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IHTFP.

Probably best known among the students and alumni of MIT, IHTFP stands for “I hate this fucking place”. I find it odd that legally-consenting students would show animosity toward an establishment which in no way obligates them to suffer its horrors. A similar situation is found here at John Brown University. A lot of the students really hate the university.

One really big bone of contention is the lifestyle expectations contract. In a nutshell, the contract just states that as a student, we can't be gay, promiscuous, on drugs or dancing. I fail to see how this is a problem? I don't smoke; I don't slam down the booze; I'm not boinking chicks, and I don't even know how to dance. People say that it's legalistic and ridiculous. I say, if you have a problem with it, you're a whiner — you either whine too much, or you like to drink wine.

I have read forum posts of people who say that they hate the university, they hate the classes, and they hate the people. Someone spoke up and stated the obvious when he told them to leave. He was told that his solution was dumb and unrealistic. I'll just state the obvious here too: if this university isn't your particular brand of vodka (or if you like to drink vodka), really, leave. I'm not going to miss you. You'll be someplace where you can better spend your scholarship money, and I won't have to plug my ears with my waded up scholarship money after listening to you complain about this place like if there was a fire here, it'd be the throne room of hell.

Being a nerd who entertains himself with reading the encyclopædia, Wikipedia is a haven for me on the Internet. Not only is it a vast repository of knowledge and facts, it's a community for people who… have no life.

I was reading some talk pages that relate to customisation of pages. There were issues such as date formats, metric verses American units, use of spelling and, most controversially, using different era symbols.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I'll provide a little background. As of this writing, the year is A.D. 2005. The A.D. stands for the Latin phrase Anno Domini meaning the year of the Lord. This refers to the calendar's use of the year of Jesus' birth as the absolute point which all other years are relative to. It might be worth noting that most scholars believe that He was really born a few years before the year the calendar uses. For years that occur before this year, the abbreviation B.C. meaning Before Christ is used following the year. The usage of these terms clearly indicates a Christian centre for the measuring of dates. It's this Christian centre that's come under attack from secularists who wish to avoid such “religious” meaning in what should be a secular system. I quote the word religious because it's not religion that's being purged from the calendar system… just the Christian part of it.

For example, if you were to look at the names of other objects existing in the calendar, you would find that plenty of them are religious. Let's look at the days of the week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. So what? The days of the week. It's so common that most of us hardly know what they mean: sun's day, moon's day, Tiw's day, Odin's day, Thor's day, Freya's day and Saturn's day. Most people would recognise Thor, Saturn, the sun and the moon from the list. Most of the names come from deities that would have existed in Norse mythology with Saturn being an unusual exception. In languages such as Spanish, French, Italian and Esperanto, the days of the week are named for Roman gods. However, this is not just found in days of the week; it can also be found in months of the year. A lot of these too were named after pagan gods: Janus, Februus, Mars, Aphrodite, Maia, Juno, Julius Cæsar and Augustus Cæsar all have months named after them.

Am I offended that I invoke the names of pagan deities each time I make an appointment? Absolutely! As long as people out there are willing to take the time to purge the Christianity out of the calendar, I'm willing to start taking the paganism out of the calendar too.

I'm lying.

I'm simply sick of people who try to make things politically correct. Of course, Christianity is one of the main targets of politically-correct-minded people. Why? Christianity is a religion that is intolerant of others. Christianity is the only way to heaven; there is no Diane Sawyer system of having all religions lead to one place. I'm not talking about sending Christians on some crusade to murder, rape and cannibalise the unbelievers again. (Side Note: Take any piece of literature supporting the crusades and replace crusade with jihad and unbeliever with infidel, read the piece again and ask yourself if the crusades sound like they were a good idea.) I am talking about abandoning this religious unity crap that seems to be the trend among ABC news anchors. If you're not a Christian, you're wrong. Am I going to stop you? No. Will I tell you that you're wrong? You're wrong. I'm intolerant of your religion because it's wrong.

Anyway, this is not an argument limited to Wikipedia. I have seen the same on my college campus. One of my Bible professors insisted on the use of the common era system to denote dates. He explained that it would be bad to enforce others to profess Jesus as Lord by denoting dates as being measured from the year of the Lord. The thing is that He is the Lord whether people believe it or not. I don't take offence invoking Freya's name whenever I mention my favourite day of the week. On the other end of the spectrum, my history professor who I greatly admire brought this same parallel concerning days of the week to the class one day during a lecture. His view was that people will look back at this point in time and comment that our society was one that refused to offend people. Me, I take one of my previous quotes: “I hope that people look back at our civilisation and laugh.”