Is right here.

I’ve uploaded quite a few more fall photos to my Flickr Photostream, here’s another quick preview of them.

So this is pretty much how a religion works…

Let’s say a person, “Bob” is in a sealed room. He can hear what is going on outside the room, and he can contact people outside the room by yelling to them, and they can respond by yelling back. Before Bob goes into the room, he is told that there’s another room to the left of him, which contains another person.

…While Bob is in the room, he gets bored and has no one to talk to, so he starts yelling to the other person, unfortunately, the other person never says anything back. Bob tries to contact him day after day, via various means of communication including speech, and knocking on the wall separating them. But, no one ever responds to Bob’s communications.

One night while Bob’s sleeping, he has a dream. This “other” person is coming to tell him something. The person says they can’t respond to him directly, instead Bob will receive his communication through various other methods, including creaks, sounds, and feelings.

So the next day, Bob yells his question to the person in the other room. Several minutes later, he hears a dull thud coming from below his room. “This must be the other person” he thinks. Every day he continues to talk to this other person, and in one way another (it seems to Bob) he responds.

…A few weeks later…

After the experiment is over, Bob emerges from the room and tells the person he’s with how he really “connected” to the person in the other room. Unfortunately, there never was a person in this other room  - they were simply created by Bob’s imagination to help or assist his thoughts during his time in solitude. However, when he’s told that there never was another person in the room, he can’t believe it. Bob says that there was another person, and no matter how many facts or figures you give up, he simply doesn’t believe it.

And this is where my point comes in. Religion is a more complex version of this story, if you will. A person needs someone to talk to during hard times, and conveniently this “someone” they talk to never speaks to them in a direct manner. This “someone” always communicates through mysterious ways. Tell me, if you wanted to prove a point to someone, would you:

• a) Tell them directly so they understand
• b) Leave a series of bland and un-factful clues and references that may or may not be picked up on by the person you are trying to prove the point to..

If you had any sort of brain, you’d pick answer a, but obviously god would rather pick b. Because you know, it’s such an easy route to take. In the words of Bill Maher, “Why does god always communicate through some prophet in the woods, in a hidden area?”. Why not simply go “Oh hey everyone, I just wanted to let ya all know that the correct religion is… Judaism!”?

Another thing that amuses me about all these different religions is that they claim to know what happens to you when you die… How is this possible? I’ll give you a hint:

It’s not.

The idea that any human could know what happens to them when they die is impossible. If you’re dead, will you come back to life, write down what happened. then go die again? I don’t think so. But this is where the word of “god” comes in again. The same god that never speaks to us directly, he (or one of his cronies) always turns up on some piece of toast in Mexico, or in some one’s dream in California.

If you’re a believer, look at it this way

Let’s say you move in with a brand new roommate at collage. You’re not religious, and have never even heard a mention of god. But, your new roommate is a evangelical Christian. He starts to tell you how there’s this giant man that no one has ever seen or heard from directly, yet he’s the reason for while the world exists, and the reason for why everything in it works the way it does…

Then, he tells you that this all-powerful being sent his son (which is actually a reincarnation of him, sort of creepy, eh) down to earth to be killed (but don’t worry he was reborn in spirit) to pay for all or our sins. Hey, wait a minute, if this all-powerful being created us, why did he make us sin? Why didn’t he simply program us to not question the word of him, ever?

A bit more reading/Watching…

If you’d like to see a movie/documentary on the subject of Religion, I’d recommend you go see Bill Maher’s Religulous, which takes a look at specific religions, and asks members of each one about their beliefs. While it make take some things a bit far, Religulous proves and explores many good points on the subject of religious beliefs.

I can’t believe how smoothly that went.

I downloaded the DB and files, then uploaded them to mediatemple. Changed Wordpress’s config for the new DB, and we’re up and running with no extra configuration. I hope PSVibes goes this well.

I’ve uploaded some new stuff to my Flickr account. Here’s a quick preview.

Well, it’s about this big.

If I were to try and make that be a true, full size representation of the money, the image would literally need to be one million by one million pixels. Or over one million megapixels. Whoa.

To put that in perspective, the standard LCD screen is 72dpi, so the screen would literally need to be almost 120,000×120,000 inches, or almost 2 by 2 miles to display the image at it’s full size. At least, if my math is correct.

…That this sums up Palin pretty well.