on losing the war

The 2009 Pishin bombing occurred on October 18, 2009, when a suicide bomber detonated explosives at a meeting in the southeastern Iranian town of Pishin in Sistan and Baluchestan Province. The attack killed 42 people including several notable Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution (IRGC, or Revolutionary Guards) commanders.

four years later and and the world is ...is it the same? from renaissance times: monarchal assasination, then anarchy, then racism, then politics, now religion. four years ago i would have thought terrorism really only sprung up after 9/11, if not merely because of increased media attention and thus my own ignorance then because of Afghanistan and then later because of Iraq.

today im not so sure; man has been killing each other since day one--only the reasons changed.

and the costs of the righteous or so it would appear, greatly outweigh the ease of which the minions of the super organism weve come to know as the Islamist assemblage are ready to end themselves in the fight against the coalition of the willing. how could it possibly end well for us?

on the certainty of survival with the expectations of failure

so many have fallen trying to scale the walls of her castle--or so it seems. blood, tears and sweat shed for what other than the simple achievement of success? no, for this battle, maybe for sworn allegiance to her kingdom? for simple recognition of some sovereignty in their own? could it even be that simple?

so many have fallen in wars, so it has been. so it is. so it must be. blood tears and sweat shed to scale castles of the world since the beginning when man took up the sword. and these soldiers leave behind their families, their first love, their temporary freedom, to fight for true freedom, true happiness. so many have died trying. their bodies long gone, memories soon forgotten. the question is, were this man's efforts ever recognised? is it even important if they are? after all, he failed to conquer that castle. and that is mostly what the peasants and the plebians would remember, that is if they even remember his name.

all for Helen. the height of her walls daunted many in the past but still they came in droves. they fell in droves. they came by the legions and they too fell by the legions. and the last came for her and he too bled blood and shed tears and sweat, and he too eventually fell in battle. and like Paris the fate of all future warmongers who live by the sword shall be slain by the sword.

the real winner must be the bard who never drew blood and thus whose own blood shall never be drawn. he is content with his song, his literature, his art, his solitude. he looks upon with envy at the warriors who enjoy fame, fortune, company and a place in history while he merely writes about it. his supporters pick up swords and fight for him, but he himself stands on the horizon behind the battlefield. his followers pull his wagon for him but the wagon never had wheels. even the king now offers him a sword and a shield to fight for his freedom but he brushes all of it aside and instead asks for the mirror, and to it the bard tells "without dreams, one can have no nightmares".

 ps 22 feb 2010 i think all that could await the bard's watchers and followers is only disappointment if what they are continuously waiting for is for him to pick up the iron; he is no warrior. and when they abandon him and helen stops watching and walks away, im willing to bet my hat that he as no qualm fading out to lonely black for all time carrying with him only his words that meant everything to him even though it was so, only to him.

choice or nature? that is not the question.

i find it personally enriching to dabble in the controversial, and this early morning i discover myself entrenched in a particularly amusing one.

homosexuality: is it a choice, or is it natural?

the amazing essence of this question lies in the very true observation that before one man can even formulate his own thoughts and opinions to derive a strong answer to (i hope) represent his character and moral, he is first flooded with the already heard-of voices of the many who have spoken before. what pains a polemicist like me is not the substance of those opinions, but the blatant illogicity upon which they were designed--the substance behind the substance.

therein lies the stunning enjoyment i derive from this terrible question--it bears no value save for fueling fallacious arguments in a case of homophobes trying desperately to rationalise the undesirable amidst their perceived ideals, in a world that is inherently flawed, vis-a-vis homosexuals who are forced to reply with polar opposite responses in order to defend the state of their sexual orientation in society; to label homosexuality with the word choice definitely implies a possibility for change while to call it nature renders it, perceptively, unchangeable, or at least that there is no reason for such because that which is exterior to the realm of choice is also external to the considerations of morality (ie. because only the unnatural may be immoral).

and so on one hand, they who believe that gayness is a choice are almost surely anti-gay, and they who believe otherwise must surely be gay. this is truth, insofar that there is no reason for providing an answer other than to (1) attempt disparage the other side or to (2) defend your position on one side. make no mistake--both sides are guilty of these idiocies.

this is also truth because almost all arguers are bad arguers. if there's one thing ive learnt about human discussion, it is that people of all opinions are, fundamentally, blundering fools who spew forth seemingly verbose rhetoric that upon simple analysis speaks more to their misaligned state of mind than the related truth and meaning of what is important and at hand.

though i am aware that sexual orientation is resultant of base genetics and factors present in prenatal development, i also know that all sexual behaviour is contingent upon choices by the individual to adhere to or allay these essentially natural proclivities.

this would imply that homosexuality is not immoral per se, because its origin is out of reach of individual choice, but because gay interaction is, then the question of morality applies. in case youre wondering, it is always morally right to act in accordance to one's own nature. additionally, a heterosexual woman must surely have been born heterosexual but it does in no way follow that she must have physical relationships that are heterosexual, for that is surely subject to choice.

meaning of life part deux

three years ago i wrote about my personal enlightenment about the great meaning from a couple of minutes at the loo.

today i watch an episode of heroes s03e23 and chance upon an albert einstein quote:

"The life of the individual has meaning only insofar as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful."

i pissed my pants.

science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind

its 2.24am and i just came back from a stroll in the park. i remember walking around the field on that newly-paved red running track, no, not the polyurethane tartan track weve all been accustomed to see at stadiums, but the more sobering kind i call concrete, and i say i remember because it was just 15 minutes ago mind you--why am i even explaining myself here? its my blog. and you should be asking why im walking around in the dark at 2am in the first place.

the night is cold and breezy. and one thing i always appreciate is the comfort i find in darkness and solitude where i can take in the surroundings and converse with my thoughts.  and the grass, oh the grass. i miss the army.

i slap myself.

in the early days of this blog i always found my thoughts circling in the soup of religion and society. and after a two and half year hiatus i am back and i still am fascinated by it. if those two years in the army taught me anything, it was the tempering of my cynical views. tonight i still think about religion with the exception that i see no soup. i see a toilet of messy contents teetering the edge of a hole so deep and welcoming and i find myself beckoned to the call of the flush.

i said i feel like pulling the flush, but even i am a man of reason. i have a faith and im not about to abandon it. its the voice of the world that trouble me, that show me how ugly even the word religion is. a world where people read with some special concern when loooking at the word Muslim, where people see the word Christian and think the annoying Mormon, the bible-selling door-to-door salesman, religio-political activism, hypocrisy, evangelical zealotry, anti-homosexuality and terrible judgement. while i, being a man of independent thought, loathe to subscribe to such blind stereotypicalism, am also a realist. and in the struggle to state my stand i find myself intentionally at a distance: a Christian away from the Christians. you say hypocrisy. i say where is the flush? because the moment i argue from one camp i become but another blind partisan of a battlefield so fraught with bias that i wish for the entirety to be washed away.

but im not running away from this one. i stand aside so i can clearly see the fingerpointing from the hands of the blind. as is with many arguments i try to reason, i find it much easier to find truth when neither pointing nor being pointed at.

from my center i see guilt on both sides. there is no merit in taking at face value the song of an atheist bigot but even in the worst of skewed rhetoric is a poem of truth, and the rhyme within it is derived from the fact of a few if not many Christians who follow their religion blindly. they partake in symbolic rituals that are perfect as such, but greatly flawed applied out of context. they believe in supernatural occurrences that many a time have natural explanations. therein lies the greatest travesty of many Christians who in their blindness (willfully or not) disregard science and substitute in its place their own misinformed interpretations of faith as evidence.

and when those atheists point i find it difficult to rule against them, for i am a man of logic; while science is far from holding all the answers, its very fundamentals encourage for the asking of simple questions that can blow holes through the religious fabric of even the toughest Christians. i describe tough not in the manner of intellectual robustness, but that of being very hard nuts.

when atheists and christians clash christians always lose. because in the field of logical argumentation the man of science is always more well-equipped. the problem i always see is christians desperately trying to bolster their force by supplanting their mere opinions for evidence (when they should be rising to the opponent with the ammunition of the new age) or even disregard the rules in its entirety, thereby only successfully persuading the invisible audience that they are all but terrible at the art of persuasion. when your job is to try to persuade non believers and you are shown to be useless at your job, that is a serious blow to the nuts, bro. on the other hand, the atheist camp can also momentarily step out of discipline when drunk with their general victory. they start spewing anti religious rhetoric that could be easily refuted by the other camp, except the latter is rarely geared for a sound defence. and it pains me because that is so easy to perform, but so easy to botch by a Man of God who has neither a semblance of Logos nor Ethos in an arena outside Bible commentary.

blind Christians, stop embarrassing me. dont let the atheists trample you. the days of martyrdom have long passed. use your God-given brains and let science help you.