Joel    Offline

Hello, world! My name is Joel Proxima. This is not my birth name. I legally changed it when I was younger to disassociate myself with my father whom had had little to do with my life.

You're here because you care. If the previous sentence was a lie in your context, then you are misplaced.

The following is a brief (but not nearly brief enough) description of my life. I'll try to make changes here and there whenever I need to update something, but you can be pretty sure that something here is no longer correct. That's life.

Disclaimer: The following in no way expresses the views of Joelville, my friends, my non-existant legal team, my pet hamsters, or anyone else whose views the following in no way expresses. I'm not even sure if I agree with half of this shit.

I was born out of a human in 1983 CE, on the sixth day of the seventh month. It was a dark and stormy night, or something - I don't really remember. I was the second creature to come from that human. My parental units divorced, diverged, and divvied up our time between them, although as a child I lived mostly with the female. She remarried with some dude with one leg and fetal alcohol syndrome. Meanwhile, my male manufacturer became a drug dealer and retained his alcoholic ways.

I am currently weary of dating due to the fact that out of the last five previous female counterparts, four have had more dicks in them than Jenna Jameson. I was not willing to share. The most recent however was a good hearted, intelligent and well-behaved individual. But since I am a jealous cannon of the douche variety I fucked things up between us and now she barely talks to me.

Now, I need a good segue to my next section, but this sentence is the best you're getting. I'm an agnostic atheist. "But wait, you can't be both!" Of course you can, and the vast majority of atheists are. A theist is someone who leans toward the belief that there is a god, while an atheist is someone who leans toward the belief that there isn't a god. Meanwhile, a gnostic is someone who claims to be absolutely certain of his or her belief, while an agnostic is someone who doesn't claim to be absolutely certain. So the two qualities overlap. All things considered, I believe that there probably isn't a god, but I don't pretend to be 100% certain about it. Hey, I'm not absolutely certain that there isn't an invisible unicorn in my room right now. I believe that there probably isn't, just as I believe there probably isn't a god. "But I have here a piece of paper with hoof prints on it. Hoof prints! What other explanation could there possibly be?"

Religion, as I see it, is an unwarranted line of thinking which requires one to accept an extremely elaborate, unverifiable, and unfalsifiable set of premises without question. At best, it serves the combined purposes of fantasy literature and political punditry, and at worst, acts as a fuel for willful ignorance, bigotry, and all-around nastiness. That is, unless that one particular religion happens to be true and all others are false, in which case getting lucky and falling into the right one could save you from eternal damnation and/or grant you eternal bliss. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't choose to worship a god who damns you to eternal torture just because every religion is just as unverifiable as the next and you happened to draw the wrong card. I don't respect people for their power, I respect them for their ethical qualities, and no amount of power allows you to redefine ethics for your own exemption.

In my eyes, anyone who unquestioningly worships something is religious. There have been many terrible theist armies in our world's history (see: Nazis, The Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, all of that Middle East nonsense...) and there have been many terrible atheist armies as well (see: the various falsely named "Communist" forces), but what they largely had in common was the religious mindset of blindly following orders from those of higher power. Ethics are not arbitrary codes of conduct handed down by authority figures, they're descriptions of measurable cause-and-effect reactions that are verifiable and falsifiable. In other words, they are scientific principles. The problem is that they are most often stated in generalized dogmatic language rather than as ground-up sequential reactions and their measured impact on a predefined goal.

What's the predefined goal? Well, there is actually a perhaps surprising amount of agreement for something as important as the goal of ethics. It's been worded a number of different ways, but the gist is that ethics attempt to basically make life better for as much of the world as possible for as much of the future as possible.

We humans are a social species. Back when the world was much harsher for mankind than it is today, it was important to your survival to work well with your tribe. If you didn't get along with others and couldn't work as part of the unit, you wouldn't get the full protective benefit society offers and were thus more likely to die an early death. That's often called "natural selection". So those who survived were the ones who worked well with society. Now, what's one of the chief factors that helps you work well with society? Some level of altruism � selflessness, compassion, willingness to make personal sacrifices for the good of the tribe. For the good of the tribe? In other words, you're trying to make life better for society for as long as possible; our goal of ethics.

What drives you and me to be ethical? Isn't it in my own best interest to simply screw others for my amusement? It actually isn't, and a large reason is that we have an internal drive to be ethical. It's called the conscience. When you hurt others, you feel guilty. When you help others, you feel good. Some people may try to ignore these feelings or go for temporary feel-good moments at the expense of the long term, but unless you're somewhat broken, we all have a natural conscience. It's just part of our bodies, like our urges to eat or sleep. To argue that we can simply ignore our conscience to seek money or power is like arguing that you can likewise ignore when you're hungry. Although you aren't likely to die of guilt, it isn't exactly the most pleasant way to live life.

The conscience is the natural motivating force behind ethics. It's part of our genetic make-up, and thus something that evolved. People with genes which emphasized the conscience were better able to function in society than those without, and were thus better able to survive and pass those genes on. The conscience can be thought of as our "instinct" for ethics.

But we don't just use our conscience anymore. Just like your sense of pleasure (an internal motivating factor) from taste can deceive you when presented with a great big candy bar, the conscious conscience isn't necessarily the definitive measure of whether something is ethical or not - in other words, whether or not it provides the most benefit to society. For healthy individuals, the conscience is often a pretty good measure, but it largely ignores long-term consequences and has a tough time handling complicated or unfamiliar situations. That's where science can step in and do a better job. For example, our conscience tells us that it's horrible to sexually abuse a child. That is easily verifiable using science, since sexually abusing a child clearly causes harmful long-term effects. But our conscience often makes a generalization that it's wrong to seek sexual pleasure from depictions of children, thus suggesting that things like lolicon (drawings of fictional children for sexual purposes) are somehow harmful. Science clearly shows a different story: countries with a higher availability of lolicon tend to have much lower occurrence of child sexual abuse. Japan is a shining example, with an absurdly high availability of lolicon and yet among the lowest child sexual abuse rates in the modern world. Evidence does show that the two are connected, since rate of child sexual abuse decreased dramatically once lolicon began to grow in popularity; and conversely, countries that have recently banned such material consistently show an immediate upswing in child sexual abuse rates. The general explanation for this is that pedophiles - believe it or not - also have a conscience and many would much rather pleasure themselves in the comfort and isolation of their own homes than seek out a real victim.

I like cream soda.

Another pleasure of mine is creating some piece of order and perfection amidst a field of disorder. This is why I take such a keen interest in services like Google and the Wikipedia. They create a kind of organized gateway to the world's wealth of information, and in an open and respectable manner.

I've never done recreational drugs (that is, any drugs besides legitimate prescriptions or your occasional headache medicine). Unless you consider caffeine to be a recreational drug, in which case I've done plenty. The same goes for marijuana. But as far as things like acid, cocaine, meth, or even tobacco, I've always chosen to stay clear of them in the interest of preserving my insanity. I'm naturally high. Red Bull puts me almost instantly to sleep. If I started taking shrooms, the world might actually start gaining consistency, and that would be unbearable.

There are seven basic stages in life: innocence, loss of innocence, facade of innocence, rejection of innocence, appreciation for innocence, melancholy for innocence, and bingo. I'm not at bingo yet.

That is all for now. I'd like to give a shout out to my imaginary friend James. You've always been there for me buddy. And to my e-wife, the beautiful Russian mail order bride Helga. You can't speak a word of English and we've never met in person but I always think about you while I masturbate and I always imagine your snatch being tighter than a six year old boy. And to anyone else... fuck you.

Peace out bean sprout.

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