This Kind of World

Tatsuya Ishida is the talented author/artist behind Sinfest. Sinfest has been around for an extraordinarily long time in webcomic terms - it's one of the first few that started in the pioneering age and went on to be successful. We don't know an awful lot about Ishida - he's pretty quiet about himself, even his artist persona (his blog/newspost updates are even fewer and far between than my own).

But we can look at his work through the years - this was his 5th posted comic:

As far as offensive/racist/punch-down humour goes, it's not egregious - you can see that he's taking the piss out of blaxploitation movies and not particularly glorifying black stereotypes.
But it's still racist. I'd measure this as Not Helpful to society at large - the good (including humour) does not outweigh the bad.

But his more recent work has taken on a decidedly more "preachy" tone (whilst still maintaining "teh funny"):

Perhaps some of the humour I took from this is coming from the reality I can (now) see - it wasn't so long ago I had the young/white/male privilege blues. This comic reflects the kind of bullshit I can literally read on the blogs I frequent (particularly tales of MRA douchebags from FreeThoughtBlogs) every couple of weeks or so (or more often).

Ishida's own journey - communicated entirely through the comics he publishes daily - resonates with me.

Whereever possible, I try to see the unthinking, unseeing, silencing creepiness that goes on in the world for people don't come from my position of privilege. I like to think I already had a reasonably solid foundation of social justice (in part due to my liberal-Catholic upbringing and a mother who adopted generally sensible views), but there's more oppression in the world than just rich over poor.

So I can look back and see my perspectives change (even the perspectives on religion/atheism when I first started this blog) - yay for me.

Here's the rub: I'm going to be a father before the year is over.

It's pretty damn exciting. But I'm terrified of the idea of having a child. Why?

Like all people, my own father had good and bad traits - but one very major drawback to his effectiveness as a father is the fact that for almost my entire life he has usually been absent. Divorce will certainly go some way to explaining that, but even when he was still married to my mother (up until I was around age 4), he wasn't terribly present in our lives. By all accounts, his own dad wasn't exactly father of the year either - apparently he was a Good Man (if your baseline is providing for your family and not doing anything terrible to them), but WWII and the culture of his time left him reasonably fucked up.

I don't plan on being absent in my own kid's life. So that's a start. But not being absent and being a good parental role-model are two different things.

With a daughter, I can see myself sharing the responsibility with her mother - there are things about a girl's life growing up that I can't possibly be expected to know, and I'm cool with learning and playing by ear.

But I feel like I'd have a responsibility to take the lead with a son to make sure he didn't end up like one of those MRA assholes, or a horrible racist, or standing outside an abortion clinic hassling people who really don't need that shit right now or ever (obviously, I wouldn't want a daughter to be like that either. This doesn't have to be a rational fear, it's just the fear I have).

I want to raise a kid who can see the things that I can see now.

Which is fine - the apple doesn't usually fall far from the tree, so I shouldn't be too scared.

But it also got me thinking - what kind of bigotry is still invisible to me? Will there be social justice issues that my kid/s will see and just shake their heads in embarrassment whenever I ignorantly espouse some backward-thinking cause?

It's possible. But I can see plenty today that I can teach them to get them on their way. I used not to want kids, but now I kind of feel obligated to raise someone capable of thinking for themselves, seeing injustice where it is, and giving their old man what-for when he's blinded by his own privilege.

I can only hope.

Religion as a Force for Good

I'm beginning to see religion as less and less of a general force for good. The difficulty, I think, lies with the uncompromising conservatism of its caretakers. At their inception, each religion (by necessity, usually) reflects the values of its culture - or possibly even reforms them. Arguably, early Christian teachings in specific geographic places gave women the freedom to refuse to have sex, sex that would otherwise have been forced upon them. Those same teachings have been maintained and twisted over the years to discourage sex - when our own secular culture alongside has become more accepting and tolerant of individual choice. It is the current cultural climate, not the religion, which has carried on the legacy of those original teachings, teachings which now are used to oppress instead of free. Does religion do good in this day and age? Sure. Does it outweigh the harm? I'm not as convinced as once I was: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/05/30/real-scientists-dont-let-the-evidence-get-in-the-way-of-the-theory/ The difficulty with the apologist's argument here is that religion no longer reflects or reforms a culture as it once did, it simply holds it back. Each progressive move in the faith is simply giving ground to something that a culture is already getting on with. Feminism, civil rights, even social justice - once the bastion of church work - all seem to be more efficiently acted out as secular movements. Religion for at least the last hundred years - and often at various times in the past - has not been allowed to reflect or reform our culture. It has only held it back. I can't, on balance, support the idea that religion is, or can ever again, be a force for good.

Hooray for Morally Justified Bigotry!

Legend Condemns Gay Marriage

She was good at tennis, so we're listening to her views on an unrelated topic.

I have a beef with people who believe that we should maintain the "traditional definition" of marriage.

My beef is not with their belief, it's with what they think that belief is based on. When you say "traditional marriage", what does that mean exactly?

Does it mean that the woman becomes the man's property?
Does it mean that the woman's family has to pay a dowry to help offset the cost of the man having to maintain her?
Does it mean that, should the marriage fail to produce children it is null and void?

Let's go back even further - as I understand it, the Old Testament definition of marriage is that it's a sacred relationship between a man and each of his many wives.

How fucking traditional do you want to get? Because if your traditional view of marriage only stretches back about a hundred years or so, then you should come clean and just fucking say that - instead of suggesting that the present form of heterosexual marriage has been somehow preserved, unchanged, from the moment that God produced 2 genetically related humans circa 6000 years ago.

For the love of God, does Court have any idea how she sounds?

Quoth the Tennis Player-cum-Reverand:

"The fact that the homosexual cry is, 'We can't help it as we were born this way', as the cause behind their own personal choice is cause for concern," she said. "Every action begins with a thought. There is a choice to be made."

Really? You guys are still beating the "it's a choice", drum? Tell me, heterosexual people, could you ever conceive of being sexually attracted to people of the same sex? No?
Then there's a fundamental difference between you and someone who does. This isn't a case of, "it's wrong, therefore it's tempting" - this is just not tempting to people who aren't gay, which possibly suggests that the element of choice doesn't really come into it.

Unless you pull a Catholic Church and say that, yes, they are born that way, God made them that way, but they can't ever have sex. In which case, fuck you too. That's still ridiculous.

We really need to move on from this as a people.

A friend of mine also recommended I read this:
Traditional Marriage Perverts the Tradition of Marriage
...it was good back then, and it's still good now.

Give us something new

The gods of everyone should wake
And wag their sleepy tongues
Give us all here something new to read

(light fingered from The Righteous Corn Farmers' Grate)

Bear with me for a moment; I'm going to whine.

Circa 2000 BC, the Jewish faith comes into being. The last of the texts of the Hebrew Bible is committed to physical form at roughly 500 BC (though I may well be wrong here as I haven't done very thorough research, it shouldn't detract from my line of thought).

Circa AD 50, the first texts that make up the New Testament are put to parchment (or whatever). The last texts are completed a few hundred years after (giving the benefit of the doubt to a later creation).

Circa AD 500, Muhammad receives the word of God from the angel Gabriel. That was recorded maybe... AD 700, if the scribes were slow.

At this point I'll level with you, I know very little about Hinduism. So if anyone provides me with rough dates for the creation of Hindu scripture, I'll take that into account.

That issue aside, what we have here are three of the most influential (and in the case of the Islamic and Christian faiths, largest) religious bodies' texts that haven't been significantly updated in 2500, 1600 and 1300 years respectively (obviously they've undergone translation and to a greater extent, interpretation, but there's been no new content).

Why? What happened? I'm most comfortable discussing the Christian texts, since I have more of a background with those - the faith was alive and breathing for a few hundred years and then... splat. It stopped.
Of course - there's still Tradition (for those of you who are Catholic) or the writings of the more prominent Christians through the ages - but none of this stuff gets appended to the existing Bible.

It's like they compiled the damn thing over a few hundred years and then... stopped.

Each faith has really shone during its time - in fact, if you look purely at membership numbers, the legacy of the "glory days" of these faiths has blessed them with worshippers in the billions.

But the core texts for these faiths have stopped... the legitimacy for change, growth and progress has been reduced to reinterpretation in the context of society.

Which is fine... but gone are the days when someone overbearing can write things to redact vestigial trappings of past dogma.

That said, I'm not without hope for the future - the various faiths obviously have relevance in today's society, and all faith denominations move on, whether they move slowly, at a medium pace or almost in keeping with the actual world.

Things will get better, and religious teachings have no choice but to stay current in one way or another - but it's just frustrating sometimes to see the lack of any new definitive texts.