I am sure that I don't know everything and though I may not always know what is right, I occasionally find myself feeling like I'm certain that I know something isn't.

Today's focus lies on:
1.) the difference between being an exemplary example and the dangers of being noticed;
2.) the idea that diversity can be taught from a standpoint of authoritarianism;
3.) questioning whether or not authoritarianism can allow for freedom of expression

two and three deal specifically with a class I'm taking to fulfill my diversity requirement @ university. The teacher stated that the classroom as "not a democracy" in the first twenty minutes of a two hour course. This was said in regards to whether or not recording class was permissible, and as a response to my statement that in the state of Wisconsin, only one person has to know that a recorder is on - and it doesn't have to be the person being recorded. In the end, her answer was ambiguous.

Her reasoning had to do with statements being taken out of context, put on youtube, and also to promote "freedom" to speak and do as any given individual requires. Meanwhile, I don't see what's wrong with having all of that recorded for posterity. How often does foolishness result negative attention, how often should it? Seems like a natural repercussion of this modern age of the all encompassing microscope vision of a globally connected humanity.

Context. She gave a story about an educator who emulated the dancing of Kanye West by grabbing his crotch, waving his hands and singing out, "hey, ho" repeatedly. Her allusions to his fate were as ambiguous as her ruling on recording class. The context of the story was that the educator was a male, who had/has a propensity for making fat jokes and possibly black jokes. Apparently his picture was taken mid-dance. Apparently his actions were deemed offensive enough for some sort of action against him. The story was super vague, and the context was just as limited.

The implication was that he was a white racist? I don't want to spend a semester discussing whiteness and blackness, because the concepts are meaningless to me. I see people, and their merit isn't judged on anything but exactly that - their merit. The more we focus on race, ethnicity and gender as concepts that form and separate us the longer they will persist. The longer they will separate us from the real "other" the silent minority (10%ers) that dictates life to the acquiescent, majority (85%ers).

I guess I hope that I find myself in the 5% that isn't included - otherwise, I guess I'm just another clueless, closet racist white guy.

"Most white people don't think racism exists," she says. Oh no, it exists, I think to myself while sitting on my hands and biting my tongue, and maybe classes like this help the tragically left behind racists of a bygone era's mindset, but they don't do anything but further a thought pattern of western bias as universal truth and keep perpetuating the ingloriously aging idea that people are to be told what to think.

Isn't diversity something that has to be experienced? Step outside of the familiar and explore the unknown - that's where the ideas that lead to progress can be found, that's where the future is hiding from the present. History is important, respect is also important, but by golly do I despise working withing the constraints of a context where social conjecture is preached as a fact-set.

Like a Saint of Sinners

Honestly, I wonder if time is moving faster these days...

My parents used to fight about what my mom perceived as my dad's ever changing personality. Sometimes I wonder if I didn't get some of that, though fortunately I'd like to believe that I also have plenty of my mom's immutable-ness underneath. Sometimes I feel like a shape-shifter.

My mom likes to talk in conceptual summaries and fantasy metaphors, my dad loves the end times/conspiracy theory rhetoric. Sprinkle in a whole lot of fundamentalism with an equal percent of Star Wars mysticism, a pinch of an absolute religious rebellion and you've got the context for my vocabulary.

If my mom's a woman sized pixie, and her husband was a wizard; my dad is a bard; this makes me the man-child of a bard and a pixie, guided by a wizard after my father the bard succumbed to the succubus' embrace; self aware and noble, he has some rather altruistic ulterior motives of his own, but cut off from me nevertheless.

My steady diet of star wars and pentecostalism really fed into my already vivid imagination. When some teenagers sneak out to have drink and fornicate, I would sneak out to play RPGs with my geeky friends. I did anachronistic reenactments, I fenced in a round. I felt free and happy, "wasting" my time. I still don't see it as a waste, but it seems so wasteful.

I should have been studying, excelling in something - some math or some science - but I still can't see it that way. I don't see a point to it, even now as I dig myself into debt to go to school, I'm loving it, but I don't know what to do next! I still don't know what to do when I grow up.

After realizing that I needed to spend the effort I spent playing video games on real life things got pretty real for me but I've still got the same hangups. I don't want to be a part of a system that hurts people, let alone the planet we all share. I do want to teach children how to read, somewhere at some point, but I wonder if I'm innocent enough to do that without imprinting my own opinions on them; optimally it would just be a desire to learn, think and desire/quest for truth.

My desire to think flows naturally into realms of spirituality, religiosity, metaphysics and mysticism - basically BS. LOL, guess it's time to start writing fiction again. Maybe that'll keep me from thinking too much of my own opinions.

Basically, over the past month I've lost my concept of what I thought truth was. It became that much more elusive to me again. I turned the entire christian upbringing I had upsidedown over the course of my late teens and entire twenties. I made it all make no sense at all. Jesus wasn't the son of God who saved my immortal soul, he was a dude who preached awesomeness, and may or may not have been an egyptian wizard, trained in techniques we'd mostly call chemistry; science meets functional superstition.

Somehow, that was more believable to me. Later, he became completely human, just a legend written a hundred years after he died by people who either said they knew him, or said they knew people who knew him, and they all either knew what he said or what he meant by what he said and did while he was around. The Qur'an seems to be a little unclear, but seems to allude to either not dieing, or not being crucified (or just not being dead after due process?)

Killed, rose again - meh, maybe, maybe not. I don't really even know anymore. It saddens me in a way, the world is just that real to me know. So much of the 'real' things that happen in 'real' life just lead me to not believe in what was fed to me as miraculous and true. People don't rise from the dead every day, and people aren't the son of God. He's got a special set of rules.

If it happened today, would science be able to explain it?

If it had a scientific explanation would it be any less miraculous?

and bam, I can't not believe in it again and again, because you know, if you don't believe that Jesus Christ died for your since, you don't go to heaven. It's just that simple to the people who believe it but it's not that simple to me, because the world I live in is different - the same but different.

I don't even know what to make of it, Rome had science and philosophy, economy, religion, they had their modern givens. Islamic societies of the middle ages had the same, greece, egypt, renaissance europe... right and wrong - but in the face of Biblical Truth, absolutely meaningless. Everything mankind has ever done is absolutely meaningless in the face of religious truth - because the next world is where it all counts, where it all matters... but it stems in what we do in this life.

Gotta believe in God - or Jesus - or Jesus as God - but not as a metaphor... never as an obtuse concept, always out of reach. Gotta have strong faith, or you might as well have none. Islam, Christianity and Judaism can tear each other's throats out over the same basic idea because they've all got a slightly different details (added/altered/invented/corrupted)in a text given to them by the same big(gest) GOD.

Always literal, always infallible - but not always that way! These books are not considered infallible by groups within each religion, though certainly not the orthodox opinion, as it pretty much takes faith in the document to have faith in what it says. Its easy to have faith in one divine author than it is to have faith in the unified voice of three dozen men, as translated by thousands of scribes. Or passed down in oral tradition by a hundred men for a couple hundred years.

'Course this is the kind of talk that gets you imprisoned in the middle east, and makes your anties fear for your immortal soul all around the globe.

See, when things get this belligerent I switch into fantasy mode, and it gets easier to think of myself as a shapeshifter in a world gone mad, and not just a child of the west who refuses his context to find people the same regardless - but then I think about judgement day again, and I think that I better get fundamental on something I believe, but then I get confused as to which one is the right one.

I just pray that my actions on my knees, the contemplations from the repentance, the thankfulness, the desire to make something better by my presence will be enough to save my ass if it becomes necessary. Because other than that, what sends you to one heaven, takes you straight to another hell.

Scholarship outside of data collection is opinionship - it's not without merit, but it's not necessarily, and probably not, truth.