I’M TIRED OF POLITICS

16. November 2008 by Frank.

 

I’m tired of politics.

 

Well, actually, I’m tired of political stupidity.

 

A guest in my house opined this brilliant piece of logic last night; “People are afraid of him because he’s a black man with a really unusual name, a scary foreign sounding name. I mean, nobody knows what he’s going to do. Nobody knows what kind of a man he is.”

 

The stupid, it burns!

 

If this is your sum total aversion to Obama then you really are a deep thinker aren’t you?

 

I wasn’t involved in the conversation, this person was my wife’s guest. But I have heard this same load of tripe for the last few weeks from a variety of sources, my co-workers and religious folks. I really don’t care if anyone is for Obama or not. What bothers me is how superficial the objections are.

 

“All you have to do is change that ‘b’ to an ’s’ in his last name and look at his middle name! It makes you think. Doesn’t it?”

 

No, it means you’ve stopped thinking.

 

It means you’re already brain dead and should report immediately to the nearest cemetery. Don’t worry, you won’t be alone.

 

What’s with all the politics? I thought this was an anti-religion blog. Well, yes, it is. Unfortunately, even the religious stuff is political lately. A couple of days before the election there was an elaborate article written by some fundamentalist whackjob which quite clearly and unequivocally stated that you could not be a real Christian and vote for Obama. It was quite heavily endorsed by an amazing amount of scripture that the author used to imply that a vote for Obama was really a vote for Satan. After the election, I’m sure you haven’t been able to avoid the story about a priest who doesn’t want to serve communion to any Catholic who voted for Obama before they repent and do penance for the horrible sin of voting for the most terrifying pro-abortion politician in history. God doesn’t like that.

 

Surely you’ve heard that the Mormon’s spent millions protecting the sanctity of marriage in California. I wonder how many starving children or how many suffering families could have been helped by all those millions? God hates gays so much he’s willing to let millions go hungry. Wow.

 

Like it or not religion is wrapped up in politics.

 

So is racism.

 

So is stupidity.

 

I really wanted to believe this country was making progress. Maybe part of it is. It sure isn’t around here.

 

I’m tired of politics.

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WHAT FREAKING ALTERNATE REALITY IS THIS AND HOW DID I GET HERE?

9. November 2008 by Frank.

 

“Now watch what you say or they’ll be calling you a radical,
Liberal, fanatical, criminal.
Won’t you sign up your name, we’d like to feel you’re
Acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable!”

 

(Logical Song by Supertramp on Breakfast in America)

 

Maybe politics hasn’t changed in the last twenty years after all. No, I like the alternate reality explanation better. Somehow I crossed the barrier between the real world and the twilight zone without realizing it. Yeah that’s it. I did too much “LDS in the sixties” (shameless Star Trek quote) and now I’m having flashback hallucinations.

 

Either that or I live in a world that is batshit insane.

 

Welcome, comrades, to the Glorious People’s Republic of Americka! Yes, we’re all socialists, communists, and Marxists now. No, I’m not quoting religious right whackjobs! That’s what supposedly normal, intelligent, ordinary people I work with are saying! I was so excited about the results of Tuesday’s election and went to work eager to talk about how wonderful it was. Instead of getting to share the enthusiasm, I was greeted with a barrage of whining about socialism and the fall of democracy. The effective end of our way of life. No one in that damn store was happy about Obama.

 

Which surprised the daylights out of me.

 

Of course this part of Michigan is so heavily conservative Republican no Democrats ran for any of the local elections. The only choice was Republican, write in, or no vote. But I had the mistaken idea that hatred of Bush would tip some of these people the other way. Wrong.

 

Which is why I usually keep quiet about politics.

 

I confessed elsewhere that I was a die hard Republican for most of my life. I hated Clinton (but not because of his lack of morals – it was his lack of a spine that bothered me) and I came to loathe Bush after voting for him twice. When it became clear he had no regard for the law, the constitution, or even the people, I became convinced that conservatism had become a dirty word. As I told my co-workers, even the rats knew when it was time to abandon a sinking ship.

 

In order to keep myself balanced, I used all kinds of sources, right and left, extreme and mainstream, religious and non-religious. That’s much easier to do nowadays with the internet, you could actually be fully informed. Unfortunately, you can also be sucked into a parallel dimension full of the most vile, disgusting, drivel you’re ever likely to see. Ed Brayton calls it The World NUT Daily. It’s actual name is World NET daily but Ed is much closer to the truth. You can find it easy enough but I’m not going to dignify them with a link.

 

They don’t deserve it.

 

These people are so far right wing, Christian nutjobs, and bigots that they should be isolated from the rest of the world so they could live in their own hate and filth and bigotry until they become extinct. Tell me something, how can someone calling themselves Christian advocate pulling their children out of public schools because our government is training them to be liberal socialists? How can this same loving Jesus follower flat out state that you need to buy as many guns as you can and make sure you have as much ammunition as possible? Because the Marxists have taken over the White House?

 

How can good old Pat Boone (yes, the Pat Boone from back in the day) tell a young boy that the country got on the wrong bus on Tuesday and now we have to be driven around for four years by some unAmerican terrorist nutjob who’s going to destroy our wonderful way of life. And make us all be godless communists.

 

So again I ask what freaking parallel universe is this? And how did I get here?

 

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good alternate reality story as much as any other science fiction fan. But the key word there is “fiction”. This stuff is happening right now in the “real” world. I like my fiction to be on screen or in books not in my face.

 

Don’t even get me started on the fact that there are people out there right now who think that Sarah Palin is the next conservative savior for 2012.

 

Shudder.

 

I want my mommy.

Posted in wild guesses, interpretation, communication, listen, hearing, emotion, education, religion | Print | 1 Comment »

WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO?

2. November 2008 by Frank.

Several bloggers I read all the time have burned out. Another one bit the dust last night. He’s tired of the same old arguments and the same old responses.

 

And the sense of not accomplishing a damn thing.

 

I’ve been blogging a very long time despite the fact this blog isn’t very old. I never managed to get the traffic and the number of commentators that most of my favorites enjoy. I’ve moved through several different sites with different blogging software and have used many different names and titles. I started in 1998 immediately after the stroke. My first move was stroke awareness and activism, subjects which I had some very marginal success with. At the same time I was writing quite a bit of religion criticism. That didn’t exactly work very well with the stroke related material; it seems a lot of people involved with strokes were looking for religious comfort.

 

So I couldn’t find an audience.

 

By the time atheist blogs started appearing, I had pretty much given up trying to find an outlet for my anti-religious ramblings. I kept a general purpose journal going in which I ranted about whatever was on my mind at any given time only occasionally bringing up religion because it seemed to offend what few readers I had. The trouble with that journal, however, is that I don’t exactly lead a very exciting life and I have a hard time convincing myself that anyone finds my observations all that interesting. I’ve got about 30 to 40 regular readers and that’s not too shabby but I always dreamed of more.

 

During the course of all of this I also became a big fan and practitioner of digital photography. Before the stroke, I was a painter of fantasy style landscapes. The damage to my right arm and hand, however, put an end to that. That was very frustrating at first but then a camera clearance sale led me into a love affair with digital cameras and photo editing software. I quickly decided I wanted to make a living with a camera. So I eventually purchased a Nikon D70 on October 31, 2004. (Hard to believe I’ve had it for four years now. I just went out hiking yesterday and took some 1200 pictures of all the lovely but really late fall foliage.) That camera was supposed to be my first step toward making a photography business.

 

I mention that because that was the beginning of an elaborate site I had that combined all my interests, including writing science fiction. I was up to nearly 70 pages of content before a series of financial disasters forced me to give it up, I couldn’t afford the cost of keeping it online. This spectacular fall from grace pretty much wiped out my entire online presence except for that little online journal I mentioned previously.

 

Since then I have been trying to find my way back.

 

I tried to revive my previous anti-religion blog but that failed miserably, it attracted no interest whatsoever. I just recently deleted it permanently. I tried setting up a photoblog a few months back. That was even more of a spectacular failure. Thanks to Google Analytics I was able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was the only one who ever looked at any of the photos on the site. Someone in Michigan running the Safari browser on Windows XP was 99.9% of the total traffic on the site. That was me and only me. So the photoblog is gone as well.

 

This blog is supposed to be the beginning of my return with a huge site covering all my interests once again. The stats here are quite good, far better than anything I have ever done before and very encouraging. But the crash and burn going on in the atheosphere concerns me.

 

What do atheistic readers want? Do you want the same old arguments over and over? Do you want personal stories about leaving religion behind? About trying to adapt to a new worldview? About problems encountered in trying to live in religious America? Politics? Seriously, what do we have in common as a group? Are we even a group?

 

My passion for religion and stroke activism has cooled over the years. At first, I was very seriously and very intently confronting those issues in my own life. But after ten years, I know what I believe and what happened to me. There’s no more internal conflict going on, the matter is settled. I tend to look back at that and compare it to things that are happening now. The difference astounds me but I frequently feel like all I’m doing is covering ground that someone else has covered much better previously.

 

I understand these bloggers feeling burned out.

 

So what I’m asking is what will it take to revive them? What do all of us need to do to keep it interesting and exciting? What new directions can we go in? Do we really need more college boy reasoning and debate or do we need real people dealing with real world scenarios? Or do we just need some good, old fashioned ranting?

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Really Funny Political Message

24. October 2008 by Frank.

Posted in communication, listen | Print | 1 Comment »

CAN I GET A WITNESS?

22. October 2008 by Frank.

 

I have been told that my stroke survivor story would be of great benefit and inspiration to suffering Christians the world over. All I have to do is give god the glory.

 

I can’t do that.

 

I did not survive the stroke with any help from god. I didn’t pray. I didn’t praise. I didn’t worship. I didn’t bow down. God did not deliver me from evil.

 

During the actual stroke event I was praying. I was very much god centered and oriented at that time. I knew something was horribly wrong with me but I didn’t panic because I had full trust in god to get me through it. There was no doubt in my mind that god was right there with me. You can see why Christians would think this is the beginning of a wonderful testimony.

 

I’ve mentioned before that I was planning to become a full time preacher. I was completely sold out to god. The thought of becoming an atheist had never occurred to me. I had absolutely no desire to leave my faith. I had no reason not to believe in god.

 

My blood pressure that morning should have been fatal. In a way it was. I know there are all kinds of scientific explanations for near death experiences. I understand that most such experiences happen in the mind and aren’t the least bit supernatural. But knowing that does not diminish the “realness” of the experience.

 

I left my body and was looking down at myself quite clearly while I was laying on the floor. That was just as real to me as it is sitting here typing and listening to music on Pandora. But I know that can be explained. It can also be explained that I felt I was drifting away to nothingness. Everything had gone black, sound was rapidly receding, there was no pain, there was no sensation. I thought I was almost dead and I was perfectly content with that. I wanted to keep going into the nothingness forever.

 

I thought I had entered the presence of god, it was perfect peace. But there was no one there. There was no light. There was no sense of another presence. There was no sense of anything. I was on a tour of a cave once in which they turned off the lights to show you what absolute darkness was like. I think everyone stopped breathing simultaneously. The complete absence of light is devastatingly shocking. We were each completely alone and isolated. My experience was like that. But it didn’t scare me.

 

Your HDTV would need a 10,000,000,000 to 1 contrast ratio to demonstrate that.

 

To say I was confused afterwards would be quite an understatement. I was confused and I also didn’t care. About anything. Nothing had any importance to me. I didn’t care what the nurses and doctors were doing to me. I didn’t care about myself, my family, my friends. But what was really surprising was that I didn’t care about my god either.

 

He was gone from my thoughts. It never occurred to me to pray. I didn’t want my bible. I wasn’t eager to get back to church and teaching the word. My attitude struck me as odd but didn’t really bother me any. I had made a complete 180 without the slightest bit of emotional reaction whatsoever.

 

A large part of my memory was gone. My personality was radically altered. I had no emotions except anger. The “I don’t care about anything” syndrome kicked in full force. Naturally, I was then diagnosed as being depressed. I was quite sure I wasn’t depressed, it was far deeper than that. My brain was no longer functioning in any manner approaching normal. I knew that deep down at my most fundamental level I was no longer the same person.

 

I did not get any support from friends or family and certainly none whatsoever from either of two churches I belonged to. People started acting like I had some kind of highly contagious plague (probably either the Rage Virus or the T-Virus), and while they weren’t actually running away from me, they sure weren’t drawing near. Neither was god even though he had promised to draw near to me if I drew near to him.

 

My faith wasn’t doing anything for me. It wasn’t long before I came to realize that the failure of my faith had caused the stroke in the first place. I really believed I could beat my high blood pressure just by believing. I hated the side effects I was getting from all the medicine I was taking. So I was highly motivated to believe in faith healing. I knew in my heart that faith in god could beat any medical problem. So I stopped taking the meds even though I had been warned that to do so could prove fatal. Oh yeah, I was a faith giant.

 

I was a fucking idiot.

 

Just a tiny little minute amount of blood got blocked from my brain and all the sudden I couldn’t control my body. My memories were wiped out. My personality, who I was – my identity, my “me” was eliminated. I embarked on a life of continual pain, filled with altered perceptions, without the comfort of god to fall back on. He was quite literally gone.

 

I couldn’t find him anywhere. His word which had been alive and vibrant to me was dead and lifeless. There was no hope or encouragement in it. Verses and phrases used to jump off the page but now sat there meaningless and uninspiring. I became aware that I wasn’t even praying anymore. I don’t recall making any conscious decision to stop. I gradually became aware that I didn’t want or need any help in the form of faith. Faith had utterly failed to keep me safe.

 

Instead I started reasoning things out. I started researching various aspects of the stroke online. I found scientific explanations for all the bizarre things that had happened to me. I started communicating with other survivors and I started seeing disturbing similarities in our experiences. I started seeing inexplicable things that had happened to my mother-in-law were happening to me. I came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do was to keep my mind active.

 

The spectacular failure of my faith led me to research church history which in turn led me to question church doctrines. That led to further bible study. When you study the bible with the faith blinders off you become aware how poorly written it actually is. There is no consistent eloquence in its words. There are literally hundreds of pages of the poorest written drivel you will ever read. There are contradictions of contradictions, errors, and flat out lies. The god depicted in the old testament is a monster, the behavior of his saints is atrocious. But that shouldn’t be surprising because they act just like him.

 

Or is it he acts just like the barbarians they are? I get confused.

 

Jesus is no better. He is exactly the same yesterday, today, and forever. That being the case, he must be just as much of a barbarian as his father. He said all of god’s promises were yes and amen in him, he said faith could move mountains, he said he would never fail nor forsake you, he said he was coming back in his follower’s lifetimes. He lied.

 

Then he said he would send you to hell for all of eternity for not believing him.

 

All this studying finally convinced me there is no god. Everything I believed was clearly contradicted by the very same book I used as a foundation. Faith requires you to make excuses when the words of that book fail to be true. Faith means choosing ignorance over reality, hopeful imagination over solid evidence.

 

But all I have to do is lie and praise god for bringing me through the crisis. I could inspire millions of Christians if I would just do that.

 

I would much rather tell the truth that religion and faith did absolutely nothing for me. Only by using my mind and its marvelous ability to reason was I able to survive. Millions of atheists would probably be inspired by that.

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THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE

14. October 2008 by Frank.

 

I’ve been burned out lately. Hell, that’s not quite accurate; I’ve been burned out for several weeks. Stuck in a rapidly going nowhere job I’ve been getting screwed over and taken advantage of to an alarming degree. It’s physically and mentally exhausting me. And my pathetic excuse for health isn’t helping any.

 

So what do I do to make things better?

 

In the past, I would have prayed. And prayed. And prayed some more. I would not have gotten an answer but I would have kept on praying anyway. I would have had other people praying for me. I would have had spirit-filled super-preachers praying and laying hands on me. I would never have gotten an answer to any of it but I would have sworn to you wholeheartedly that prayer works. I would have been totally sincere.

 

But I look back at that now and all I think is, “What an asshole!”

 

I knew it didn’t work. I knew I wasn’t getting any answers but I would never admit that. You admit that, you’ve lost your faith. Without faith god can’t do anything for you. It’s amazing how readily eager Christians are to make excuses for god’s lack of performance. Christians are supposed to be able to speak to mountains and have them move with only as much faith as a mustard seed. Christians are supposed to be able to do greater things than Jesus did. He wasn’t subject to the laws of physics, why are we?

 

My particular branch of Christianism usually prefered the you don’t have enough faith excuse. God’s failure to deliver was always your fault. Because you had a doubt. Because you said something wrong. Because you indulged in some sin. Because you didn’t pray hard enough. You didn’t offer sufficient praise. You didn’t put your full tithe in the collection plate. Whatever it was, you somehow tied god’s hands so he couldn’t get the answer to you.

 

On the other hand, I also spent time amongst the Baptists. Their favorites were, “It’s not god’s time,” “God said, NO!,” or the ever popular, “God only promised to supply our needs not our wants.” I never much cared for any of those because they directly contradicted scripture.

 

It’s only in looking back at it years later that I can see how absurd my beliefs really were. So many crises came and went without an answer from god. But I kept praising him anyway. He was just teaching me to trust and depend on him. Even when I got sued for not paying my bills after a series of financial disasters wiped us out, why, I was just leaning on my own understanding instead of seeking the will of god.

 

God never helped me out of any of these messes but I kept on praying.

 

Obviously I survived. I managed to solve one thing after another because I had to. I managed to get the money from one earthly source or another. I always gave god the credit, however. Even though he had nothing to do with it. It always struck me as odd how god was supplying my needs by my own hard work. That’s sort of what happens even if you don’t ask for his help.

 

Even now, my wife and my former SDA friend give god the credit for the SSI check my wife gets every month. Funny, it seems to me the $4000 lawyer was the one who won her case for us. And the money comes from the good ol’ US of A government which, by it’s Constitution, has nothing to do with god.

 

I haven’t prayed for over ten years now. Disasters far worse than anything before have come and gone. And I have survived them all. The only thing that’s different is that I didn’t waste my time and energy praying to a god who was never going to answer, I just put my mind to work and found a solution.

 

The scary thing about that is simply that that is precisely what I was doing all along but I wasn’t taking any credit for my own actions good or bad. It was all the will of god. Exactly the same results whether or not you call on god.

 

The reson is simple: there is no god.

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THAT FRIENDLESS ROUND-HEADED KID LOSES ANOTHER ONE

21. September 2008 by Frank.

 

Why is it that we are supposed to respect the beliefs of the religious no matter how ridiculous they are and they in turn have absolutely no respect for our beliefs or lack thereof?

 

My best friend is a devout Seventh Day Adventist. I have been going over to his house on Friday nights and arguing religion with him for quite some time. It was fun but I got tired of it. He wasn’t trying to convert me very hard but he was attempting to draw me in slowly. SDA doctrine is very rigid and dogmatic and essentially excludes all the other branches of Christianity for not abiding by those doctrines. They are the exclusive club among exclusive clubs. Their intense study of the bible appeals to my former sensibilities, however, so I kept going along with him because I really did enjoy examining those doctrines up close and personal. But a few weeks ago when he brought out the Ellen G. White reasons we can’t have fun stuff, my interest flew out the window.

 

So I told him so.

 

He was fine with that. No reason to ruin a friendship.

 

BUT…………..

 

We cannot meet on Friday nights any longer because that is Sabbath preparation time. Despite our disagreements we were studying the bible and talking about the things of god so we were good for Friday behavior. But not now. Now any other night is acceptable. Friday is god’s night.

 

And now the absurdity of it all has hit me square in the face.

 

I have been bending over backwards to accommodate his religious beliefs in this relationship and he hasn’t given one tiny bit in return. When we have gone out to dinner it always has to be a place of his choosing because it has to be vegetarian. I have had dinner at his house many times but he has never come to my house because we don’t do vegetarian dishes. I do all sorts of things on Saturdays but the only thing he’s willing to do is go to church. No matter what I say he always finds a way to add god to it so even if I specifically deny god had anything to do with it, he turns it around so god gets praised anyway.

 

And I just keep going along with it.

 

Obviously, I am a glutton for punishment. No, what it really is is desperation. He was the last real friend I had left. I have friends at work but they are only friends while we’re there, never outside the store. There’s no real relationship other than work. This guy was the last person that actually wanted to spend any time with me. So I kept going along even though his religion was getting on my nerves more and more and more.

 

Even so, some things aren’t worth saving when they become so one sided you can’t tolerate them anymore. When you tell me that common ordinary things I do all the time are an abomination to your personal beliefs but you don’t expect anyone else to live by your beliefs, you’re still managing to condemn my behavior while still pretending you’re being nice by tolerating me.

 

Unfortunately, when I let you do that to me constantly, I’m pretending, too.

 

So it’s all over but the death rattle.

 

And that’s a shame. Religion divides people. Any religion. You’re either one of us or one of them. If you’re one of them, we can tolerate you if you behave a certain way and give us a certain amount of respect and lip service. If you don’t, well, who needs you?

 

I don’t have any friends. I’m going to have to change my name to Charlie Brown. But I think that’s copyrighted.

 

Rats!

Posted in communication, wild guesses, religion | Print | 6 Comments »

CARNIVAL OF THE GODLESS #100

13. September 2008 by Frank.

Posted in wild guesses, interpretation, communication, listen, hearing, religion, emotion, education, Uncategorized | Print | 3 Comments »

THE ULTIMATE FOUNDATION

5. September 2008 by Frank.

 

My wife is very disappointed in her church because they decided to make the youth pastor the new senior pastor. He’s under 30 and his style is definitely more appealing to teenagers. Despite this, she is more determined than ever to be fully involved with their AWANA club and choir. And even after 10 years she still doesn’t understand why I want nothing to do with it.

 

You can’t just give up on god and lose your faith.

 

The thing of it is she isn’t so gung ho adamant because she’s a bible scholar, it’s all emotion for her. Emotion and training. She has never read the bible, not even the new testament, just bits and pieces she was told to read. Her mother constantly harped on her family to go to church and now she feels it’s her duty to carry on that tradition. She believes all the “right” doctrines that her church promotes but has no idea what they’re based on or what makes them “right” in the first place.

 

I’m not putting her down. I’m just using her as an example. The vast majority of people in that church have only a rudimentary knowledge of the bible. This was true of people who had been believers for over 50 years as well as those just starting out. I used to question the Sunday school adults why they held certain doctrines, very few of them knew. This is the average American churchgoer. Assured that their’s is the only way but lacking a love for the foundation of that way.

 

I was the exact opposite. I could have cared less about all the social programs and activities. I hardly ever studied what the pastor said to study. I studied the bible cover to cover relentlessly. It was of the utmost importance. My viewpoint was that without a solid foundation you could be swayed by anything.

 

Which is where the strangeness comes in. You can’t sway my wife or her church at all. They won’t budge. And they won’t be persuaded.

 

I came from a charismatic church that preached love for the word of god. It was a church full of people who were sure they were “mature” believers because they studied the bible thoroughly and because they were filled with the spirit of god. They had all the spiritual gifts functioning to build up the body. They had a much better base than those old dead mainline denominations.

 

Except that they fell apart and imploded because of false doctrines.

 

All their bible study and spirituality didn’t do a thing to keep them from destroying their church. I saw the same thing at Sumrall’s church. He had his own bible college, the church bookstore made a huge profit selling his college syllabi. Studying the word was a huge part of the church activities. And yet there were totally unqualified guest speakers, false teachers, and in some cases, complete idiots allowed to preach there. I never saw the slightest bit of discernment that these people had no business preaching.

 

Sumrall never missed an opportunity to condemn the old mainline “dead” denominations and the Baptists never missed an opportunity to condemn word of faith and pentecostal denominations. While they all claim to be bible based and preach love for the word of god, their foundations are radically different. The Baptists were far more cohesive because of their social structure. These big faith churches don’t have that.

 

Unlike Sumrall’s church where people were definitely following the man, the Baptist church is on their 7^th or 8^th pastor with almost no variation in how worship is conducted or the types of sermons presented. The people are there for each other not for the man of god and the word he brings to them.

 

I never fit into that. Even though I was teaching constantly and filling in for various pastors I never really belonged. I was regarded as an outsider from the very first time my wife took me there. The reason was quite simple but it eluded me for a long time. I wasn’t a Baptist. I was one of those dreaded Pentecostals and I didn’t have the decency to keep it secret. Eventually I took a stand for that and got myself thrown out of the church. I was informed that I would be happier somewhere else and that I didn’t belong among that congregation. And, of course, I could never be allowed to speak there again.

 

So I was not a typical Christian. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to the average pew warmer. My foundation was the bible. The social part was secondary or nonexistent (at least at Sumrall’s church). It was also missing at other churches I attended and tried to be a part of. The first church I started at that destroyed itself tried to force a social order on itself. It failed miserably. Social foundations happen on their own.

 

Perhaps that explains why being away from church never bothered me any.

 

It also explains why the bible is what finally convinced me god doesn’t exist. It was my foundation as a believer and, ironically, it’s my foundation as an unbeliever.

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FUN IS SIN THEREFORE SIN IS FUN

30. August 2008 by Frank.

 

Thou shalt not have any fun whatsoever.

 

It leads to impure thoughts, evil desires, corrupt thinking, wanton abandon, a lifetime of sin, the neglect of god, and essentially more sin than Jesus can possibly forgive even if he has eternity.

 

That’s a lot of sin. SIN I say!

 

I actually had the joy of reading excerpts from one of Ellen G. White’s books (which one? I’m not sure – the pages were copied without any titles) last night. It was mainly talking about raising children and controlling their behavior by keeping their minds focused on god all the time. While admitting that everyone needs rest and relaxation, the activities involved in that must be godly. None of this playing card games, checkers, chess, dancing, and, god forbid, bowling. And no going to the theatre! I’m sure TV and movies would have been included on the list if such things had been around back then.

 

Just to be perfectly clear, what I’m saying is reeking with bitter sarcasm.

 

A couple of weeks ago I offered to take my Seventh Day Adventist friend to see THE DARK KNIGHT even though I knew he’d turn me down (which he did). Well, he decided that he should explain to me why he turned me down. He chose to do that by showing me excerpts from Ellen G. White. It was everything I could do not to laugh my head off. Even when I was totally gungho I wasn’t this far gone.

 

But I do have to admit that many times I found myself doing things that my leaders said I had to do to be holy. I wasn’t doing them because I believed they were required by god, I was doing them because I was told to. Why in the world someone would obey the rantings of a constipated, old preacher who thought that any form of pleasure was dirty and sinful is beyond me. But I have seen this before. Sumrall once preached against the evils of playing cards. Because some people play cards for money, somehow that evil gets infused in all playing cards, and thusly corrupts anyone who uses them. I often wondered if that was the case how come he didn’t condemn kitchen knives? After all, some people use kitchen knives to kill other people. By his reasoning the evil of that should become part of all kitchen knives and thus anyone who uses a knife will be tempted to kill someone else.

 

Not to mention the far more obvious point of preaching for money.

 

I do enjoy discussing religion but I can’t take this anymore. My SDA friend is my best friend but the more I find out about how he wants to live his life, the more alienated I become. I will give him credit in that he admits believing such things is a personal matter and can’t and shouldn’t be forced on anyone else. But the simple fact that he believes this nonsense is staggering to me.

 

If it feels good, don’t do it.

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