AIN'T NO gOD

Now, if we only get tough with America's religious right which openly advocates putting their faiths into public schools and who routinely put their religious tomes above the Constitution of the United States.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Labels: France, Islam, religion and government, secular government

I SENT THIS TO SENATOR MCCAIN

Labels: health insurance, McCain, partisanship

I'm so far to the left that people in the middle might call me a Socialist, or worse, a Communist, but I believe in free markets and small businesspeople as the best way to distribute wealth (even though they're the ones who'd probably call me a Socialist). Somewhere in the real middle of all this current economic chaos is a position which realizes that government is necessary and useful to provide certain social benefits that the private market is not suited to provide and that, yes, it may take higher taxes for all (who can afford them) in order to build the sort of safety net that makes being on the bottom less onerous. Of course we need to guard the door very carefully through which we decide to send those in need of aid so that the undeserving don't make it through, but we need to be fair... some people just can't compete in today's markets for one of many reasons. Should we let them and their children starve? Also, we ought to admit that religious charity isn't the best way to handle poverty because the religious just can't help making their charities opportunities to preach. Thus the vulnerable become the most susceptible to religious indoctrination.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Well, here's another list that, as usual (if it's unfavorable traits the Southland tops it and if it's a list of favorable traits the Southland comes in toward the bottom) proves it's better to live anywhere but in the American South.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

WHEN THE AMERICAN DREAM FAILS

How will we know if the American Dream has failed? I can think of two sure signs:

1) If there were only one religion and 2) if there were no atheists.

Labels: American Dream, atheism, religion

GLOOM AND DOOM...

Labels: Boomed Out, injury

THE REPUBLICAN HATE FRONT

Republicans love to claim that we all hate Palin, but what about the hateful things Republicans like Lynn Vincent and Sarah Palin say about other Americans? Lynn Vincent, Sarah's ghost writer, is notoriously anti-gay and wants to deny them the CIVIL right of marriage even though the Constitution says nothing about gays. Only in the Bible are gays so defamed, and the Bible is not the basis of American law, the Constitution is. If these Bible Bibbers would only put the Constitution ahead of their religious books, then America could get on with being a nation of laws rather than a medieval cesspool on the verge of another Inquisition. Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Labels: Bible Bib, Chrisitianity, Palin

ANSWER THE CHARGE OF HATRED OF GOD

In response to the following statement "(1) God doesn't exist, and (2 they hate him" which appeared on the Columbian newspaper website from a man attacking "liberals",
I entered the following response:

Let me assure you, I don't hate god. I have absolutely no feeling whatsoever about the tremendously generalized idea about a superbeing that created this universe. I care about as much about this hypothetical superbeing as I do about Martians in space ships visiting the Earth or the idea of Santa Claus which I used to put a great deal of stock in. I was tremendously disturbed when I heard that Santa didn't exist, but I got over it.

The idea of god is a scientific hypothesis about how and why the universe appears as it does to the human consciousness. Currently, the god hypothesis has no evidence whatsoever for its validity. One proof, of course, would be to find and photograph the angels waving their swords at the entrance to the Garden of Eden to keep us humans from getting at the Tree of Eternal Life. They were put there to be seen and should still be there. I can't find anywhere in the Bible that they were relieved of duty so where are they?

Currently all the evidence available to us supports the idea that the beginning of the universe came about 15 billion years ago in a tremendous and unexplained explosion which is evidenced to our ears in TV static and to our eyes through the Hubble telescope and our being able to tell by light shift that the Cosmos is expanding at an ever increasing speed out in all directions. As far as we can measure and think, the material universe itself is as infinite and eternal as any possible spiritual entity, if and when we can ever, through our material senses, record this supposed "spiritual" realm that some have great hope in to reward them for obedience and to torture everyone else who doesn't agree with them... like me, for example. As far as I know about who hates who, my wishes for Christians aren't half so hateful as to include a place where they'll be eternal tortured for not agreeing with me.


AS TO A LOCAL PRAYER BREAKFAST (the Xtian tool for corrupting our Constitutional guaranteed secular governance),

I replied:

My wife suffered the unintended oppression of working for an organization in another city in which some members networked every day at lunch on the job with the boss to pray together. Quite naturally when people meet together on a regular basis, drawn together by a common purpose, they tend to grow closer together than those who don't share their common purpose and don't meet with them. "In" people tend to trust "in" people more than the "out" people in any organization. This is a well-documented phenomena in group dynamics. It's also the problem that all minorities of any kind deal with daily in any culture. That's why our Constitution is specially designed to protect minorities from the oppression of the majority. It's why "separation of church and state" was implemented in our Constitution. Our founding fathers knew what it meant to be oppressed by religious majorities.

To return to my wife's case. Turns out that every time an opening occurred in the management network of the place where my wife worked, people who networked together in prayer (several also attended the same church) were selected more often to fill the openings. Not only that, certain of the males who networked together in prayer, openly espoused the Christian idea that women's work was in the home. One of those men eventually came into authority over my wife, and when she was asked to do some (what seemed to her) questionable things, she respectfully disagreed with the Christian in charge and suggested other ways to handle the situation at hand. Her manager (like so many Christian males) was not able to handle being disagreed with by a woman who ought to be at home (and who did not pray as he prayed) and soon he fired her for insubordination. I should mention that all my wife's suggestions were offered within the framework of staff meetings where such matters are supposed to be offered up and discussed. This Christian male was way out of line. 

My wife is a quiet, conscientious sort of employee. It's not her usual way to create disturbances where she works. When she recently received her Masters in Public Administration and was honored at an awards ceremony for their top students, her supervising professor said, "M______, no matter what, she's always the consummate professional."

My wife could have, of course, pursued this injustice as a sex discrimination case, but, as I said, my wife's a quiet sort who doesn't seek trouble and we didn't really have the resources to embark on such a course of action. However, she was so much in the right that the president of that little incestuously Christian office, after a sweaty and nervous apology to my spouse, wrote a glowing letter of recommendation for her. It was so glowing that one wonders why she was fired? Get the idea?

My point is that no matter how unintended, when people join together in groups (prayer or otherwise), they are building networks which favor the in people and exclude the out people. It doesn't help that I know for certain that many of the people in attendance at these little pools of incipient prejudice are there only to protect their prestige and standing with others who might benefit them in business. Sad that freedom of belief is so suppressed in our culture that average businessmen must pretend to a strong belief that they don't necessarily have in order to further their business interests. Very few people in America are courageous enough to buck the prejudices of the majority Christians until after they've retired and are free to think differently than the majority. It's an age old tale.

If I found a businessman whose services or products I needed who was courageous enough to buck the Christian power elite of Vancouver, I'd do business with him/her in heartbeat. I'd know he had integrity for sure, whereas all those in attendance at these well-publicized networking opportunities for the majority Christian power structure are highly suspect in my eyes.

Labels: Big Bang, Chrisitianity, Cosmos, national prayer breakfast, prayer breakfast, secular government, Universe

AN ADAPTATION CALLED MORALITY

The following is a commentary I entered into the debates that go on all the time on the Columbian website in Vancouver, Washington:

Ray M.... Since it's now tomorrow, I don't know if you'll read this.

You mention a couple of excellent rules for behavior within a culture and, then, credit them to the Bible. Actually, those ideas are inherent within the human animal as we evolved through time. You will find those rules within all cultures and religions, past and present, with slight modifications. I'm an atheist, and I don't need a hypothetical superbeing to tell me that I ought to feel bad if someone steals something of value from me. My feelings inform me pretty well as to how nasty stealing feels, so of course I want laws to protect me from thieves. Bible people just wrote down what people were feeling at the time about the thieves among them and the adulterers, et cetera. Now, of course, we've learned that adulterers are always among us and that, often, those most vociferous about the evils of adultery are the ones practicing it on the sly.

Some will now say, "But what about people whose feelings don't agree with yours?" There are such people as that. They're called sociopaths, and they threaten cultural norms, but most people have evolved the same feeling structure as their neighbors and, thus, agree as to common rules for good social harmony. Less threatening and more helpful are those people who aren't comfortable within whatever culture they're born into. They are always demanding that we reevaluate our cultural priorities. If we didn't change and adapt, of course we'd die out as a species, so those people are healthy in a society. People like the latter brought us democracy. Though I'm an atheist, I recognize that Martin Luther brought needed reform to the Catholic Church, and Protestantism soon followed. Hopefully, Richard Dawkins will help end Protestantism and usher in Humanism as an ethical basis for cultural cohesion.

People interested in the subject of how morality is an adapted trait might like to read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

Labels: bible, Dawkins, morality, religion, sociopath

THE TWO OF US IN PORTLAND'S
JAPANESE GARDENS

This is for Kerly to see the two of us lovebirds: George and Mertie in Vancouver, WA.

The photo is by a friend called Carl who I once upon a time taught English to at Vandalia-Butler
High School. We then became hippy friends after my first divorce and shared a walkup flat with others of like mind. We often drove up to Yellow Springs to watch foreign films at the Little Art Theater.

Labels: Carl Tropea, Mertie and I, PDX Japanese Gardens