We Are the Insurgency

Awhile back I came across a question in another blog:

"Can we overcome and find a way to remain relevant in the political arena without compromising our minds and conforming to the “majority rules” mentality?"

First, this is not an option.  If we don't do this, we don't survive.  It's that simple.

Ever see the Kevin Costner movie "The Postman"?  Probably not, it's on everyone's hate list.  Pacifist movies never fare well at the box office in a warrior society.  The storyline is simple enough, an actor surviving by his wits in a post-apocalyptic world and finds a bag of mail and uses it to get a free ride by delivering it to the local people in the survivalist communities.  The moral is simple:  society is held together by the personal relationships between people, not by the force of arms imposed by tyrants.

The whole thing gets out of hand and the con man finds himself running a real postal service in the communities of the northwestern states.  Real pony express with young people doing the riding through territories controlled by a copier salesman turned dictatorial madmen using the teachings of a cheesy and creepy how to succeed in business book from the old days.

An old Vietnam vet attaches himself to this Recreated US Postal Service and the whole fantasy that back in the eastern states the country is being reformed. He knows it's bullshit, but he knows it takes a lot of bullshit to make things grow.  The con man is hesitant to take him on wondering what he can offer the operation.  He rattles down the list of things he can do any man can boast who's lived life on the streets and in the shelters so long that when the rest of the world gets knocked down to his level he's waiting there to show them the ropes.

Then he adds, referring to his military unit, "And other stuff."

Comes a moment when the con man's children that he set off on a lie and a promise start getting killed by the copier salesman and his army.

He hears about it and immediately goes to the old Vet and says:

"Tell me about the other stuff."

The movie, as I said, is pacifist and the 'other stuff' only escalates the situation.

I'm not advocating violence.  I am suggesting that we are facing the greatest threat to the union since the Civil War and that one very real possibility is the splitting of the Union along theocratic lines.  This would drastically reduce the power of both the Renewed Confederate States of America and the Disunited States of American on the world front and be the end of Empire Amerika.

I am saying these people have been stockpiling weapons for years and have pledged themselves to take up arms against the duly elected government of the US if the representatives of the people pass a law requiring all weapons to be confiscated for the public safety.  Taking up arms against the US government is the bottom line of Tea Party Theocracy.  There's a word for people who take up arms against the government and it isn't patriot.  It's traitor.

Two years as a Marxist Socialist during the Sixties.  Got an A in a graduate level course at West Virginia University even though I was an undergraduate at the time.  The class was supposedly in existential writers but the first day he said:  "We will not be studying existential writers, that's just what I tell the dean so I can use the room.  We will be studying the work of Karl Marx.  If this is not what you want, I'll sign your withdrawal slips."  We had Black Panthers as guest speakers to teach us street tactics.  Our final was on the same day the National Guard killed four students in Kent Ohio and colleges across the country went on strike in protest to these home invasion murders.  I was sitting in the room waiting for the professor to arrive and give us the test.  He came bustling in ten minutes late look around at all of us good little students and said, "What the hell are you doing here?  Your final is in the street, go out and earn your grade where it counts."

I've been a lot of places and done a lot of things.  One way or another, I've spent most of my life on the fringes of society.  You learn a lot that way.

One thing I know is nothing changes until people get angry and stay angry.

I learned from Fiddlin' Sid Harkreader on a gig at a local high school hoe-down/dance back in the Sixties in Nashville, Tennessee.  Fiddlin' Sid was a fiddler on the Grand Ole Opry back when it first started out.  He could play 'Whispering Hope' on that fiddle and each pure sweet note was laced with the sharpness of an onion drawing unbidden tears from your eyes.  Between sets he hung out backstage with us booted and jeaned young fools pontificating on what he has learned in life just as I am doing now and Sid said to us:

"I'll tell you all you need to know about the music business:" long pause. so long we started looking to see if he was still breathing, then he finished, "if you're gonna give up, then you might as well quit."

In order to fight a fanatic you have to be just as committed as they are.  Not just as fanatical, but sometimes it will seem that way to others...how often have you heard some asshole say "These radical atheist are just as bad as the fundamentalists."

As if there were some middle ground between sanity and madness and, if such a place were found, we could all sit down over a cup of tea and discuss it like professors and artistes and the intelligentsia.  That naive attitude has lost this country to the forces of ignorance and violence.

We need more than intellectual assent to the ideal of free thought.  We need people who are willing to leave behind their own lives, their comforts, their fortune, and their reputation and fight for the light against the encroaching darkness.

We need riots, not rhethoric.  Protests, not prose.  Action, not reaction.

We need people who will take it to the streets.

The other comment I'd like to add is to the statement about:

"...compromising our minds and conforming to the “majority rules” mentality?"

I do hope you are speaking metaphorically of our minds in the social milieu.  Of course, there is a difference between an experienced, what at one time we would have called "sophisticated", educated and skeptical mind and the common rabble.  Alas, we intellectuals are hoisted on our own petard.  All of our brilliant, insightful and impressive (at least to our fellow sophisticates) ideas and manifestos are useless without the sheer bulk of the lower classes to bring them to fruition in the real world. Marx was a brilliant man for his time but his time was the dying of the "single-person-changing-history" era.  Like Darwin he is a dinosaur.  As is Einstein.  It's a toss up whether he or Freud should be looked at as the last of the breed, but whoever the last man was he forgot to turn the lights out when he left.

As far as sneering at the 'majority rules mentality' that is the one thing we must preserve at all cost if we are to avoid tyranny.  It is axiomatic of a democracy that the state exists at the consent of the governed...all of the governed, one man/one vote...and the only way to discover what the people want is through voting.  Hitler, Lenin, Castro, Stalin, Bush, Rand (Ayn or Paul), Palin all failed or will fail not because they endorse the wrong system...Socialism, Nazism, Libertarianism...but because they did or would take the vote from the common man and give power over to those who think they know better than the people do about what is best for them.

The war in this country that has been going on for the last century, the war I've been fighting for over thirty years now, the war that atheists are just now beginning to discuss and form committees and write books about...

...is a war we have already lost.

Make no mistake.  Atheists haven't a chance in hell of getting political influence in this country.  Any politician who would dare touch us with a ten-foot pole would be committing political suicide.  They know it, we know it.  Our politicians are all cowards as is the media...the vaunted Free Press...of this country.

We are the outcasts, the antichrists, the sacrificial class, the enemy, the monster that all men loathe and all women tremble before, we are the Walking Dead, we are the resistance.

We are the insurgency.

God Is the Fear of the Dark

God is the fear of the dark; a paralyzing terror that keeps us hiding in bed beneath the covers too afraid to get up and turn on the light and find out what really made that bumping sound.  You mutter prayers and incantations and, after a while, the darkness becomes familiar and comfortable. 

It is not easy to stay asleep when the light is on.  Once you investigate and discover what made that bumping sound, and there’s always a rational explanation and a material agency with the light on, you can return to bed, turn off the light and sleep soundly and unafraid in the dark with no need of God to hold your hand while you cower beneath the covers.

People who are afraid of things that go bump in the night are called children.

People who turn on the light to see what made the noise are called adults.

Skeptic has become a bad word.  It is used to characterize people as ignorant of the world around them and unwilling to accept anecdotal evidence in their alleged insistence to force the world into a materialistic box.  There was a time when this was not so, a time not so long ago.  There was a time when the opposite of the word skeptic was not open-mindedness to new and faith based belief. 

There was a time when the opposite of the word skeptical was gullible.  Gullibility is the eagerness to believe that pushes aside contradictory evidence in favor of unsubstantiated rumor and, in the case of religion, raises the ability to believe in spite of no evidence at all to a level of virtue higher than that awarded to a person who insists on knowing the truth.  Faith in a demonstrable falsehood is, in the mind of the religious, far better than knowledge.  To the faithful, knowledge has become the enemy.  Knowledge, the search for truth in increments, is shallow comfort to a person used to receiving his information about the world in one lump, and in one book, through revelation from a non-existent being.

The opposite of knowledge is not faith.  The opposite of knowledge is ignorance.

Gaining knowledge is hard work.  It requires reading, not just one, but many books.  It requires education, paying attention in school and doing your homework.  It requires at least an undergraduate degree just to introduce you to the subject and graduate level work if you want to participate in the conversation rather than listen in.  When you are an adult, it requires even more reading done on your own time stolen from obligations to family, work and the community in order stay conversant with the newest literature on a subject.

Ignorance is easier and frees up so much of your spare time for the various entertainments, religion being the foremost, offered by our distraction obsessed culture.  The knowledge is available through the public library system or, if you have the money, Amazon.com.  The only reason for any person to remain ignorant is laziness.

The problem comes when the lazy and ignorant person is confronted with a person who has done the hard work and, therefore, knows more than the ignorant person does.  The ignorant person could, and should, realize his opinion is ill-founded and start doing the hard work necessary so he may gain enough knowledge so he may join in the conversation.  That this does happen shows it is possible; that it happens rarely shows the bond between laziness and ignorance is hard to overcome.

The problem is a matter of pride.  In order to gain knowledge, the first thing that has to go is the idea that your opinion is as good as anyone else’s.  It isn’t.  Admitting there are people who know more than you do on a subject and seeking these people out and learning from them is not only hard work but it is an act of humility.

Alas, ignorance is its own advocate.  When confronted with knowledge that is not to their liking, the last thing the ignorant/lazy want to do is go back to school and learn even more knowledge that will be even more upsetting to their narrow view of the world.  The next to the last thing the ignorant/lazy want to do is admit their opinion isn’t equal or superior to the opinion of the person with knowledge.

The poor, the uneducated, the ignorant and the lazy are drawn to religion because they find a way of salvaging their pride and, more importantly, demonize both knowledge and the educated as the work of Satan.  Each argument is to be treated as a satanic attack on their faith that must be resisted on threat of eternal punishment in Hell.  The person who knows more than do becomes an agent of the Antichrist.  They go from being lazy and ignorant to being morally superior to those people who have worked hard to gain knowledge. 

Religion is the triumph of ignorance over knowledge.

Their God is hiding behind a curtain pulling levers and pushing buttons and hoping nobody will rip the curtain aside and expose him as the fraud he is.

Their God is no longer the fear of the dark children have then leave behind when they grow up.

Their God is the fear of the Light.

Christian Morality and Education

Things happen along the way and whether you are a victim or a predator depends entirely on the moment in life you are at.  We all are good and evil, sure.  We all are capable of being good and evil.  I mean, it just isn’t fair.  It’s good and EVIL shoudn’t it be good and “bad”?  I think jumping straight from good to EVIL  right off the bat like that goes right over some very important gradations.  What ever happened to nice?  It’s become a taboo word in our society.  Nice is like calling someone a zombie.  Someone to be pitied ignored.  A clue word for fat on a blind date.  Would it hurt to throw in a couple of grades between A and F for Christ’s sake?  I’m not trying to clue you in on your own creation, High and Allrighty, but most of us are C students with an increasingly large percentage dropping out each month.  And if you are so omniscient how come you’ve never figured out how to grade on a curve, man?  This pass/fail shit is killing us. 

The only way they can sell Jesus anymore is to tell people that if you believe in him, him being the Big Enchilada’s Son and all, he can slip you out a copy of the answers for the final exam and you’ll sneak past and into heaven and still get to do all that bad stuff you did down here.  Talk about the best possible worlds.  Pascal wins big time.

Here’s the deal.  Religion has nothing to do with morality.

Religion is how to cheat.

Look at it this way.

Penalty for lusting after a woman in your heart?

Eternal damnation.

Penalty for carrying out the act and nailing her? 

Eternal damnation.

So where is the impetus to keep someone who already sees himself as damned from doing whatever they want to as a result?  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t so damn it just go ahead and do it.

Here’s the truth about Christian Morality:

Christian morality is based on lack of opportunity.  They don’t do things they never had the opportunity to do in the first place and pride themselves on their morality.  What to know what they are really like under the hypocritical surface?  Tell one of them you’re an atheist.

Tell a Christian you’re an atheist and the very first thing out of his mouth will be what he wants to do in his heart.

“You’re an atheist?  Then why don’t you just _______?”

Rape, murder, steal…whatever the Christian puts in the blank is what he wants to do in his heart and only his fear of Hell keeps him from the act itself.

The saddest response I ever got was when I told my doctor I was an atheist and she replied:

“If you’re an atheist, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

It’s sad, because one day she is going to die and when she does she will cease to exist just like every human who has ever lived before on this planet since Mother Eve and you know what?  Believing that isn’t going to happen, that you will survive death and live forever, is a lie.  Dare I call it a lie?  Sure do. 

Everyone who has ever has died.  No one has come back.  When every case of an event has the same result then someone who tells you he can get you a different result is a liar and you are a fool for believing him  Your faith is not in God.  You faith is in these madmen, these monsters, these criminals.

Do you have any idea what’s it like to grow up in a Christian family, a kid with a 145 IQ and reading Hemingway before I was ten, and being fed a steady stream of lies all your life?  It sucks.  I was ignored because my mother and father and brother thought I was weird.  All the time each of the three of them sexually abused me.  I was raised by television and books and movies.  But mostly books.  Everyone asks a kid what do you want to do when you grow up?  Then doesn’t pay attention to his response, pats him on the arm as he gently pushes you away and says “Stay in school.”

Everything I could come up with I wanted to do always ended with “And then write about it.”

After a while, even a kid begins to get the message.

Hell, I asked for a typewriter for my eleventh birthday.

But there was always a deeper reason, the fuel that drove the engine of my life.

I wanted to know the truth.

I believed there were truths that even God had to obey.  I didn’t realize that made me was a born heretic till years later.  It just made sense.  If God was who they said he was, then he had nothing to fear from objective truth.  The idea that God created truth, that anything he said was true simply because he said it, that truth was subjective and the whole purpose of mankind was to discover this subjective truth pronounced one and forever by God and submit himself unquestioning to this truth believing that any doubt or flat out denial of truth by objective experimentation was a lie simply because it came from the wrong source was insane.  When I grew older and understood Christians actually believed this, not only that, but this thinking was at the base of all Christian theology, and that I was damned to hell for believing there were truths that even God had to obey was the beginning of my lifelong struggle with religion, spirituality and…deep down in the darkest part of my soul…myself.

If God created truth yet could have created a world where other things were true then the concept of truth is meaningless. 

We are rats running a maze without an exit for the amusement of a Supreme Being who is a cruel voyeur. 

If truth is independent of God, then the question of God’s existence or lack thereof becomes not only a viable question…I mean, you can’t really question someone whose answer is always: “That’s the way I did it, shut up and eat your fish.”

There are children out there, millions of them, who have been homeschooled then sent to colleges specifically designed for homeschooled children or Christian colleges of some sort, all the way up to the graduate level if they want.  My parents believed in education.  Coming from the hollers of West Virginia they knew it was the only way out.  But still they required me to take ‘at least one year’ at a church college before going to a secular university.  They believed that this would inoculate me against the truth and keep me from losing my faith.

This Generation of Fools has been taught lies all their lives. 

They do not understand that there are truths available and that there are real scientists and real historians and real psychologists out there who study the data, create an hypothesis, test that hypothesis through experimentation, then publish their findings and conclusions in peer reviewed publications for others to attempt to repeat their experiment or refute their conclusions on the basis of newer or neglected evidence.  Accepting that there are people who know more than you do on a subject and you would be best studying the consensus opinions of these people from any field of scholarly endeavor before formulating your own beliefs is an act of humility.  Acknowledging that, because of your lack of an education, you do not have a place at the table when these things are discussed (no more than watching a football game on TV qualifies you to be a quarterback) requires an act of intellectual honesty few people possess. 

But most importantly, there is no way to make a profit by admitting this truth. 

If you’re young then you can begin a study in a field you are interested in.  This will cost you much money and much more time at the end of which you will be awarded an academic’s salary and the opportunity to do your own research and theorizing based on knowledge of what has already been tried and either succeeded or failed to prove adequate.  Dawkins, Sagan, Hawking and the handful of other names the public hears about may end up with book deals and speaking opportunities are the exception to academic success and certainly nowhere near the norm.  Add up all the wannabee movie stars, singers or just ‘celebrities’ out there and compare them to the number of people whose names you actually know from People magazine or Entertainment Tonight and you get an idea of the ratio.  Yet the fame (infamy) and profit motive are always implied or flat out stated in the criticism of their work and, by implication, the work of all scientists and scholars.

Projection, assuming your own motives in your enemies but denying them in yourself, is at the root of such criticism.  Vanity, the belief that your uneducated opinion is on a par with that of a person who has dedicated his life to the search for the truth, is subjectivism writ large.  They are the nobodies who ride the coattails of learned men by attaching their name to books, media and public speaking that do nothing but tell the ignorant what they want to hear and thus encourage and propagate future generations of sheep.

The homeschooled, the Christian educated, are fed on this pap.  Their only exposure is to uneducated men who start with what they want to prove…the existence of God or some myth surrounding his son…then work backwards to their data they feel contributes to proving what they had already accepted as true and without any rational reason for doing so.  Being taught nothing else from the time you were born till the time you went out into the world on your own…or rather, transferred from college to mega church…they don’t know how to think.  They have been indoctrinated, not educated.  They are the foot soldiers of the enemy.

To not educate your children in the truth of history and science is the worst, ugliest form of child abuse.  To deliberately stunt your own child’s mind is the act of a fiend. 

You don’t want to damn your children to hell by exposing them to the truth that would destroy their faith?  You think I am the one who wants to send your children to hell?

You are the one with hell in your mind.  You are the one who believes in this place.  You are the one who believes that this is a literal place, a place of perfect torment made by an omniscient, all powerful God for the sole purpose of tormenting those who do not believe in him all the while keeping them alive forever.  And you…not your God, don’t hide behind his back (neat trick since he doesn’t exist)…you are the one who would push your own child into this place to be tormented with sublime agony through all of eternity.

You are his judge.  Not me.  I want to tell your children to stop letting all that crap you put into his head about God screw up his life.  I want him to be free.  Something you would have wanted for him, too, if you weren’t so messed up yourself.

Education vs. Indoctrination

Education is the cure for ignorance by introducing you to conflicting information and requiring you to defend your assumptions in the face of cogent evidence to the contrary; indoctrination is learning the doctrine of a group to which you have already given your allegiance.

Education is a lifelong endeavor.  To be educated to the extent possible at any given moment in history is simply not enough.  As knowledge grows; re-education is necessary.  Education is hard work and it hurts.  It does not feel good when cherished assumptions are proven false.  It does not feel good to realize you have been wrong all of your life.  In the face of the hard work needed to learn about then apply newly found knowledge to your life, the lazy person finds ways of avoiding this work.    

Education demands change; indoctrination forbids change.

Indoctrination, especially religious indoctrination, is reinforcing your cherished assumptions.  It isn’t hard; being told you are right and have been right all along is easy.  Change is not required of you since the information you receive is a lump sum, from one book, and is revealed, not learned.  Change is forbidden on the threat of eternal punishment.  How else could it be?  For the believer, change means changing, not his beliefs, but the actual Word of God.

Knowledge is the incremental acquisition of truth through education.  Indoctrination is the suppression and manipulation of truth in defense of a fixed and unchangeable revelation.  Knowledge is on-going and, for all practical purposes, un-ending.  Indoctrination is a one-time inoculation against further knowledge and is fixed in time and space to a particular moment in the existence of a particular group.

That education is superior to indoctrination was once upon a time obvious to all but the ignorant and uneducated.  How did we get to our current situation where the beliefs and opinions of the uneducated are given equal footing with those of the educated? 

Public education enforced by law is necessary for a cohesive society.  Children must be taught to think; not what to think.  They must be educated to live in the world as it is, not as it was and most certainly not as a radical, anarchistic movement would have it to be.  When the ignorant are allowed to remove their children from the public education system they are not simply giving them a different sort of education, they are denying them an education at all.  They turn their backs on education and substitute indoctrination.

This is child abuse far more harmful than beating or sexual abuse.  This is imprisoning their children in a dark room and forbidding them the light of day.  This is taking a free mind and making it a slave to ignorance.  This is child sacrifice to a God they did not freely choose to accept.  This is an unimaginable, unforgivable evil.  That this is an accepted practice in our country is in direct conflict with and denial of the concept of freedom to which we give lip-service and little else.

This is the last and largest bastion of the treatment of children as property to be disposed of at their father’s pleasure. 

That the ignorant will instill their children with their ignorance is sadly unavoidable.  What is not unavoidable is the cooperation of the state in this folly.  Yet that is what has been and is still allowed to occur.

We have allowed generations of children to be raised as automatons, foot soldiers in a war they were never given the option to decide if they wanted to fight or not.  We have allowed a separate nation to grow like a cancer in our country.  A nation that has stolen our history and befouled the beliefs of our Founding Fathers.  A nation intent on domination not only of our country but the world.

Hannibal is living inside the Gates and is our neighbor we wave to on our way to work.  We have come to accept this situation as normal.  We have no one to blame but ourselves.

A nation divided against itself cannot stand.

How soon we have forgotten the hard won lessons of history.

We have learned nothing from the past and now we are to suffer for our own stupidity.  It is to be expected that the ignorant, the gullible, the infantile will find leaders to tell them what they want to hear.  Leaders who rise to the top because they are more willing to lie than the honest men who insist on the truth.  In a country of the blind how could you tell the person who claims to see isn’t just as blind as you or is lying about what he sees? 

Ignorance is blind. 

And if the blind are allowed to carry and stockpile weapons, whose fault is it when the shooting starts?

  

Don’t Talk To Christians

Having a conversation, either on line or face to face, with a Christian is something all of us site 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 you’re 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…she 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.

i will not drink the blood of a fool

when the glory of the lord shall shine

and blind men to his crimes

as the lies that he had promised me

would bind me to his tree

when all the angels in the dark

would brand me with the devil’s mark

i’d curse and cry with my last breath

‘i’ve still a half a bottle left!’

leave me alone, save someone else

i love my sinful, wicked self

take off of me this pit bull’s leash

save it for a pederastic priest

what good is my soul without my mind?

oh, please, dear god leave me behind

to enjoy myself those seven years

to sleep with whores and dance with queers

your kingdom is not mine to share

King Christ is in his underwear

and there is no one to point out his flaws

the hole in his briefs where you can see his balls

i scream, i scream till i can scream no more

but never, no never will i implore

this madman with his halo bent

to bless me with his sacrament

i refuse to eat the flesh of a ghoul

i will not drink the blood of a fool

There Is No God

How did we get to a place in our world that to use the word 'truth' was to mark yourself as uneducated, unsophisticated and a rube?


I blame the arrogance of the hard sciences.  Here's a clue, guys:


You do not live in a quantum world.


You live in a world where you have to go to the bathroom and poop a couple of times a day.


Physics makes lousy philosophy.  I remembered my allegiance to Ayn Rand's Objectivism was totally shattered when I heard of the Particle/Wave dichotomy.  This was years ago when the idea first came out and everyone saw it is as proof that minds control the universe.  You don't change the Particle into a Wave and back through your observation like the psuedosci misuse this anomaly and ignore the rational explanation for this phenomena.


What I saw was that this phenomena disproved Rand's basic premise...or, rather, exposing the inherent weakness of her argument::


A is A and cannot be B


Simple enough when you're talking about a rock and a fish.  But the Particle/Wave dichotomy destroyed the underlying assumption of her philosophy since:


Light can be a particle or a wave depending on which you are looking for.


The fatal flaw of Objectivism was that it required a single perspective.  A leader whose perspective on the world was perfect and, more importantly, the criteria by which what is and isn't Objective is determined..


Ayn Rand boasted of how she lived her life objectively and rationally.  She ended up a petty cult leader just like Jim Jones only poisoning minds instead of bodies.  I don't know if any of you have ever had the "Guru Experience."  I have.  Only a freed slave knows the meaning of the saying:  "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."  Or as like to put it:  "If you meet Christ on the road, kill him".


About hard scientists all I can say is you can have your teapot orbiting the sun, the world we live in is not that large, the population of our species not that great.  Since this planet and our species are not infinite, then we a can make truth statements based on observation and experimentation.


This idea of an avowed atheist refusing to say 'There is no God' because of infinite theory is humiliating to all the great men who came before us.


The truth is there is no God.


How can I say that?  Because we can trace the idea of deity through the history of mankind.  We can see how the God we have now is a product of the exchange of ideas between men.  The reason this God did not create the world...or, at least, Intelligently Design it...is because the God we have now did not exist at the creation of the world.  He only came in to being as a reactionary and defensive move by Christians backed into a corner by the truth and having to pile another self serving lie onto the teetering tower of lies that is religion.


Look at it this way.  We can trace the development of the plow from a stick in the ground right up to the newest John Deere.  Because we can do this mental exercise without reference to the supernatural then we can say with confidence that the plow is a human artifact.


We can trace the development of God right from the first clap of thunder to the Crystal Cathedral and we can do this without reference to the supernatural.  Why do we draw back from the obvious conclusion that God is a human construction?


Money and power.  Control over the minds of others.  The whole Great American Fame Package that includes unlimited sex with multiple partners as would befit the Leader of the Pack.


What?  Were you under the impression religion is anything more than show business with a stick?


Show business is about appealing to the greatest number of people through advertising to come see a show.


Religion is about appealing to the greatest number of people through advertising to come see a show...and if you don't, you'll burn in Hell forever.


That's a big stick.


There is no God.  Religion is just a bunch of men motivated by the same greed and lust as any man working in an office.


Am I saying none of them start out sincere?  Of course not.  Sincerity is nothing but denial with a solemn look on its face.  What I am saying...and saying about religion in particular...is that the people who rise to positions of power have to shed themselves of the naive sincerity of their youth.


In a supernatural organization...they like to be called spiritual but that is a positive, emotive word that they do not deserve...the person with the most outlandish claims becomes the center of attention.  Since these claims are all false...and I've been through every brand and generic of religion and the one thing I can say for a fact:
is that in over half a century of involvement I never once saw anything that could even remotely be considered miraculous.


The dynamic of success in religion forces the worst men to the top.  The men who are willing to tell the most incredible lies become their leaders.  Are they sincere?  Hell no.  These are intelligent men.  They could just as easily gotten a library card and learned the truth.  They made a choice to remain ignorant based on the enormous profits to be made from religion.


The funny thing about the truth is there is no way of making money from it.


There is no God.


Oh, I know there are some people of accusing a handful of writers making millions off saying it.  Fools.  You can take everything that anyone has ever earned from avowing atheism and not have a fraction of what the Worldwide God Market makes in a day.


There is no God.


I like saying it here.  I'm afraid to say it to my boss or my friends or my family or the people on the bus.  How can you make profit...for that matter, how can you gain power...when you dare not speak the truth aloud.  Sure, there are still enclaves of freedom in this country, but the noose is tightening.


There is no God.