Month: August 2012

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The Path to Non-Belief

I wasn't always an Atheist, although like all human beings, I was originally born that way. My family wasn't particularly religious (my mom was Lutheran and my dad fell into the "none of the above" category), but we did attend church on the usual holidays, and Dad allowed Mom to fill our heads with her particular brand of mythology as we were growing up.

Like a lot of teenagers, I became very religious during high school and started attending church regularly—ironically inspired by the fact I had a terrible crush on one of the guys in my freshman class who also happened to be of the same sect. A year or so later, my mom got it into her head that I had to be confirmed into the faith—and since I was already deep in it—I went along. In the process I met another boy who I ended up crushing on equally hard. (The first guy and I had stopped hanging out together after I'd confessed my true love; go figger.)

Anyhow, my church attendance dropped precipitously after I went off to college, and ended completely once I came out. I still considered myself a "spiritual" person, but the Christian faith just wasn't cutting it any more. How could I embrace something that so obviously and vocally had no place for me? And the more I read of the atrocities that had been committed in the name of Christ down through the centuries, the more disgusted I became with the whole business.

The first summer back home from college I had what I then considered an almost "religious" experience during my first screening of Star Wars. When Luke stood there looking out on that double sunset, I experienced an overpowering sense of deja vu. I didn't know where or when, but I knew that at some point I'd once gazed out upon a similar landscape. That led me into reincarnation—and by extension—the whole "New Age" thing.

While I can't deny that the New Age practice of Reiki played a big part in at least putting my head in a good space during my cancer treatment, in the couple years that followed, even New Age philosophy began to lose all credibility, and I came to realize that none of it could be proven any more than the existence of god, angels and the resurrection of Christ.

When you're looking death in the face, it causes you to examine your beliefs in detail, and I think that was the beginning of the final turning point into non-belief for me. I thought of all the possible after-life scenarios, and came to the conclusion there was absolutely no way of knowing what—if anything—would follow, and for that reason alone, worrying about it was kind of ridiculous. If our essence, our energy goes off in some form after our body stops functioning, fine.  If not, and we just wink out into nothingness, how can that be frightening? We won't exist to experience the nothingness anyway.

The only thing I rejected then—and reject to this day—is the crime and punishment view of the afterlife as espoused by the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell. That's just batshit crazy. And don't even get me started on the contradictions, illogic, and outright proven falsehoods contained in the Bible.

But if I am proven wrong and end up burning for all eternity (leaving aside the question of how a soul can burn) because I don't believe this bullshit and wasn't a good little Christian and flat out rejected the delusion that passes as "faith," you can bet I'll have my non-corporeal middle finger extended upward the entire time, because the Christian god (by his "own" supposed inerrant words) and the vast majority of his followers are psychotic and I want no part of their insanity.

Coming out as an Atheist can be compared to coming out as gay. While I will admit there are truly some folks out there who are attracted to either sex, for a lot of us, labeling ourselves "bisexual" offers a psychological buffer before finally fully embracing what we knew to be the truth all along. By the same token, calling myself agnostic has served as a psychological buffer for many years. But lately—prompted in no small part by the hysterical ranting of those on the far right who are demanding that their own petty hate and prejudice become codified into secular law—I've finally reached the point where I can no longer deny it and am compelled to say fuck you to all religions, all gods and in fact all things metaphysical, and wear that big red atheist "A" with pride. I will continue to live my life in a moral fashion and treat others—as much as is humanly possible—the way I would want to be treated, and without the need for a promised reward waiting at the end of my life.

 

 

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"Kentucky: We're dumber than you think."

Well apparently the Kentucky GOP is outraged—outraged, I tell you—that colleges want their incoming students to know things. The nerve!

From Wonkette:

Kentucky Republicans passed education legislation in 2009 that made it easier to compare the state's students to other states. Now they're very upset that the results came back Stupid.

ACT, the state's testing company, interviews professors to figure out the things most important to student readiness for college, which sounds like a smart thing to do. Unfortunately, those professors have bad news: If you want students to do well in biology classes, they have to know about evolution.

Rather predictably, the Kentucky GOP is madder than a plumber in a Chipotle.

"I think we are very committed to being able to take Kentucky students and put them on a report card beside students across the nation," said Republican Sen. David Givens. "We're simply saying to the ACT people we don't want what is a theory to be taught as a fact in such a way it may damage students' ability to do critical thinking."

Yes! Let's teach students about how Chuck E. Cheese made the Earth out of popsicle sticks three years ago. We don't want to damage them.

It gets even better. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Givens said he asked the ACT representatives about possibly returning to a test personalized for Kentucky, but he was told that option was very expensive and time-consuming.

Aw, come on, Smart People. Is that so unreasonable? All Kentucky wants is national guidelines that exempt the state from knowing science, because the best way to prepare students for college classes is obviously to ignore the advice of the people teaching them. Don't worry, they have a totally real and responsible argument:

"The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science — Darwin made it up," [Rep. Ben] Waide said. "My objection is they should ensure whatever scientific material is being put forth as a standard should at least stand up to scientific method. Under the most rudimentary, basic scientific examination, the theory of evolution has never stood up to scientific scrutiny."

See? It's simple — evolution isn't real. Not like Jesus! Have you even HEARD of the scientific method, biologists? It's a little thing where you get evidence for a thing, and continue testing that thing, except in cases where an invisible man made the heavens and the earth, then you have to believe it and definitely teach it as science and DON'T YOU BE ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT IT, HEATHEN.

What say you, Vincent Cassone, chairman of the University of Kentucky biology department?

"The theory of evolution is the fundamental backbone of all biological research."

Oh.

"There is more evidence for evolution than there is for the theory of gravity, than the idea that things are made up of atoms, or Einstein's theory of relativity. It is the finest scientific theory ever devised."

Wait wait wait. Are you saying… are you saying we have more evidence for evolution than for gravity? ARE YOU SAYING WE DON'T HAVE EVIDENCE FOR GRAVITY?

Somebody get Kentucky on the phone. It's about to float away. [Lexington Herald-Leader]

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This and That

While taking the freeway to work is relatively okay in the morning (although it can be hit or miss, depending on what time I actually get on the 25), in the afternoon it's uniformly fucked. For that reason, I've started taking what I refer to as "the back way" home, avoiding the insanity altogether. My alternate route is slower speed, fewer cars, and much less stressful than that stupid freeway. It also takes me past places like this.

And surprisingly, it only takes me about 10 minutes longer to actually get home.

Tonight I chose Elton John's Greatest Hits to accompany me on the drive, and after not hearing any classic EJ for several years now, it was quite refreshing. The songs he wrote back in the 70s—providing the soundtrack for a good portion of my adolescence (much to my parents' consternation) show that even though he's turned into a pompous, arrogant old queen of late, at one point there was some major talent burning inside Sir Elton.

Captain Fantastic remains my favorite EJ album, followed closely by Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only the Piano Player.

Good stuff.

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This is What Panic Looks Like

From what is not-so-affectionately referred to as The Great Orange Satan by the lunatics on the far right:

Mitt Romney, today

Mitt Romney was never truly tested during the primaries. He ran an exclusively negative campaign, refusing to spend a dime justifying his own existence in the race. Rather, he had his cast-of-clowns opponents systematically felled by the Super PAC funded by his gazillionaire donors.

It is now August, and Romney tried the same tactic—over $100 million has been spent by the conservative Super PACs attacking President Barack Obama, yet the president has remained resilient in the polling. Perhaps more damaging, Romney has been stuck in the low 40s in key battleground states. His personal unpopularity has acted as an anchor around his neck, preventing him from making real gains against Obama.

Then, with the press in a frenzy over his refusal to release more tax returns, and with a conservative base ready to revolt at his convention over his sudden defense of Romneycare, it was clear that Romney was close to the breaking point. Thus, the bizarre and poorly crafted rollout of the Paul Ryan VP pick.

Yet rather than earn him some breathing room in the campaign and a nice honeymoon, the reception has been cold at best. Sure, there's been a smattering of puff pieces about Ryan's body fat composition, but the coverage has been more focused on the facts that Romney has moved to the Right rather than the center, that he had to pacify an increasingly hostile base, that Ryan endangers GOP advantages with seniors, that his presence on the ticket is a nightmare for downballot Republicans, and that his budget gives Democrats a treasure trove of material with which to attack.

Indeed, in the last several days, half the questions Romney has gotten have been along the lines of, "Where, exactly, do you disagree with the Ryan budget?"

Romney is on the breaking point. He's already had to cancel campaign appearances (though not fundraisers!) because of exhaustion. He's used to being surrounded by yes-men who tell him he's wonderful. Now that Obama fellow (and even critics on his own side) has the temerity to talk about him!

The president's campaign has put out a campaign that's talking about me and attacking me. I think it's just demeaning to the nature of the process, particularly when we face the kinds of challenges we face.

It's so demeaning to elections to have candidates talk about each other! Of course, it wasn't demeaning when Romney accused Obama of not being American. That part was as perfectly all right as was insulting the British prime minister, the cookies at a campaign stop, and the ponchos worn by NASCAR fans. That's just Mitt being Mitt (IOW, a dick). But to have other people talk about you? That can't stand!

Thus Romney is on his epic hissy fit today, frazzled and, yes, unhinged. It's only mid-August, and he's already lost his composure and spewed crazy shit.

People who are winning don't act like Mitt Romney is currently acting. If you want to see how winners act, just look at President Barack Obama.

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And Microsoft Inches Further Into Irrelevancy

From MacWorld:

When Microsoft updated Office 2011 for Mac for Mountain Lion late last month, Retina display users quickly noticed that Outlook was the only app to receive updated Retina graphics. One user described the remaining Office apps as "very blurry and tough on the eyes" on the new Retina Macbook Pro. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Microsoft plans a fix anytime soon, as a response from the Office for Mac Team explained Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will continue to run in the same resolution as on non-Retina Macs:

Outlook for Mac 2011 already supports Retina Display and the remaining apps will have the same viewing quality as on any non-Retina device. Unfortunately at this time, we cannot comment on any future updates regarding supporting Retina on Word, Excel or PowerPoint… Hope that helps!

 

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It's Like Riding a Bicycle, Really

In another lifetime, before I stupidly heeded the advice of people who said, "You're so good at fixing computer problems, you should do it for a living," I was an architectural drafter. I'd been doing it professionally for about 19 years until one day burnout descended and I reached the point where I didn't care any more if commercial toilets were spaced at 2'-6" or at 2'-8" on center. (FYI, there are whole government agencies and regulations devoted to that very issue.)  I hung up my scales, adjustable triangles, mechanical pencils, drafting brushes and electric erasers and said, "Enough." (To be honest, at that point it was actually more of a simple matter of walking away from AutoCAD. Those other tools had been sitting pretty much unused for the better part of a decade.)

But within a few short years, I came the realization that for all my mad troubleshooting skills, my new career as a I.T. professional was really devoid of any true satisfaction. Yeah, it was fun to figure stuff out and fix the shit, but dealing with the constant whining from the willfully ignorant day in and day out has only grown more and more tiresome as time has passed.  And no matter how many times I would have to redraw something because a client didn't know what he wanted until he saw what he didn't, when I was intimately involved in the architectural field I felt like I'd accomplished something at the end of the day. When the fruits of my labors were finally built—even if they weren't my own designs—I felt tremendous pride in knowing that I had contributed to something tangible and worthwhile.

There's none of that in I.T. support. It's been my experience these past 14 years or so that you're viewed—and treated—as a necessary evil by most companies and I often describe my profession as changing diapers and making sure that no one's sippy cup is ever knocked over.

But every now and then I get the rare opportunity to put my old skills back in use. The company where I'm currently working has a workable floor plan of the main offices in Visio that we use to maintain seating charts, but they had nothing for the Colorado Springs office. One of my long-term projects was to remedy this, and my daily workload has finally slowed enough where it was practical to begin this project.

To that end, last Friday I spent the day hiding out at our satellite office, amazed that I still knew how to properly measure a building.

Even more amazing was discovering yesterday that I still knew enough AutoCAD to actually translate all my measurements into a working drawing!  It really is like riding a bicycle. As long as I didn't think about it too much, my fingers almost knew instinctively what commands needed to be entered, even if the version of the program I was using was several generations removed from the one I'd originally mastered.

And you know, yesterday was one of the best days I've had in years while at work.

I know my general architectural knowledge is a little rusty, and it did take me an entire day to create a single floor plan, but I'm toying with the idea of seeing what would be involved in getting back into architecture and abandoning all this PC troubleshooting bullshit.

Unfortunately, as long as the economy is in the toilet, there isn't enough new construction happening to make this fantasy a reality.  But a boy can dream…

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Okay, Let Me Get This Straight

According to Christian mythology, God is omniscent. God created Adam and Eve (not Adam and Steve, as we're so often reminded). Eve was tricked by Satan (in the form of a talking snake) into eating of the Tree of Knowledge.

Because of that, we lost our immortality and were cast out of the Garden of Eden to live out our lives in pain and suffering. (And apparently snakes were also stripped of the gift of gab as part of the punishment…just because.)

Let's stop right there for a moment.

The Christians' invisible friend-in the-sky is perfect and all knowing. Yet he created beings who—by being omniscient—he knew from the very beginning would be flawed. In other words, humans were built broken (and therefore created imperfectly) to begin with. So if God is incapable of making mistakes, that means he intentioinally created humans imperfect and subject to sin.

WTF? I mean seriously. WTF?

He created imperfect humans so they'd sin and "force" him to cast them out of the Garden.

What kind of sick fuck would do this?

Good ol' Yaweh, that's who.

This Christian God sounds like a real asshole.

And if Adam and Eve (and later, their two sons) were the only people on Earth, where the fuck did Cain and Able get wives? Were they screwing Eve? So they married their own sisters? Where in the Big Book of Traditional Marriage does that option appear? (Turns out, more often than you'd think.)

But hah, not this time. Instead they went east into the Land of Nod, where there were apparently already a large group of people living quite contentedly without any knowledge whatsoever this wondrous Garden and its psychotic keeper to the west.

W…T…F?  Where the hell did these people come from if there were only supposed to be four living people on the entire face of the planet up until this point?

If you ask any man of the cloth this question (when he's not busy raping pre-pubescent boys) the answer is generally, "Some things are just taken on faith." In other words, shut up and don't ask questions.

My brain hurts.

But let's back up even further.

Perfect, all knowing Christian sky-fairy creates everything—including another product of the fevered Christian imagination—angels.  But one of them rebels and is "cast out." So once again we're shown that God isn't perfect, or that he just intentionally creates imperfect things that he enjoys torturing, like a kid with a magnifying glass encountering an ant hill on a sunny day.

Why does the word "psychopath" keep coming to mind?

Later on in the Big Book of Lies (aka the BuyBull), God says "Whoopsie!" and decides that humanity—after being fruitful and multiplying—didn't turn out exactly like he'd intended again and should be killed…except for one small family who is then tasked with saving a pair of every living creature on earth. Or at least within walking distance of their home.

What's the matter? Isn't this God quite capable of saving all the animal life he wants on his own? Or is Norman Bates already growing impotent? And what about the plants, for chrissake? If the planet needs a reboot to rid it of the sin that Mr. Invisible created in the first place, why not just send it careening into the sun and start again from scratch? Or is that now beyond his power? I mean seriously…a flood?

And one more question: If all current humanity sprang from that one little family, where did all the races come from?

But going back to the Garden of Eden for a moment. Let's play a little game and say that Eve didn't eat of the Tree and humanity was never cast out from the Garden or lose its immortality. Can you imagine what a sty that place would be with fifteen to twenty billion of us trying to squeeze in there now? (Remember, people don't die, but they sure don't stop reproducing either!)

Anyway…

Later on, magic sky fairy realizes that he's fucked up again and Noah's descendants turn out just as bad their predecessors. You'd think that by now the idiot would realize this, right? (Definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.) But this time, instead of flooding the place (or sending it careening into the sun) he's going to go down there as himself…as his son…to torture and descend into hell so that whoever believes in this ultimate sacrifice latest bit of crap doesn't have to go to that make believe place themselves.

These fairy tales are fine for iron-age savages who don't have the deductive reasoning—or scientific history to back them up—that modern men do, but c'mon guys…it's the 21st Century. We've landed men on the moon and have just put a probe the size of a car on Mars. If ever there was a time for the "All Powerful" to come down and say "Great job, guys!" it's now. But since he's been conspicuously absent from the goings on of our daily lives going on 2000 years now and from all accounts is a major DICK, I think it's high time for him to put up or shut up.

This is why I'm an Atheist. Because all these magic stories are pure, unadulterated bullshit.

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TMI, Continued…

1. You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what's even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What is that power?

Personal invisibility and the ability to turn any object I touch invisible at will. Wouldn't you want to slip into a closed-door meeting of government officials to hear what they're really thinking? Or expose all the religious hypocrites for who they really are? (And capture it on video!)

2. You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again?

Assuming that I retain full memory of my present life and actually go back to the age I was at the chosen time, pretty much any Friday or Saturday night circa 1978/1979 at HisCo Disco in Phoenix. I would revel in the company of long-departed friends and dance. my. ass. off.

3. You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?

I don't know what it is with these memes and their obsession of things in the past. I've had unpleasant experiences throughout my life, but each of them set me on a path that brought me to where I am now. And I wouldn't change that for the world.

4. You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. Who would it be?

Ew. Why would I want to do that? I'd rather sleep with my Bubba.

5. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart immediately. Where are you gonna go?

How long could I stay in the destination? If this was just for a short getaway I'd probably say San Francisco. I could sorely use a big fat injection of that city's energy right now.

6. Do you have any relatives in jail?

Not that I know of.

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Honey, Just Because…

…you sit on the other side of the cubicle wall from me and I can hear you bitching about your computer problems day in and day out doesn't mean I'm going to do anything about it. My predecessor may have hopped up the moment he heard your whining, but those days are long gone. Get off your fat, lazy, self-entitled ass and put in a ticket—or if that's just too difficult for you to handle—pick up the goddamned phone and call.

Otherwise, you can just stew in your shit.