Archive for October, 2009

Protect Marriage in Maine

By allowing gays and lesbians to marry just like we allow any two other consenting adults to marry. Marriage, as defined in the law, is a secular institution and contract between two people who wish to share their lives with each other, and provides a slew of legal benefits you simply can’t easily get any other way. Some, such as tax benefits, can’t be received in any other manner. So, if we deny gays and lesbians the right to marry, we deny them the right to a beneficial contract that can enhance their lives in a way no other substitute contract can.

Most opponents of gay marriage laws present their case as protecting their religious freedom and religious institution of marriage. I have some bad news for these people. The government can not and does not regulate the religious institution of marriage, only the secular contract. Gays and lesbians already get married religiously, and there are plenty of religions perfectly happy to perform the ceremony for them. Besides which, while you have the freedom to practice your religion as you see fit (so long as you bring no harm to another), other people have this same religious freedom, including the freedom to allow gays to marry in their services. Furthermore, Maine’s gay marriage law doesn’t force churches to perform marriage ceremonies that go against their religious beliefs. A gay couple will instead simply find a church who supports their marriage, or they’ll be married by a justice of the peace.  No infringement of religious freedom is required to provide equal rights to gay couples.

So, to those who would deny the right to marry to gay couples, stop pretending you’re protecting marriage. You aren’t, you’re simply trying to enforce your view of religion on everyone else and deny a group their civil rights. Frankly, I’m tired of hearing this argument that the religious institution of marriage will fail if gays are allowed to marry, and I’m tired of hearing you treat religious marriage and secular marriage as the same thing, because they aren’t. They’re just currently tied a little too closely together in the law.

Stop trying to deny gay and lesbian couples their civil rights. Don’t force your religious beliefs onto others. Instead, learn to live peacefully with your neighbors, and accept them for who they are. We’ll all be better off if we can manage this. So vote no on question 1, and show the state of Maine and the United States that we support marriage, equality, and civil rights by allowing gays to marry.

Note: For reference, this is question 1 in Maine on November 3rd: “Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?”


Check out some videos on gay marriage in Maine:

Rachel Maddow
A cool WoW machinima piece on gay marriage in Maine
People’s reactions to letting gays and lesbians marry

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Thoughts on God, Faith, and Free Will

Ah yes, musings about the nature of God. This is the kind of thing that gets sticky sometimes, so I just want to say right here, I don’t profess to know the true nature or mind of God. Everything I write in this piece is speculation, both my own and others at points where I agree with them or think they may be on to something. I’m writing this because it’s fun to speculate about what we don’t know, and also because I hope it might help some people on their own path. Obviously, I think there’s some truth to what I’m saying, or I wouldn’t write it, but I know that I could be wrong. Now, with that out of the way, let’s begin.

It’s quite often that I hear people who have fallen on hard times begin to blame God, or perhaps lose faith in God since a loving God would never let this happen to them. Sometimes, I don’t feel like they fully think through why it might not be God’s fault in the first place. Of course, I can’t say I blame them either, since it tends to be people who’ve fallen on hard times in some fashion. By nature, they’re simply going to be more fixated on their current problem or problems than a bigger picture. However, I think that blaming God or losing faith in God due to falling on hard times isn’t the appropriate response either. This is, of course, deeply personal though, so this shouldn’t be construed as saying it’s wrong to change your beliefs, nor is it intended to say it’s wrong not to believe for any reason. Nor is it intended to claim that belief is the proper path. Rather, it’s intended to convey my reasons for continuing belief, through good times and bad, and to possibly provide another perspective to those who may be considering abandoning their faith or those who have already done so due to hardship. In the end, the choice is still theirs.

My first point is that God promised humanity free will. This means that all people have agency to make their own choices, and God will not interfere with that agency, even though he has the power to do so. This means, should a person wish to inflict harm on another, the person has agency to do so, and the victim has agency to respond in a way they believe appropriate. In a more general sense, God is not responsible for anything that happens to you due to the actions of another human. If your girlfriend breaks up with you, someone robs you of all your money, or frames you for a crime, God didn’t do it, the person who made the decision did it. Now, obviously, I’m not trying to say you wouldn’t feel pain of some kind over one or all of those losses, I’m just saying it doesn’t make a lot of sense to deflect blame to God on this point. Unless you believe in predestination, but I don’t know many religious or spiritual people these days who do believe that. For those who do, very little of this post will likely apply.

Now, I’m sure there are some who are wondering how natural occurrences and coincidences factor in. When natural disasters hit, a tree branch falls and wrecks your car, and so on. Assuming no human tampering (that would fall under free will) , there are a couple ways to look at this while acknowledging the existence of a loving God. The first would be to consider that perhaps God simply doesn’t alter things, even when the laws of physics would allow him to do so unnoticed. In this scenario, it’s simply a matter of God letting the world work as it does. He did create it to work remarkably well and consistently after all.

Another way to look at this, though, is that God could be providing you with these setbacks as challenges to encourage you to grow. In my family, I was raised to believe that God would never provide me with a challenge I can’t overcome, and that this applies to all people. This is a belief I carry to this day, because so far it has been true (and I’ve had some tough challenges in my life, though not the type I wish to share publicly). Of course, I admit that belief could be what has helped me overcome some of those challenges, but it still seems to be true and is an idea I stand by.

A third option would be the combination of the two, in which challenges arise from your circumstances, and God will make sure you have the strength to deal with them as they come up. This is more specifically how I look at it, because I think it a rare occurrence for God to intercede in the physical world. If it weren’t rare (and subtle) then we’d have likely noticed by now.

So, if you accept my premises, then we have a God who loves us and trusts us enough to let us make our own choices. But he also allows bad things to happen due to those choices, since otherwise he’d be taking the gift of free will away from us. So, was this a foolish thing for an all-powerful, all-knowing being to do? I don’t think so. We’ll grow and learn a lot more from the struggles that we face, and while it may be painful sometimes, we’ll come out better for it in the end.

Of course, if you’re in pain now, that isn’t likely what you want to hear. So, what recourse has God left for those who have fallen on hard times? There are a couple things. First, you can work to better your circumstances. While the work may be difficult, it will get you where you’re going. It’s never fun to deal with the painful experiences we have, but it does make the good ones feel a lot better when we get to them.

The other thing you can do is ask God for help. This doesn’t mean that you’ll magically have the money you need, or an old friend will just decide to drop his grudge with you and be friends again. That would violate the laws of reality and the promise of free will that God has already set up. But, he will help you by giving you or helping you to find the strength you need to face your challenges, and the will you need to get the job done. Perhaps some inspiration to start moving in a good direction. In short, he will provide help in preparing you for getting through whatever challenges have come your way, but they won’t just disappear.

Perhaps this will help some people look at this matter in a different light. That doesn’t mean this will be a satisfying explanation to everyone, but it covers a fair bit of my thoughts on the matter. Recognize that God isn’t responsible for the actions of everyone you come across (unless you count his creating us and giving us free will as making him responsible, but that isn’t really constructive). Instead, recognize the cause of your pain in this world, be it person or event, and do what you can to resolve the issue or move on with your life, whichever you feel is the better path for you. And perhaps ask God for a helping hand in doing so.

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The Conservative Bible Project

Just reading the title, you might think this would make sense given how much some conservatives love Bible quoting. But just in case you needed a reminder that anything the far right does these days seems to make no sense, this is it. Here’s a link to the article I read on Huffington Post that brought my attention to this: The Conservative Bible Project.

The group behind this project feels that the Bible has too much of a liberal bias. So, the liberal passages need to be taken out and replaced with ideas about the free market, mention of government needs to be removed, and old wording needs to be replaced with modern conservative buzzwords. Excuse me? Isn’t the far right conservative movement based on the idea that the Bible should be taken literally? Yet here they are, changing the book they believe is the literal word of God to suit their personal political agenda.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the Bible should be taken literally. However, the group of people changing it, up until this point in time, believed it should be. Furthermore, I guarantee you when they finish their editing project, they’ll insist their version is the word of God, even though it will have obviously been written by people with a political agenda.

Basically, you believe in literalism or you don’t. Make up your minds. If you believe in literalism, you don’t get to edit out the parts that support liberal arguments just because we can quote verse as well as you can. If you don’t believe in literalism, you don’t get to quote the Bible as your only source in making an argument, and really shouldn’t be using it as a basis for policy in the first place. Of course, that shouldn’t be done anyway (remember separation of church and state?), but I’ll ignore that point for this argument.

So, in conclusion, far right conservatives claim the Bible, the foundation of their belief structure, has a liberal bias. Perhaps now that they’ve seen the light, we’ll see them changing their beliefs and joining those of us in the center and on the left looking for health care reform, helping the poor, and ending unjustifiable wars. More realistically, they’ll just decide to edit the book their belief system is supposedly based on until it matches their beliefs word for word. Too bad they’ll miss the irony.

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Everyone Has a Story

No one’s life is boring or a blank slate. Sometimes, our lives seem that way when we look at ourselves, because everything we do seems normal… to ourselves. But, for anyone looking into our lives, not everything we do is normal, and some things are going to stick out to them. These are the things that grab the interest of a lot of people when they look into the lives of others. I guarantee you that you have these habits and events in your life that, even if you find them positively bland, other people will find them fascinating.

Of course, not everyone will agree with which parts are interesting, but that’s not the point. The point is that people will find you interesting. Furthermore, there are some things people just don’t know, and possibly won’t ever know, about all of us. But if it were ever published as a story, people would love it. Learn to recognize this, and you may find your life less bland and more exciting. You may also learn to accept the bad in life as a challenge to overcome instead of something that’s dragging you down, though there are certainly other ways to do that.

Here are some examples from my life:

-I’ve informally studied various forms of magic and the paranormal since the seventh grade. I’m still learning new things about it and related topics over ten years later.

-I had a friend who got herself locked into a pair of real handcuffs, thinking we had the key to them. We didn’t. We needed to get help from a real police officer to get them off.

-I was an outcast when I was younger. I had no social grace and didn’t know how to empathize with others. As I grew up, I slowly learned to do these things. While I’m still a little socially awkward, I have tons of friends now and love getting out and being around others.

-On a related note, I’ve always had a strong sense of wanting to do the right thing. Unfortunately, when I was younger I thought this meant blindly following the rules. As I grew up, I learned that just as often, it means challenging those rules which are unjust or immoral. And actually discovering what is moral and just.

-I went to college to learn more about things that interest me and to push my social boundaries. Finding a job was of secondary importance to me. In hindsight, this may have been a bad idea, but it still led to me growing a lot as a person, and I don’t think I’d take back that decision.

I may elaborate on some of these in the future (if I haven’t in other posts already), and I also may not. To me, this is just normal, but other people I’ve talked to seem to think it’s either cool, or find themselves identifying with me on a particular point because it’s something they’ve found others don’t relate to as well. Some of you may find one or more of those things I mentioned interesting. Others may think they’re positively bland. I’m willing to bet most readers will be interested by at least one point though.

In any case, if you really think life is boring, examine your personality and events in your life and think about the story they all weave together. I bet you’ll find your life isn’t as boring or normal as you think it is.

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