Family Radio and the end of the world!

Last week I was driving home from work here in Columbia, SC and on the other side of the street was the most ridiculous bus. I tried to grab my camera to take a picture, but the light changed and it moved on. I did, however, remember the name and made a note. Luckily there are plenty of pictures online. The bus belonged to the group “Family Radio“, an apocalyptic Christian group eagerly counting down the days till all of humanity, including everyone you love, dies in bloody agony at the coming of their god.

Have you heard the awesome news?!?!?! The world is going to end!!!!1 These people are really fucked up. Though the bus is an improvement over their old one:

Free candy for children only!

Apparently they’ve decided the world is going to end on May 21, 2011, and even though people have been incorrectly deciding this for thousands of years. (But oh no, THIS time we’ve got it right. THIS time he’s coming back. We’re special, everyone else was wrong because of X,Y, & Z) It’s a good thing people like this don’t date much. Can you imagine how long they’d wait on the front porch if you stood them up for prom? Jesus has stood them up for over 2000 years and they still don’t get the hint that he’s just not that into them.

Look, this idiot even painted her brand new car with the date when she gleefully awaits the death of all humanity. You know what, I would gladly join their church and pray with them if they signed over all their money and property to me. Why wouldn’t they? The world’s going to end anyways! They’re going to be swept up with Jesus! What hesitation should they have to sign over all their worldly possessions to me? They ARE sure it’s going to be May 21, 2011, right? They wouldn’t happen to have some doubt and be keeping their things just in case, would they? They shouldn’t because according to the bible in Acts 5:1-11 the apostle Paul kills a couple for doing just that.

I really wonder what all these idiots are going to do on May 22, 2011. Can you imagine? It’s happened to thousands of people before throughout history. It’s going to be extremely awkward. The lady in the picture here is probably going to be huddled around her family and these other wingnuts, hands clasped in prayer, eyes squeezed tight, waiting for the clock to strike 12…tic toc tic toc. When it hits there will be silence. She will have her eyes squeezed shut for a few moments till she carefully opens one and looks around… “Maybe it’ll happen sometime today, not right at midnight?” And so she’ll spend the entire day paralyzed with anticipation, just like the rest of the sheeple. When it comes close to midnight of that day she’ll start sweating bullets. “It has to happen! Why is it taking so long! Why aren’t everyone I hate dead!?!?”

As midnight comes and passes she’ll lie there in bed, staring at the ceiling in shock. “Fuck….fuck fuck fuck!!! I have to go to work in the morning!” (The 21st is on a Monday) She’ll maybe get an hour or two of restless sleep, get up, make some coffee, grab her keys and stumble out to her c…..”Oh FUCK! Now EVERYBODY is going to know I’m an idiot!!! People are going to be pointing and laughing at me where ever I go!” (And you damn well deserve it!) How awkward and embarrassing is that going to be? She’s eventually going to have to take it to a body shop and have it all removed, or paint over the date with the new and revised date in case she’s in denial. This is all assuming they haven’t signed over all their possessions to their leader, which is a very real possibility; and I guarantee you if it doesn’t work out, he’ll be on the first plane to the Caribbean with all their money.

The higher the body count, the less we comprehend.

Tonight I’ve watched “John Rabe” about the Nanking massacre and “Hiroshima”, about the use of the first atomic bomb in war.  No surprise, I’ve been thinking about mass death. I heard there was a study done on how people perceive large numbers of needy, but I can’t for the life of me find it. The study concluded that people’s empathy for a person in need goes down the more people there are. This is easy to see in the media. A lone white college girl is kidnapped on spring break in the Caribbean and everyone is captivated; 400,000 people die in Darfur genocide and people turn to the sports page.

I think psychologically we are unable to grasp horror in large numbers. If you see someone murdered in front of your eyes, that would be traumatic; yet we don’t multiply this feeling by the number of people killed. The comedian Eddie Izzard touches on this:

He’s being comical there, but I really believe he is onto something. I think our brains really do shut down at some point. We simply cannot comprehend large numbers of dead. Even our language fails to convey the horror of what we are describing. At that point those adjectives become numb, ineffective.

Horror. Pure horror. Does that word mean anything? Does it evoke in you the feeling it names? Does it have any impact at all when talking about such levels of mass death? I don’t think language is able to convey the soul destroying evil it attempts to describe. I think you can only see it, and unless you witness it first hand you’ll never fully feel the impact.

A doctor who was on the outskirts of Hiroshima and survived described a sight that has haunted him his entire life: The bomb had just exploded, and he was quickly making his way through the woods to town when about 3 kilometers out he came across this creature. The creature was unlike anything he had ever seen before. Pure black from top to bottom, with grotesque limbs, with something that appeared to be a face, but there were no eyes or mouth, staggering through the woods blindly. When he carefully approached this…thing… he realized that it was not a strange demon, but a man. The fireball had burned his flesh off his body and fused the limbs together. It was chard skeleton walking towards him. The man, what was left of him, died right there in front of the doctor. When the doctor  got to town he saw thousands of these chard husks.

You can listen to what these people saw, and see pictures of the burned bodies, but you can’t fully grasp what it feels like. It is literally incomprehensible.

I’ve heard stories about the allied soldiers who first discovered that Nazi death camps. Many of them were haunted for the rest of their lives. Seeing something like that has to tear the humanity from you. I had a friend who’s grandfather liberated a camp, he said that he could never forget the smell, that it gave him nightmares every night.

Sure you can go to museums, see the pictures, watch films, even visit the camps (I’ve personally been to Dachau), but you can never fully taste the horror.

I remember standing there among the row of prisoner barracks in Dachau. It was a quiet, peaceful place. It was no different from a park, except that everyone was very quiet. Today Hiroshima is a bustling city of one million. The streets are full of people happily going about their day. If you didn’t know your history, you would have no idea that just a few decades ago these sites were places of mass death and suffering. Even with knowing your history it is hard for the gravity of the atrocities to sink in.

The human body and the holocaust

I have a feeling this will be another strange post. You see, I’ve just spent the night watching more foreign films dealing with beautiful people fighting, loving, and dying amid one of the darkest periods in human history; and it’s 3am, I’m exhausted.

Allow me to let you in on something a little personal: I often spend time thinking about the human body. No, not in the way you’re thinking a normal 20 something guy would think of human bodies, particularly female bodies, though that is a part of it. Most of the time it’s more of a detached, clinical observation; though to be honest it’s a mix of both, sensual and clinical. The whole thing is somewhat mystical to me, the way you might lie in bed examining the body of a lover; slowly gliding your fingers over their skin, taking note of the texture, the rise and falls of their curves, the soft malleability of their flesh, or the strength and elegance of their collarbone.

The paradox is intriguing to me. While the human body can be a graceful work of art, almost ethereal, at the same time it can be gritty and dirty; unkempt hair, sweat, grime, blood. Without proper grooming and hygiene, we can be a real mess. But the dualities don’t end at aesthetics. While the human body can be soft and delicate, we are able to build powerful machines and structures out of steel. Though we lack thick protective skin, or claws for self defense, we make up for it with tools and ingenuity. To highlight this contrast, imagine people going about their jobs, yet doing so in the nude. (And please leave the crass sexualization for the children, that’s not what I’m going for here) In the middle of a hard, sterile, mechanical environment we have these soft and delicate bodies that created it. It’s hard to try and explain this through words. What I’m trying to express is a thought that is very sensory in nature. Trying to translate how a thought feels, tastes, sounds, and looks like is hard to translate into text, so lets move on.

Maybe it’s the humanist in me, or an extension of that mystical feeling I feel about the human body, but we really are fascinating creatures. Yes, a machine can do something a million times with laser precision, but humans are just so versatile. While we divide up into various social and economic classes, and vary in degrees of intelligence, we all have basically the same potential. For example, the janitor who cleans a building, their job does not make them any less of a human than the CEO of the company they work for. If you took that janitor and trained them intensively, they would be able to do the things the CEO does, it’s just a matter of education and training. (Now obviously janitors don’t become CEOs, but that’s a symptom of society and some starting off in more advantageous positions than others, not because there is an inherent difference between people)

So where does the holocaust come into all of this? Well since I look at the human body as works of art, and value the potential of every human being, the holocaust is something that deeply interests and disturbs me. The wholesale, systematic slaughter of millions of people… It’s just beyond me. I may really hate somebody, but I can’t escape the fact that they are human. I still see them the way the curious lover does. Thus it’s beyond me how you could hurt something like that, let alone pack millions into freight cars and slaughter them.

Seriously, what’s going through this soldier’s mind? How can he not see that the mother and her daughter that is is about to murder are people? It just baffles me. People have been committing atrocities like this for millenniums, it still goes on today, though not as grand and mechanized as in the 1940’s.  How can we live with ourselves? I think most people just ignore it or put it out of their minds. I’m not sure we are able to fully comprehend the horror of what we do to one another. I’ve heard stories about soldiers who liberated the death camps, how many of them could never sleep well for the rest of their lives, how some could never forget the stench of the mountains of dead. I think to fully comprehend the horror would destroy you. My thesis advisor in college was a holocaust historian for a while. He had to stop because it was destroying his humanity just talking about it. He said he went numb and the numbers and atrocities blurred together, that if he hadn’t changed subjects he would have committed suicide.

How are we capable of such acts? How can we do such a thing to something a beautiful and amazing as a human being? I guess it’s also part of our duality;  we have the capacity for great goodness, and the capacity for unspeakable evil.

Atheists have killed millions!

One of the most often used attacks against Atheists is to try and associate them with the French revolution and Communism. The “argument” goes something like this:

“The French revolution and Communism were run by Atheists and they killed millions of people! Therefore Atheism is evil and morally bankrupt.”

This claim is ridiculous on so many levels, yet this does not stop people from hurling it at Atheists. So, where many leaders of the French revolution Atheists? Yes. Were some leaders of communism Atheist? Yes. So that’s checkmate for the Atheists right? No.

There is a very important point that people repeatable fail to recognize: Killing is one thing, killing in the name of something else is another.

This is very important because although the French revolution and communism killed a lot of people, they did not do it in the name of Atheism. Religious fanatics on the other hand have been killing people for thousands of years in the name of their religion, because of their religion.

This is not to say that the killing done by the French revolution and communism should be dismissed, but that you’re comparing apples to oranges. People who killed other people and happened to be Atheists vs people who killed other people because of their religion. In fact, this is an extremely slippery slope for religious people to go down. If they want to claim that Atheism is bad because some people who happened to be Atheists committed crimes, then they are completely damning themselves for this simple reason:

There has always been more religious people than Atheists. Because of Atheism’s smaller population, inevitably more people have been killed throughout history by those who happened to be religious. This includes all murders done by religious people for religious AND non-religious motives. Comparatively murders committed by Atheists are fewer in number, and murders done by Atheists for religious reasons fewer still.

“Well, ok, so there are more theists than Atheists, I bet proportionally the numbers are still equal.” Wrong. When you average out the data to see the ratio of murders done by Atheists per population of Atheists to murders done by theists per population of theists, Atheists commit fewer crimes than theists.

The pope and condoms

Well, the pope is at it again. He’s in Africa preaching the evils of condom use. In the most AIDs ridden part of the planet he’s denouncing condoms as “not the answer.” This is appalling because condoms are the most effective strategy to fighting AIDs according to the World Health Organization. When used correctly condoms can prevent an infection 98-99% of the time!

The pope’s answer? Just don’t have sex. How realistic. Just come on in Africa and try to impose your twisted ideas of sex and morality of a people suffering from a humanitarian crisis. People are going to have sex. They always have and always will. That’s a fact! Ideally the pope would like all the Africans to have christian marriages, join the catholic church, have copious amounts of children, and pay as big of a tithe as possible to fill his coffers. Not going to happen.

What the pope is doing is nothing short of encouraging mass death and suffering in the name of his fucked up ideas on sexuality and his invisible make believe god. As such he should be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity.

The selfishness of religion

It’s been a while since I last posted since classes just started up a little bit ago. One of the classes I’m taking is a comparative religion’s class. The class covers christianity, islam, and judaism. What transpired yesterday in the class really infuriated me.

We were talking about how people always try to rationalize bad events, like tsunami’s, floods, terrorist attacks, etc… One guy raised his hand and stated how god doesn’t do these things for no reason, and something good always comes of it. The problem with this point of view is that it ignores the people who suffered and perished. It’s easy to say something good will come of it if you’re alive or it didn’t directly affect you. But what about everyone else who died? Obviously nothing good was going to come to them, they’re dead.

The guy then pointed out that god does this to teach us a lesson. A lesson?!?! That still doesn’t address the problem of what about all those who died to teach you a lesson? I just feel it’s extremely selfish. I asked him if this included the holocaust, to which he said “yes.”

So you mean to tell me that god allowed SIX MILLION people to be SLAUGHTERED just to teach you a lesson!?!?! Omfg. He said “yes” you this too. Then, upon seeing my anger and shock, he chastised me for “valuing human life too much.” I value human life too much?!?!? Here I’m about to throw up. This is just really fucking sick. I don’t know about him, but here in America we care about human life. Whatever happened to leave no man/woman behind?

I just think it really says something about the nature of religion when you don’t value human life and have no qualms about millions of people being systematically butchered all so you personally can learn a lesson. (Oh, and then he went on to deny that genocide still goes on today….what a fucktard.)