the immoral majority

"AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals" - Jerry Falwell

"And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, You helped this happen." - Falwell on who's to blame for 9/11

"Billy Graham is the chief servant of Satan." - Jerry Falwell

"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history." - Pat Robertson

"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." - Pat Robertson

"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war...We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with." - Pat Robertson, calling for the assassination of democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez


Am I the only one who's getting sick of those guys? It seems like every time I turn around, one of them is saying something bigoted and idiotic and in the process making Christians look bad. Because I'm a Christian and a republican, I end up being associated with them. The media acts like they represent my views, my thoughts. Obviously, they do not. And I don't think they actually represent many Christians at all.

Beyond God doing a miracle, I don't think there's any way to get Pat and Jerry to shutup. And of course I believe that they have the right to say whatever they want to say, no matter how horrible it may be. However, that doesn't mean that the media needs to keep giving them an outlet to say it. They keep putting those clowns on the air partially because crazy people make good TV, but partially I think they because they honestly believe that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson speak for "evangelical Christians" (I hate that term, by the way). So how do we stop it? We show them that they do not speak for us and they do not speak for anyone. It's a small step and might not accomplish anything, but I started an online petition. Please sign it, whether you're a Christian or not, and let your friends know about it too. Somebody needs to stop these men from making us all look like hateful idiots.

Click here to sign the petition.

flash fiction

Whenever I try to follow the dotted line, I get lost somewhere between the dots. The shortest distance between point A and point B isn't a straight line when there's a chasm between them. I always end up falling somewhere around step three. Sometimes I'll make it to five if I'm lucky. Sometimes.

The box has gotten a bit dusty over the past three weeks. I cleaned up my apartment today, which meant I had to notice it. Not that I don't notice it anyway, sitting in the living room next to the fireplace. Sitting there. Collecting dust apparently.

I don't know what's in it. Nothing special I'm sure. At this point it's become the Pulp Fiction briefcase. Whatever's inside could never live up to the hype. So I let it sit there, don't even touch it. It's just an ordinary box: four walls and a roof, taped up with blue masking tape she brought home from her job. It's gained a life of its own now. Some mornings I make an extra bowl of Fruity Pebbles in case the box decides it's hungry.

Part of me wonders if maybe she left it on purpose. She hasn't asked for it. Not that we've talked. She's come online a couple of times from her parents' house, but she hasn't said a word to me. I'm afraid to break the silence. She cleaned out every other trace of herself while I was gone to work, even vacuumed her hair out of the carpet.

Maybe she wants me to open it. Maybe what's inside is important. It's a burmese python patiently waiting to end my life. It's pictures of her sleeping with all my friends. It's the teddy bear I bought her on Valentine's Day with a note saying she'll always love me.

I've never been this sentimental, so pathetically tied to my emotions. I should just leave it on her parents' doorstep. It's just some pots and pans or old sweat shirts. It's not important. It doesn't have power. It's just a box.

I'm watching one of those shows on E!, one of those "look how rich and better than you celebrites are" shows, the ones that make me sad to be American. The box is right there. Ten feet away. Five steps. I should throw it in the dumpster, take it to the country and burn it, cut it to shreds with a chainsaw. But I'll let it stay here for now. Maybe I'll use the box as a bridge to connect the dots, a raft to sail down the river at the bottom of this canyon. Maybe it's part of the metaphor, some sort of symbol for something. I so wanted to make it to step six this time, but my cardboard friend and I are stuck here at five.

NYC Pictures

This isn't an actual post. I just wanted to post links to the pictures from my vacation. Look at them.

album one
album two

more honesty

I wanted to add something I forgot to mention in my last post. Total honesty doesn't mean you always say everything that's on your mind. Remember that movie, Liar Liar? While it's one of Jim Carrey's funniest, it always bothered me because I didn't buy the premise. I'm okay with the kid's wish making it so that his dad can't lie, but that doesn't mean he has to say everything he's thinking in every situation. Every time I watch it, I find myself wanting to yell at the screen, "Just shut up!"

At any rate, I'm not advocating people saying horrible, mean things to each other simply in the cause of being honest. Sure, there are some things that people don't need to hear and there are ways to tell the truth in a nice way. I'm not against any of that. I just think too often we cross the line from being tactful to being deceiptful.

time to cancel the policy?

We've all heard it said a million times that honesty is the best policy, but is it really? Sure, it's good to tell the truth most of the time, but is it always best to be completely honest with another person in every situation? Let's think about it.

For our first scenario, we'll use an incident that occurred in my last relationship (I say "last" like there's been so many). My girlfriend at the time (we'll call her "Jessica"), got her hair cut a month or so into the relationship. While it wasn't a drastic change in length, to me at least it was a pretty big change in her "look." When I saw the new 'do, she asked me immediately if I liked it. I thought for a second and said something along the lines of, "I'm not sure yet. I definitely don't dislike it or think it looks bad, but I liked your old haircut a lot and this one's going to take some getting used to." Obviously, that wasn't the answer she was looking for. She wanted me to simply say, "It looks great. I love it." whether I meant that or not. And maybe that's what I should have said. But, as I told her at the time, "If I tell you the truth now, then when you ask me another question down the line like, 'Am I fat?' I can say, 'not at all, sweetheart. You're beautiful." and you'll know I mean it. I chose to keep my credibility rather than telling her what she wanted to hear. On the one hand, my total honesty (some might say lack of tact) was probably one of the myriad reasons we split up. On the other hand, at least I can look back and say that I never lied to her. Was it worth it? Hard to say.

Speaking of break-ups, one of the times when people lie the most is when they're breaking up with or rejecting someone. They feel bad enough about the whole thing already and try their best to spare the other person's feelings, even if that means giving them some false reason for the decision rather than telling them the truth. But is that wrong? Personally, I've always said that I'd rather have a girl tell me, "you're ugly and annoying and I don't like you," than give me the old standby, "I don't want to date anybody right now" (translation: I don't want to date you. Ever.) or some other made-up excuse. That's just me though. I can't claim to speak for everyone. Some people might prefer to have their feelings spared. I was actually discussing this subject with a friend the other day and she wondered if maybe it isn't best to sugar coat things sometimes. And it's definitely a logical point. Unless you have some sort of grudge, nobody wants to hurt another person unneccessarily. Why tell a person your real reason for not wanting to date them, she wondered, if it's not something wrong with them or something they can change? What purpose does it serve? My answer was that it doesn't need to serve a purpose. Honesty is intrinsically good. It's right and good to be honest with someone regardless of what it accomplishes. Sure, it may save someone a few self-esteem points to tell them a lie or half-truth, but rejection hurts regardless and at least they won't lie awake in bed at night wondering what went wrong or if they have a chance in the future if you tell the truth. In fact, I'd go out on a limb and say that, when you lie to someone in a break-up or rejection, you're really worried more about your own feelings than theirs. You want to feel less mean and not seem like the bad guy. And I don't mean just girls. They probably get more chance to practice since they get asked out more, but I gave a girl a half-truth once myself in my younger, stupider years. In that case, like most I've seen, all it did was cause more problems and we went from being good friends to not on speaking terms anymore in a matter of months. If I'd been completely, brutally honest, I may have hurt her feelings, but maybe I'd still have her as a friend.

So there you have it. If you're protecting government secrets from the Iranians, by all means lie your butt off, but otherwise, what's the point? If we can't be honest with each other, why even bother communicating? That's my take on things at least. I know it's not exactly ground-breaking (So you mean lying is bad??? Wow!), but maybe it's a bit thought-provoking at least. The way I see it, honesty is, in fact, the best policy.

"how are you" shouldn't be a rhetorical question

I went through the drive-through at Wendy's tonight to grab a baked potato and a frosty. When I got up to the window, the girl gave me a rote, "How are you tonight?" I responded with, "Not too bad. How about you?" I got back nothing but a blank stare. Not a "pretty good, " or an, "okay." Not even a shrug or a smirk. She made it completely obvious that she did not, in fact, care how I was. The same thing happened to me at Burger King recently. That time, the cashier didn't even give me a courtesy "how are you?" She just stood there and let me do all the talking without even saying so much as, "may I take your order" or "thank you." And you know what? That really pisses me off.

Honestly, few things irk me more than a lack of friendliness from people in the retail and service industries. To me, that's such a basic part of the job that ignoring it is just as bad, if not worse, than getting my order wrong or over-charging me. And it's the easiest part of the job by far. I don't care how much you hate being at your job. I don't care how little you're getting paid. If you can't put on a fake smile and pretend to have some sort of basic people skills for a few hours a day, then you don't need to be in the work force. My job at Toys [backwards]R Us gets tedious or stressful some days and there are times when it's the last place I want to be, but one thing I've never failed to do is smile and greet the customer and thank them for their purchase. I may seem unimportant, but it's not. Think about it. How much better do you feel about a store when you have a real conversation with an employee or share a joke with the cashier? It makes you want to go back. And more than that, it makes you feel good for at least a brief moment of your day. I'm not claiming to have talked people off of ledges or saved wives and children from abuse. All I'm saying is that as long as I'm collecting a paycheck, I'm going to do my job to the best of my ability. And part of that means being friendly and personable even on days when I don't feel like it. Even when I'm not on the clock, I still smile and attempt to be friendly with people. It's part of who I am, not something I have to think about, and I can't understand why some people find it so difficult.

a long-winded response

After reading my last blog, my friend Austin, posted an interesting response. I like what he had to say and I feel like I owe him a well-thought out response, so here's his comment followed by my thoughts.

Again, I completely agree with you on "the one" concept. I was just wondering, though, how big the difference is between saying, "I just know he's the one," and, "I just know He's the one." It seems to me that both statements employ a blind faith in the service of relenting any doubt that the object of that faith will fail. I guess if you believe that there is a sovereign governing power controlling the life that may house the changes, imperfections, and variable outcomes you mention then there is no worry associated with those experiences, and a person consequently submits to God, Providence, etc. That said, I do think it's important to believe in something larger than oneself and one's total ambient experience or to, as it were, allow oneself to be convinced of the extraordinary, the sacred, the divine mystery. In order to do so, though, it often helps to have empirical evidence rather than an interpretation of an occurrence or action. Of course, I don't want my entire experience of things like love and passion to stem from science. Though it's blasphemous to say this as a writer, there are many things I'd prefer to simply feel and not understand or be able to articulate. I do, however, suspect anything based entirely on a feeling someone has, in spite of the romantic notion that a gut feeling will determine the correct answer and save the day. I guess it just seems that the only ultimate defense of a belief in religion is, "You just have to believe/trust/have faith" or, in other words, "I just know. Because the Bible, or my physiological response to pheromones says so."

AT

And sorry to offend your many Christian readers, as well as you; I have the utmost respect for your (collective) belief.

You're right of course that despite any evidence we might have of God's existance, it does take a leap of faith at some point to move beyond that to belief. However, I don't think it's as complicated as people make it out to be sometimes. Faith isn't some mystical, magical thing. We use it every day, in every aspect of life. To quote Memento, "I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there." When I sit in a chair, I have faith that it's going to hold me. When I flip a light switch, I have faith that there will be light. If you're talking to a friend and he walks into another room, do you sit there and contemplate whether he still exists or not? I highly doubt it. Faith is nothing more than making assumptions based on the evidence at hand and what's happened in the past. Let's take my friend Britney for example. We met online. I've read her blogs and seen her pictures and we've chatted over AIM, but we've never met in person. If you were to provide me with enough evidence, you might could convince me that Britney's not who I think she is. Maybe the pictures she posts are of a friend. Maybe her name's not really Britney. Maybe she's actually a thirty-seven-year old bald man from Queens. But somebody wrote those blog entries and somebody typed to me over AIM, so the person I know as Britney does, in fact, exist. The same could be said for God. I've seen His creation. I've felt His prescence. And I've seen His hand working in my life. Maybe my concept of Him isn't perfect, but He most definitely exists.

I don't have a problem with someone asserting that their significant other exists. I don't think it makes you crazy to believe in Thomas Jefferson or Julius Ceasar. How is believing in God any different? And if I do believe in Him, then why wouldn't I worship and praise the being who created everythings and gave me life? I don't think it's wrong to have faith or make assumptions. When I flip that light switch, unless there's a power outage I don't know about, it's pretty safe to assume that the light will turn on. I could probably guess when my roommates will come home tonight with some degree of success. If a really crappy football team was playing a really great one, I could probably predict the winner. Making educated guesses is different from claiming certainty though, and predicting what will happen five minutes from now is different than claiming I can see thirty years into the future. Maybe I'm using semantics or splitting hairs, but it seems to me that having faith in God and having faith in some fairy tale life with a significant other are two entirely different things.