Mischief Maker wrote:

ndd wrote:

i just don't get why you are still so dishonest about what you're interested in and why. religion and society matter to you. you have serious thoughts and questions about them. you're not just dicking around with this shit because LOL CALTROPS - that's a lame excuse and i think even you know it.

what is your actual interest? you can tell me, i'm not going to laugh at you. caltrops isn't going to die due to an excess of sharing.

Only dishonest in my intentions. Everything I've posted on Caltrops is consistent with my personal philosophy, I've just been doling it out in small, out-of-context chunks that avoid spelling out the overriding theme for 3 reasons:

1. I don't want to pull a Quentinbec and give enough identifying info here that the antics of my electronic persona begin to interfere with the life of my meat persona.

2. Defining my actual interest is still very much a work in progress and when I've tried to express it in its incomplete form to people IRL, it's often completely misinterpreted. Lord knows how it would fly in cyberspace.

3. {Ed. Note: fucking youtube clip retracted}

But for you, my dear, anything.

Ever since my young adulthood, I have been troubled by people/society's tendency to value imaginary/conceptual things over real/material things, and their protection of such dysfunctional beliefs by granting them sacred/serious status. Religion is merely the most obvious example of this phenomenon, and as such I attack it with gusto.

To address uwpp's previous ruminations, my disdain for religion is not the result of being "Mr Rebound" for churchy chicks in High School. That was actually pretty awesome, if confusing. If you want a formative trauma from that time that shaped the trajectory of my life, it would probably be writing for the high school newspaper. I did not submit a single article that was not censored in one form or another. Tellingly, it was not my dirty jokes that were cut, but my criticisms of the school administration's policies. I guess I've now answered my own question of why I've stuck with the 'Trops through thick and thin.

The philosophy of Science was obviously very appealing, but I soon learned in college that lab work was not fulfilling to me, didn't play to my natural talents, and with Bush and the Republicans buddying up to the creationists and putting stem cell research under the crosshairs at the time, didn't seem like a secure career choice. Nonetheless, I still identify much more as a scientist than as a lawyer.

This is why I found your idea to become a preacher so awful. Even a "live and let live" noncommittal left-leaning religion like Unitarianism. If anything, its refusal to scrutinize the validity of any religion's "sacred" values is anathema to me.

But truth be told, scary as religious folks are getting these days, I think the more pernicious influences over the world today are "unquestionable" secular values.

For the specific topic that's been on my mind these last few months, I'm still mulling over "The Great Happiness Space." I saw the prostitutes and hostesses willfully letting themselves be victimized by the same racket they profit from not as a freakshow of crazy Japanese subcultures, but as an example of a desperate longing that everyone in our society attempts to satisfy with imperfect substitutes (religion being one of them,) amplified by these people living at the outermost edges. But to satisfy that longing? That would require slaughtering one of the most sacred cows of civilized society...

At the same time I'm in a career shift from Lawyer to full-time Mediator. The more I learn and the more cases I mediate pro bono, the more I'm amazed and appalled at the waste caused by deferred conflicts and people overvaluing their dysfunctional beliefs. This is a job I'm hoping will truly satisfy my personal values.

Does that answer your question?