I wrote a couple South Park reviews on TV.com. I don’t know, it’s sort of nice to be able to write down your opinion and archive it somewhere public. I gave “Smug Alert” a negative review and a rating of 5.5, so to balance it out I gave “Red Hot Catholic Love” a positive review and a rating of 10. (I’m biased against newer seasons, but it’s not even that--newer seasons just have a bunch of shitty episodes.) Part of the message of “Red Hot Catholic Love” is that fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible’s mythology and rules obscure its true point, which is to love thy neighbor and be a good person. After writing the review, it occurred to me that the people who wrote the Bible may never have expected anyone to interpret its stories literally and use them to justify hatred and bigotry. It’d be like if people in the future made a religion out of South Park, if they removed its morals from their contexts, and just focused on the stories, acting like they actually happened. That’d be pretty ridiculous, but it’s basically the same as what happened with the Bible. I think Jesus would be annoyed by fundamentalists, and really bothered by the way some people have glossed over his message, spread hatred through religious bigotry, and spread fear through the invention of Hell. The stories in the Bible are often beautiful, but they’re just stories. You wouldn’t expect somebody to read The Odyssey and treat that like fact, would you? Religious mythologies differ by region and time period. The only reason Christianity is so ubiquitous today is because of the invention of the printing press way back; it’s the same as humans preserving species that are evolutionarily obsolete, like the panda. If you strip away their mythologies, many religions boil down to the same principle of love thy neighbor. The fact that so many cultures across the world independently came up with that suggests to me that humans are good creatures, and that’s incredibly uplifting.

Scientists have already concluded that backward time travel is scientifically impossible. (See http://www.livescience.com/1339-travel-time-scientists.html if you're curious.) But if you think about, anybody can come to the conclusion that backward time travel is logically self-eliminating. Right now time works like a one-way street: the past influences the future, and that’s all. But if someone were to open a portal between the future and the past, it would be a two-way street. The past and future would be constantly changing one another. Some dude goes back in time, messes up the past; he ceases to be because the future has been changed; another guy from the new future messes up the past in a new way. Time would be constantly changing itself until the future was changed in such a way that the time machine was never invented and never would be invented. Only then could the loop be broken, and time would be a one-way street again. The thing is, this is not a temporal phase or anything like that. It doesn’t start and stop. If backward time travel were invented at any point, the entire past would be changed, since one of the first things people would do would be to go back to prehistoric times to figure that out. So, hypothetically speaking, if backward time travel were not a scientific impossibility, the time machine WOULD exist. Somebody WOULD have invented it at some point down the line. The future would be changing all the time in correspondence with the past and the snowball effect until the point where the time machine never was. Therefore, if the time machine exists, it does not exist. It self-destructs.