You don’t call, you don’t write…

I’ll be honest, I’m just too fucking tired to write anything meaningful lately. Not that I ever write anything meaningful. There’s a ton of shit going on in my life and a handful of good things. Actually, I think the specification of “handful” would be 3. I’m broke, I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m in pain, I’m a little broken, a smidge jealous, and Trevor, my inner monkey, is acting up a lot lately. And there’s something about Mormons that drives me absolutely fucknuts. Don’t ask, I don’t really understand it myself.

But it’s late, my laundry is finally done, I’ve had about 2 too many beers, and I’m neurotic that I’ll screw up the only thing going right in my life.

If I don’t make it back here before Monday, Happy Halloween everybody.

Dear ex,

Suck it, bitch!

Because I Can

Fuckin bitch fuckin goddamn how the fuckin fuck fuck what? Seriously, what? FUCK! I mean, what the fuck? Seriously. Did I really fuckin FUCK! I really did not fuckin realize how fucking sick fucking humans could fucking be. I mean, FUCK! I fucking married that? FUCK! What the fuck was I fucking thinking? I’m fucking sick! That’s fucking sick. Fuckin’ seriously. I mean, who the fuck fuckin’ stays married to a fucking fuck like that for fucking HOW many fuckin’ years? Fuck. Fuck Fuck Fuck.

It’s like a parasite that you can’t remove. That’s it’s name now. The fuckin’ parasite. What a waste of oxygen.

Aw fuck.

End rant.

I saw the moon tonight…

Full moons always make me thoughtful
And sometimes just a little sad
I’m usually not sure why

I feel like I’m looking for something I’ll never find
Like a decades long game of cat and mouse
Maybe that’s all that life is

It was a little more comforting when I thought life was magic
Like a storybook. Climax, denouement, happy ending
But even then, there were no happy endings

It’s a daily struggle to make sense of so much crap
Sometimes you see things as you want them to be
But they’re not

I’m not very good at being alone
Life is better with a friend at your side
Shuffling through the crap with you

I’m not very good at being alone
Though I’ve had a lot of practice
It didn’t help

I don’t always feel happy with who I am
Like my life’s journey got derailed way back there
I ended up in Beijing when I was headed for Stuttgart

But there’s no train back
I’ll have to walk
It’s a long walk

Maybe I’ll make a friend along the way
Maybe a lifelong companion
Maybe just a passing ship

Sometimes I walk in a zigzag
Life keeps putting curves in the road
But I just keep walking

No matter how much it hurts

Spank your monkey

A “new” video from philhellenes I hadn’t seen yet. I say “new” because it’s new to me. It’s quite insightful, and goes a long way towards explaining me.

Where the effin’ eff has effin’ Cowboy effin’ been? What the eff, effer?

I’ve fallen a little behind, but just in case anybody was wondering, I’ve started something like six blog posts, all of which are unfinished. Each one is a potential gem of poetic wisdom that, once spread in the wild, will surely unite mankind in peace, love and harmony, end war, feed the starving, and usher in the dawn of a new era of rationality and caring.

The problem, of course, is that due to various influences in my life, I’ve been simultaneously depressed, ecstatic, exhausted, invigorated, angry, happy, and confused.

No, I’m not going to explain that.

Hey, as awesome as I am, I’m just one guy. Stay tuned, the stream of consciousness wisdom you’ve come to count on as guidance in your daily life will soon resume.

And… we’ve reached a new level of crazy.

Michele Bachman has gone Anti-vax.

Yep, she went there.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/professors-offer-more-10-000-proof-bachmann-story-132647843.html

Seriously, if she wanted to adopt a left wing cause, why not one like health care reform or ending war? Why the nutty one? Because she needs to adopt as many causes that represent stupidity and death?

Excepting Jon Huntsman, all the Republican candidates seem to be anti-evolution and anti-climate science. Now Michele “Pray the Gay Away” Bachmann has upped the ante and gone anti-vaccination. This woman has a very real possibility of being the next president of the United States. Anybody with half a mind or more should be quaking in their boots. If elected, she could push this agenda through with help of the crazy Tea Party douchebags being elected by nutjobs like the ones who shouted during Ron Paul’s debate.

Kill the poor! Kill the poor! Kill the poor!

Honestly, John McCain is starting to look pretty fucking good right now. I’d take Nixon back over these people.

A president like these people could turn the United States into a laughing stock (more than it already is), but not a very funny one. These are people that if given their way would turn the United States into a backwards Theocracy (like Iran), but it would be a backwards Theocracy with the world’s most powerful military and largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. 

Think about that. This is not a game. Putting these people in to positions of authority (like they already are) has real consequences and affects real lives. Are we so in love with the dark ages that we want to recreate them?

Once again our choices seem to be between scary shit like this and Barack “Give the Republicans What They Want And Call It Compromise” Obama. The world may not end in 2012, but I’ve got a bad feeling about 2013.

Skepticon IV

I recently registered for Skepticon IV. I’m not going in an official capacity, FYI, just attending. It would be great to be a speaker, but that would require a certain percentage of the community actually knowing who the fuck I am first.

I love the fact that it’s occurring in Springfield Missouri, right smack in the heart of Jesus Central. It’s also nice that it’s within easy driving distance from here.

I’ve never attended any Atheist/Skeptical conventions before. In fact, the only large scale convention I’ve ever attended was DevConnections four years ago. Luckily, this one is a lot more affordable than DevCon (free vs. $3k or so). It runs November 19th and 20th. I was hoping to make it on Friday the 18th, because PZ Meyers is planning on taking a group down to the Creation Museum just for fun. Going to the Creation Museum with PZ Meyers and posting some photos of the ensuing insanity here sounds like more fun than I’ve had in years, but it looks unlikely I’ll make it on Friday at the moment.*sigh*

I recommend going if you can make it. It looks like it will be a load of fun. I’ve made several Atheist/Skeptic friends in recent months through local meetup groups, and many of them are going. I’ve personally met Darrel Ray, author of The God Virus, and he’ll be speaking there this year.

Here’s a list of this year’s speakers: http://skepticon.org/speakers.php.  The list grows year by year, and it’s exciting to see something like this catching on.

If you go, I hope to see you there. Be sure to comment on this post and maybe we can meet up while we’re there. If you need someone to room with, I’m not your guy. Already got plans ;)

Screwy Logic

I just ran across this article from beliefnet on the “insanity” of Mayor Bloomberg and his decision to not have a prayer at the 9/11 memorial service.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/news/2011/09/no-thanks-to-god-or-first-responders-at-mayors-secular-911-ceremonies.php

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants Sunday’s 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks to focus on the victims and their families — not on God or the heroes who rushed into the burning towers to save as many as they could.

Let’s forget that there are more than just Christians in the United States. Let’s forget that the first amendment of the constitution establishes a separation of church and state making it inappropriate for an elected official to engage in a religious activity as part of his duties as an elected official. Let’s forget Congress’s blatant refusal to help the “heroes who rushed into the burning towers” when they needed our help, not our thanks.

The statement here is we should be thankful to God. For what? For helping the heroes of 9/11 save over 20,000 lives? So I should be so condescending and arrogant as to say that they could not have done that themselves, that they required intervention from a supernatural deity to accomplish what they did? No. I will not do that. They were heroes, they put their own lives at risk. They ran into the buildings everyone else was running out of. And many of them were still there when the buildings collapsed. Many did not come back. I will not dishonor them that way.

So what else should we thank God for in regards to 9/11? The 3,000 victims? Surely not. The author, despite his irrational convictions about the supernatural, could not possibly be that insane.

Perhaps what he is trying to say is that God was present and helping out on 9/11. Nobody saw him, of course, but why not. 

So,  why  didn’t  God  stop  the  planes?

Perhaps the almighty supernatural creator of everything helped save lives that day. Why did he allow 3,000 others to die? Why did he not prevent the disaster in the first place? Surely that would have been trivial for him. The firefighters and rescue personnel on the ground could not have stopped the planes from hitting the building so they did everything else they could to save as many lives as they could. But God could have stopped the planes, couldn’t he?

So what answers might a theist give in response to this?

1) God works in mysterious ways/We cannot know God’s purpose/etc.

I hate this one. It’s probably the most common response of all, too. It’s a cop out. It’s a way of saying (and rationalizing) “Something bad happened and God did not stop it, so he must have had some greater purpose in mind that I just don’t understand.” Replace “God” with “Zeus” and the sentence means just as much. Muslims worship the same God, the God of Abraham, and on that day certain Muslims were rejoicing because God had struck a blow against the evil west.

2) God allowed it to happen to bring people back to God. There was a resurgence of religion in the intervening years.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Replace God with a man’s name and see if the sentence still sounds great. “George allowed 3,000 people to die in flames and horrible crushing death so that people all over the world would worship him and proclaim his glory.”  George sounds like a sick bastard to me. A god that allows thousands of people to die a horrible death so that I might love him? Pass.

3) God works subtly. He could not work overtly because we must have faith.

The “God can’t tip his hand” argument. If he stopped the planes in midair and placed them gently on the ground, we would have definitive proof that he exists, and we are required to love God without proof. This one never made sense to me. If it has to be my decision to “love God” of my own free will, what does that have to do with being given proof that he exists? I have no more proof that Yahweh exists than I do of Zeus. Who do I pick? Do I convert to all religions just to be safe? They all have equal validity.

This is the kind of warped logic we use to attack each other politically these days. We are in grave danger of becoming a Theocracy. Every day we behave more and more like the Christians of the 14th century, or like the Muslims of today. 9/11 was not about God except to the Muslim terrorists. Whether you believe in a God or not, he wasn’t there that day.

9/11/2011

Ten years ago today the unthinkable happened. The TV has been filled with footage from 9/11 today, much of it I’ve never seen before. It’s a wound in the collective psyche of America that’s healing, but not yet healed.

9/11 meant different things to different people, but most of us can agree that it was a wake up call to the capacity for evil.

But whose evil? It’s easy to point to 9/11 and say that Muslims are violent and Islam is an evil religion, but in actuality Islam is in a state now that Christianity was in only a few centuries ago. The difference being that the violence perpetrated by the followers of Islam have 21st century weaponry.

I won’t pretend that the world would be a perfect place without religion, but it would be a better place. 9/11 was proof positive of the evil that can be perpetrated by those that can manipulate through religion. The most obvious examples come from Islamic terrorists, but we are not all immune to this. Listening to Pat Robertson can easily show you that we’re not that different on this side of the pond. A leader of the free world like Michele Bachmann would make us little different from Iran.

For me, 9/11 was a wake up call to the evil that can be perpetrated in the name of religion. I’m not naïve enough to believe that it’s just Islam though. We are mere footsteps from being the mirror image of the Middle East.

We must step back from the brink. We must not become evil to fight evil. We must be clear on what evil we fight. We must remember who we are as Americans. We must remember what America is about. It’s not God, it’s not Guns, It’s freedom. We are not a Christian nation, we are a nation of the free. We must stop sacrificing our freedom to our fear. We must call for our freedoms to be restored.

Ten years later, we must begin to heal. We must become what we were. We must stop the pointless bickering. We must stop allowing the clowns in Washington to play us like fools.

Each and every one of us must decide who we are. We must determine this absent of propaganda and religion. Once you have decided who you are, you can decide if you really agree with what is being fed to you. When I did this, I didn’t. Who I am is so different from who I was before 9/11, but I’m a better person. I’m finally true to who I am.

You can be too.