I have this in a frame in my home…

“I dislike the veneration of ignorance, the glorification of idiocy, the wild-eyed hatred of progress and the fear of education, which send the faithful shrieking, vampire-like, from the light of knowledge.

“I dislike the way in which prejudice is passed off as piety. The way superstition is peddled as wisdom. The way intolerance is raised to the lofty heights of “Truth”.

“I dislike how hatred is taught as love, how fear is instilled as kindness, how slavery is pressed as freedom, and how contempt for life is dressed up and adored as spirituality.

“I dislike the shackles religions place on the mind, corrupting, twisting and crushing the spirit until the believer has been brought down to a suitable state of worthlessness. So lost and self-loathing, so bereft of hope or pride, that they can look into the hallucinated face of their imaginary oppressor and feel unbounded love and gratitude for the additional suffering it has declined, as yet, to visit upon them.

“I dislike people’s need for a communal delusion, like drug addicts who unite just to share the same needle.

“I dislike the way reason is reviled as a vice and reality is decreed to be a matter of convenience. The way common sense and ordinary human decency get re-named “holy law” and advertised as the sole province of the faithful.

“I dislike religions’ wholesale theft of any number of ancient mythologies, only to turn around and proclaim how “unique” their doctrine is.

“I dislike how intelligence is held as suspect and inquiry is reviled as a high crime.

“I dislike the pillaging of the impoverished, the extortion of the gullible,
the manipulation of the ignorant and the domination of the weak.

“I dislike the invention of sins for the satisfaction of those who desire to punish.

“I dislike the demonization of unbelievers, the ill-concealed hate of proselytizers, the hysterical rants of holy rollers, the wigged-out warnings of psychic healers, the dismantling of public education via religious school vouchers, the erosion of civil rights by theocratic right-wingers, the righteous wrath of gun-toting true believers, the destruction wrought by holy warriors, the blood-drenched fatwas of ayatollahs and the apocalyptic prophesies of unmedicated messiahs.

“Most of all, though, I dislike the certain knowledge that religion, in one grotesque form or other, will be with us so long as there is a single dark, cobwebbed corner of the human imagination that a believer can stuff a god into.”

That pretty much sizes it up for me.

For those of you experiencing the metaverse known as Second Life™ with me, I have a small rant to get off my chest.

As live musician in this cyberworld, I have a problem with large gestures spamming the chat.

You know, the howling wolf, 2 finger peace sign, cat, lips, the HELL YEAHs and the YEEHAWS et al.

I’ve talked to many residents and have had it explained to me a number of times.

“It’s my way of expressing my appreciation to the musician!”

While that may be your motivation, it appears to everyone else to be nothing more than an attempt by the gesturer to be noticed… by everyone in the vicinity and further if SHOUTED. It seems to be more self serving than expressive.

In reality, there’s nothing really expressive about it. It’s not original. In most cases you simply buy the gesture and assign it to an F key. It’s almost a non effort.

The larger the gesture, the more chance that someone else’s posted request, suggestion, advice or comment will be sandwiched into the gesture and, thereby, lost.

If you want to be originally expressive, type those 20-30 lines of chat manually for every post with different messages and images each time.

Now THAT’s an original expression of appreciation. (No, please don’t try, thanks! No really.)

A good number of residents as well as a lot of live musicians will mute you in a second for gesture spamming the room chat because it interrupts their chat/conversation with their friends in room as well as with the performer.

Kinda defeats your purpose .. right?

One can only hope that the Labs of Linden will, for residents who would choose to ignore gesture spam, come up with something that would auto block spammed gestures more than three lines long.

I could use that. I have friends that could as well.