In Continuum.

Do crazy people scare you some time? We are not talking about the mentally challenged, or the mentally impaired, and neither are we talking about the mentally unstable people in this world. We are talking about the crazy people, okay? You know, the kind that sings with his pants down around his ankles in the rain about his son running away to Mexico with his wife? Or, if you remember, the man I saw in Taiwan who was praying to a giant billboard with a candy in his hand, pointing it into the sky as if it was some kind of offering. But our society has taught us that calling other people 'crazy' isn't very polite, it isn't very nice. So they have come up with all sorts of euphemisms to counter the word 'crazy', when there really isn't anything wrong with the word by itself. I remember my friend Andy from primary school and his little incident with the crazy man from the coffee shop near school. I remember us visiting that coffee shop after school one day when that famous crazy man approached Andy and started pulling his hair while singing some Malay pop tune. Andy, being just a little over ten years old at that time, just froze in fright and allowed his hair to be tore out of his head. 

I think we all know a crazy person or two, in our families or in the neighborhood. There are the kind that kind of just sings to you underneath your block, or the kind that follows you home for a nickel. Most of these people are pretty harmless, unless you are unlucky enough to meet one of those psychopaths on midnight trains with a dagger hidden in his sleeves - then you have a big problem. These people are, for the most part, clinically certified as being crazy. That is, if they were to volunteer themselves to a local mental clinic, they'd be certified as being crazy and probably given a certificate of some kind to prove it as well. You cannot actually dispute with the results of these tests, they are as accurate as it gets. That margin of one's craziness has widened over the years, but I suppose the basic formula for one to be called crazy, scientifically speaking, is still pretty accurate. But the word 'crazy' has been thrown about too easily these days, don't you think? You don't have to have a defect in your brain to be labeled by others as being crazy, you just have to do something completely ridiculous or strange. You know, backflip off the top of your house and try to land in a swimming pool would be 'crazy' nowadays, or trying to stick your finger into a leopard enclosure. Pretty crazy yes, and pretty damn stupid too. 

I think the standard of crazy is something dictated by the society. You learn about what is right and what is wrong since young, and the same goes for learning of what is crazy and what isn't crazy. Your brother probably pointed out the grumpy old man in the neighborhood to you as being crazy, or the teacher at school who decided that it'd be nice to set a difficult paper to fail everybody. Everybody seems to be capable of some sort of mental instability these days, and other vocabularies just went right out of the window. Even falling in love can be something crazy now, you always hear about singers going "I love you like crazy" or something along the lines of that. Apparently, a chemical reaction in your head that resembles eating a full box of chocolates is supposed to also paralyze your brain altogether. It doesn't make any sense, but it is one of those social standards that we have grown to accept. You know, like calling the grumpy neighborhood old man as being crazy, that is something we have accepted haven't we? If he likes to dance around while being covered in chocolate sauce, we think that he is crazy. But then how do you define the line between a person who is crazy and one who has a fetish anyway. It's difficult to tell, really. 

If you watch the trailer for a documentary below, you are going to think that those people are absolutely crazy. You ever seen those people in churches or religious rallies? The way that they would dance and shout, scream and cry, and some of them would even faint because of an overpowering wave of emotions? We have seen those people on the news and read about them in the newspapers, but we don't really label them as being crazy somehow. What is so different about one of those religious fanatics and an old man who likes to dance around in chocolate sauce anyway, to me they are either both equally crazy or equally sane. We don't think those people in churches are crazy, we just think that they are devoted and passionate about their beliefs. The same cannot be said about our chocolate sauce loving old man, we just tend to think that he is mentally unstable and perverted. There isn't anything wrong with chocolate sauce if you think about it, but there is definitely something wrong when you are giving away all your money to a church that pays no tax at all to the government. 

The new documentary is directed by the same directed behind Borat, so I suppose you know what the content is going to be like. Take what you saw in Borat and you combine that with religion, and you pretty much get a two-hour long comedy slash chaos - right up my alley. The documentary is hosted by Bill Maher, and you get to see him interviewing members of various religious institutions in United States, and you see him question the beliefs of those people in ways that you'd not want to be in his position. It is true though, if you think about it. A person can believe in an invisible man living in the clouds and listening to all the world's prayers at night, but he can't believe in the idea of Santa Claus flying around during Christmas and dropping gift boxes into chimneys, what's with that? God is supposed to be fair, well I think Santa is pretty fair too. He gives presents only to the good boys and girls, isn't that enough to justify his impartialness? Maybe God really is Santa. 

I do love documentaries like that, and it certainly isn't an attempt to make fun of religions. People always argue and say that people should respect each others' religions, and that is a true thing. What I personally cannot take is when the religious people do not respect my own beliefs, and that really rubs me the wrong way all over. Anyway, the title of this documentary is called "Religulous", which I feel is aptly named. It is a wordplay between the words "religious" and "ridiculous", and sometimes those words can cross in certain definitions. It only applies to a certain group of people of course, but it certain is true in those cases. Let's admit it, according to primary school science, we probably know that most religions aren't preaching anything that is scientifically based, it doesn't make any sense at all. But people believe in different religions, people vehemently defend their own religious, and that is when Sachs' persuasion lessons really come into play. Authority, social proof, reciprocation, consistency, you name it, they have done it. If the Pope says that it is true, then it must be true! A sense of captainitis! He is the Pope after all! Noticed how those church-going people would nicely direct you into the church, find your seat for you, offer you a cup of water, give you a free bible, and all that kind of fancy gifts you get on your very first church visit? I was at a church visit once, and I was showered with gifts, as if I was some foreign emperor visiting some African tribe. I felt good, but that's just me falling victim to a case of reciprocation. They were probably nice because they'd like you to join them, and of course the money is always nice to have. 

If a billion people believes in a concept that is crazy, a belief that is totally out of this world, then it really isn't so crazy any longer. The concept of "crazy" really is defined by social standards, or what we would consider as being crazy. If believing in an invisible man in the sky sounds reasonable enough for you, then it really doesn't matter if you decide to fork out all your money for a church that doesn't pay tax. That is the way things work, and the way things have been working throughout the years. If the majority subscribes to a crazy thought, then the thought isn't all that crazy any longer - fact. There was a family in Taiwan who believed in the supposed healing potential of human urine, which was why the father would collect the urine samples of all the members of the family and then freeze them up in the freezer at home. We think that they are crazy, in fact I think they are really crazy. But in that household, everybody does it and they seem to enjoy their piss a lot, so they probably think that it is fine eating their own frozen urine. Hey, if the majority of the house is doing it, it must be right. Right? 

That is also the reason why I don't get all the complaints about Scientology. You know, that religion I mentioned in the previous post which believes in humans being little collections of alien souls. These warped ideas came out of the mind of a science fiction novel writer named Hubbard, and somehow it grew and grew over the years. Now Tom Cruise is a member, John Travolta is a member, Will Smith is a member, even Beck is a member of this church. Everybody, however, hates Scientology with a raging passion for some reason, they think that they are merely there for the money. They also think that they are wrongfully using child labor in their churches and breaking up families all over the world. The only reason why Scientology is getting so much controversy, I feel, is because it came a few thousand years later than all the other religions. Think about it, if Scientology came right before the whole Christianity thing, people would have subscribed to it without questions. They are basically talking about the same baseless assumptions, same pointless beliefs, same ridiculous facts. Everything doesn't make any sense, but it all has to do with the structural contrast. Scientology came later, and does seem a lot more ridiculous to all the other religions. 

I am not for Scientology here, in fact I think it is a pretty screwed up cult to be honest. I am against religion as a whole, I think it shouldn't even exist at all. You don't call a man an anti-christ and then change that man to somebody else when he turns out to be just another bastard in the government. Religion isn't meant to be a bad thing, in fact I believe that it was meant to do a lot of good. It is always humans, always the humans, manipulating things into their own causes. It's about the money, all the free money just by giving talks and sermons every Sunday in churches, and you get buckets of money flooding in - oh, joy! The line between being religious and being ridiculous really is a thin one, but it's not like the majority is going to recognize anyway. We subscribe to the majority, we go with the masses. We don't want to be seen as different, we want to be normal. Well, explain to me why the religion of "no religion" is also the fastest growing belief in the world? People are waking up, and people are beginning to understand - that everything is just 'religulous' indeed.