2.1 billion doesn’t count for shit

2.1 billion people can’t be wrong!

Honey, I hate to tell you this…. but yes, yes they can. We’re going to call her Sarah, mostly because I’ve never really had a friend whose name was Sarah before, and in fact a good portion of the Sarahs that I’ve met have been complete bitches. So Sarah, obviously not her real name, has made the famous argument that 2.1 billion believers can’t be wrong.

It’s a stupid argument. Nobody argues that Christians are wrong because the 4 billion other people on the world “can’t be wrong”. What if I told her that the 1.3 billion muslims in the world “can’t be wrong”. Or that the 1.1 billion people described as “secular/nonreligious/agnostic/atheist” also “can’t be wrong”. It’s just a really dumb fucking argument to make.

Because the fact of the matter is, any number of people can be wrong. It’s actually not all that hard. How many children are there in the world who believe in Santa Claus? Probably a whole hell of a lot. Do we argue that because there are so many of them, they can’t possible be wrong? No. Because we already know that they are.

There are a lot of stpid reasons to argue that Christianity (or any religion) must be right. But the “2.1 billion other people believe the same stupid crap I do” is one of the worst ones out there.

What’s the boundary? How many people does it take to be incapable of being wrong? A few thousand? A couple million? A few hundred million? Or does it depend on what you’re arguing for? But at the end of the day, whichever arbitrary number you decide… yeah, that number of people can be wrong. They can be brainwashed or gullible or lied to, and they end up believing something that isn’t real, and at the end of the day, you end up with 2.1 billion who can be wrong — and in the grand scheme of thing… 2.1 billion people who are wrong.

Because there is no god, no guy watching out for you, no Jesus that rose from the dead, no sacred text inspired by an all-knowing deity. I’m an atheist, and I’m convinced that I’m right, but it’s not because x amount of people agree with me. I don’t give a crap about how many people agree with me or disagree with me, because it doesn’t matter. There’s no good reason to believe in god, but the billions of other people believe it too is a really shitty excuse to be stupid.

Human Evolution 101

It’s been something of a relief, my Anthropology 101 class. I sit in class and the professor talks about how people evolved, and never once mentions creationism. It’s almost as if, for fifty minutes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday — stupid religious dogma doesn’t exist. It makes it one of my favourite classes, that I can just sit and bask in the science of where people come from, how we became what we are today, and not have to worry that some religious lunatic in southern Florida or wherever-the-fuck is going on about how evolution is a big, fat, evil lie. It makes me happy.

I was reading my Anthropology textbook, the section about evolultion, when I came to a section about creationism. Being familiar with some American textbooks, I immediately groaned. “What the fuck is this doing in here?!” I wanted to know, thinking my happy bubble had been burst. I was expecting it to be some sort of apologist tripe about how creationism might be a viable theory, and we shouldn’t judge.

Instead, I got the following:

In the United States, supporters of what is called creation science claim that it provides a serious scientific alternative to evolutionary interpretations of our origins. No one doubts the religious sincerity of creation scientists, but their explanations are not convincing as science. Evolution is consistent with scientific facts, but creation science is not. Creationism is a faith-based alternative to evolutionary interpretations of human origins, but despite the name of one of its manifestations, it is not science.

I’ve decided to interpret this as their way of saying (politely), “Creationism is FULL OF SHIT.”

And it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy all over.

Superbowl 41

I haven’t written in a while, which isn’t entirely true — I have a few half-written posts that I just haven’t finished and thus haven’t posted yet. First off, the Colts won the Superbowl, not that I actually care that much. I watched, and I did cheer for the Colts, since I lived in Indianapolis for six years, and (technically) I live there now, despite the fact that I go to school in Canada.

There was wine and good food and the game was fun to watch, especially the opening act (Cirque de Soleil)… until, at the end of the game, the head coach opened his mouth, and made me want to puke. He wasn’t proud of his acheivement because he was a black coach, no, but because he was a Christian coach, and he seemed to be operating under the delusion that being a Christian was some kind of a black mark, that it was rare for people to be annoying, proselytizing religious dickwads. I’m sorry, but I was under the illusion that atheists were the minority, not Christians.

And seriously, dude. If God did exist, which he doesn’t, who do you think he’d be more concerned with? The millions of starving children across the globe… or your football game. I’m sorry, stupid question. You’re right, of course. Football is way more important than starving, dying children. How could I have been so dense?

Then there was the repeated statements by the CEO & Owner that they were “world champions.” I guess the world must have stopped including… oh, every country besides the USA, while I wasn’t looking. God, I must have been distracted.

I got a migraine shortly after hearing both of these speeches. Coincidence?

Other than that, it was fun. I did enjoy hockey more last season, but I think hockey is more fun in general. They have sharp things on their feet and slam each other into walls and small black objects flying around at high, and potential very painful, speeds. Plus the Oilers got to Game Seven of the Stanley Cup, and, well… I’m Canadian.

Porn Nation II

The Porn Nation talk was yesterday — I didn’t go. Instead, I went to a strip club. Yeah. You can see how I feel about the whole “porn is bad” thing.

In any case, they covered the campus in even more advertising because yesterday was the Day Of, so they spraypainted PORN NATION on the snow in big orange letters everywhere. I could be wrong, but that probably isn’t very good for the environment. Then again, they probably think The End Times Are Coming. Whatever. Regardless, all the extra crap put my in something in a bad mood, until I left my ANTHR 101 class, and saw one of their signs.

Someone had written “BIGOTS” across it in big letters.

It made me happy inside. But maybe I’m still just irritated about the whole “Well, we can be sure that Jesus wouldn’t have like homosexuals” thing. I’d take a picture, but my camera is on the fritz again. Still. Apparently it only works when I’m at home. Ugh. I’m thinking about buying a Holga.

Related links: Christianity: Boring, Untrue, Irrelevant?, Holga Microsite. See “Christianity: Boring, Untrue, Irrelevant?” for other links related to the Porn Nation campaign.

Beauty hurts.

It is 10:30 PM, and I am sitting my living room. My head hurts. I am wearing jeans, a tanktop, and pumps. Not because I’m going out or have any special plans for the evening, except going to bed in the near future because I feel a migraine coming on, pulsing in my right temple with irritating persistence. In fact, I am working on my New Year’s Resolution.

People usually make resolutions along the lines of “get in shape” and “get better marks this term.” And I am resolving to do those sorts of things as well. I want at least make an effort to exercise, because an effort is more than I’ve put forth so far. I would like to get all As and Bs this term. Some people make one or a few serious resolutions, like those, and then one silly one, such as “don’t smoke while jumping out of airplanes naked”. I, too, have a “fluffy” resolution, but it’s one I actually work at, at least a little.

I will learn to wear heels.

I guess I just want to learn to be a girl. I mean, I am a girl. I have all the right anatomy. But I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy, and that’s me. I’ll always be comfortable in jeans and t-shirt, but damnit, sometimes I want to be pretty. Sometimes I want to wear a skirt or a dress with ridiculously tall shoes and be 5′7″ or 5′8″ instead of 5′5″.

It’s not that I want to change who I am. There’s this sort of cliché where the tomboy becomes the pretty girl, but “sells out” and discovers she shouldn’t have done it, or whatever. People sometimes have this idea that I don’t like being feminine, and yeah, I went through a stage where I really wasn’t crazy about the whole feminine thing — I didn’t like skirts, or the colour pink, because those were girly and girly was bad. It’s like being a nine year old boy. But now, you know, I like pretty things. And sometimes I just want to wear heels, or skirts, or a dress, not because I think it’ll make people like me or because I want to fit in, because at this point, man, I just don’t care… but because I like it. Because it’s pretty and sometimes, you know, a girl just wants to look… pretty.

So I want to learn to wear heels, which have always terrified me. Before this Christmas, I owned one pair of heels which I hadn’t even seen in six months, much less worn (I’d left them at my mother’s house over summer break, and I think I’d worn them maybe twice in the year before that). I now own four pairs: two pairs of black pumps, one pair brown (bought earlier today), and a pair of black, heeled boots. It makes me happy to wear them, even when my feet start to ache and pinch and hurt.

I’d like to wear makeup, some of the time. I don’t even own any right now, but when I get some money, I think I’ll buy some. I won’t wear it all of the time, but sometimes, it would be nice.

I’m not about to turn in my baggy guy’s jeans, snarky t-shirts and comfortable sneakers. I am not going to wear high heels every day or six tons of makeup. But part of me avoiding these things hasn’t been a rebellion against the fashion industry or against how people expect girls to dress — part of it was I didn’t want to grow up, didn’t want to dress the way women do, like a grown-up instead of the fashionless six-year-old (if the shirt has flowers, and the shorts have flowers, they match; they might be completely different flowers and completely different colours,  but they’re both flowers, and it might be incredibly busy, but they match, damnit) or the tomboy sixteen-year-old (pink is girly and it sucks). Another part was that I didn’t think I was pretty enough to pull of being, well… pretty. I didn’t have the self-confidence to wear heels, but now… I think I can pull it off. It might take a little practice, but I can.

I’m nineteen. I’m ready to dress like a grown-up now, and maybe actually get a date one of these days (wouldn’t that be nice?) and wear things because I like them without worrying about if I can “pull it off”. I like doing what people don’t expect. The fact is that I can pull it off, and it isn’t that damn hard. But wearing heels and looking pretty and girly and cute doesn’t change who I am, and I wouldn’t want it to. I can be pretty and still be a tomboy, and wearing a dress isn’t gonna stop me from calling everyone I meet “dude”.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I don’t want to offend anyone, but…

You always do manage, don’t you? Whenever someone starts a sentence with, “I’m not trying to offend anybody” or “I don’t want to offend anyone” or something like that, I know… I just know they’re about to say something that I’m going to want to slap them for. Especially if they’re Christian.

Yesterday morning, I was not having a great day. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak, after having a night of weird-ass dreams, and was not in a really great and bouncy mood, and I considered just staying in bed. I should have. But no, being the good, dedicated student that I am, I lurched out of bed, got dressed, and went to class: The History of Christianity. The class was originally supposed to be taught by somebody else, but now it’s being taught by some kind of a reverend or preacher. He’s alright. I tend to not agree with him, but he tries not to say anything stupid, so you know, A for effort and that sort of thing.

The same, however, cannot be said of most of the rest of the students. At the end of last class, he wanted us to think about what Pope Benedick, I mean… Benedict… said about how Canada had turned its back on God by allowing gay marriage and abortion. His point was that people can interpret the scriptures in different ways, and he wanted to know where in the Bible the Pope had gotten this idea. One guy said from parts of Romans and from the Old Testament. But then this girl puts up her hand, and she says, “I don’t want to offend anyone, but…”

And I just knew. I knew I was about to want to slap her, because she was about to say something incredibly stupid, like the following:

“I don’t want to offend anyone, but Jesus wouldn’t have liked homosexuals.”

Jesus never said a damned thing about gay people, but we can assume he would have had a problem… why, exactly? Look, girl, just because you have a problem with people being queer doesn’t mean Jesus did, and it’s not like you can exactly ask him, now is it? Chances are that 2000 years ago, they didn’t really have a concept of what it meant to be “gay”, and even if they did… so what? Give me one, one good reason I should care what a Jewish construction worker who lived and died 2000 years ago, thought about gay people? And don’t tell me he was the Son of God or whatever bullshit it is that you believe, because there’s two possibilities here:

1. You’re stupid enough to believe that shit and think that homosexuality is evil and bad because of the Old Testament (in other words, stuff some dead Jewish goatherders wrote even longer than 2000 years ago), or
2. You’re using the Bible to justify your own prejudices, because your ideas and ideals are about as antiquated as those of the dead Jewish goatherders.

In either case, I have zero respect for you. Think for your fucking self.

By the way, I totally didn’t mean to offend anyone.

Not.

Spoon Bending

I know a guy who is convinced this guy he knows can bend spoons. I can bend spoons too, and I’m just guessing here that you probably can as well. The difference, of course, is that this guy, the Guy Who Bends Spoons, does it with his mind. Just like Uri Gellar.

Of course, Uri Gellar was a liar and a fraud, but that’s beside the point. This other guy really can do it, I’m sure. I’m positive he would never, ever, ever play a trick on his unsuspecting and apparently rather gullible friends.

First of all, if you had psychic powers, and I mean… real psychic powers, the ability to move things with your mind, telekinesis if you will… wouldn’t you use them for something a little more impressive than bending spoons and doing card tricks?

The fact is that these sorts of things are parlor tricks. Sleight of hand, generally.

Point #1: If he really was bending the spoon with his mind, and not his hands, he wouldn’t need to touch the spoon. Maybe our magician would make the argument that he needs to have some sort of physical contact with the object in order to use his mind powers on it. I don’t buy it, but sure. Then he should be able to bend the spoon with his mind while laying one pinky on it.

Point #2: Just because you can’t figure out how it’s done doesn’t mean it’s magic. I have no idea how David Copperfield did his tricks, but I can be fairly confident that he didn’t actually make the Statue of Liberty vanish, and couldn’t actually fly. Just because I can’t catch the “trick” of the guy bending the spoon, doesn’t mean he’s doing it psychically. As Richard Feynman said,

“the weakest position to be in is to think that you are cleverer than the other guy, and that he can’t fool you. Because a good magician can do something shouldn’t make you right away jump to the conclusion that it’s a real phenomenon; you need a helluva lot more rigidity. And you’ll find out that 99.9 – 100 percent of the time it’s not something strange, it’s not something mysterious, but something ordinary, a trick! But it’s fun to find the trick, and the only way to find the trick is to be damn sure it’s a trick, and not to be ready to think that it might not be, because otherwise you slip too easy.” (You can read the rest of Feynman’s story about meeting Uri Gellar here.)

Point #3: I am pretty certain that ESP is not real. However, the argument I often hear is this one: “We only use 10% of our brain, therefore the brain must have all sorts of other abilities.” Uh, wrong. My stepdad has said, and I think this is a good point, that if you only use 10% of your brain, you should be able to cut out the other 90% and the only difference will be that you are suddenly incapable of ESP or other psychic powers. Who here thinks that’s really the case? I don’t know about you, but I’m not in a big rush to go lobotomize myself. Removing 90% of your brain would kill you, because the fact is — you don’t use 10%, 30%, 50% or even 90% of your brain — you use 100% of it. You need your brain. Saying “We don’t use most of our brain and/or we don’t know what most of the brain does… therefore, it could be capable of ESP” is not a justification for believing ESP. It’s an argument from ignorance, it makes no sense, and it doesn’t prove anything. You might as well say, “I don’t know what moon is made of, therefore it could be made of green cheese.” That’s an extreme example, but you see my point.

I have a strong suspecion that The Guy Who Bends Spoon is having one hell of a laugh at the expense of The Guy Who Believes Him. It’s a conjuror’s trick, it is not real. If you do a search on line, you can in fact learn how to do the trick. I kind of want to learn to do it, so I can demonstrate to The Guy Who Believes that it is what it is: a trick, sleight of hand. Not paranormal.

Related links: Feynman visits Uri Gellar, James Randi exposes Uri Gellar (YouTube Video).

“Dude” and the malleability of speech

“I’m still not a dude,” my mother often reminds me. This is because I find it difficult to speak to her, or anyone else for that matter, without constantly saying it.

“Dude, where’d I put my keys?” “Dude, that show is awesome.” “Dude, I have like 165 pages of reading to do — for tomorrow!” “Dude, have you looked at the syllabus yet?” “Dude, stoppit!” “Dude, chill!” “Dude!” I should try and count how many times a day I say the word “dude”, either while talking to myself or other people. I probably wouldn’t be able to, mostly because I do it unconsciously, no matter how many times my mom says, “I’m still not a dude.” Sorry, mom.

The funny thing is, I never used to say ‘dude’. Ever. It was simply not a part of my speech pattern. When I told a friend that I was thinking of writing a blog entry about my use of the word dude, I remarked, jokingly, “Dude, I say dude all the time.” Her response? “You do.” In fact, it’s kind of hard to miss.

I think it has something to do with me being the sort of person who easily picks up patterns of speech from other people, especially a certain someone I typically see once a week. See, I like television a lot. In fact, I sort of love television, and one of my favourite shows is CW/WB’s Supernatural. I could spend a long time extolling the virtues of my favourite show, but instead I’ll just tell you… they say dude… a lot.

The following is a YouTube video which demonstrates to what extent the word “dude” comes out of the mouths of the two main characters, Sam and Dean Winchester.

Supernatural: Dude!

You see where I picked it up. “Dude” is an obvious example for me because it’s something I never used to say, but which is now a verbal tick. But I do it with other television shows occasionally as well. Sometimes I find myself speaking in improper, colloquial English, and then I know I’ve watched a few too many episodes of Firefly, which contains such eloquent speech as Jayne’s exclamation, “Them ain’t kosherized rules!”

Of course, I don’t just pick up language from television. Spending time around certain people can affect your speech as well. A good example is the slight differences between Canadian and American speech. I have never, and will never say “aboot”. However, Canadians tend to say “mum” instead of “mom”. Like most Canadians, I say it with the U sound. However, my aunt informs me that in Canada we say “grade one, grade two, grade three, etc.” while in the United States, they say “first grade, second grade, third grade, etc.” After living in the U.S. for six years, I say 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade. For a while, my aunt tried to “correct” me, but I obstinantly refused to be corrected — if only to be annoying.

Part of this, I think, is because it is natural for speech to be malleable, to pick up patterns and expressions from the people around us. These gradual and incidental shifts of language seem natural to me. On the other hand, I refuse to modify the trends I’ve picked up simply to sound more Canadian. Language changes naturally as a result of environment and the people around you; you pick up verbal ticks and turns of phrase from the way other people speak. However, I’m not going to put the time and effort into deliberately training myself to speak a certain way… which might be why I still call my mom “dude”, as well as often saying “college” instead of “university” (in Canada, college implies community college, often unaccredited, instead of in the US, where colleges and universities are approximately equivalent, and all students of post-secondary institutions are called college students) or “first grade” instead of “grade one”.

In a way, the way we speak is a representation of our lives: it reflects where were grow up, where we spend our time, what we watch on TV, who we talk to. We combine all these elements into our own speech patterns so that our way of speaking is unique, not quite the same as someone else’s, changing subtly depending on our surroundings.

Because of being removed from Canada for six years, I don’t really say “eh” all that often, and usually if I do, I’m thinking about it. It’s not something I do unconsciously. There is one purely Canadian expression that I did pick up, though, that’s earned me a few odd looks south of the border: “Well, it’s better than a kick in the ass with a frozen moccasin.” Yeah, it’s official. I’m Canadian.

And “dude” may not be particularly refined English, but… dude, it’s an awesome word!

Related links: Supernatural: Dude! YouTube video, CWTV.com.

Edmonton Prolife

I tried to take pictures of the PORN NATION images all over campus, but with no luck. My digital camera appears to be busted. However, let us continue our tour of on-campus advertising with the lovely image on your left, from Edmonton Prolife. A friend of mine reminded me of this ad, which, as well as another one, with the same image but different text (“The human heart begins to beat at 22 days. Canada’s government allows women the right to stop it for the next 258 days. Abortion. Have we gone too far?”) appears in the LRT terminal at the University Station.

When I showed this advertisement to a friend of mine, she misunderstood me. This advertisement pisses me off. However, she thought I was upset by the fact that abortions are allowed up to 9 months. This is not the case. First of all, I know that it is not a fact that abortions are allowed for the full 9 months of the pregnancy, and that the people who posted this ad are gross, disgusting, lying scumbags who should be taken out back and shot. Doctors generally do not perform abortions when the fetus is of an age that it could survive outside the womb. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule, in the case when the health of mother, fetus or both is at risk. If there weren’t such exceptions, I would be having some major issues right now.

What upsets me about this advertisement is the fact that they’re lying. The same way the pro-lifers lie about “partial birth abortions”, the medical term for which is dilation and extraction, and which, according to the Guttmacher Institute, constitute 0.17% of the 1.3 million abortions performed in the United States in 2000. (In an aside, another lovely advertisement from the fine folks at Edmonton Prolife reads, “Because Canada has no laws restricting abortion, the governmnet [sic] says you can choose abortion. After the heart starts beating. After the arms and legs appear. After all organs are present. After it sucks its thumb. After it responds to sound. After it could survive outside the womb. After it is partially born. Abortion. Have we gone too far?” Idiots.) That’s approximately 2,000 abortions out of over a million. Not exactly a common procedure. According to the Abortion is Pro Life website, in 1996, fewer than 1% of abortions in the United States occured after the 21st week of pregnancy. Admittedly, that was 11 years ago now, but it’s the only statistic I could find for you. It is worth noting that the number of total abortions actually decreased by 3% between 1996 and 2000.

Edmonton Prolife is unhappy because abortions are performed, period. I am guessing here, but they probably belief than a fetus becomes a human being at the moment of conception, even though at that point it is just a couple cells, not even remotely resembling a human being. In order to support their god-driven claims, they post advertising saying that abortion is legal at any point during the pregnancy. In truth, late term abortions happen very rarely, and it’s never just because the mother decided, “Oh, I changed my mind, I think I’ll get an abortion even though my baby is due in three weeks.” Abortion is Pro Life suggests a few reasons that women get abortions later in the pregnancy, for instance:

1. Pregnancy is undiagnosed until late in the pregnancy.
2. Medical complications, such as the pregnancy will worsen a woman’s health, or she is undergoing chemotherapy.
3. The fetus is somehow abnormal or malformed, and this was not apparent until late in the pregnancy.
4. Teenage pregnancy; in many states in the US, teenage girls have to wait to have an abortion due to delays imposed by the state.
5. It is necessary to raise money before the woman can have the abortion.
6. There are no nearby doctors who perform abortions.
7. In some states, there are state-imposed waiting periods which delay the abortion.

They also cite shame due to rape as a reason, but I’ve excluded it from my list because it’s something of a red herring. I don’t think a significant portion of aborted pregnancies come from rape. Some do, of course, but tens of thousands.

Now that we’ve gone over why I don’t like this advertising, it goes without saying that I don’t like having it on campus. Of course, the reason Edmonton Prolife chose to post their disgusting ads in the University LRT station is fairly obvious. There’s a lot of students there, between the ages of 17 and 30, a population whose rate of accidental pregnancy is probably higher than say, women between the ages 10 and 16, or 31 and 50. People in their late teens and early twenties may also be unaware of the truth of the issue, than late-term abortions are not a real, significant issue, but instead a red herring used to villify abortion. Also, the LRT station is visited by a lot of non-students who use the LRT to get between home and work.

Still, seeing such advertisements on campus make my stomach churn, partially because so many people don’t realise how such organisations mis-represent the facts. Take my friend who thought I was upset that abortion was legal in the 8th month of pregnancy — if she had known that the procedure was never performed without a very good reason, she wouldn’t have thought that was why I found it so disgusting, since she knows (or I thought she knew) that I’m vehemently pro-choice.

Eventually I will actually write a post about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I’m currently reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris, although I have a whole bunch of fun textbook reading to do for my courses, which I should stop writing and get to. ;)

Links related to this post: Abortion is Pro Life, Guttmacher Institute, Edmonton Prolife, Edmonton Prolife Ad Campaign, Alberta Prolife, Partial Birth Abortion on Wikipedia.

Christianity: Boring, Untrue, Irrelevant?

University campuses are constantly plastered with advertisements: for beer, pubcrawls and bars, for used textbooks and exam prep sessions, for jobs and student groups. But it seems like the advertisements I see most of all are for religion.

Today I saw one which asked, “Christianity: Boring, Untrue, Irrelevant?” Well, Christianity is interesting, and it exists, so I guess in that sense it’s true, and in today’s world, it certainly isn’t irrelevant in today’s world, since the Christian fundamentalists practically own the White House. The contact person was “Darwin” at churchon99. I find that ironic. I checked out the website, half-hoping it would be something ironic and atheistic, but it wasn’t. It never is. Now, if the question had asked “The Bible: Boring, Untrue, and Irrelevant?” I would have said yes, it is.

It turns out that Church on 99 offers a course, which is what this sign was advertising for, called “Alpha”, which supposedly answers the questions of whether Christianity is boring, untrue or irrelevant, and if the bible is reliable. I’m just guessing here, but they probably say the answer to the first question is “no” (which I’m willing to accept. I’m just not willing to accept that the beliefs that Christianity expects one to have are well… all that believable) and the answer to the second question is “yes”. In fact, I bought a bible today, and the introduction to that bible claims that the bible never, ever contradicts itself (according to the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, it contradicts itself some 383 times), is “a completely dependable and trustworthy book” and that “we can believe everything it says.” Wow. And all this time I thought it was full of crap. Guess I was wrong, because you know, God says so.

This is really just a segue into the major advertising campaign going on around campus. Everywhere you go, every corkboard in ever hallway in every building everywhere is plastered with these signs. “PORN NATION” they read in big, evil-looking red letters. Others have part of a woman’s body as she lays on her side with a ribbon around her hips, and it asks “OVER-SEXED?” These lovely posters are brought to you by your friendly, neighbourhood Campus For Christ.

After doing a little research online, I’ve found that if you attend “PORN NATION” on January 24th, you will get speechified at by recovered porn addict Michael Leahy. He will tell you all about the evils of pornography, his very sad story of losing his wife and being otherwise miserable, and how God made everything all better. Excuse me while I go throw up.

I don’t really care about pornography. I know a lot of women get up in arms about it because it often makes women into sex objects, but I think pornography is a fairly natural offshoot of human sexuality, and I know a whole lot of Christians might disagree with me, but sexuality is not, in my book, a bad thing. No, I’m not a big fan of Playboy, but I always check out the most recent issue of Maxim whenever I see it on a magazine rack. I’m a poor college student, and it costs like $6.00, so I never buy it, but I always think about it. Hell, my 2007 calendar is the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar.

What it comes down to is, if you don’t like it, don’t read it. I don’t like Playboy or Hustler or Penthouse, but I respect the rights of men (and women, I guess) everywhere to read it. I don’t have to. There are obviously some ethical issues with pornography, especially concerning the sexual objectification of women and instances where the women who pose in such magazines aren’t actually all that crazy about their work. In an ideal world, the women who posed in those magazines would do so completely voluntarily and because (for whatever reason, and because we’re assuming an ideal world here, it would not be a product of poor self-esteem or other neuroses) they enjoyed it, and would be of legal age to do so, and so on and so forth. And in such an ideal world, I would care absolutely not a whit about pornography, provided nobody forced me to read Penthouse.

Pornography, in my opinion, is not a sign of a degenerate or sick society. And what is pornography, anyway? Shows like Queer as Folk or The L Word are filled with characters involved in sexual activities, and I’m willing to bet a lot of Christians would write them off as dressed up gay porn, and evidence of such a degenerate, sick nation. You can probably guess I don’t agree; Queer as Folk was one of my favourite shows when it was on the air.

This isn’t an ideal world, and there are some issues with porn, but I don’t think for a minute that the number one most important issue about pornography is that it’s addictive. Pornography cannot be compared to cocaine or crystal meth. However, according to Lydia Low, the president of Campus for Christ at the University of Toronto, we should be wary of pornography because it, among other things, “rejects the notion that we are children of God, uniquely fashioned by the Creator of the Universe.” In that case, maybe I should start buying Playboy. One of her other concerns is that porn fuels ideas that equate sex with love. I’m not an expert on porn, most of my experiences with it being in the form of Queer as Folk or that fabulous, terrible, funny movie, Orgazmo, but… uh… somehow I’ve never really gotten the impression that pornography does anything of the kind. How could it, when the plotlines are so notoriously bad?

In any case, I have to wonder how effective is this campaign really going to be. Preaching the dangers of porn and sex addiction to college students? Chances are, most of them are mostly concerned than they’re not getting enough sex, rather than that they might be getting too much, and I doubt anybody is going to be burning their copies of Playboy after they return home from their chat. If anything, they’ll go get the newest issue.

All the talk about porn aside, I’m sick of the religious advertising everywhere. Seeing PORN NATION plastered everywhere across campus gets on my nerves, and even when it wasn’t there, the whole place is covered in leaflets inviting me to find Jesus. Everywhere I go, old men are offering me free Gideon bibles. Fuck!

Maybe next time I’ll write a post about Dawkins’ The God Delusion. That should make me feel better.

Links related to this entry: Church on 99, Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, The Silhouette: The naked truth about porn, The Methods Reporter: “Porn Nation”, Michael Leahy, Campus for Christ.