disenchantedbunny.

The belief in demons of certain sorts is a cross-cultural phenomenon. While their attributes may differ from place to place, people to people, a majority of these beliefs can be attributed to the personification of natural phenomenon, an explanatory and predictive theory. Cultures devoid of some type of renaissance typically have their theories intertwined which such entities. Ancient myths are filled with blood sucking, flesh eating monstrosities that generally play some important functional role, if only to scare little kiddies into belief. Creatures and entities are often clearly invoked to explain phenomenon.

What of metaphor? These supernatural creatures that inspire fear should surely be left out of the atheistic, naturalistic vocabulary. Folk tales are generally considered useless, fiction as irrelevant to fact. But culture can often give us an insight into important human problems. The modern Vampire is one of those insights.

Our modern vampire is largely influenced by Bram Stoker’s Dracula: the fangs, the blood, and most importantly, the immortality. Feeding from the blood of humans (particularly, children, women and the innocent) in a delirious quest for ever-lasting life – once this impulse to escape death is embraced, one is truly a vampire.

I was introduced to the novel Dracula when I was in 5th grade. I still vividly remember how exciting the book was to read back then. The literary style was different to anything I had read before, and the struggle between the protagonists and the antagonist Count Dracula seemed epic in proportion to the shit that primary school kids are given.

Most vampires don’t suck blood. Modern vampires prey on people’s gullibility, sucking their money, their emotional welfare and their ability to cope with the modern world. A vampire, upon sucking the blood from their victims, will often give a little of their own blood to the victim, a little taste of immortality, and convert them, feeding on their desires for power and everlasting life. An emotion-vampire will break down their victim so as they feel they cannot live without their master, giving them tiny rewards and reinforcing the desires that keep them as slaves.

What better metaphor for religious communities? Priests and Rabbis, shaman and sages: charismatic leaders, promising their followers eternal life, sucking their emotional stability and bank accounts dry, keeping them in their place until death comes home to open arms. Opiate of the people, as Marx once said.

I want to run through this metaphor a bit more thoroughly than I usually do, because the vampire theme in popular culture is kinda enormous. The ways in which religious themes dominate vampire stories is pretty damn complex… hopefully giving it a few posts will make the relationship a bit more coherent in my mind.

By the way, how funky and cool is my new blog theme? w00t!

 Unfortunately, and rather obscurely, this movie has no men on fire (I don’t recall any, but I was rather drunk when we watched this). But like any movie in the action genre you have hyper-masculine, masochistic, wounded protagonists spinning off cheesy one-liners as they kill everyone and everything in their way – in an often convoluted manner.

Even more unfortunately, the plot for this movie was stolen directly from Rambo II. John Creasy, ex-CIA (Rambo, ex-army), depressed at the failings of his previous occupation, takes a new job in hope of redemption, fails new job, goes on redemptive killing spree. But whereas Rambo was inspired by post-Vietnam America, Man on Fire is inspired by Bush-administration family values.

With this in mind, one shouldn’t be surprised at all the random cross-and-crucifixion shots dished out. The problem is that appealing to family values and Jesus is more difficult when you’re trying to make a gory, sadistic action film.

Firstly, the ‘bad guys’ are in an organised religion. Institutionalised enemies are good bad-guys, because even if their motivation is the same as the good-guys, their deeds can be rationalised within a hierarchy. The bad guys are pointed out always saying “we’re professionals – we’re just doing our jobs”, implying some Nazi–bureaucracy where no single person thinks that they are to be held responsible. In this film, it is the individual that is responsible – for his own salvation, for the family (that he represents) and for justice itself. Welcome, protestant audience.

There are obvious verbal pushes to indicate how personal justice (ie. Vengeance) is more efficient than organised justice. The police point out that Creary is doing more to remove corruption in the force than they could hope to achieve in years of organised work.

The problem, as it normally is in these types of movies, is where does the justification for this overkill arise? This is especially problematic when there is also a Christian theme. The injustice of the seedy Mexican underworld is made out to be the construction of a chain of corruption: man-made evil. The free-will defence is being applied here. There is no injustice in the natural scheme of things, but the actions of free men imposed it regardless. So technically, it’s up to men to fix it, right?

Here is the scary crux of the free-will argument. The divine punisher, the imposer of God’s will, is no longer God. Men must take up God’s will, whatever religious creed they have been indoctrinated into. The bible says to forgive, and only God can pass judgement. So says an old man to Creary. But, Creary says, they have an appointment up there – and he’s just pushing them to the front of the line.

And this line of reasoning is what made this movie so fucking scary to me. The way that these action films are meant to work is that we, the audience, are supposed to empathise with the protagonist and his struggle, and cheer his overkill, revel in his Dionysian bloodlust. But this is the deus-ex-machina of religious fanaticism. This is the hundreds of martyrs and saints killing the heathens in hope of apocalypse.

This is a reminder of the dangers of religious justification and its implication to everyone in a free society.

Jesus ain’t no friend of mine
Just one look into my baby’s eyes, tells me
That he don’t listen to her prayers
No, he don’t fuckin’ care about her
She cries herself to sleep every night
Clutching his merchandise

Can I get an Amen?

So cry me a river, baby… cry me an ocean.

“For a start, the earth is four and a half billion years old, for gods sake. That unsavoury taste is the palpable palette of your faith-fucked goals.” And so opens the most reasoned atheistic punk and/or rock album I’ve ever heard.

Lungs are an east-coast Australian band headed by ex-Staying at Home guitarist Adam Lees, and musically I find the fast-paced under-40-minute album An Anatomical Guide to be plain orgasmic. Maybe I find the bass a bit boring, but I am a bassist, and as long as it is following Lees’ guitaring then it is going to be good enough for me. Lees, the author of the rationalistic prose contained in the songs, is rather evidently a fan Dawkins and even includes images from The Blind Watchmaker in the album artwork.

Opening track Tens of Thousands doesn’t show any mercy to faith-based religion:

“You can euphemise these insane holy wars to ethnic cleansings of terrorisings, but there’s such an obvious obtrusion behind it all. You’re all just as bad as each other. You’re just as stupid. Promptly decloud your heads and put them together instead”

And the closing track Alone in a Godless Universe makes it even more explicable, paraphrasing Douglas Adams:

“Consciousness beholds the garden in its various beauty. It’s natural. But isn’t it enough without having to believe in fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Backing up popular culture with reason:

“Complexity could never be explained by merely postulating further complexity. An infinite regress.”

Lastly deserving a mention, from their previous EP, off the song Huxley (which I can’t help assume is about T.H. Huxley, agnostic and famously labelled ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his loyal support of Darwinism):

“It’s true that to know is delusional… but not knowing is driving me crazy”

Huxley’s agnosticism was the result of his scientific world view, in which he proposed that beliefs should only be formed on the basis of evidence. Asserting that one could know in such cases that there is no evidence is dogmatism and clearly incorrect. Problem is, most of our everyday beliefs, including much of our social interactions, are based on assumptions that we can’t live without; ie, the notion of another consciousness, or the notion of an outside world. Sceptical arguments from classical empiricists like Locke and Hume seem to be impossible to decisively refute, and yet impossible to rationally accept. This is basis of Camus’ absurdism; that we know things like the outside world (through living in it) and yet can never know such things (through the necessary, if ever-so-small, possibility of intellectual errors). Sure, Camus might have exaggerated how much indeterminate evidence can suck, but he had the right idea. Karl Popper can also be classed an agnostic in this case; falsification only eliminates whatever is incorrect within controlled premises and a controlled environment, but can never give us positive knowledge.

Anyone interested in pop punk that is technical, intelligent, melodic, critical and poetic should check these guys out.

Um… pizza is cool too

The new movie I am Legend cries the catch phrase “The last man on Earth is not alone”. Matheson’s book on which the movie is based has Vampires and a rather pessimistic twist at the end, offering us interesting thoughts about xenophobia. The point to the new interpretation is much simpler. Will Smith’s character will be fine in a zombie-filled world because god is with him.

All the ridiculous suffering in that occurs in this movie is reduced to human ignorance. In trying to cure cancer, scientists unwittingly introduce an airborne virus that turns its hosts into zombies. It is this “playing god” (in inverted commas for many reasons) that leads to the destruction of the majority of the people in the world. Blatant cross-bearing and prayer seems tame after Will Smith’s character is given a Jesus-like sacrifice for the good mankind deal and the small human settlement that survives has a few buildings and a big fuck-off church.

Not only is the flimsy at best free will defence employed, but the movie fucks up its theology in trying to make a zombie film into a jesus story. For starters, it should be pointed out that it’s not a fucking sacrifice if the one who is being sacrificed tried to commit suicide a few hours beforehand and has no reason to live.

Most importantly for the bad theology, these types of “playing god” ideas are implicitly new-age environmentalist at heart. The logic runs something like this: god is good, what god made is good, if we interfere there is the possibility of making it bad. Maybe this is how environmental extremists sometimes value the natural world over humanity itself, relegating us to being simple groundsman here to serve the world’s bidding in some impossible communication with a pantheistic being. But in Genesis, Adam is given dominion over the world. The Christian analogy fails here too.

What’s worse is that the “playing god” scenario isn’t even a Christian idea - it was stolen from the Greeks and their silly ideas about fate. Oedipus tries to change the natural order of things, and being a mortal, eventually fails.

The idea of the wrongness of interfering is an impossible one, even if a god sat up in heaven stroking his beard in our general direction. Geneticists often get accused of “playing god” in manipulating DNA. But when it comes down to it, how could one not interfere? We have been genetically modifying animals for centuries, choosing which stock to keep, valuing those that are most ‘domesticated’. An analogy can be made with the larger picture: how could we tend to the world, living in it and manipulating it (even by sitting still), without interfering with it? Ways of knowing what’s best for the world involve living in the world and current religious zealousness conceives of us as mere visitors that should leave the place as we found it when we leave. Just as circumstance is going to affect genetics, every one of our actions will be interfering with the world and “playing god” because we’re part of it.

The movie closes on a shut-in compound, enclosed from the world and centering on the church. Now I think about it, it does seem fitting. Otherworldliness thinks itself to be clean and free from the dirt of our animal, worldly and finite behaviour. Truth is that no man is ever an island and anyone thinking themselves outside of the world is simply deluding themselves.

The most popular of the latest batch of competitive, degrading ‘reality’ television programs privileged enough to be gracing the exclusive and sought after halls of the Australian free-to-air channels is a show called Kid Nation. A bunch of American kids are chucked together with the intent of building and maintaining a model town. Luckily for anyone concerned about the ethics of all this, we could be assured that the network would have written permission from the parents to ridicule their kids as much as they wish. The only reason I put myself through the experience of watching this was to get some new material for a blog post (apart from the fact that I’m bored shitless in a country town). The ads told me there was a religious conflict so I was drawn in to see how they all inevitably decided that god was awesome. Oh, and also I’m bored shitless in a country town. Fucking holidays.

I don’t think that anyone seriously believes that ‘reality television’ depicts actual everyday life, but in case my often horribly misplaced faith in humanity fails me I should make a few generalizations about the genre. Shows like Big Brother and Survivor work through their narratives each season by presenting an end goal and a means for achieving it, such as individuals competing and conspiring against each other, gradually eliminating the others. Each episode is a fragment of the main narrative with brief conflicts inserted to be resolved before the next; kinda like a purposeful soap-opera. To make the story-telling ends meet contestants are reduced to fit fictional characters of the main narrative. In Kid Nation the competitive aspect is largely overlooked for the teleological end-goal, which is the completion of their town ‘Bonanza’. Still, the miniature conflict-towards-a-purpose model fits as the kids perform their given tasks with the notion of hopefully choosing what is best for the town.

The problem is supposed to arise when the kids are literally told to organize their religions. While it seems that about a third of the kids have no real strong religious conviction/indoctrination, the kid leaders try to organize a group ritual where everyone can pray and worship and learn about the other’s religions. While there doesn’t seem to be too much protest at first, somehow the idea gets to the kids heads that there should be conflict here and blonde fundamentalist declares that her faith is so strong that she wishes to remain ignorant of ‘them’. At the dinner table the ‘Jew Crew’ is formed, while the Christians declare that they are awesomer and much betterer. We are told a couple of times that putting together people of different religious persuasions is what starts wars - “even with guns”. Yep, it is surely the case that few of these kids have any idea of what is going on, let alone why there is supposed to be a conflict other than “Ma an’ Pa raised me this here way”.

The exception is little gap-toothed Asian kid, who compares the disagreements to the Tower of Babel problem, with kids talking around each other, making no progress, unaware of why they’re arguing. He does a census of the religious population of the town and the diversity makes it obvious that the script writers chose the contestants with this problem in mind for the meta-narrative.

Eventually one girl organizes a bunch of people to makes prayers around a fire (mind you, she eventually wins $20,000 for this kindness by the end of the episode). And after succeeding in their competitive church-building activity they get to choose between a bunch of bibles or a fucking MINIGOLF COURSE (I want one). Despite the kids being clearly torn between the two, they are eventually convinced that the minigolf is only a temporary gratification (much like the show itself) whereas the holy books are forever, like diamonds or some shit, there to be looked at and to be put on display to show how much better they are than others. “This is a chance to grow spiritually”, one boy states matter-of-factly, as if patience and virtue have nothing to do with golf. Upon reading the ‘Holy’ texts (out-loud to the cameras for some reason) the selected sample of kids conclude that “It’s all saying the same thing”. Tall black Christian kid cries at the fire-prayer service, touched by how prayers to gods sound the same in other religions. It isn’t just theism they talk up either. ANY religious teaching is claimed to be valid, as long as we all get along.

While the ‘many paths up the mountain’ idea may be good for stamping out fundamentalism and sure makes me laugh when it turns into vague crystal-worshiping spiritualism, the problem is that they have blatantly ignored all the kids who are indifferent in their beliefs or are merely unreligious. There is no voice in this conversation for dissent from religion. The show acts as if these people are just too different to be considered: their ideas are incommensurable with the ideal community. To drive the point home, the theistic religions (plus Hinduism) are looked at in the mock-census, while Atheists are grouped with ‘Other’, tacked on the end like a footnote not relevant to the discussion at-hand. One girl claims that she is having a “crisis” where she is not sure if she believes in god anymore, like being irreligious is something detrimental that needs curing. I can almost hear the voice of Bush Snr echoed in these kids.

If I was a betting man (which I’m not) I would say that the producers of Kid Nation did not realize what they did. They solved their episode conflict in the same manner that religious conflict is generally pushed under the carpet: by completely ignoring the Other (which in this case is unbelief) and by selling minor difference as novelty not to be taken seriously. Rest assured that there is no conflict when pushing ideology.

    It has probably come to everyone’s attention that December has arrived and Christmas, whatever that means to us, is around the corner. Although I hear that Americans atheists have to suffer the torments of a hegemonic Christian reading, down here in Australia a rather secular tone is wafting out streets. Still, everyone in the West, regardless of nation, must put up with the horrible TV schedule dished out to us. Dodgy re-runs and cherished “Christmas Classics” permeate our poor television sets and for someone who in normal, non-holiday circumstances has the privilege of downloading whatever they want to watch it can be quite a traumatic experience.

With the largely secular atmosphere down here there is not too much for an atheist to say. Theism is sometimes tacked onto the end of a news broadcast, but most of the attention goes north to visit Santa. All those Christmas-Santa-ish movies are being screened at the moment. Last night it was The Santa Clause. Tonight it is Elf or something. They all follow the same plot: disenchanted parent (most likely a business autocrat of some type) realizes that the world can be an exciting, enchanted place due to some magical happening and despite being regarded as delusional by those around them continue in their sugary existence. THE END. The (more often than not) bitter skeptical characters such as the step-father in The Santa Clause are shown to be the irrational ones, having committed to their mechanistic beginnings at an early age (the step-father stopped believing in Santa after being disappointed at age three). They invested so much of their personality in being heartless that they cannot accept any enchantment when it is presented to them.

Sure, if an elf from the North Pole started talking to me I would not be in a position to doubt its existence. But if no one else could see it I would most likely check myself in to some sort of Institution and stop drinking so much. And so skepticism is treated in these films as being one of the more disgusting traits of humanity. Oh, us bitter, joy-killing, godless heathens!

But if you really want to milk the stereotypical Mr. Gruff, you will find that it is not the religious zealots who are benefiting from the caricature. Kmart started stocking tinsel about a month ago (I know this because I have a tinsel fetish). The famous Myer ‘Christmas Window’ in Melbourne opened a few weeks ago too. Shopping centers are the source of enchantment for everyone at this time of year, including the religious. If anyone hears of a religious family not buying each other presents they will be accused of being cold and bitter; disenchanted from the spirit of giving at Christmas. The joyful Christmas displays generally exist solely around the sites of consumerism that we worship to a larger extent around this time of year, with ‘Meet Santa’ booths opening everywhere. The festivity is here to intoxicate us, with those 50% of my street competing to see who can muster up the most extravagant lights display on their front lawns.

The problem is that this is such a religious event - it seems scarily all-encompassing. If I do not buy a gift for my girlfriend I will most likely be dumped and if I neglect my family members I will be shafted as the greedy and selfish black sheep. I enjoy the fact that this time of year makes everyone happy, but I never asked for gifts! I don’t want gifts, for fucks sake, I’m a philosophy major who has his bass and his computer and is content!

But anyway; while it is hard for the disenchanted to get out of participating, we should at least try to keep a cynical, condescending eye open to mock the spirituality of the other, right? And now I need my morning coffee.

It is a little known fact that there exists a potholed relationship between dogs and ambulances. Dogs, as we all know, chase ambulances. Popular theory states that this is due to the fact that most dogs will chase any large moving object with flashing lights and loud noises. But in reality (and ambulance drivers know this), most dogs are injured and in need of urgent medical attention. Perhaps they were abused by their previous owners, or perhaps they were all just born that way; it does not really matter. Nor does it matter to the ambulance drivers, who seldom stop to check if the dog is okay. Unconsciously or not, ambulance drivers are in the habit of slowing down to let the dog chase them for a brief period longer.

This could be for many reasons, but I will only list a few. Some ambulance drivers selfishly like dogs and the vision of a dog chasing them, if only momentarily, will pull them out of the everyday despair they find themselves in. Or, perhaps, their current problem in the back is not urgent and they can spend the occasion tormenting some small creature. Some may even feel the need to stop and help the dog (although these cases are far and few between). The point I wish to make though is that the driver will inevitably find their own problems more pressing than those of the dog and drive off, leaving the dog stranded by the side of the road.

It may be fair enough that the life of a human is more important than that of a dog, but let us all pause a moment and give a second of silent sympathy to these suffering canines. Imagine the hope that must be running through their little doggy heads. Ah, they would say to themselves - I am finally saved from my agony! But as quickly as this implausible thought might enter their heads their hope is thoroughly and efficiently broken as the ambulance speeds up and drives off.

This is, in all probability, why I am not a dog.

     During my earlier school years, my publicly owned school decided that we should get some Religious Instruction classes for those parents who didn’t throw up at the notion. My parents, being more indifferent to religion than to the non-existent hairs on my pre-pubescent back, didn’t see why this was such a bad idea. So those crazy missionaries came and penetrated our school and undoubtedly countless minds in a ideological rape that we’ve all grown to despise in our godless lives. (Only the Christian story too, of course.)

It was quite an exciting story mind you; this god who now sits up in heaven and talks to us all after he decided to kill himself who wasn’t really him or something something… my parents got to hear me ramble about it for about a day before Good Grief, Charlie Brown stole my attention and the Great Pumpkin began his conversations.

Obviously I left this near-accident relatively unscathed. But one memory of this god-time really stands out in my mind as engagingly symbolic (or prophetic) : sitting on the toilet, reflecting on the story that was told to me earlier, I wondered why I could never hear god talking to me. Ah! The magnificent parent (read: father-figure) of the universe! At that point, I began to wonder who god’s parents were and when his birthday was. In fact, after pushing out that giant shit that kept me occupied in there for some time, I began to worry if anyone else had even bothered to check when god’s birthday was. How offended he must have been!

In show of good spirit I hummed ‘happy birthday’ to god in my head while I wiped my asshole clean. And that was all.

I grew up listening to cynical pop punk and shit like that, so I was a big Blink 182 fan-boy. But some of their lyrics used to annoy me with their religious connotations - only occasionally, but enough to stop me getting my lip pierced and hair dyed in worship. Going back over some older music the other day and I’ve learned why I was always slightly concerned, and I’m kinda surprised as to how I didn’t notice it when I was a big’ol rebellious 15 year old… former Blink182 guitarist, Tom DeLonge, is completely insane.

For starters, it seems he believes in the existence of aliens and their coinciding government conspiracy theories. The song ‘Aliens Exist’ is probably where I should have noticed this. He also seems to think that the whole ‘anarchy’ thing is cool and awesome while at the same time criticizing the ‘government’ and ‘corporate leaders’ for corrupting them into it. And in his recent band, he seems to have adopted a 9/11 conspiracy. Wow.

Surprisingly enough, he’s a Christian. Imagine my shock when I found out one of my favourite songs off the Take of Your Pants and Jacket album is just a plea to Jesus. His solo album had a song titled ‘Letters to God’.

Luckily, former Blink 182 bassist Mark Hoppus has saved me from condemning the entirety of my teenage years. His new band, (+44), has convincingly shown that there had to be some reason why I liked most Blink 182 songs. Take the lines from the opening song, ‘Lycanthrope’:

And we’ll be beaten down without mercy or meaning
I turn my face to a careless skyline
I’m searching hard for a sign from heaven
But they’ve forgotten me here

And even more when we get to the third song, ‘When Your Heart Stops Beating’:

I’ll be there when your last breath’s taken away
In the dark when there’s no one listening

Ah! The refreshing sound of real world activity, no transcendental bitching or hoping! It’s getting easier to die every day and at least some pop-culture realizes it. Perhaps there is some alchemical purpose or Aristotelean telos floating around this world; but with the plurality of contradictory answers given throughout history, it is quite silly to assume that anyone could find it. How should we begin extracting purpose from a tree? Perhaps the new age movement can answer us. Perhaps if we squeeze a cross hard enough we can extract some. Where have we come since Aristotle but to the realization that (contra Newton) there are only discernible material causes, mechanical causes and indeterminate probability? Newton the alchemist was as mad as the metaphysicians that he was otherwise criticizing for spinning a web out of their own substance with a priorisms and pure reason.

Another point to be made in the song ‘Little Death’:

Please sleep, my darling, sleep
Your cry for inspiration
Never reaches ears on distant stars
And every night our lonely planet
Slides across the universe
And I won’t pretend I understand

Please sleep, my darling, sleep
Your death by information
Won’t disturb the peace on distant stars
And even when you lock the doors
And slide behind the unlit shades
None of us are strangers anymore

Fall asleep with the windows open
Come to me with the worst you’ve said and done
You’ll close your eyes and see me
A little death makes life more meaningful
I stand no chance at all

David Hume would certainly agree. Our lives are only meaningful in that they are finite; otherwise every one of our actions that we make in this life is meaningless in-itself, just waiting around on the front porch to be let in the house. Pretending that large scale natural disasters, our inevitable deaths and the overall futility of civilization is all part of some loving and meaningful design is delusional and relegates any responsibility from ourselves. The fact that I’m not going to be here in a few decades just can’t stop my present meal from being tasty, and the fact that breakfast doesn’t last the day won’t stop me preparing for and planning my dinner. Lucretius said ‘Where death is I am not’, although I can’t remember where.

So congratulations to Mark Hoppus after such an embarrassingly idiotic partnership. To spend over a decade with someone like Tom DeLonge and still come out of it writing clever pop-punk songs is just astounding.

Oh, and this is the first post that I’ve written this year where I haven’t been drunk.

/end monthly rant