With that out of the way, I would like to express my concern for Flickr’s Explore feature. I’m an amateur photographer and cinematographer with great intent on becoming professional. I refer to Flickr and other sites to illuminate ideas for my own work, yet I’ve found that as their tenure for online portfolio showcasing increases, the creativity becomes commonplace. The term original becomes a bastard in a pool of stock memory on celluloid and disk. When I click on the Last 7 Days Interesting, there is an overwhelming amount of images that I don’t necessarily identify with. Of course, there is no problem with that, but I still wonder what justifies such images to be chosen as Explored, or Interesting. Let me elaborate. Last 7 Days Interesting page comes as a random reload page of 9 images at a time. At any given “reload” one will most definitely find the following in proper ratio: 1/9 flowers and puppies, 1/9 random still life, 2/3 self-portraits of teenage girls, and sadly, 1/9 actually interesting and well composed images (maybe after a few clicks). That specific 2/3 group I unveiled is what I think hurts me most these days. They have so much talent, yet their drive is dragging at the ankles.

Now before, the argument starts, I must confess. My photostream is also repetitive, slightly unoriginal, and lacking the depth that a true “portfolio” expects. So, I’ll take the position of: I am one of them, therefore I can speak for the sake of enlightenment for all. Perhaps I have become a product of the dull images I stumble upon each day. The teenagers and twentysomethings that take square-cropped and photoshopped portraits of themselves in fields and forests with nice cameras and remotes. The even more bitter portion of the platter I’m dishing out is the fact that most of these many young photographers have the gift of taking great pictures, yet they just keep doing the same self-portraits, hanging their heads down low and writing some over-dramatic poem that demands the reader to click on a link to their Tumblr or song of the day. Try something new. I know you have it in you. I know you have friends who can model for you. I know you have more interesting clothing and accessories to include in your shots. I know you have more than one background to feed from for each after school shoot. I know this, because I tell myself these things every day when I pick up my camera. Together, we can make that “reload” button actually exciting again. Well, I have to get on Explore first, but someday. What’s right around the corner? Something fresh! Interesting! Artistic! Original! Personal!

I’m not attempting to be callous or impertinent. I just want to see the creativity expand, develop, and soar to the highest reaches of one’s ability. I want to be wowed by Flickr’s Explore again. And so I say once more, Flickr is a place for everyone…But, Explore should be reserved for those artists that produce gorgeous and meaningful images that are worthy of heavy public rotation. Spin it like I’m the coach’s pep-talk at halftime when the team is losing the championship. Let’s see more, because I know there is more. Don’t just snap the same shot (which was great the first couple times) and sit back to watch yourself get clicks and ho hum hoorays by fans. Tell me a story. Tell it well.

You first, though.

Dear little Six – Billionth Living Person: As one of the newest members of a notoriously inquisitive species, it probably won’t be too long before you start asking the two $64,000 questions with which the other 5,999,999,999 of us have been wrestling for some time.How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?Oddly – as if six billion of us weren’t enough to be going on with – it will almost certainly be suggested to you that the answer to the question of origins requires you to believe in the existence of a further, invisible, innefable Being “somewhere up there”, an omnipotent creature whom we poor limited creatures are unable even to perceive, much less to understand.That is, you will be strongly encouraged to imagine a heaven, with at least one god in residence.This sky god, it’s said, made the universe by churning its matter in a giant pot. Or, he danced. Or, he vomited creation out of himself. Or, he simply called it into being, and lo, it Was. In some of the more interesting creation stories, the singly mighty sky god is subdivided into many lesser forces – junior dieties, avatars, gigantic metamorphic “ancestors” whose adventures create the landscape, or the whimsical, wanton, meddling, cruel pantheons of the great polytheisms, whose wild doings will convince you that the real engine of creation was lust; for infinite power, for too easily broken human bodies, for clouds of glory. But it’s only fair to add that there are also stories which offer the message that the primary creative impulse was, and is, love.Many of these stories will strike you extremely beautiful, and therefore seductive. Unfortunately, however, you will not be required to make a purely literary response to them. Only the stories of dead religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you. So you will be told that belief in “your” stories, and adherence to the rituals of worship that have grown up around them, must become a vital part of your life in the crowded world. They will be called the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity.

It is possible that they may at some point come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable, but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery, and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it’s true that human history is full of the public oppression wrought by the charioteers of the gods. In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its name.

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn’t get it right. There was no celestial churning, no maker’s dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But here’s something genuinly odd. The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn’t lessened the zeal of the devout in the least. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.

As a result of this faith, by the way, lt has proved impossible, in many parts of the world, to prevent the human race’s numbers from swelling alarmingly. Blame the overcrowded planet at least partly on the misguidedness of the races spiritual guides. In your own lifetime, you may witness the arrival of the nine billionth world citizen.
(If too many people are being born as a result, in part, of religious strictures against birth control, then too many people are also dying because religious culture, by refusing to face the facts of human sexuality, also refuses to fight against sexually transmitted diseases.)

There are those who say that the great wars of the new century will once again be wars of religion, jihads and crusades, as they were in the Middle Ages. I don’t believe them, or not in the way they mean it. Take a look at the Muslim world, or rather the Islamist world, to use the word coined to describe Islam’s present day “political arm”. The divisions between its great powers (Afghanistan against Iran against Iraq against Saudi Arabia against Syria against Egypt) are what strike you most forcefully. There’s very little resembling a common purpose. Even after the non-Islamic NATO fought a war for the Muslim Kosovan Albanians, the Muslim world was slow in coming forward with much needed humanitarian aid.

The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their “sphere of influence.” They are wars of the godly against the largely defenceless – American fundamentalists against pro-choice doctors, Iranian mullahs against their country’s Jewish minority, Hindu fundamentalists in Bombay against that city’s increasingly fearful Muslims.
The victors in that war must not be the closed-minded, marching into battle with, as ever, God on their side. To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities. So, how did we get here? Don’t look for the answer in story books. Imperfect human knowledge may be a bumpy, pot-holed street, but it’s the only road to wisdom worth taking. Virgil, who believed that the apiarist Aristaeus could spontaneously generate new bees from the rotting carcess of a cow, was closer to a truth about origins than all the revered old books.
The ancient wisdoms are modern non-senses.

Live in your own time, use what we know and, as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things. As the song says, “It’s easy if you try.”

As for mortality, the second great question – how to live? What is right action, and what wrong?- it comes down to your willingness to think for yourself. Only you can decide if you want to be handed down the law by priests, and accept that good and evil are somehow external to ourselves.To my mind, religion – even at its most sophisticated – essentially infantilizes our ethical selves by setting infallible moral Arbiters and irredeemably immoral Tempters above us; the eternal parents, good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm.

How, then, are we to make ethical choices without a divine rulebook or judge? Is unbelief just the first step on the long slide into the brain death of cultural relativism, according to which many unbearable things – female circumcision, to name just one – can be excused on culturally specific grounds, and the universality of human rights, too can be ignored?(This last piece of moral unmaking finds supporters in some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, and also, unnervingly, on the editorial page of the Daily Telegraph,UK.)

Well, no, it isn’t, but the reasons for saying so aren’t clear-cut. Only hard-line ideology is clear-cut. Freedom, which is the word I use for the secular-ethical position, is inevitably fuzzier. Yes, freedom is that space in which contradiction can reign, it is a never-ending debate. It is not in itself the answer to the question of morals, but the conversation about that question. And it is much more than mere relativism, because it is not merely a never-ending talk show, but a place in which choices are made, values defined and defended.

Intellectual freedom, in European history, has mostly meant freedom from the restraints of the Church and not the state.
This is the battle Voltaire was fighting, and it’s also what all six billion of us could do for ourselves, the revolution in which each of us could play our small, six-billionth part; once and for all we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behavior. Once and for all we could put the stories back into the books, put the books back on the shelves, and see the world undogmatized and plain.

Imagine there’s no heaven, my dear Six-Billionth, and at once the sky’s the limit.

• Extract from Letters to the Six Billionth World Citizen, published in English by Uitgeverij Podium, Amsterdam.

(//This is also context fit for today’s struggles in the socio-political and tyrannical sphere. Take a look around…Iran is crumbling…N. Korea is pushing buttons…Iraq and Afghanistan are wasting away…And so many other nations are beginning to reach closer into the possibility that it allcould be for nothing. Nothing but a system of control and fear that keeps the dying machine from shutting down. Ah, Renaissance…//)

Thank you dredg for resurfacing this article for your art and our eyes//ears.