Brettia

Whee! I’m a bloggin’! Yeah. I know I need to blog, since it’s been well over the customary seven-day period. (Ten days, right now.) I’m still going for Photoshop CS, in case you were wondering (I know you weren’t), which is a cool $270, and I have $105 so far. Subtract about $5 in charges incurred from Apple iTunes Music Store downloads, and you have a good $100. Technically, PCS isn’t out yet, but I can preorder it. I’ll probably wait to see if the general web development community likes it before spending so much money, so I’m not really in a rush to accumulate my $270. Patience, young Padawan. Soon what you desire will be yours. Only a little bit longer.

In other news, I had to present this project for Spanish today, which really sucked, because we had to (God forbid!) speak in Spanish! Actually, I got an 89% on the speaking portion and an estimated 97% on the PowerPoint presentation portion, for a nice 93% average, which is low according to my academic standards, but not too bad. It seems that in high school you have to present things a lot more often, and I haven’t had a single project I haven’t had to present except in English class. I’m not the world’s best public speaker, but I’m better than some. It’s that nerdy shyness that makes it hard. And then that doubles when you have to speak in a different language to a group of kids who are all 1-2 years older than you (I’m a level ahead in my Spanish class).

The project itself was an organizational nightmare; we (my group) were all trying to go to each other’s houses and stuff and it didn’t really work out. We ended up just corresponding though e-mail and AIM, though one of the group members didn’t do anything at all. I somehow was spared having to do the bulk of the work this time, like I usually do. Poor Ellie Conser and Raquel Parks, both pretty nice, decent people, got crushed by the load and were saved by me because of my impeccable grammar (English and Spanish) and my crack technological skillz. Okay, that was a bit immodest, but I did help out a lot in the end. Most of the time it was kind of funny because Ellie was getting a bit intense whenever we were under the gun to finish something. Her eyes flare and you have the sudden thought that it might be a good idea to stay away from her for a while.

Lately I’ve been plagued with questions about religion. I’m no longer sure if I want to be Christian or not, or if I want to have any religion at all. My friend Jim is a Buddhist, and he seems to like it okay, and my friend Dylan announces he’s an atheist every ten minutes, just in case I forget. Tyler, the other writer for the blog, is quite unhappy with his overly religious parents that ship him off to religious education classes one night a week. (These are only one set of his parents; the other ones seem to not care much about church.)

So if my friends are grudgingly Catholic, atheist, and Buddhist, then what am I? Currently I’m Methodist, which I feel is the best flavor of Christianity because it isn’t so ritualistic and strict. Plus we Methodists don’t have priests or popes or cardinals, meaning there aren’t middle-aged men raping little boys in our organization.

Really, I don’t care much for Methodism, or Christianity, but it seems to be the best thing for me that I have found so far. I don’t know what the parental reaction would be if I announced I no longer want to be a Christian, so I just keep it to myself, go to church every Sunday like the little fat sheep I am, and get presents on Christmas, that holiday that used to be Christ’s birthday but is now every child in the world’s second birthday, with the exception of those poor souls who were born on Christmas and must wait a whole year before getting anything new. That would suck royally.

Anyway, I’ve thought about atheism, which would be the easiest to fulfill, since I wouldn’t have to do anything, but it seems kind of empty. My idea of a good religion is one that promotes philosophical beliefs and the meaning of life, rather than emphasizing some benevolent, all-powerful creator and the afterlife. Christianity is so geared toward going to Heaven that it seems like there is nothing else to it.

[WARNING: Possible Book Spoilers Ahead] I read a book recently called The Da Vinci Code, which is about a college professor who is called to investigate the murder of the curator of the Louvre museum in Paris, who is actually a member of a secret society called the Priory of Sion who are charged with guarding the Holy Grail and revealing it when the time is right. Contrary to popular belief, the Holy Grail is not a cup, but rather Mary Magdalene, that little known Biblical character who was actually Jesus’ wife. She bore him a son, meaning that he had a bloodline, meaning that there are descendants of him. The college professor is chased by the police, who think that he is the murderer and are trying to trap him at the scene, and he is helped by a cryptographer, none other than the granddaughter of the curator.

The book goes through several cities, unveiling a huge conspiracy started thousands of years ago by the early Catholic Church, when it rewrote parts of the New Testament in order to secure its position in the world (if Jesus had a bloodline, then he was an ordinary man, rather than the all-powerful virgin the Bible declared him to be). The Holy Grail, Mary Magdalene, is actually her remains and several chests of documents proving the New Testament incorrect that were once guarded by the famous Knights Templar from the Crusades. You should read the book to get the whole story, but my point here is that Christianity is built on a foundation of lies and deceit such as this.

I’m not saying that The Da Vinci Code is correct (though it could be, since many of the facts presented in it are the truth, and I’ve been to many of the places described in the setting, and can affirm their reality), but that perhaps we aren’t getting the true story in the Bible. Also, the Catholic Church, and Christians in general, always come up with some other explanation or reason for something when they are proved wrong. What happened when Darwin put forth his theory of evolution (which is bolstered with more evidence every day)? The Church was quite unhappy, and in fact Darwin’s wife feared that he would go to Hell for trying to prove the “holy” Bible incorrect. But now that we are almost sure that Darwin was right, the particular part of the Bible that was disproved isn’t spoken of anymore.

So now you know my reasons for being unhappy with Christianity. Buddhism, on the other hand, is full of philosophical jargon and such, full of fulfilling thoughts about nature and the world, and has no all-powerful god. (Though Buddha is called a kind of god or holy man, depending on the sect of Buddhism you join.) So perhaps I’ll consider it. More likely, I’ll go on with my empty faith routine, and hope that one day Pastor Doug will say something at church to enlighten me to the point where I feel driven to “serve God.”
I think my mom knows about my unenthusiasm about our religion already because she brought back a book from a positive thinking seminar in Texas called The Power of Positive Thinking for Teens. I read part of it to humor her, thinking it might be somehow worthwhile, but put it down immediately when I found that all it was about was “trusting God to see you through your problems.” This was incredibly deceptive, since the book says nothing about religion for the first ten pages, nor does it look religious in any way. Just another reason not to judge a book by its cover, I guess.

This brings to light another thing about Christianity: it’s too happy and trusting. They want you to think that everything bad is just God’s will, and that everything good is a reward for doing God’s will. Thought: What if everything bad happened just because it did, or because of a previous action, and everything good happened because you worked your ass off for it? I don’t want to attribute all my successes to someone else! Where’s the logic in that? And has God ever proven that He’s there? No! Have my prayers ever been answered? No! And if He’s such a good, benevolent God, then why does He let people kill each other in their constant arguments and wars over Him? Does He just watch over us all as we starve and die and kill and rape, laughing at our stupidity?

Now, any pastor or devout Christian would give me the classic Christian response to the above paragraph, telling me how God did this and that for us, all the while avoiding every question I asked in the interest of drafting me into the religion of lies. I don’t mean to be harsh; I have as much respect for Christians as I do for anyone, but I just can’t believe in it because it sounds so stupid and ludicrous. I read another book a long time ago about a radical Christian group who thinks the world will end and only they will be saved, so they pick up their families and move to some remote hilltop. Then there’s a huge gunfight against the other people who want to be saved as well, and lots of innocent women and children die. How is that Christian? You’d think God would have mercy on us all and just disappear rather than exist and continue to torment us by causing wars and fights in His name.

I dunno. I just don’t get it, I guess, but I’m tired of those “classic Christian responses” that don’t help at all. Maybe I’ll figure it out someday, but I have a feeling the answer to Christianity won’t make me want to join the ranks.