Robots, AI's, Immigrants...could a Future with no jobs be a good thing?

I really don't see a nearby future with no jobs at all. Immigrants surely  aren't our biggest concen. Those who complain that they are, are a far bigger concern. Because they are detached from reality.

What I do see is a not to distant future with fewer jobs, with jobs taken by robots and AI's and a few people. Times are changing and we can either get on the bus to the future, or we get run over by it. As things are now most of us are about to get run over by it because of the (allowed) greed of corporations, and an inability to change quickly by government and the electorate.

Foolishness in politics and a lack of proper priorities is major a part of our problem. Politicians trying to point everyone in one wrong direction for their own benefit is another problem.

I have said repeatedly before that we need to pay workers more. Why? Because they have been kept back from receiving the increases they have earned and deserved now for decades. And those in charge merely argue reasons why it is okay, rather than reasons why it is not.

Worker need to be working less days per week, less hours per day. Not more. That then would not only give us more workers in the workforce , but would prepare us for when robots do more and more take over our jobs.

We also need to start preparing now for a future of people living longer while there are fewer jobs available.

If we don't make that connection soon, not only will we have shirked our duty as a nation, to increase the quality of the lives of our citizens as we have been doing (or not doing) for years in pushing workers to work more days and longer hours for less money, but we will be unprepared when we find that we really do not need these workers either to to jobs having moved out of country, which isn't as bad as we make it if we had handled things in the ways I'm pointing out, or robotics having replaced our workers.

Having fewer jobs or some day, no jobs, is NOT really a bad thing, We have merely made it that seem that way due to a lack of vision, planning, and proactivity. At the very least we have allowed it to have been made that way.

If we had built our economy properly, if we had other things for people to do, if they had been oriented to consider that once freed from slaving at their jobs, they can move on to higher ideals, things such as the sciences, inventions, the Arts, of bettering humanity's existence both on this planet and off, then the quality of life in general for all would be increasing now and not following a path that is no where near that kind of a consideration.

Now, if you think none of this is possible then you are simply considering the wrong things, and looking at all this in old fashioned, anachronistic ways. You are taking the tact that it's not possible, rather than considering how it is possible. And we need to be considering how things like this ARE possible. If you like, we need to "think outside the box".

But I would argue, we are currently living an existence that is outside of that box already. We have merely be deluded for so long that we can no longer see it, beyond the status quo that has been sold to us as just, "how it is", when really we have all been "sold down the river" just so the rich could become richer, and powerful, more powerful. All at our expense.

I'm not even arguing a national or global conspiracy here. It's just how it is, has been, and those who can, have jumped on the bandwagon in order to further their own agendas, bettered their own lives. It has replaced the American Dream with the Dream of the Rich and Powerful.

And no one seems to have noticed! Though I suspect they are finally now beginning to.

Central to all of these things is not despondency among the masses so much as poor education. In cutting our benefits over the past decades, at letting our infrastructures go, to devolve, we have dumbed down our population and made it easier for some of the stupid beliefs that are going around and have been governing our nation. We need to change that.

We need to be thinking through a new paradigm shift in preparing for it to allow it to happen. We need to be living it and moving on into the future. We need to do  it, ourselves. We need to vote for those who should be running things. Those who want to end big money in politics. Those who will oppose the ignorance and stupidity in politics and in the voting public.

As with others knowledgeable in the topic, I do not so much worry about the resiliency of people but in the inability of the lumbering giants of government, business and finance. We will have to kick them repeatedly in order to give them a consistent and hard myocardial thump to the near cadaver of those who have been handed over the charter to protect us. We need to push through to their central cores, to their hearts if you will. To restart it to once again beat for us and not just as they seem to do so well and so often, merely fend for themselves.

Robots, AI's, Immigrants? Could a Future with no jobs be a good thing?

Digital Dilettantes and Their Fundemental Misunderstanding

I was once one of those believers in “Information should be free." That was back at the beginning of the public internet in the 1980s before the web took hold in the 90s. But the issue really wasn’t not paying people for their efforts, their art, their genius. It was about what can be free being free. 

Information, should be free. Information that IS free, should be made free. Old information surely. Public information, absolutely, and so on. Government for one should be supplying citizens with all the information possible. 

An informed citizenry is far more productive for a nation, for the world, than an ignorant citizenry. 

"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." --Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820.

The current spate of dilettantes crying for “free information for all” have diluted the original meaning of the original intent of the phrase. To quote, as friend and fellow author Kurt Giambastiani put it in his blog recently, "Talent Just Wants to be Free: The Idiocy of Digital Dilettantes", there is a problem with thinking that all information should be free. Obviously, artists deserve to be rewarded for their talents and efforts.

Please feel free to go check out Kurt's blog that spawned my blog here as well as his comments there on this blog. Kurt always has something interesting on his blog. He offered this as an example of part of the problem with this information should be free issue: Income for US authors falls below federal poverty line – survey.

If information is made freely available to the general public, it will enhance the human experience overall. Certainly Public Domain works should be freely disseminated to the public, world wide. The downside is that some ignorant people will take in some of this information and yet remain ignorant as we have seen so much of lately. 

At that point those people are stumbling into the realm of stupidity in choosing to accept bad information merely to support bad information they already have. However, if we offer as much good and accurate information as possible, eventually the truth tends to win out. 

Supplying information leads into the same issues we see in the services industry. 

Why for instance does a mixed drink cost more at a bar than at home? Because you’re paying for more than the ingredients. You're also paying for the venue, the mixologist’s skills and knowledge, the server serving you so you don’t have to serve yourself, others of the public congregating in the venue, perhaps music or talent that is supplied, and so on.

So it is with supplying information to the public. 

Someone needs to package, store and disseminate it. The infrastructure leading to accessing that information needs to be monitored and maintenanced. Which is why I think the internet is no different than our roads and bridges and should be available to all to utilize them. If the government needs to pay (through us) to have and make information freely available online, then so be it.

Someone has to do it, and it needs to be done.

That is not to say that new information that has a cost. especially for individuals, musicians and artists, people who deserve to eat and live a good life while producing their works, should have their works devalued. Of course their works shouldn't be free and they should be appropriately compensated for the quality of their time and works.

The issue isn’t so much that these digital dilettantes are wrong, as they are misguided and perhaps being cheap bastards too. 

YES, information should be free and freely available to all. IF it’s free to begin with. At some point then down the long road of time it should become free. Free as in public domain. A concept I think we should retain after the death of the artist and perhaps that of their immediate family. As for the succeeding members of their family retaining rights, there are currently laws in place about that as well as their ability to retain those rights and so on.

We do need to push information out to all humans everywhere who want it and it does therefore need to be free. 

There are also other important considerations as has so kindly and eloquently (as always) pointed out by Kurt Giambastiani. 

Still, people need information to live, to eat, to survive. Artists and content producers do need to live and eat and survive. We just need to consider the context and not gloss over the issues like ignorant and greedy dilettantes.

Getting a project going, moving, done and completed

This story was taken from the book, “Conversations at the American Film Institute with the Great Moviemakers.”

I got this from Robert McKee who was talking about the actor Charlton Heston.

 “Heston said getting his first acting job came down to luck. After a theater production he had auditioned for fizzled and a directing job ended, his wife suggested Heston go to auditions for a production of "Antony and Cleopatra." Heston went over to the office and found it crowded. People who had connections in the theater industry auditioned first. Finally, Heston was the only one left. A staff member asked his name. "I said, 'Charlton Heston. Maynard Morris of MCA sent me up,'" Heston remembered. "I'd never been inside MCA and never met Maynard Morris. She said, 'Well, we're a little ahead, I guess we can see you'... Don't ever say luck doesn't count."

Again, let me be clear just as Robert was being. I'm not condoning lying or cheating to get ahead anymore than he was. That being said, I can tell you what the director Stanley Kramer once told me during a seminar series in talking about how he first got started in film.

He got his first film made through sheer guts. Since he couldn't get together the three pillars of filmmaking, what you need to produce a film, he told the bank that he had he actors and the studio. Then he told the studio he had the bank and the actors. And obviously he then told the actors he had the bank and the studio. And so he got his first film produced.

However that may not work so easily now a days. With instant media and such ease of checking into things now, it still may work if you handle it right. It's not so much in lying about things to get the ball rolling (though maybe sometimes). It's more about your attitude. About what you are projecting to those you need to be projecting it to.

It is about getting things done. Pushing through the impossible to the plausible on into the completed.

Never say die, they say. Never give up. It is those who stick with the process to the bitter end who survive to win.

If you have a dream, don't just dream it, but dream it big, with passion and bring others into that dream. Do things and get things done. Show people you can do those things. Infect them with your passion for your project, your business, your dreams.

You'll be surprised what you can accomplish if you just act like you should be doing what you're doing and then, do it.

Do we really need gun control in America?

Something about gun control just occurred to me. We need it.

Conservatives who are pro gun and concerned about having guns to protect themselves from their own government, are part of the group who have a strangle hold on America in many questionable ways. IF they are truly worried about their government to the point that they need assault rifles should they need to bear arms against their own nation and government, then they should vote appropriately to keep that from being a concern.

So that they do not need guns to protect themselves from their own government. Then they would not need assault weapons, just if anything, hunting and sport weapons and assault weapons (ASSAULT) weapons, are not sport firearms. Listen to this again.
Assault weapons are not sport firearms.

They are weapons.

If they think they need to protect themselves from their own government they need to be active in their government to keep vigilant so they never need weapons against their own stewards of their nation. if their nation is not going the direction they think it should be going and they are involved, perhaps they are looking at things wrong and in the end they are the ones who aren't seeing reality, who aren't evolving. Assault weapons are fun.

There is no doubt about that. Owning a fighter jet or a tank would be fun. Boom, ha ha. Yes, fun. But we should limit weapons. Otherwise nukes would be legal and most would agree that isn't a good idea. So there are limits, there is a border. Perhaps we do not need assault weapons. Yes the old argument when guns are outlawed only criminals will have guns is a double meaning. Only thugs will have and use guns illegally and only law abiding citizens will own them illegally because they have the moral right somehow to them.

If we have guns being used illegally more guns aren't the answer. Social programs are. Yes, that means spending money and spending it correctly. And I wouldn't look to a conservative for that answer. We need mental health considerations and programs. We need to address the things that have led us down a path of having more people in prison than any other country, more deaths by gun than any other country in peace time.

We can have guns enough however and of a type to protect ourselves against illegal guns. Yes, some will die because they too do not have a machine gun. But that is part of life. It's unfair. But when you consider the number of these incidents it's really not much of an issue, it's a fear stoked by people with an agenda that goes all the way up to the gun manufacturers and back around to the most powerful lobby in the world. The US gun lobby. The NRA.

Part of the nightmare we have today, the polarized separation of left and right, of conservatives and liberals falls right on the head of the NRA's divisiveness over past decades and Wayne LaPierre's actions in particular. A man who couldn't even use a gun when he started with the NRA. He was a politician seeking power and he found it in the ignorance and power of the NRA's membership and advocates. He has turned the NRA into something that politicians and Americans fear as well as gun manufacturers.

To say like LaPierre said, what if an armed and trained individual was there when a grade school got shot up, is a stupid, monstrous, decisive thing to say. Inflammatory and it got him a lot of donations from those he was trying to inflame. What if a cop where there? How often are cops really where shootings happen? It's a pipe dream. It's ineffectual. It's a lie.

Then the one time the NRA under LaPierre was going to compromise, after the Sandy Hook school shootings, the Gun Owners of America group, and even harder core of gun supporters than the NRA stepped in and subverted what could have been a good thing, saying that if you give in once you set the tempo for losing more. Which is a stupid thing to say, it's a politician's thing to say, a conservative's comment, a professional's comment, showing no real concern for people at all or for the real issues at hand.

The real issue is not guns, it's people. It's not about people's entertainment shooting guns, it's certainly not for the most of us, about food, shooting game, it's not about protecting America from it's own government. It's about people dying. Or not dying, through some common sense and reasonable measures to protect the citizens of this nation, from themselves. The odd and ironic thing about this is that the citizens of this nation are trying as hard as they can not to protect the citizens of this nation, from themselves.

The point is that those who think they need all guns all the time will never feel safe. Nothing will ever be enough. They will never trust the government, a functionary that swings like a pendulum from year to year election to election from right to left and back again. It's apart of democracy. What these people want is not democracy however. It's something else. And it's something we don't want or need as a nation.

It's past time to do something about it, put these people in their place, and push the NRA back into the safety and sport organization it once was, and was what I grew up with when I looked up to the NRA not as a beast trying to wear sheep's clothing but as an advocate for safety and sport, not murder and mayhem and power.

I used to belong to the NRA. I belongs when I was a kid int he 1960s and was proud of it. I haven't belonged to it in many yeas now. Because I dont' even recognize what it is anymore.

Do we need gun control in America? That's not even a question, it's a fact.

Unbecoming, not freedom

Big Brother is not watching you.

The chaos you see all around you as some masterplan is not some kind of uber society manipulating you, watching you all the time, plotting against you. Except that now a days Big Brother actually is watching you and that has really confused things for many people. Because they now think that their paranoia is justified. When in reality, it's just paranoia and the masterplan you see going on all around you, those patterns you try to apply to the chaos, is just that. Chaos. Incompetency, mostly. People trying to live up to the complexity of the chaos all around them.

They try to excel in their little piece of the pie so that they feel they have some kind of control over their life no matter how small or inconsequential.

Only inn reality they have no control at all. Just the appearance of control so that they can continue on to the next day. To take that next step. To complete the next step of the plan that no one understands and everyone is working on.

If you die it will continue. If you don't die, you will continue to supplement the beast, to feed it, to sustain it, caress it, make love to it, nurture it, give birth to it.

You can try to escape it, some do. Some think they do anyway. But you can't. Not really. This is it. This is all there is. So make the best of that tiny piece of the process that you can alter your life to in order to make it seem like you have finally escaped it, that you have finally achieved your goal of falling into that warm pool of freedom.

There is only one way to become immersed in it though, to swim through it to the other side. That is to leave it, completely, finally, forever. Then and only then, it is done, are you done. But that isn't freedom, it only seems like it. Because in reality it is merely your unbecoming.

Dating Sites and no not Ashley Madison

I got bored the other day, so I hopped on a dating site. See I live in an area here in the woods, twenty-two miles across Bainbridge Island and Puget Sound as the crow flies from Seattle. I seem to run into more potential dates in Seattle than I ever do in my area here in Kitsap County. Or they are clear across the country or the world from me. 

I've been saying that I'm sure there is someone for anybody, somewhere. I just figure that my potential "soulmate" (a kind of ridiculous romantic notion) is probably in the back alleyways of Mumbai, or Tokyo, Rio, or Belfast (or for that matter Dublin, Galway, Cork, or Limerick...see I'm going there in less than a week for my birthday, so....).

I've been single now since 2010 when my girlfriend and I split up after about a year and a half. She was a great lady but she kept breaking up with me. So on about the fourth time I said I thought maybe I wasn't what she was looking for. 

She was a very lovely Vietnamese businesswoman and I think she had trouble with my being white, mostly because of her family and not really her. I also wanted to pay as much time on my writing as possible and as my kids were just about grown and moved out of the house and onto their adult lives, I needed to have someone going to keep me from empty nest syndrome. Plus, I've made great strides in my writing career now too!

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. 

I'm on a few dating sites just for fun, but I don't much go on them. Not sure why I'm even there, really. I think it's like when I'm shopping for sweets at the store. I am losing weight, so I don't want to eat sweets. I just look, and move on. Window shopping if you will, so I don't buy in the end. 

And no, not Ashley Madison. 

I find a dating site dedicated to people cheating on their supposed best friend in life, utterly despicable. I don't understand the concept of cheating. IF you love someone, if someone is your best friend in the world and you marry they, how can you possibly kill their spirit by going out on them when they don't know it? 

Now I'm pretty open minded and I feel whatever agreement two people have as to what their relationships is, is between that couple (or threesome, or whatever they have agreed upon). But when you agree to be with only them and they don't know you are running around on them, well, you're a low life, aren't you?

I've been trying to change careers and if anything will suck up your time keeping you from attaining a goal... yeah, it's relationships.

So I get on this one site and run into a woman here or there who strikes my interest. I look past the surface info and photos and inevitably find a reason why it wouldn't be workable. Fine.

It's in the not workable part that I found something interesting. What exactly is it that makes them, unworkable?

Number one I think is, I just see the crazy in their eyes, in the look. After several marriages and various girlfriends over the years, the crazy has just gotten to be too easy to located.

Number two is either their location or religion or both. 

They seem to be equal in number of instances. Funny how I can see a photo and know instantly they are Catholic (having been raised Catholic) and I'm almost always right. 

Location has to be reasonable and religion definitely has to be reasonable.

What's reasonable for location? VERY local. I don't want to spend two hours getting there to see them (or vice versa) and the location around here is shall we say, interesting? It's really nice around here actually... unless you're into dating. 

Anyway, same goes with religious orientation. If there even IS one indicated. Yeah, I'm not big into religion, maybe you've noticed that. I'm not exactly secretive about it. Because then it feels like it's more than two hours from here for me. Here, right up here in my head, see? Get it? It's then more like it's light years from where they are then.

So then there is a number 3. 

Which I suppose is... what they say in their profile. Not to mention their photos. It is so annoying when someone posts photos of their flowers, or their pet (espeically if their pets are their children, I mean, really? If there's not enough listed about them, then they are holding back something, right? But if it's too much, then they are either giving up too much (and why?), or they are just too opinionated and either have issues like in having too many rules, or maybe they're simply too high maintenance. Many very attractive women have that issue in having been treated so well by so many throughout their lives. It's not so much a statement about them as it is about what you might have to deal with in being in a relationship with them. And I have no doubt that it's just like that if you're a woman looking for a guy.

But it got me to thinking.

If there's NO one out there then who is reasonable for me to take a crack at, then what's the common denominator in my not finding anyone who works for  me? 

Well. Me, obviously. 

Good grief, what a loser. Right? What a jerk! A cretin!

In considering all that I do realize something. Actually I realized this a long ago but it doesn't help me much in writing it out here now, does it? I'm quite sure I must be coming across the same, to some anyway of them anyway. 

So what's that mean? It's just not really workable I suppose.

I've actually always done much better in person. 

To consider putting your life on paper and then try to look good, is problematic to begin with. Rather when you see someone who catches your eye from across the room, then it's far easier to discount them and move on and not even realize it. Or to find that spark that suddenly flames up into something curious and interesting and well, there you are. All the work getting started is done without even thinking about it. 

And if they say too much or too little (well that comes when you start talking I suppose), other things can dilute the negatives, be it a smile, a laugh, a movement, a glance. Some of us are far better in flirting in person I suppose. Some of the "magic" in who we are is in us interacting. One has to wonder in viewing profiles online and rejecting them, just how many would you have gone for, if you had met them in first, in person?

What was my point in bringing this all up?

Romance I think. Interpersonalities. How we boil ourselves down to a profile and miss some of the great things in life in not having allowed things to grow and mature organically and within physical proximity. Don't get me wrong. 

I met my first online girlfriend back in the early 90s online (obviously) on a BBS, this being pre-interwebs and all. I was thirty six and she was twenty. She found me. She had heard of my reputation on that site and became attracted to me.

Seems she heard about a transexual flirting with me who I thought had been born female. Hey, just my preference. There is so much baggage for me in dealing in relationships, I really don't need any more than the usual that I'm familiar with. So shoot me. Once she outed herself to me online (we never did meet), I was a little stunned. I had started to realize someone was wrong when our sexualty as we discussed, seemed to match up too well. As if she were a guy. A Tomboy? Maybe. But I started getting an odd feeling. So one day online I asked some probing questions and she fessed up.

I tried to explain to her that she really needs to make that clear up front, not later on. I had recently just gone through this kind of thing with someone else on that site. A woman who said she was a model. She told me about her traveling Europe with another model friend. We got as far as phone calls. 

Then she fessed up about having been raped in Europe on that trip, then gaining a lot of weight. I felt betrayed at that point and the betrayal outweighed her physical changes from what she had described. I had a degree in psychology and I was seeing some serious issues here she needed to deal with, before she dated like this. 

I explained to her it was better to be up front with people, and not deceive them as how can that work out to her benefit? I'd also been through my last two major relationships which both ended in deceit. My long time girlfriend through college had an affair, then ran off and my just recently ex wife, had an affair and I threw her out. I was a little partial to not being lied to by that point in my life. Especially considering I had never had a woman break up with me until I was in my 30s.

Getting back to the transsexual, I was actually worried about her meeting some guy who then finds out he situation and he hurts her. I treated her like a person, I showed concern and I was concerned. Well she told everyone on the dating site and I so I somehow got a bit reputation for being cool, I suppose. 

Which led to a relationship with a very attractive, very bright twenty year old computer tech (who looked a lot like Mackenzie Davis' character Cameron Howe, on the excellent show, Halt and Catch Fire. Even down to the short blond hair and who even my housemate liked back then and she was pretty harsh on whomever I dated. She said of all the girls I had dated while living with her, she liked that one the best. High praise indeed. 

Halt and Catch Fire, which I just heard was being cancelled as I write this but hopefully uncancelled by time this blog is published in a couple of weeks as I'm in Ireland at the time this blog goes live. 

That Vietnamese lady I mentioned in the beginning? 

I also met her online back in 2010. She actually (again actually) initially contacted me. This was on a dating website (BBSs having gone the way of the dinosaur by now I suppose though it wouldn't surprise me to find there are still some around).

We met up, hit it off and had a great eighteen month relationship. Until I got tired of being broken up with. Well I understand. She'd had a tough life in some ways, certainly, romantically speaking.

Even though I've had some very good success stories in online dating I still prefer meeting someone in person for the first time. there's just something more as I said, organic about it. I feel like the tentacles of personality have a better field to invest in, to be enriched in. Surely it can work online and then you meet.

Look, that concept of finding someone similar online with similar interests and orientations in life, is all reasonable and everything, but some of my most intense relationships were when we were very different and people would even remark on it:

"How did you two ever get together. You're so very different?"

Love, we supposed. We very much loved each other and the differences just didn't matte.

Not right away anyhow, but after about five years or so (mostly because of raising kids really) those differences did seem to matter after all. Quite a lot actually. Of course those relationships didn't last forever. But it was really Something, let me tell you!

Anyway, like I said. Dating sites. I was bored one day....

Still am. 

Well, moving on.... I have writing to do and an upcoming trip out of country to get ready for.

Don't Wear the Holy Blinders.

This has bugged me for a long time, most of my life really.

So many people who are religious want to wear "Holy Blinders" to allow them and the Devout never to see what all God has created for them NOT to see... apparently.

The Holy Blinders?

Much of fundamentalist theism seems to be like this. Surely the Islamic terrorists are like this, but also many Christians are like this, especially in the American wingnut Evangelical movement.

I've never understood it.

We have a form of thinking here where you have to worship a Being, divine or not and apparently regardless what is asked of you by this Being, this Divine Despot, this Galactic Dictator, it's all okay because after all, you were created by this Being. So anything, any abuse goes. He says kill your kid, bang, kid's dead. Right?

You are given rules to follow, to think a certain way but not another way; and to think more of this Being than anyone or anything else...apparently.

What I never got is that these people have found a way to cheat, on pain of death, what their divinely dictated path is. Rather than learn to be a certain way, rather than to build the spiritual muscle to be that certain way, rather than to suffer, toil and trouble over making their path what they believe it is and then tread upon it, they simply completely avoid being that certain way by using tricks, avoiding any need to use their free will.

How to succeed at using free will correctly? Don't use it at all of course. Eliminate the choice and bang, you're one day in Heaven. God must be so proud.

I don't think so.

In Islam they make women wear clothes to hide their features so men don't have impure thoughts. Rather than learning not to have those thoughts or learn to stop them once they crop up. Because apparently they found it too difficult. So they decided it's better to put upon women then to put upon themselves, or force themselves to have some inner discipline, to treat others accordingly and not abuse anyone outside of themselves for their own lack of strength as a human being.

Lazy? Simply that scared so as to have become irrational? Cowardly? Or what?

They will sometimes even kill people for not following the rules at times. Sometimes even over some very silly rules.

Rather than allowing them to be dealt with by that divine Being after death, they take the matter into their own obviously unclean hands. They can't even avoid thinking about sex without covering women up, So they are the dealers of death in "God's" name? Really? Sounds more to me like ignorant, poor self esteem punks in a street gang.

And don't tell me when all they can see is just a woman's eyes, that they don't spring to attention in seeing those deep lovelies looking at them from the deep mystery of that all encompassing cloth. As with the ancient Japanese. In covering women completely up in kimonos, the back of the woman's neck became a very erogenous zone for men.

It makes no sense.

A therapist I knew years ago once told that me her son (they were Japanese Buddhists), wanted to live in a monastery in order to live correctly. But she told him, and this is important, that it doesn't mean as much. It's not as useful as it is to learn to be how you'd want become while in a monastery while living in the real world. 

It is more important to live your life in the real world, dealing with real things in how a normal person has to deal with them on a daily basis. That is the true way to live. Yes we need those in monasteries as it serves a purpose for the rest of us as a kind of touch point. But most people need to live in the real world and deal with their beliefs as normal human beings.

Christianity is much the same in disallowing all humans from things like sex, contraception and because at times that fails, abortions. Rather than allow them each to use the free will God supposedly had based the trials of humanity on in the first place. Rather than allow these humans to make their own decisions, should others really be making those decisions for them? Isn't that cheating, not allowing those decisions to be made in the first pace by the individuals involved?

It's weird. It's dishonest. It's twisted. It's ugly. And many times... it's evil.
What kind of religious runt, what kind of weak, lame, wimpy people act like that in the face of a Supreme Being as if this Being won't figure out what they are doing? How they are subverting the challenges originally and allegedly given them? How they have twisted the Divine Message? How do they get away with it? Do they? Will they?