About Me

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I started this blog as a means of distracting myself and as a testing ground for my rudimentary HTML skills. And because I really enjoy cursing. A lot. So much of life demands censorship that the internet often serves as society's soundproofed primal scream therapy room. This is my little corner of the postmodern cybercatastrophe.

I'll admit up front that The Sanity Project is more overproduced than a Kelly Clarkson record. This is partly because I was a raging sick insomniac for two months and after I exhausted Daily Kos and Fark for the night, tinkering with the site seemed the next best option.

Philosophy

My core guiding principle is that nearly everything lends itself to a good, healthy rant - and a laugh. Let's face it. Life ain't always a parade. In fact, it's never a parade. I haven't had a single day I would call a parade, even the days I participated in a parade. Life is, however, tolerable if one sits in the back row and Mystery Science Theaters the goings-on. Which is pretty much how I pass the time. The truth is I'm actually quite non-confrontational and pleasant. Blogging is just cheaper than therapy.

Why Religion?

So why beat up on religion, you might wonder. Was I molested by a priest or force fed communion wafers despite an intense allergy to wheat products?

None of the above. In fact, I was raised in a wonderful Methodist home with the world's greatest parents, a dog, and all the love and guidance a kid would ever need. So it was not without some irony that I, Joshua David James (yup, a Bible name trifecta), drifted loose of my moral and religious moorings precisely because of the values instilled in me from an early age.

The bits about fairness, kindness, generosity - all stuck with me. So when I perused the Old and New Testaments and found a genocidal, homophobic, racist god with all the self-control of Amy Winehouse on crank, the cognitive dissonance switch in my head flipped and I started committing the horrible sin of "leaning on my own understanding."

Am I an atheist? By some definitions, yes. I've since come to regard organized religion as humanity's long, hard struggle to avoid common sense. If I suffer from one intellectual allergy, it's an inability to stomach declarations of faith in unfalsifiable, unknowable, and unfathomable "truths." Unfortunately, in this country admitting ignorance of such matters is considered strange and insulting to the masses. This inevitably leads to an ass-backward society, where religiosity is equated with decency, faith with courage, and certainty with rightness.

People adopt ideologies of all sorts - political, artistic, etc. - but religion presents a special case. In every other instance, believers in a particular school of thought can point to reasons and evidence for their positions (perhaps not compelling evidence, but evidence). When it comes to religion, everyone seems content to play a massive worldwide game of pretend, all acting for whatever reason as if we know things we manifestly do not know.

Breaking that spell, I think, can only lead to a healthier, more intellectually honest society.

What I've Found

Music and animals are my refuge. I firmly believe humankind can boast of no special place in the universe and there is no such thing as a "dumb" animal, only beings acting within the limits afforded by their evolution. Contrary to the popular Christian conservative meme, the theory of evolution does not necessarily suck its adherents into a suffocating void of immorality and nihilism. Embracing evolution has actually brought me closer to other people, not to mention other species. Knowing one is made of the same stuff as the world is both inspiring and humbling.

I treat life like a ride - perhaps headed somewhere, perhaps not. I consider comedians more truthful than pastors and people more important than property. I believe Nickelback is the worst band since forever. My favorite color is maroon and I love green olives. I believe in peace, reason, and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems.

Woot.

That is all.