Is it all right to do nothing with you life?

Simple question.  What harm would come if you simply woke up in the morning and went to work then came home at night and enjoyed yourself?  Working, of course, is an essential aspect of living.  If you want to have a place to come home to that is your own, where you can be alone, then you have to work to make the money necessary to sustain you own life.  You may not want to, you may find ways of getting around working.  But experience has taught me that living off other people in some way, shape or form is always more complicated than simply working. I call this the 168/40 ratio.  There are 168 hours in a week.  If you work 40 of those hours, then you are left with 128 hours to do with as you please.  It isn't a bad deal, when you think of it in those terms.  In order to make this 168/40 ratio work, you need to get your self-esteem needs met in the 128 hours you have to yourself.  If your self-esteem is tied to your work then you eventually end up giving up your free time in order to bolster you self-esteem.  The 40 hours alloted to work can easily expand until your entire waking life is spent either at work or thinking about work or taking classes to make your work more rewarding financially and satisfying emotionally.  This ends up in a situation where you are just a working man, 24/7, and the only time for yourself is when you are sleeping.  Many people find this sort of life acceptible.  And that's fine for those poeple.  They will reap the benefits of their hard work and advance in the corporate ladder, achiece success, make more money or however you wish to think about it.

What if making money is not your primary goal?  Everyone wants more money, sure.  Some people trade off large portions of their me time in an effort to get more money.  Second jobs, after hours training etc.  Other people buy a lottery ticket.  Each pathway to getting more money has its pluses and minuses.  Each path is not a certain sure method of achieving your goal:  more money.  Education is a gamble just as surely is the lottery.  You gamble that the money invested in your education will eventually pay off.  You fund your advanced education through student loans.  Student loans come due whether the education purchased by them results in more money or not.  You can, and many do, end up in a situation where you attempt at further education ends up fruitless and you are stuck with paying off loans that you cannot bankrupt on with high interest rates.  At this point you are likely to ask yourself if you would have been better off by investing the money in buying lottery tickets.  The advantage of the lottery ticket strategy is you either win, in which case you enjoy the benefits of more money with an extremely lower investment in time or money, or you lose.  But you only lose the money you have already invested in buying the lottery tickets, no more.  In short, if the further education strategy doesn't pay off, then you end up with a mountain of debt that will haunt you for years but if the lottery ticket strategy doesn't pay off you only lose the money you have put into the purchasing of tickets.

To get back to the question as first asked:  What if making money is not your primary goal?

We are so focused on making money as the only goal available in our capitalistic society that the idea of other goals is difficult to concieve.  What would a goal that did not end with you having more money look like?  How would it function?  Is it even possible?

What if you goal was just to be happy?  What if, at the end of the day, all you wanted was to be able to sit back, watch a movie or a football game, and go to sleep at a decent hour without any worries or anxiety hanging over your head and interfering with your sleep?  

What if your goal was to have another person in your life with which you could share your happiness and derive even greater happiness from their presence in your life?  

What if you were content to have a roof over your head, food on the table and a few extras such as TV and the Internet?  What if, instead of wanting more, you decided to settle for less?

Less is always easier to get than more.  As a point of fact, most people have more already and getting less would involve less stress, less work.  Not just 'cutting back' in order to balance your budget, but actually changing your focus from wanting more to needing less?

Capitalism teaches us to look up.  To see the people who are higher than us on the pyramid.  To envy these people, to covet what they have that we don't, and to work harder to raise ourselves from one rung of the ladder to the next.

What if you stopped looking up...stopped seeing your status as so many rungs of the ladder to the top of the pyramid...and started looking down?  What if you began to think of your status as how far you are from the bottom instead of how close you are to the top?  

What if you started thinking of your possessions as how much more you had than the people at the bottom of the pyramid?  What if you began to focus on how rich you are in comparison to the rest of the world?  

What if you began to think in terms of how much  you had instead of how much you needed?  

What if you began climbing down the ladder instead of climbing up?

What if you began to believe...or to remember...that greed is wrong?  That selfishness is a vice, not a virtue?  

What if you began to see the children who are starving to death in the world the same way you look at your own children who are whining about not having the latest version of a video game or smart phone?  

What if you opened your eyes and saw the world the way it really is?

It's a simple declaration but a radical commitment.

What if you determined in your own heart and mind...

That no one should get dessert...

Until all the children have been fed?

Is it all right to do nothing with your life?

Yes, it is perfectly all right for you to seek you own happiness.

Is it all right for you to have luxuries while children die?

No.

It isn't right.

And there is no philosophy, no religion, no politics that can change this wrong into a right.

Should you despair of being able to do anything to change this situation?

No.

Despair is the refuge of cowards.

Reduce what you see as essential.  Reduce your diet to that which is optimal for your age.  Get rid of your car.

Let your own conscience determine what you need to get rid of and what you can keep.

Don't make excuses.

Allow yourself to be happy.

Sell off, give away, drop out.

Get involved.  See the faces.

Humble yourself.

Insolent

Insolent I mount the stage to strut my speech and rhyme
Impotent I feel my age rebut me line by line
Only sorrow

Don’t Talk To Christians

Having a conversation, either on line or face to face, with a Christian is something all of us have endured.  Just out of curiosity, can anybody point to an incident where they accomplished anything by doing so?  I know I can’t, but maybe some of you have a higher tolerance for fools than me.

So why talk to them?

Perhaps you are afraid that by not responding you concede the argument and they win by default.  This appears to have merit until you examine the idea closer.  The premise is you can win an argument with a Christian.  There are several reasons this is impossible.

There’s the difference between intelligence and ignorance.  Christians want to couch the argument in terms of Faith Versus Reason since it implies there is an equality and similarity between the two.  As my brother (a Christian minister) put it, “Faith is another way of looking at the evidence.”  Say what?  There is a fundamental difference between faith and reason best illustrated by the Two Switches analogy.

Faith is an on/off switch.  Either you have it or you don’t.

Reason is a dimmer switch with absolute the darkness of ignorance on one end of the spectrum and the full light of knowledge on the other.

Christian faith permits no compromise, no concession even on the smallest of points.  It is all or nothing.  Reason is all about compromise, concession, revision, rethinking, admitting when you are wrong and adapting your beliefs to new evidence.  In conversation a reasonable man believes that he can educate his opponent and, with the right arguments framed in the right manner, the other party will be convinced.  When a reasonable man loses an argument he is justifiable humbled and begins the long process of rethinking his ideas in the light of the new information or ideas he hasn’t taken into account.

A Christian cannot do this.  He is not motivated by a desire to learn the truth.  He is motivated by fear.  The fear of going to Hell, of course, but more importantly the fear of losing his status in the tightknit community to which he belongs.

A reasonable man begins with no idea where rationality will take him.  A Christian begins with the conclusion then works backwards to find ways of justifying his presumptions. 

This latest batch of Christians is particular frustrating and deliberately obtuse.  They want to prove that God exists.  They don’t get it that by searching for scientific or logical proof of the existence of God they prove nothing except they have lost their faith. 

Let me say that again:

Any Christian who seeks to prove the existence of God has already admitted that the evidence for the non-existence of God is so strong that their faith has been brought to ruin. 

More importantly, they acknowledge that anyone exposed to the evidence will lose their faith as a result.  So they run around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to find logical and scientific evidence to replace their own faithlessness.

A long time ago, so long I can’t remember when I first encountered the idea; I learned something about automobile advertising.  Automobile advertising is not directed at convincing people to buy a particular brand of car; rather the ads are designed to assure people who have already bought the car they made the right choice.  Brand loyalty it’s called.

Christians believe first then justify later.  The trolls on this site aren’t here to convince anyone of the truth of their arguments; they are here to convince honest seekers, a group to which they most certainly do not belong, that they have evidence for the belief in God.  They aren’t here to join in an open conversation.  They are here to throw as much bullshit they can against the wall in the hopes that some of it will stick.  They are here to inoculate people against the truth by giving them the smallest dosage possible so they will not seek any further. 

They are here to close open minds.

They feed on ignorance.  The only way they can make their billions and to exert an un-Godly political influence over the minds of free men is to keep people ignorant.  Never mind their alleged founder was offered by their mythological Satan the Kingdoms of This World and he refused the deal.  They believe that Jesus made the wrong choice and that he’s coming back to take Satan up on the offer.

They are worse than Islamic suicide bombers.  Their own scripture condemns them.  To paraphrase:  “Don’t be afraid of men, who can only kill your body, fear those who can kill your mind.”

It’s 3 am.  I stopped working on this post about 10 hours ago.  I just finished watching a movie called Season of the Witch with Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman, actors whose work I have enjoyed in the past.  There’s one more reason we shouldn’t talk to Christians.

They are the enemy.

In this movie Cage and Perlman play deserter Crusaders because they have lost their faith.  They are caught and perform one last duty:  transporting a young girl accused of being a witch and causing the plague.  According to this piece of shit, the Inquisition was right, there really were witches! And, guess what, these witches actually did cause the Plague!

Turns out the girl isn’t just a witch she’s Satan!

Don’t worry, Cage and Perlman rediscover their faith and do battle against the witch/Satan in order to end the plague. 

There is a moment in that battle when she…Satan always uses the weaker sex who fall prey to his wiles…makes a clear statement to the priest who is reading a text in  Latin from a Sacred Book…says to him:

“But isn’t it true that the church has killed more people than any war?”

And the priest pauses and starts to think about it.

And the others yell:  “Don’t listen to her!”

And the priest goes back to jabbering incomprehensible words in Latin.

That this movie could be made at this time and openly shown in theaters portraying atheists in such a manner then maybe don’t you think it’s time to admit that this is a war and these people are our enemies.

It’s like the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish resistance inviting the Nazis over for a debate.

The time for debate is over.

Unfortunately, the war is over, too.

We lost.

the poor are breeding stock

the poor are breeding stock

the poor are breeding stock

the welfare and food stamps

the rich dole out to these sows and studs

serves as the paddock’s lock

and the lure to lead them up the ramp

so the ones with promise

            can be separated from the duds

each season they trim their herd

this one has a beauty

            worth cultivating

this one is tall and quick enough

            to play pro ball

here is a voice to make them even richer

            if they decide to let it be heard

a few with minds worth exploiting

            but these are the dangerous ones

                        so their numbers are kept small

then there are those fit to be nothing but cannon fodder

just smart enough to learn to take orders

but not so smart to question why the US borders

circle the world, an empire far, far larger

than just our fifty states

most of them are left behind

turned loose in the wild, wild streets

they live a life of horror

they cluster together in gangs

and churches to survive

but the cruelest cut of all’s

how the rich split the poor in half

the whites fearing colors,

the colors hating whites

the deliberate installation

of the very thing

they say they hate

until we, the poor of this country

the livestock rejected at the gate

the left behind

the true poor

the poverty that goes on for generations

and the only thing we have to leave our children

when it’s their turn to step up to the plate

and so we’ll stay this way

until we learn that white’s a color, too

and skin don’t make the man

admit we have a common foe

for the enemy of my enemy

is my friend