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.

(I love critical analysis, and I really enjoy doing little mini-reviews on Facebook. But those are unstructured, stream-of-consciousness pieces done just to get my mind engaged and thinking about whatever I watched/read/played. So here I'm going to try to convert those pieces into full-fledged reviews, as well as discussing some of my thoughts on reviewing, from the stand point of someone who knows very little about the theory of it -- perhaps useful, most likely not, but I'll do it anyway. This first one is from almost a month ago, Facebook told me -- still long after the film itself originally came out.)

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.

The protagonist's titular antisocial act in Crime and Punishment leads to much discussion of his theory regarding "ordinary" and "extraordinary" people, a philosophy that seems an almost perfect restatement of Nietzsche's over-man decades before Nietzsche formulated his own theories. Of course, most of the characters in the novel recognize this theory as absurd and dangerous (upon declaring that he wanted "the right", Sofya Semyonovna says, "The right? The right to kill?", clearly horrified), and I think most people in reality would respond similarly.

The anniversary of D-Day was three days ago.

An associate asked people to remember the Allied soldiers who died for the liberation of Europe.

Another person suggested people remember the German soldiers as well, because they were people to, fighting for their country. (Apparently the Italians the Japanese get no love.) People agreed, for the most part, but someone added, but not Hitler and the rest of the bastards at the top.

And I say, why not? Hitler and his fellows were horrible people, certainly, but they were people. Not monsters or evil demons sent by Satan to spread death and destruction among the naturally good societies of man, but people, shaped by genetics and experiences and their own choices.