Dear Ted Haggard,

Fuck you.

Hold on. Allow me to back up just a bit.

Ted, you have spent your life building and maintaining boxes. All kinds of boxes, but particularly in regards to sexuality. You have a "Normal" box, and a "Faggot" box. You have built a career putting people into these boxes. If someone didn't quite fit neatly into one box or the other, you'd cram and shove them in.

Then, you'd nail the boxes shut and lock them up with chains. If anyone ever tried to pry open their box just a little bit you would shame them, taunt them, and threaten them with all kinds of horrible things. When everyone was packed uncomfortably in your boxes, you were happy to kick the "Faggot" box into a lake of fire - quite literally in your mind. You did all this in the name of Jesus, and the name of love.

All the while, you were living a secret, double life. You were paying a man to bring you drugs and have sex with you. The next day, you'd return to your boxes. You would have been perfectly content to continue the double life forever wouldn't you? But the man you paid for sex didn't let that happen - he exposed you. I bet you were mad at first, but it wasn't long before you told the world how liberating it was to have all your secrets out in the open. Lucky you.

Now, Ted, you've been on Oprah, and you told her you don't think that you fit nicely into one of your own boxes. You have a complicated sexuality that can't be defined simply.

Well guess what Ted: Everyone has a complicated sexuality that can't be defined simply. No one fits nicely into one of your boxes. All of this time you've been ruining lives by forcing simple definitions on complicated people, in the name of loving them, and all it took to change your mind was having your lies exposed, your hypocrisy made public, and your reputation and fortune threatened.

So fuck you, Ted. Fuck you with a white-hot metal rod. Fuck you so hard you beg for the lake of fire.

Sincerely,

The Jolly Bloger

George Bush - God

Don't read any politics into this, its just really cool.

GW Bush Vs John Lennon: GOD - Click here for more free videos

Redefining Death

"We try to think of organisms as engaging in a work of self-preservation. To be living is to be engaged in that work. To die is to cease to be engaged,"

I love bioethics. I think it's the most intellectually compelling field in science. The problem is this: It is unethical to remove organs from patients who are considered "alive". Alive used to mean a stopped heart, but with modern technology, it's possible to keep a heart beating in a clearly dead body. So now "alive" means the brain is functioning. But it appears as though some brain functions carry on in what we would also call dead bodies from a humanistic moral perspective.

So, do we severely cut back on organ transplants, resulting in many more deaths, because of a technical definition of "alive," or compromise medical ethics by removing organs from "living" people, or do we sit our asses down and think like we've never thought before to find a satisfying philosophical way to fulfil our moral requirement, while still managing to maximize the lives saved by organ transplantation? What do you think the bioethicists did?

Probablemente Dios no existe.

(via RD)

The atheist bus ad campaign is spreading. Faster that I would have thought, and in unlikely directions. Wonderful!

Don't you just love how that sounds in spanish?

"Probablemente... Dios no existe."

The Double Standard

Ok, Madoff is a jerk, but this guy kinda makes me smile. Is that bad?

When I saw the headline Catholics targeted by NY man in $17M Ponzi scheme I said "I thought the Pope lived in Italy... and I'm pretty sure its waaay more than $17 million."

Seriously though, isn't religion all just one big financial scam, among other things? Surely Catholicism is (though technically, a Ponzi scheme implies at least some people are paid back). So the question becomes: to what does the title of this post refer?

Lacking a good theory, an awful one may be the best

A strange thing happened at a wind farm in the UK. One of their turbines got severely damaged. Assuming it was hit by an object (which, from the damage, looks likely), the object must have been approximately the size and weight of a cow. It is currently unknown what specifically may have hit the turbine.

Therefore, it was an alien spacecraft. A very small, cow-sized one. Drunk driving too, I imagine. Bats can avoid those motherfuckers. Bats rule, but I gotta think interstellar travelers could trump even a bat's navigation systems with their UFO (Ungulate Flying Object).

Update:

I figured it out! It was one of these! An undiscovered population of extant pterosaur living in England is way more likely than clumsy visitors from planet Moron.

Happy New Year

2009 is going quite well for the Jolly Bloger so far. Wanna know what my resolutions are?

As always, I'd like to blog more. I'm much busier at work than I used to be, and some of my hobbies have suffered. However, I still waste too much time on unproductive activities. I'll try to make more time for writing, and also for reading books. I just finished this one, and started this one.

I also want to get outdoors much more often. I'll be using this book for motivation - I'll try to work my way through the entire thing eventually. If anyone in the Vancouver area is looking for a hiking partner and doesn't mind talking to a crazy person, let me know.

I'm going to continue to consciously shed my collection of silly childish biases that I have accumulated throughout my life. I have plenty that I won't go into right now, and it's time to let go. Part of this, however, is a ridiculous bias against new technology. I was against cell phones for far too long, totally against blogging for even longer, and it seems that every time I hear of a new trend I automatically take the stance that it's a pointless fad. RSS, torrents, podcasts... I held out on these for ages for no reason, and now I can't live without them.

No longer: I'm on Twitter!

I signed up this morning, and so far it seems alright! I haven't quite got the hang of it yet, but I'm following a few people, including Penn Jillette, from whom I have already learned more about the next season of Bullshit than I could find on Wikipedia. So that's a plus.

The thing is, I'm using my real name on Twitter. I'd like to share it here, but this blog is more or less anonymous. Although... that has created some difficulties for me in the past. Let's do this shall we?

My name is Jesse Brydle. I am 23 years old. I live in Vancouver, British Columbia. I work in tech support, for a non profit organization. I am also one of the leaders of the Centre for Inquiry in Vancouver. My personal email address is jbrydle [at] gmail [dot] com. My Twitter feed is twitter.com/JesseBrydle.

Ah, ok. That feels better. I don't particularly love the idea of family members or potential employers Googling my name and having all this insanity come to the top, so I'm still going to post as the Jolly Bloger. I just won't be going to any lengths to hide my identity anymore, i.e. when posting comments on other sites.

So, that took a weird turn. Happy New Year everyone!