I thought we all knew the song,

Dear God, don’t know if you noticed, but… your name is on
A lot of quotes in this book, and us crazy humans wrote it, you
Should take a look, and all the people that you made in your
Image still believing that junk is true. Well I know it ain’t, and
So do you, dear God.

And the part that goes, “did you make mankind after we made you?”, right? Well, apparently there are some researchers who had not heard that song.

In this article on the New Scientist website, Dear God, please confirm what I already believe, they discuss just that.

“Intuiting God’s beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one’s own beliefs”

And the world goes, “duh”.

It’s frustrating me more and more, every time I see an article like this. I can’t even find a job to live on, and here are groups of people getting paid more than I ever have, to make great announcements about things most of us already knew.

I should write them. Tell them that from now on, they should just ask me first. I wouldn’t charge as much, and chances are, I’d be able to point them in the right direction – the direction of, “Duh.”

Today, we’re going to talk about parents.

Something I will never understand. People who bring another human being into existence, then have no follow-through. Having a kid is a responsibility, but they only do the bare minimum to keep them functional until they can “legitimately” discard them.

I will say this first – I did NOT have an ideal childhood. There were ugly things going on for many of the years. But there things I could pretty much depend on: Food in the house, Mom generally making sure we were clothed and sheltered, backup systems in place (in the way of shitloads of relatives who’d take us in in a minute).

So when I have a kid IM’ing me; a kid who is friends with my daughter, who comes to visit and eats pie at my house, a kid who tolerates me making emo jokes at his expense; he IM’s me to say he needs a place to stay because he’s afraid to go home…I don’t get it.

It makes me angry. It makes me even more angry that I have even less faith in the System to take care of him, should I contact them.

So he’s probably coming over today after school, I’ll feed him and make sure he’s got a couch to sleep on. If I had the space, the money, and no roommate, I’d just say – stay.

But I can’t. Because in my situation, I don’t have the means. So I’ll feed him, and give him a couch for the night. Tomorrow, I don’t know.

…is a crusade only of the brave. That’s how the song goes.

I’m going to bitch for a few minutes about tradition, and about how a large group of people in this country (and probably every other country, to some extent) enforce tradition by law.

This comes about from reading today that Maine rejects same-sex marriage law. In the article, it quotes the spokesperson for the movement as saying

“This was a campaign about protecting traditional marriage.”

Right.

So what he is saying is, it’s ok to mandate a tradition by making it law to change it.

I’m going to go through my life and see what I’ve got going on that’s non-traditional, that they may as well take away based on that logic.

I am a single mom – non-traditional.
I live with a man (as a roommate) – non-traditional.
I have a kid going to a charter school – non-traditional.
I don’t go to church – non-traditional.
I put tomatillas in my homemade mac&cheese – non-traditional.

Now we’ll see why I’m being all unlawful.

I am a single mom because my husband found himself a new girlfriend while I was visiting my mother when she was sick.
I live with a male roommate because, as a single mom, I can’t afford to live alone.
I have a kid going to a charter school because I didn’t have faith that our school system could deal with “odd” kids.
I don’t go to church because every person who ever tried to get me to go to church was a massive hypocrite.
I put tomatillas in my mac&cheese because it’s damn good.

Now, by my estimation, people who get married, get married because they want official “couple” status. Ask them. Not because the act itself is traditional, although the trappings are – but because they want the status that comes with enforced tradition.

I honestly can’t understand mandating tradition. Shall we mandate no tofurkey on Thanksgiving, because it’s not tradition? Or maybe How far back do we go, for tradition? I think we should bar trick-or-treat, because if you go far enough back in tradition, they wore animals skins as costumes, not vinyl and plastic; and they performed burnt sacrifices, not this “votive candle in the pumpkin” garbage.

How much legal control can tradition have on our lives, really? It seems to me that it’s all the same – the people who want these traditions enforced are scared. Afraid of change. So they mandate that no changes be made. I will agree that change for the sake of change is silly, but change for the sake of making people happy…that’s an incredibly valid reason to change things. Change to make people feel better, to make them feel equal, to put them on the same footing as other people who feel the same way about their partners…yeah, that’s pretty valid.

Just for the record, I’m not gay. I don’t really have a personal stake in it, other than that it makes me worry about what else they will decide we need to keep lawfully traditional. I have a sister who it does effect, but me, not really. It just makes me mad. That’s all. Stupid people make me sad. Willfully stupid people make me angry.