religion

Rules:
Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

Done in the third person, for effect.

1. Roy likes some plot in his porn. Hey, what can I say, I’m a romantic.

2. Roy is a bit too honest sometimes. I’m working on being a better liar.

3. Roy is absolutely sure the next statement is true.

4. Roy is totally positive the previous statement is false.

5. Roy has been studying infinite self-referential loops for a while now.

6. Roy has been studying consciousness for a while now.

7. Roy sometimes repeats himself. In the third person. Sometimes even in fourth.

8. Simon says start over. From the top.

9. Roy wrote a short proof for the existence of evil (according to Simon) in this list. He also posted a longer one to Flickr a while back.

10.Roy has been accused of a crime he didn’t commit, and not accused of one he’s sure he committed. He’s also been accused of a crime he committed, was honest about it, and went to prison for a few days.

11.Roy likes to tell stories. Some of which are based on true stories, some of which I pull out of my ass.

12.Roy would like to mention the POMA stories are usually the happy ones.

13.Roy enjoys discussing politics and religion, but only if the people in the conversation follow simple rules. Rule #1: Define terms.

14.Rule #1 means you usually don’t actually talk about politics or religion, but what words mean. It’s like Fight Club, but in real life and with characters instead of actors. Err, English characters…you know…letters. Fighting makes you tougher, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Suck it up.

15.Roy is pretty sure Rule #1 ends most discussions before they begin, and certainly before they become violent.

16.Roy is almost positive that most bad arguments and many wars come from two people, or two groups of people, using the same word to define different things. “God” is a big one, in this context.

17.Roy has some rather curious, and rational, definitions of God. Yes, there is more than one that applies. Hence the confusion and the killing. Sooooo much killing.

18.Roy is pretty sure our species has figured it out again, just in time for us to self-annihilate and let the turtles take over. Again.

19.Roy doesn’t really think there are Aliens, but if there are, he’s pretty sure he knows where they are hiding.

20.Roy has friends from all over, and is rather adept at making new ones. It’s about one word, and projecting that word into the minds of others. Smiles work, as does honesty, kind words and sincere interest.

21.Roy also knows how to shatter minds and hearts. Hey, it comes with the territory. You have to learn how to break it before you can put it back together.

22.Roy is like an ogre and a troll. He’s got layers and they regenerate.

23.Roy has watched New York City sleeping. It was cute and cuddly. Then it nearly killed him.

24.Roy kept re-creating himself until he was happy. Then he started freaking people out with what he had created, and how he did so.

25.Roy is like a computer with feelings. Yea, computers have feelings. Well, one of them, anyway.

26.Roy is pretty sure he found a serious flaw in Newton’s math and is absolutely positive Newton was a nutjob.

27.Roy doesn’t believe in imaginary numbers. And thinks rules are made to be broken and fixed later.

28.Roy is totally positive he has solved that whole “moral relativism” problem. And the mind/body one.

29.Roy spent twenty years in a cave studying light and the things light does. He also read his first book on quantum mechanics at about 15. He didn’t tell anyone. Intellectualism was a dirty word in his home.

30.Roy likes to calculate things in his head, and made up a system of calculus to do so. But it’s more of a metaphorical calculus than a mathematical one. It does, however, work for math too. Solves it, in a sense.

31.Roy can prove that P=NP and that it sometimes doesn’t. The solution, curiously enough, includes an infinite number of zeros. Also, you need at least one time dimension.

32.Roy thinks the Buddha was hilarious and that Jesus had a better sense of humor than most modern Jewish comedians.

33.Roy knows that without a brain to process reality, it looks a whole lot different. This is why he values his time here so much it often looks like he’s wasting it. And why he doesn’t believe in traditional versions of Heaven or Hell. They are both real, and here. I’ve been to both and lived to tell about it…for some god-damned reason.

34.Roy thinks that if you can’t explain your theory to an eight-year old, it’s either not a very good theory, or you don’t understand it yourself. Eight-year-olds, dude.

35.Uncle Roy is a big hit with his nieces and nephews. Roy is not so much a big hit with his own family. See his list of “25” things for a few hints. What, it wasn’t supposed to be in base 22.5? Says who?

36.Roy got the fuck out of Texas after college to free his mind. He came back after he freed his soul.

37.Roy knows a bit more, and a bit less, than he lets on.

38.Roy is really fun to watch football with.

39.Roy decided to go with RobotPirateNinja because it’s the coolest thing ever and was bored shitless watching the economy collapse around him. It was only a matter of time, people.

40.Roy has probably written more online that most people will read in a lifetime. If you factor in the illiterates. What?! It’s not like they are going to read this and get all pissy about it.

41.Roy thinks making fun of illiterate people is mean and should certainly not be done in prose.

42.Roy is mean sometimes, for comedy’s sake. Comedy is a right bastard.

43.Roy has been very blessed and is moderately cursed.

44.Roy acts like a slacker but is a cave-dwelling over-achiever.

45.Roy has lived in a cave since about 10. He thought everyone did. Then he realized it’s only most people, and they live in caves of their own creation.

46.Roy likes it better outside. A lot better.

47.Roy is an Eagle Scout. This got him his first real job. Which then got him his second. Which then got him his third (repeat until last summer).

48.Roy sometimes thinks N-dimensionally, which is tiring and stressful, and more fun than people might imagine. Kinda like sex.

49.Roy is pretty sure he talks too much, but he’s got a lot to say. Spending twenty years in a cave will do that do a man.

50.Roy is a big fan of the number fifty. It’s waaay cooler than twenty-five, although hyphens are fun too.

0. Thanks for reading. I could do this all day. Did it for a month, turned it into a book.

Declining membership, baptisms worry Southern Baptists – USATODAY.com

For most of four decades, Southern Baptists could boast of rising membership even as more moderate and liberal Protestant denominations lost members in droves.

But with membership slightly down last year, and flat for the past five, Southern Baptists face a growing anxiety about their future as they gather for their annual meeting Tuesday in Indianapolis.

“We have peaked,” Southern Baptist statistician Ed Stetzer wrote in an online commentary on the latest statistics from 2007. “…For now, Southern Baptists are a denomination in decline.”

I blame the dancing, or lack thereof. This trend will generally continue in the modern world because of two things.

1) This is the Information Age and many (most) dogmatic religions require a good bit of ignorance to be considered accurate descriptions of the (unknown) world. With more information available, it is more likely people will be exposed to a world their religion does a poor job of explaining/describing.

And…2) People are getting smarter…

Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the “intellectual elite” considered themselves atheists than the national average.

A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed.

But the conclusions – in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence – have been branded “simplistic” by critics.

—

He said religious belief had declined across 137 developed nations in the 20th century at the same time as people became more intelligent.

…

“Linking religious belief and intelligence in this way could reflect a dangerous trend, developing a simplistic characterisation of religion as primitive, which – while we are trying to deal with very complex issues of religious and cultural pluralism – is perhaps not the most helpful response,” [Professor Gordon Lynch] said.

[full story]

Quite the contrary, in fact. Looking at it as primitive is precisely what the world needs. There are primitive things that are useful, but they are not dominant…anymore. That’s why we call them “primitive”. We have better answers now.