Beware of voices inside your head

It doesn't have to be a little voice. It could be a big voice. A loud voice. Or a soft voice. It doesn't even have to be you who hears it. It could be something that someone told you that was spoken to him by a voice inside his head. Or something he saw by reading the spots on a damp wall, or a burnt toast, or the apparent patterns of the stars in the sky. Or something you read in a book written by someone who heard voices in his head and saw drug-induced apocalyptic visions. The point is, as long as something can be traced to voices in one's head, or visions or personal "revelations" - beware. These things are not as harmless as they seem.

I suppose I am not the only one who is absolutely disgusted by this news: A poor five-year-old Mexican boy had his eyes ritualistically gouged out by his own mother "to prevent an earthquake and save the world". Drugs were involved. Connect the dots. It is the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his own son Isaac all over again. Except, this time, the boy was physically harmed before intervention came.

I could imagine the ritual to be a lot like this:

And they came to the place which God had tolde him of, and Abraham built an Altar there, and layd the wood in order, and bound Isaac his sonne, and layde him on the Altar vpon the wood.

And Abraham stretched foorth his hand, and tooke the knife to slay his sonne.

Isaac had a narrow escape when God stopped Abraham at the last minute, and Abraham found a ram to offer instead:

And the Angel of the LORD called vnto him out of heauen, and said, Abraham, Abraham. And he said, Here am I.

And he said, Lay not thine hand vpon the lad, neither do thou any thing vnto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withhelde thy sonne, thine onely sonne from mee.

And Abraham lifted vp his eyes, and looked, and beholde, behinde him a Ramme caught in a thicket by his hornes: And Abraham went and tooke the Ramme, and offered him vp for a burnt offering, in the stead of his sonne.

The poor Mexican boy wasn't as lucky as Isaac, but I am pretty sure that both boys were more or less equally traumatized. And I hope that people would be reminded of this and other incidents like this and be disgusted all over again every time they try to talk to those guys who they think can hear everything they say wherever they are. Because, really, there are far worse things that those voices and visions can do than take someone's eyes out.

Gay marriages: Why not?

As much as I admire Manny Pacquiao for his achievements as an athlete, I am very disappointed with his recent comments regarding gay marriage: "I'm not against the gay people. I'm not condemning them. ... I have a cousin (who is) gay. I have relatives (who are) gay. I have a lot of friends (who are) gay, so I'm not condemning gays. What I said is I'm not in favor of same-sex marriage. ..."

He had just contradicted himself. If he doesn't condemn gay people, and doesn't hate them at all, then why does he not want them to practice the very thing that sets them apart from so-called "straight" people? Why is he in favor of discrimination against unions that happen to be between people of the same sex? Or is he in favor of same-sex relationships, just as long as they do not legally marry? If that is the case, it is very puzzling indeed.

What's worse than this apparent hypocrisy is that the reason behind his anti-gay marriage stance is "It's the law of God." Which leads me to ask, which god, and why? Of course, he was pertaining to the Roman Catholic god, and if his reason for preferring this god over Allah (or Brahma, or Buddha, or Osiris) is simply because it happens to be "his" god, as well as the god of the majority of his country, then he, again, is guilty of discrimination, this time against people of other religions.

If he has friends and relatives who are gay, then why does he not understand that homosexuality is not inherently a bad thing (otherwise, why would he be against same-sex marriages)?

Pacquiao, as well as other politicians (yes, he's a politician, representing Sarangani province in the Philippines' House of Representatives), has to stop citing religion as a reason why same-sex marriages should not be allowed, because there are different religions in the world, and even if some of their beliefs overlap, they generally believe in different things - mutually incompatible things. Even people from different Christian religions disagree whether homosexuality is a bad thing. Also, in Amerindian culture, there were women who decided to live as men took other women as their wives. Obviously, these Amerindian women were permitted by their culture and their religion (why else would they be allowed to hunt and go to war with the men?). Pacquiao may invoke his right to freedom of religion. Walter Wink may also invoke his right to freedom of religion, but he has a different interpretation of the Bible from Pacquiao and the Catholics' interpretation. There are people who don't practice any religion, and it is also their right not to do so. Whose rights are we going to uphold then?

There are people who may argue that same-sex relationships are "unnatural," that men are not "meant" to have sex with other men, and that is why there are two sexes anyway. At first glance, it may seem a sound argument. But we are also not "meant" to cut open the body of a brain dead person and transfer its still functional vital organs to another body. We are not "meant" to grow some cancer cells outside of a living body so that we may learn more about how to prevent them from becoming too numerous inside of us. We cannot equate "unnatural" to "bad." There are "good" "unnatural" things such as life-saving surgery, and "bad" "unnatural" things like environmental pollution due to anthropogenic activity.

Assuming that "unnatural" is equal to "bad," we only have to demonstrate that homosexual behaviors occur in the "natural" world (meaning in non-human animals and/or plants), and the argument that homosexuality is "unnatural" and therefore "bad" is thrown out the window.

What appears to be abnormal about homosexual behavior is that it is not conducive to procreation. However, there is more to relationships than reproduction. There is also companionship. There is also the benefit of splitting household bills. There is also sex for the sake of sex. We can consider these things as mating rituals, and they are a by-product of procreative mechanisms of course, but is it necessarily bad to have a relationship and not have babies? Is it bad to have sex just because it is fun? If sex is only for the "perpetuation of the species," and if we really think about the good of our species, then shouldn't we ban sex for a few years until our population reduces to a healthier level? No, no, no, and no. We keep having sex but we take precautions against unplanned pregnancies as well as excruciating diseases. It is entirely possible to control our population without missing out on the non-procreative benefits of sex.

Another argument against same-sex marriage is that it is "immoral." Everyone has different opinions on what "moral" means, but fortunately, science can tell us whether something is "reasonable" or not. And science tells us that homosexuality is not maladaptive and is not indicative of mental and developmental problems, and that homosexual relationships can be just as stable and committed as heterosexual relationships. It also tells us that children raised by homosexual couples function just as well as children raised by heterosexual couples. Just like heterosexual relationships, homosexual relationships may be bad or good, therefore the success of a relationship has nothing to do with whether the people involved are of the same sex or opposite sex. There really is no sensible reason why homosexual and heterosexual unions should not be treated equally by legal systems.

The OMG Phenomenon

Call me archaic, but I never use the expression OMG or Oh my god or other variations such as Oh my goodness when I get surprised or something. Not at all. One reason is that I don't believe in god or gods, but I never used OMG even back when I did believe in a god. The main reason is that three syllables is just too long! I'm more likely to utter single-syllable expressions such as wow or shit or damn or fuck.

Another reason is that it's annoying when it's said too many times. Have you ever sat beside someone or near someone in a bus or train who keeps saying Oh my god while reading the newspaper? Alright, I suppose saying it once is fine, but there are people who overuse and it's just totally annoying when they do. For example, someone would talk about, say, seeing Justin Bieber up close and personal, and they wouldn't finish telling their story without saying Oh my god a dozen times. And the person (or persons) they're talking to would react to every statement with another set of OMGs.

As a genuine expression of surprise, I suppose it's alright. And as long as someone says it only once, and doesn't say OMG over and over to indicate their speechlessness.

Let's go back to OMG having too many syllables. I really think it's just not practical as an expression of surprise, when you could always say wow, and that's just one syllable. Or great. Wicked also seems short enough and needs minimal tongue and lip movements. What if you're someone who's become used to saying OMG whenever you're surprised, and then you find that you're about to get run over by a truck? What if you only have half a second to move out of the way? My hypothesis is that OMGers are more likely to get run over than non-OMGers. And it follows that OMGers are going to be extinct in the next century or so. Of course, it will only make sense to conduct such a study and predict the extinction of OMGers if there is statistical evidence that OMG utterers do tend to freeze in their spot (while uttering OMG of course or any variation of it) when faced with imminent danger.

Another possibility is that non-OMGers are the ones in danger of extinction, if uttering OMG will prove to benefit mental processing, in the same way that speech fillers such as uhm aid a speaker's cognitive processing. The spread of OMG as an expression may be attributed to some sort of benefit anyway, though my suspicion is that it spread because it's easy to type. That's why Oh my god evolved into OMG, right? Oh my god is too long to type. People nowadays, at least in cities, do a lot more typing than speaking, and so they eagerly embraced OMG, and they carried it over to their offline language. And speech fillers mostly benefit mental processing in the sense that it helps one think of what to say next and/or how to say it. So I'm still more inclined to think that being an OMGer is disadvantageous when you're in the way of a runaway truck. And even if the use of OMG does decline as the century goes by, it would more sensible to attribute this not to OMGers getting run over by trucks, but to the rise to popularity of another expression that would take its place.

Emotional Blackmail

I suppose everyone must have experienced being made to look like the bad guy when all they did is to point out that, say, "Hey, something doesn't look quite right here," or "Hey, that argument doesn't make any logical sense." It's one thing if you were being rude or impolite, or it just wasn't the right time for unsolicited advice, but sometimes even if you were being polite and you were in the appropriate forum, instead of getting a valid response, they get "I am so hurt. You have no regards for my feelings." or "I am so hurt. You don't even appreciate my efforts."

That sucks, right?

I don't know of any scientific studies about it, but I know I usually get that from women, particularly women who are said to be or claim to be highly intuitive. Which could as well be synonymous to highly emotional, but that is only my personal observation (I don't belittle intuition at all. It's possible that it's heightened mental processing, so there's nothing hocus pocus about it. But to act blindly on intuition certainly is hocus pocus. And we can leave that, my lovelies, until the next blog post or so). And there's this one particular woman I went to college with who totally gave me hell with how she reacted. We were working on a team project, and, during one meeting, she was on her laptop doing something totally unrelated, and she still hasn't done what she said she'd do, and that has made us far behind schedule, and so I pointed it out to her, very politely, meaning calmly, without using any cuss word, without any screaming, without any sarcasm. She ran out of the room wailing.

I thought, and hoped, that it must only have been the stress of having to deal with a lot of things like homework and exams and terror teachers and having to cram all of that in only 24 hours per day. Then she blogged about it and made it appear like I was antagonizing her for no reason. I wish I could find the link, but it's a private blog, and it's been years since I unfriended her from that site, so I can't view it anymore, but I don't remember her writing about what happened before her histrionic fit. All it said was that I was an insensitive bitch and I hurt her a lot but she's forgiven me because she values our friendship more than being right. What disappoints me was that she didn't address the real issue at all, which was her procrastination. I would have made up with her if she didn't resort to emotional blackmail. In fact there really wasn't any making up to do. It's not like I was picking a fight with her. Well, according to her, I was.

Frustrating, really frustrating.