This was written for my Creative Writing class last fall. For various reasons I haven't posted it until now. I wrote it for an assignment with a multitude of unrelated requirements aimed at inspiring something new and weird.

She is a dire radiance, a star blazing dark
Against the gibbering mouth of pity and self-
Indulgence. Her words dissolve this landscape to stark
Clarity: expose these relics upon this shelf

Of ancient wormwood—sturdy-looking, smelling foul
As decapitated roses—as nothing more
Than hollow tokens, the hooting of a barn owl
Captured by the deaf scribe scratching upon the wet shore.

Because she soars, burning, the world turns—the sun rises—
And the soul of that cursed man, Merlin, master wizard,
Soars above the fields of Albion, no guises
Or masks or crude lies. At long last he hears the word.

With ash on his tongue, the Revelator did speak:
Et nomen stellae dicitur Absinthius—thus,
The name of the star is Wormwood: she shall blaze bleak
Against the dark sky and, pitiless, destroy us.

Like Carthage, Babylon, Ilium before, all falls.
The fields burn, and the cities, and the land and water.
Two star blaze dark together beyond all the walls
Of Earth, the crumbling relics, the noble slaughter.

3. How does international law attempt to limit the propensity of sovereign states to go to war?

War is the purview of a sovereign state--sovereignty is fundamentally the right of a state to impose legitimate violence, which is defined as war (or more generally justice). Therefore the project of international law is to limit and eventually revoke sovereignty and impose a world government on the free Christian peoples--God's chosen--of America. The United Nations--which mocks through its very name the divinely-inspired sovereign righteousness of the United States of America--is obviously the most prominent actor in this conspiracy, a desperate but more successful revision of the failed Leage of Nations--brought down by the righteous refusal of the American people to bow down before such an obvious and overt attempt at external seizure of control despite the President's unlawful attempts to bypass their will--but there are far more actors working against sovereignty, some obvious and inept, like the International Courts, taking the names and symbols of holy justice but clearly missing the divine mandate that enables such proceedings to have any legitimacy, or a few more insidious entities, secret groups whose activities are closely guarded but nonetheless, like all agents of the Anti-Christ, occasionally make mistakes--groups like the Trilateral Commission or of course the Majestic Twelve, who are far greater threats to American sovereignty than any open international organization, infiltrating American society at its highest levels--no President of the last fifty years can be trusted, all puppets or pawns of one or another attempt to destroy the glorious American peoples foiled only by American ingenuity and of course God's will--and slowly gaining control of culture, media, the national consciousness, eating away at the average American's divinely innate sense of superiority and attempting to replace it with the mindless values of equality and unity that are of course the hallmarks of communism, another enemy of American sovereignty and explicitly, openly in the service of Satan but--or perhaps as a result--far less successful, the grand dream of a world socialist government, all individuals nothing more than automated cogs in the machine of production without purpose, never anything more than a mad dream of those Satanic idealists who poured out their dark hearts onto so many pages of texts no righteous American ever read, save for of course the purposes of educating himself about the enemy, studying as one might the ways which Satan attempts to corrupt the faithful so as to be better prepared against his true advances, that in their misdirected passion failed to actually accomplish anything short of blowing up a few buildings, which actions were, ironically, highly antagonistic of whatever public unity they sought to achieve--another sign of communism's clear and intrinsic failure as a true threat to sovereignty--and in its own perverse way more a reflection of the American holy values that protect we glorious chosen people against such threats to soveriegnty, by way of course of the Second Amendment, which decrees or more rightly reaffirms, for it did not establish God's will but merely stated it plainfly for those righteous souls who cannot sense it from birth, the right of all Americans to keep and bear arms as divinely-ordained defense against attacks on our sovereignty--even by our own American government, which as discussed can rarely be trusted to hold our best interests in mind, despite its positioning of itself as a physical incarnate of God's will (itself a blasphemous Catholic notion, as any true Christian understands the soveriegnty of the individual leaves no authority between himself and God), often being corrupted by those Satanic forces it was established to protect us from--and more importantly a symbol or better the physical means itself of our soveriegnty, which if as previously defined is the right to legimiate violence then is most incarnate in this Second Amendment, the most holy Amendment in those second Ten Commandments, the succesor to that which established God as the sole authority over any individual, as proclaimed to Moses upon Mount Sinai but inevitably misunderstood by those near but not completely within God's light and corrupted within that limited gap of misunderstanding by the ever-malevolent and lurking machinations of the Devil and his servants, who include not only communists, the United Nations, the Majestic Twelve and the Trilateral Commission but also of course more ancient evils like the Elders of Zion, that false of council of false chosen who have deluded so much of the world for so much time and orchestrated the most successful of efforts against American sovereignty, most notably the complete control of American government with regards to the illegitimate nation of Israel, which persists today solely through the power of American aid bought by the most heinous scheme in all of history, the intentional massacre of many of the weaker, less "useful" members (as if they were all but tools of the greater Zionist good rather than individuals whose only loyalty lay to God), sacrificed--if such a noble word can be applied to such a horrifically ignoble cause, perhaps the greatest crime in all of history from Adam to now--to achieve public approval for their first step towards revocation of sovereignty through immense guilt, unwarranted of course but inevitable given any good Christian values, an unfortunate consequence, allowing our enemies to exploit God's given goodness to further Satanic purposes, an irony that the Devil must deliciously appreciate even as he fails to realize that such a victory could only be achieved through taking advantage of true Christian values, for no American would ever willingly consort with Satan, and such a victory is achieved only through the utmost deception and fortunately (or not, as it is surely not fortune but simply an aspect of God's eternal plan) cannot be furthered, for any advancement against our sovereignty would require more open corruption, an attempt unhidden by the massive deceit that previously allowed such great evil to come to pass and thus doomed inevitably to failure, as all such schemes are when forced into the light of God by his faithful, those few who recognize the Devil's deceptions always and without failure due to our being chosen by God and ordered as shepherds to protect the chosen people from the great dangers of deception, deceit, and other such Satanic devices, weak of course but nonetheless dangerous, for while to remain righteous the faithful must be ever vigilant, the Devil is pleased with each and every minor success, every minor corruption or disruption in divine righteousness, a satisfaction that is both pathetic, for such minor offenses are small and insignificant in comparison to the totaility of good that is Creation, and misplaced, for God's forgiveness and grace means that all such minor victories are ultimately meaningless, forgotten, more, erased by the light of God's love, all of us imperfect beings transformed into the image and more importantly substance of perfection by God's will and according to God's plan, of which Satan's attempts to disrupt and minor disturbances that are from the total perspective variations upon the whole that add to the fundamental beauty of Creation rather than take away, so that in the end the Devil, ironically, is nothing more than another unknowing servant of God.

For some reason I've been thinking about D'Anna again (partially I'm sure due to the recent release of The Golden Compass, the source material of which features an explicit parallel to Eve). And I think I'm able to better detail just what the difference between the three (original Eve, Battlestar's D'Anna, and His Dark Materials' Lyra) is, and why I prefer D'Anna's story. I'm not going to make a lot of sense here but I'll give it a shot.

Let's try this again.

I'm a religious atheist. What follows is just how I view the world. I'm not trying to present it as fact, but I'm not going to throw in a bunch of IMOs because it'd get tiresome and I think you can figure that out.

Humanity, unique (as far as we know) among life on Earth (and possibly the universe), is sapient. That is, it possesses the ability to think and reason beyond instinctual programming. (Many animals are sentient; many animals can learn. These are not sapience, however.) This causes two problems for us: the problem of absolutes, and the problem of purpose.

Over the years I've spent a lot of time thinking about religion -- some of that has come up here -- but only in the past couple of weeks have I really began to organize my thoughts into a coherent theology that I think I can live with for quite some time. It'll change, of course, as everything does, but nonetheless I want to record it here, organize it and write it down for the first time so that I might not forget where I came from.

This is going to all sound very obvious because, well, it is; but it's not something I've ever realized in quite this form until today (when it hit while reading Marmeladov's opening speech in Crime and Punishment -- great stuff, by the way).

Basically, what I've realized is that there's a fundamental incongruity in Christian doctrine. There's the Old Testament-inspired fire-and-brimstone stuff about hell and damnation and eternal punishment, which, no matter how many times Christians say is overriden by Jesus' words later, is still a major part of the Christian faith; and then there's the New Testament-inspired God-is-love and infinite-forgiveness stuff (the stuff that I like about Christianity).

The problem is that these two things cannot work together. You can't have infinite mercy and still condemn people to eternal damnation. God can't be love and still force people to suffer after death.

For future reference, both a fascinating dialogue and proof that video games are more than just entertainment (this is from Deus Ex):

MORPHEUS: JC Denton. 23 years old. No residence. No ancestors. No employer. No --

JC DENTON: How do you know who I am?

MORPHEUS: I must greet each visitor with a complete summary of his file. I am a prototype for a much larger system.

JC DENTON: What else do you know about me?

MORPHEUS: Everything that can be known.

JC DENTON: Go on. Do you have proof about my ancestors?

MORPHEUS: You are a planned organism, the offspring of knowledge and imagination rather than of individuals.

JC DENTON: I'm engineered. So what? My brother and I suspected as much while we were growing up.

MORPHEUS: You are carefully watched by many people. The unplanned organism is a question asked by Nature and answered by death. You are another kind of question with another kind of answer.

JC DENTON: Are you programmed to invent riddles?

MORPHEUS: I am a prototype for a much larger system. The heuristics language developed by Dr. Everett allows me to convey the highest and most succinct tier of any pyramidal construct of knowledge.

JC DENTON: How about a report on yourself?

MORPHEUS: I was a prototype for Echelon IV. My instructions are to amuse visitors with information about themselves.

JC DENTON: I don't see anything amusing about spying on people.

MORPHEUS: Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.

JC DENTON: Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.

MORPHEUS: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

JC DENTON: Electronic surveillance hardly inspired reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.

MORPHEUS: God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment, and punishment. Other sentiments toward them were secondary.

JC DENTON: No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.

MORPHEUS: The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.

JC DENTON: You underestimate humankind's love of freedom.

MORPHEUS: The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.

MORPHEUS: The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.

They say that money doesn't buy happiness. That saying is often dismissed as being obviously wrong, and it is, in a way. The intent of the saying, I think, is that money in and of itself is not happiness -- having piles of money does not inherently make you happy. This is true (hopefully obviously). But money can (also obviously) make acquiring life's material necessities (and pleasing unnecessities, if I may make up a word) easier -- which is the intent of those who scoff at the saying.

The point is that money is a means to an end, and not an end itself. This is what many people lose sight of when they waste their lives in pursuit of cash and forget to ever stop and enjoy it.

This, I think, is a well-known situation these days. But this issue also applies to other situations, such as science.

I previously mentioned that D'Anna is my favorite of Battlestar's recurring characters. Hers is to me one of the most simultaneously beautiful, tragic, and inspiring stories I have ever watched on television. D'Anna's story is one we all know -- it is the story of Eve, and all the others who have reached for the forbidden fruit --yet it deviates from the archetype in important ways that make D'Anna's story not one of a fall, but an apotheosis, an elevation to divinity.

The tragedy at Virginia Tech has generated a spectrum of responses from a multitude of people; some offering sympathy for those connected to the dead, some using the tragedy to bring gun control issues back to debate (whether in an honest attempt to prevent future tragedies or simply to further their own political agendas), and some expressing understandable outrage at the murderer, and, more disturbingly but still understandably, at the fact that, by killing himself, he prevented people from administering "justice" to him -- their idea of "justice" being something similar to the suggestion in the title, which is an almost direct quote from a fellow student.