FIREBLIND.COM

As most of you know, I recently retired from my 41-year acting stint as evolutionary psychologist Dirk St. Claire on Telemundo’s Novela Sin Conclusión. You might have seen the retrospective on CNN, but that’s besides the point. The real point is that, in my opinion, playing a “scrappy, never-say-die rebel psychologist with a dark and adventurous past and a heart of gold” has more than qualified me to write on the topic of dream psychology and the link between the unconscious and conscious mind. I think everyone else would probably agree, as I’m sure you do.

Rather than publish in a trendy, hoity-toity peer-reviewed psychology journal, I’ve decided to share—here with you, my faithful readers—a theory that Time magazine has called “the most important psychology discovery of the last decade.” (ed’s note: yeah, not so much.) I’m calling it “King Awesome’s nightmare-bladder theory.”

As it turns out, I don’t dream much. Or, if I do, I don’t ever remember what I dream about. The only time I ever remember dreams is when I have a nightmare, and even then, those are incredibly rare. I realized after 4 or 5 recent nightmares that when I woke up there was something physically bothering me. In most cases, I was super hot under my blankie comforter, but occasionally I found myself having to pee worse than R. Kelly at a middle school. Since this realization came to me, I’ve noticed that everytime I wake up from a nightmare, there’s something going on that I need to be conscious to “solve”.

In the case of being too warm, I would wager that my body tried to kick off the comforter. When it couldn’t through basic effort, my brain probably tried to wake the conscious part of me to get rid of it, but because I’m always so exhausted from lack of sleep it wasn’t having an easy time of it. Thus, part of my subconscious decided to punch my conscious brain in the nuts by throwing a nightmare its way. Presto! Heat problem solved.

While this is all well and fine, it would be nice if my asshole subconscious would be more selective with its nightmares. Last night I woke up after dreaming about my entire family dieing when a bloody airliner crashed into their neighborhood, killing them and like 200 other people in houses nearby. And to what end? I had a full bladder. Apparently, my subconscious associates my parents’ and siblings’ deaths with urination. Go figure.

What I want to know is, what ever happened to traditional, wholesome nightmares, like Freddy Kruger or an out-of-town drifter strangling me after a night of anonymous sex in an alley? (ed’s note: uhhhhhhhhh…) I may only be thirty-years-old, but in my day we did nightmares the right way. The American way. I just don’t understand this world anymore. *sigh*

Yeah, this is probably old news to real psychologists, but in case it’s not: if you’re a “real” scientist with a current “scientist license”, I guess you can steal my theory. Just don’t forget to credit me, King Awesome (yes, that is my real name; you can thank my urine for naming me that).

Link of the day: on second thought, don’t click this link, unless a half-Hello Kitty, half-woman in lingerie is your bag.

I’ve been on a tear lately with respect to how “obvious” it is that the Bible was written by man. At every turn god is inefficient with his actions, forgetful, angry, grudge-holding, drawn out, and just all-around a great showman. I realize that if he exists, god can pretty much act however he wishes. It just seems that, time and time again, the god of the Bible acts exactly like a petty human would, and not how I imagine a rational, all-powerful being would.

For example, take the story of Moses. Rather than just change Pharaoh’s mind and set all the Israelites free, god embarks on a long, drawn-out story arc involving a kid in a basket, a prophet with magical powers, plagues of frogs, unadulterated murder of innocent firstborns, parting seas, burning bushes, and so on. It’s as if Andrew Lloyd Webber were sitting around his apartment one day with too much synthesizer music on his hands and decided to write a stage production involving lasers and smoke. Why a burning bush rather than just talking to Moses in his head? Why part the sea rather than just kill all of the Egyptians with a wave of the hand? Why float Moses down the river in a freaking basket rather than oh, I don’t know, just let his mom walk him over to Pharaoh’s house?

Or, how about Noah? Rather than just snap his fingers to wipe out mankind and be done with the whole sordid affair, god cooks up a convoluted plan involving floods, a boat too impossibly small to hold all the animals, 40 days of rain, drowning every last man, woman, and child (and dinosaur!), a dove, a rainbow, and so on. It is unfathomable that a rational, all-powerful being should go to such lengths to teach mankind a lesson, and then to actually instruct his human scribe to write down that the rainbow is a reminder to himself, as if he would somehow forget! I wonder if he forgets to send Christmas cards to his ugly kids from his first marriage?

Why say we have free will and command us to choose god, only to let a malicious evil spirit run around and tempt us surreptitiously? Why say we have free will, but handicap us from the start with original sin (the default state of which is hell)? Why create animals with camouflage and organs for killing when there is no death or hunting in the garden of Eden? Why give Adam and Eve a urethra (we know this because they were ashamed of their nudity) and not just allow them to exist without the need for food? Why create billions of stars and planets that mankind will never see, even with telescopes?

Lest I drone on and on about what a good playwright the big G-O-D is, let me just say that the Bible itself is the biggest farce of them all. Why record, over the course of several thousand pages, the convoluted and most banal occurrences of a few hundred insignificant humans? Why not just imprint the most salient points inside each human’s mind, or perhaps save us all the boring filler and just have a page listing the don’ts? Why not just create us like the angels, instead of throwing horrible physical tests at us, not to mention torture, starvation, burning, and so on? You can almost see a little Jewish priest sitting around a campfire, making stuff up, thinking of ways to show how cool he is because he’s good friends with Yahweh.

The fact that the most important testament that the universe has ever seen was written in languages unknown to 95% of the word’s population, or that it was not physically present in geography where 95% of the world’s historical population has lived, demonstrates that it is at best irrelevant to human existence.

I realize that I’m arguing from an irrational position (”IF god, THEN anything” is the simple refutation to my position), but the religions of the world are so needlessly complex that even the best soap operas can’t touch them for worthless story line and non-nonsensical filler. To take the religious tomes at face value would imply that god is highly inefficient where he could be efficient, painfully murderous where he could painlessly snap people out of existence, and incredibly unimaginative. “Hi, I’m God, creator of the universe. I’ll create everything and then let it all unravel because a talking snake is too smart for me. Oh no!” Bloody hell. If the true god is really this incompetent and dramatic, we’d be better off with a junior high school girl in charge. Sure, they’ve about as much drama as god is, but at least they won’t murder your children every time a king pisses them off.

My last post was kind of a convoluted mess about free will, age of accountability, and a couple of paragraphs on dinosaurs. I thought it might be useful to restate the age of accountability stuff without all the anti-dinosaur propaganda. So, here goes.

My observation is that most (though not all) modern American Christians subscribe to a concept of something called the “age of accountability”. In its most simple form this belief holds that children (and the mentally retarded) are not mature enough to be held accountable for their sins, so god treats them differently from adults when they die. Basically, the church holds that god is merciful and even though children are stained by original sin, god grants them entrance to Heaven because they didn’t have the opportunity to “undo” the sin through salvation and baptism.

It’s interesting to note that this doctrine appears nowhere explicitly in the actual Bible, and until the Catholic church adopted the idea of Limbo for unbaptized children, doctrine was that unbaptized kids went to hell. The now-apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter, for instance, written sometime around the 2nd-century, clearly shows children in Hell. Nevertheless, I wish to take up the modern Catholic and mainstream American Protestant belief that all children, regardless of baptismal status, will go to Heaven upon their death.

I feel that a modern Christian would say that all of the following are true:

1. Children who die before the age of accountability will go to Heaven.
2. Fetuses that are aborted have souls, and will therefore go to Heaven.
3. If a child lives to the age of accountability, it’s more likely that they will end up in Hell rather than Heaven.
4. If a fetus is actually born, it is possible that its life will be one of hardship.
5. It is always preferable to be in Heaven rather than Hell.
6. Murderers can be saved and can go to Heaven.
7. Women and men who choose abortion for their fetus are murderers. Or, if not “murderers”, they have committed a sin.
8. Women who get abortions can go to Heaven.

Based on the above statements, I contend that abortion is the best possible scenario for a human being. The child will never know the hardships of life, and since they won’t make it to the age of accountability, they have no possibility of making it to Hell. Since Hell is never better than Heaven, and since being born raises one’s chances of going to Hell, dying before birth avoids all possible negativities associated with life as a human. Or, if the child is born, dying before accountability prevents them from going to Hell even if it does not preclude them from having experienced hardship.

In order for this paragraph to be false, either children who die go to Hell, fetuses don’t have souls, or sometimes Hell is preferable to Heaven for a soul.

As far as the adult life goes, so long as they repent for their abortion, and so long as they believe Christ to be their savior, the Bible teaches that they can get into Heaven. The words of Jesus himself would seem to indicate that in actuality it is more likely that both lives will choose Hell rather than Heaven, so even if the mother did not repent before her death, she at least guaranteed the salvation of her own child.

Someone might say “abortion or child murder is wrong because god says it is, therefor you shouldn’t do it”. In reality, that’s irrelevant. If all of my statements above are true, it is 100% likely that at least one soul will get into Heaven. If the adult repents, the likelihood of both souls going to Heaven can also be 100%. On the other hand, if the child is allowed to live into adulthood, the likelihood of both souls going to Hell seems to be better than 50/50. Thus, it doesn’t matter what god says, as his own doctrine leaves an “out”.

In the end, we have a doctrine that either must be false (children do go to Hell), or we have shown Christianity to have a very serious internal contradiction (abortion/murder of children is preferable to letting them live). My own personal feeling is that a perfect god would not allow for an irrational doctrine, so this contradiction furthers the idea that Christianity is not divinely inspired. Or, if there is a god, he’s not perfect and can be irrational.

A friend of mine put up a website a couple of months ago with a pretty active forum. A lot of talk was going on about the concept of free will, so I started a thread on Christianity’s concept of free will and how it pertains to children and the mentally incapacitated. Feel free to check it out here.

My basic premise is that we don’t have free will, and that we’re essentially biological machines operating on autopilot. I argue that the idea of a soul has no merit.

The more I think about it, the more screwed up the concept of free will becomes in the context of religion, Christianity in particular. Although a lot of American Christians do believe in predestination to at least a small extent, most don’t. Their idea is that we have a soul, and that soul has free will to sin, to choose god, and so on. There are certain conditions, like children and the mentally incapacitated, where the free will rules don’t apply.

Let’s think about all of this for a second. You go to a wedding because your stupid friend is marrying someone he shouldn’t, and you have the amazingly good fortune of meeting the hottest—and apparently dumbest—bridesmaid there. You guys dance and even though you swear you’re not gay, you set the floor on fire with your enthusiastic version of the chicken dance. A couple more hours of open bar and you two are riding the no condom train to 3-minutes of pleasure town (I’d be like 2 hours though, because I’m obviously such a stud). Even though she swore she was on the pill, you’re an expectant father by 2 a.m. Congrats. Your ugly horse baby is on its way.

God, sitting up in the clouds, notices that you’ve magically placed an order for a soul and whips one up to come down and inhabit your new fertilized egg. Since Christians feel that the point of this life is to demonstrate our character to god so that he’ll let us into heaven later, we can say that god has just created a soul merely to test it. And, since Adam and Eve sinned in the garden of Eden around 5,700 years ago, your kid is automatically a sinner without ever having had a chance to utter his first swear word (I vote for “boobies” when he does).

So, before your kid is even an hour old we’ve had two problems with free will: we’ve forced god into making a soul, and your kid is a sinner without ever having sinned himself.

Three things can basically happen with the pregnancy. First, it can fail on its own, in which case god made a soul, let it incubate in your dumb girlfriend’s womb for 4 months, and then decided to kill its body and take it up to heaven. Second, you can get an abortion, in which case you killed the baby and it still gets a free ride to heaven. Third, you can have the kid.

If your kid survives the pregnancy, he will either be born retarded or normal. If he’s retarded, he gets a free pass to heaven. If he’s normal, so long as he dies before the so-called age of accountability (which doesn’t actually exist in the Bible), he gets a free pass to heaven. But, if he’s normal and lives too long and then doesn’t accept god, he’ll go to hell.

In short, I’m not sure why the hell anyone would actually want to survive into maturity. Isn’t it better to die as a kid so that you can go to heaven? If the purpose of life is to test the soul to see if it’s worthy to get into heaven, why give kids and the Corkies of the world a free pass? Why even have something called childhood? Why doesn’t god just magically create souls in a coliseum and make them run laps or something to see if they’re good enough for heaven? It seems like he’s just wasting time cooking up kids, inserting souls into them, and then snuffing them out just to take the soul back up to heaven.

Does the retarded kid have a soul? If so, is his soul too retarded to be able to figure out good and evil? I used to work with disabled kids, and the ones with Down Syndrome were always rubbing on stuff. If being retarded means I get to rub my junk on everything and I still get to go to heaven, I’m not sure how retardation is a bad thing.

The logical conclusion of the free pass for kids quite literally is that it’s moral to murder children. It sounds like I’m just trying to be argumentative, but I’m not. If there really is a god and he’s all pissed that I write this blog, wouldn’t I have been far better off if my parents had aborted me or had driven me into a lake or something when I was a kid? They could have asked for forgiveness and had their sins forgiven. Meanwhile, I could be kicking Mother Theresa’s ass in limbo up on a cloud somewhere. Instead, I live to be an adult, watch too many episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and now I’m the one who gets to go to hell. I’m the one who gets a butt full of flaming hot coals, all because Adam and Eve ate a stupid apple that a stupid talking snake offered to them and because my parents didn’t love me enough to abort me. Thanks a lot mom and dad. Jerks.

Seriously, how is abortion a bad thing? It’s a free ticket to eternal bliss, and there’s no risk of ever having to experience starvation, thirst, genocide, drug abuse, depression, or freaking progeria. Why would we want to solve birth defects that result in mental retardation? Wear a helmet and a diaper as an adult and you and your retarded soul also get into heaven. None of it makes a lick of sense. We should be praying for failed pregnancies. We should be encouraging mothers to drink and smoke and snort their lunches. Muslims should be totally stoked when the Jews kill one of their kids. Instead they get all like “kill the infidels” or “may Allah’s sweaty balls rub on your Jew face”.

In conclusion, if you love your kids, you should abort them. Or maybe do copious amounts of pot while you’re pregnant. Anything less means you want them to go to hell. Ass.

Ok. Now, i know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “no way is he going to write a blog about sex with animals and how it’s kinda sorta ok”. You’d be wrong though, because I am. Before you go back to watching Malcolm in the Middle or whatever other dumb show you’ve got on, hear me out for a second.

I was reading a story about a guy who pleaded guilty—for the second time—to having sex with a female dog. The lawyers in the case were deciding whether to charge him with a sex crime and put him on the sex offender registry.

To put it simply, I hate the sex offender registry in this country. Actually, a better way to say it is that the sex offender registry idea has merit, but the way in which it has come to include nearly every possible crime there is is beyond stupid. In some states, you can be charged as a sex offender and forced to be on the registry for life because your drunken ass really had to pee after a party and an alley was the only place to go. Nevermind that your willy was nowhere near another human being, you’re somehow a sicko who can no longer live near schools or playgrounds.

Our society has decided that sex crimes are worthy of special infamy, and I’m cool with that. Molesting kids is possibly the best way to ensure that their life is one of misery and confusion. Do something worse to a kid beyond simple molestation and you’ve basically guaranteed that that kid will suffer every day of their life. Sex offender registry. Done. Make the bastard have the worst life possible.

Another story I read the other day was about a female teacher or school coach or administrator or something who was accused or found guilty of having sex with a male student who was 17 years and like 361 days old. Four more days and he’d have been 18. Guess what? That female is now on or bound for the sex offender registry, which is ridiculous. There should be some bloody common sense in the system. Maybe you put her away for a little while for abusing her position of authority. But in no way does having sex with someone who is 4 days shy of an arbitrary “legalizing” birthday merit lifelong stigma and punishment. It’s insane.

Anyways, back to the guy and the dog. You know, maybe the guy has some screws loose if he feels the need to give his dog the ol’ heave-ho. I’m not a trained psychologist, but I would bet good money that a paraphilia like bestiality has little to no relationship to sexual aggression towards humans (children or otherwise). People who are into things like scat and whatnot don’t get put on the sex offender list, and that’s about as screwed up a fetish as you can get.

Here’s what I find particularly ridiculous about our society. Let’s say that you and that female dog were in like a warehouse, and an earthquake knocked it down. You two are trapped in it, and rescuers are having trouble locating the two of you. After like a week, you could reach over with your knife and slit the dog’s bloody throat, consume its raw flesh, and when they dig you out, it wouldn’t count against you. You just murdered your dog and ATE it, and more than likely, that would just make your ordeal sound that much more harrowing and add to your heroic triumph over adversity. But, if you get a little lonely while you’re buried and decide to try and make puppies, when they dig you out you’re f’ed for life.

We kill, murder, and otherwise slaughter millions of animals every day, and that’s totally cool. We take their bloody lives in inhumane and cruel ways and it’s looked at as another 9-to-5. But, the second you let your male dog try the ol’ donkey punch on you you’re completely hosed.

Now, I’m not saying that you should give in to those come hither glances your golden retriever is always giving you. I’m just saying that this world would be a better place if we used some common sense every once in a while. Maybe let the dog guy talk to a counselor. The teacher with the 17.96-year-old student? Maybe she abused her authority, but given my 12 years’ experience as a teenage boy, I’m pretty certain that kid had an erection when they were having intercourse.

Seriously people. If you want a sex offender registry, go nuts. But, if you’re going to destroy the rest of a person’s life in putting them on it, just consider whether they really need to be there or whether some other solution would work better.

An old friend of mine sent me an e-mail the other day, and as he does each time we talk, he reminded me that god still loves me. We hadn’t talked in a while, so I told him that I was increasingly more happy with my choice to reject Christianity as time went on. As you can imagine, this isn’t exactly ideal news to someone worried about your eternal soul.

Since moving past Christianity, I’ve actually studied the religion and its holy book far more in depth than I did when I was a believer. When one studies how Christianity and the Bible developed in the first centuries following the death of Jesus, it becomes increasingly obvious just how much a work of mankind the Bible really is. Thus, when i read the Bible as a work of man, I’m actually pretty impressed with it. It’s an amazing work of human ingenuity and imagination, and a historian like me finds a wealth of information on how ancient cultures lived and related to one another.

On the other hand, when I read the Bible as though it’s supposed to be the word of god, I find it so stupid as to be ridiculous. This person called god is the most amazing being to have ever existed, and yet he’s obsessed to the point of murder over the most retarded and inane minutia of human existence. Every time I read the Bible, I’m glad that I left it all behind.

To help illustrate my point about how ridiculous it all is, I’ve decided to write a little play about Deuteronomy 22:11. In this verse, god commands the Israelites not to wear garments made of both linen and wool.

The part of god will be played by me, Tom Selleck, and the part of Gabriel the angel will be played by you.

Scene opens. God is sitting on a sofa, eating a bag of Doritos. Gabriel enters from stage right.

Gabriel: Hey God, what’s up?
God: Oh, not much. Just chillin’.

God crunches loudly on a single Dorito.

Gabriel: You know, I was just thinking God; remember the time you invented space-time? Remember how there was nothing, and then you, the most powerful and rational being ever, simply thought it into existence? I mean, this is even before the planets, which are totally easy for you. But seriously, inventing the very fabric of space-time? That was pretty cool.

God smiles and blushes a little.

God: Yeah, I guess that was pretty cool.

Gabriel, excitedly: Or, remember how humans weren’t around yet, and so you took dirt from the earth and made DNA out of it? Freaking DNA! You took dirt and made a DNA chain for Adam that was like, what, 4 billion molecule pairs long? I gotta give it to you God, you’re pretty rad.
God: Thanks Gabriel. You’re pretty alright yourself.

God and Gabriel go quiet for a moment, considering how rad God is. God puts a Dorito in his mouth and chews it loudly. Gabriel smiles, thinking about something else totally rad that God did. God puts another Dorito in his mouth and looks slightly up, as if looking off in the distance. All of a sudden, he throws his bag of Doritos down and stands up excitedly, pointing.

God: Holy shit Gabriel. Holy SHIT. That man has just made a shirt of both linen and wool. Together!

God paces quickly back and forth as he mutters “holy shit holy shit holy shit”. He appears to be thinking. Gabriel looks worried, in stark disbelief that a man made a shirt of linen and wool. God stops and looks determinedly at Gabriel.

God: Gabriel, I want you to take 50 of your best invisible angels and go down to earth. You’re going to have to do battle with like, 70 of Satan’s invisible demons who are obviously taking over this man’s very soul. Fight them, and make me-damned sure that you don’t leave any of those me-damned demons standing. I want the oceans to run red with their invisible demon blood! Now GO!

Gabriel quickly assembles the best 50 invisible angels he can find, including Esteban, the Latin angel with the sexy accent that all the invisible girl angels would totally die for if they knew they were girls and liked boys.

God sits down on the sofa again, elbows on his knees and his hands holding his head. He worriedly strokes his long hair.

God, very quietly: How could it have come to this? How could I possibly have let someone make a shirt out of both linen and wool? I mean, I created a hundred billion stars with the sweep of my very hand. I wished bloody gravity into existence. And yet, I can’t keep someone from making a shirt out of linen and wool together? Oh, whoa is me. They’ll take away my god card for sure. I’m ruined. Ruined!!!

God continues to fidget nervously with his hair. He considers eating another Dorito, but decides that he’s sick to his invisible God stomach over the invisible battle going on on Earth right that very moment. As the curtain closes, God wipes away a single small tear, not so much for the soul of the guy with the shirt made of wool and linen, but because he could have had it all, including Stacy and the new Camaro. He might have even been captain of the track and field team. He’s not sure what will become of him now.

-Fin-

Link of the day: The Old Testament test for female adultery was forcing her to drink dirt water. If she got sick, she was obviously an adulterer. Kind of reminds me of the Monty Python witch test.