Katie Über Alles

Juno, Waitress, and Religion and Politics

Went to see Juno last night at AFI.  Definitely a good movie - funny, but also touching, and Ellen Page does a really good job.  I'm sure she'll be in some other movies soon.  Also, I love Allison Janney and she was hilarious in this movie.  I highly recommend going to see it if you haven't already.  Oh - it also had a fabulous soundtrack with Belle and Sebastian on it.

After the movie we went to McGinty's and had a few beers.  We started talking about politics since CNN was on covering the Super Tuesday returns.  I told Keenan that I thought a McCain/Huckabee ticket was all but unstoppable...and that HRC probably has the best chance against them, but it would still be an uphill battle.  Somehow after that we all started talking about religion and our personal views on it...even Billy got in on the conversation after being largely quiet.  It's been a long time since I've had a real talk about religion with people and it was nice.

When I got home it was still pretty early - around midnight, so I decided to pop in one of the dvds I currently have from Netflix: Waitress.  This movie got really good reviews and I was looking forward to it, but in the end I didn't think it was that good of a movie.  Basically, Keri Russell plays a waitress who makes pies who is in an unhappy marriage and gets pregnant.  She starts having an affair with her doctor, and she has all kinds of inane conversations with the other waitresses at work.  Anyways, I thought it was overrated.  I wonder if I would have liked it more if I hadn't seen it immediately after Juno.  Whereas Juno was a movie that was about strong and empowered women, Waitress seemed to me to have a lot of codependent female characters...even the ending which I think is supposed to be the strong female ending did not seem to be that way to me. 

One of the best blog posts I've read in awhile

Read this! (from Overcoming Bias)

I'm tagging this with a poker tag because eventhough it's not explicitly about poker, it is about decision theory which is always applicable to poker.  Political science tag because decision theory is also blatantly related to polisci (especially in the rational choice literature...regardless of your opinion of RCT, in polisci we are concerned with understanding and predicting how people behave politically speaking, so obviously decision theory is relevant).  Religion tag because I love his characterization of his path to atheism.  It mimics my own (side bar: Maybe people interested in promoting religion should stop giving such vapid answers to children who obviously are deep thinkers and in asking "why" want a real answer, not one that betrays a lack of understanding of the topic at hand). 

Marriage: Religious and/or Civil?

It has become very clear to me that there is a big problem that is manifesting itself in all different ways: marriage is increasingly a civil proposition in addition to a religious one.  And guess what, this post is not even inspired by gay marriage.

As probably anyone who reads this knows, Jeff and I were married civilly, not religiously.  In other words, our marriage is not sanctioned by any religious authority, only by the state of Florida (and fortunately for us, since we are straight, the other 49 states too). 

When gay marriage first started becoming a hot topic, I immediately thought of Jeff and myself (though obviously we are not gay).  What about our marriage?  If the word marriage is only supposed to be used for religious unions, do Jeff and I have a civil union instead of a marriage?  Are we not supposed to refer to ourselves as married but rather civily united?  Is it OK because we are a man and a woman?  And if it is OK because we are a man and a woman, how does this not amount to government discrimination against homosexuals?

I came to believe that either the state would have to start calling all civil marriages civil unions and permit gay civil unions in addition to heterosexual civil unions, or that the state would have to get out of the business of "unionizing" people all together.  Leave it to the religions and allow people in domestic relationships regardless of their religious marriage status to have partnership benefits.  Obviously (or at least it seems obvious to me), it makes more sense to go with option number one, or some variant thereof rather than having the state get out of the marriage business.

Anyways, this is one big digression from what actually prompted me to make this post.  This legislation being considered by the Maryland General Assembly came to my attention today.  Yet another instance of a problem caused by the state and religions trying to do two different versions of the same thing.

Funniest quote in the article:

"While the bill may "intersect with religion," he said, it "would not excessively entangle" the two."

Honey, the two are already hopelessly, excessively entangled.

Runner up quote-wise:

""We hope it will be seen as a religious freedom issue," he said, because it makes it possible for women to "marry and remain in [their] faith."

Without such a bill, "women have to make a choice if they wish to remain" practicing Orthodox Jews."

Ummmmmm....  Does anyone else see the problem with this?  Obviously if the above are true, then it is the state legislating what religions can and cannot do, which I have a huge problem with. 

It seems like there are more and more instances of church/state issues related to marriage.  I wonder when eventually things are going to tip one way or the other.

Atheists: most distrusted minority

The University of Minnesota recently completed a study that identified atheists as America's most distrusted minority. 

From the press release:

"Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.

Edgell also argues that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past—they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. “It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that ‘core’ has historically been religious,” says Edgell. Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism."

Pretty interesting...  I am always interested in this kind of stuff, and the difference between groups that are visible (African Americans, for example) and groups that are "invisible" (do you know the religious preferences of everyone you interact with?)

Click here to read the full press release.