Today’s video started off with me just rambling on, and ended up being like four hours of work cutting, cleaning, and compiling clips.

And it’s not even very complicated. It’s just me talking for most of it. I forgot how much work it is to edit video. I am beginning to see why a lot of vloggers don’t bother, the lazy buggers.

But I could never just put my ramblings up there unedited. I am higher standards than that. As I get the routine down, hopefully the editing stage will take less time and I will have more time to add little bells and whistles to make my videos less “talking head” and more “something people would actually watch”.

In fact, after primary editing was done, I had planned to go through and see where I could add images, bits of text, and other frippery in order to break things up a bit, but I just plain do not have the energy.

I am tapped out for the day. I ain’t used to working this hard. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to have found something that absorbs so much more of my energies.

But right now, my gas tank is empty, so, talking head it is.

You will also notice that tonight’s video looks a little different. That’s because I rendered it in a lower quality format than before. Sorry about that, but I wanted to compensate for fairly low local upload speeds, so I thought I would give low-res a try this once.

If, after a cooling off period, I think it’s not good enough, I will discontinue the practice.

But for today, I did not feel like it taking several hours to upload the darn thing.

It’s odd thinking about things like bandwidth and hard drive space after staying so long “on the cloud”. It has been ages since I have downloaded anything bigger than an MP3 or uploaded anything… well, anything really. And it’s also weird to find that weird, because bandwidth and downloading used to be a huge part of my Internet experience.

But then the Flash game revolution came along and suddenly I had a lot less reason to download games any more. And the great thing was, Flash games worked just fine (for a while) on this computer, which is way too old to play any current games.

Couple that will getting the Wii and not being able to hack it, therefore no more game piracy, I just found that I didn’t download much of anything any more, apart from the amount of uploading and downloading that comes from using the Web.

Suddenly, though, I am a content provider (well, fairly content… ) and so I have to think about upload speeds and video quality and hard drive space and all that folderol.

What else… a few fun news stories. Like how male train drivers in Sweden are wearing skirts.

See, recently the word came down from head office that Swedish train drivers would no longer be allowed to wear shorts. Why? I have no idea. I suspect someone’s wife saw some ugly bony knees and was traumatized for life or something.

I mean, who even sees the drivers?

The train drivers responded by taking a careful look at the revised clothing code and noticed that skirts were still allowed, and there was no mention of gender.

So to get that cool sensations on their legs once more, in protest, 13 of them started showing up in skirts, which sounds comfy to me.

And the company they work for is fine with this. Well, they can’t very well protest without seeming transphobic, can they? Not to mention looking like they have no sense of humour.

And I imagine they surmise, quite correctly, that once the novelty wears off, these guys will go back to wearing pants and the company will have basically won.

That’s much more intelligent than the usual mindless corporate reactions, though, and so that at least impresses me. Most corps would have released some angry half-baked press release about how awful these men are and played right into the protester’s hands.

Instead, the company gets free, mostly positive publicity, and victory too.

Oh cool, the upload is complete. Here’s the video :

Astute readers of the blog will recognize the main points of the video as things I have talked about once or twice in this space. I have developed the idea somewhat since then, but it remains essentially the same idea, just elaborated.

I am still not convinced that you could actually get people started on believing in a non-physical, entirely spiritual God. Certainly it would be difficult at first. But if the initial conflict between wanting a spiritual God to be as real and present as you or I, and the knowledge that in all probability such a God does not exist, can be resolved this way, it could be enormously liberating.

People would know that their faith was absolutely impervious to disproof. By turning God into an idea, you put Him in the same category as love or art or freedom, all of which do not exist outside the hearts and minds of the human race, but which are certainly considered “real” by us nonetheless.

In fact, ideas are arguably the most powerful force in human existence. Ideas and the symbols we choose to represent them have the power to move millions of people, drive them to war, and teach them the value of peace. Love is the binding force of all human civilization. Freedom is the deep desire of all living, mobile things. And art… is art. Nuff said.

So saying it is somehow demeaning to consider God “just an idea” show an ignorance of just how powerful ideas can be.

But the question remains : can people worship the idea of God?

I think it’s possible, although probably not in those terms.

They could certainly worship a God who only exists within the hearts and minds of human beings.

We already worship a lot of things like that!