A Midsummer's Night Wet Dream....

I'm off to see A Midsummer's Night Dream with my lady and an old friend today. It's part of an open-air Shakespeare festival being staged in the ruins of a 12th Century Abbey....right within the ruins themselves. Should be good....

....except it's going to piss down ;-(

Oh well, a typical English summer event then!

Confession
I have a confession. I've been two-timing with MySpace. *shock*. I have to say though, I vastly prefer the Bloggerdom, MySpace seems to be full of people who can't format a page, write in phonetics a lot, don't blog and are often overly zealous Christians, which I find more than a little tiresome. In fact, the only reason I still go back there is that some of the "friends" there are quite interesting....and I have a kick ass page. That aside, it's time to move on to my topic of the day, which today has been contributed by a just another mindless Christian thoroughly locked within the box:

"James 4:4 states, “Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.” John states in 1 John 2:15, “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” He goes on to say that the world and everything in it will come to end. Why place yourself in a no win situation? Living for the world will not get you anywhere. Living for Christ has eternal benefits. A pretty easy choice, huh? God and eternal life or the world and nothing. Why can’t you make this simple choice for your life? Just don’t pass this off as you do every other thing having to do with changing your lifestyle. If you are truly Christian you will willingly do anything to better yourself. Christians should have their eyes set on what is above, not on worldly things that perish. If you aren’t a Christian you just live a worldly life."

So what he's basically saying is fuck the world. What do we care. We'll just wait for something better. We'll just look in ourselves. As ever, the truly religious engaging their own egocentrism. Of course, this is all very well if you live in the Western world where all your material and energy needs are provided; where you have clean water on tap; where, if you're truly unethical, you can afford to not give a shit about the world. Meanwhile, they can be safe in the knowledge that at least they're ok, nevermind those countries whose "worlds" are suffering so that you can have your daily bread. I'm sure impoverished families farming on the edge of the Sahel in sub-Saharan Africa, or in southern Sudan, or the communities displaced by loggers or agro-velopment really get a warm feeling by being told to give up and wait for the better life that comes later.

Is this unfair? Yes, a little. You see, this isn't actually a Christian view, it's a parochial, brain dead, conservative Christian rhetoric. It's sad, it's bad, it doesn't actually help anyone and it means next to nothing to quote from 1600 year old tripe by a guy in a society where people vanishing over the horizon were falling of the edge of the world. Who'd not want to escpae such confinement?