Thinking Unenslaved

Earlier today, I tweeted: “they protest in the streets, on rooftops. chanting their devotion to the very faith that enslaves them and from which they beg deliverance.”

This is a thought that has been coming upon me for several days. Even with all the Twitter support for new elections in Iran, or at least a full recount of the vote, we are forgetting, if not simply outright ignoring, that the populace, in large part (even if proven not to be a technical majority), does not seek emancipation from its theocratic republic. All this outcry is, instead, the expression of a desire for a slightly more emotionally digestible form of theocratic rule.

Another way of saying that is: The protesters in Iran don’t want freedom. They are simply demanding that the shackles be loosened slightly so that they can scratch a philosophical itch or two.

And that, really, is it.

After some considerable consideration (pardon the redundancy), I changed my twitter avatar from a green one (Green is, as you might remember, the official color of Islam anyway), to a regular one a few days ago. In retrospect, I don’t support this Free Iran charade at all. Because it’s a charade. It’s pompous blowhardiness. Sure, if the elections were rigged, that’s wrong. Undoubtedly, if votes were ignored or uncounted, that’s wrong. But the desired end result is far too closely related to the status quo to be worthy of this much angst and bloodshed. How incredibly, unfortunately, disappointingly…

…ignorant.

“Save us from our self-imposed delusion with a slightly different form of self-imposed delusion” is precisely what this is all about. That ain’t freedom, friends and neighbors. That’s self-perpetuated willful enslavement. Iran will only begin to be “free” when the majority requires the government to remove the yolk of religious oppression. And it’ll still be a long way from there for them to go as a country.

And it’s this faulty, delusional presumption that makes the senseless, needless deaths, injuries, and property damage all the more depressing.

Humanity: the perpetually incessant bane of human progress.

Yes, “unenslaved” is a metaphor.

I have no delusions, illusions, or conclusions that the type of “slavery” I refer to when using this metaphor in any remote way correlates to the various forms of tribal, racial, and societal forms of slavery which have been committed upon people throughout humanity’s inglorious history. By using the word “unenslaved”, my intention is not to demean anyone who is, or has ever been, subjected to the crime we commonly refer to as slavery.

That having been said, I want to apologize for the dearth of posts over the past nine days. for what it’s worth, I was in the hospital with pneumonia from June 11-15, and sick for several days before that. It was the first time—ever—that I have been brought so low, and that’s including being quite sickly as a toddler, shot in combat in Panama, and having sustained back injuries during Desert Storm, along with the relatively typical respiratory issues from the same. At 42 years of age, I’m still young enough to be grossly opposed to feeling helpless. It was not a fun week, and I’m still not at 100% yet.

Now, why my guest bloggers didn’t do anything, I can’t tell you. Lazy bums they are, off with their own domains and such! Bums, I tell you! BUMS!

Anyway, let me take a moment hear to explain what this site is REALLY about.

When I started unenslaved.com, the thoughts in my head revolved around many subjects, ranging from a simple celebration of not being bound by traditionalism, religion, and other forms of social oppression through to wanting to be a resource for people who are in the process of freeing themselves from the various forms of institutionalized social repression (which includes some forms of education, religion and sociological circumstances). Ultimately, I think I’ve settled on the former, with a willingness to help those who want it, in terms of the latter. As well, if something I manage to bust out happens to pique someone’s interest to the point that they begin to at least toy with changing the way they think, then I would be a happy man indeed. This is also why I’ve invited others to post here: more opportunities to get more neurons firing, after all.

You should be aware that I, and my guest-bloggers (at least I believe I can safely speak for them on this level), are all smart-asses, but we are are passionate about the things we have come to know as true. For myself, as a “de-convert” of original Christian upbringing, I often have a difficult time not belittling those whose thinking is woefully clouded by delusion, because my de-conversion was a function of my personal maturation process. While I have every intention of continuing my patented smartassery, I also intend to improve upon not talking like a smarmy asshat, or even internally believing that I’m “better” than someone else who lives under the veil of delusion. I doubt I’ll be perfect at it, but I’ll honestly try.

Anything else, after all, would be me imposing a particularly insidious form of mental slavery on myself: a belief that I am “better” simply because I corrected an error. Such things don’t truly make anyone better, they just make one less gullible. Just as many bad things can happen by virtue of one’s transfixed skepticism as by virtue of one’s gullibility, after all.

So here’s the challenge: I hope that those of us that blog here will continually challenge ourselves and each other to be true to the premise above: We are not inherently better than anyone else. Now, we might be better at some things than certain other people: things like critical thinking, analysis, etc. But we’re not inherently better, or more superior at least I don’t believe we necessarily are. Let us educate without belittlement, and let us communicate without condescension. I realize this is no easy task. The easy stuff isn’t really worth doing, though.

The challenge for those who come here to read these things is to at the very least attempt to be non-judgmental. You are neither expected to nor desired to agree with everything we put out to be read. You are certainly not expected to think like we do, believe what we believe, or frankly to be as self-reliant as we are.

Some are going to read that as a sidelong put-down, but that’s not the intent of that statement. Most people who believe in a deity are actually not quite as self-reliant as they tend to envision themselves. This is precisely where communications tend to get bogged down. The only thing I ask is that we make honest attempts to communicate as opposed to simply vociferating, pontificating, and jumping feet-first into the ad-hominem grab-bag of oneupmanship.

Thanks for your time.

No matter how you cut it, ‘atheist’ is their word for us; thinking human beings free of superstition.

Sadly, freelance religion has had a very long time to weave into the public consciousness such an elaborate distortion of this simple definition, into one which actually has very little to do with reality, that in many parts of the world atheists are ranked well below every other minority in terms of public trust.

They also describe us as having lost our faith, when in reality we have gained so much more; some kind of first glimpse into critical thinking–or at least some kind of impression of what the world should be like, were mere human animals truly capable of honest self governance.

At this point words often begin to take on more flexible meanings, than they do in ordinary dialogue. Ostensibly secular friends and family suddenly have an armchair opinion on metaphysics, which although well meaning are often vent out-loud rote, rather than that which can be corroborated by facts. We’ve all heard the one about there being, “some kind of energy or spirit out there” and that “atheists believe everything was created by nothing“. How far this is from the truth is as spectacularly insulting to us as perhaps anything can be. And there’s that word again, truth: that which is, given all the evidence, as unambiguously described as can be.

For some, the vocabulary we use to express this aspect of our humanist conviction isn’t found in the written word, it’s in the way we make music or art or that which motivates us to act with passion and true faith. This is just as strongly felt in the irreligious as it is felt by many within a religious faith, but it is a different much calmer, less anxious energy which gets the irreligious out of bed, than that which inspires Christian missionaries and aid workers.

It’s these people who I personally draw the line at criticising. If a near destitute nun in Somalia is looking after a mud hut full of AIDS orphans, you can bet your life she cares less about what happens to herself when she dies, than she cares about what those in her care will do without her. Who am I to criticise her? Many people find the energy to continue in this kind of work from the pages of a book we just so happen to be able to prove is so full of contradictions that it could not have been divinely authored. So be it.

Not that this acknowledgement of the good people do lets every Christian altruist off the hook. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, for example, certainly raised a great deal of awareness in the western world to the plight of the destitute in India. That and a Nobel Prize for peace still doesn’t excuse the fact that she knowingly received donations from Charles Keating of other people’s money, which she then refused to hand back, once Keating found himself in jail.

As sentient, emotion driven creatures of pattern and habit, we turn to literature and the words of those who came before us to understand our place in the scheme of things. The irreligious are no different to the religious in this regard.

In Africa, for example, as within many sects of Christianity, ancestral spirits are worshipped on a par with Yahweh and Jesus. There is an understanding in remembering the dead from whom we are directly descended and observing the traditions they stood for, which transcends the labels which have been placed upon these numinous aspects of our id by centuries of organised religion.

The lazy Christian, who allows herself to behave as irresponsibly at the ballot box as she does in her private life, is as ignorant of the past as she demands a share in the illusion of capitalist choice and no more chosen or saved because her lip-service adhearance to Christianity than she is capable of forming a rational opinion on herself or anyone else, much less the true motivations of her Pastor or Priest. It is her opinion of the irreligious which defines the word atheist in much of America and Europe today.

That is why, without fail, the single most popular kind of fan fiction in every bible believing, Palin voting, Obama hating Christian bookshelf, is the obligatory “When I was an atheist” semi-autobiographical sob story.

The names Lee Strobel and Antony Flew crop up most often, in this genre. The latter having penned “There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind” and the former having arrived at a life in commercial religion as an investigative journalist, with books such as “The Case for a Creator”.

In the light of such erroneous definitions of the word atheist, as those which are propagated by the very people who stand to gain the most from doing so, Flew and Strobel reveal their true intentions.

Strobel, far from presenting evidence which undermines any of the solid scientific principals which outline a naturalistic world-view, relies instead on a style of writing which appears to reveal an unknown, almost conspiratorial conflict between various scientific disciplines and individual scientists. These rifts, which invariably take place at the bleeding edge of any endeavour into unknown territory are, in fact, exactly the kind of values in the logic of discovery which are required if you want to be sure of your evidence.

Strobel knows this and ignores it, specifically when he misrepresents the anthropic principal, which “is the collective name for several ways of asserting that physical and chemical theories, especially astrophysics and cosmology, need to take into account that there is life on Earth, and that one form of that life, Homo sapiens, have attained sapience.” – wikipedia

Flew, on the other hand, is an apologist of convenience on an entirely different level of intellectual dishonesty. Most Christians read the title of his book and assume that there are people out there who, overnight, “get saved” despite years of being irreligious. This is not what happened to Flew.

In October 2004 he stated that he was a deist, saying “I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations.”, adding, “My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species.”

This is an order of magnitude more sophisticated an argument than claiming to have “seen the light” or had a personal experience he can’t explain. But to read the hype on Flew, you’d be forgiven for assuming his road to Damascus moment was one of a profound arrival at a new set of truths so compelling they assuaged him of a great evil.

This artificial line of demarkation between thinking outside of biblical literalism and thinking which assumes a prime mover to be the de-facto explanation for the unexplained, is tantamount to asserting that because you can’t explain something by natural means you can therefore explain it by postulating supernatural causation inductive of unfalsifiable conjecture.

This is an extremely disingenuous way of insisting upon your audience that because it may well be many hundreds of years before we can definitively answer some of the most important questions in the philosophy of science, until then it is better the devil you know to assign to words like God and faith, entirely different meanings than that which they are generally understood to mean by the vast majority of Jeudeo Christian believers.

Regardless of the somewhat academic difference between an agnostic and an atheist, the assumption among the vast majority of evangelicals is that if a self-espoused atheist can change his mind, why can’t Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens, or even you, reading this article now? And so, out there, we perfectly awake free thinkers, continue to encounter the same religiously founded, wilful non-thinking which underscores so much of society.

The trick, if that is an appropriate name for staying alert, is to deliberately practise open-mindedness. I find this animation by QualiaSoup to be effective in outlining how this might be done.

Hello everyone, I’m Jim. @Synthaetica invited me to blog here after we chatted via twitter on atheism and religion. Over the coming weeks and months, I intend to share with you all some of my thoughts which hopefully add to the debate on atheism and rational enquiry.

My Background:
About 4 or 5 years ago now, I realised that the perfect antidote to my near constant frustration at being offended by religious interference in my otherwise perfectly happy life, was to fling open my virtual windows and shout, “Jesus, save me from your followers!” at the top of my lungs.

In the time since then I’ve come to realise that there is far more to the subject of religion than the provable lies of educationally subnormal inbred evangelical creationists.

I now spend the majority of my time blogging on my ever expanding understanding of various sciences, via my own blog howgoodisthat.wordpress.com, where numerous characters from the wacky world of Christian faith in faith and evangelical belief in belief, rant uncontrollably in my comments section until they’re blue in the face about how God loves me almost as much as he does them, and if I don’t like it he’ll prove it, after I’m already dead, by forcing me to in fact carry on living only this time for eternity and in permanent agony. Which is ideal, since I’m also quite partial to a bit of BDSM. Wait, did I type that or think it?

I presume from this rather contradictory account of what constitutes perfect love, Yahweh is no fan of evidence, British humour or, indeed, the very freewill his followers claim he gave me in the first place (although quite how you give freedom to someone on the proviso they only use it to enslave themselves is never quiet explained). Regardless, I assert with full confidence that not only is the whole hell for all eternity scenario a complete load of steaming fresh dog’s eggs, but that even if it were possible for people who claim to know something for sure based upon the say-so of a two thousand year old book plagiarised from Pagan astrology myths, I can’t personally imagine anything more like hell than spending eternity surrounded by Christians–and am therefore fairly indifferent to the whole “thou shalt” thing regardless of the threat to my just as non-existent soul they claim I’m dabbling with, by thinking for myself instead of being told what to think.

Anyway, one regular Christian reader / commentator of my blog recently asked me to pose some of best toughest questions. I suspect a hack job blog entry of some kind, somewhere in his future, but I thought I’d share the list of questions / observations I sent him as an opening salvo.

• Where is the archeological evidence of the exodus?
• If Jesus was a liberal pacifist, why is he working for the Americans?
• If God is omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent, who is the devil?
• Why doesn’t prayer heal cancer?
• When did Jesus say “do unto others as you would have them do unto you, unless you’re a white middle class conservative Protestant”?
• Why did God allow a devout practising Christian to discover and prove that there was no supernatural causation to human evolution?
• If it is the unalterable perfect word of the creator of the universe, why doesn’t the bible once mention penicillin, dinosaurs, bacteria, radiation, electromagnetism, DNA, gravity, aerodynamics or special relativity but has detailed descriptions of how those who don’t follow Yahweh should be enslaved, tortured, raped and murdered?
• Why did Yahweh ignore the screams of Auschwitz but listen intently to Rick Warren?
• How many atheists have planted bombs outside school yards in the name of rational secularism?
• Which part of every single peer reviewed falsifiable data on palaeontology, archeology, genetics, anthropology, geology, cosmology, quantum electrodynamics and the principal of maximum entropy do young-earth creationists not understand?
• Why is faith in a lack of evidence a virtue, but a belief in the truth an attack on morality?

Well, nice meeting you all and I hope to communicate with you all soon. Twitter me!

The following was originally titled “Because Theocracy Leads to Permissible Extremism, THAT’s Why!” and posted at the otherwhirled and Mock, Paper, Scissors on March 23, 2008 in support of the Blogswarm Against Theocracy. This short series of posts is still pertinent today, I believe.

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I cannot recall how many people I’ve spoken with, either via blogs or in-person, who reacted with the word “But nobody wants a theocracy in America” whenever I bring the subject up. And indeed, until recently, there wasn’t really a specific push to alter our Constitution in any formative way, and the only reason the American public has come to recognize that there are some minority movements in that direction is because of the thankfully-failed presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee. Thanks to his “charming” southern style and disarming smile, however, even given the suddenness of the our coming to understand that conservative fundamentalists DO want to turn this nation into a Christian Nation, many still don’t realize the true threat that impetus represents. And since nobody in that campaign ever used the term “theocracy”, these very same people who were “a bit put off” by Huckabee’s stance on altering the Constitution still don’t believe that anyone is creating, or has ever made any attempt to create, a theocratic state.

Head in the sands, their worldview is written on the backs of their eyelids, and its name is sciolism. But I’ve already spoken enough about that.

When the Buddha was destroyed in Bamyan by the Taliban back in 2001, everyone here in America seemed taken aback. But at least on the part of some of us, that incredulity was largely feigned. After all, we already live in a society which unapologetically and unabashedly forces galleries and museums not to display works of art that are uncomplimentary to the Christian Deity and Its Holy Progeny. We already live in a society which disallows admittance to certain schools to those who are openly homosexual, refuses military service to the same and withholds benefits to service men and women whose homosexuality becomes known. We already live in a society where religious-sponsored abstinence-only education is taught in public schools, where religious-sponsored “alternatives” to centuries-established science are required to be taught alongside the scientific curriculum, and where educators must mark as correct responses from students whose religious doctrine define the Universe as a 6,000-year-old mechanism created and overseen by the Christian Deity. We already live in a society in which the government sets up programs exclusively available to religious organizations, and subjectively requires candidates for political office to publicly hold at least some form of religious belief that is not Muslim, Wiccan, Satanist, or Pagan.

In many ways, America is already not very far removed from being a theocratic state. Hence this blogswarm and the absolute important it holds to those of us who recognize the potential impact of the things I detailed in the paragraph above. And of other things, I’m sure. One of the things that frightens me the most about the permissiveness with which religious bigotry is handled in our society is the impact it has on our children. Even in what has become a largely progressive society on many levels, these children still grow up thinking that only members of their religious denominations will share the “Kingdom of Heaven”—in some cases, only members of their particular congregation. Children are being home-schooled in higher numbers, and this only produces more insularity, more misunderstanding, and a greater sense of that misplaced entitlement that is already so pervasive in our world today. I do honestly look upon this treatment of our children as a form of child abuse. They are not prepared for the world at large whenever they do leave home, and that is the gravest error any parent can make: worse even than the rote teachings of intolerance, bigotry, self-righteousness, and duplicity they are given before they leave the house. And as adults, these children live in a society in which their intolerance and bigotry is tolerated, even encouraged, by the news media, by politicians, and of course by the company they keep in their insular segments of the society. In turn, those who do not eventually see the silliness (or perhaps the abject cruelty) of their ways, will start the cycle all over again with their own children.

What the Taliban did to Buddha in March of 2001 in one brazen act is no different than what conservative fundamentalists in America do each day to our nation as a whole through a measured, implacable series of legislation. The reason why we blog against these acts is to make people more aware that they even exist. Since ours is a society largely defined by convenience, attempting to recognize the patterns left behind by the religious fundamentalists takes work, and work is awful inconvenient. Even those who recognize these issues largely feel that anything they could do about them would be too limited, too small of a scale, to have any impact. That’s not true.

This is just the third blogswarm on the topic of theocracy, and if I’m not mistaken, sometime during yesterday, we surpassed the number of posts from the last one. We blog, people read, people begin to understand. We are not helpless in our fight against theocracy, for our readers begin to recognize that the theocratic movement has many faces, many subtle nuances, and the most recent public expression of that desire was probably communicated out of sheer ignorance on behalf of Huckabee. The fundamentalists like to work in the dark, behind closed doors, sending hand-picked groups out into the open to whine and complain and argue and fight, knowing that they cannot be trusted to reveal the true mission, couching it instead in the simple terms of “Freedom of Expression”—the very same Freedom, in fact, they would hope to deny so many others.

So, over this weekend we have blogged again. But we are reaching a point where blogging, helpful as it is, is by no means enough. I believe it is time to do more than blog. I believe it is time to actively, even proactively, fight the elements of theocracy in our courts, our schools, our universities, and yes, even our churches, synagogues, and mosques. Religion has no formative place in our government. We can be proud of the fact that many religious people fought and died to earn this country its independence without having to hold every election under a cross. We can celebrate this country’s Judeo-Christian roots without turning every courtroom into a prayer service. And we can remind our friends and neighbors who have no problem with the efforts to make this a Christian Nation exactly where such ideas got the people of Afghanistan. Help them envision what life would be like without the Freedom of choice, the Freedom of expression, the Freedom of Art.

Here are some helpful questions you can ask those who don’t think this is a real issue:

1. Would you love your God if the Law said you had no other choice but to do so?
2. Would you want your children to attend a public school where Baptism was the first pre-requisite?
3. Would you be excited to go to Church on Sunday if you were required to sing praises at work each day?
4. Would you uphold the Law and stone your child to death for disobedience?
5. Would you want to live in a Democracy where all the candidates were ministers? or priests? or rabbis?
6. Would you want to live in a society where “choice” amounted to whether you go to mass on Saturday or Sunday?

Our freedom is at stake. Let’s not just leave it to a collection of postings once or twice a year.

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Technorati Tags:
1. blog against theocracy
2. anti-theocracy
3. religious hegemony
4. separation of church and state

cross-posted to Mock, Paper, Scissors

The following was originally posted at the otherwhirled and Mock, Paper, Scissors on April 8, 2007 in support of the original Blogswarm Against Theocracy. This short series of posts is still pertinent today, I believe.

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Ah, you came back. Thanks for that. This won’t be so long, because the thing that makes a group of people tend towards the dismissive is fairly easily identified.

Neoconservatives are very quick to dismiss the “Blogging Against Theocracy” endeavor as one born of fear. We are apparently so afraid of Christianity, that even allowing a piffle—a tish, a skosh, a teeny bit—of it in our lives is too much to bear. Yes, yes, I know. It’d be a wonderful life if everything were so obvious! But of course, despite its inherent untruth, this argument is the most commonly chosen because it is the one stance with which they can readily identify.

One of the things which continually strikes me as I discuss “faith” with my religious friends, is that they tend to forget the entire premise of faith: that that in which they believe might well not be true. For if it was inherently true, there would be no need to have “faith” in its truth. If all the elements of a religious belief were known, scientific fact, faith would cease to exist, replaced by knowledge. And yet repeatedly, evangelicals speak about their “faith” in terms of what they know. They know the Word of their God is Inspired. They know He died for their sins. They know He rose from the grave. And yet, somehow, they wrap it all up and refer to this supposed knowledge as faith, implying that their knowledge may well be unfounded!

Yeah, have a sip of that wine or beer or whatever. This stuff makes my head hurt, too.

This happens because so very many of them practice their one true universal talent of sciolism on themselves. Oh certainly, there are many believers who understand what their faith is about, and who appreciate the inherent risk of believing in something that others don’t believe in. But there are many more whose faith amounts to the steadfast belief that what they think they know is right and true and pure and immutable and holy and…and…and…well, it’s just right! Because they’ve been taught that it is right in Sunday School, told that it is right in their households, and instructed that nonbelievers (and oftentimes those who practice the same religion in different ways) are simply wrong and going to Hell. I can’t even count the number of times during my own childhood when I was frustrated with my friends for not believing in our own cultish practice of Christianity, that I was told something to the effect, “Oh, don’t worry about them. They’re not going to share the Kingdom of Heaven with you.”

Answers like that, and the rebuttals you see to this endeavor from the evangelicals, are easy. I don’t think they’re malicious by any means—and let’s do keep in mind that most of these people merely do what they believe is the right thing to do!—but such responses are a form of fear-mongering. And fear is the root of sciolism. After all, the most formative periods of growth in any religion are during those times when it’s being persecuted. It’s a human nature thing: we perform more efficiently, and often more effectively, under duress. And goodness knows that with the ease of making a few Moslem extremists look like an entire religious society (a theocracy, no less) is set against “America” (which to fundamentalists means “Christians”), the neoconservatives are under a lot of duress. Even acknowledging that there is at least one religion in the world that is practiced by more people than those who subscribe to the tenets of their own faith must have been difficult.

One last sip. We’re almost done.

So now, they claim their religion is being attacked on all sides. All they want to do is have a little prayer, and we “unfairly” want to keep them from doing so. Read Bob’s interpretation of the tenets of this endeavor that I shared with you yesterday. It is written from fear. We’re out to get them. We’re out to force them to change their ways. We’re out to undo all the good they’re doing. We’re out to redefine their definition of “good” and “right”. And it’s oh-so-easy, and ever so disingenuous, to describe us in this manner, because Bob and people like him honestly fear the fact that responsible members of society might hold a faith that differs from their presumption of knowledge. That’s a by-product of sciolism, for they have failed to understand what we’re talking about, just as they fail to understand the true intent behind the actions of church leaders on the national level. People like Bob may not intentionally be wanting a theocratic state (and for what it’s worth, I believe his assertion in this regard), but I do not believe the same is true for those for whom neoconservatism is a business.

But what is most striking—and of most concern—to me is the depth to which these fundamentalists fear themselves. If they truly had faith in their religion and their ability to teach and enforce its tenets, then what would they have to fear by not infusing public education, political discourse, and state and federal legislation with their religious beliefs, practices, and interpretations? If their God is truly all-powerful, what risk is there in leaving the religious education of their children to home and church? Let us not forget, that no matter what happens in the world at large or in their private lives, they will say that it was God’s Will that whatever-it-was came to pass. And if that’s really true, what is the harm in leaving science to scientists, literature to academics, and religion to the priests and ministers?

If they truly have faith in their chosen way of life, then people like myself would simply be targets for that “Go Ye Therefore” doctrine, right? We wouldn’t be “the enemy”, and neither would anyone else. Instead, due to their sciolistic review of their own religion, “preach the gospel” has become “make up a new ‘science’ and try to teach it” and “attempt to pass anti-abortion legislation instead of trying to extend the definition of ‘life’”. Because those things are easier to do, dismissively treating dissenting views as reactionary.

It’s easier, you see, because that way, proponents of their “faith” will band together and work harder for their “cause” under this manufactured duress, as opposed to having faith, even in themselves. Fear has become the new faith for them, and Fear is a much more demanding god than what they had before.

A pity, that.

{published on Mock, Paper, Scissors as well}

<Technorati Tag: blog against theocracy>

The following was originally posted at the otherwhirled and Mock, Paper, Scissors on April 7, 2007 in support of the original Blogswarm Against Theocracy. This short series of posts is still pertinent today, I believe.

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Sit back, grab a beer or a glass of wine, turn the lights down, put on some quiet music, and imagine with me for a moment:

Imagine a world where people of diverse ideas can discuss important topics without burning straw men. . . .a world in which our natural, innate curiosity is shared by adult members of all political and idealogical persuasions. . . .a world in which it is by no means satisfying to glance at a thing—an idea, a principle, a philosophy—and consider it known. . . .a world in which a dismissive attitude towards the things which question one’s sense of normality, emotional security, or even personality, would be a foreign concept.

Imagine a world, in other words, devoid of the vagaries of all those things which have become the hallmarks of neoconservative philosophy: hypocrisy, duplicity, intolerance, sanctimony, deceit, guile, pretense, and sciolism.

Now, take a sip of whatever that is you chose to drink for this, and bear with me, because I’m about to address something that most, if not all, of us participating in this Blog Against Theocracy have been tap-dancing around, to our collective detriment. For in our attempt to be respectful and considerate, we have left this relatively indefensible word, “theocracy”, dangling out there, ripe for the picking. After all, there is, to all perception, no overt movement to set aside the First Amendment, so when we use this word “theocracy”, it is easily dismissible by those invested with a solopsism so self-definitive that they truly do not understand the relevance of differing opinion. And as a result, our mission is undermined at the outset, victim to the sciolistic tendencies of evangelicals, who honestly believe that in cursorily perusing a few posts relating to this endeavor, they understand not only our mission, but our impetus and our history.

And I’m very sorry, but there’s really only one religion in America which attempts to suborn the separation of Church and State instead of confronting it directly. I don’t need to name it. Theirs is a facile stance for argument, you understand, because it inherently makes all counter-arguments reactionary, and our being reactionary is something the more juvenile among them take great pride in pointing out.

Another sip, if you will, because I must beg your patient indulgence in explaining this.

I know that I was very clear [ed: Clean Cut Kid went dark in early 2008], when I announced on Clean Cut Kid, that I would be participating in this endeavor. I said:

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I believe that this is an important endeavor to support, and please note the careful wording of the intention behind this movement. We are not anti-religious, or even necessarily predisposed against any particular relgion. [sic, sorry]

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So, shortly thereafter, one of South Dakota’s most extreme voices signs on with this as rebuttal. Go ahead, click the link and read the whole thing; it’ll open in another window for you. An excerpt follows.

---

Oh, they included a description of what it is they’re against. It isn’t any stuff that constitutes a theocracy, but they’re apparently so repulsed even a whiff of Christian beliefs being expressed publicly or informing public policy that they’re calling it “theocracy”:

* religious discrimination (not sure what this means–disparaging those who worship government?)
* end-of-life care (i.e. kill the disabled and infirm at will)
* reproductive health decisions without legal restraint (i.e. kill your baby if it interferes with your sexual fulfillment)
* academic integrity (i.e. vehemently reject anything the Bible says, no matter how much scientific sense it makes, in favor of anything that fits an atheistic worldview, no matter how little sense it makes)
* sound science (i.e. embrace naturalism)
* respect for all families (i.e. whether they’re a family or not, let them call themselves one, because feeling good trumps all facts or truths)
* the right to worship, or not (a right guaranteed and enjoyed by all Americans, unless you are a Christian who wants to express your faith in public)

---

Did you catch all that in the full post? The dismissiveness, obviously barren of any investigation (let alone concern) whatsoever into whatever it is we’re talking about as “theocracy”? The deliberate rendering of an anti-theocratic stance as anti-Christian. The placating tone of one who not only firmly believes what he believes, but who is palpably unappreciative of the fact that SOMETHING might be going on in the world that could at the very least be construed as sowing the seeds of religious hegemony? And why should he be appreciative of it? If a theocratic state is eventually founded on his principles, then the right thing would obviously have been done. There are many points on which his post could be rebutted, and not the least important of those would be the fact that many of those participating in this endeavor are religious individuals. He’s got digg on his blog, so you can agree or disagree with him on your own accord.

But my point here is not what or how Bob thinks. Far from it, for Bob and everyone else are quite welcome to their own thoughts. Bob is merely an example of how certain people think, or fail to think. I don’t even care that he is a devout Christian, for even more fundamental than that, Bob is a sciolist. That is, one who indulges himself in superficial knowledgability, both to his own detriment, and to ours. A rational discussion on this subject cannot actually be held with sciolists, for they do little but utter rhetoric while pretending such utterance invests them not only with holiness, but with the right to expect all others to subscribe to their belief in what is holy. Sciolists will skim over a dissenting writing, or worse yet, just hear about it, and presume that not only can they rationally refute it, but that they can also argue the dissenting point and play “devil’s advocate”.

It is in this way that our discussion of the imminent theocracy in America is immediately curtailed, for when we talk, or write, or post, we are precluded from effective communication by the very act of intentional, willful, directed ignorance—sciolism, in more succinct terms. And as long as Bob and people like him indulge themselves in this sanctimonious pretense of understanding things which they dismissively ignore and impugn, we will continue to have to operate on the same level as political extremists. And what is most aggravating about that is the fact that working to protect the First Amendment is at least philosophically as centrist as one can be.

Oh, by all means. You need another drink? No worries. I’ll wait for you. Like I said, this will take a while.

Next: the roots of sciolism ~ {these posts are all mirrored at Mock, Paper, Scissors, by the way}

<Technorati Tag: blog against theocracy>

(the following is a re-post from the otherwhirled. i felt like being snarky this morning.)

photo credit: Holyland Imports/ny

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one of my favorite groups when i was a younger lad was Echo & the Bunnymen. at least until they went and got all religious about life. back in 1984, on the album, “Ocean Rain”, they produced a song called “Thorn of Crowns”, hence the title of this post. yes, i do know the two things are distinctly different. nevertheless, i include a video version of the song below, because the one reminded me of the other. my favorite line is the opening:

You set my teeth on edge
You set my teeth on edge
You think you’re a vegetable
Never come out of the fridge

it may be overly ambitious, and actually, it probably is. but, i figure what the hell. we have one life to live and this is no dress rehearsal, after all.

anyway, i have installed, and even potentially correctly configured, the IntenseDebate plugin for comments here. IntenseDebate will facilitate better conversations than the default WordPress comments system.

i’m also using a plugin I hadn’t seen before, WP to Twitter, so that posts will go directly out to Twitter. we’ll see how this works as opposed to some of the external services. those are pretty slow (they poll their subscribed RSS feeds on a schedule, so if they tweet in real-time, it’s coincidental). i’ve already seen one go real-time, but with an error. we’ll see how it auto-tweets this post to determine if my tweak worked, i guess.

my thanks to these plugin developers.

other than that, i’m going to try to keep the site as slim as possible. i’m not expecting hundreds of gazillions of users, but faster is always better, and easier to maintain.

peace, out.

 

so….

in my previous post, i lamented the fact that my blog participation was sporadic at best. naturally, part of me wants to improve up on that factor. the other part(s) of me are completely aware of the fact that:

• i have a pretty intense job (typically 55-65 hours per week)
• i have two time-intensive extra-curricular activities (martial arts student/instructor, soccer referee)
• i’m a homeowner, spouse, and parent of two wonderful young free-thinkers
• while not addicted to Twitter, it very much fits into my modus operandi

in other words, at least from this broadcasting station, don’t expect “unenslaved” to mean “irresponsible” or “ignorant of the inherent impact of one’s actions on his peers and the world around him.”

so, my posting will be a bit infrequent here as well, but since this is focused on more fundamental personal impetuses, it should be a bit more regular. i have invited a couple of others to post here from time to time to help keep things moving.

to answer a question that hasn’t been directly asked yet: yes, i am walking away from the otherwhirled. the domain name (otherwhirled.com) is cute and all that, but it’s not really me, if that makes any sense. and doing what i’m doing here just wouldn’t be that effective. if anyone wants the domain, i’ll make it cheap. i’ll even be happy to continue to host it. it comes up for renewal on 08/27/2009, along with otherwhirled.net.

fair notice: i am an atheist. on Dawkin’s scale, i am willing to assert that i am functionally a “6″, but intellectually a “7″. i listen to reason, but for the past twenty-odd years, i’ve not heard any theocratic arguments that are actually based in sound reasoning. as an atheist, though, i live in a conservative, religious community in which i participate actively. i live in a world circumscribed by theocratic thinking, and i do so without even thinking of heinous acts to commit against the inherent stupidity. resultingly, much of what i’ll be writing about will concern the need to think, feel, reason, and converse unenslaved by these social interdependencies while living a life that is inherently circumscribed by them.

changing ourselves, and changing our communities and environment will be a life-long process for those of us who are reading this today, the day this entry was written. this kind of change is not a short-term effect. it is really a series of processes that will need to be continually reavaluated, reassessed, audited, and adjusted. what i’m doing here today is not the beginning of that process. i’m just very tired of not doing more myself to help it along.

so let’s hope that i can do so.

there will be an inherent element of “preaching to the choir” in what i (and hopefully “we”) do here. there’s nothing wrong with that at all. conversing on our actions, sharing ideas and experiences, promoting critical thinking….these are all worthy actions to undertake. but of course, that’s not all of it. i honestly hope for the participation and feedback from theists who are genuinely concerned about the future of humanity, and who are willing to question not only their beliefs, but the directions those beliefs carry them, and the impact those beliefs have on their worldviews.

there is actually much more for these types of people to consider, than there is for those of us who are unburdened by theistic oppression, after all.

greetings.

i am Synthaetica. i have blogged in many places, under at least a few names, to the point where i felt enslaved by the practice of blogging. my participation in such places was sporadic at best, and those places largely just served to piss me off about how much i didn’t get done.

as well, the reason why i tended to fail at those endeavors was because their focus was never quite solidified. sure, i love photography, but not with the same frenzied passion that so many do, so i’d wander off on other tangents. and i also love being a smartass, but at 40-something the constant acerbity sets my own teeth on edge. not to mention that the one-trick-pony approach was pretty lame when the trick was essentially photo-caption snark. well before the last elections, i managed to burn myself out on that.

so from the outset, this site is something a little different. you’ll find that my being a smartass is a little difficult to avoid, but it won’t consume what i do here. the intent of this site is to address my true passions, which are, summarily:

• working against the establishment, especially the indirect enforcement of supporting legislation, of a theocratic state
• fighting against all forms of religious involvement, entanglement, and decision-making in the realm of public education
• offering insight to those people who want to receive it, regarding the process of disassociating oneself from delusional thinking in terms of religious beliefs, spirituality, and emotional dependency.

so, that’s what this is about. this takes up from where i only briefly touched upon in the written form, on a few occasions, at the otherwhirled. i hope you enjoy it as much as i believe i will.