About the oral presentation

 "Why do you love me?
Why do you love me?"

"Why Do You Love Me" - Garbage

As a class task, after an oral presentation about a variety of topics that were once supposed to fit a limited number of categories, we've been told to rewatch ourselves and judge how we did. My presentation was about activism, in the sense of fighting (in a non-violent way, of course) for the sake of pursuing a certain objective related to a societal change or the suppression of a social issue.

As I started speaking, my fantastic ideas of interacting with the crowd with striking questions and keeping everyone awake with the dynamization of ideas, as well as part of the content, vaporized from my mind like sublimating iodine, leaving a trace of purple smoke only my almost-crying brain could see. And, as the presentation went on, so did my nervousness and the disappearing of any strand of excellence my humble work could harbour: by the time I was exposing historical examples of activism, I was almost trembling and I'm not really sure I was speaking English... or any language ever known by Mankind.

Things became a bit less panic-inducing with the topic moving towards the possibility of activism in our generation. My interactionism came back and I could somehow speak to one of the other students without stuttering too much. Overall, the ending wasn't so terrible.

Hello, this Heather about presentation made by activism...

Another detail was the informatical support. I knew from minute one that my OpenOffice Impress presentation was lame and uninteresting, consisting solely on coloured textboxes with different typographies and spawning animations; the thing, I guess, is that this should serve me as an opportunity to learn why making a presentation during the bus trip to school with a netbook is never a good idea: presentations are not presentations without content copied from the Net.

After watching myself, I realise I've been even too optimistic; it's not that I was nervous: I was practically numb. I'm still going through long sessions of meditation in order to reach a conclusion regarding how the hell my classmates knew it was me, or anybody at all. Another issue is how the whole presentation was like "hi, this is me, now GO FIGHT FOR MY RIGHTS, MY BELOVED ALLIES!" I've never considered myself to be a good despot either way.

So, yes, my presentation was an incredibly overrated mush of overlooked vocabulary meant to hide an obvious lack of content and a terrible informatical support. But, you know what the worst part is? Everyone said I was the best.

Religion as a mass control method

"Unless I watch you disappear in to the ground

My one mistake was that I never let you down,

So I'll waste my time

And I'll burn my mind,

I'm Miss Nothing,

I miss everything."

"Miss Nothing" - The Pretty Reckless

Experience leads us to the conclusion that every human being requires, by nature, a system of beliefs, which can range from the firm conviction that there's a spaghetti monster watching over Mankind to the common conception that the existence of the world around us is an absolute truth. Beliefs, though, have a wide variety of origins and natures: some come from philosophic statements from known authors, some are taken as a trait Humanity has had since its very origin, some require certain rites and actions such as praying and some don't imply any specific action taken.

Love it or love it twice, but love it either way.

Once the prior has been stated, it's important to stress on those belief systems that require us to take action in certain ways. In our day and age, we're witnesses of the existence of many generalized belief systems known as religions that share the trait of morally forcing their believers to do so. That obligation, however, doesn't assume the believer will do it for the sake of religious devotion: no, in most* cases, in order to make sure believers follow the established path, religions threaten them with elements like eternal punishment after death or dishonour.

And, once again, it's important to highlight one detail of what has been exposed: in most cases, believers follow the rites and paths of their religion with the sole purpose of avoiding a negative consequence of not doing so; in other words, they do so because they fear what might happen otherwise.

Though this trait major religions of our world share has a very important outcome, it's not what I wish to focus on. On of the things that catch my eye the most is the societal imposition of the beliefs that conform a religion (or, said in a better way, of the fear leading to a certain religion). In an environment where a concrete religion is present (call it a family, a social group, or a intellectually-third-world country), individuals who are yet to form an established opinion and, therefore, are still predisposed to acquire a belief system, are unconsciously forced to, as I call it, "breathe what's in the air," or, in other words, adopt the predominant religion in the context.

Religions are not innate ideas, they are passed from individual to individual in a variety of ways, majorly involving some kind of social imposition or assumption. A pattern that comes up as incredibly useful to exemplify this is the case for sects, where, for the sake of acceptance in a social group, an often extremely delusional belief system, mostly created in recent times with the conscious objective of manipulating a group of individuals, is adopted, often leading to actions such as the transferring of material possessions to the manipulator or even collective suicide rites.

See? Jesus looks the other way.

Leaving that behind, another one of the traits most religions share which captures my attention is the value those religions tend to assign to the believers' actions, whether they are strictly religious acts or not. Most religions assume the objective of our physical life is pleasing a higher entity in order to gain salvation and avoid the punishment I mentioned before. This implies the demotion of Humanity from feeling entities, able to decide what to do and to do it for the sake of themselves and others, to slaves of a deity with no other worth than making God get a boner (sorry for that, I might be getting a bit angry here.)

And, yet again, this leads me to something I've already spoken about: in this case, Humanism. Believing the people around are worthy of love and believing in most religions are not compatible.

The list could go on and on. I know this doesn't do the job as a proof that religions are wrong, but it does prove they are the first thing to get rid of when trying to improve one's own life.

*Whenever the word "most" is used with religions, it has the sole objective of excluding exceptions with almost no representation in our western world like Buddhism. Major religions (Christianity, Islam and Jewism) fall to the definition used to write this post.