Atheist Meditations

In a recent episode of the BBC America's 'Jekyll' (I'm waiting for the six episode to re-air, as an unforeseeable TiVo accident failed to record it - this we're not talking spoilers here.) the highly animated Mr. Hyde asks his tormentor from the secret organization which has been stalking him from birth if his last statement was a threat against his family. The response is something like, 'Yes, I am threatening your family. Explicitly, emphatically, and earnestly, I am threatening your . . . gaelllllll . . . ' at this point Hyde has slit his throat and is talking him through the difficult process of dying by encouraging him to count backwards from ten.

'Jekyll' does a fine job of cultivating audience pathos for the monster Hyde via a tri-fold strategy. Establishing him as an anti-hero who is still morally/rationally superior to the quasi-government organization that seeks to use him as a weapon. The suffering and challenges of his Dr. Jackman other half, and the sheer maniacal charisma of the lead actor James Nesbitt. In this scene the rationale is crystal clear. Once one has threatened to murder your children, then any act of violence is justified in defense of them. Nesbitt's Mr. Hyde responds to the threat with certainty, violence, and a homicidal flair.

Trust me, all males dream of being able to act in such a way. At least any male whose balls have over a millimeter of 'hang.'

My point is that most moments of moral certainty are transcendent to the point that a villain can exhibit them and instantly be reconciled. The fundamental moral truths; protect your family at any cost, don't shit where you eat, don't harm children - these don't need some religious mumbo-dogma to enforce, they are instinctual and obvious. To the contrary, only those deeply damaged by the plague of religion frequently cross these moral lines. Universal moral codes are just that - universal - and . . .

I've been rambling and don't see this blog striking exactly where I originally intended.,

Religion demands that it be held more sacred than family, thus it devalues family. Religion denies the world of cause and effect that makes 'don't shit where you eat,' obvious. Religion, in the weakness of its premise, has been targeting children in multiple, damaging, ways for endless centuries.

If our ability to think is what separates us from the orangutans., then religion is our primate tail. Caught in an evolutionary trap, but we don't seem to have the will to rid ourselves of it. Wolves caught in a trap during their obviously human orchestrated extermination from the lower forty-eight earned infamy by chewing off their own leg and living on to consume more livestock and slay more pets.

Do you fucking care fiercely enough to live or will you simply,weakly, die?

Religion is the pillow held over your face by the feeble and queer old priest. Do you just lie there while he slowly chokes you to death?

Labels: pseudo-inspirational, Spirituality

In discussing our weekend plans with some friends over for dinner this Friday, we had to make a call between catching a movie with Cory or trying to get tickets to tag along when his partner went to the Twins game today. Boy, did I ever make the wrong call.

We saw 'Stardust', and I've got to say that's a pretty damn good PG-13 flick. Cindy couldn't understand how it's falling behind 'Rush Hour 3' (a fun movie but nothing to write home to mother about.) We both enjoyed the movie.

But Brenda got to be at the dome when Johan Santana broke the Twins record for strikeouts in a game. 17 strikeouts in eight innings. Wow. 8 x 3 is, like, only 24 batters, so having seventeen SO's is bordering on crazy! Only Sammy Sosa could hit his stuff, and it just wasn't enough today.

Cory and Brenda got a kitten from the Humane Society yesterday and I was teasing him all afternoon that he better name the little guy after the Twin's ace. If I stop by next week and that cat ain't named Yo-Yo, I'm never talking to him again.

Seventeen Strike Outs, what a performance. . .

Labels: Twins

I'm embarrassed to admit that in catching up with a good friend's blog this afternoon, I discovered that he had 'tagged' me almost a week ago. That's why my blogs been sucking lately, I just can't endure the caffeine levels that allow me to produce content constantly and keep up with the few noble souls who give a shit about what I'm posting here. Fair enough, I'm 'tagged' so I'll devote five paragrabs to personal details.

#1 I'm an Aquarius from '75. That makes me 32. Anyone who has known me for the last decade will tell ya that I'm terrible when it come to the anniversary of my nativity. I get depressed sometime around Christmas, and lay the whine on pretty damn thick regarding the erosion of my physical prowess as well as the certainty of my mortality. Partly, I think I just like the attention and the chance to engage other's mental constructs with novel notions, partly I think I'm saddened by the fact that our consumer culture targets the young and the wealthy. I once was young (and damn good looking); I'll never be wealthy. It is rather depressing when you realize that the media that once worked overtime to stimulate your ego no longer gives a good god-damn about you or your purchasing habits.

#2 My woman Cindy is the most important thing in my life. In my twenties I had many 'friends' but our disagreements regarding the nature of reality insured that they would never be my 'intellectual equal' or even view me as anything other that a 'lost soul to be saved.' Any brother atheist will understand immediately how rare it is for our kind to find a partner who can contemplate the horrible awesomeness of Atheism. I consider myself to be diabolically eloquent, but I can never express to her how lucky I am to have her as a partner. Too many women have been bred and indoctrinated to a level of submission that is boringly sub-human. Daily I stagger at the blind luck of finding a female who still thinks of herself as a full member of the species - she sees her sex as an equal part of the human family, not as a caste; like worker bees or drones, with the species.

#3 I live in a household with FOUR FUCKING CATS. Since they are all calicos I often lie about this, since a casual observer may be unable to differentiate between all those shapes of white, black, and brown. 'Nope, that's the same cat, we only have two.' Suffice to say, I've never walked down the stairs, or crossed the kitchen without considering the disrespectfully sprawled form of a cat.

#4 I was a judoka in my youth, and still find the skills and philosophies of Jigaro Kano to be valued in my later life. I was the state champion in my weight class in 1989, and won the silver medal in the 'star of the north games' the following year. I'm not trying to impress anybody here, when I was competing in judo the field contained less than a dozen competitors at my age/weight class at the time. This was Minnesota. Yet I consider my training in ukemi (the art of falling) to be largely responsible for the fact that I have never broken a bone, despite my many misadventures. No child should enter their teens without that training, unless their parents have limitless health insurance or just don't care about them.

#5 I'm nearing completion of my first serious work of fiction, what I've titled 'The Education of Io.' For the last three years it was the 'Education of Aelectra,' but I decided Io was much more visually groovy. Basically, it's a post apocalyptic world where slavery has returned and the American Empire has been largely balkanized. What Io learns about how the world works will hopefully be a education for my teenage readers in realpolitik and the structures of social control. I hope to have a working draft by the end of the year.

Thus concludes our test of the compulsory tagification system. Thanks.

One of my favorite characteristics of blogging lies in the ad hoc, stream of consciousness-ness, nature of it. In no other medium can one expect to begin on one topic and only barely seek to justify a transition to an entirely different subject. These are the subjects dueling for my attention today.

Yesterday I picked up Christopher Hitchens' latest book, god is not Great, from the local appendage of a chain book selling company. This marks the third or fourth clearly atheistic work of non-fiction that I've purchased in the last six months, and this one is easily my favorite by far. I took an hour and fifteen for lunch today so I could squeeze in just a few more chapters. I'm hooked on some literary kine.

Here's a quote a driving intensity, regarding the sexual dysfunction almost always glorified as a pillar of various religions:

The homicidal lunatics - rehearsing to be genocidal lunatics - of 9/11 were perhaps tempted by virgins, but it is far more revolting to contemplate that, like so many of their fellow jihadists, they were virgins. Like monks of old, the fanatics are taken early from their families, taught to despise their mothers and sisters, and come to adulthood without ever having a normal conversation, let alone a normal relationship, with a woman. This is disease by definition. Christianity is too repressed to offer sex in paradise - indeed it has never been able to evolve a tempting heaven at all - but it has been lavish in its promise of sadistic and everlasting punishment for sexual backsliders, which is nearly as revealing in making the same point in a different way. (p 55)

I can understand why in a debate over the war in Iraq a few years ago British MP Galloway screamed at him, "Yes, you write like an Angel, but you are working for the Devil!"

Christopher Hitchens was a former Trotskyist and even a regular contributer to The Nation before leaving the Left - an act few at The Nation seem to be capable of forgiving. That betrayal was the lever which opened the bomb doors for: 'wet-brained alcoholic' and 'jaded opportunist.' I was pretty biased against him before I read much of his work - and in that debate with George Galloway he did utilize some rather unsavory rhetorical tactics.

Yet I'm feeling my own energy for the Left dissipate, and a combination of my spiritual need to be intellectually better than worthless fundamentalist (i.e. to occasionally consider that I might be wrong) with an attraction/respect for cleverly coherent writers; I'm open to the opinions of this fellow atheist even if they contradict my established world-view. We all want to dig in and defend our territory, but we have to be ready to accept that the world is a whole lot bigger than what we thought. We may need to take more territory, not defend this insignificant and strategically weak parcel.

In fact, I'm reaching the point where I no longer want to be called a liberal. Not because the right-wing media has convinced about half of our population that liberal is a synonym for fag - if that were the case I'd be calling myself a 'bright', a practice I agree with Mr. Hitchens when he refers to that 'cringe-making proposal' to 'conceitedly nominate themselves to be called' - I don't know if I really understood what Liberalism means. Was it just a broad drag net, an abstract designed to let a large number project their own hopes and dreams upon this ideology? Could it be more than Civ4's Free Religion, Free Speech? I think I might be wrong in cherry-picking quotes from the Founding Fathers of our Liberal Democracy and cherishing that 'Liberalism.' Maybe it is just an overloaded term, similar to 'Communism' that means absolute good to some and absolute evil to others, thus making the term meaningless?

Part of it is that I'm now starting to realize what '9/11 changed everything' means. To continue a blog of naked honesty, as a midwesterner 9/11 didn't shake me up all that much. For a while it was dramatic and awesome, like a living in history sort of thing. Then it was just advantageous, cuz for a few blessed weeks the crew I was working with was willing to listen to Public Radio instead of neuron deadening christian rock. I've never been to the east coast, and the impact of 9/11 was not too personal, similar to hearing about the killings in Sudan, but these folks were rich and white. I saw plenty who wanted to indulge in the horror of 9/11, titillating themselves with camp fire horror stories about 'what ifs.' I despised that practice, every time I heard a preacher or a pundit hold up 9/11 like a teenage boy holds up pornography in his left hand.

Hitchens, and some of the other writers I've been reading lately was on the East Coast, for them the trauma was much more real. More akin to the brief panic I felt when our bridge collapsed and I didn't know for sure my father was not on it. More than just the 'Pearl Harbor Level Event' of that disgusting memo, it was a shock treatment to a massive chunk of our 'liberal population.' The shocked included our federal politicians, our students at our 'elite' colleges, our bastions of progressive population. . .

I feel like Alan Alda as his M.A.S.H. character, not sure if the surgery was a success, but done and wanting to just tell a subordinate to 'close for me.'

9/11 really did change everything. More so than just a talking point for the propagandists of the corporate media. It changed what a plurality of educated Americans thought about how the world does and should work. Unilateral military action that ignores the Geneva Conventions is now the model. Our country will interact with the rest of humanity with the righteous rage of a man avenging his murdered family for the next generation at least. No rules apply to us, no limits are permitted to be discussed regarding our militant behavior - have you forgotten September the Eleventh?

That's what burns my soul but I need to just get over and accept.

Part of me wants to just scream at the wind. The 'Greatest Generation' laid down life after almost countless life in a World War. Except for ourselves, almost no civilian population was spared the horrors or war, on scales that are neigh unimaginable today. The French were occupied for terrifying years, the English had the Blitz, the German people suffered Russian rapes and English fire bombing of cities, the Russians lost cities and citizens on a horrific scale, the Chinese suffered more than anyone in sheer human numbers to the Japanese, the Japanese lost two entire cities to the most terrible weapons ever used by our species. Italy, Egypt, the Balkans, Indonesia - it was a World War and innocent civilians were targeted and terrorized over and over again. Out of that came the Geneva Conventions, a code of honor for warriors that was trumpeted by the United States in our hour as the 'good guys', the noble defenders of liberty.

The Geneva Conventions were ratified, and by our nation's law that makes them also the law of our land. They contain the wisdom of a generation that not only fought, but won a world war.

An invading country under the Geneva Convention has an obligation to provide law and order. To even pretend you were going to do that in Iraq would have required four times the number of troops we needed to knock down Saddam's speed bump of a military. There would also have been more initial casualties as nationalistic Iraqis attacked the nearest invading American. More Americans outside of the Green Zone, more casualties. Remember Rumsfeld watching looting in the streets and saying something about 'democracy is messy.' That's a failure to meet the Geneva Conventions, that breaks American Law. When your Commander-in-Chief comes from a state that routinely executes the mentally retarded, don't go pretending that pleading ignorance will save ya. A country with a population of 24 million, over sixteen million in the population centers? Could even a feces-flinging retard articulate the position that a hundred and fifty thousand troops were going to provide unquestioned authority.

Under the Geneva Conventions an invading country has a clear obligation to respect international law, and under such law the right to organize cannot be curtailed. Yet Paul Bremer re-affirmed Saddam Husseins' law criminalizing labor unions almost immediately after taking control of the country. Labor unions, perhaps the most effective means of forming bonds between people that transcend ethnic or religious lines, were made illegal to please Chevron, BP, and Exxon. It is illegal and it is wrong. Paul Bremer should not escape justice.

We have two choices. Either the Bush Administration intended to turn Iraq into another Nigeria, where 'business partners' were nothing more than reactionary tribal dumbasses who could be manipulated with a promise of a case of M-16's or a pair of Apache Helicopters (both of which were also easy profits for an established political donor.)

Or the Bush Administration was populated with political hacks who were far more concerned with expressing their political loyalty to Mr. Bush than affecting the real world that some of us remain committed to living in. Honestly, if the entire bureaucracy that one brings to the Presidency is filled with nothing but eager interns and graduates in 'Yes Man,' are you not responsible for the tragedy in that wake?

Yet that scream may be just an outlet for immature misunderstanding. If the mass media will never speak the syllables of a crime, is it really a crime? If no politically appointed prosecutor will mention and no politically appointed judge will hear, is it still illegal?

On the other hand, what I need to be holding up before my panting vision be the fact that 9/11 was enough to change the landscape forever. Pretending that the sole remaining Superpower should even consider the opinion of our lessors is now heretical. America is good, and pretending that our Leaders should ever be endure a judgment other than hagiography - have you forgotten 9/11.

It is now ten bells. I started this at seven thirty PM. I have more beer bottles before me than I can count with my blurring vision. Don't hesitate. Reading up on the Gen Con (amusing) or even the biography of C.H. can't hurt. What is becoming of our generation and our society?

I saw in the paper today that 78% of Americans are still actively keeping up with news about the tragedy that is our collapsed bridge. That makes this news event one of the top ten 'attention grabbers' since 1991, or something like that. Hmm.

First, let me say that the incident did give me some personal insight into what something like 9/11 might have been like for New Yorkers. At first, Cindy's yelling distracted me from whatever I was working on in my room, to see the headlines on CNN or MSNBC. The national cable networks didn't know dick about our local infrastructure, and their reporting was so confusing that I mistook the bridge in question for another one to the south - closer to where my parents live. My father travels a lot with his occupation, so I called him immediately. He didn't have time to chit chat, so I admitted in the trill of the moment that I only wanted to hear the sound of his voice - confirmed that mom was good too - then called my brother to get word on his family. Verizon was overloaded by then, I could not make a call for the rest of the night.

For about four hours everyone in the metro was either trying to call family or fielding calls from out-of-state relatives while watching the news. Even though in the end only about a dozen human beings actually died, the panic effect was powerful.

I think the effect hit me a bit more intensely than it might otherwise have, my father's clan buried two of its own in the two weeks leading up to this; I carried his brother to his final resting place exactly one week before. Bitter irony and the 'rule of three' were pounding on the panic button when I speed dialed the old man.

Thoughts post collapse:

It must be nice to be the Governor of a state with a well known fault line. Any failing bridge is going to collapse during an earthquake for sure, and everybody will buy that as an act of Gawd. Like that Murray peacock who owns the mine that ate those men this week - just keep talking about Gawd and earthquakes, the media will ignore those geologists who define the seismic noise as the sound of the mine collapse, not the cause of the collapse.

Like a morning show guy on KFAI mentioned this week, we finally have a reason be be happy that the Republicans are going to kick us out of our own capital city for a week while they have the theater they call a convention. They have an opportunity to turn the 35W tragedy into a 'win' for them, so for once our Blue State might see more money come back from the federal government than we pay out every year in taxes. They are still the party that holds graft and cronyism in an elevated spiritual realm far above reality, so I'm not holding my breathe. At least I can grant them a possible motive force.

Not to be ghoulish, but I just don't get why we are still sending divers down into the river to put their lives at risk, rather than just bringing in the heavy equipment and getting the clearing process underway. What gives here? It is not like after a week, when the chances of finding a living survivor from 9/11 were zero, the recovery teams broke out the shovels and toothbrushes and turned ground zero into an archaeological site. The remains of the 35W bridge are underwater. We are going to spend weeks, and millions of dollars, and put human lives (not just any human lives, but highly trained divers) at risk to recover remains that are water-logged and crushed, rather than remains that are water logged and more crushed? I understand respect for the dead, but over a million people can not continue to pour money, time, and risk lives over the remains of a few corpses. Obviously, if we lived in a society with limitless resources the bridge never would have collapsed in the first place. . .

Finally, our NPR station has devoted an ass-load of time to dwelling on the tragic event (despite my disdain for the network, a savvy listener can filter useful information out of their hopelessly 'objective' propaganda). They had a doctor on this afternoon who had evidently had some positive role in the treatment of victims of 8.1.7 (yeah, whatever). This crisis response official was asked about a scenario that kept him awake at night and he did not have an answer that involved asteroids or the eruption of Yellowstone. His response was an influenza pandemic. He stated that it might not be this year or the next, but it would happen within his career as a physician, and that our hospital system could never handle it. We have 20% less hospital beds today than we had in 1970. Large segments of society would have to be triaged and isolated. Think Katrina. To summarize, we have not had a pandemic in the history of 'modern' hospitalized medicine, but we are due, and we're screwed.


Remember to live life in the moment and appreciate all that we have. Any of the French Louis' would have unhesitatingly slain their own fathers to have a lifestyle that most of us take for granted. Plus we have access to the level of education and understanding that would have driven them to abdication or suicide. Don't shirk from the subversive truth. Revel in your consciousness, enjoy your existence. Move our culture forward.

Labels: current events, personal, pseudo-inspirational

I'm still bothered by the same banshee screams as one culture is ground asunder by another. Like one tectonic plate sliding beneath its neighbor; sometimes quiet, sometimes quake.

Either I'm just growing a little less idealistic and that's scuffing me into a pattern of negative thinking, or the culture of America has changed quite a bit in the last six years. I'm not sure which. Really, I'm not.

I've heard more than one person observe that 'you can tell who's going to be an asshole driver on the road by whether they have a fish/God Bless America/Support Our Troops bumper sticker on their vehicle. The kernel of this be more than the fact that a-holes are drawn to the dominate culture; the propaganda model currently applied to those groups purposefully excludes the information and perspective necessary to make the co-operative process of freeway travel possible.

Just as our Lieutenant Governor (and Secretary of Transportation) yesterday got neigh hysterical denying that the 35-W tragedy could possibly be something she might have to own up to - 'my daughter drives that bridge twice a day going to school, so to suggest anyone in our department chose dollars over public safety is an outrage' - - - the patterns never change. It is not about having contemplated the fact that your daughter drives a particular bridge every day, the kernel lies in never having contemplated anything. Nothing beyond short term impacts upon the self can be engaged in the current media model disseminated by corporate media.

This is brutally fascinating in a state where just one hundred and fifty years ago Sioux Indians were worth twenty five bucks a scalp.

We occupy our place in Minnesota because a majority of our ancestors were able to dehumanize the natives to the level of dogs. Yeah, its too bad they can't feed their children, guess they should have worked harder on their farms this spring. A subconscious refusal to connect the dots between forcing them off the valuable land and starvation of their next generation.

Again the refusal to consider other human beings reigns supreme.

Ms. Molnau, our Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of Transportation, totally misses the point. For her, the notions of human beings' safety and the bridge integrity were so far removed from the petty concerns of governance . . . that was engaged in such a level of the abstract as to be meaningless.

Of course she starts breaking glass with the sound of her nasal voice when she contemplates her daughter being in one of those submerged cars, but she has never considered that scenario until it happened to ten or so Minnesotans! It is the retardation of the neo-cons. It would have ironic value if dead people were not involved. They can never see themselves or their loved ones as part of society, only as elite - better than, superior too. We all die when the bridge we're driving over collapses.

So back to the initial impetus. The dehumanization of others has long been a part of the 'conservative' view, and now it is ascendant. All conservative media separates a man from his society and makes him feel defensive and reactionary; that's an easy man to control. That's a man with deformed testicles, but that's another blog entry.

Just as you will never get that prick in the SUV to back off more that six inches from your rear bumper before you find a place to merge into the right lane - no bumper sticker or hand gesture is going to change that behavior. It is not that the driver is too stupid to understand that their SUV has twenty times the mass of the motorcycle they are tailgating, just that they don't consider it or the life of said motorcyclist as being worthy of immediate consideration.

Grrr. I'm still frustrated.

Just as the tobacco industry made bazillions by screwing multiple generations of Americans into emphysema and lung cancer, so is the media cartel making bazillions at the cost of our democracy. They don't care. Just as our society is saddled with tens of millions of oxygen tanks 'cuz our legislature would rather lick the sensitive spot between the balls and the anus of Big Tobacco than challenge it, they are not going to challenge a media that turns potential human beings into retards.

Who wouldn't want to be a leader in a superpower populated by retards? Unlimited power, zero oversight. Sounds like fascist nirvana to me.

Labels: Grrr