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.

Oil and Sand

Tease and torment Is the way of a woman Bluff and brag The way of a man And when the two get together In the dark autumn night They grit like oil and sand Oil and sand That's all we get for it Bought for the rich With the poor man's blood Oil and sand Dealt cheap from dictators Who's going to save you When they are all gone? Take time for the day Make love to each moment And time for the night With serious intent You'll never know When the trap Will be triggered So live in the moment Till your time is spent Oil and sand Make a bad sexual lubricant My penis, tho great, Should never be grate Oil and sand Is a muck ugly mess Clean your ducks down with dawn Before it's too late Time's come for you now You're caught in the flow Can't you feel the wind At your back? Yet through sweat and fear There's a voice in your ear Saying Fuck no, I'm taking it back! Oil and sand All in a land Where religion has Foretold the End Oil and sand And Armageddon Sounds like one Hell of a Band! So go to sleep children Upon your soft pillows Dream dreams of dreaming Then dream them again Lost in your own maze Will be your undoing But hush now and sleep 'Cause it's all just Oil and Sand

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.