Thoughts on religious ignorance

I've been hearing it since college (shows how isolated I am) that Christians are uneducated/ignorant. Well, when I first heard/read that, I was understandably off-put. Ironically, I was ignorant of that stereotype. In the last couple years of living in the Bible Belt, however, I have come to realize how true that is... just not in entirety, rather, in general areas. Like certain parts of Oklahoma City having decently educated Christians while the WBC in Topeka, KA, is notorious for their ignorance on literally anything. So, while the saying is true that "there are extremists in every religion", we should consider not just extremists in doctrines and how some interpret those doctrines, but also extremist in intellect or ignorance.
If one were to ask me how smart I think of myself, I'll be honest on how I see my own mind: "Not as smart as some, nor as dumb as some, I'm as smart as I am, and I'm okay with it." Some have looked at me very weirdly for having flunked the 4th grade once (my brother still pokes jokes about that one), nearly flunking high school, and and doing so in college twice. My excuse? I'm not fit for academic requirements and felt pushed to learn what didn't interest me. What interest me? Foreign mythologies (which has confused my mother deeply at times, though some are uniquely connected to Christianity and Judaism in different ways), foreign languages (not the typical ones likes French and Spanish, but Latin, Norwegian, Gaelic, Russian, and more ancient ones likes Babylonian, Sumerian, and ancient dialects of modern languages), and different types of puzzles. Oh, yes, and one thing that definitely confuses people- different cultural taboos. So, yeah, I simply know things others don't while people know things I don't. And I'm okay with that.
Now, as for this Age of "Enlightenment", I've noticed something about using "science" as a way of knowing things, at least, in the way "enlightened" people (like atheists and skeptics) use, something that late Christian apologist/author had noticed as well- science has become less about knowledge and more about control. At times, that control seems to also mean degrading people who don't see things their own way. I would know, one of my bosses at my current job, Wal-Mart in Alva, constantly talks to me as a child, degrading me in literally every way he can think of. He's a preacher's son who says he's Christian, yet his attitude, etc., proves otherwise, and he does constantly say he knows more than I do, yet none of what he knows seems to be related to work knowledge of Wal-Mart ("Dude, I've been around Wal-Mart all my life, I know how things are run!") Yeah, well, I suppose I should know how to take complete care of rigs since my father was a big rig driver- oh, wait, sorry, he believed he was only to drive them, not take care of them, so I guess that doesn't matter. Not a single person at W*M (as I've taken to calling it on facebook) believes he's worthy of being a leader, let alone an unworthy boss.
Now, there is something I'll agree with atheists about, there are some churches that show some stereotypes and cliches to be true. Unfortunately.
Aside from Westboro Baptist Church, there's also a website called jesus-is-savior.com that takes extremist literalism (in other words, not recognizing symbolism and poetry for what they are and not reading entire parts, just reading the convenient parts) and degrades many who see/do things differently than the curator does.
Example, while it's true that rock 'n roll does have some dark roots and so many heavy metal bands are actual devil worshippers (and there are some that use front as a getup, they really don't, they satirize the idea, but the religious elite doesn't recognize the joke and condemn them vehemently), there are Christian rock/metal bands that are full-out Christ-followers. Yet the curator loathes them and condemns them for many reason. One constant thread of condemnation is that they're rock bands. Period. I guess he never heard of iamsecond.com, started by former lead Korn guitarist Brian Welch, who says "God and Jesus is first, I am second.", and Brian lets his complete faith be known throughout his music, without shame nor reserve. And also reveals how dark his life had been through some of the lyrics (like in his song "Chemicals", there's a line that goes "You're the kisser and the killer" in reference to the drugs he used to take). And that's just one thing the guy condemns throughout the entire website. He literally tackles every issue. Sad thing is there's no "contact" button anywhere so anyone can reveal the truth about what he's saying.
Nor is that the only website that reveals why people see Christians as ignorant/stupid.
The next is called objectiveministries.org The onyl good thing is that there's not been a single update in two years this coming September. Why's that good? Just go to the Mall Mission to find out why. Certain stores are condemned as evil/Satanic. Cinnabon for sounding like "Sin Upon", Hot Topic for promoting gay lifestyles and "any guesses as to why they have 'hot' in their name?" Uh, yeah, they go with whatever is "hot" (slang for current topic of social thought), not for temperature of Sheol. J.C.Penny's for being reminescent of Jesus Christ and having- WHOA, WAIT A MINUTE! Is it just me or is that misspelled? Oh, yeah, j.c.pennEy's is named after the founder of the store, James Cash Penney. The site claims that "Penny" is how little value the store sees in Jesus, and claims that even Judas valued him at 30 pieces of silver. Okay, that claim just showed a couple pieces of historical/Biblical ignorance. Not ignorance coming from the Bible, but ignorance of certain details within the Bible. For one, which Judas? In His circle of twelve disciples, there TWO men named Judas (since I'm an originalist, I'd rather call them as their original name, Iuda), that's why some called him Judas Iscariot, or literally, Iuda of Kerioth-Hezron, now a haunt of jackals. And plus, he didn't value Jesus at 30 pieces of silver. Maybe he just went for a random piece of fortune, maybe he wanted a grand amount. Whatever he wanted, he was chosen by the Pharisees to bring in who they saw as a blasphemer (it all started when he told a paralyzed man that HE forgave him, not what everyone else had normally said, "May the Father forgive you") and gave him one. single. day's wage as an offer to bring Jesus in. So, I really don't know, maybe Iuda saw no value in him and was only in it for whatever price he had coming to him, but he went with it without complaint (likely). So, just with that one store, that church showed quite a bit of ignorance in their own sacred text and national history. They also condemn Sears for the name sounds like "seers", what happens to the flesh in Sheol.
I guess some churches have too much time on their hands to take down anyone who thinks any way different than them. Then again, they have "ways" of being different and "witnessing" to regular shoppers. And many of those ways borderline on total incredulity. Read it and find out. I suppose it's like that Blue Stahli song says, "force-feeding, misleading." And all that's just for the Mall. They also have a section exclusively for video games, and they're just intensely ridiculous. All (save one) M-rated games are rated 0 crosses (MGS2:SoL is given 1) out of 5. Things is, they don't play them, they admit it, they say the games aren't allowed to be played on their university campus, so they go by second-hand information. That's like making a review on a possibly great game and saying it's terrible because someone else said so while not trying it for yourself. All games they deem as Christian (save one) got 5 crosses (including Minecraft, which looks like a 3D, 8-pixel version of the Sims to me, but what do I know? It's not my thing, so I won't play it), with the exception getting 4.
It's become a sad state of mind that we've become. Our Lord was known for His unqiue creativity in storytelling (and those stories of His were rather dark- virgins being left behind, a man going to Hell for ignoring a beggar's plea for any water, then begging himself for a single drop of water, weeds choking the life out of seeds, etc.), and partying with the... worst of them (the Pharisees saw Him as a glutton), and here we are worried about what our brethren would think of us. Are they judging you? Would they listen to your reasons? If so and if not, then that's not where you should be.
Personally, I'd read the Bible not only through a guideline lens, but also for psychology, prophecy, mystery, suspense, maybe even a horror story or two. When I think about it, it's not only full of guidelines for how to live an interesting life, even if you don't believe in it, then it's full of literally every single type of literature and genre there is. Seriously.

Living unrated in a rated life

My brother and I have a little inside joke about movies and coffee. It goes like this...

If there's a movie that has a rated and an unrated version, the rated is like decaffeinated coffee, in that it has less than potential, less to it. An unrated movie has extra stuff in it, making it better. When I think about it, I realize I've been living a rated life as a Christian whereas so many immensely faithful people in the Bible didn't care who was looking nor how they'd react- they lived an unrated style with an unrated love for God. They made people's jaws dropped. They infuriated the religious (rated) elite. So what's wrong with me? Routines can often times bring me to become rated (*yawn*) when I want to do so much more.
I've come to realize that, in this day and age, words with specific meanings have become loose terms that people have forgotten the original meanings for. In example, "unrated" brings to people's minds horrific horror movies with even more guts and blood, plenty more swearing, and this junk and that crap. For me, it should mean more substance.
I've noticed this about unrated movies, there are two kinds- the kind that has extra content that would've been too graphic for theaters (if it were released in theaters), and the kind with extra stuff that makes the story itself (and maybe even the characters) much stronger.
A good example of this is Kingdom of Heaven. Yeah, it's a politically correct film about the Crusades that show Christians in a bad light, but skipping over that detail, the Director's Cut has extra scenes that provide extra information about the main hero as well as provides support for someone who was a secondary character in the theatrical version, making her integral to the story alongside the hero, not just a living prop.
So? Living unrated helps people see that life can be about so much more than a few flimsy words in a day, helping someone or cursing someone, eat, sleep, do nothing, wait for the day you die then that's that. If that were true, Christianity wouldn't be needed because life would have no leniency in its existence to allow the thought of a Creative Creator with ironic wit have any part of us (no matter how lowly we make ourselves to be, no matter how much of a blessing He tells us we are).
So I don't feel like living the first kind of unrated, the world has enough problems with people doing things like that. I want to live like the other unrated- be a living example of extra content, let God be my Director, who doesn't make deleted scenes, but keeps moving the scenes forward.
I want to be like King David, who danced in the temple (and I imagine the Pharisees were like today's churches, seeing dancing as the 8th Deadly Sin) for the glory of GOD, not man. I want to be like Jesus, who flatly told off the cheats at the temple (after whipping tables and knocking them over) to never do it again then give a very forward reason without beating around the bush. I want to be like the Apostle Peter, who told off the status quo when they questioned his antics (thought him drunk and he told them it wasn't even the right time of the day to be drunk!) and tell religiously suppressing government that they can't stop him from telling the truth about how he sees life with the Christ.
Those are just the better known examples of people pulling off unrated lives that shocked everyone because they broke the social rules, gave living a new meaning, set an example for others to consider, rather than go through a bland living (think Halloweentown's version of the mortal life).
How do you want to live your life? Bring on the unratings, and get ready for the special fatures.

The little moments in this anomaly of life. Touch, a review

There's been something on my mind for a while, something that would be considered almost a nonissue to some, yet could potentially seem life-and-death important to others. How life works.
As a child, I had a gift to understand words. It was how I was able to get straight-A's in spelling and understand what words meant. It's what enables me to understand what I read and what I type. It's how I learn about the world- through written word more than anything else, except hands-on. Yet as a kid, I hated numbers, I would find out eventually I have a form of dyslexia for numbers, called discalculae. No one in my family's familiar with that term, so no one could understand why I was great with words (in the 5th grade, my reading level was already in the college level) yet terrible with mathematics while my brother was the exact opposite. I felt that the public education system was always trying to force me to be like everyone else, something that's never ever worked.
With the opening of Touch, a young boy explains how the world works with the universal language of mathematics, focusing on patterns and how they're everywhere in life yet only a few people on the planet can see them. Then he reveals the exact amount of time he'd been alive, then throws the punch- "In all that time, I never spoke a single word." From there, this episode seems to be a sequence of little moments that, at first, seem disjointed while showing the realities of life, including social prejudice when it comes to autistic children ("Your kid should be locked up in a cage!" "What'd you say!?"). And yet, there's another plot going on, literally around the world dealing with a lost phone that, while the owner's trying to get back because of the photographs on it, other people are using it for their own solicit gains.
The boy, Jake, has a beautiful talent with numbers, seeing them in many numerous ways yet using them in specific ways. When his father starts seeing a start to the pattern, he starts to wonder what his son is seeing altogether.
The phone subplot could be a plot all on its own with how people are shown to have disconnected dreams and different backgrounds of life, yet are all connected in some way or another, whether in life or through an unseen connection in life.
Life may seem trivial to many. Like a cruel cosmic punishment for simply existing. Like it's trying to push you to your own extreme edge with loss, confusion, pain. These Jake's father is seen to suffer, yet he never loses hope, even when he's on the brink of losing hope with an agency. And an agent in said agency finds out Jake's talent when he reveals a number he couldn't have known but is familiar to her. Then, moments later (show-wise), that same number ends up in what seems like a chaotic mess, only for that chaotic mess to end in hope for someone else eventually. I once read recently a short story of a man talking to God about how bad his day's been and asks where God was. Post-complaints, God reveals what all He was doing for the man. Even in when it seems like tragedy, it doesn't mean there's nothing dealing with God in it.
And one of the hardest emotional scenes deals with a teenage boy in the Middle East being forced to wear a suicide bomber's vest. With that one man's phone as the battery for the vest. The boy gets a call to let him know the phone isn't his and he needs to give it back. The boy reveals that it isn't his fault, he's not a bad person he has a dream and almost believes it lost when he's given a chance to achieve it. The way it plays out, even though you can very well guess what's about to happen is tear-jerking anyway. The boy achieves his dreams, the woman who calls him has helped him, and everyone who's had a connection with the phone has had more than just connection by touching the phone, they just won't realize it.
Young Jake reminds me of the character Holden from Karen Kingsbury's book, Unlocked. People see him differently, don't understand him, even when he has a close connection to the world around him, just differently than we would expect. I've never been tested for it, though I have a few suspicions about having Aspberger's Syndrome, a high-end autism disorder, which explains how I miss certain social cues, get socially awkward, yet in my own little world, I see everything immensely different. How something is simple to most can be difficult for me to grasp and vice versa. Jake doesn't speak a single word in the episode, yet he helps immensely with connecting people in unseen ways through the use of what I once loathed with a passion, helping me understand (and remember) that mathematics isn't strictly formulas and basic structures with a couple symbols and whatnot, but something I can understand more easily- a pattern within life.
The creator of the show has gone from showing how evolution can make people have unique powers once only in comic books to how God is in life from looking into its bizarre complexities that we can NOT escape from, no matter how hard we try.

Thoughts on Quantic Dreams' "Kara"

abort:
In strictly modern American sense, reference to a procedure that brings forth a human fetus before it is ready to be born on its own time, normally to be killed off.
Other actual definitions: (to fail, cease, or stop at an early or premature stage), (to develop incompletely)

There's a chance you've heard of this tech demo at a recent video game convention, called "Kara," which literally creates a video game model as though a robot. Part by part, internally to externally. With every part brought to its being (I'll refer to "it" as "her" since she's being made into a female body anyway), a disembodied voice asks her to do certain things to see if she's working properly. When the voice asks her to tell the audience what she does, she makes a list of things she does... one of which involves being a sexual slave. When the production is complete, and she's having flesh color added to her being, and she gets a bra and panties, she finds out she's only a product, which shocks and dismays her. "I'm a product." The voice affirms it and asks what else could she have been.
"I thought-"
"You thought?"
Then the voice commands the production to disassemble her, which truly frightens her, and she asks why she's being taken apart, and the voice says that she wasn't designed to think, she was designed to do, and that thinking indicates she must have a glitch in her system, something that's unacceptable. Things finally come to a denouement when she yells out "I'M AFRAID!" All the equipment suddenly halts. She asks to be remade into what she was and the voice relents, even if reluctantly, and tells Kara to behave, that he doesn't want any customer complaints.
That whole film is 7 minutes long, and does more than just show off the latest CGI developments for video game development companies, it also has a deep story dealing with what life is. The video I watched, I noticed a lot of people comparing the short but deeply thoughtful story to the overly lengthy and very shallow storyline of the Twilight series. I won't say "Now I'm not saying..." because truth is, as much as I enjoy horror stories (including some vampire stories), I truly hate Twilight. I couldn't read even half of the first book, and could barely suffer watching the first three films. Why? Not just animation (it had good bits of cinematic techniques and technology), but the story is very shallow, to the point of a needless reduction and remake of vampires. Too much style, nowhere near enough substance for a horror fan (and occassional romance fan, I'll shamelessly admit) to enjoy. This seven-minute production seems to have referred not only to abortion, however. That line about being a "sex slave" brought to mind what people expect in pornography. Specific body styles, a certain look, the ability to say empty nothings, able to handle literally anything any number of men can do to them. If you've ever seen the movie Taxi Driver, I'll use a familiar line, "If you were happy, I wouldn't be able to use you." Jodie Foster's first film and she was a child prostitute (aka, an illegal prostitute being underage), and her pimp tells her that he can't use her if she enjoys being basically raped. There are many secrets the industry never wants revealed lest the industry comes to a halt- which is what the ex-stars wants to happen (including Shelley Lubben and Jenna Jameson, believe it or not, they've both got books outt here about the devastating reality they lived through), but we're all taught that, since they're human, they'll get over it and enjoy it, right? That's what all the movies say. What about when a robot is being designed to fulfill her "master's" wishes? And she becomes self-aware? Even having the ability to cry actual, liquid tears? Will we pay attention? Or still be, as I call it, "social robots"?
As I like to tell people when they question my faith, "I'd rather be a Jesus Freak than a social robot." This tech demo does illustrate mankind's selfishness and the contrast with people who don't want self-aware people.
Check it out, let me know what you think.

Oh, last note: if you think you can get onto David Cage (the director of Quantic Dreams) about the use of teh word "abort" in the tech demo, remember, he's not American, he's French, our hooker-loose standards of speech is horrendous compared to other languages.