29. April 2009 by Frank.

Sometime right around this week, I launched this blog to a huge sigh of indifference.  But it quickly started picking up traffic and is now generating very decent numbers.  I’ve got readers from England, Australia, and Brazil; to name a few.  The big thing I lack is readers who comment.  Yeah, there’s a handful to whom I’m very grateful.  But none of my blogs (and I’ve had several) have ever drawn much in the way of interaction.  This is both a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, I know that if anyone does say anything, they actually want to communicate with me.  On the other hand, I know that sites with tons of commenters often become steaming piles of stupid.  I seldom see real dialog and debate taking place so I wonder why in the world I should want that.  It would be great to get feedback, however.

I occasionally write about current events but I try to avoid covering the same things every other atheist blogger is covering.  I tend to prefer real life stories with personal involvement.  When I do my bible deconstruction articles, I start feeling like I’m lecturing to a class of very bored freshman zombies.  (I must say that I am fond of zombies since they are always looking for brains.  More braaaiiiiiinnnsssssss!)  All the while I see more and more evidence that the religious seem to want to shut their brains off and never use them again.  I doubt I’m reaching any of them but I don’t deliberately set out to antagonize them.

Blogging helps me tremendously.  Sometimes it’s the only way I can get things off my chest or my back.  I have the storyteller gene.  That’s part of the reason I want to expand online again.  Words and/or pictures and in any combination thereof are what I am about.  However, I sometimes wonder if I’m headed the right direction.

I’ve been blogging since 1998 although it wasn’t called that back then.  I just killed (deleted) my general purpose journal that I had going since 2004.  I’ve decided to concentrate on this one blog from now on so look for the range of topics I cover to expand considerably.  I don’t believe that the only thing all atheists do all the time in their lives online is debate religion with people who are very into religion.

Did you know, for instance, that if you don’t shave you increase your risk for stroke?  Put that in your pipe and debate it.  Said the heavily bearded man.

Posted in religion, stroke, Blogroll, Uncategorized | Print | 5 Comments »

27. April 2009 by Frank.

I have been trying on and off again to re-establish myself online with a large elaborate site featuring my photography and writing.  At one time I had a site with over 70 pages of content but I had to give it up for financial reasons.  Well, that, and I discovered no one was reading any of it.

The site featured 32 stroke survivor stories from actual survivors told in their own words.  I was quite proud of it, I felt it was of great benefit for the people to tell their stories and that it would help other folks who would eventually find themselves dealing with stroke.  I didn’t want the stories to just disappear with my site so I gave them to a stroke survivors group on MSN Groups.  Unfortunately, like many other one time mainstays online, MSN Groups went the way of the Dodo the last couple of years.  I have no idea if the stories survived.  The group did but you can’t view anything on their site without joining.

I’m not going to do that, I moved on.

All the people I cared about were gone or dead by the time I decided to move on.  Stroke had killed them off one by one.   That thought is never far from my mind, not that I’m worried, but that stroke kills.  I have no desire to have another one.  You may have picked up on the fact that health problems seem to plague me and my family and that I have incredibly bad luck with doctors and medications.

My arm has been killing me lately.  Sometimes when the weather changes abruptly the pain intensifies.  Mid 80’s in April followed by storms and a plunge back to the 30’s or 40’s is usually a sure sign I’m going to be hurting a lot more than normal.  So, last week’s episode of FAMILY GUY titled 420, and featuring a hilarious spoof of “The Old Bamboo” from CHITTY, CHITTY, BANG, BANG, called “A Bag of Weed” got me thinking.  As the lyrics said, “A bag of weed, a bag of weed, everything is better with a bag of weed!”

(You can watch it yourself on Hulu.com)

A bag of weed for medicinal purposes.  What’s wrong with that?  Oh, that’s right we have this phony war on drugs in this country.  There are times I would love to have something that would relax me so much the pain would stop.  I could have a prescription for some powerful narcotics if I wanted but I don’t.  They’re too addictive and they render me incapable of functioning in daily life.  So I deliberately chose to live with the pain.  Most of the time I’ve got it under control but every once in awhile what I wouldn’t give for some relief.  Do you know there were actually some Christians who condemned me for that decision?

I’ve seen them condemn a cancer sufferer for trying alternative therapies after all the radiation had failed.  The guy was in horrible pain but he didn’t want to spend his last days drugged out of his mind.

They spent over $40,000 for pain medication for my mother during the 3 weeks that she died.  There was nothing else they could do.  God didn’t do anything to help her either, neither did any of her Christian friends.  They prayed to no avail and offered platitudes.

I have no idea what I even wanted to write about.  I’m in pain and I’m worn out.  I guess I’m just blowing off steam.

Posted in wild guesses, education, emotion, religion, stroke | Print | 2 Comments »

23. April 2009 by Frank.

or REAL LIFE TALES FROM BIZARRO WORLD

This is a tale of mirth and whoa (no, not woe; whoa) guaranteed to give you several WTF moments.  I’m listening to some really laid back jazz from some female sax player (Candy Dulfer) so I can maintain my cool while relating these events to you.  Are you ready?  Then let us proceed.

Last night I was supposed to take my wife to the South Bend airport for a 7:45 flight to Louisville.  She was going to go on a two week visit to a friend who had been begging her to come down for some time; this woman had even paid for the airfare.  Supposedly.  When I got home my wife was visibly upset, bewildered, angry and generally in a daze.  She had called the airport to confirm the flight and had been informed there was no such airline and, in fact, there were no direct flights from South Bend to Louisville at all.

Unable to reach this woman on her phone, my wife decided to call the golf course the woman said she was the manager of.  They never heard of any such person.  All I could manage to say was, “WOW!” and, “Holy Shit!”  I wanted to say, “WTF,” in all its fully spelled out glory but my wife hates that word and it would have just made her madder.

My wife has been talking with this woman for over five months.  They met playing card games on Yahoo.  We have met several people online over the years and have become real world friends with them.  One of them is from Australia.  She came to Chicago to visit relatives and because we’re so relatively nearby she came here and visited for several days.  So we’ve had good experiences meeting people online.  So despite there being some slightly extravagant details to this Louisville woman’s story, she’s been very consistent about it for over five full months.

It takes some very powerful delusion to be able to lie consistently for that length of time.

Well, we then spent some time researching her story online since it involves some fairly well known people and places.  Some of it was true, minor details that were public knowledge.  The great bulk of it, however, was a bald faced lie.  I really have no idea what this woman was trying to do since she never asked for anything and never actually arranged this plane trip.  Maybe she just desperately needed a friend or someone to share her delusion with.  Her phone number is actually a Louisville number.

The moral of the story?  While there are good people online that you can have real meaningful relationships with there are also real nutjobs online as well.  I’m sure you’ve heard the stories including the one about the guy using Craigslist to find someone to murder during the last few days.  How to tell the difference is $64,000 question.

Have you said, “WTF?” or “WHOA!” yet?

After calming down, it was dinner time.  I made myself some frozen burritos in the microwave.  I was eating and trying to calm my wife down some more when I suddenly realized my mouth felt really funny.  Upon looking in the bathroom mirror, I discovered that my front tooth was gone.  It either disintegrated or fell out completely, in which case I swallowed it.  Now I did say, “WTF?”  Since the tooth next to it was already gone, I now have a two tooth wide gap right in front of my mouth.  Despite my ruggedly handsome sexy good looks, I now look like Cousin Buford from some pathetically bad hillbilly movie if I even remotely smile.  I do have dental insurance but with all these other medical bills I don’t see what good it does.

Then my daughter came over to print her wedding invitations.  For some absolutely bizarre reason my printer would print one card perfectly centered and the next one would be noticeably off center.  The one after that would claim the paper was upside down followed by there is no paper.  Her printer had done the exact same thing.  So she decided to do them at the print shop but she tried her printer one last time.  She thinks the error was caused because we specified the paper as “other greeting card” instead of “other specialty,” but, nevertheless she got them to print.  Now she has to mail them.

This morning started normally enough, that is, blah, blech, and phooey.  I was about to get my work clothes out of the dryer when I noticed I had some black gunk all over my hand.  It did not want to wash off so I settled for mostly off.  Fortunately I went into the bathroom because there were two huge black streaks across my forehead as well.  I backtracked my steps, checking everything I touched, trying to figure out where this gunk had come from.  It turns out that I had gotten soot off a candle holder when I picked it up to use as a paperweight for a note I left for my wife and then wiped my forehead.  I said, “Whoa!” when I got a look at my toothless black streaked face in the mirror.

Then at work some old coot brings in a poster sized picture to the copy center that he wants enlarged.  They talked him out of it because the only machine we have that can do something that big only does line drawings well, not photos.  They also didn’t want to copy the picture anyway because it was so blatantly offensive.  What was it?  A picture of a plantation in the South with an entire crew of slaves working the fields under the watchful eye of a whip wielding slave driver.

The reaction of everyone was pretty much, “WTF?”

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

19. April 2009 by Frank.

My 54th birthday is the 23rd this week.  I find myself asking myself what happened quite a bit lately.  How did I get to this point in my life in such sorry ass shape?  What did I do wrong?  What did I do right?

Midlife crisis?  No, there’s no crisis.  I’m too worn out to have a crisis, those take energy and I haven’t got any of that.

Like many people I have a pathetic job that I hate most of the time.  Even though I have the keys to the store and can perform all the functions of management I’m still nothing more than a glorified stock boy with the minimal wage that entails.  Despite claims to the contrary there is no way I can advance any further in this company.  I signed on to be a computer salesman but it quickly became obvious the industry isn’t about selling hardware, it’s about selling “service”.  Which is bullshit.  So I found myself in the back room doing inventory related things which I seem to have a knack for.  Unfortunately, you don’t make big bucks for physical labor and I’m still required to sell service plans.

My problem over all the years I’ve been working is that I never had anything even remotely resembling a plan for a career.  I started out washing dishes then moved onto bagging groceries.  From there I became a warehouse worker.  Then I became a machinist.  All of these were random chance.  I had no plan for any of them.  I needed a job and just happened to find one.  I just sort of stumbled into all of them.  Even this current job was simply a matter of being desperate and being in the right place at the right time.  I had been out of work for nine months and was having no success at finding anything.  I decided to go in the store one day to see if there were any new computer games and there was a sign on the door for a computer salesman.  My only plan was to never set foot in a factory again.

The only career, if you could call it that, that I really wanted was to be a preacher.  It was my calling.  It was what god wanted me to do.  I was ready to throw everything else in my life away and pursue it wholeheartedly.  But pastors and other preachers kept getting in my way.  I’m quite sure some of them were deliberately trying to stop me because they were fearful of losing their own position.  Or of losing control over their congregations.  The stroke ended this ambition permanently.  Afterwards I realized my heart wasn’t in it and I had nothing further to say.  When I finally concluded there is no god all the opposition made sense.  It wasn’t god or satan that was striving to stop me, it was plain ordinary men.  Fearful men who didn’t want to lose any of their power.  Take the supernatural out of the equation and everything becomes fairly simple to understand.

We’ve weathered more financial disasters over the years than I care to remember and we are currently in seriously deep financial shit.  Unless I can find a better paying job or a second job I’m going to be forced into bankruptcy soon.  At my age that isn’t a real good option.

But there’s an abundance of good things, too.  Last month my daughter turned 25 and in June she’s getting married.  She graduated college and is the best daughter in the world.  In May, my wife and I will be married for 28 years and at nearly the same time we will have been in our house for 20 years.

That’s pretty good for a burned out bungler.

Why look how I compare to Mel Gibson.  I’m practically the same age and have been married just as long.  But I’m not getting a nasty expensive divorce.  I don’t have a billion dollars but what the hey, I’ve got my health.

Oh, wait!  I don’t have that either.

Posted in wild guesses, education, emotion, religion, stroke | Print | 5 Comments »

17. April 2009 by Frank.

While searching for new blogs to read I came across one that had an article about a biblical contradiction that I had never considered before.  It was so interesting that I decided I had to rip it off and put in my two cents on the subject.  The blog is called “I wonder as I wander” and you can find it here  and the article is entitled, “I think, therefore I kill you.”  It’s a good read and a good point.

2 Corinthians 10:4-5 (NIV)  “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.  On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.  We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ.”  (Emphasis mine.)  The King James Version phrases it a bit more ominously, “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God.”  Is it any wonder Christians resist any form of logic or reasoning we may try to use to convince them?

Imagination is dangerous, thoughts must be controlled.  Colossians 3:2 tells us, “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.”  Back in the day, this seemed like good advice to me.  But I have to be honest, I failed miserably at obeying this command even in my heyday.  I love imagination.  I always have even though I spent a great deal of time trying to direct it to heavenly matters instead of more fun or productive things.

If you looked up that other blog, you already know it refers to Matthew 5, the Jesus sermon commonly called the beatitudes.  In verses 21-22 Jesus says that just being angry or saying “You fool!” is equivalent to murder and therefore subject to the same judgment.  In verse 28 he declares that looking at a woman lustfully means you have already committed adultery with her in your heart.  That verse right there condemns every heterosexual man on earth throughout history to hell.  Thoughts and imaginations are sins.  No wonder they need to be taken captive.

So just indulging in a little harmless sex fantasy is the same as adultery.  They used to stone you to death for that.  Imagine that, just thinking about sex should get you stoned to death according to god.  Imagine what should happen to you if you watch porn.

Thinking about doing bad things is just as bad as actually doing bad things.  The thought is the same as the action.

How many times have Christians offered to pray for you in lieu of actually providing you with any real, substantive help?  Here’s where the contradiction comes in.  They are imagining that their prayers are helping you.  They are imagining that their great sky daddy is listening to them and taking their advice.  They are imagining that he is providing you with the money, health, wisdom, whatever that you need to survive your crisis but they aren’t actually giving you any money, healing you, or providing sufficient wisdom for you to figure out how to solve your own problems.

They are thinking about doing good things.  But is that the same as actually doing good things?

No, it isn’t.  According to the same bible, it’s not.

Look at James 2:14-17 (NIV)  “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?  Can such faith save him?  Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes (Oh my god, we’re imagining naked women!) and daily food.  If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?  In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”  Quite clearly the thoughts here are not the same as actually doing the deed.  What good is it?

Why should bad thoughts be the equivalent of doing bad things and deserving of judgment?  How is it that good thoughts, no matter how well intentioned, are not the equivalent of doing a good thing?  Aren’t you doing the exact same thing in both situations?  Aren’t you thinking and imagining something?  Why is it that one way it’s the same as if you physically did something but the other way it isn’t?

This being the case, what good is prayer?

What good is it to ask god to meet someone’s needs without doing anything to meet those needs yourself?  Are your good thoughts accomplishing anything other than making you feel good?  All your good thoughts do are make you feel like you did something when you know damn well you didn’t.

But don’t you dare think about sex.  That’s the same as actually having sex.  And that’s a sin unless you’re just thinking about having it with yourself.  No wait, that’s a sin, too.  Damn.

Well, then, I wish you many orgasms.  There, I can’t get in any trouble with that.

Posted in interpretation, communication, wild guesses, emotion, religion, Uncategorized | Print | 1 Comment »

11. April 2009 by Frank.

Easter Sunday, 1980.  After five weeks of listening to sermons about the glorious end of the world, I walked down the makeshift aisle of a little Charismatic church and made a profession of faith.  I got saved.

At first, it was wonderful.  The weight of the world was lifted from my shoulders.  I had gone cold turkey with my extreme boozing habit and psychiatry hadn’t done much for me.  I was at the lowest point of my life.  I had ruined my life and here was Jesus offering to forgive me for it.  How could I resist?

Indeed, resistance was futile.

But looking back I should have resisted.  I ran into Christian hypocrisy almost immediately.  A deacon’s wife started talking behind my back about my relationship with a girl who had been divorced.  We were just friends, she was dating a guy who became my best friend.  But because she was divorced she was a hot topic for gossip among all the godly women.  And here I thought it was possible to have a purely platonic relationship with a member of the opposite sex.  What a fool I was.

This deacon’s wife eventually went on to accuse the pastor of the church of being demon possessed which literally destroyed the church.

My mind was screaming, “HYPOCRITS!” at me furiously.  But I chose to ignore the warning flags.  I wanted to be accepted by god, I wanted to fit in with a group of people.  I wanted the godly love I was promised.  I wanted the bible to be true in all its promises.

I took it all literally.  I took it all extremely seriously.  I noticed very quickly that I was not like other people in the church.  Church obviously influenced their daily lives to some extent but not like it influenced me.  I was reading and studying the bible constantly, I was having hour long prayer sessions.  I was telling everyone I came in contact with how wonderful my god was.  I was positively giddy with excitement about my faith.

Other people were like that while in church.  But outside of church they were much more subdued.  Outside of church they were smoking and drinking, watching horror movies, being far more enthusiastic about sports than they ever were about Jesus.  They were like normal people.  Not me.  Jesus was my life.

It wasn’t long before they were telling me to calm down.  No way could I stay in that mountain top frame of mind.  It just wasn’t possible to stay that high on god for that long a period of time.  You can’t be so heavenly minded that you’re no earthly good.  Eventually they wore me out and I came down, hard.

Then the church destroyed itself and I found myself amongst the Baptists.  They weren’t about being up either.  They were about being guilty, they were about being miserable sinners saved by grace.  In fact, it was a frequent theme that whenever someone started feeling that god was really blessing them he suddenly thought they were too happy and would bring some disaster into their lives to get their heads out of the clouds and their feet back on the ground.  God enjoyed his children suffering.

This really didn’t fit with my god is wonderful and exciting philosophy. 

So I got very big into the whole televangelist phenomena.  Mostly the word of faith ministries, the preachers of the prosperity gospel.  These people were much more upbeat and less obsessed with suffering for their sins.  I began to wonder if the sole purpose of church was to make you feel weak and helpless so you’d keep coming back for the strength you could only get from god.  So there I was trying to bring some of the more positive upbeat teachings to people who seemed to want to remain miserable.

This eventually got me thrown out of the church.  You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a pastor telling you that he wanted you out of his church and that you could never be allowed to speak there again.  Ah, the love of god is such a wonderful thing.

Then I got involved with a big time ministry complete with its own TV network.  At first, I was in paradise.  Then I got too involved and much too close to the inner workings of this “business”  because that’s what it turned out to be, it wasn’t really a church.  They would even take you on a tour of their factory underneath the sanctuary, proudly pointing out the machinery of their Christian publishing ministry.  Some of the biggest names in Christianity passed through there and I heard and saw things behind the scenes with these people that was absolutely devastating.  Hypocrisy and fraud are too mild of words to describe it.

Then I moved on to small town, tiny little, just starting out churchianity.  This wannabe Pentecostal group was friendly enough and they were mostly upbeat.  They weren’t into oppressive guilt.  But they weren’t into serious study either.  They wanted emotion.  They wanted odd behavior.  They wanted signs they were blessed by god.  They wanted spirit-dancing instead of words from god.

Eighteen years had gone by and it was stroke time.  My brain was rewired and my personality was severely altered.  My job was gone, my health, my entire livelihood was over.  My faith died completely and utterly and no one cared or noticed.  I found out I had no friends in churches or out in the real world.  I learned how to manage constant pain without drugs on my own without any training.

I spent the next couple of years trying to figure out what happened to my faith.  I looked at other religions.  I considered viewpoints I would never even acknowledge before.  I tried to find some way to if not remain a Christian at least remain a believer in a god of some kind.  But ultimately I realized there is no god.

There are only mind control experiments.

Religion is about control.  Controlling your thoughts and your behavior.  It’s about controlling your money and/or your time.  It’s about taking something that is yours and giving it willingly to the people trying to control you.

The bible talks about bringing every thought into captivity to Christ.

Religion is mind control.

It had me for twenty years (the final 2 years not so much).  The stroke was in 1998, it set me free.  But I have been studying and pondering and reasoning ever since then.  Trying to figure out why.  Why did I fall for it?  Why did I want to preach it myself?  Why did I keep on when it was so obviously flawed right from the very beginning?

And now what can I do to set others free?

Posted in wild guesses, interpretation, easter, education, religion, emotion, stroke | Print | 5 Comments »

5. April 2009 by Frank.

One of the stranger things about my Christian experience was my moving between the Charismatic/Pentecostal side and the Baptist side. Both sides frequently indulged in condemning the other. Sermons were preached to explain why those other people weren’t real Christians. Why, those heathens weren’t even saved!

They didn’t just have issues with each other, they had issues with almost every other denomination. Both sides labeled the Seventh Day Adventists as a cult. And let’s not get started with the Catholics or the Mormons. All of this flew in the face of biblical verses which clearly taught we were all growing together into the unity of the faith, that God’s great plan was for his entire body to be in harmony.

Each part has equal care for every other part. One part suffers the whole body suffers.

That’s right out of the Bible but you can’t even find it in single congregations let alone multiple denominations. Lutherans from one synod will not pray with Lutherans from another. They won’t even consider praying with a Baptist or a Methodist. But they all love their Jesus and they’re all part of him.

Makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I read a lot of atheist blogs and I get a sense that a lot of atheists have no idea just how fragmented Christianity actually is. Not all atheists came out of religion like I did and not all experienced very many denominations if they did. Nor does there seem to be much realization that a Baptist Fundamentalist is an entirely different animal than a Pentecostal Fundamentalist. The problem is that they all use the same words but the meanings are radically different.

For instance, the word “saved”, a common religious word if ever there was one. Most of the groups I moved in defined it as a personal relationship with Jesus. However, in talking with a devout Lutheran, I learned he had absolutely no idea what that meant. He didn’t even think that a person had any part in getting saved, that it was all a matter of what god did. There was no accepting Christ into your heart, no confession of faith required. If Christians don’t even agree on something that basic, you have to wonder how they are even considered a cohesive group to begin with.

Atheists are as divers a group of people as possible. There’s nothing in common except a lack of belief in gods. We’re not all liberals, democrats, pro-choicers, radicals, extremists, or any other label you care to apply. We don’t all kick puppies or eat babies (although they are good with Extra Spicy Hot Sauce), and we aren’t all angry, miserable creatures with no morals.

What it all means is that the vocal factions which get involved in politics and social engineering are not representative of the Christian religion as a whole. There is no such thing. Christianity is not unified in its beliefs or its social issues. Yes, there is a loud contingency that sounds like they speak for all but that’s all it is, sound.

All these polls and statistics which make the news and show declining religious numbers don’t really show the giant schisms there are between all the competing denominations. Yes, there are a lot more people who define themselves as Christians than there are who admit to being atheists. But Christian “A” can be 180 degrees opposite Christian “Z” on all major issues. They both call themselves Christian.

Not everyone studies apologetics. Not everyone sits around using logical arguments trying to disprove the other point of view. Not everyone is confrontational. Not everyone wants everyone else to agree with their viewpoint.

Just as there’s no such thing as a typical atheist, there’s no such thing as a typical Christian either. So all we can do is express ourselves as best we can and hope that sometimes we find someone else like-minded enough that we can communicate.

Without offending each other.

Posted in interpretation, communication, wild guesses, listen, emotion, hearing, religion | Print | 9 Comments »