freethinking

Asking a person to read a book is a very cruel thing. Tragic story after tragic story, despair, humiliation, disaster after disaster, disease, suffering, I have to carry poor Jacob and Wanda around with me for the rest of my life! And one could argue that by reading The Slave you are making the characters real. Yes, those sad people are now stuck in at least 20 more people's heads. And they never get to die and rest in peace either, no, they will be alive for... wait, the Apocalypse is just around the corner right? Who cares then. But seriously? You do know the world will end in 2012? The Mayan calendar will end, the nephilim will return to earth, the reptoids will make themselves visible, the antichrist will be strolling around, and the stargates will be opened up. Oh yes, enjoy what little time you have left.

But, cough, all serious aside, cough, cough, cough, I have been getting a kick out of reading Tom Horn's Apollyon Rising 2012. If you want a real zany look at end of times, 2012, and America as the new Atlantis, look no further. What he writes is completely off the wall, but who doesn't love that? Giants, aliens, crop circles, free masons, sign me up! I don't pretend to be completely above the material, I do love complaining about the banking elite as much as the next conspiracy theorist, but read for laugh, hate, analysis, all of it.

I haven't really thought about what I want to do with my paper. Hate, hate, hate, comparing two texts together. It's exhausting, opposite of fun, and I suppose that's why teachers like it. I can already picture myself scanning through text I read a month ago trying to find something that's related to the bible. It's all over the place, that's a given, but I hate over-analysis of anything. It ruins it for me. Take a great movie like Zombieland. You know what would kill it? Analysis. Enjoy it, don't spend hours thinking about why it was great or not, if something meant this or that, because honestly the author probably didn't know when he or she wrote it. So, might do the second option. How I am going to stretch that into a full paper... God knows. Seriously, He does in a biblical lit class. Most classes He doesn't care about.

I have learned a lot, but nothing I could conceivably write a paper on, in less you like hearing about how much I liked David. I could do a paper comparing Samson with Brock Samson, or the South Park Job episode, or any other inane thing about the bible. I could write about how much I piss off my religious roommate now (I memorized the first part of psalm 23, and I can tell it makes him angry that an unbeliever would just enjoy the bible for the stories). Sounds like a lot of fun, but somewhat lacking in a concept. I could tell how much I despise politicians (well, most) with their idiotic reverence for the holy scripture without having read it (among many other things). I could tell you how much I hate men like Richard Dawkins. I could tell you what I feel about God now. I went from a self-imposed unbeliever (in a Walt Whitman, Alan Watts-sense), a heretic, a gentile, to a believer in the power of God's Word. A believer in how stories can shape our world for the better, and the power of faith can have on a man. If I was going to relate The Slave with the bible, I would stay on that topic. The power of Jacob's faith and how faith can affect us. That is all for now.