Taofucianhauism?????

All, or most of, the pictures that I will be posting on this blog will be from my trip to Asia. I had grandiose plans of starting a picture blog while I was there but dumbing down my English all day every day definitely made it difficult to write intelligently and stunted my creativity. I think it's been good for me to remove myself from the pictures for a while anyway. It's given me a chance to examine exactly what it is I saw and look at them from a more subjective eye. I think if I had written this while I was in the midst of my travels I would have missed the point behind a lot of them.

First of all, I don't remember who said it, but someone once said, "we should cherish our comedians, they contribute more to our society then we realize." Tonight I watched the last stand up HBO comedy special George Carlin did before he passed away. He spoke on religion, politics, and family amongst other things and constantly repeated the line "It's all bullshit, and it's bad for you." In homage to Carlin and because I feel that that statement is one of the most universally true statements I've ever heard that will thread through many of my own posts I’ve decided to name my blog "Bullshit is bad for you."

I took this picture in a famous temple in Hoi An, Vietnam. I chose it as a topic centerpiece for my first post because it was always a good friend's favorite and because of that I always wanted to use it for something. I didn't ask the monk to pose for this picture he was actually performing temple duties at the time.
Vietnam is an interesting country with an interesting religion, a religion I personally admire for numerous reasons. Since I'm never amazed by the ignorance of people here (if one more person asks if they speak Taiwanese in Thailand I really think I'm going to have to blatantly call them out as mildly retarded) I'll explain a little about the religion the majority of Vietnamese people claim to identify with. If you were to go out on the streets of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh city and survey people most would probably claim to be Buddhist, BUT only because it would be too confusing and complicated to explain what they really are, which is essentially a hodgepodge of three different religions or philosophies. Due to the overwhelming influence from China and other countries years ago Vietnam has sculpted it's own religion from the clays of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. While they still call it Buddhism, and there still are a lot of similarities, there are still many obvious differences that I'll choose not to delve into.

I'm not "that guy" that thinks believing in God, Buddha, nirvana, heaven or whatever it is you want to believe in, is a bad thing. They’re all great stories that help a lot of people get through rough times in their life but ultimately they’re stories, the star wars of the BC generation. If these stories had been written in contemporary time and been placed in the non-fiction section of your favorite Barnes and Nobles, the author would be bitched out on Oprah within two days of the book hitting the shelves. The problem with religion for me is it takes away the ability for people to think for themselves and determine for themselves what good and bad is. Instead they are told the difference between "good" and "bad." They are TOLD what is acceptable and what is not, and millions of people around the world blindly follow it. What I loved about the Vietnamese people, and what I have tried to do in my own life, is they took pieces from different religions, ideals that THEY thought were good, and made set their OWN sets of morals based upon them. Now I'm not here to endorse or censure the beliefs of the Vietnamese people, I just think it's a feat to be commended that they didn't buy into the bullshit. I'll be the first to say those books, the Bible, Koran, Preaching’s of the Buddha, they all have some really great, meaningful, fulfilling ways to live your life by, but they’re also a how to guide book for anyone with half a brain to obtain power over someone else. What I think we have to do, and what the Vietnamese people as a collective have done, is learn from these things without following them blindly. If we are blind there isn’t even the possibility of us seeing the bullshit. Ultimately I think we just have to remember "its all bullshit and its bad for you," because if we remember that we will never go blind.