Category: Atheism

9/11/2012

I wrote a blog post on 9/11 of last year. I think what I said in that post still pretty much sums up my feelings about 9/11. I’m still continually disgusted at how politicians try to politicize 9/11. The truth is, It’s just another day now. For 11 years we’ve commemorated 9/11, but I think it’s time for us to collectively move on as a nation. The resulting fallout from 9/11 is some of the most frightening things I’ve seen in my lifetime. I’ve seen our liberties eroded, our young soldiers killed, foreign civilians killed, foreign leaders overturned and executed, and our country tip towards the brink of fascism without even knowing it. 

9/11 has often been compared to Pearl Harbor. It’s not quite the same, but even so, we commemorate Pearl Harbor quietly these days. The pain of that attack has subsided. World War II was fought and ended. We fought and toppled fascist governments, discovered unthinkable crimes, and tried and convicted those responsible. What happened after 9/11 was a little different. We entered a war, but not with the foreign power who attacked us, because there was no foreign power that attacked us. It was a ragtag band of religious zealots living in the deserts of Afghanistan. The government of Afghanistan refused to cooperate with us, and we entered into the nation’s single longest war (that isn’t really a war because it was never declared by congress) with that government. We almost immediately lost sight of the criminal who murdered 3000 of our citizens, and turned our attention to another despot who hadn’t really done anything to us. That conflict cost us dearly. but no matter how dearly it cost us, it cost the citizens of Iraq much more dearly. We are not popular in that part of the world, and there is a reason for that. And no, it is not “because they hate our freedoms”. But recently we’ve found the criminal who murdered our citizens, and he was killed in the event. I will not entertain conspiracy theories about that event either.

9/11 will forever remain for me the epitome of what religious extremism can lead to. Unfortunately, it can get far worse. The crusades were a religious war, and they were fought with middle ages technology. Imagine if the crusades were fought today. That is the future we must avoid. Religious zealots are constantly trying to control our government, and the moderately religious are encouraging them to do so. This is the danger of even moderate religion, as Sam Harris points out. If we fall to fascist powers and become a religious state, the world as we know it will be in danger.

It is time to return to the ideals that made America great in the first place. Our freedoms and liberties must be restored from erosion of the last 11 years. Our adherence to the separation of church and state must be absolute. The balance of powers must be restored. And we must once again strive to be an example to the rest of the world as we once were, not the bully that the rest of the world is afraid of that we are now.

The last year has been very eventful for me. Around this time last year I had just started dating the first girl I had dated since I met my ex wife. Since then I’ve had quite the emotional rollercoaster. My divorce has been finalized. My children finally know that there are alternatives to extreme religion, and they’ve returned to public school. I’m alone, but I’m free of my ex wife to as much of a degree as possible. My house has been foreclosed on and soon to be repossessed. My apartment is overrun with cats whom I’m desperately trying to find homes for. I’ve returned to the job I had 11 years ago, as much as that job still exists, and I was with and lost a woman I’ve been secretly in love with for over a decade, and whom I consider to be my perfect mate. Sorry, fairy tale endings don’t happen in real life. It’s amazing how much can happen in just a year. I haven’t even covered everything that’s happened in my life, I’m sure yours has been just as eventful.

A year is a long time. When 9/11/2013 rolls around, it would be nice if we didn’t have to once again call for the freedoms we’ve lost to be restored again. 

You took the kids WHERE???

I’m going to a picnic at Darrel Ray’s this afternoon. I find it kind of cool that I actually know the author of The God Virus. If you’re a member of the KC atheist community, you’ll realize that it’s not all that big of a deal, he knows all of us. But still…

I’m taking my kids too. Part of me.hopes the ex finds out. I can already see her doing a Rumplestiltskin type angry dance similar to when I embarrassed her lawyer during the trial.

Why yes, as a matter of fact. If you didn’t already know,  I am an asshole. To those who’ve earned it.

It’s Wabbit Season!

I started therapy yesterday.

Let’s face it, I’m fucknuts. I was watching Looney Toons with my kids earlier, and we watched Rabbit Fire. That’s the one where Daffy and Bugs go back and forth with the “rabbit season” “duck season” bit. It’s hilarious, and I’m reminded of the time during an improv group when I basically did that scene by myself. There was one guy who ended up playing Elmer Fudd, and my spastic self played both Daffy and Bugs. He was a bit shy, and didn’t seem to know what the fuck to make of me. I think I scared him a little, but the end result is it was fucking hilarious. I was awesome.

Was.

I remember the guy who did that. The guy I was back then. 17 years of bad marriage will fuck you up, and that guy is gone now, and I can’t get him back. I know, I would be a different person now even if I hadn’t married the batshit crazy church lady, but I think there would be more of that guy left.

I’ve thoroughly trashed three relationships since the end of my marriage. Well, in fairness to myself I had a little help trashing them, but still… I can’t seem to pull off a successful relationship. Maybe I’m not dating the right people, but I was absolutely sure the last one was right. I’m still having trouble reconciling it a month later. I should be past it by now, one would think. But I have a fuckload of baggage, and I think I didn’t realize just how much until yesterday.

The therapist seemed to catch on immediately just how much the cult fucked me up. This is something that I don’t think anybody else ever has understood about me. These people did more damage in the couple of years they had me than my wife did in 17. I’m still dealing with it in many ways. On the other hand, had it not been for the cult I might have never examined my own belief systems, and realized that the whole thing is bullshit. I suppose I should thank them for that. But fuck if I will.

Most people seem to blow the whole cult experience off as trivial, except for one or two other people I know who went through the same thing. It’s not like we talk about it though. Former cult members don’t have conventions. We don’t chat on facebook about it. “Hey, remember that time that the one kid crashed his car because he was so tired from sleep deprivation and almost died? Yeah, good times!” There are exactly 0 people that I’ve been able to talk to about this over the last decade. My ex didn’t go through the exit conversion the same way I did. In fact, I’m not sure she ever went through it at all. She’s been looking for a replacement for the cult for the last decade, and I’m pretty sure she finally found one.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is I think this is going to be good for me in the long term. I may not be able to save my last relationship, but maybe I can make the next one not crash so badly. I’ve already realized about myself that my dating experience pretty much consists of my teenage years, a couple of years in my 20s, and the last year. I haven’t had a lot of time to figure this shit out. My marriage was pretty much fucking awful for most of it, so I don’t have a lot of experience in how a good relationship works. I do know that I really wanted the last one to. But first I have to straighten out some shit in my head.

I may not be that guy from 20 years ago anymore, but maybe I can be someone else just as good.

Atheism+: What the F*** is it???

During one of my frequent twitter rants that I’ve come to be known for, I ran across a tag that kept coming up in the tweets of others that I follow: AtheismPlus. I was intrigued. I started asking around, doing searches, and eventually ran across a blog post by Richard Carrier with seems to have started the whole movement. I believe it was this one: http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/2207/. Feel free to read it for yourself. It’s ok, I’ll wait.

Did you read it? It’s ok, I’ll wait, I don’t mind, you should go read it first. It’s not the last blog post link I’m going to send you to. Go ahead.

Ok, I’ll take your word for it. So my take on it was: Hm, sounds like they’re taking Humanism and rebranding it as AtheismPlus. But there’s more to it than that. The whole idea seems to be about taking these people and saying we don’t want these other people so we’re going to have a new movement that’s just the people who believe what we like.

Don’t get me wrong, the beliefs they espouse are good ones, and I could easily join the AtheismPlus movement without cognitive dissonance. Richard Carrier is also a writer and speaker that I greatly respect. I saw him at Skepticon IV last year, and really liked his talks. But what bothered me is this: this is exactly what happened to religion. I don’t mean Hindus vs. Muslims vs. Christians vs. Mormons, but Lutherans vs. Baptists vs. Methodists vs. [about 600 other denominations here]. I don’t think this is going to work out the way they want it to. If the atheist movement goes down this path of splintering into smaller and smaller groups, the atheist movement as we know it will falter and die. We are more effective now than we have ever been because we are united, and the religious can no longer ignore us. If we become a bunch of small denominations of atheism, they can ignore us again.

Not to mention the fact that when you add a belief system to atheism, you take one of the more ridiculous arguments of the theists, that atheism is just another religion, and make it suddenly true. I kinda have a problem with that. Humanism starts out with the precept that it’s a belief system, and atheism is one of the ideas that it is based on, but it doesn’t try to rebrand atheism. It’s something else entirely. I consider myself to be a humanist, even though I’m not very involved with them.

So, basically I said all this shit, and a shitstorm came back at me. One side coopted me as an ally, another side told me I just didn’t get it. I managed to avoid some of the hatefulness that seems to be going around out there, but it still freaked me the fuck out.

Many well known personas whom I normally respect in the atheism movement seem to be into this and promoting it. A handful of others seem to be opposing it. Apparently I’m supposed to hate Thunderf00t now. Fuck that.

A brilliant, well thought out blog post by someone I consider a twitter friend is here on the subject: http://evolutionchild.com/2012/08/25/a-take-me-to-your-leader/

You didn’t read that, go back and read it now. It’s one of the best posts on the topic I’ve seen yet, and largely sums up how I feel as well. I’ll wait.

I was a little freaked out by all of this, and I don’t like where it’s going, but it seems to be happening all the same. So here’s my final say on the matter. Please don’t come to me with any more AtheismPlus crap after this.

I quit.

I want out of the atheism movement all together. I am not going to pick “sides”. I am not going to pick a denomination of atheism. That’s bullshit. I was on my own before I found the atheism movement, and I can be on my own again. Atheism was already rather disorganized before this and now I apparently have to pick a new denomination. Fuck no. I’m the Cowboy. That’s what I am, and that’s all I need to be. I’m an atheist, I’m a liberal (well, not exactly but just roll with me here a minute), I’m a musician, I’m a lover, I’m a writer, I’m a geek. I’ll watch you guys from a distance and see where things go before I decide if I want back in.

Introspection

Today I pushed my boundaries.

Every few years or so I seem to go through some kind of change. The best way to describe it is that the answer to the question “Who am I?” changes. I couldn’t tell you what they all are, but I remember a few. A significant one was the one that led me to leave the cult. Another one happened a mere year later when I finally shed Christianity. Yet another happened in May of 2007. That’s the year this blog was created. Another in June of 2008 while I was in Minnesota. The most recent one was November of 2010. I filed for divorce the next month.

Now we come to August 2012. I’ve had a small handful of relationships since being kicked out of my house, ending with the most recent one. I gave her my heart. I couldn’t tell you exactly why I did. Phrases that I put no merit in like “soul mate” and “meant to be” come to mind, but the fact of the matter is I think she and I were a good match. Possible the best match I’ve ever had. We just… clicked. If I could describe my dream woman, a completely made up woman who embodies all of the traits I find attractive, she damn near hits them all.

Then it all went to shit.

Whaaa? Trouble in paradise? How can it be? You two were meant for each other!

No we weren’t. To quote Tim Minchin “If I didn’t have you I’d probably have somebody else.” Relationships start with physical attraction amplified by pheromones and from that point on they take an assload of work. I think that last part is where we ran in to trouble.

So I find myself suddenly single, emotionally hurt, and a bit bewildered. It’s moments like this when you do your best thinking.

I realized that I’m not ready for relationships yet. I got out of a nearly two decade long marriage a year and a half ago. It officially ended less than two months ago. I’ve been dealing with nearly constant insanity from my ex and the court system of the great state of Kansas for what seems like a bajillion years now, while helping my children deprogram themselves and realize that crazy extremist fundamentalist Christianity isn’t the only choice they can make, and trying to reinvent my entire life all at the same time.

It might not have been the best time to decide to invest a lot of time and energy into a relationship.

So the past several days have involved a significant reexamination of my life. I came to a few realizations.

  • Being single fucking rocks, even at 41.
  • Casual dating with no commitment is ok.
  • Friends with benefits doesn’t work. It just doesn’t.
  • I don’t know who the fuck I am.

Oh I know, I exude mucho confidence here and all aspire to even be a shadow of my cool, but the truth is, I haven’t had much time to figure out who I am after the last change. But I do know this: I feel dead inside.

Every day I get up, go to work, and spend the better part of my day in a felt covered box dealing with somebody else’s problems. At the end of that, I might get a little time to myself, or I might have my kids. There’s not much time left for me at the end of that and what little I had I was giving away. It seemed like a good idea at the time…

So today I got up, put on my hiking shoes, went to a local park, and got myself lost. Really lost. This is a big park, and practically nobody else was there. I’m woefully out of shape and I had one bottle of water.

The point was, I was not guaranteed of making it back alive. Sure, the odds were in my favor, but there’s that chance that I might not. That was the key. I pushed myself past my endurance point and found out I had more, so I kept going. I finally reached the end of my endurance again, and found out I had yet more, so I kept going.

By the time I found my way back to where my car was a few hours later, I was drenched with sweat (it’s over 100 degrees here with Kansas humidity), exhausted, thirsty, and a smidge on the loopy side. My legs were so worn out I could barely walk. A few hours may not sound like much to some of you, but I went from completely sedentary to hiking maniac pretty much today. I had no endurance level, and I pushed the fuck out of it anyway.

AND IT FELT FUCKING AWESOME!!!

I mean it did and it didn’t, but pushing myself  so far past what I thought I could do gave me a feeling of being truly alive. I found myself laughing and the smallest things and just enjoying being alive.

Later I grabbed an old friend (“old” being a relative term since she’s 10 years younger than me and I’ve known her less than a year) and went back out at night to see the universe. It was awesome. It gave me a feeling of being connected with the universe. It’s awesome when you can look up at the sky, see a lot of stars (even in Kansas City they’re hard to see without getting out of town), and know not only what they actually are, but that your perception of them is really looking backwards in time to several different points time simultaneously. One may be 100 years ago, another only 4, another 6 billion. And every atom that makes up my body, every atom that makes up yours, every atom that makes up every thing on earth that we see was forged in a star like that. Not only that, but the star it was forged in died. It died so that I could be here. And it died over 4.5 billion years ago.

SCIENCE FUCKING ROCKS, BITCHES!

I’m still kind of figuring out where this is going, but I think this could be the most interesting change yet.

Will you be happy in heaven when your family and friends are being tortured for eternity?

I’ve been a little quiet lately. There will probably be an update on the reasons for this later… well, maybe. Anyway, Mr. Deity has put out a new Way of the Mister video, and this one is a smidge more blatant than most of his stuff, but very poignant.

It never fails to amaze me how the actions attributed to God are excused. We don’t understand his ways, blah blah blah. Why are the rules by which we judge God different than the way in which we would judge another human? The things God supposedly does would be considered crimes of the most horrendous nature if perpetrated by a human, yet we (figuratively) call it “Love”. I call bullshit. If God is real, he’s a bastard fucker and I’m gonna punch him in the teeth.

The Gospel of Jeshua Cottontail, Savior of all Animalkind.

The Great Big Gig in the Sky

And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes…

I look out of my window, and everything is in grey. I look for things I once I once enjoyed and I’m not interested. I wander around looking for something to fill the void, but there’s nothing, I just walk back and forth. Eventually I just sit down, and stare. Everything went sideways, everything I had made was destroyed. Everything I had hoped for was dashed. Everything I loved was taken.

There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.

The voice in my head tells me the hard truth. It’s not the world, it’s not them, it’s not her, it’s not him, it’s not supernatural. It’s me. It was always me.

Got amazing powers of observation…

Slowly I realize the lies I’ve been told. Lies I’ve told myself. Lies others have told me. Lies woven into the very fabric of society. Lies built into the nature of reality. In a brittle, desperate moment of clarity, I see through them all. No darling, I’m not. I can’t do anything. I can’t even do something. I break everything. That’s what I do. I think it might be what we all do. But I do have a talent: I fuck things up.

You shout and no one seems to hear.

I feel that desperate feeling deep down inside, that feeling “I need someone to know me. I need someone to understand me. I need someone to see all the way to the bottom of this cesspit of a psyche I have and know and understand what’s driven me my whole life, and what I truly need at the end of it all.”

And I got a strong urge to fly, but I got nowhere to fly to…

This is the danger moment. This is that moment when some turn to religion to fill this desperate emptiness inside. There’s a ready made solution to an age old human weakness, an imaginary friend who loves you, understands you, is always there for you, protects you, and will never hurt you.

The Lunatic is my head…

But no thanks darling, I’ve already got an imaginary friend. The difference between me and you is that I know he’s imaginary. Mine says some mean things, but not as mean as yours my dear. Mine doesn’t take those I love from me, but he will smack me out of my rut sometimes and set me straight. Fix me. It hurts sometimes, but he knows how to fix me, darling. He’s the only one who does.

I don’t need no arms around me…

I’m not alone in my weakness, the need to have someone understand me. The fact that I know when I’m gone, that this consciousness, this being whom I know more closely than any other, will someday be irretrievably lost wears on me. It makes me desperate for someone else to know what it’s like to be me. But you hurt me darling, you have to go now. You won’t make it to the bottom. Nobody has yet, only me.

And I don’t need no drugs to calm me.

So close… so close… so close… but it’s gone now. Floating away on a spring breeze, into the sky, never to be found again. I was so close…

Don’t think I need anything at all…

And now it turns out I was laying here the whole time, staring at the ceiling. Was it real? Was it all my head? Did any of that really happen to me at all, or was it someone else? Was there someone else driving the bus while rode shotgun? What is here and now is painfully clear, but what was and what could have been grows fuzzy and dim. I reach for the bottle in the drawer.

You rearrange me ‘till I’m sane…

And finally he comes again. He shouts this time. You idiot. You fucking moron. What did you think would happen? Why do you do this to yourself over and over and over? Did you really not see it coming? That was not for you. This is, darling, this is. My head leans back, and the pain begins. Such lovely, deep pain. I finally feel real, and the clarity returns.