Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
What’s Up?
I started posting on Skeptical Eye a while ago, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on it here. Basically, I have some criticisms and I don’t think it’s polite to air them on a blog that I was invited to be a contributor for. You aren’t supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth… but this horse ain’t got no teeth.
First of all, SE is run by a guy who is an “anarchist.” No, those quotes aren’t nice… let’s use Anarchist with a big “A,” whereby “anarchy” is what a country descends into when it becomes lawless and “Anarchy” is what a country ascends to when it no longer needs laws.
As a philosophical concept, Anarchy is all well and good, but it requires a sort of gradual evolution of governance. I believe a country that practices socialism can ascend to anarchy, but not a greedy capitalist oligarchy. You can’t skip a step. Anarchy’s success lies in the need for a population that will willingly and spontaneously help others, not one whose mantra is, “What’s mine is mine.”
But beyond the irreconcilable differences in political structure, I have several other problems with the basic ideals of Skeptical Eye. For one thing, the posters play the same tired old tunes popularized by right-wingers everywhere.
They all rail against the MSM (that’s “Main Stream Media,” for those of you who aren’t fluent in bat-shit-crazy). And yet, oddly enough, a good number of the posts are nothing but cut and paste stories from well established right-wing news sources, and there’s a healthy helping of Faux News clips from YouTube.
Look, if you’re going to pretend to be unbiased, you have to get your news from sources that are not overtly ideological. I don’t watch Keith Olberman, nor would I post a video of his. I don’t go posting every other clever thing Jon Stewart of Stephen Colbert says. I don’t read the Huffington Post. I don’t even read that… SomethingKos or whatever it is that the liberal kids are reading these days.
Cutting the strings from liberally biased media has allowed my ideology to grow and evolve beyond the stale, pre-packaged, mass-manufactured trash that Democrats sling. Right-wingers and anarchists would do well to wean themselves off of Fox News’ nipple. If they do, maybe they can finally take some baby steps in a new direction, instead of just being an unwitting mouthpiece for the pseudo-Libertarians, aka Republicans.
Which reminds me… SE is run by someone who hates intellectual property. This makes sense for someone who rarely writes his own stuff and usually just fills his blog with conservative talking points borrowed from others. I would call it lazy, but it’s actually more whorish, because SE has ads.
And boy are the ads hilarious. SE uses Google advertising, so keywords from the site trigger certain ads. A criticism of Christine O’Donnell yields her bright, smiling face asking for donations in the sidebar. Criticism of religion results in Bible Study College opportunities in the top bar. Criticism of banks… yep, you guessed it. Pretty much everything you try to criticize will get its respective ad displayed.
It has never occurred to me to stop posting on the site. I just appreciate the soap box and the ability to get my writing torn apart by packs of rabid right-wingers. Too often, I think liberals shy away from competition, from adversity, from criticism… really from anything difficult. I want an ideology tempered in fire, and that means taking some heat.
To top it all off, most days I honestly feel like I’m done talking about religion. “Anything But Theist” is more or less obsolete to me. What more can I say? “Religion is full of shit,” what else is there? More importantly, what does it matter? Religion only matters to the religious, and all of the “problems” I have with religion are ultimately political ones which are argued either for or against in non-religious terms.
It’s times like these I wish I hadn’t renamed my blog a year ago and completely retooled it to be centered on atheism. Oh regrets… do you ever stop piling up?
So, in the coming weeks, I may or may not start another blog. If I do, I’ll probably do what I did last time and transfer all of my posts to a new location while leaving the old site up as an archive (so old links keep working). Or maybe I’ll keep this one as-is and just start posting more here, even though it won’t usually be about atheism.
It’s a tough call… abandon a blog that no one reads but which I can convince myself is doing okay because I have 70+ followers (more than I ever expected), or start over and force myself to build my [non-]following all over again.
For all the shit I talk about SE, it’s just nice to have your ideas read, and we atheists are just not dedicated. It’s not in our nature to get passionate and fired up and to stay motivated and active in a community.
Atheist blogging goes like this: post some stuff, no one reads it, comment on other people’s blogs, they comment on yours, and if you both agree… you never talk to each other again. If you disagree, one person makes fun of the other person’s mom and their comment gets deleted… and you never talk to each other again. It’s really discouraging, and it’s not surprising that most atheists burn out quickly in the blogosphere.
I have a lot of steam left in me to write, and religion will probably always be a passion of mine, but how many times and in how many ways can I really say, “I know more than religious people?”
First of all, SE is run by a guy who is an “anarchist.” No, those quotes aren’t nice… let’s use Anarchist with a big “A,” whereby “anarchy” is what a country descends into when it becomes lawless and “Anarchy” is what a country ascends to when it no longer needs laws.
As a philosophical concept, Anarchy is all well and good, but it requires a sort of gradual evolution of governance. I believe a country that practices socialism can ascend to anarchy, but not a greedy capitalist oligarchy. You can’t skip a step. Anarchy’s success lies in the need for a population that will willingly and spontaneously help others, not one whose mantra is, “What’s mine is mine.”
But beyond the irreconcilable differences in political structure, I have several other problems with the basic ideals of Skeptical Eye. For one thing, the posters play the same tired old tunes popularized by right-wingers everywhere.
They all rail against the MSM (that’s “Main Stream Media,” for those of you who aren’t fluent in bat-shit-crazy). And yet, oddly enough, a good number of the posts are nothing but cut and paste stories from well established right-wing news sources, and there’s a healthy helping of Faux News clips from YouTube.
Look, if you’re going to pretend to be unbiased, you have to get your news from sources that are not overtly ideological. I don’t watch Keith Olberman, nor would I post a video of his. I don’t go posting every other clever thing Jon Stewart of Stephen Colbert says. I don’t read the Huffington Post. I don’t even read that… SomethingKos or whatever it is that the liberal kids are reading these days.
Cutting the strings from liberally biased media has allowed my ideology to grow and evolve beyond the stale, pre-packaged, mass-manufactured trash that Democrats sling. Right-wingers and anarchists would do well to wean themselves off of Fox News’ nipple. If they do, maybe they can finally take some baby steps in a new direction, instead of just being an unwitting mouthpiece for the pseudo-Libertarians, aka Republicans.
Which reminds me… SE is run by someone who hates intellectual property. This makes sense for someone who rarely writes his own stuff and usually just fills his blog with conservative talking points borrowed from others. I would call it lazy, but it’s actually more whorish, because SE has ads.
And boy are the ads hilarious. SE uses Google advertising, so keywords from the site trigger certain ads. A criticism of Christine O’Donnell yields her bright, smiling face asking for donations in the sidebar. Criticism of religion results in Bible Study College opportunities in the top bar. Criticism of banks… yep, you guessed it. Pretty much everything you try to criticize will get its respective ad displayed.
It has never occurred to me to stop posting on the site. I just appreciate the soap box and the ability to get my writing torn apart by packs of rabid right-wingers. Too often, I think liberals shy away from competition, from adversity, from criticism… really from anything difficult. I want an ideology tempered in fire, and that means taking some heat.
To top it all off, most days I honestly feel like I’m done talking about religion. “Anything But Theist” is more or less obsolete to me. What more can I say? “Religion is full of shit,” what else is there? More importantly, what does it matter? Religion only matters to the religious, and all of the “problems” I have with religion are ultimately political ones which are argued either for or against in non-religious terms.
It’s times like these I wish I hadn’t renamed my blog a year ago and completely retooled it to be centered on atheism. Oh regrets… do you ever stop piling up?
So, in the coming weeks, I may or may not start another blog. If I do, I’ll probably do what I did last time and transfer all of my posts to a new location while leaving the old site up as an archive (so old links keep working). Or maybe I’ll keep this one as-is and just start posting more here, even though it won’t usually be about atheism.
It’s a tough call… abandon a blog that no one reads but which I can convince myself is doing okay because I have 70+ followers (more than I ever expected), or start over and force myself to build my [non-]following all over again.
For all the shit I talk about SE, it’s just nice to have your ideas read, and we atheists are just not dedicated. It’s not in our nature to get passionate and fired up and to stay motivated and active in a community.
Atheist blogging goes like this: post some stuff, no one reads it, comment on other people’s blogs, they comment on yours, and if you both agree… you never talk to each other again. If you disagree, one person makes fun of the other person’s mom and their comment gets deleted… and you never talk to each other again. It’s really discouraging, and it’s not surprising that most atheists burn out quickly in the blogosphere.
I have a lot of steam left in me to write, and religion will probably always be a passion of mine, but how many times and in how many ways can I really say, “I know more than religious people?”
Monday, October 11, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Saturday Reflection #7
In the garden of philosophy, falsehoods are not weeds, but attractive flowers which bloom beautifully for a time, until its petals fall away, it wilts, and inevitably dies. Truth is nothing like a flower. Rather, truth is a weed that takes root and returns, season after season (despite the wishes of the gardeners).
Tattoos and Booze
I don’t have any tattoos, and I never even thought about getting one for more than a few minutes. Then again, all the alcohol I have ever drank in my life would barely fill a kitchen sink. I sometimes wonder if the two are related…
Even though I don’t drink, I am very permissive of drinking. I would never sever my ties with someone because they drank, nor would I probably recommend they stop (with some troubled exceptions, which might warrant a verbal jab now and then). The same goes for tattoos. And while we’re at it, we can throw in piercings: I have none, but I’m indifferent to other people doing so.
Out of curiosity, I googled “anti-tattoo campaign.” To my mock surprise, the first few relevant hits were religious. Oddly, PETA also got some highly ranked hits, though they were in favor of tattoos [“Ink, Not Mink;” almost clever].
Why is it that the only people who seem interested in whether other people get tattoos or piercings are religious?
This sort of gets to the heart of why religion rubs the faithless the wrong way. There aren’t atheist group out there telling people what they can do to their body. There’s Christian (and for that matter Jewish) groups organized to discourage tattoos, piercings, alcohol, Harry Potter, masturbation… the list goes on for days.
Atheists pretty much only organize in opposition to one thing, and they do it so rarely that it’s news when it happens. So imagine our frustration when we see religious people are out creating roadblocks for people trying to live their lives differently.
Look, I could pull some argument out of my ass about how tattoos spread Hepatitis. I could parade out the horror stories of regrettable, misspelled tattoos of ex-wives’ names on your forehead. I could even quote mine dozens of intelligent people speaking negatively of tattoos.
None of this really means a damn thing.
The test of legislation is this: if non-consenting people are not physically affected by an action or its consequences, then that action ought to be legal. Emotion, regret, and moral outrage are not factors.
I am a heterosexual, monogamous, married, non-tattooed, unpierced, non-drinking, white man. I lack one thing that keeps me from being a Republican, and it’s not being a jackass (I most certainly am one). It’s a love for freedom, liberty, and [way more than those two heaping piles of horse shit] a person’s right to live their own life.
If you ever feel motivated to tell other people who are not hurting anyone how they ought to be, I suggest you try some good ole fashioned not givin’ a shit.
Even though I don’t drink, I am very permissive of drinking. I would never sever my ties with someone because they drank, nor would I probably recommend they stop (with some troubled exceptions, which might warrant a verbal jab now and then). The same goes for tattoos. And while we’re at it, we can throw in piercings: I have none, but I’m indifferent to other people doing so.
Out of curiosity, I googled “anti-tattoo campaign.” To my mock surprise, the first few relevant hits were religious. Oddly, PETA also got some highly ranked hits, though they were in favor of tattoos [“Ink, Not Mink;” almost clever].
Why is it that the only people who seem interested in whether other people get tattoos or piercings are religious?
This sort of gets to the heart of why religion rubs the faithless the wrong way. There aren’t atheist group out there telling people what they can do to their body. There’s Christian (and for that matter Jewish) groups organized to discourage tattoos, piercings, alcohol, Harry Potter, masturbation… the list goes on for days.
Atheists pretty much only organize in opposition to one thing, and they do it so rarely that it’s news when it happens. So imagine our frustration when we see religious people are out creating roadblocks for people trying to live their lives differently.
Look, I could pull some argument out of my ass about how tattoos spread Hepatitis. I could parade out the horror stories of regrettable, misspelled tattoos of ex-wives’ names on your forehead. I could even quote mine dozens of intelligent people speaking negatively of tattoos.
None of this really means a damn thing.
The test of legislation is this: if non-consenting people are not physically affected by an action or its consequences, then that action ought to be legal. Emotion, regret, and moral outrage are not factors.
I am a heterosexual, monogamous, married, non-tattooed, unpierced, non-drinking, white man. I lack one thing that keeps me from being a Republican, and it’s not being a jackass (I most certainly am one). It’s a love for freedom, liberty, and [way more than those two heaping piles of horse shit] a person’s right to live their own life.
If you ever feel motivated to tell other people who are not hurting anyone how they ought to be, I suggest you try some good ole fashioned not givin’ a shit.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Monday, October 4, 2010
The Last Great Human Mystery
In these times of the human genome being mapped, perhaps for the first time in history we seem to know more than we don’t. Sure, we don’t know what causes autism and people are still dying of heart disease, cancer, botched plastic surgeries… but just go with it, this is the premise of the blog post.
The biggest remaining mystery has to be: what happens after we die?
This is a classic bullshit exercise, because we’re all acting from a position of ignorance. Let’s face it, no one has any inside knowledge on this, since we’re all alive.
“But what about people who have near-death experiences?”
Near-death experience? Would you count it if you “near-lost” your virginity? Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, my friend. Oh, and near-misses, I guess those are bona fide misses (I suppose they’re really “near-hits”). I don’t want to know what happens when doctors revive you. If I wanted to know about near-death experiences, I would ask an expert, like Courtney Love.
“She’s still alive?”
Yeah, I’m as shocked as you. You know what they say: the good die young.
So anyhoo… what happens when you die is tough, but so is, “What happens in people with dementia or in deep comas?” I mean, I took anatomy, so I have a cursory understanding of what is physically happening, but people want to know: is that it?
I would say yeah, unless you can somehow repair the physical damage. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that there is some ephemeral storage method for maintaining our memories that is apart from our physical being. Our lives and experiences are fleeting stories written in sand just above the water line at low-tide.
So then perhaps another way of looking at the mystery is to ask: What is the experience of dying like?
I’m sure if you’re bleeding on a sidewalk and slowly dying, it’s not too pleasant until shock kicks in. Once one loses consciousness, it’s anyone’s guess. If you’re in a hospital, I imagine the cocktail of drugs you’re on makes feeling anything difficult. If you pass in your sleep… it’s peaceful, but I wouldn’t want to leave like that. It’s like breaking up with existence via text message.
Cicero wrote, “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living,” and I agree. Our best hope for existing eternally as fragile mortals is to be remembered. I really believe that having your ideas recalled by others is not only close to immortality, it is literally deification.
What are we but ideas? Are we the sinewy meat that plods through life? We are the heart that beats tirelessly without a thought on your part? Are we the scars we have accumulated, or are we the lessons learned acquiring them?
Cicero also said, “Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.”
Perhaps it was impossible in the past, but these days nearly anyone can become a published writer. If you have access to a public library, you have all the resources you need. I’m glad to live in a time when it is so easy to share ideas.
Though it is depressing if you look at it too literally… then you see all of these blogs as nothing but pre-emptive, digital tombstones. Total downer.
The biggest remaining mystery has to be: what happens after we die?
This is a classic bullshit exercise, because we’re all acting from a position of ignorance. Let’s face it, no one has any inside knowledge on this, since we’re all alive.
“But what about people who have near-death experiences?”
Near-death experience? Would you count it if you “near-lost” your virginity? Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, my friend. Oh, and near-misses, I guess those are bona fide misses (I suppose they’re really “near-hits”). I don’t want to know what happens when doctors revive you. If I wanted to know about near-death experiences, I would ask an expert, like Courtney Love.
“She’s still alive?”
Yeah, I’m as shocked as you. You know what they say: the good die young.
So anyhoo… what happens when you die is tough, but so is, “What happens in people with dementia or in deep comas?” I mean, I took anatomy, so I have a cursory understanding of what is physically happening, but people want to know: is that it?
I would say yeah, unless you can somehow repair the physical damage. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that there is some ephemeral storage method for maintaining our memories that is apart from our physical being. Our lives and experiences are fleeting stories written in sand just above the water line at low-tide.
So then perhaps another way of looking at the mystery is to ask: What is the experience of dying like?
I’m sure if you’re bleeding on a sidewalk and slowly dying, it’s not too pleasant until shock kicks in. Once one loses consciousness, it’s anyone’s guess. If you’re in a hospital, I imagine the cocktail of drugs you’re on makes feeling anything difficult. If you pass in your sleep… it’s peaceful, but I wouldn’t want to leave like that. It’s like breaking up with existence via text message.
Cicero wrote, “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living,” and I agree. Our best hope for existing eternally as fragile mortals is to be remembered. I really believe that having your ideas recalled by others is not only close to immortality, it is literally deification.
What are we but ideas? Are we the sinewy meat that plods through life? We are the heart that beats tirelessly without a thought on your part? Are we the scars we have accumulated, or are we the lessons learned acquiring them?
Cicero also said, “Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.”
Perhaps it was impossible in the past, but these days nearly anyone can become a published writer. If you have access to a public library, you have all the resources you need. I’m glad to live in a time when it is so easy to share ideas.
Though it is depressing if you look at it too literally… then you see all of these blogs as nothing but pre-emptive, digital tombstones. Total downer.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Saturday Sunday Reflection #6
At times I am haunted by a past that lacks any real ghosts, so I cannot imagine the nightmares of those who have witnessed true horror.
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