It's a Duck, it's Quacking

Anyone who's ever done their homework on the subject knows that Christianity is basically plagiarized from a lot of other religions--including the pagan beliefs that preceded it. It's no coincidence that Easter tends to coincide with the spring equinox and Christmas falls close to the winter solstice--both important symbolic events in a lot of long-dead polytheist faiths--and both holidays incorporate symbols and practices, like eggs and rabbits and evergreen trees, that had significant meaning to another religion. The pagan roots are evident in more or less every permutation of Christianity but it's most obvious in Catholicism.

Catholicism predates other denominations, so it was the one that the 'heathens' were first exposed to. The first Catholics from Celtic and Germanic and Norse tribes were converts from various flavours of paganism--because old habits die hard, they didn't entire drop everything associated with their former belief. (Even Emperor Constantine, after he converted to Christianity, routinely made sacrifices to Ares and Apollo.) Because of that, and possibly also because the church itself was trying to make itself seem appealing to pagans, a lot of practices and rituals persisted despite having nothing to do with Christianity at all--they were rooted in pagan beliefs.

But all Christian denominations view Christmas and Easter with reverence and embrace the pagan symbols they've absorbed. What makes Catholicism stand out as being clearly based on paganism is the fact that it is itself essentially paganism.

Think about it.

On paper there is only one god, but Catholics revere the Holy Trinity of father and son and holy spirit. They are on the same level. They are all gods. Look at the way Catholics in particular worship the Virgin Mary. What is she but a goddess?

Look at the saints. The saints are demigods. Like the gods of Greek mythology, the saints are cast as the protectors or stewards of specific things--of war, of learning, of travel, of childbirth. The list goes on and on. Even today, when some Catholics want to, say, pray for a safe journey when they're about to go on a trip, they pray not to their head honcho god but to Saint Christopher.

What is that but paganism?

Catholics really hate it when you point that out.

Culture Clash

I like to think of myself as being a typically open-minded person who accepts other people and our differences. Different strokes, right?

However.

The next time someone tries to defend the indefensible and thinks that 'it's just a part of their culture' is an acceptable rationale, I'm going to fucking kill them with a screwdriver. Because this is the stupidest, lamest, most worthless excuse in the entire world. (It ties for first place along with using 'it's part of the religion' to defend the most horrific abuses and crimes.) If your culture is founded on things that are not in at all okay in a civilized world, that part of your culture is not worth preserving and you should be ashamed of yourself and your people for perpetuating and defending it.

It's rude to show the bottoms of your feet in Saudi Arabia. That's cool, I can live with that. The French eat horse. I'm cool with that, as well. Differences that pertain to food, familial structure, education, language use, and certain gestures are completely innocuous and I'm 100% okay with those things because they harm nobody.

You know what's not okay?

Hurting people. Denying people basic human rights. Killing people. Treating people as less than human. That shit isn't good.

Ruthless and often violent discrimination of certain demographics based on factors over which they have no control--race, sex, sexuality, their place of birth--is rife in certain parts of the world. Women are denied the most basic of freedoms in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Homosexuals are killed outright. I do not give a single microscopic fuck about what those cultures or religious beliefs say about these things because these things are absolutely unambiguously wrong. It is wrong. It is not okay to do these things and I don't give a fuck what your religion or cultural tradition dictates. You should not be doing it and I am disgusted that anyone else in the world is allowing this to continue in the name of tolerance. You can't be tolerant of something that's intolerant.

For whatever reason, 'cultural differences' are taboo. We can't oppose them if we aren't of that culture. If something is done in the name of culture, tradition, religious belief--it's untouchable. And that needs to stop. It isn't okay and nobody anywhere is in any way obligated to defend it. And anyone who tries to defend it should be ashamed of themselves. How can you defend that shit? Why is a crime not a crime when culture and god are evoked in its name? It isn't. Something are wrong, full stop, and holding onto these things just because it would be uncouth to demand they be changed is almost as bad as committing them in the first place.

Women in the Middle East are by and large not people. They can't go out, drive, go to school, get jobs, or even enter certain establishments--sometimes they need an escort, but most of the time they're just banned outright. Women are treated like property. They are regularly beaten and raped, then punished for being a victim. Marriages are arranged without any consideration to anyone's feelings or right to run their own life. Women are killed for being the victims of crimes, for something that isn't their fault. You cannot defend this. This is not at all acceptable, and the fact that it's an integral part of the culture doesn't mean anyone is obligated to accept it--we, as people, are obligated to stop it. Especially because, being 'part of the culture', they're easily defended and made to seem, if not harmless, then at least made to seem justifiable.

These things are not justifiable. These things are not okay. And they need to be stopped.

The Aztecs (as well as many other cultures) practiced gruesome human sacrifice. It was an integral part of their culture, of their religion. The practice was stopped. The Chinese mutilated the feet of girls for hundreds of years, a horrific painful process that crippled them for life. It was an integral part of their culture. The practice was stopped. Widowed women in India would be burned alive on their husband's funeral pyres. It was part of their religion and culture for centuries. The practice was stopped.

Because these things are not okay. They never have been, and they never will be, and just because it's part of the culture or religion doesn't mean it's anything but wrong to do it. 'Culture' should stop being a shield. I don't care about your culture. I care about your people. And your people are being wronged in the most repulsive and egregious ways because of your stupid, disgusting, horrible culture.

I don't fucking care about cultural differences. If a cultural difference results in harm or discrimination of innocent people, that culture is not worth defending or preserving. It should die out. It should be eradicated. It should be stopped.

Not everything in the world is black and white. Very few things are. Almost everything is shades of grey. But some things are wrong no matter what, they are objectively wrong. You should be outraged that such atrocious crimes are committed regularly and defended fanatically. You should be outraged that they become accepted and expected parts of life. And you should be outraged at yourself, at everyone in the world, because it has been allowed to continue, above scrutiny and above the laws of human decency, for as long as it has.

A culture in which people are treated like anything but people is a culture that needs to be wiped out. If you're a member of this culture and defend the horrors you wreak on innocent people, I just want to tell you that your culture is disgusting--and so are you.

True Love

Dirty secret:

Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing' is simultaneously my favourite and most hated romantic comedy ever.

On the one hand, you have vapid shallow Hero and her Claudio, who decides he loves her after setting eyes on her once (par for the course in Shakespeare) and then accuses her publicly and humiliatingly of adultery based on nothing but hearsay which was in turn based on something someone who didn't know her very well glimpsed through an open window. (That turned out to be a trick in the end anyway.) Not only is Claudio a complete prick about it, Hero takes him back! Willingly! He only apologized when he thought she was dead for god's sake. He sounds like a complete asshole and emotionally volatile. I wouldn't marry him. I wouldn't even hold hands with him.

On the other hand, you have Beatrice and Bennedick. They are possibly the funniest, most adorable couple in the entire Shakespeare canon. Within the context of their exchange in the play (which also happens to be their first on-stage argument and the first time she verbally trashes him--the first of many), you learn that they have a history together that might or might not have been at one time youthfully romantic. These are two people who are very similar to the point where it makes them often not get along. But immediately apparent is that behind all their arguing is an affectionate animosity. While Kate and Petruchio from 'Taming of the Shrew' don't actually like each other one shred, Beatrice and Bennedick clearly do actually care for one another. And I love it. So much of staged romance throughout the ages is unrealistic. Here you have a couple who have no problem saying it like it is. "Look, you drive me up the walls and sometimes I hate the sight of you, but I adore you."

And then there's the plot device that gets them together in the first place. It's been copied a thousand times and never quite imitated successfully. Even Shakespeare himself couldn't recreate the relationship he created with Beatrice and Bennedick. Two people who clearly adore one another but don't admit their feelings are brought together by scheming friends who manage to convince them individually that the other has privately confessed love. It's a completely contrived plot device that has, again, been used a derpjillion times. And it's never very good except when Shakespeare did it.

Beatrice and Bennedick are hands-down my favourite Shakespearean couple. My favourite characters in all of Shakespeare full stop. They're so easy to relate to, at least for me. I've always expressed my affection in various levels of violent verbal insult. If I take the time to concoct a really good verbal barb, it means I care about you. If I didn't I would have just called you a fucktard and taken a longer lunch.

You can keep Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Ophelia, Kate and Petruchio, Rosalind and Orlando. Two of those relationships involved suicide and murder, one was completely fucking abusive, and the other was based on lies. Beatrice and Bennedick are the only couple who probably won't end up in marriage counselling. They don't need to. They'll get it out of their systems by calling each other imaginative horrible names, and then go to bed and have uninhibited hate-sex until they make up and have makeup sex.

That's the only reason I like 'Much Ado' to begin with. Sometimes I even just fast forward through the parts with Hero and Claudio. I don't blame Don Jon for sabotaging them. I would too. I just want to see Beatrice and Bennedick argue themselves into true love.

Because, at least in my world, love wouldn't be love without that animosity. I'm not sure what that says about me, but for once I don't actually care.

Inevitable

There are a lot of common arguments that fail to hold up to scrutiny. And I'm not even talking about the controversial ones--that if we are descended from apes via evolution, then that gives us permission to be totally uncivilized like apes--but ones we all know and hear and use every day. 'I wouldn't have done that' might seem like a reasonable thing to say but when it comes down to it, you don't know what you would have done in any given situation unless you were there at the exact time under identical circumstances because any change at all could result in a totally different outcome.

But the one that holds the least amount of water for how common it is isn't really even an assertion at all. It just states that your life would be less fulfilled without a particular very basic object or concept. 'Without Person X, we wouldn't even have Invention Y!'

To be fair it's perfectly true. Certain people invented certain things and without those people we wouldn't have them. But it's not as big a deal as people think and the implication that your life would be somehow harder or less fulfilling easily falls apart when you consider a few basic facts.

First of all, you can't miss something you don't know exists. How many of us thought our lives would be radically transformed by cell phones fifteen or even just ten years ago? We got on just fine without them even though a lot of people today can't function if they don't have theirs, as evidenced by the number of people who completely lose their shit when they misplace their phones. Without some feature or other, life would be different but you wouldn't feel deprived because you would have no basis for comparison. I'm not saying things wouldn't change, I'm just saying you wouldn't notice it.

Secondly, there's nothing inevitable about anything. Especially human inventions. This is the bigger point. What no one stops to consider is that every single manmade object in the world first had to be specifically thought of and developed somewhere at some point by somebody. They may seem perfectly natural and some are quite intuitive--for instance, shoes make perfect sense--but others don't seem to have any real practical application--like hats. Who thought of hats? Except for maybe keeping you slightly less damp in the rain, they don't serve any obvious purpose, so why think of them in the first place?

There's also no guarantee that if something hadn't been invented when it was, it would have been invented at all. Because, again, nothing about life is inevitable. If someone didn't specifically come up with it, it probably wouldn't occur to anybody to do so. Particularly when you consider the sheer number of world-changing inventions that were initially shunned or believed useless. The telephone, the single most valuable patent in the history of the US Patent Office, for the first few years was regarded as insignificant and a passing phase that would have no future with mankind. Edison himself said the telephone was 'just an electrical toy'. But then, Thomas Edison was completely shit at working out what inventions were going to be successful and which were going to fail spectacularly. He invested significant amounts of money and many years of his life to concrete houses, which failed on every conceivable level to make any kind of cultural impact. Which is also why you've never heard of them until now.

I'm hardly making an argument here against modern inventions. They're just a part of life adn I'm grateful for all the ones I use on a daily basis and sometimes take for granted. All I'm saying is that neither my life nor yours nor anyone else's would be significantly negatively changed without them. And even if they were, you wouldn't realize it. If nobody invented the wheel, it probably wouldn't occur to anyone to stick a round solid object beneath a heavy load for ease of transport.

What it all comes down to is you can't miss what you never had, a sentiment that in the end sounds way more poignant than I actually mean.

Knock it the Fuck Off

I try.

I mean, I really try.

But I think I should just admit it: I am shallow and judgmental and I form prejudices about people based on how they look.

And I do it to women, even though I am one and even though I'm guilty of occasional behaviours for which I exceedingly harshly judge other women. (Skirt's maybe too short, top too tight or too low, too much makeup.) I'm starting to become the sort of woman I used to despise. I feel weird without makeup and my jeans are all so tight they leave seam imprints on my skin.

I also feel loftily superior to women when I think they're behaving badly.

Look, stop showing off your navel piercings. It isn't sexy. It's like the one piercing I cannot stand to see on anyone. I would rather see a scrotal piercing or nipple rings. For some reason the belly button piercing--which I seem to be the only woman who doesn't have one--are infinitely trampier than walking around with your labia piercing hanging out.

Belly-baring is probably a pet peeve only because I can't do it myself. I look like I'm a good few months into a pregnancy. Stop showing off your stomach. Get a top that actually goes down the whole way.

And stop showing your fucking thongs.

And your tramp stamps. That's like the one place I refuse to ever have myself inked.

Stop bleaching the fuck out of your hair and take the stupid blue contacts out.

The light/nude/shiny lip trend is ugly and you look like your lips are made of the same material they make school bus seats out of.

Put some clothes on. If you want to show back or leg or cleavage or whatever, fine. But don't let your bits show in public and just pick one thing to show off. Leave a little something to the imagination.

And also I am not likely to want to have sex with you if the impression you give off is one of 'anything you can think of I will do for the price of a pint'. And I will fuck anybody. I don't care if you look like a high-class hooker or a $20 one. If you look like you could be paid to put out, you need to reevaluate how you're presenting yourself.

The end.