Thinking Unenslaved

this job/contract-hunting scene drives me nuts. this little voice that has hung around me for 40-odd years tells me i should have been more patient where i was at and taken the woefully lose-lose situation i was in as some sort of challenge to improve myself or some shit.

amazingly, i do manage to refrain from bashing myself in the head.

my best lead right now involves waiting to replace the guy who’s currently fucking up that position right and left. he apparently needs one more major screw-up, then the two people over there i’ve spoken to will push me in front of their senior vp of professional services. i’m not normally one to root for someone else’s failure—not even in sports!—but it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and from where i’m sitting, there just ain’t enough dogs.

that’s a quote from somewhere, i forget where. meh.

read more: focusing the unfocused

Reminder: ThinkAtheist.com Weekend Podcast on September 6, 10p Eastern. This Sunday’s general topic is Traditionalism. We’ll discuss several forms of traditionalism that are pervasive in our lives, especially these minor forms of religious traditionalism that are quite transparently fixed in our secular lives. There’s a possibility that Dr. Frink will be with us, so keep your fingers crossed! ThinkAtheist.com members: Please RSVP on the event page linked above!

NEXT: Un:Enslaved contributor and fellow twitter-whore, @MovingToMontana, has designed something that every card-carrying atheist needs: the card to actually carry. Download yours today, tonight, or at some other convenient time for you. I’ll eventually get that link into the sidebar, too.

and lastly….what i actually came here to do today….

Look. I’m fine if you want toworship a non-existent “God”, even if your only real reason for doing so is the gross combination of “that’s what you’ve been told to do” and “that’s the emotional crutch you need to have.” Really, it’s okay.

But. Each and every abrahamic religion is premised upon one common concept: FAITH. Without faith, your religion has no meaning, no purpose, no relevance whatsoever. And, functionally speaking, faith is the opposite of fact. So when you start spouting elements of your faith as fact, you have ceased contributing to the formative discussion. And worse, when you spout the “God is Love” stuff, you actively undermine the entire premise of your own faith.

Think about that for a minute. This isn’t a new argument from the atheist standpoint, but this is the exact problem with every abrahamic religion: your God is NOT “Love”. Your God is not even nice. Your God, according to your own Holy Books, is an insensitive, insecure, vituperative ass, wholly and exclusively interested in exactly one thing: the undying devotion and ego-massaging of vast numbers of human beings.

And what’s REALLY ironic about that is the fact (the proven, irrefutable fact), that the God described in your Holy Books is actually just a construct of human thinking. The irony is nearly overwhelming. You ultimately choose to believe in an imaginary God because certain persons from the Bronze Age who sought a slightly more insidious way to control the population (as opposed to simple, direct militarism) made up some quaint fairy tales for you to believe in. And worse than that, a lot of those stories are far from “quaint”. According to your Holy Books, your God is responsible for the deaths of millions, directly ordered the rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of women and children, and even struck down his own people for being as gullible as he supposedly made them.

Yeah, I know, you’ll cast that all aside and argue at me with the other self-contradictory stories from your book of fairy tales. And that’s okay. Just understand that when that’s all you do, when that’s the sum and total of your apparent ability to form cohesive thought, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to swallow the condescension. And yes, when you willfully confuse the concepts of faith and fact, I don’t even try.

It’s Tuesday, folks, and you all know what that means! That’s right, it’s time for me to ramble semi-uncontrollably on several potentially-related-but-probably-not subjects. Yes, yes, welcome to the mental ramblings of a forty-something untreated ADHD sufferer/channeler/user/whatever.

Okay, actually, you probably didn’t see that one coming, but it’s about time I started some sort of meme over here, so T.M.R. (Tuesday Morning Rambling) it is! Besides, TMR is almost like TMI, but all piratey and shit. Truly, what could be better?

1. So, speaking of piratey things, I want to thank Cap’N Dyke for keeping me listed as her official “Snarkalopicus” (see her sidebar) despite my long absence from snarky things here, there, and really most anywhere other than Twitter.

2. Actually, related to the previous, be advised I am still working on fleshing out the blogroll over here. I’m being very prudent this time, however, and selecting those whom I already very much admire, whether I knew them from previous blog incarnations and have been reading them all along, or whether I met them more recently on Twitter. To be perfectly honest, to be in my blogroll here should “mean a lot”. Current listings constitute less than 5% of those whom I at least skim on a regular basis, and these ones, I read every posting every day. They are golden. Subscribe to their feeds!

3. If you, or anyone you know, are looking for someone with a couple of decades’ experience in Software Development from the Quality Assurance perspective, please put them in touch with me. Being who and what I am, I try to keep my professional life somewhat distinct from most of my online presences, and I would truly be peeved for this to stand in the way of that. Discretion is recommended.

4. Tune in this Sunday to the ThinkAtheist.com Weekend Podcast hosted by yours truly. Since it’s Labor Day weekend, I fully expect drunken discourse on virtually any topic under the sun, but the theme for the night is traditionalism.

5. Do you Twitter naked? Good for you!

6. I’m genuinely curious: How many of you are using social networks such as Twitter to find like-minded people in your local areas for friendship or romance? Is the process successful? And if it is, do you tweet to these friends/relations more or less since you found them? Answers in the comments if you would please be so kind.

7. Same question as the above, without regard to local proximity. In other words, if you use Twitter, etc to find friends/romance, is it all about location, location, location, or are you willing to move around a bit? Again, answers in the comments if you would please be so kind.

8. Do you blog naked? You fucking sicko! Put some damn clothes on!

9. Nine is actually the loneliest number. If you don’t know why, you don’t need to ask.

10. You all realize, of course, that what we really need is a national health care system, don’t you? Of course you did. Let’s make it happen, folks.

11. I see in the stats that some of you have begun browsing or even pulling feeds based on my categories/topics. That’s cool, but pulling in my old posts from the otherwhirled pretty much screwed all that up. After I get my favorite folks into the blogroll, many of the categories, and a lot of the tags, will be munged together a bit. too many is too distracting. You have been warned, hah.

Alright, that’s it for now. Peace, out, and remember, be careful out there ‘mong them xtians!