Prayer in Schools

know, I know, I’m ranting about religion again. But if it didn’t cause so many goddamn issues in the United States maybe I wouldn’t have to! The subject here is prayer in public schools. People want it back in. Why? Because it’ll make kids more moral? Well those kids who shot up Columbine were church-goers, so I don’t think that’s it. Actually, there really isn’t a good reason to reinstate prayer in schools after they’ve been fine without it for the last 4 decades. The only argument people seem to be able to think of in favor of it is: "Why not? It’s harmless."

Is it? When people say "prayer" they really mean Christian prayer. Sure no one has a problem with that, but what if someone suggested Shinto prayer? Buddhist prayer? Hindu prayer? Wiccan prayer? Why, parents would be in an uproar! So why is it when anyone gets in an uproar over the notion of Christian prayer in schools they’re painted as overreacting to something "harmless" and "good"? Well it’s not harmless. And it’s not good either. Freedom of Religion doesn’t apply to just Christians, it applies to all of us, and indoctrinating other people’s children with your religion is definitely a violation of that.

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Meme’s The Word

My mom’s been using the internet more and more and like many of you out there I am concerned with parental safety on the internets. My mom’s in this grey, nebulous area where she’s not young enough to find *chan raids and sending disgusting pictures to your friends funny, but not old enough to know nothing about the internet beyond "the Google" and "it’s a series of tubes". I was already a tad worried when she started to become a YouTube addict, but her increasing activity on the intrawebs has made me realize just how far *chan memes have penetrated the internet as a whole.

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Sweating Up SingStar

So the other day my brother brought the game SingStar home. While making a sandwhich that evening I heard him and his friend downstairs in the basement singing in dual monotone, so I threw open the door and yelled down "YOU SUCK!" to which my brother yelled back "LET’S SEE YOU DO BETTER, BITCH!". And today he challenged me to just that… we ended up down in the basement singing for 2 hours.

The game is pretty amazing, on the screen it displays the pitch you’re expected to hit, and shows where your voice is as you sing (it also shows the lyrics and highlights them when you’re supposed to sing, just like karaoke.) Even then it’s kind of hard to correct (at least on the normal or hard setting), especially while we were singing "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones (he got the rock version, obviously), I kept having to drop my voice to deeper and deeper octaves just to satisfy the damn thing. It also didn’t help that, seeing as I was trained in chorus singing during my youth, my brother bumbling the lyrics of songs here and there was screwing me up too. But that wasn’t even the highlight of his, or my, antics.

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Get Your Cross Off My America

Who names their kid "Newt", anyway?

"A growing culture of radical secularism declares that the nation cannot profess the truths on which it was founded"

Another slimey old Christian Conservative said this as part of a commencement speech at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University (you know, the one that was bailed out of debt by the Moonie cult.) That slimeball would be Newt Gingrich. I don’t know how Mr. Gingrich can find secularism to be radical as the sole purpose of secularism in a country is to focus purely on the basics of society and to not rely on any intangible ideas belonging to any particular religion so as to best serve and care for all the citizens. But I suppose Gingrich and other Conservatives consider this idea something drastic and extremist?

All one has to do is replace the word "radical" with the word "infidel" to get an idea of what Gingrich and others of his ilk are really thinking. To these people anything anyone else does is somehow purposefully orchestrated to attack them, and striving for neutrality so to fairly cater to people of all creeds and philosophies isn’t something they care about. You would think such people would be ignored and written off, wouldn’t you? And often it’s claimed that they are. And when Gingrich went on to imply the goal of the Religious Right is to convert all of America to Christianity, he was not met with scattered clapping or awkward silence, no, but cheering.

Anybody on the left who hopes that when people like Reverend Falwell disappear that the opportunity to convert all of America has gone with them fundamentally misunderstands why institutions like this were created [emphasis added]

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Defending Gabriel

It should come as no surprise that I have heard many remarks over the years that my characterization of the Archangel Gabriel is extremely… girly. Where all of my angel characters are in fact androgynous (or well… at least were created that way) they’re referred to in the masculine and have, for the most part, masculine bodies. Despite this androgyny and the tendancy of having pretty faces, Gabriel in particular seems to delight, confuse, or outright scare people with his femininity.

But over the years people who have watched me on deviantART may have seen me defending his design, citing Classical and Rennaissance art as inspiration. And since no one seems to believe me and since I got a site where I can talk about anything I want with pretty visual aides I’m going to take some time to explore the sources behind Gabriel’s girltastic looks.

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