Sunday, December 14, 2008
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
"Tax the stupid people!"
My partner and I got into a heated discussion on what the best way to reduce CO2 emissions. I favor two things one, a cap and trade market for CO2 and changes in tax policy. If you added a tax to CO2 (and other things that are bad for the environment) and reduced income taxes (or completely eliminated them) you could offset the higher prices of products and energy in the short term and give people an incentive to pick environmentally sound products because those products would be cheaper then their dirtier competitors. The cost of dirty energy, shipping products from far away would also go up. But companies that produce sustainable products and energy and local companies would have lower taxes (and lower cost of doing business) then companies that do not, giving them an advantage, and allowing them to undercut dirty company's products prices and ultimately allowing them to win in the marketplace.
The point is that we should use tax and regulatory policy to reward corporate behavior that is positive and penalize corporate behavior that works contrary to the public good. The same goes for cap and trade. It gives incentives to companies doing the right thing (reducing their emissions below the cap) and give disincentives to poluting (having to buy credits or pay a fine).
If you want to learn more (or see data to back up these ideas) check out the Earth Policy Institute and the book Plan B 3.0.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
I'm curious?!
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Confessions of a Former Fundamentalist Christian: Part 2
So to get away from the pressure of the Christians and at the same time remove myself from “temptation” I transferred to a tiny Bible college in Pennsylvania. And yes it was surrounded by cows. I went from a school of over 20000 to a school of around 1200. It was a big change but I think it was the best decision I could have made at the time. A friend of mine from my youth group days was also going there. So I at least know someone else there. And the people were very accepting. I was still not out of the closet, but I was learning to be myself more and more. The professors were much more liberal then I think the students. They didn’t want you to believe something just because your parents did, they wanted you to discover it for yourself. I met some good people who I hung out with, whom I felt comfortable being myself around. There wasn’t that pressure to be the perfect Christian around them.
Many nights I would stay in the computer lab working on papers and such and one night I stumbled upon someone’s stash of gay porn on one of the computer lab computers. It was hidden pretty well and this was in the early days of the Internet so to get pictures you had to get them from a newsgroup in a text format then use some program to decode them and view the images. Not as simple as it is these days. I copied the files and figured out how to decode them. Then viewed them in the graphics lab. I had never seen pictures of guys having sex. I remember in one picture a hairy guy was fucking another guy on a towel outside on a beach. The most I had ever done with a guy was a blowjob, (although one friend did come close to it when he dry humped my ass crack). The pictures also meant something else; they meant that there were other people like me out there. That even other Christians were gay.
I began to accept my identity more and more. I finally accepted that I was gay. The first person I told was a friend of mine, Mark. I was so scared to say the word. But it wasn’t as bad as I thought he was actually very cool about it. He said he used to think that he might be gay too, but he was dating this other friend of mine at the time (a girl).
I was going to tell my roommate but before I could tell him he said something about how disturbed he was by his previous roommates, how he had found KY in the fridge and how they had been so blatant about having sex with one another and he could not take it if I told him I was gay. So I let the mater drop. But I think I had found whom the porn belonged too.
I stayed at school one summer to work and became good friends with Dave, I eventually told him I was gay, he was totally cool with it. I still considered myself to be a Christian but I learned that maybe I could be gay and a Christian too. In one of my classes we learned around the civil rights movements and there was even a part about the gay rights movement and stonewall. I did my senior paper was on homosexuals and the holocaust.
I returned to my old school one time to visit my old friends and I told them I was gay. It was like I had some kind of disease. Most of them did not talk to me after they found out. I think it was then that I started to question being a Christian.
So where does a good "Christian" boy who once vilified "new age" as the work of Satan go to work after college?
As a missionary?
A health food store and a "new age" newspaper?
Find out in the next installment!
If you are wondering what school I went to, here is a link to site set up for gay alumni and students.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Confessions of a Former Fundamentalist Christian: Part 1
We went to lunch with some friends today and the issue of religion came up. My friend said when she was in college she went through a time where she stopped being a Christian, her parents split up and she became a bisexual. The question was, "so now what do you consider yourself?"
It got me thinking about where I was and where I am now. I guess you could say I'm a post-christian. Although I don't really know what that means, saying you are not something doesn't really define you. To really understand who I am now you have to know who I was before. I used to be a real wacko Christian. The whole nine yards, praying for sinners, speaking in tongues, singing praising Jesus, oh and loving dick. I was one mixed up bunch of conflicted sinner and saint.
I grow up going to church. I was part of the youth group, sang solos in front of the whole congregation that the old ladies still talk about when they see me (which has been very little in the past decade). I once played Judas in an Easter musical, (kind of fitting looking back), it was very moving. I was always the first go to alter calls.
To everyone I was the prefect Christian boy. But they didn’t know the real me. In youth group was where I had some of my earliest sexual experiences. At an all night “lock-in” I and another boy in the group had a bet to see whose dick was bigger. I one $5, and he was three years older than me. As an added bonus we traded blowjobs. So being a saint and a sinner seemed to be two sides of the same coin for me.
I did all kinds of things that should have gotten be struck down by God, like coming on the alter at the front of the church! Or having sex in the AV closet while church was going on. Strip poker and skinny-dipping at bible camp and so on. This double life was catching up with me though. The more things I did the more ashamed and guilty I felt later.
I went off to college, a big VA school with over 20,000 students. I joined the Campus Crusade, and hung around with the Christian groups. I even wrote “Epistles” to back to the youth group and friends I had left behind. At the same time I masturbated every day and got off on looking at the guys in the shower. The bathroom downstairs in one of the common buildings was a tearoom (not that I really knew what that was at the time.) People would leave messages on the walls to try to hook up. I would go there and write responses, but not to try to get sex (which I secretly wanted) but to try to “convert” these perverts. I started attending these groups run by a Pentecostal church. I read all of the Frank Peretti books, (books about spiritual warfare, which seem to center a great deal on how New Age was the work of the devil) it is therefore all of the more ironic that after college I ended up working at the new age paper. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I started attending a that church, everyone had like 8 kids and they always seemed a little too happy. They preached about the evils of society, abortion, homosexuality, etc. They had tracts (cartoon books) for every occasion (even homosexuality) I went “evangelizing”, sometimes door-to-door.
I had friends, a purpose, something to believe in, you think I would have been happy, but I was not. After two years there I needed to get away from it all. I needed a safe place to go and sort out my feelings. So where did I end up going?
A. A liberal arts college in a big city near gay nightlife.
B. A tiny bible college built in the middle of a field of cows.
Find out in my next exciting installment…
Saturday, November 22, 2008
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