group of family members and trusted friends. Some people carried this around like a badge of superiority, and others wore it like an invisible veil keeping their private life separate from their social life. Those who wore it like an emblazoned badge of Christianity were typically those people who easily “fall from grace” (more on this in a few) or just do it for clique status. Now, there seems to be a new way to outwardly proclaim your abstinence and show everyone you’re down with chastity: purity balls.

From the first few sentences and title alone, I was expecting some bizarre incestuous rite of passage. Instead, I was greeted by a new fad in claiming abstinence. It sounds just like a wedding and has all the trappings of a wedding except a father and daughter claim to live a pure life and promise to not have sex until marriage, respectively. A noble thing to do in theory (and it just jerks tears from those bleeding hearts) but the truth is it probably doesn’t hold up well after a few years. What’s the reason for it being the father and the daughter in the proceedings instead of involving the family as a whole? In reality, taking this vow of chastity is a family-oriented ordeal and does not solely involve the father and daughter. I would think the Purity Ball would be a great exercise in bringing together the nuclear family not isolating the father and the daughter. Why not the mother and daughter instead? Does this harken back to Biblical times where fathers were the controllers of their daughters life outside the home?

Now, earlier I stated most people that take this vow break it before they’re married and usually before they leave high school. The temptation is too strong simply because it’s now a taboo action and forbidden. The article goes on to say:

They also point to studies showing that the majority of adolescents who take purity pledges break them within a few years, often by engaging in risky and unprotected sex.

One study conducted by researchers at the universities of Columbia and Yale found that 88 percent of pledgers wind up having sex before marriage.

Really, why is this occurring? Surely not because it’s now a forbidden act since they’re abstinent or peer pressure. Randy Wilson seems to attribute this vow breaking to “sexual images” in the young girl’s culture and surroundings. If that’s the case, tell them to stop watching MTV and risque reality TV shows that promote sexuality and sexual prowess over personality and humanity, they could stop taking their kids to stores such as the abhorrent Libby Lu or Little Miss Priss that completely objectify all little girls as divas or primped up pre-Prom Prom Queens with the world at their disposal. Breaking the vow also couldn’t be attributed to the lack of true sexual education in today’s schools. The classes that are held, in majority, teach abstinence and choose to throw things like STDs and proper condom use to the wayside. The administration is apparently dumping over $205M USD into teaching abstinence while not teaching about the troubles of teen parenthood or teens dealing with some of the more serious STDs, both of which are only increasing as months go by.

I applaud those who take vows of chastity but turning it into public spectacle does not seem to do well in cementing the values of the act in the minds of these girls. With most breaking their vows in a number of years, is this a good way to continually promote abstinence? Would facts about teen pregnancy and the atrocity of STDs not serve to be just as effective is taught in conjunction with abstinence? I know I have no idea as I’m far out of school but I’m sure I could poll some kids to get a good idea of what would work.

The weekend!

March 25th, 2007 • chatter

My week at work is always the same: long and boring. Even though it’s a standard 5 day work week, it seems like an eternity. The never-ending boredom and ethical problems seem to multiply as the weeks progress yet I have no back up plan to fall…back on. The ever present doldrum of my job has anything but killed me although it may do that eventually. Traits such as ambition or creativity, things jobs thrive on, are frowned upon in lieu of being a robot and doing exactly what you’re told.

I revel in my 48 hours of freedom I get at the end of each week only because it allows me to be able to smile or laugh. The weekend seems like an alien world to me, I never know what to do. Luckily, this weekend I have a concert to attend! That is, provided I can find my ear plugs so I don’t lose my hearing listening to the likes of Nachtmystium and Goatwhore. It’s been months since I’ve been to a good show and I miss attending them immensely. At least I haven’t missed out on too many good ones since the year started and this tour season looks like it’s going to be a great one.

With the likes of Nightwish, Sonata Arctica, Gojira, and the upcoming Sounds of the Underground 3 tour, I’m in for an ear bleeding 2007.

Christian intolerance among MySpace clones

March 24th, 2007 • 8 comments christianity, intolerance

So I came to work this morning and as usual, I started reading my normal Atheist blogs. I then came across this lovely post from The Friendly Atheist about a site called HisHolySpace.com (HHS) which is exactly what it sounds like: a Christian Myspace rip off. Now, since I work for a large web hosting company, I see these all the time and all of them fail in way or another so what sets this one apart from the rest? Christianism, that’s what!

Just going through the registration process is painful enough but then you have extremely backwards thinking and double standards going on. Take the tidbit of information on the first page alone:

HisHolySpace.com is an online Christian Community that is structured on the Core Essential Doctrines of Christianity. The Bible itself reveals those doctrines that are essential to the Christian faith. They are as follows: (1) the Deity of Christ (2) Salvation by Grace (3) Resurrection of Christ, and (4) the gospel. These are the doctrines the Bible says are necessary. Though there are many other important doctrines, these four are the only ones that are declared by Scripture to be essential…

I never realized that Christ was a deity, Jesus Christ was merely a person and a prophet not a deity. Making him into a deity would mean people would worship him and go against the Ten Commandments. Worshipping Jesus as a deity goes directly in opposition of Exodus 20:3 :

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

And since when has the resurrection of Christ been a core doctrine of Christianity? When I went to church, I must have slept through all those sermons because I don’t remember it at all. I also missed where the reverend at hand said his resurrection was essential to the understanding of the Christian ethos. It only gets more interesting:

A non-regenerate person, or a false religion, will deny one or more of these essential doctrines.

Just wow. How narrow-minded and intolerant. I guess they think that Kabbalism is a false religion too, just don’t go telling some intelligent, well-learned Rabbis that.

HisHolySpace.com separates itself from other online religious community sites, by only allowing those religions that follow these Core Christian Essentials, to be promoted on the site. Anyone from any religion is welcome to join HisHolySpace.com. But if your religion and/or your beliefs fall outside the realm of the above-mentioned Core Essentials, and it is your intention to promote your religion and/or beliefs on HHS, you may be in violation of the site rules, which could result in the cancelation of your membership.

I guess you can join if you do not believe in the Christian “core doctrines” but don’t ever say that or you’ll be kicked off! Saying “anyone from any religion can join” and following it with “if your beliefs fall outside our narrow scope, your account will get cancelled” doesn’t really mean everyone is welcome and you promote tolerance. Let’s get into the site itself and how backwards it continues to be.

Case in point: Rank User. I have no idea how often this is actually used on MySpace as not only have I never used it, I don’t know anyone that has in the two years I’ve been on MySpace but anyway that’s beside the point. On HHS, instead of ranking users, apparently you get to JUDGE them. Excuse me? Doesn’t judging someone (something Christians are taught not to do) usually carry a negative connotation in any social circles? I just don’t understand “Christians” like this. I was raised devout Presbyterian and if my mother ever found out I was judging someone or prejudicing against someone, I was in huge trouble because it’s against the Christian ethos as laid down in the Bible. But apparently, the people behind HHS have no problems whatsoever in welcoming judgement against its’ users and they more than welcome you to do it. I guess their version of the Bible says this is OK. Then you have such atrocities as “Add to Congregation” instead of “Add to Friends” or “No Gossip IM” instead of “Instant Message”. I mean, No Gossip IM? What is this, a Communist regime? I understand trying to seperate yourself from the rest of the clones but come on, who’s going to buy this drivel? Everyone, including Christians, gossip and no one can truthfully deny they do not do it.

Even though I’m not a Christian, I find this highly offensive. I think even if I was a Christian I would never visit this site and continue using the sinful and tempestuous MySpace because at least they know what goes on and they do not try to cover up. It seems they want to actually push Christianist values down your throat instead of trying to cultivate and market a healthy Christian image. I haven’t made a Satanist MySpace clone so I can use it to my own evil ends and make people feel like they need to repent after logging off. It just seems that in many parts of the country, especially in the South, people are being taught Christianist values instead of the old Christian values that have been taught for the last 2,000 years. They have all of the outward trappings of a Christian but once you get them to open up, you find out it’s all a thin veener and there’s a regular ol’ sinner underneath there that really has no idea what they believe or why they “believe” they’re Christian. Is this how we want our children to start progressing through life? As one dimensional robots, devoid of any humanity or self-understanding?

I just don’t understand this at all.

Book Reclassification Day

March 23rd, 2007 • atheism

What is Book Reclassification Day? It’s Dan Harlow’s idea of a way to get back at book stores for improperly shelving and categorizing books. Lots of people like the idea, lots of people do not. People are split on what to do mainly because reshelving would mean extra work for already tired employees but people want to do it because it may make the stores rethink their ways of shelving and categorization. Personally, I think the idea is not the greatest because I know people that work in book stores and that shelve books and the last they willingly want to do is move a whole mess of books from one section to another because someone is trying to passive-aggresively make a statement.

But why did this entire idea of a new “day” come about? Well, Saint Gasoline made a hilarious comic about it and Dan ran with the idea. While not an Atheist in any sense of the word (I am a strict Gnostic Luciferian minus that magick mumbo-jumbo), I do support what Dan is trying to do 100%. He wants book stores to reshelve or reclassify books based on or about Intelligent Design moved from the science section to either the religion or faith section because Intelligent Design is nothing more than faith-based pseudo-science (meaning Christian fundies and other Christianists). Some books on ID are written by scientists but does this make them science section worthy? Many Christians will vehemently argue that Richard Dawkins‘ books such as The God Delusion are as much based on science as Intelligent Design is and would love nothing more for them to be removed from the sciences sections. Better yet, they’d probably want them tossed out and burned.

So what’s my real take on this? After a day or so of commenting and discussion between myself, Dan, and a number of other commentors, Book Reclassification Day went from moving books (and pissing people off) to simply turning them upside down, leaving notes regarding the books’ falsehood, making hip little signs to alert passers-by that books on ID are not science worthy and so on. Not only will I stand by this far more than I will moving books, I will probably participate myself. However, my true stance is that instead of taking guerilla actions such as these, I find it would be far more beneficial and effective to write the book stores and complain over and over about the poor classification of such books and demand they rethink their shelving strategies. I know that shelving positioning and determination are almost entirely based on popular demand, e.g. groupthink, but seriously I don’t see why an extra section or two cannot be created to shelve books more appropriately.

If this ever works, I’ll start writing so I can get the damned books on Satanism removed from the atrocious “New Age” section and properly placed in the “Religion” section where they truly do belong.

How the Semantic Web can further education

March 22nd, 2007 • 2 comments education, web

The semantic web has brought us many things, some useful, most not. The best thing about the emerging semantic web is the widespread proliferation of information. While I personally think most of it’s junk, the one thing I find extremely beneficial is the fact that so much literary and educational material is now available for free or very low cost. The ever present front-runners of open source information, the O’Reilly Radar has an excellent post about the use of Google Books for finding books that you most likely will not normally find in a library or even a specialized one at that.

Let’s talk about online books from some major outlets first: Google Books and Amazon‘s reader. I remember when Google Books came out of alpha and was ho-hum on the content. The reader was shoddy (pre-AJAX days, imagine that!) but there was very little real content to search through. Fast forward nearly 4 years and the reader is fully functional and simple to use, modeled after simplistic PDF readers and is relatively lightweight. The content’s also gone from nearly nil to overflowing with books. Take the example of Albert Pike’s seminal book Morals and Dogma. I own two copies of this book, a first edition and a 1999 edition, but if I didn’t I could just read the entire thing online since Google Books has a number of copies cataloged for full text. This is a boon for research-a-holics and those who just love to read books digitally. Instead of plunking down a nice bit of money like I did for my editions, I can read the whole thing online for free from the comfort of my own couch! And it doesn’t stop there, libraries around the world are getting in on the action too. With Google’s library partnership booming, more and more libraries and librarians are contributing to the Google Books project and helping to spread rare and common books alike with the rest of the world. In the three years since I began using Google Books, I never thought the project would actually take off like it has, especially in the way of rare or hard-to-find books. And Google’s educational reach doesn’t stop there. They also have Google Scholar that allows you to search scholar journals without worry and this trend is only going to continue.

But let’s not leave Amazon out of this! They have their own online book application too and it’s far more polished than Google’s version. Using my example from Pike, I can easily read excerpts from Amazon or I can even search the full text of the book. Not only does this somewhat mirror Google’s output but it’s an awesome way to save money if you only need to read a particular part of a book and don’t want to buy it. This has helped my girlfriend out a number of times in her studies where she did not see the need to purchase a $200 music history book only to need to reference a single chapter subset for a paper. What’d she do? She hit up Amazon, found the book, searched the full text and got what she needed. If you take the cost of the book, around $200, and how much we were charged from our ISP for that time, in essence the book cost a total of about $1. Quite an immense savings, I’d say. Their selection of searchable and viewable books is growing day-by-day as they, and more importantly publishers, recognize the growing want of being able to read sections or entire books online.

Then you have sites such as lecturefox.com, Open Educational Resources Commons, and varsitynotes.com with all offering free lecture notes online from an enormous number of schools and professors. Lecturefox in particular is growing exceedingly fast with lectures being submitted from world renowned schools such as UCLA, Stanford, and MIT. Granted, none of these sites were really the first ones to do this but they’re some of the best aggregators around for it. A few years ago, MIT started putting all of its computer science lectures online and its since grown to just about everything at the school through the incredibly successful Open CourseWare site. Since MIT’s breakthrough work in free coursework, you’re hard pressed to find an Ivy League or otherwise credible school not doing something similar.

The semantic web has brought many good things and many bad in the last few years, I can remember when semantic web was just a dream and buzzword on the tips of tongues for many big names in the Internet scene but now it’s a reality. With this new found availability of information, it’s only inevitable that education resources would being cropping up and populating the web and they’ve done so with a force and are reaching people far beyond what any had hoped. Everyday I find a more useful resource than the day before and it’s only getting better. The other day I jokingly remarked that I no longer need to go back to school for my Master’s degree since so much scholarly information is free (as in speech, not as in beer) and frankly, this may come to be true.

Awesome word of the day

March 22nd, 2007 • 1 comment beards

Blog perusal lead me to the most awesome word I’ve heard in weeks:

pogonotrophy (po-guh-NAW-truh-fee) noun
The growing of a beard.

Now, PZ Myers has a mighty beard but it’s not much compared to my once flowing beast beard and my now trimmed up and long goatee/chin curtain (pictures are somewhere).

Ah, a fresh(er) start

March 22nd, 2007 • 1 comment chatter

It’s time to start using this domain for more than hosting my own wiki.