Music - any and all, but I like metal, classical, blues, swing and hot jazz the best. I
especially like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull. And Queen's
Bohemian Rhapsody. And the Beatles.
My favorite movies are (not necessarily in this order) :
The Medicine Man
The Fifth Element
The Princess Bride
Dr. Strangelove; or How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb
2001 A Space Odessy
The Abyss
Brazil
Cool Hand Luke
Gangs of New York
Dirty Work
Nothing But Trouble
Big Trouble in Little China
Bloodsport
Books:
Fiction:
I like sci-fi and non-fiction science, mostly, some fantasy, some horror. The book I've read the most (at least 10 times, I've lost count) is
The Walking Drum, by Louis LaMour. A book I only read once, but enjoyed greatly, was Giles, Goat-boy.
Hobbies:
Chess, puzzles of various sorts, hiking in nature, surfing the web, arguing with fundies, and, above all, reading, reading, and more reading. I read incessantly, almost compulsively. I even read while walking down the sidewalk, if the light's good. I listen to a lot of progreesive radio talk shows.
My favorite quote:
We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew, we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless inconceivable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries...It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the mind of man has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening...
Out of our...lineage, minds will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this Earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars.
I was baptised a Southern Baptist, but I was able to choose whether and when the event occured. I was "on fire for God" at the time, and dove into the church hand over foot. I was 14, I guess, and I'd been wondering about the liklihood of an afterlife being something I could really look forward to. I figured, if their's no God, then how am I to have an afterlife? If I have no afterlife, then I don't have to worry at all about burning in Hell for my "sins", and I'm free to do, or think, anything I like, as long as I can keep anyone from knowing of the bad things I did, or thought. I guess I succumbed to a form of Pascal's Folly, I decided that it was better to assume God's existence until I could rule it out. Friends of mine at school ( I went to a different school every year of my schooling, but that's another story) were of differing denominations, though all of them were Christians of one stripe or another. We discussed our various dogmas at lunch, or at recess sometimes, and I couldn't help but notice that each of our sects included the postulate that all other interpretations of scripture were not only wrong, but were of the Devil. Each of us were taught that our respective brand of Christianity came straight from the Word of God, and that false prophets were trying to preach a different Jesus. I remember, for example, talking about speaking in tongues, since some of my friends (which included both genders) were of the Pentacostal persuasion, Church of Christ, that kind of thing. But we Southern Baptists, we didn't believe in speaking in tongues, and yet it seemed to me that they made a good case for tongues being scriptural.
So I began to wonder how I could be sure that I just happened to be of the right religion. And I wasn't even yet considering anything other than Christian sects. I set about to discover if there was some way I could distinguish the correct religion out of all of the ones that were available. Unfortunately, by that time, I'd already been infected with a love of science, and though I'd hoped very hard to find some kind of reason to believe in a life after death, all of the avenues to that end I studied, all of the spiritual arts in which I sought a clue to evading oblivion, none were persuasive enough, in the light of observational evidence, to convince me.
So, after years of reading, and living life (that's another story, too), I decided that, given Occam's Razor, I had to conclude that, complex as the universe is, it is simpler to postulate a universe without a supernatural realm. Without a supernatural aspect to the universe, there could be no supernatural entities, gods or otherwise. No ghosts, no goblins, no gods.
Once I realized that I could no longer have faith in God or an afterlife, I was a bit miffed, feeling I'd been decieved by the adults in my life the whole time I'd lived. I felt that they must've known that what they'd been preaching to me was a fairy tale, just like the fairy tale of Santa coming at Christmastime. I was in my late 20s by this time, and I was having a good life, so I didn't make any waves about it, I just didn't keep my disbelief a secret. I didn't have forums like this I could go to in order to fellowship with my fellow freethinkers, and being in Dallas, I had to be circumspect with my philosophical opinions.
