OMG!
The idea of a “safe space” or “positive space” sprung into vogue a decade, or such, back as marginalized peoples sought out corners amongst the dominant culture at colleges or the workplace where they could chit-chat without fun-making. The concept soon spread online and these “safe spaces” became ruthlessly protected with any sniff of opposition being put to the sword before spreading like cancer.
Thankfully, the most marginalized of groups, middle-aged white surfers, have seen the benefit of guarded thinking and congregate at the safer space swellnet.com amongst likeminded, like-believing, like-socioeconomic, like-racial others.
Equally thankfully, an anonymous writer on the website penned an open letter from “God” to “Devout Brazilian Roman Catholic Surfers of the WCT” decrying their behavior through the tried-and-true truncheon of undergraduate (private) liberal arts philosophy best served alongside a lukewarm bed of early mushroom experimentation.
A sampling:
Don’t get me wrong, cocksure globetrotting wave-rider, there’s some top advice in those books, we’re all fans of the decency, love, and forgiveness parts of the Bible and the Quran etc, but there’s no secret, exclusive moral code contained within that can’t be practiced using your basic, garden-variety, secular common sense – treating others how you’d like them to treat you, etc. It’s not rocket science.
But I get it, young Latino Firebrand with sticker-laden surfboard, much religious faith comes from perfectly understandable human traits, many of them very sweet. We love our family and friends, the grief we feel when they die is so sharp and painful that we wishful-think heaven into existence, so we can be consoled by imagining a heavenly reunion one day. And certainly, the idea of an afterlife makes it easier for us to contemplate that fearful day we too become a corpse. And so, smart cookies all through human history looking for power and social control have levered these two emotions – love and fear – into different versions of the same fantastic story – do the right thing and the reward of eternal life is yours, misbehave, or be born into a heathen society, and hellfire awaits. I won’t point out the resemblance that such a hell carries with the earthbound volcanic lava that inspired its imagining. And let’s not get started on the idiocy of different subsets of the same supposed faith turning on each other. (Could anything more sharply betray the human origins of religion? FFS)
So, for your sake and Mine, let’s stop for a moment and think, together, about what you’re actually saying when you give Me credit for, say, answering your prayers and sending you a heat-winning wave.
First of all. You’re fond of attesting to the power of prayer. It can produce miracles! Infinite Glory! Yes? Yes! You are also, presumably, not oblivious to all the messed-up crap out there. You’re aware of the 80 million people in the world right now who’ve been forced to flee their homes, 25 million of which are refugees. People trapped in lives of misery, boredom and danger, whose various prayers to various Gods (humbly asking just to be able to live at home or whatever) are seemingly not being answered as yours are. What are they doing wrong with this prayer malarkey that you seem to be doing so right? Has your virtuosity on a wave somehow magnified your virtue of prayer, and mysteriously unlocked a clear line of comms to the Divine?
Religion worked well when humanity was starting to ask questions and figure stuff out. It was understandable that gods were conjured to make sense of floods and famines, natural phenomena, locusts and loss. It was – and still can be – a good set of training wheels for decency and charity.
Dear talented, hardworking, fortunate athlete. You’re not at all a bad person. You’re great! You mean well, and of course you’re welcome to reach out to Me any time. But let’s keep those convos humble, and between us.
Etc.
Devout Brazilian Roman Catholic surfers, much less ones on the World Championship Tour, have not, nor never will be allowed to mingle amongst the swellnetters giving the “open letter” the exact sort of universal praise and applause it deserves.
A further sampling from the comments:
Surfcarter: Seriously that is the and best most common sense article ever written. Thank you for a long awaited and realistic explanation of every religion ever conjured up. and don’t get me wrong everyone needs a little belief in something better than them but this is 2022 and people don’t levitate to the heavens and so on.
Fcalmon: This is gold. The best ever article in history. Whoever wrote this (God?) is a bloody genius.
Andy-mac: Excellent article… Thank you Sir, err I mean God….
Memlasurf: OMJ this one was well overdue and brilliantly written. Take it for what it is, a great summary of religious beliefs and it is only about ‘don’t take the Lords name in Vain’ or something like that. I think GOD is pretty busy in Ukraine at the moment and couldn’t give a toss about who wins some surf contest in the colonies (if you believe in the supernatural which I don’t).
Etc.
Like a warm downy blanket fresh from the dryer.
Like chocolate cookies, cold milk and a Longtom contest report wrap at the end of a long day.
Oh. Is Longtom at swellnet?
Dang.
I meant below the line.
Perfect example here, “content unavailable”. Wow Chas you are just so edgy, dangerous, and open. Bwahahahaha.
He should stop being a hypocrite, get rid of the moderators and let the monkeys run the place.
There’s a fitting quote from an unknown Brazilian philosopher; Cry is free.
Not really. Here you can call someone a cunt and move on.
It’s good you’re taking my word for it. It’s equally common knowledge that trolls do have unproportionally small heads.
nahhh the theological underpinnings used in those days have largely been forgotten exactly because they didn’t matter. And in 500 years no one will care whether Einstein was a Christian, a Jew or an atheist. Nor will it matter.
That’d must have been a nice change ,pitching instead of catching
Slough
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.
Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.
And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:
And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.
But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.
It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead
And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.
In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.
Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.
-John Betjeman (1906 – 1984)
Nah, I’m sorry for ranting. I still think your numerology magic is bullshit, but I’m not ‘condemning’ you.
I was brain-farting towards towards religion and mysticism generally.
But I think you might’ve misread my text.
The “you” wasn’t YOU, it was towards the indeterminate fictional person. It was less pretentious than using ‘one’.
I would never accuse you of riding a 9’5″purple and green longboard with six fins.
What a waste of my time and yours.
If you’ve already asked for stickers then they are in the post. Happy to do more as soon as I can afford them
peas
You sound so serious
Will they blame COVID for their PR goons attempting to take credit for Brutus’ buddies’ tree planting projects?
Far out. Look at that guy on the left doing some kind of terrorist fisting symbol. We’re all doomed. Oh and what if there was like, another two groups of these guys, a little further along the beach. Then that would be THREE groups of SIX... 666.
Wooooooooo ThInK aBoUt It…
Dude…
Yes, earlier thinkers and philosophers and scientists (for lack of better term) were also religious or at least went along with the culture of religion, because they had no other frame of cultural reference. Also, the freedom to speak one’s doubts about divine power aloud is a really recent thing and we should defend that.
Also the idea that an ‘athiest’ (lets roughly define this: a person who generally insists on a rigorous logic based on evidence, rather than a belief in the supernatural) who uses numbers, letters, or indeed breathes air and whose shit stinks, is somehow being hypocritical because people before them who ‘invented / inherited / improved upon (also breathed air and whose shit stank) these concepts were religious / lived in a religious society / were not noted in history as having openly questioned the dominant religion at the time… is… silly.
Religion is a constant change of goalpost over time, and always ultimately about control of wider society via vague threats of retribution or denial of something or other. The whole Jesus story arc is inherited from a story about Baal / Marduk from over a thousand years previously and likely so on.
People love to tell stories for fun or as lessons (how to survive, how to help the group function better, how to avoid your parents smacking you round the head). A lot of these stories got taken a bit too seriously or removed from the original context and become a belief, not evidence, a belief that one must not query, lest some poorly-defined wooogly-booogly sky creature give you stink-eye.
… Except (spoiler alert) Teh All-Powerful Woooggly-Boogglyy never did shit… OTHER PEOPLE made your life hell or fucking KILLED YOU, because you dared query the status quo and control structure which they were either ; complicit with and profiting from, OR so wrapped-up in and gullible that they were willing to do HORRIBLE things to be part of the structure that they did not question. (or third: they just shut up and did nasty shit because they didn’t want to get killed so they played along)
People can think whatever magical stuff they like about crystal healing, and not eating pork, how Harry Potter books are evil because contain ‘real spells’, and that society is utterly falling apart because biology has finally been allowed to be recognized in the general public as being a fantastic mash-up of gradiations of sexual attraction and gender identity (separate than sexual attraction, don’t get them confused).
As soon as they try to inflict all these contradictory beliefs upon me or the rest of society, whether we like it or not, there’s a fucking problem.
Oh and I did I mention how people are ALLOWED to like, exist in public, (or even vote, God forbid) if they aren’t from ‘white’ Northern European genetics and THAT’S ACTUALLY OK NOW!??!?! KERRRAAAZZZYYY huh?!?!?
So by extension: Government should be clean and rational, to allow everyone the structure to have peace, shelter, sanitation and food, so that they can go do their own crazy stuff without hurting anyone else.
Do you like to surf? Cool, go do it.
The government has made laws to ensure that everyone has free open access to the beach, and your taxes pay for the upkeep of the park behind the sand, the parking lot, cleaning up after slobs, and even medically trained lifeguards if you have some emergency. The taxes also pay for the roads, the signs, and enforcing the traffic laws so that people hurt each other less. Oh and guess what; the taxes pay for the schools which taught you how to read the signs and traffic laws. Oh and they stopped sewerage and toxic industrial waste from flowing directly into the ocean, in which you wish to partake of your whacky aquatic poncing which you find so important.
…What? Do you have to be part of some special in-group, or believe something special to get all those benefits? Nope. Just don’t be so much of an asshole that you end up locked away in a prison, thus NOT enjoying all those benefits.
Oh wait… actually there was a time not so long ago, like it only ended in my parents lifetime, where if your skin was little too dark then no, you couldn’t enjoy most of those benefits… but now the majority of society has recognised that the colour of one’s skin is irrelevant.
Do you believe a story about how your mystical Wooogly-Booogly does not like surfboards under 9′ 5″ in length,which are not coloured lime green and brown with purple stripes and have less than 6 fins, and one must never EVER wear sunscreen on the right-hand side of your face, and that you must only surf on the rising tide on a Thursday, a falling tide on a Monday and that the only way to get to the beach in to insert your log vertically through the sunroof of an AMC Gremlin ( Has to be an AMC Gremlin, any other car is for evil ignorant blasphemers) and you HAVE TO drive around the block 3 times, and THEN go to the beach at EXACTLY 20MPH below the speed limit OR ELSE YOU ARE BAD, BAD BAD!!! ???
OK…
Welp… you do yours buddy. I’m sure glad that I live on the other side of town and take a different road to a different beach.
BTW, just because noone else wants to obey the same restrictions doesn’t mean we are evil hate-mongers. And no, the fact that we also measure surfboards using feet and inches does not make us hypocrites because we think your religion makes no sense.
I was with ya for the first few paragraphs but I couldn’t be bothered reading the rest.
Fair enough. I don’t blame you.
Sorry.
I’d delete it but it would set a bad precedent
I got successfully trolled and bit hard on that hook.
You just need to figure out what gets your “content unavailable”. Wouldn’t it be cool if after three content unavailable we got a badge?
I have no idea what you’re on about. But I’ll just upvote you out of general goodwill.
Many scientists , your earthly Gods, are deeply religious
Oh you go!
what a twat I am eh?
No! Loved it.
Swellnet is a very weird place indeed.
They love a public shaming.
I went there once and the comments were as boring as dry stale toast.
Chas, “middle-aged white surfers, have seen the benefit of guarded thinking and congregate at the safer space swellnet.com amongst likeminded, like-believing, like-socioeconomic, like-racial others.” Really?!? Bwahahaha. You dont get to act like you and your BG is some edgy, free thinking, market place. Per my long argument with your moderator Negatron, you and BG are just another highly moderated, pop culture loving, click bate site that is terrified of free thought/speech. This site should be called Playa de hypocrites.
You haven’t even had a comment deleted, I’m obviously terrified of your firebrand style of free thought🙄
Thats not the point. Chas claims his site is for the free thinking, that it is edgy rather than safe, it’s not for homogenous thought, and that it is diverse. When in reality it is a heavily monitored and edited, single minded safe space for pop culture loving cowards that only think like him.
You’re 100% right. Thank you, anything else you need to tell us here?
BANG! He realised He had backed into the lamp post.
No stoopid. He fell backwards over Tyler taking the knee
Infinite mystery.!!!!
It’s the big bang. Not God.
Faaaark, that’s deep. And very well explained
Sith Lord?
Or The Force.
Bit of both is ol xixi