The most offensive stick figures you've ever seen

Now that 21 May has come and gone with, shockingly, no Rapture, I offer the following for your consideration:

(courtesy friendlyatheist.com)

If you weren't aware, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris proclaimed 20 May 2010 to be Everybody Draw Muhammad Day as a protest against the death threats and persecution that artists like South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, among many others, have faced for violating Islam's supposed prohibition on likenesses of their prophet, no matter how benign (I say supposed because this is far from a consensus view among Islamic scholars). The event gained an extraordinary amount of press and was a leading news story for several days last spring.

I am not content with Everybody Draw Muhammad Day being a one-time event. I think it needs to be annual, if not more frequent. To use a non-gender-neutral idiom, it takes a great deal more testicular fortitude to take a stand for free speech repeatedly, even if on the same topic, than to defend it once and move on. I therefore announce my intention to draw a respectful, non-threatening image of Muhammad every 20 May for the foreseeable future. I implore you all to do the same (and if this blog is still going at this time next year, send them to me and I'll share them on the site!).

Does atheism imply liberalism?

To me, it has never seemed logically inconsistent to be both an atheist and a libertarian (I wouldn't be both of those things if it did). As a matter of fact, I've always thought it was quite natural--each philosophy is, in its own way, a rejection of the necessity and/or legitimacy of an authority higher than oneself. Of the few serious libertarians I know, a fairly large proportion of them, while they may not necessarily classify themselves as atheists, tend to be sharply critical of organized religion. When, as a teenager, I realized* I was an atheist, one of the things that appealed to me about the atheist community was that it was an open-minded bunch of people, who, I hoped, would not belittle or denigrate my political beliefs, as is all too common.

The cowardice of political correctness

I mentioned in this blog's inaugural post that the creation of the blog was inspired by an event which "really pissed me off." This is the story of that event, and why I think it matters.

Those of you who know me personally will probably know that I recently ended my four-year-long membership in Northwestern University's Model United Nations club (NUMUN). NUMUN was an incredible experience for me and contributed more to my enjoyment of my four years at Northwestern than just about anything else; I met most of my best friends at NU through NUMUN. I served as a member of the staff for our annual high school conference my first two years in the club and on the club's Secretariat, in roles primarily pertaining to the quality of simulation at the high school conference, in my final two years. I also represented NU as a delegate at quite a number of collegiate conferences. (Lest you misunderstand my motives, I left the club not because I didn't like it anymore--quite the contrary, in fact--but simply because I won't be back next year.)

What will probably end up being my last NUMUN meeting was on Wednesday night, when we selected the committees the club will simulate at next year's conference. Even though I won't be back for next year's conference, and despite the fact that I still consider everyone who was in the room a good friend, the meeting left a sour taste in my mouth.

Welcome to Excessively Logical

Note: Thanks to a massive disruption in Blogger's service, my blog was wiped off the face of the earth early this morning. I apologize to anyone who followed my blog or commented on it yesterday; it appears that I just have to start over from a clean slate and that your contributions have been lost. Below is the initial welcome post, which I'm glad I had the foresight to copy/paste into a word processor on my computer after the disruption started.

I have to admit, I started this blog on something of a whim. Something really pissed me off (you will, I trust, soon find that this is an extremely common occurrence), and I decided I had to tell somebody--anybody--just exactly what I thought about it. I suspect that this is how a great number of blogs, most of them completely unreadable, begin their existences.

But, despite the hurried nature of its eventual creation, this blog has been a long time in coming. I have thoughts--a lot of them, in fact. Most of them are probably of no interest whatsoever to anybody besides me, but that has never stopped me from posting them on Facebook. In the past, those few intrepid souls masochistic enough not to hide my updates from their News Feeds have never been shy about agreeing or disagreeing with me in one of the most public fora imaginable. It is mostly for me, but to a certain extent for them, that I begin this endeavor--if you know me and interact with me on Facebook, I hope you'll follow me over here, as I'm very eager to have a place where I can air my opinions (and hear the opinions of others) without character limits or inexplicable formatting and layout problems. (Facebook is, no doubt, an incredibly useful tool, but its many vagaries will probably constitute the topic of one of my early rants posts.)

In other words: this blog is a vanity project, an ego-stroker. I am here because I like seeing my own words on the Internet and people's reactions to those words. I have never claimed that I am not a narcissist.

I am currently enrolled in an academic course which studies the institution of marriage from a practical point of view--in essence, it is designed to teach undergraduates how to make a marriage work. One of the readings in this course defines "excessive logic" as an unhealthy defense mechanism used to hide one's feelings during a conflict. The title of this blog derives from the fact that I have absolutely no conception of how logic could possibly be "excessive," or how it could be employed negatively. To me, logic is the only tool a human being can use to understand the world in which he or she lives. The guiding principle of this blog is that without logic, we are lost.

I have no idea how long I will continue this project. So long as I do, I have no idea how often I will update it. Three years from now (that length of time is currently significant to me, for reasons I will probably talk about at some point), there may be two posts on this site or two thousand. I might talk to myself half a dozen times a day, or I might leave my thousands of devoted readers without new material for weeks at a time. I don't consider myself a particularly impulsive person and rarely do anything that might be considered spontaneous, so the fact that I have not the tiniest inkling where this will take me is exciting for me.

There is one thing you should know before you begin following me, and it is that I have never pulled a punch in my life. I originally wanted to call this blog Equal-Opportunity Offender; I didn't, because a) that would have made it seem like I like to insult people just for the hell of it, which isn't true, and b) that URL wasn't available on Blogger, but the one guarantee I will make to you is that, at some point, I will almost certainly say something you find utterly repulsive. When that happens, it is extremely unlikely that I will apologize for it. I don't like upsetting people, but I find it preferable to being mealy-mouthed and ambivalent. I am direct. I am outspoken. I do not believe in the concept of profanity and use words others consider truly vile with absolute impunity. This blog will not be for the faint-of-heart or the thin-skinned.

If, during your wanderings through the vast constellation of the Internet, you happen to have stumbled across my tiny piece of it, and what I've described above doesn't sound like your cup of tea, I don't begrudge you a thing. Go back to Google (please tell me you are using Google, not Bing or Yahoo or some such), type in something interesting, and enjoy yourself. For those who stay, I hope you will find the content of this site, by turns, fascinating, puzzling, enlightening, infuriating, and a thousand other things.

Welcome, and please excuse the following posts, which some may find Excessively Logical.