Ave Satani

So, I've watched Damien for the second time through (the first time live every week last year, and then finishing it up today, coincidentally Bradley James's 34th birthday, via Hulu).

I have such an interesting... appreciation, I guess is the word, for blasphemy, or at the very least things that don't put God exactly in the highest light. I like the songs "Man in the Box" and "Stop Smiling". I've actually like dark-themed shows, like Damien, and then there are shows that put different spins on Christian belief, history, and lore, such as Dominion and Supernatural, both of which I've esteemed.

There are dark-themed movies like The Chronicles of Riddick that have essentially death-worshipers.

Where am I going? Who knows?

Human Bodies

This post contains what some might see as spoilers, even though The Matrix is nearly 20 years old, and Jupiter Ascending is going on three years pretty soon.

My mother had me thinking about the Wachowsk(i/a)s/Wachowscy with an assignment she has to do.

Part of what I've liked about their worlds they've built is how they'd trivialized the human body. They've made them into nothing more than disposable robot batteries and grind-up fodder for a youth serum. They've shown that you can just shoot one dead and, while it hurts some people, they move on. They've shown that we're, in the grand scheme, not very unique because the genome is finite and eventually, as I've remarked on before, someone else will come out exactly like us genetically long after we've died.

They've show being cavalier with modifying the human body, augmenting it, pushing it, warping it.

I can't speak for their other creations because I haven't given them shots (or a care, really), but I'm sure they have those themes somewhat too. In the back of my mind, I've had the thought that it probably relates to their eventual transgender identities.

What really makes humanity so special, though, eh? Because God created us? Because we're somewhat modifying this planet to suit our needs at the expense of all the other life it has? Because we're the "only beings of merit/consequence" in the universe?

People need to remember this planet can, and has, squish/ed us flat.

Rape/Sexual Violence/Stuff I Don't Get

I'm a fan of The Handmaid's Tale series on Hulu, and had been anticipating it since practically they'd put it up that they'd be broadcasting it. They go into a lot of heavy things, including rape.

So, this on top of, especially via the BBC World Service Africa Today podcast, hearing about "corrective rape" and just a casual rape culture in especially Africa, I've tried to fathom why these especially men (or "men", since what true man actually does that?!) feel they need to do this.

It would require a lot of reading into probably a bunch of stories that would probably make me cry and hate humans more, but I'd been mulling over some possible underlying "provokers" to "induce" a "rape culture".

That's a lot of scare quotes.

I think those cultures that really, really make masturbation taboo make a powder keg. This itself may not be a reason, because I think they might combine that with sex having to mean something (so, if they rape someone, they can get their sexual urges out of the way doing it the "proper way", but not having to care about the person; it's not legitimate sex of you don't view the "thing" with what you're copulating as anything, right? 😤).

Then they're doing it in groups, which makes them no better than their primate cousins (and even cetaceans too, I think I've read) that have their own rape gangs. And they, conceivably, don't realize consciously and thoughtfully what they're doing, either.

Then, bringing it back to the phrase "corrective rape" I'd used earlier, some people use sex like a weapon, that they use something God has given us and made it into something to shut someone up violently, or using it to meld someone to one's will (like God didn't give us free will and choice).

I'm kind of scared to research this.

Singles Awareness?

Something I see on message boards and hear every now and then is some people grousing about why guys and girls constantly complain they don't have boyfriends and girlfriends. They should be happy with being single, that it shouldn't be a great concern.

I think it's not as easy as they say.  Just now I'd seen a Georgia Power commercial featuring a father, mother, and kids. The news I watch constantly has advisories for people with families, or ways that husbands can do things for their wives or vice-versa. Gun rights activists talk about protecting your families.

Certainly, it shouldn't be an all-out focus for people. If you're single, it shouldn't be your life's focus to get a partner, but this world does remind singles there aren't many arenas for them.

"God didn't mean for us to be alone."

NewScientist - Viruses 'r' Us

I found this article fascinating because it could mean that the only reason we're so different from all other forms of life on this planet, why we're the only things capable of dooming the planet entirely, is because we're a mélange of what was and millions of years of viral activity.

My Christian upbringing side of my brain yields this: God is a being that uses what we've known as science, subtle interactions of everything in the universe - physics, chemistry, and whatever else - to make things as they are. He experimented, came up with viruses, and experimented with those to eventually make us.

The sci-fi-ish part of me says otherwise. Define otherwise as something like the Alterani/Ancients, experimenting millions of years ago with whatever life comes on a planet in their ever-expanding goal of ascenscion. This is just one sci-fi view though. As pesky and arrogant as they've been in the Stargate universe, they're pretty cool-like.

My mind keeps spooling me to think about the divergeance between what a good number of Christian researchers have said in regards to how old everything truly is and what conventional science has said. My wanting to reconcile the two always leads me to think perhaps they're both on to something, but then we need to work on some things. Perhaps we've not discovered it yet, but it might be that time flows differently for God, and perhaps He's arranged a slowed-down version of time for us.

Always the experimenter.

I don't know; I'm a bit confused myself.