I have issues about religion. Have I ever told you that?

When I was a kid, I was like, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, etc.” I could recite Psalms 23, 2nd Corinthians 13 and a whole slew of other biblical passages from memory. (Nowadays, I can do equally cool stuff like reciting whole php class and object definitions from memory, but of course, that’s completely different …) I knew it by heart, and the funny thing was, I didn’t have to be forced to know it all by heart. I just kinda enjoyed it.

I’m not sure what happened since then but I think it’s safe to say I’ve lapsed in my faith … well, completely.

This afternoon I had a conversation with nyx about why Christians wear crosses; I said I thought it was vastly inappropriate to be commemorating the deceased by using the thing that killed him as the logo. Kinda like honoring JFK by wearing sniper rifle badges on your chest, or remembering Aaliyah by setting small paper airplanes on fire. (This isn’t an original idea by the way: I got it from Bill Hicks, the rudest stand-up comic/political satirist ever, God rest his soul.)

nyx said it was because the cross is a reminder of how JC died for our sins; it’s not how he died that the cross commemorates, rather it’s why he died. And then she said something that really got me thinking: you can’t compare JC to JFK (or I suppose, Aaliyah). For awhile, I was like, “Why? They’re both dudes that died tragically for their beliefs: JC stood for being righteous, and JFK stood for being democratic.”

“You just can’t.”

It took me a while to get it, but I think I finally do now: Religion isn’t something you can measure with conventional means. Arguing about it by using analogies and parallels misses the point completely. People are always debunking creationism by showing carbon-dated fossils and tectonic plate movement patterns; and they think that the fact that creationism is wrong means religion is wrong. The thing is, religion isn’t explainable. It’s not about the facts, or what you can prove. It’s about being a good guy and not stepping on other people and believing that some Person made this whole mess and wants you to enjoy it.

I still don’t believe I have the dedication, discipline or patience to be a willing, active participant again, but I think I can understand it all better now.

My new Principles in Life are now as follows:

1. Be a good dude

2. Enjoy life

3. Try everything

4. Never, ever code with a Microsoft product

With the exception of #3, I think this list is applicable to everyone.

Cheers, motherfuckers.

And so, on a whim, our hapless group of intrepid mallgoers (consisting of sonOfAngron, mike, mike’s girlfriend and myself) decide to watch the much-hyped and overly lauded A Walk to Remember. I am prepared for the worst here, because although everyone from avid to unit has said that this movie was worth watching, I simply cannot bring myself to expect a pop-singer vehicle to ever, ever be good.

And it turns out that the movie was not that bad.

That is, compared to Titanic.

Let’s start with stereotypes:

So on one side, we have the preacher’s daughter, Mandy Moore’s character, an astronomy geek who looks up at the stars and wants to see angels. On the other side, Shane West’s character, the leader of the school’s “In” crowd, a rock-music-listening, leather-jacket-wearing, angst-ridden teen youth who drives a cool car. The cool part about having stereotypes like these is that the filmmakers save on running time because they don’t actually have to flesh out the characters, they just say “religious school girl”, and you immediately have a cliche firmly in place. (Everyone in this movie is a cardboard cutout; there’s even a token black guy to make crude sex jokes and say “Yo, what’s up with you, man?”)

The first hour of the movie is your regular opposites-attract plotline, with our Bad Boy being forced to join a school play and reluctantly asking our Preacher’s Daughter for help with his lines. They fall in love, like, immediately. I am kinda reminded of the whole Anakin-Amidala farce in Episode II. The second hour has Preacher’s Daughter revealing that she is terminally ill, and of course, after some melodramatic hulabaloo, they get married so Bad Boy can fuck her brains out before she dies. The last half hour has the director vainly trying to jerk (or in some cases, wrench) tears from the eyes of the audience, but everything is so ineptly done that all you can do is kinda be embarassed for them. He even has two epilogues to make sure that every last teardop has been milked.

One reviewer said this movie was a bargain because it featured two tired old movie plots for the price of one tired old movie plot, which coincidentally brings me back to my Titanic comparison. This movie was better than James Cameron’s billion-dollar turkey because 1) it was cheesy without costing the Philippine national debt to produce, 2) the movie’s theme song had less chin to it and 3) hey, at least it’s not Leo, am I right?

This movie is aimed squarely at 11 to 15-year old girls, so unless you’re part of that section of the market (or wish to be, but can’t), avoid it. Avoid it like the plague.