I found this, this morning. Honestly, its brilliant.

I'm not going to lie, I was looking forward to this documentary, Bill Maher is a pretty funny guy, and normally I enjoy sceptical documentaries. What I don't enjoy is cut and paste interviews, with mostly fringe elements of the religious world.

If all you want to see is Bill Maher making people look stupid than this documentary is great. If you expected any sort of intelligent debate, then seriously, go elsewhere. If he was trying to make a case to religious people, then insulting them is the wrong way to do it. If he was trying to make a case for skeptics, why not delve a little deeper into the rhetoric, and mythology, instead of wasting time with making fun of people? I'll be honest... to me this documentary was very shallow. The only people who are going to get anything out of this are the ones who have a grudge against religion. It will appeal to the people who don't believe simply because they had a bad experience or because they don't like religion period. We don't need more intellectually impoverished documentaries playing on peoples emotions, this was almost as bad as expelled. Thats pretty bad.

We need the straightforward honest truth. There are very good reasons why people are skeptics or Athiests. People need to hear these reasons in a form that is not insulting or condescending. Bill is right, religion is tearing apart our world, and is a very destructive force. However the last thing we need right now is more divisiveness, and I can't imagine how this documentary could cause harmony.

I think the harsh reality that us skeptics need to wake up to, is that we are an exception to the general rule of humanity. I really don't think its possible for everyone to see the world as we do. People don't want to think that their lives are completely up to them. It's easier believing you have a friend in high places that has a plan for your life, than to realize that unfortunate circumstances are usually in some way your own fault. Something I hear a lot from religious people is "I wouldn't want to live in a world without a God." No wonder you get such incredible denial from the religious, I have a feeling most people would fall apart if they were forced to wake up from their fantasy.

Humanity cannot be forced off religion, we will have to be weaned.

Maybe if I make an effort to post on here every day I might actually succeed. Its not like I don't have anything to say, I just never think to say it here. Its gotten swallowed up in the myriad of other internet things I have an account with, but never actually use.

This is ok, since I'll bet If I was to check or use every social site, music site, or whatever else everyday, I would probably have 30 seconds for each. The internet is definitely all about prioritizing. You just have to ignore certain elements of it, if you want to find any part of it useful. Being human I just don't have enough time to devote to all the things I would like.

This seems to be a theme in human life. It is downright maddening that one of these days I'm going to have to choose how I specialize my life hereafter. I've managed to postpone this, taking a few years off school but I know its coming. I can't be a musician, programmer, biologist, physicist, philosopher, etc all at the same time without some serious dilution.

Yes I do, but I've never really had any pretensions to being one. One of my New Years resolutions is that maybe I might post on this a little more than Bi-annually.

Today I went and bought blank cds. I haven't had any for like a good three months, and for no better reason than because I kept forgetting to get them. Every time I had something I wanted to burn to a cd I just didn't. I only ever listen to cds in the car so its not like its a big deal.

Where Cd's are a really important is when it comes to evaluating my compositions and songs. Ive got a large amount of material I'm finishing up and taking it for a ride is an important step.

Ive been to this place once before. The place where you start going through your songs and rearranging them into little folders according to genre, and the culling the stuff you want to release, from the stuff that had better never fall on anyone else's ears but your own. The last time I was here I was trying out pcBSD which is a Unix-like operating system, and accidentally put it on the wrong hard-drive partition. Don't ask me why I wasn't backing anything up. This wasn't the first time I've lost everything. I had a hard-drive crash two years ago where almost everything I'd ever done since I was 14 that hadn't been bounced to wav and burnt to a cd was rendered inaccessible.

I realized my mistake about 15% into the install. I panicked and hit the restart button, the partition had already been reformatted and some data had already been written to it. I downloaded some partition recovery programs off of some torrent site. None of them worked, I could have taken my hard-drive to a professional but I didn't. I accepted my fate, rebooted my computer, and reformatted the partition back to NTFS. The odd thing is, I wasn't angry, I wasn't depressed... at least not until the next day. It was like I had been cleansed.

Its now a little more than a year later. I'm 22 years old. I'm a little paranoid and I burn everything to DVD quite regularly. I have tons of them with backups of my buzz folder, my VST plugins, and of course my *.bmx files. I'm now at that same place again. Time to decide what I am going to put my heart and soul into. I burnt almost 40 unfinished tracks to a CD, grabbed my keys and headed for my car. It went to Burger King bought a coke, and a whopper with cheese and bacon, drove back home and parked in the lot. I shut off my car, turned on my CD, ate my food, and for the first time it was just me and the music. It was so quiet and when the reverberations tailed off of a note, they trailed off into silence. Its amazing the difference it makes to not have the subtle hum of your computer, the distraction of your screen, the dishwasher in the background, but to sit in the darkest silence 100% tuned into your creations. I'm sitting typing this out barely half an hour later and the feeling is still with me. Its almost spiritual, I feel transcendent, alive, and inspired. I'm excited to finish up and share what I have been quietly, or not so quietly sitting on. But I have half an hour before I have to be at work, and I still need to hop in the shower...

I totally forgot I had this blog.

It randomly occurred to me to search for it... so I did. It took a bit to get into, as i had completely forgotten my username. However, after plugging in random email addresses i have used over the years, I was able to rediscover it.

I'm kind of sad I gave up on it so soon.

It would be cool to be able to read posts from the last two years of my life, but I guess I was too lazy.

i vow silently to continue it

Well thats all I have to say.

So after a long and rather stressful day as an expo at the Cheesecake Cafe, I found myself sitting on a couch in their lobby eating "those little cookies" and waiting for a Liz Siemens I had only ever talked to on the phone.

She was about 10 min late, but I forgave her.

Thus began a rather uneventful journey home. All the way to Medicine Hat compliments of her cousin. Then continuing on too Pambrun, rather quickly, whilst I enjoyed a deep sleep compliments of Liz's shoulder.

I was rather tired when I got home despite my nap, I had only gotten about an hours sleep the night before, on account of going out, getting rather sauced while playing pool, before going back to a friends house to play some Golf on his XBox. Having to work the next day meant I was forced to awake at 5:00, luckily, as I did not hear Kristin's Alarm, and would have dozed on until morning had she not woken me. I got up, after having some difficulty finding my shoes, I whereupon set out to find my way home. After some confusion as to exactly where in the world I actually was, I found my way without undue difficulty. I reached home, had enough time to doze for about a half hour, and then ran to work in record time, all the way praising myself for the sense to sober up with copious amounts of tap water. Needless to say, no hangover fairy did come grace my presence, and I felt well rested and refreshed. However the situation at Cheesecake is such that I have no difficulty in believeing Jesus himself would fly into a righteous flaming fury after only a few short weeks. However since I am not God, and am unaffected by the blatant mistreatment of those around me by a certain sadistic Bastard, I have lasted much longer.

Anyway, all that matters at this moment, is that I am not more than halfway done my holiday. Being home has been good, seeing my family, and how much they have grown, along with their hair (my brothers now all sport some serious shag). I finally saw The Chronicles of Narnia, and did moderately enjoy, however not to any great level of extremity. I finished reading Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A Heinlein. It was also chanced that I should come across both Gattaca, and Bladerunner dvd's, in the bargain bin at walmart, for a combined total of about 14$. So my DVD collection has grown slightly.

I'm afraid I have spent zero time fraternizing at the Bible College. It seems I don't feel comfortable at all even seeing people that I was previously aquainted, I'm too diferent now from them. I haven't sat mindlessly soaking up the repetitive biased doctrine this school has to offer, I'm afraid that my development as a free thinker, and an agnostic has seperated me a bit from my hyper-religious peers.

Anyway, It seems my brother Micah needs to use the phone so I must cut this muse short.