Ok, this is the part of my website where I'm allowed to rant. This said, I'll try to keep the ranting to a minimum. It all depends on how caught up I get with writing it.
I try and have political views without being politically active. To those who see this as a bit hipocritical, I apologise in advance. In my late teens I generally saw myself as being a communist. That was until I worked out that communism is a benchmark, a cardinal point that is probably unattainable and unsustainable on a global scale. In the last couple of years I've identified more strongly with anarchism, not as something that we need to work to achieve, but more as something we're almost certainly heading for. Once the oil runs out and technology fails the old states and global economy will fall into dust and people will survive by living in virtual anarchy. The simple reason is that nobody will be prepared for any kind of catastrophe, living as we do in mind-numbing conformity. We're told to buy this or buy that, and we do, because somebody said somewhere that it's a good idea. This way, people will be busy making money to the end, and will have no time to spare wondering what will happen.
On one level I still believe firmly in leftist principles: chiefly that the sate exists (or should exist, if at all) for the sole purpose of bettering the lot of all its citizens. On the other hand, I also believe in the individuals responsibility to take charge of his/her life, to better it and themselves as much as they are able. If empowerment by other people is required to get on the road towards empowering themselves, then that should be available and known about. It follows that individuals should be allowed to make mistakes and learn from them. Sheltered people are invariably ignorant people. I was shocked when I went to the US a couple of years ago how plastic and unnatural their society was, and how little ordinary people seem to know about anything other than what's been told to them. I hope I didn't just offend some worldly and more in-tune Americans out there; I'm simply reporting on what I perceived when I was there. If anything, the apparent apathy of the majority tended to make switched-on members of society stick out more than usual, and I had many interesting conversation with such people while I was there.
Religiously, I'm technically an atheist, as I don't believe in God or Gods. I believe in spirituality and reincarnation, and that reincarnation is what drives much of our evolution. Just as we have physical evolution, so too must we have a spiritual evolution, as wisdom is slowly compounded and shaped over many lifetimes. Just as we have spiritual evolution, so too I believe do we have spiritual lineage in parallel with our physical lineage. Life and consciousness are entities in the universe, just as matter and energy are.
I have a distain for organised religion in general, but people of an organised creed don't bother me as long as I am not targeted by them. I have no time for religious fanatics who accost me in the street and promise me vision if I convert. The only miracles I believe in are the ones we create for ourselves. After all, magic is just science which we don't understand yet, but we can still utilise. Just as exorcisms gave way to psychiatric treatment, alchemy to chemistry. Hell, people drive cars everyday and just assume that they go.
I try not to make judgments on people as groups. I know what it's like to be stereotyped, and to have to overcome these stereotypes. Being bi, blind and living in a small country town taught me that being categorised and thusly treated by other people is horrible and so I go to lengths not to do it myself. (Might add more if I feel like it).