kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It's all about the art, man. Blergh. I just saw something that made me rather annoyed. As you all know, I'm a member of a number of jewelry forums. Since they are targeted forums, the flaming issues and so forth that often come up on other discussion sites don't often happen, and when we do touch on matters of politics and religion are handled respectfully and carefully. It's all about the Art, man. But whenever I see intolerance raising its ugly head, I get nervous....and tonight, I saw on one of my jewelry forums, someone writing in all upset because they found that the website name that they had chosen was very close in name to a website that featured "that new age stuff and satanism." Um, hello? It's about the art? Coulda been worse, could have been an all-vegetables-all-the-time porn site? Even if it is new age stuff, it's probably NOT Satanism, and even if it were Satanism, I bet you work with one or two? I'll be the first to admit to my own little prejudices, dear NonScheduledReaders, but I do at least acknowledge them as growing out of my own experiences, rather than something based entirely on supposition and sheeplike devotion to someone else's dogma. I really don't get most of the evangelical Christian religions (being ex-Catholic, I'm pretty much allergic to any organized religions, but the religions that don't encourage education for women and/or thinking for yourself tend to leave me colder than threeday haddock leftovers--not to mention, being a New Englander, if you proselytize in my general vicinity, be it Jesus or Jolly Ranchers, I'm likely to be amused, disgusted, and worried about the state of your mental health). I don't care for the pagans who've retreated into some self-created, sans-homeworked amalgam of warm-n-fuzzy Every-Rock-And-Tree-Should-Be-Canonized hippie tree-hugging solipsistic daydream from which they apparently cannot emerge even to do things like pay their rent and the gas company, and whine that it's religious discrimination to make them pay for a phone line because electricity comes from Nature, and nature is Goddess. I have a horrified distaste for anything resembling racism, including the white-power-god-only-loves-white-people-and-while-you're-at-it-take-out-them-homos-too hooha, and that is one variety of belief that I equate with mental illness on the level of pederasty and fucking goats through holes drilled in their skulls. In fact, that's just about the only variety of belief that even if the practitioner presents themselves rationally and in a calmish matter that I simply will not sit still and listen to, usually because four sentences in I'm looking for the nearest fire ax with which to prune that family tree. And I have no patience with willful ignorance. When I first started hearing about suicide bombers, I took pains to educate myself in order to understand that the extremists are not the representatives of the whole. When I first learned about the IRA, I wanted to find out why they were bombing pubs. When I first learned about Satanism--which is, in my not-so-humble little opinion, a very sad little religion because it's mostly nyah-nyah Catholic church and any religion that can only come up with negations instead of affirmations is pretty lame--I learned that the teenaged kids running around in their underwear listening to Judas Priest and staking out puppies in the woods and calling themselves Satanists, well, weren't. I'm not sure where I'm going with this. One moment. Ah, there it is. Educate yourself first before you condemn. I'm not saying don't have an opinion or a belief--I'm not even saying don't express it. But for the love of little fishes, would you please first do your fucking homework? I'm thinking of getting a website one letter off from the all-vegetables-all-the-time porn site. 9:37 p.m. - 2003-05-19 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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