{"id":1069,"date":"2004-12-19T23:30:00","date_gmt":"2004-12-20T05:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1069"},"modified":"2004-12-19T23:30:00","modified_gmt":"2004-12-20T05:30:00","slug":"sharing-from-nytimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1069","title":{"rendered":"sharing from nytimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

When (an old friend of Simon’s, who works for PIRG and is therefore awesome, also my most likely candidate for roommate had I ended up living in chicago) posted a heartwarming christmas story<\/a> from the nytimes opinion page, written by Maureen Dowd, I went browsing around for other items on the same page. I also found one talking about the “year of the passion”, an article discussing the current prominence of fundamentalist christianity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And it reminded me of a couple of things over dinner. One, my recent “antagonism” towards christianity, which led to come out as a christian in his first post, and Two my plans for a transcontinental bikeride. <\/p>\n

I would like to reiterate my religious beliefs and my attitudes towards believers. Which is that we’re all shooting in the dark on some questions: What is the nature of consciousness\/self-awareness? Where did the world come from? What happens when we die? Is there a reality beyond the one that we perceive with our five senses? I further claim that the answers to these questions are unknowable. That is, I don’t doubt there is an answer to it. I strongly suspect that what we see is the only reality, that there is no god, that when we die our minds\/awarenesses\/consciousnesses end. Lights out, game over. And I really have no flippin’ clue where the universe came from. That doesn’t mean that I will accept the first plausible answer as absolute truth. I accept that it is theoretically possible that an omnipotent entity created the world, complete with fossils (carbon dated for extra humor value), oil, etc, and even that such an entity cares deeply about who I have sex with and exactly how I have sex with them. But I consider it functionally infinitesimally unlikely. Your guess is as good as mine no matter how certain you kid yourself into believing you are about it. And so long as you don’t go around proclaiming your superiority or my inferiority, we’ll get along fine. Also, if you insist on talking to me at length about your imaginary friend after I’ve indicated disinterest in the topic, well….<\/p>\n

The other item was my transcontinental bikeride. The reputed conservative resurgence and triumph of intolerance throughout the country scared me. Poor atheist, homo like me gets caught somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, likely to get his head blown off by some bible-thumping fanatic trying to protect the community from my taint. It’d only take one, and I’d be spending alot of my planned three-months out in the middle of nowhere. Add that on to the risk of being run over by a semi or a soccer mom (or her partying teen kids) and it starts to look pretty daunting. But I could get run over by the semi, soccer mom, or drunkard teens here. And I think it’s important for me to meet people I wouldn’t normally. I don’t think there are as many homo-haters as the newspapers say. I think it’s also pretty important for people who normally would never run into anyone like me to meet me, and to see that I don’t bite. I still want to do the bike ride, and I ain’t gonna let this stop me. Hell, I didn’t freak out flying in late september of ’01, I ain’t gonna freak out over this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When (an old friend of Simon’s, who works for PIRG and is therefore awesome, also my most likely candidate for roommate had I ended up living in chicago) posted a heartwarming christmas story from the nytimes opinion page, written by Maureen Dowd, I went browsing around for other items on the same page. I also … Continue reading “sharing from nytimes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}