J. Beaman - The Magazine

A website for christians that sends emails to their heathen friends explaining what has happened and given them (us) one more chance to pull their (our) heads out of their (our) asses before we burn. From the website:

We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses you provide, 6 days after the “Rapture” of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period. Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system.

We give you 150mb of encrypted storage that can be sent to 12 possible email addresses, in Box #1. You up load any documents and choose which documents go to who. You can edit these documents at any time and change the addresses they will be sent to as needed. Box #1 is for your personal private letters to your closest lost friends and relatives.

Ok, here’s some important things:

If you think that I’m going to burn in hell for eternity just because I don’t think like you that makes you an asshole and I despise you. I don’t want your emails and I’ll be glad you’re gone. Ooooh. Wait a minute! Unless the “documents” in the “encrypted storage” are the deeds to all of your churches where my friends and I could outfit with cool modern design furniture and have hip, swanky cocktail parties.

Actually, the rapture is a totally awesome idea.

Are those who believe a in a literal interpretation of the bible stupider than those who don’t? Don’t start arguing with me either. My IQ is high enough to know better than to take IQ scores seriously but it’s so fun to see the chart.

Christopher Hitchens in a debate with Andrew Sullivan on Tim Russert’s MSNBC program:

“I just think that if she knew how it made her look, sort of alternately soppy and bitchy, she’d stop it. But she can’t help herself, can she? She just can’t.”

He also called Sullivan a lesbian. Apparently some people are all worked up about the lesbian thing and the soppy and bitchy thing is just icing on the cake. Sullivan thinks the whole thing is silly.

This is one of my favorite things ever. From Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

What the old lady is describing is the infinite regress. From Wikipedia:

…if the truth of proposition P1 requires the support of proposition P2, and for any proposition in the series Pn, the truth of Pn requires the support of the truth of Pn+1. There would never be adequate support for P1, because the infinite sequence needed to provide such support could not be completed…

Apparently it’s one part of the Münchhausen Trilemma, ironically named because the Baron Münchhausen pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair.

And.

Euclidean geometry (invented by Euclid of Alexandria…duh) is a system which assumes that a small set of things are true (i.e. any two points can be joined by a straight line) and then using those assumed truths (which although appealing have no actual proof) to prove a bunch of other shit. A whole set of maths based on assuming some things are true. That’s so not mathy.

Anyway, both of these things remind me of what Norman Mailer liked to call magical thinking. I live this way. Assume a few things are true (even if I know they’re not) and create a whole life system out of it. It’s turtles all the way down, dude.

Yesterday was the 23rd anniversary of my mom’s death. On June 6th, 1982 my dad, after my mom told him she was leaving him and taking us (my sister and I) with her, broke into our neighbors house and stole their gun (the one that he had sold to them months earlier) and shot my mom three times in the face. He actually shot six times (all the bullets the gun would hold) but only hit her three times.

I think she lived for a few days or maybe a few weeks but June 6th is the day I choose to remember. June 6th is the day she left me. It makes me sad.

I’m going to talk about my mom for a minute.

(I was going to talk about how listening to LCD Soundsystem was like getting your asshole licked but I changed my mind. “Whew!” some of you are saying, or maybe “Damn, that sounds way more fun.” Either way, I understand.)

On May 22nd, 1982 my mom (Glenda Grace Beaman) graduated from Sacramento State University with a nursing degree. I think it was a day of freedom for her. I think she knew for a long time that she would be leaving my dad when she got that damned nursing degree.

Ok, I’m tired of talking about my mom (I didn’t get very far into it, did I?). It fucking hurts. It hurts because I don’t have more than ten memories of her. Not only was my mom robbed from me, but most of my memories of her. Half the memories I have of my mom involve her taking beatings from my dad to protect us. Sometimes it makes me angry but mostly it makes me sad.

I sometimes wonder why I’m not a sociopath. Or a rapist. Or a wife beater. It’s too bad that I don’t believe in god–I could give him the credit. How does that even work? “Hey, god, it’s cool that my mom’s dead and that my dad killed her because you made sure I didn’t turn into a sociopath.” Christians are so dumb.

I’m just lucky, I guess. We live in a universe of pitiless indifference and I seem to have dodged a few bullets.

Yay me.