Archive for the ‘ Religion ’ Category

The Game

This post might take some thinking, some reflective thought. I hope that it does.

We’ve all done it. Played along to get along. The game of life, all that crap you do every day so that you can rush around in some strange place for a week or two, burning through all your savings, so that you can tell everyone what a wonderful time you had while you weren’t doing all that crap you do every day.

 

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Game:

a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.
synonyms:    pastime, diversion, entertainment, amusement, distraction, divertissement, recreation, sport, activity

https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.Ma437bee194a54789f760b220acd90590o0&pid=15.1

We don’t always realize it. Graduate from school not sure what we’re going to do and the next thing you  know you are caught up in trying to pay your bills and meet the requirements of being human. Eat, sleep, fornicate, drink, breathe… in any order that you like. Lather, rinse, repeat. Our interests distract us and we become overburdened just trying to meet the 5 requirements, the 5 necessary things that our bodies demand we do. Sure, some of us try to ignore them or do too much of one or more of them, but in the end we’ll do all 5. Our biology ensures that this will be. That’s it. The 5 requirements of mammalian life, and it appears that it applies to all forms of life that we know of.

Most of us will find that even if the 5 are satiated and no more difficult to acccomplish than opening our eyes each morning, something else is missing. Something else needs to be done. Those 5 just simply are not enough.

Not necessity, not desire – no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything – health, food, a place to live, entertainment – they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche was a fairly smart guy. What could that demon be? How are your demons today? What is true must be true for the best of us and the least of us. That demon has to be able to affect all of us, from the greatest human to the lowest worm. Thought of it yet? Think harder. Fear. Fear is the demon. Fear that we will not accomplish one of the 5 requirements now or in the future. Our biology drives us this way. It tells us to be afraid, makes us react whenever something, at its core, will stop us from doing one or more of those 5 things for too long. There it is, the five laws and the only demon we all share. Think about it for a bit. All the rest of human society and culture is based on these things, built up layer upon layer of complexity until we no longer recognize it. So many layers of complexity that we have thought ourselves more than animals for a long time, looking down upon those that do the five with much greater efficiency than ourselves.

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So many are sure that the world, that life is an illusion yet you are certain that your world and your life are real. Your mind will tell you many things in your life. That inner voice, your subconscious twin. It will tell you what beauty is, what it is not and it will tell you that the limb you used to have is still there. Can you truly know that it’s missing or not if your mind tells you so stealthily? Your mind interprets all the data that it can find and tells you what the world is, what society is, and what they are not. Who are you talking to when you talk to yourself. Who answers back when you reflectively seek answers to problems in this illusion of life? Do you have a twin inside your mind?

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When you tell yourself that you’ve done the best you can for today do you hear a reply? There is much to think about. Will both of you agree on what the answers are? Will you both even conclude that there are answers? If there are no answers, then what? What if the big questions have no answers? Oh, there’s that demon again. Now the argument with your twin begins in earnest. One of you dared ask “why are we here?”, “For what purpose are we here?” The wisest among us end such argument with the simple thought that it does not matter, here we are and here we will remain until someone figures out how to change that. The luckiest among us never ask the questions, they simply get on with the business of being. Once we ask our twin that kind of question all sorts of mayhem follows.

We worship ideals that we have deified, accepting the wisdom of this illusion because our ideal dictates to us what we must need do, how it is that we make sense of the world we cannot be part of. No, you are your mind and it will never touch or taste or smell the world around you. It does not have those abilities. It simply crunches data and models the world around you. Sure it has sensors but your mind will never know what a rose smells like, really know. It will never know the color of a juicy apple, never really know. All it, all that you will ever know is an approximation of what the world is like. You and your twin are trapped inside a skull. Yes, it is _your_ skull but it’s no better than any other skull. It just happens to be the one wrapped around the brain that your mind is in, that you are in.

You will never be closer to the world than some electrical signals tell you that you are. If we live in a simulation you will never know because whether it’s a simulation or just nerves bringing you sense data, your brain will interpret that data as reality. When you have a ‘reality’ the game begins. By the time you were 2 years old the game had begun. The day you were born, not so much.

It’s a game. Complex, scary, difficult. Still, it’s just a game. It’s the only game there is. Even that is complex for you can create a game within the game, play by your own rules in that part and by the other rules in other parts. The rules get complicated, layer upon layer of rules. What if you don’t want to play? What if you want to simply be? Can you step outside the game? Can you stop playing and still meet the 5 requirements? What would it be like to be outside the game?

Oh, that’s a lot of questions for you and your twin to talk about. I wonder what answers you’ll come up with? I wonder if you’ll share them here?

To help you and your twin to think about them, here’s Bill

2015
10/03
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2 comments

Christians Keep Trying And Failing To Understand Anything

I’ve not claimed to know everything in the world. I have claimed that my understanding of it is a little different than what I read from others. That difference is what this blog is about. In this post I’m about to rip into a believer’s post about god and gay marriage and their thoughts on such. I don’t care who this author is or what their actual motivation is. I care what they said because that is what the public hears and what influences others. Perhaps this author has no real audience so is impotent in this regard but perhaps they do. In either case it is important that there be discussion. What follows is my one sided discussion of thethoughts of this author. You don’t have to like it. I’m not writing here for popularity. This post is not because I’m an angry atheist but because posts like this make this anti-theist angry.

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I’m not going to quote the entire post (but did anyway) so if you want to read the whole thing, it is here.

After a conversation I had the other day, I realized that the biggest questions that skeptics have about Christianity in our day concern homosexuality.

Our author is clearly now well informed. So how should we treat their opinions if they clearly are uninformed? Trash them? Ignore them? Perhaps we should take the high road and give them a chance to speak? I go for the latter because it gives us much more reason to simply dismiss them outright next time.

How could a God that says that He is love incarnate oppose a marriage between two people who claim to love one another?  The question is such a difficult one and it is so widespread that I have decided that I must offer my best understanding of this issue to those who are genuinely seeking answers.What makes the question so difficult?  It is not difficult because it is intellectually difficult, it is difficult because the question hits every human being where we live.  Sex is the greatest gift given to us by God and the idea of doing as we think best is tremendously attractive to sinful human beings.  For this reason, God’s rules are going to be at their most unpopular when they tell us to restrict our sexual behaviour in ways that are not easy to understand.  Jesus Christ would have been enormously popular had he said, “It is a tough world out there, just do the best you can to live a happy life.”  Unfortunately, he said “If you love me, keep my commands” and this can be very difficult.  One of the clearest commands in the Old and New Testament prohibits homosexuality.

This presupposes a priori knowledge that sex was given to us by a god. We assume that sex was also given to animals so when animals are not heterosexual they must be acting in the nature that the creator god gave them. From this point on you can dismiss this author’s words and thoughts. The author assumes that the holy text of Christianity is the word of their god and as such is without reproach. For this reason alone you can also dismiss everything this author says. He talks about commands of the god who no person has ever seen. Oh sure, Moses saw his ass but that’s it, you won’t find anyone of credit saying that the stories of Moses in the Christian bible are accurate except those that believe on faith alone. Not even Jewish scholars and archaeologists. Think about that for a minute.

Because the number one attack that is going to be levelled against anyone who dares to speak out on this issue is that they are callous and hard-hearted and don’t love homosexuals or understand what they have gone through, I am going to start by explaining my background.  I am not a successful heterosexual who was brought up in a Christian home and who has no experience with the pain of loneliness.  Rather, I am a 47 year-old who has never been married, who has rarely dated and only had sex a dozen times in my entire life.  I was a hardcore pornography addict before the Lord finally delivered me from that completely about a year and a half ago.  I know what it is to be lonely, miserable and suicidal and I have enormous sympathy for those who reject God’s perfect standard because it seems too painful.  I have even written a post where I have tried to minimize the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality and I have wrestled with divine severity in this regard for years.  Having said all of that, I have come to believe that obedience to God’s commands regarding sexuality is essential for God’s purpose and I am going to attempt to explain why.

Well, there’s a ringing endorsement of the power of prayer if EVER I saw one. Not only did prayer and his Jesus get him away from pornography but they made him a successful heterosexual…. oh, wait. A 47 year old with practically no sexual experience is about to give us sexual guidance from the book he probably hasn’t read from cover to cover yet. I can’t wait! Bonus points, he is going to explain his god’s purpose to us.

Sexual Brokenness in Our Society

The first thing we need to understand when we consider this issue is the fact that sexual intimacy is absolutely, completely and horrifically broken in our society today.  To see this ubiquitous brokenness, consider how widespread abortion, paedophilia, pornography, divorce, rape, homosexuality and gender confusion are in our society.  Now I would never suggest that sexuality has ever been handled perfectly in any fallen society, but anyone with a shred of honesty would have to agree that our society has become almost entirely sexually dysfunctional.  Where did this sickness come from?  While an in-depth discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this post, let us just say that the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960’s introduced a “dog eat dog” competition into the most intimate and vulnerable relationships that human beings have and this poison has been slowly destroying our ability to be intimate and vulnerable with one another ever since.  (See “Beautiful Propaganda, Ugly Reality” and “God’s Purpose for Sex” for more discussion on sexuality.)

The reason that it is important to understand that our society is horrifically sick is that those who support homosexual marriage act as though the only alternative to it is a life of loneliness and despair.  In this way, they reject God because they believe He created homosexuals to be absolutely miserable.  Nothing could be further from the truth than this hideous lie.  The essence of understanding God’s attitude toward homosexuality is understanding precisely that God wants something vastly superior to anything we can imagine or think for each and every human being.  God calls homosexuality an abomination because this lifestyle prevents large numbers of people from attaining the true joy and love that God wants for all of us.  To understand this, let us think this through one step at a time.

Ok, so sexual superstar believes that sexual intimacy is broken beyond repair. He’s had 12 encounters in 47 years, about one every 2.5 years of adulthood. He is undoubtedly an expert. This paramour of the ages knows exactly what his god wants for us and it is something that is vastly superior to anything we can imagine or think… yet he is able to do just that. What wondrous luck we have to have found his writings. The rest of his  post has the portents of revelation, I can just feel it. Yes, I’m not gay or lesbian so I must be lonely and in despair. I’m getting the feeling that if you punch this guy in the head there will be a ringing sound. Wait, he’s giving us a step by step guide so let’s continue

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The Nature of Love

Now in the opening paragraph I used some language that many homosexuals and their supporters found offensive.  I said that homosexuals “claim to love one another” instead of that homosexuals genuinely do love one another.  The reason I used this wording, however, is because it is important for us to understand that the most amazing human love still falls very short of the perfect divine standard.  We human beings think that we love another, but when you look at our best relationships from the divine perspective you see that even the best human loves fall woefully short of the genuine article.  Consider the following verses:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. (1 Corinthians 13: 4-8)

As I have shared in a number of other posts, God’s plan for mankind is the heaven that is only possible if every human being has the perfect love described above for every other human being on the planet.  If one considers the real behaviour of the human beings around us, one quickly comes to the realization that heaven is absolutely impossible.  Selfish and self-centred human beings are, quite simply, incapable of the kind of love that would make heaven possible.  What is God to do if he wants to create heaven and populate it with human beings?

So this guy knows what the divine perspective is? Whether he thinks it has been revealed to him or that he found it in the good book doesn’t matter. To know the mind of a god is not possible by all the accounts of the attributes of such beings. He even knows what makes heaven impossible. We are truly privileged here. He’s going to tell us the nature of love and cannot define it. In fact nobody can define it precisely. That is one of the problems with the word love – there is no precise definition. Go on, I dare you to define it for us.

Loving Others with Divine Help

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  (Galatians 2:20)

The keys to human beings living in paradise is obtaining divine help to love other people.  The Bible teaches us that with God’s help we can die to ourselves and learn how to love other people.  The keys to this process are a faith that trusts God even when we don’t understand his command and an obedience that attempts to do things which are absolutely impossible within the confines of our limited humanity.  Faith is important because it allows us to transcend the limitations of our own understanding, our imperfect attempts at obedience demonstrate our faith and are essential so that God can guide us toward the correct path.

Okay, so the key is to trust what we can’t understand, something that rapists would like to tell their victims. Further that we obey even when it is impossible to do so. He further states that we use faith to ignore all the warning signs we see in this. We have to fuck up so his perfect god can guide us. So much for omnipotence. To summarize so far, you’re fucked, sexuality is fucked, everything is fucked but you have to have faith because … god.

A Glimmer of Hope

Over the course of my 21 years of Christian life, I wrestled with pornography until God finally gave me complete victory over this sin about a year and a half ago.  When I think about the many years of struggle against my sexual sins and lusts, an obvious question arises.  “Was it worth it?”

As I consider this question, I think about a number of my beautiful sisters in Jesus Christ whom I love and with whom I have genuine friendship.  Before I became a Christian and for many years thereafter, these relationships would not have been possible.  At that time, I had no control over my sexuality and my lusts.  These lusts and ugly thoughts would have prevented me from forming genuine bonds with these women by distracting me from the things that really matter.  Was it worth it to kill these lusts and ugly thoughts within myself through 20 years of struggle and sacrifice?  Experiencing the joy of freedom from sin and lust and the friendship that it makes possible, I can unequivocally say that love and freedom are absolutely worth the sacrifice.

Okay, sexual superstar says he can’t control his lusts. He’s a moron, apparently, not capable of self control. He’s finally found some kind of self control and tells us that this is because of a god. Well the rest of us with self control just think this guy is a fucking idiot. Just the same it’s nice of him to tell us he has so little self control. How is one to trust anyone that has so little self control? Who knows but he’s going to continue on telling us what is wrong with the rest of the world.

Doubts and Reservations

Now some people may look at the Christians they see around them and express some doubts and reservations.  “No offence”, they might say, “but the Christians around me and those I read about in history don’t seem to be that much more loving than other people.  This path to eternal life and love doesn’t seem very credible.”  This is only one of the many valid questions that one may ask on one’s Christian journey.  Though the questions may seem fatal at first glance, I believe that satisfactory answers can be found if one searches the Scriptures and prayerfully seeks an answer and this website is dedicated to sharing the answers to those questions that I have found in my own journey.  (See, for example, my answer to the above question in “The After Action Report“.)

Well, at least he admits there are credible questions. He doesn’t provide any answers despite the fact that he knows the will of his god. In fact he hasn’t shown himself to know much of anything but I bet you can get some good recommendations for porn sites from him. He doesn’t seem very determined to fix the sexual brokenness that society suffers from. In fact, he’s offered nothing which would help fix sexual problems in society. He’s just blathering on about how his god’s divine plan is awesome but hasn’t even said what that is. Moron. That’s the label I give this guy.

Conclusion

Any rational human being who is aware of their own faults and sees the world as it is knows that human beings do not have anything close to perfect love.  Any rational human being who has known the fleeting joy that is possible when human beings enjoy genuine friendship and love knows that an eternal life of perfect love would be heaven and is worth any extreme of sacrifice.  After all, if I offered you a mansion and a small mountain of gold if you worked out 10 hours a week would you take it?  How much more should we as human beings be willing to give up temporary and imperfect love down here to attain eternal and perfect love with the help of God?  A genuine believer in Jesus Christ must practice and teach that obedience to difficult commands and faith when things are not clear are the keys to the eternal life of joy that Jesus offers to every human being.  This obedience is impossibly difficult for a human being without the promised divine help, but we trust that that help is available to everyone who seeks it and that heaven is worth any sacrifice.

Those who support homosexual marriage and fluid gender identification cannot conceive of the idea that Christians genuinely believe that the Bible is the Word of God.  Because they think we are “making things up as we go along” instead of genuinely seeking to understand God’s will and God’s word, they think it is no big deal for us to interpret the Bible such that homosexuality is acceptable.  In reality, however, Christians are following the path to true and eternal love laid out for us by our Lord and Saviour.  We must stand for the sexual purity commanded by our Lord and resist the world’s siren call to accept homosexuality.  To do anything else is to compromise the truth and betray our most deeply held beliefs.

First, I’m offended that this guy is talking about perfect love, something he’s had no chance to explore according to his own admissions. He has no definition of perfect love or at least has not shared it with the rest of us. What a daydreamer this guy is. He says any extreme of sacrifice is worth heaven yet he doesn’t know what heaven is, nobody does. I want to know what kind of mushrooms this guy puts in his omelets for breakfast. Still, heaven is worth any sacrifice. At least he thinks so according to his definitions of love and heaven. Unfortunately he never defined either one. I’ve not heard of god giving people the talent of mind reading so neither non-believers or believer should believe anything this guy is saying. He’s a fucking nutjob.

Oh, we can conceive of the idea that Christians genuinely believe the bible is the word of a god. The trouble is that because they do we think they are deluded or sick or crazy or ill. If homosexuality was not acceptable then why did the creator god make it so many animals exhibit this trait? I assume that by sexual purity laid out in the book he means that if you can afford 900 concubines as king, then that is okay. If your brother dies you have to service his widow and keep her and so on. His most deeply held beliefs are fucked. He has not read the book and does not think critically yet his voice among many others is out there for wanna-be believers to listen to. He is dangerous and stupid. You, my readers, I hope will reject this kind of blabbering outright, without a thought. That is what it deserves… on a good day.

 

 

 

 

2015
08/30
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Life Before Death? There is only life. It All Ends At Death.

Those of you who have read my ‘about me’ page know that “Sometimes I think the way I see the world is perhaps worth writing down.”

That view of the world is as present as ever when I read the posts of other bloggers. I want to know what they wrote and why they wrote it. It tells us something about them, or likely does. One of my favorite theist bloggers is Franks Cottage. His writing is different than a lot of theistic writings. He seems to stay on the positive perspective side of the debate. That he is a theist does not meant that I don’t find cause to stop and think when he writes. That said, Frank has posted recently on life before and after death focusing on the before part from his Christian perspective. Reading that gave me a few thoughts that I’d like to share here:

The entirety of his post is included and quoted but reformatted a bit for ease here.

I guess there are some atheists out there who believe that people of faith are just gritting their teeth and tolerating this nauseating existence before going on to unending glory in the life to come. But from my perspective as a follower of Jesus (whom serious Christians believe is God’s divine Son), atheists and Christians have “life before death” as a common belief. Let me make this as clear as possible: while life after death is of supreme importance, life BEFORE death is just as significant. How can I write that? Consider these words of Jesus, recorded in a section of the Bible called ‘John’: “I came to give life—life that is full and good.” He’s not talking about life after death; He’s talking about life RIGHT NOW. So what does that mean?

This premise is a promise that, as we’ll see, is not a promise of a wonderful life of prosperity

1.  Life becomes full and good because you’ve join a worldwide movement of believers. So you don’t have to make a go of it solo. You can attend a church, read the Bible, regularly pray with (and for) others and support each other through good times and bad.

This indicates that Christians don’t want to do this life on their own, can’t do it on their own. They have to have social intereactions which echo their own beliefs and actions. There is nothing here that could not be accomplished in an Atheist church, outside of praying and which books you read. So here we see Christianity fulfilling basic human wants rather than doing something special this part is a requisite part of human social interaction. Nothing special here. You’d get much the same if you belonged to a D&D club.

2.  Life becomes full and good because you have a new power that helps you set aside the meaningless, superficial priorities of our culture and focus on what’s truly important. So you are put on a path to stop worrying about whether you have a new car, the latest smartphone and the biggest flat-screen TV. You stop looking to your mate or your friends to give you happiness because you realize that happiness comes through following Jesus.

Here is a claim of a ‘new power’ that has no evidence for it. A power which most atheists seem to have or can have, I know I do. So this power being promised is not supernatural nor necessarily derived from a holy text. It’s just humans thinking in one way vs. a different way. That last bit where ‘You stop looking to your mate or your friends to give you happiness …’ is very interesting. You don’t need a god for this or a church or holy text. If you can’t manage this on your own a therapist can help you. This is not a special gift from a god, it is simply good and reasonable thinking. You do not and should not need a god to do this.

3.  Life becomes full and good because you have a pathway to becoming truly generous. It’s no longer about getting a charitable tax break or seeking something in return when you give. It’s about being Christ’s ambassador in a world most of us are willing to admit isn’t doing very well.

Ahh, the old giving altruistically bit. Being religious does not make you charitable or good. Spend a couple of minutes searching for atheist charity on the Internet and you’ll see the folly of this #3 item. In fact, #3 here is rather insulting to those charitable non-believers.

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4.  Life become full and good when you realize that the 70-odd years most of us spend on this planet is merely a blip in time compared to the eternity Christ followers have in Heaven with Jesus. The blessing of that perspective means we no longer have to put so much stake in every good or bad thing that happens to us in this life. We see the bigger picture and it changes everything.

There it is, life is good because there is a promise of eternal life afterwards. Live this life for Jesus so you can live forever at his feet worshipping him and his pappa. That is, unless there is something wrong in that heaven and you want change, then you’ll get cast out. Going to heaven has not been shown to be a one way ticket and it’s hard to imagine what being there would be like if all your loved ones or friends are in hell being tortured for eternity by the very god you worship. This promised next life needs to be approached with logic and trepidation. The promise sounds good but you wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive, for a reason.

5.  Life become full and good because you realize that Jesus died to make up for all the wrong things you’ve done and the right things you’ve failed to do. So the burden of guilt and shame is lifted from you; God sees you as He sees His Son: perfect in every way.

Well now, for this part you have to believe that this Jesus existed and died. It’s hard to come to grips with the fact that most of us do things which are not good at some point. Living with that requires a bit of thinking and attitude adjustment. The Christian’s like Frank think they can absolve themselves of responsibility and guilt by believing a story which says they are forgiven and will even get a reward while their friends and family are roasted in hell for eternity. Sounds selfish to me. Oh, I know. Frank and others are trying to share the free trip to heaven with us. I don’t know about you but I’m a little suspicious of the get out of jail free card given because I believe in the very god who built the jail just to torture me with if I don’t love him. It all seems a bit suspicious. One might stop to ponder at this point how well cows are treated before they are slaughtered for meat. They’ve been taught to trust their human masters who have made life easy for them, keep them healthy, feed them and so on… that small walkway to the new barn is not the stairway to heaven.

Now I’m not going to sugar-coat this and claim followers of Jesus float on a cloud of bliss. In another part of ‘John’, Jesus tells His followers “In this world you will have troubles. But be brave! I have defeated the world!” That means the world doesn’t automatically have the final say on your life. If you decide to follower Jesus, then HE has the final say. And that final say is glorious.

There it is, let me translate: This life is going to suck, sometimes it’s really going to suck. Your 2 year old might even be diagnosed with terminal cancer. Not to worry, if you believe in Jesus you’re promised a full and good life and there is the church to lean on when your mind can’t find the necessary impetus to even walk, they’ll support you and pray for you … and your child is still going to die of cancer before he can be saved by Jesus but hey, at least in the next life you’ll be worshipping the god that killed your kid and doomed him to eternal torture. That, that makes all the suffering worth it, don’t you think?

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2015
08/29
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Stuff You Say When You Are Stoned!

Oh, I know that this could be a long running series but I only intend to make this one post. I think the video says all you need to know when you understand that this is the kind of stuff you say when you’re higher than a kite. We tend to forgive people for stuff they say when they’re high because we know that their brain is not working as it should and the owner of that brain is enjoying the malfunction. If this guy claims he’s not high you can go ahead and laugh at him because he’s clearly stoned out of his mind.

 

Wait a minute, this bag of flatulence is allowed to vote. Seriously, why do believers wonder why non-believers laugh at them and want them locked up?

If you believe in the same book and the same god as this jerk (see what I did there?) could you please explain what is wrong with him? What exactly did he read in your holy book that tells him this stuff?

2015
08/26
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I Did An Experiment

Let me start by apologizing. I did an experiment. My previous post, rather than presenting my thoughts on a topic, simply stated one perspective on a problem much bigger than the perspective would allow. I did this with the thought in mind that my followers are generally quite thoughtful and intelligent and as a result I should see at least a couple other perspectives on the same problem. I was right. Each perspective showed we humans as one of the four blind men holding on to part of an elephant and describing what it must be.

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Perspective is everything. The problems of humanity, the dramas of our species, very seldom change. Sure, there is a change in the props on the set and perhaps the demographics of the audience but the plays remain the same as they have been for hundreds of thousands of year or longer. Fear drives us. Without it we’d happily gorge ourselves, raise children, and die. We’d never give a thought to anything else. The one thing that makes us human; the defining attribute of humanity … is fear. Yes, fear. Fear for our food, fear for our children, fear for our freedoms, fear for our happiness, fear for our lives, fear for our existence. Fear is everything to humans.

What does that have to do with the video and the post? That video illustrates one counter point perspective on a big fear, xenophobia. Fear of those that are different. We humans have a very long history of not celebrating differences. Multiculturalism does not work exactly because you cannot mix multiple xenophobic cultures and hope to find a pasteurized common culture at the end. They will clash and one will become dominant. This _is_ human nature or the nature of the human species. One can spend hours arguing for the esoteric or ideals of altruism but in the end we have to admit that this is how humanity works. It is what made humanity the most dangerous species on this planet and what will make us the most dangerous species in this galaxy.

I recently commented that the war between the states was not about emancipation, rather it was about federation over states rights and ‘manifest destiny’ over isolationist views. That war, atrocious as it was, remains very important in that there were three sides: north, south, and antipathy. One dominated and the world was changed forever. Now we have the EU, NATO, North America, United Nations, BRIC countries, remnants of the British Empire and so on. Do you see a trend? The world is like a school yard playground and people are choosing sides. They will clash, one will dominate, and the species will continue on in the ‘new’ political paradigm. That civil war will have to be fought again and again until we are one people, one community, one group. The mechanics of this political mechanism will never allow us to create equality because true equality is the dismantling of the very mechanisms that make us successful. And we wonder what happened to the Neanderthals!

In my opinion the one hope that we have is to begin celebrating differences and to use our resources to empower the individual rather than the group. When the focus is on the individual and not the culture then value and importance is placed on the individual rather than the culture or the politics or the ideology. Should we make heroes of individuals? Not really. I’m talking more about socialism through individual empowerment. To empower each individual requires a socialist perspective. Yeah, I know, socialism is a dirty word for many. So what does that mean?

SOCIALISM: a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

See that word community there? If we replace them with the words ‘human species’ things change drastically. The community is no longer individual cultures but the species itself. Contributors to the world stage are no longer states or countries but individuals. I don’t think it is too late for us to empower individuals through socialist protections of those individuals and society itself.

[[ I was going to put a picture here of tribal hatred but when you look at what Google serves up it is a short lesson in humanity. There is no representative picture of tribal hatred there is only every picture ever made of humanity. ]]

Yes, I’m very aware that treating all as equal will give rise to a raucous noise of ideas and desires and wants by the many people. Currently we filter those through a strainer we normally like to call culture. In fact, culture is a set of values and rules we use to strain out anything that does not fit our generalized and accepted ideals. That’s all that culture is. If you move one person from one culture to another they adapt to the new culture.

The video argues against treating all boys the same, and worse treating all boys the same as girls. It does not stop to say that treating all girls the same is bad also. The perspective of the speaker is the harm done to boys but the problem is that we are trying to treat all people the same, like brown shirts of WWII Germany. The speaker’s perspective was not that we should treat boys as individuals with individual responsibility to society but that we shouldn’t treat them all the same and expect them to be like girls. The speaker only addresses a small tip of a large iceberg. Even in a single class you can’t classify all girls the same – they are different! GASP

The political ideals that treat us all with labels are dangerous in this modern time. (religion, feminism, political parties and so on) They are dangerous because they promote the ideal that our value is based on culture and what other people think of us. People tend to rebel against this kind of thinking. They check out mentally, stop being productive, stop helping others. They can’t conform to the values demanded by the culture. Whether the culture is that of feminism or conservative politics etc. it alienates some even as it invigorates others. The divisiveness of group think in humans will always end with one group dominating and the other group(s) disappearing. You can rewrite that a bit to arrive at a theoretical formula for equality. When you do you’ll find that feminism as a group ironically cannot create equality for all. They can’t even support equality for all. I may seem to be picking on feminism but it seems topical these days. The very same can be said of any religious sect. Let’s take Islamic State as a quick example. They are not even going to try to create equality. They very honestly want to be the dominant ideology on the planet. We will all be alive to see their demise because there are so many other groups that cannot tolerate such thinking outside of their own halls of power.

One commenter went to great lengths to point out the problem with statistics. I appreciate that. Labels eliminate the outliers and exceptions. Labels eliminate the individual just as statistics are used to do most of the time.

Though the video tries to tell us that boys are being harmed I have to say that if equality is really the goal, any viewer should realize the video is showing us how we are all harmed when we fail to recognize the individual and treat everyone as a label. In this perspective it is boys that are harmed but what damage will that do later in life when they become fathers and husbands? We are all harmed by inequality, every kind or form of it. No group or political agenda can create equality. It has to come from each of us in how we treat others for that is the only way to change culture permanently. Only when we have a culture of equality will we be able to filter out what is not equality. This is an egg and chicken problem, for certain. A conundrum that can only be answered by asking the right questions and calling out those that ask the wrong ones.

We must take our self worth from personal values not those of society or community or even worse the government we didn’t pick. Individual value is the only path to equality under the law. Those that do not teach this have missed the point entirely. My value is not what you think of me, not what the government thinks of me, not what the universe thinks of me. My value is what I think of me. I am an individual. Until most other humans are also individuals under the law and in the culture – well, we can only function as a label. Labels compete with one another until there is dominance and victory. Individuals are more likely to show empathy than groups. Mob rules and all that.

Think. Be an individual. Teach children to be individuals.

 

2015
07/12
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Racists, Bigots, Multicultural … Out On A Limb

I shouldn’t have to show you pictures of or tell you about Charleston, McKinney, Baltimore, and other places which have been in the news lately. As proven by thousands of blog posts and news broadcasts there are a many opinions about what is wrong and why it is wrong and why the other group who is complaining is wrong.

The fundamentalists told us the mass killings in schools was because there was no god allowed in schools, now they tell us that it’s the gay agenda that got the Charleston 9 killed. Everyone is busy blaming everyone and everything else as the cause of the violence, hatred, and … well… humans being humans.

We hear a lot about how feminists think society should be or at least what they think is wrong. Blacks tell us what they think is wrong. Each political party tells us what they think is wrong. In fact there is an endless stream of people and groups that are more than willing to tell the rest of us what is wrong with the world today, or society, or that other country etc.

http://dearally.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/blame.jpg

I have my own ideas about who is to blame and what groups we could do without. My unspoken knee-jerk reactions would make vehement fundamentalists look like babes in cradles should I let them fester and act on them. I’m not here to talk about those or such from other people. In fact I’m not here to talk in this post other than to ask a simple question of all who read this.

What does a society without racism, bigotry, cultural hatred and similar items look like? Maybe you’ve only thought what it would be like without violent cops. Maybe you’ve only thought of what it would be like without gender inequality. Maybe you’ve only thought about what it would be like with equality under the law for all people. No matter what your pet project is I want to know what you think a society would look like that did not have hatred, racism, bigotry, fundamentalism, gender inequality, sexual orientation discrimination and so on. What would that world or country look like?

Between this current world we live in and the utopian world I’ve asked about, what are the low hanging fruits that we can work together to start us on that path to the world without the worst parts of humanity?

Go on, I want to hear it in the comments. I want to know what we are supposed to do to fix the giant fucking mess we humans have made of life and living. I want to hear how we fix it not what is wrong with it.

So tell us, what does a ‘perfect’ world look like? How does it work? Where would you fit in that world? Where would McKinney cops fit in that world? Where would former racists (of every color) fit in that world?

I know many may read this. Some may even click the like button. What I really want is to hear what a ‘perfect’ society would be like. Let’s have that discussion here.

2015
06/20
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Something Rather Than Nothing … What Would Moses Say?

This might simply be a side note on an otherwise huge debate regarding the subject of this post but I would like to share a few thoughts about that

That video shows imagery which were built from actual photographs taken by space craft that we humans have sent out into the solar system. Apparently a creator god made Ceres too.  Go on, watch that video again. There is a dwarf planet in our solar system that looks just like this (nearly). Why did it need to be created? Why did it need to be pummelled with asteroids so many times. Why would it need to have water on it? What was the creator’s plan for this rock that might have more fresh water than Earth does.

Ceres is not the only body begging these questions.

If you read the holy books of Earth’s religions none of them address this. None of them predicted humans getting up close photographs of these space bodies or even landing craft on them. Since the dawn of modern science we have been living beyond the grasp of anything in those holy books. You may be reading this post on your phone, even watching the video on your phone. In your hand is more technology than could even be dreamed of in the stories of the holy books.

What is the creator god’s position on bioethics? Is it okay to eat meat grown in a lab? Is it okay to grow new body parts and then graft them on to our bodies? Is it okay to augment our bodies to make them better than his supposed design? Is it okay for us to change our diets to improve our cognitive abilities? Is it okay to use nuclear energy to provide energy for the survival of humans? There are thousands more questions that the holy books cannot and will not answer. Everything that any believer has to say about the modern world is simply interpretation to try to make it fit into the ideals of the ancient world. I’d be willing to bet that if we had a time machine nobody would go back to 500 bce to bring someone to this day to work on cars, and with good reason. Why do we keep bringing books from that time to our current day thinking they will fix our problems? I know that was not the best analogy but the point stands.

What would be Moses’ take on images of Ceres or Pluto? Could or should we expect anything cogent if he could answer?

What do you think Moses would make of our technology, the technology that we take for granted?

2015
06/14
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In Progress … Please Wait

A lot of believers spend a great deal of time worshipping their deity of choice. You know the one, the deity their parents handed down to them like an old bicycle from grandpa. That religious belief takes a lot of effort. They are in church once, twice, maybe more times per week.

The math quickly: 16 waking hours times 7 is 112 waking hours per week. If you take away 3 (18.75%) hours per day for meals and meal related things we’re down to 91. Let’s say we spend an hour per day (6.25%) on hygienic activities. Basic survival means we spend 50% of our lives doing mandatory things as a kind of average value.That’s 12 hours per day to stay alive and leaves us 84 hours per week for other stuff.

That doesn’t count the hours spent each week at work or travelling to and from work. It takes 50% of our time to simply keep breathing. Of the other 50% we have about 9 hours per day 5 days a week for work as a sort of minimum. That drops our 84 hours to 39 on average, less for a great many people.

To get a calculation, let’s say the religious believer goes to a meeting building 3 times per week. Preparation, travel, and meeting time (I’m guessing) take up the better part of 4.5 hours or 13.5 hours per week.

13.5 hours is 34.62% of our available time, on average.

https://thedevelopersinfo.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/with_title2.jpg?w=595

Where there is a choice, believers (arguably) spend more than 1/3 of their disposable time worshipping their ‘deity of choice’. Now let’s add in daily prayer and other events such as bible study and discussion etc. It can quickly and easily become 50% of their disposable time. That would leave them 19.5 hours per week to do things other than survive, work, and worship. Average television time for Americans is around 3 hours per day (ref) , and that drops the disposable time to a negative value. I didn’t count household chores etc. You can use the link to adjust the values to see where the time goes.

So where do the religious folk get their worshipping time from? If religion was an app on your phone, it’d be too busy to be useful.

 

 

2015
06/13
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Why Praying Is Hard

It used to be easy for me when I believed that it did something useful. Then I wondered why an omniscient creator god needed to hear from me to guide his perfect plan. Then I wondered why his perfect plan included so much pain and suffering in the world. Then I learned statistics.

https://i0.wp.com/www.officialtherefromhere.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/baddaytshirt.png

On any given day there will be a sizable portion of the population of which it can be said “it sucks to be you.” It’s hard to remember that when it’s my day to have a sucky life. These days are the ones that I used to pray about. It never did any good. Sometimes, drinking few fingers of Scotch and playing with my dogs makes it better. Some days there is nothing for it but a few aspirin and more sleep than normal.

In the end, no matter what your philosophical position is, none of us have it all figured out. Some days or weeks just suck, badly.
https://i0.wp.com/www.politifake.org/image/political/1305/nothing-fails-like-prayer-battaile-politics-1367640197.jpg
When that happens, I try to meditate, relax, remind myself that it will pass because it will pass. I’m not talking about first world problems or fears about imaginary things. I’m talking about real life that grabs me and shakes me and won’t let go till I somehow figure out how to solve the problem. Without a solution at hand it often enough feels like a good scotch and some tearful moments will fix things. Perhaps even an attempt to ignore them will do it. Sadly, nothing like that really works.

Instead of prayer I sit and talk with myself. Amazingly there is a sound thinking part of me willing to have the conversation. I complain and that other part of me tells me it’s just one of those days so buck up sunshine, till you do something nothing will change. It would be nice to have a skydaddy that would fix it all for me but there is none. Even when I pretended there was, it was me that did all the hard work.
https://i0.wp.com/www.inspiredliving.com/stress/DogMeditation.jpg
If I can do this anyone can. I’m juggling 153 things at once and I just want to put some of them down. No such luck. I just have to soldier on. Writing this is not helping me do any of them but it is allowing me to have that internal conversation that I need. Do a few more things tonight, wake up, shower, do some more of them. Keep doing that till there is room to breathe or sleep. That is all I have. It’s the only plan I’ve got. The weight on my shoulders will not go away till I shed it myself. Praying would not fix it. In fact, praying would be no more effective than me writing this post.

That’s how this nihilist anti-theist does it.

How do you deal with shitty days?

2015
06/07
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How To Think Like A Baby, Why That Is A Good Idea

That title can lead a lot of places so some of you may be wondering where this is going to go. Well, it’s movie night or at least video night. I’ve got two videos for you to watch on the topic of babies and what or how they think.I know that 45 minutes is a long time to carve out of your day but I think both of these are worth watching. The second one can be understood with just the audio for the most part.

Some of my regular readers will be aware that I think we humans are meat machines with grand computers between our ears. I’ll go ahead and say it here, we are born blank slates with no reason to even think there are imaginary or invisible beings that created all that is existence. This first video goes a long way to explaining why we might be thinking there are gods by the time we are 5 years old.

Our brains are given to us with little to no meta-data about the world. We do not know red or round or hot or that sometimes all three belong to the same object. These are things we must learn as children. We learn from our parents and our surroundings. When all we know insists that there is an invisible being that created all existence and watches when we masturbate it is completely natural that our brains would accept this as true. The experiments in the first video hint at this without going that far.

In the second video the speaker talks about babies doing something that we like to call critical thinking. Don’t rule out options a priori, explore the evidence and then make a decision.

Our brains are brilliant at several things and from the time we open our eyes (if not before) they are doing just that. One of those things I think is hugely important to intelligence is to acquire and assign meta data about the objects we find in the world around us so that we can simulate those objects in our brain. Linguists study how we use communication as do authors and others. When I say “I like driving my vehicle except when other drivers are careless” I have communicated an incomplete idea. Your human brain will, in an attempt to simulate the idea in your brain, assign ‘reasonable’ meta data to the objects in the story. You will have done one or more of the following as you read that sentence:

  • envisioned what kind of vehicle I drive
  • where I am driving
  • the type of traffic
  • what it means when I say drivers being careless

The reason that your brain does this is because you have to simulate the idea in your head to comprehend it. Even if someone is talking to you over the phone you can see how you imagine in your head what the story is doing even as it is being told. Critical thinking is about not using your own meta data but investigating until you have all the meta-data required to replicate the idea in your brain rather than simply simulate an approximation of it. The critical thinker will ask

  • what kind of vehicle
  • where I am driving (highway, small country lane etc)
  • is the road busy or near empty?
  • By careless do I mean talking and texting while driving, not using proper signals, or something else.

Most of the human race likes to take short cuts in communication. You can think of hundreds of ways that you do so every day. The better thing is to not accept short cuts from others, especially those with a reason to confuse you or lie to you. Politicians and preachers come to mind. Even if they are not trying to confuse you on purpose and their intent is good, do not accept short cuts. Don’t fill in any of the details for yourself. Make them give you every detail of the ideas they are trying to convey. This is exactly what children are doing as they learn about the world. They will make inferences about what they are shown. The isolation that religion creates is bad. If you showed kids of 2 years old that people go to all kinds of churches it would be very helpful to those children. Most religious groups are guilty of abusing the children in their care simply because they isolate the learning mind of that child from the other possibilities.

I suspect that boredom or the ‘know it all’ syndrome in teens stems from not having enough to learn or the challenge to learn it. This is where I think our learning institutions could do much more and exactly why they should be better funded. Who knows how many geniuses fell prey to ‘boredom’ and never expressed the genius in them?

 

 

2015
06/07
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20 comments