The Time of My Eternal Life!

Times seem bleak. In the US there's the fabulous CrackerGate. (A Florida student walked out of a church with a communion cracker and has since caused a media farce complete with death threats, claims his crime was "beyond hate speech", "worse than kidnapping" etc. Then PZ Myers [links above] mocked the stupidity and is now getting the same treatment.)

Meanwhile I'm in an extended metaphor of CrackerGate in Sydney. The government generously kicked in $86M of public coinage for World Youth Day. The 200K pilgrims paying for plane tickets can't possibly chip in an extra $200 each. The Catholic Church can't possibly find the remaining $46M behind the couch. Guess they have a slight cashflow problem from their recent SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY MILLION settlement in LA for the molestation class action.

I live near the celebration zone. I've included a map of road changes for your convenience (left). Feel free to read the map metaphorically. This rant isn't about the specific religious nature of the celebrations either, it's more on the fact that all of these are part of a much larger universal gargantuan human stupidity that striketh folk of all kind. Even the semi-official slogan (the time of your eternal life) is ridiculous. It implies that everyone in Sydney (even the pilgrims!) are going to hell: if now is the time of our eternal life then it doesn't get any better than this, so none of us can possibly going to heaven!

Is there no end to the stupidity and darkness? There's so many vibrant young people here -- will they never be liberated from the Cosmic Jewish Zombie, free to enjoy the Woodstockean hedonism the world has to offer?

A note of hope: yesterday a friend said about my post on spam: spammers are actually helping advance technology since they're causing a coevolutionary process. Last night on Skepticality Mel Lipman said his humanist organisation tripled its membership over the last 6 years as a counterpoint to the extremism of the Bush administration. This is one bright aspect within the insanity. There is a coevolutionary process between the forces of sanity and insanity. The more ridiculous one side gets the more incentive people on the other will have to sharpen their tools. Coevolution with The Insane until at least someone, somewhere, achieves a reasonable level of advancement? We could do worse.