29. November 2008 by Frank.

I hate Christmas and the entire holiday season for a number of reasons. So, in no particular order, here are my reasons:

• (1) I work in a large scale retail store so I have to take part in serving the crowds on Black Friday. The buying frenzy and outright greed on display amongst the customers is sickening. 300 people pour through the door in a matter of a few seconds acting like their lives depend on getting the bargain stuff. If you don’t think this behavior is disgusting try asking the man who was trampled to death at Wal-Mart (in New York). Find out what his co-workers must have felt like as the morons continued shopping. How in the world did people in this country allow themselves to be trained to participate in this bullshit year after year? And keep in mind that what I see is nothing compared to Best Buy and Wal-Mart across the street.

• (2) I’m sick to death of being forced to go to family holiday functions. These people don’t want anything to do with us for the rest of the year. My wife’s family all live right here in the same area so there’s no travel involved. They frequently do things with each other but they always leave my wife out and they ignore me entirely. My wife’s late mother used to enforce holiday gatherings with an iron fist. I think they continue it now because of that training. My sisters live in Louisiana so there’s nothing going on there either. None of us can afford that kind of travel. I would much rather spend time with friends. If I had any.

• (3) Apparently I missed the training sessions but this season does not give me the warm fuzzies. I don’t indulge in nostalgia. I don’t have fond childhood memories — most of my memories were wiped out by the stroke. And unlike all these oh so sincere celebrities who clearly remember their incredibly supportive parents who gave them their first dancing shoes, microphones, footballs, baseball gloves, etc. , I don’t recall my parents ever supporting anything I was interested in. Unfortunately, that isn’t because of my memory being totally screwed, my parents really didn’t support anything I ever tried to do. My late mother’s strongest words of support were, “That’s nice — if you like that sort of thing.” She used that for my acting, my painting, and my photography. My step-father never had anything to say and my natural father abandoned me when I was nine. Warm, fuzzy, childhood memories? I don’t think so.

• (4) Contrary to 20 years of Christianity, Jesus is not the reason for the season. Christianity usurping pagan holidays for its own needs is the reason Xmas is on December 25. You should really study church history. It’s amazing how many pagan gods were born or celebrated on December 25 long before Jesus ever showed up.

• (5) We are living on my wife’s Social Security Disability and my below poverty level income. We literally have not been able to afford Xmas for several years now. That’s alright, I understand that giving presents is fun. I enjoy that. But I have made the leap to realizing that only things I can give are things that I can make myself. My wife still thinks we HAVE TO BUY things. She has been trained thoroughly. This creates stress. There’s no more credit to be had, we used up our share long ago. Just like retail, everything has to be bigger and bigger and more and more expensive every year. Sorry, we reached the point of no return several years ago. Retail pins the entire year on what it can do in December. We need a new system. This one has destroyed us.

• (6) I am subjected to 36 hours a week of Xmas music. Non-religious, generic Xmas music. After hearing the same 25 songs 5 million times, you begin to hate Xmas music. I hate it with a passion.

• (7) There is no War! On! Christmas! Christians are not being persecuted in this country. Saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is in no way, shape, or form even remotely close to persecution. Let’s have the secret police break down your doors and haul you off to concentration camps before you start whining about persecution. Let’s burn you at the stake, torture, and abuse you before you wail about the evil atheists trying to ruin your (pagan) holiday.

So there you have it, 7 reasons I hate this whole Xmas season. I could have also mentioned the snow, ice, and bitter cold but that’s what you get when you live in Michigan.

“You can’t fool me. I know there is no Sanity Clause.”

Posted in communication, emotion, religion, stroke | Print | 3 Comments »

23. November 2008 by Frank.

I just made a serious mistake in judgment; I went to the park.

We had a blizzard that dumped over a foot of snow on us yesterday. It was preceded last Monday by an ice storm. The entrance to the park is at the bottom of a steep hill. Which naturally meant the hill was covered with ice. I knew I had made a mistake as I passed a guy in a van on the wrong side of the road who had obviously slid over there while trying to go up the hill. To say that the roads in the park were a mess would be a gross understatement. But I have this thing about nature and beauty.

I also have a thing about not getting stuck if at all possible. So I did not stop or slow down anywhere in the park. By the time I got back to the entrance hill the guy had managed to get unstuck and had backed down the road. So I kept on going slowly up the hill carefully trying not to change speed. I was cursing myself for a fool all the way out but I made it without mishap.

When I related my story to my wife a few minutes later, I started to tell her what I said to myself. She interrupted and said/asked, “Lord, help me make it?”

“No,” I replied, I said, “You dummy! Don’t ever do anything this stupid again!”

Praying never occurs to me anymore. I have 35 years of Winter driving skills and my car has a brand new set of tires due to the aforementioned ice storm (my wife slid across a street and demolished the right front wheel on a curb – snapped the axle in half) and those reasons are why I drove out safely.

Back in the day I would’ve been praying/begging and then given god the praise even though it still would have been my driving ability to got me out of a bad situation.

I also would have had to contend with the nagging problem of why didn’t god warn me not to go in there in the first place.

My beliefs got me into conundrums like that frequently. The usual resolution was to determine I obviously wasn’t listening to his guidance. It never occurred to me to think there was no guidance being given. Whenever I prayed about what to teach or speak about in church I always got an answer. I was sure god was talking to me plain as day. But any other request seemed to fall on deaf ears. Financial guidance, emotional problems, health, all that sort of question never got answered in a way I could perceive.

It was not until later that I finally realized why I always got an answer about what to teach and speak about. It was really quite simple and completely non-supernatural. I was reading and studying constantly. I loved my bible and books about it. My head was quite literally filled with scripture. I could put together a talk with almost no effort since I was thinking about that sort of thing all the time. So it seemed as if god answered me without hesitation if I asked about his word.

Everything else, however, came under the heading of “Lean not on your own understanding.”

Christianity does not want its people to think for themselves. I could never see that. It was always a matter of god wanting me to depend on him more and more. When I first started letting myself read things to that effect I reacted very defensively, denying that such a concept was possible let alone accurate. But all you have to do is look at that one verse to understand the truth. “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.”

I’m the type of person who follows these sorts of things all the way out to their logical (or illogical) conclusions. It’s not hard to find hundreds of verses which agree with and confirm this anti-intellectual bias in the bible. You can dig yourself a very deep hole with these words telling you not to think for yourself. All the while you’re doing it you’re telling yourself that you are seeking and acquiring the “true” wisdom that comes from god alone.

Not to bring up politics again but surely you cannot have missed all the religious ignorance on display during this election season, especially if you frequent atheist blogs. There were appalling videos all over the net. The vapid stupidity and ignorance was awe inspiring in a perverse sort of way. And atheist bloggers jumped all over every example of it. So this is a very real, very modern up to date problem. That these people were proud of their ignorance only serves to prove the point even further.

I couldn’t see it and even denied it while I was involved in it but the evidence is all over the place.

Religion deliberately breeds ignorance.

Since I joined the rational world praying no longer is part of my thinking. Giving god glory never crosses my mind. If I make a stupid decision, I make it on my own. And if I get out of it, I do that on my own as well. This is so much simpler and so much less stressful than my former religious behavior.

You go down an icy road there’s no one but yourself to get you back up it.

Posted in communication, wild guesses, listen, hearing, religion | Print | 2 Comments »

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.

Posted in interpretation, communication, wild guesses, listen, education, hearing, emotion | Print | 2 Comments »

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 | 3 Comments »

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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