Mood:Long winded
S.O.C.: "Come with Me" by Koda Kumi
OKay I had to read an article by Stephen King for PSO English and here's what killed me and I wanted the others opinions. They kinda have the same voice style. I wrote this a while ago (Jan 30) but Blogger was being evil so I just sent it out as an e-mail to most of you guys but yeah anywho ^-^ I want you guys to compare is all and tell me what you think. Especially in King's last paragraph. Also I think King makes a lot of good/Jhonen points. Also I need to read this and analyze so this helps me too.
January 30th 2003--A rant about religion
Live and Let Live
Man….there are too many condescending overly zealous religious people in this world. I mean….I have my belief and you have yours. I’ll work my side of the street and you work yours and in the end we’ll all be okay.
For all of you super Christian people thinking, “but we’re only trying to save your immortal soul--we’re doing it for your good.”
I got three words for you--mind your business. Personally I think that Christianity might have been the beginning of the end. If you guys were awake for World History you know where this is spawning from. In the beginning-- cradle of life Gods and Goddesses and whomever your deity maybe no one went looking for trouble. The oriental religions didn’t force people to convert and what have you. The Japanese we’re a big melting pot. Shinto, Buddhism, and Zen all were present and intertwined. There may have been times when sure people were forced to change but I don’t think on as large a scale as when Christianity happened. Now that we can thank Christians for. Europeans came over to the Americas whipped out peaceful people with their disease and war and those that did survive were forced to give up their heritage.
Now don’t confuse the issue here I’m not saying that Christianity is bad or anything--I’m Roman Catholic in a free lance sort of way--what I am saying is that people need to live and let live. If I’m going to hell then let me sit in my hand basket in peace and enjoy the little happiness I have (which by God won’t be very much in this place) so when I am burning in hell in eternal anguish and pain I don’t have to think back and think good God why didn’t those freaky cult kids leave me alone.
The Bible
Oh Children shy away from this rant for this is not for the faint of heart. People….the Kings James Bible is not the only Bible. There were Bibles long before that one. And believe it or not kids things do get lost in translation. Also let us not forget that well not to sound like a conspiracy nut but the government only allows you to know what they want you to know. It’s not always freedom of speech and all that good stuff. Like people do you really know what’s going on in the outside world? Point being--back then only the learned could read the bible and if the king didn’t like what it said I’m sure he could have very easily changed it to something he did like. Point being keep people ignorant and they won’t revolt. The counter attack would be they were superstitious back then and feared to change the word of god, but the counter to that is simple human error. They don’t slaughter lone wolves guys--they slaughter masses of sheep. So silence those lambs and seek the truth.
Free will
Also for all you kids that can’t date outside your religion, aren’t suppose to do certain things because your religion says so--think long and hard about what I’m about to say. God gave us free will. The power to make our own choices. He gave us a suitable enough mind to differentiate between right and wrong. No one can be all good or all evil--we are not “clockwork oranges.” Besides for all you people that ask why does God allow bad things to happen? Because if he whipped out all the bad in this worlds then humanity would go right along with it.
With this said--why can’t you date outside your religion? Or why do you believe that above all the other religions, sects of Christianity and what have you , you’re the only ones that are right? Please work through your egoisms and take a look at the world. You do the whole church thing and what have you but why? Just because you were raised that way just to due what you are told? Conformity kills people. I’m not saying rage against “the man.” What I am saying is think about it. Your faith doesn’t offend me at all I just want you all to be able to have a firm stance in your faith. I believe in divine evolution and I can back myself up in this thinking. Can you guys defend your religious quirks? Do we all have to believe the same thing? Hell no but we can allow people to believe what they like and think things through. Also please stop preaching and start practicing. Do not go to Church Wednesday night and then Thursday morning start cussing up a storm. Do not go to Church Sunday morning and then Sunday night start banging some person you just met. Lets stop being pretentious and stop acting holier than though art and get REAL. We’re all human, we’re all flawed, no one is any better or more right than anyone else. Besides we got to share this planet, so lets make it easy for everyone and stop the stupidity.
Thank you.
"Why We Crave Horror Movies"
Stephen King
I think that we're all mentaly ill; those of us outseide the asylum only hide it a little better--and maybe not all that much better, after all. We've all knowon people who talk to themselves, people who sometimes squnich their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is watching, people who have some hysterical fear--of snakes, the dark, tight places, the long drop...and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground.
When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.
Why? Some of the reasons are obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid,that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a reallu good horror movie maynot surprise a scream out of ud st some point, the way we screm when the roller coaster twists through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have been the specail province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one's appetite fro double twists or 360 degree loops may be considerably depleted.
We also go to re-establish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in
Die, Monster, Die! confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of Rober Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years fomr the true ugliness.
And We go to have fun.
Ah, but this iwhere the ground starts to slope away, isn't it? Because this is a very peculiar sort of fun indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced--sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur's version of combat, then horror films has become the modern version of the public lynching.
It is true that they mythic "fairytale" horror film intends to take away the shades of gray...It urges us to put away ourmore civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites . It may be that horror movies provide psychic relif on this level because this initation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality, and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow or emotinos a free rein...or no rein at all.
If we are all insane, then sanitty becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murder, we clap you alway in the funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand your insanity leads you to only to tlak to yourself when you're under stress or to pick your nose on themorning bus, then you are left alone to go about your busines...though it is doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.
The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (excluding saints, past and present; but then, most siants have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and then, he has to be let loose to scream and roll areound on the grass. Our emotions and our fears forn their own body, and we recognize that it demands its own excercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these emotional muscles are aceepted--even exalted--in civilized society; they are of course, emotions that tend to maintain the status quo of civilization itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness--these are all the emotions that we applaud, emotions that have have been immortalized in the couplets f Hallmark cards and in the verses (I don't dare call it poetry) of Lenoard Nimoy.
When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement; we learn this even before we get out of diapers. When, as children, we hug out rotten little puke of a sisiter and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, "Isn't he the sweetest little thing?" Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often follow. But if we deliberately slam the rottle little puke off a sister's fingers in the door, sanctions follow--angry remonstrance from parents, aunts, and uncles; instead of a chocolate covered graham cracker, a spankking.
But anticivilization emotions don't go away, and they demand periodic exerceise. We have "sick" jokes as, "what's the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies? (You can't unload a truckful ogf bowling balls with a pitchfork...a joke, by the way, that I head originally from a ten-year-old boy). Such a joke may surprises a laugh or a grin out of us even as we recoil, a posibility that confirms the theseis: if we share a brotherhood of man. then we also share an insanity of man. Nono of which is intended as a defense of either the sick joke or insanit but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, mangae to be reactionary, anachistis and revolutionary all at the same time.
The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, out most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized...and it all happens, fitting enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them--Dawn of the Dead, for instance--as lifting a trap door in the civilised forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.
Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who siad that all you need is love, and I would agree with that.
As long as you keep the gators fed."
