Hey kiddies. Long time no post. Seems I’ve sort of neglected this. I think at one point I had an audience of as many as 20 people. I’m pretty sure we’re back to zero now. A lot has happened. To all of us. When I started this blog it was many many years ago. I was married, I had two kids, and my wife was going slowly insane. We still don’t know exactly what is wrong with her, but I have a few amateur armchair suspicions. What’s important is after a long drawn out legal battle in a justice system that is skewed against dads and, in particular, atheists, I divorced my wife and eventually got residential custody of my kids. My kids went through hell and there was nothing I could do to stop it. They’re both grown adults now, and I think they turned out pretty well despite everything. And by everything I don’t just mean their mom. I made plenty of mistakes myself. The difference is that I own my mistakes. Anyway… rambling again.
Another impetus for this blog was the trauma of leaving a religious cult. Those folks fuck with your mind, and I spent a lot of years sorting through who I was and what I believed. As part of my recovery I took a class in Logic and Critical Thinking and it was the single best thing I ever did for myself, although it changed my life irreversibly. I’m now an atheist, a science enthusiast, and (by American standards) a crazy ass whacked out deranged libtard. That’s American for “I care about people I don’t know.”
I sorted through a lot of things on this platform. Actually, it was another platform and it’s been so long now I don’t even remember what it was. But it had an orange logo. I imported everything here. That’s probably about the time I lost the handful of followers my blog had at the time. Sometime around then Facebook and Twitter became the bright shiny new thing. I started tweeting. A lot. Don’t go looking for it, that account is gone. When Elon Musk went full on far right psycho I deleted the account. I don’t really have a social media presence left. Not as Dr. Cowboy anyway. But while I was doing the incessant tweeting thing, broadcasting every stupid thought that popped into my head out into the interwebs, I stopped blogging. I got married again. This time to someone with mental conditions that range in the two digit range (e.g. she was diagnosed with more than 10), none of which I knew about when I took those vows. So that was fun. I learned all about narcissistic personality disorder. And antisocial personality disorder. And a few others. I popped back in for one more blog post in 2019 in the middle of that shitstorm. I don’t think anybody read it. I doubt anybody will read this either. The blog has always been for me, with the rest of you invited along for the journey. I’ll probably keep exploring all of those topics, because the trauma from all of them still lives in my head. I’m still working through all of it. And now, we have orange Jesus in the white house. And every trigger I’ve accumulated over the last 2 1/2 decades is being triggered again. We’re gonna explore that too. I’m gonna have a hard time getting through the insanity that’s coming our way. Hopefully we can get through this together.
We’ve had quite the journey, y’all. Where do we go from here? Well, the country decided to elect an over the top narcissist with apparent dementia and a felony fraud conviction and a history of insurrection and stealing classified documents. Because why the fuck not? What’s the worst that can happen? Well we’re finding out day by day. We’re only a couple of weeks into the second term and the shit is flying fast and furious. I’m not going to be able to keep up with that, so don’t look to me as a news source. Plenty of others are doing that already. I’m here for us regular types who didn’t drink the orange koolaid, and are trying to keep our sanity intact while deciding what to do. When we studied Nazi Germany in school some of us wondered, or perhaps even asked by the teacher, “what would you do if you lived through that?” I think we can say for certain now that most of us gave a bullshit answer. Most of us should have said “not a goddamned fucking thing.” I don’t want to be that one. I intend to resist. I intend to keep people safe. I intend to be the person who hid Anne Frank, not the one who turned her in. Although sometimes I wonder if I’m not in danger of being Anne Frank. Let’s hope it doesn’t get there, but folks, we can’t assume anything yet. We’ve got at least four years of this shit to get through. One hopes our form of government holds long enough to retain elections for that long. That’s not what happened in Germany. Or Russia. I mean, technically Russia still has elections, but… c’mon. We all know, Vladimir.
So once again I need this outlet. I have no idea where we’re going. Let’s start finding out.
glimpse into to how the deranged mass of neurons I call a brain works: Weeks ago I had a very brief (something on the order of three sentences) conversation with a friend along these lines. I finished the conversation today in my head. I do that a lot: I have entire conversations with other people in my head that they didn’t actually participate in. Oh, c’mon, you know you do it too.
answer is simple: there’s no proof for god. Basically those of us who label ourselves as skeptics have adopted the scientific method as a way of approaching life in general. It goes something like this:
The problem though, is that it’s more than this. There’s more to it than just a simple lack of proof. The entire concept of God fails any kind of logical reasoning. For instance, take this example. 
happens and it leads to a series of events. The end result of this chain of events is that someone gets hurt, probably me or you. This has happened to all of us, each and every one. The specifics of this particular example don’t really matter, because the same pattern has happened several times in my life, and probably several times in yours. Let’s go through a couple of scenarios now. 
In this example, God started a chain of events. Possibly God thought that something positive would come of it all down the road (e.g. he meant well). However, things did not turn out the way he intended. Basically, God fucked with my life and screwed everything up. God is incompetent. He fucked up. Everything would have been better if he just stayed the fuck out of everything. 
Let’s forget the logical inconsistencies of God being all of these things at the same time, and suspend disbelief just long enough to finish the example. In this example, God knew full well that the outcome of the events he set into motion would be and the disaster that occurred as a result. He knew full well the pain waiting for me (or you) at the end of these events. Why would he do that? The fundamentalist would say some dumbass thing like “God works in mysterious ways” or “He was teaching you a lesson” or some other completely inane bullshit. If he’s all powerful, couldn’t he just simply pass said knowledge along? The fundie says “but you wouldn’t learn the lesson that way”. Okay, but if he designed and made me, why would he design me that way? Why not “design” me to just simply know? There’s only one inescapable conclusion to made here no matter how many logical rabbit holes the fundie goes down, God is a complete and utter flatulating butthole. 
So, we’re left with two choices, 1. God is incompetent, 2. God is an asshole. Using the bible as a guide, I think we can safely say that #2 is a gimme, but the point of the whole exercise is this: If you proved God’s existence tomorrow, I would, of course, accept the existence of God, but I would not convert back to religion even then. There is no escape from the logical conclusion that if God exists, he is not worth my time. On the 
other hand, if we accept the null hypothesis that God does not exist, than all of this is nothing more than random bad luck, the kind that statistically happens to everybody all the time. No supernatural explanation is required for this, and I have no reason to be angry at any supernatural entities who refuse to prove their own existence to anybody. Nice, simple, clean, and so much easier to accept and explain.
Another Idiot with a Blog 