Heroes

I heard a story the other day. I don't know if it was true, but I do know that it holds a lot of meaning.

Anyway, there was a army photographer tagged to a GI unit in Vietnam for 6 months. Everyday for 6 months he went out with this unit on patrol, and everyday this photographer took pictures. Eventually it came to the day before his 6 months were up and he and the unit went out on patrol - just like everyday. 

The platoon were picking their way through the jungle until suddenly, the LT pushed over the photographer to the ground. From the ground, the photographer saw that same LT get shot in the head. What also happened was something that happened by pure chance. Pure luck. As the photographer hit the ground, he hit the ground, the camera went off as a result of the jolt from the impact with the ground and snapped the exact moment that the lieutenant was shot.

For 25 years, this photographer didn't show anybody this picture and didn't tell anybody of this story. He was racked with guilt, thinking that that LT had died instead of him, that he thought it should have been him that was killed. But one day this photographer looked at this photo at realised that this wasn't a man dying because of him, instead of him - but a man saving his life. It was a person dying whilst saving another persons life. 

From that moment, the photographer showed this picture, and he told the story, and he made sure people knew of this hero. I think that this just goes to show, it doesn't matter what happens, there is always two ways you can look at something. It's just up to you to decide which.

Define: Blog.

"1.) blatantly uninteresting online diary that gives the author the illusion that people are interested in their stupid, pathetic life. Consists of such riveting entries as "homework sucks" and "I slept until noon today." 

2.) a place where people whine  about their daily activities which nobody is interested in. topics like why they argue with boyfriend and how they end up together at last, daily anorexic activities like drinking blended organic fruits and vegetable for breakfast, lunch and dinner, talking about cutting themselves with a razor blade and how good they felt, whine  about their shopping activities and what they got."

No, I didn't write this, but I wish I had. I do think that the person who did write this definition may have just sat and trawled Tumblr for 10 minutes and came to the conclusion that this is what blogging is. I feel that there are a few other points that needed to be added. Like the following for Blogspot:

3) a place where traditional Christian American families can pose with their perfect prosperous lives with the persona of simple perfection posting pictures of mommy and daddy and their children on lovely days out together whilst seemingly clueless to the significant levels of risk associated with carelessly posting this information to the world.

Five out of 10 on the Blogspot blogs that I viewed at random came up with blogs matching my above description. That's HALF. Obviously this isn't a fair representation on the content of Blogspot, but it is definitely a large proportion of it's server space.

Obviously not all blogs fall within these 3 confines; there are a lot that are dedicated to cooking, faith, politics, music, film, games, cars, computers, blah-blah-blah-blah. There are blogs about literally everything. However, the above points are just a satirical generalisation to the blogesphere as a whole; much like the stereotype that all teenagers are lazy, skint, anti-social hoodies. 

Religion in society, that, and we're all going to die.

Earlier this week I saw a young Muslim chap in Sunderland with a young lady under his arm and a jacket that had the word 'Allah' on his back in Arabic. Aside from the girl, of which I'm sure there's somewhere in Islam that says that's naughty, I want to focus on the jacket.

I was fortunate enough to take advantage of my compulsory state education and during my dull Religious Education classes I was taught how the word God, or Allah, was written in Arabic. It's been a couple of years since I was at school, but after some thought about what I saw, I eventually recognised the Arabic word as God. When I realised this, I didn't look down on him, I didn't think he was a prat, I just accepted it as who he was and let him get on with it.

But this would not have been the case if I'd seen a young Christian chap with a jacket on that said God, or had the Christian fish on the back of it. I'd have given him a wide birth and came to the conclusion that he was a nutter.



Why would I have thought this? Isn't Christianity the national religion of Britain? Why do we collectively view anybody who chooses to openly advertise their religion with such scorn? I believe the leading role of this is the media tabloids (yes, them again.) They are so quick to jump up and publish stories such as "Islamic extremism creating 'no-go' areas for non-Muslims in Britain" [Mail Online] and then jumping to "Christian faces court over 'offensive' gay festival leaflets" [Mail Online].

From the outside (which is how the vast majority of people take their news) this would make it look like faith is narrow-minded, non-dynamic and all the same. The first article's headline even makes it seem like Britain is suffering an invasion! It probably doesn't help that extremist Islamics are blowing themselves up everyday in the name of a god - if there was a god, why does he allow people to so heinously commit these acts in his name?

I think another aspect that cannot be overlooked is the massive advances in social opinion towards many things that religions are against; homosexuality, marriage, abortion, euthanasia and science. As the everyday person is evolving their opinions on these matters, religion seems to steadfastly oppose it. Issues such as euthanasia and abortion could be argued to be matters of morality, but others such as homosexuality are not.

In every advancement in science, religion would seem to appear more and more false. For example, pictures such as the one of the one above that shows the residual aftermath of radiation that was left over from The Big Bang. The term 'I'll believe it when I see it' jumps to mind, and to this date, there is no modern evidence that proves the existence of a greater being.

Just because religion may be based around mythical beings, fictional stories and in some areas, backwards ideologies, it can't be denied that people that believe in a faith tend to live lives of charity. Without Christianity, many western organisations such as the YMCA and Salvation Army wouldn't exist and far many people would be far worse off.



Now on to my next point today, we're all going to die. Could you imagine living in a time without penicillin and other basic anti-infection drugs? That time could be returning soon thanks to the evolution of new super-bugs such as MRSI and C-Difficile and their tolerance to our main weapons against them. Not very many things like this worry me since reports such as this are released all the time, but this does. I find it chilling to the bone due to it being so believable. We are already in the opening rounds of the fight against these bugs; it's ever so slowly becoming harder and harder to find ways of treating them. 


Is this just a medical phenomena caused by humanity and it's overzealous use of antibiotics, or is it Mother Nature's answer to culling the human population that is plaguing the planet?