Some things I'm thankful for (and not so thankful for) in this festive season
Well, I'm thankful for my friends, and my LJ friends, two groups that intersect to some degree. Which is one reason why some parts of this message will be behind a cut. I'm sort of happy the worldcon is coming to Denver, that I get to work on it, and that we were able to get Kathy Mar as Special Music Guest. And I'm thankful to have lived to be 52, with most of my faculties intact and to have the ability to reason and question. Yes, every day, I look up at the sky, clench my fist, and shout,

Thank God I'm an Atheist!

As Brother Theodore once said (and I paraphrase using my mildly distorted memory) religious people spend too much time thinking about the beyond, and who or what is behind the beyond, to a point where they can't see beyond their behind.

I mean, think about it - don't so many religions hide behind the beyond, defining their deity as undefinable, unknown, mystical, beyond human understanding, unknowable, and on and on and on and on and on? To me, this entire spectrum of knowledge - that which is not yet known, defined or within the realm of science - is definable, simply, as ignorance. I can't understand how worship of the unknown is any different from the worship of ignorance, and I find this to be an execrable state of affairs. And as science makes inroads and discovers things about our universe that once were unknown, as the beyond shrinks and inroads are made on areas that were once unknowable. Is there anything to prove that any of that which is now unknown will always be unknown? If not, is there such a thing as the unknowable? As ignorance decreases and knowledge increases, god becomes smaller and smaller.

So, anyhow, what I'm actually getting at is those annoying ecards people keep sending me wanting me to be "blessed" by their particular brand of ignorance. I have an idea for my own ecard, but my artistic abilities are limited, so if any of you are artists, here's what you can give me for Festivus: An ecard, ready to send, patterned after a 50s B-movie style poster, headlined THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING GOD, in which Cthulhu-like creatures made out of steaming test tubes and mushroom clouds are eating away at an old man with a beard lying on a church pew, holding a black book of some sort. You see, paradoxically, I don't see the worship of knowledge for its own sake as being any better than the worship of ignorance.

And, having completed my rant, I'm thankful for owning my own house, in which I will now comfortably crawl into bed and sleep soundly.