Thinking Unenslaved

I’ve spent the past several days listening to various skeptic, atheist, and agnostic audio podcasts. A few of them were quite entertaining (Brian Dunning is excellent, for example), while (what was to me) a surprising amount appeared to consist largely of insider information to small, specific sub-communities of individuals. In a tweet I posted in the middle of that research, I bemoaned our lack of an appreciable foothold in that medium. Indeed, I was rather disappointed about this at first, until I remembered what a great group of skeptics, atheists, and agnostics we have on YouTube, and whose reach is literally millions.

Now, as much as I love people like Thuderf00t, AntitheistAngie, ZOMGitsCriss, Zinnia Jones, The Thinking Atheist, and many others, the problem I have with YouTube is the reliance on visual cues, overlays, and the like, to communicate ideas. There’s nothing wrong with this at all (in fact, as a photographer, I naturally LOVE it), but what about the viewer or listener with too much to do to sit around watching videos? What about the person who’d like to put a podcast on while doing chores, or driving around town? To be explicit, what about the kind of person who could listen attentively, but not watch? Communications that rely on visual content to convey meaning either miss this type of listener, or the listener fails to completely benefit from the medium.

I’ve struggled with this for a long time, actually. Very early on, when I started becoming involved in the ThinkAtheist Radio Show (formerly on TalkShoe and BlogTalkRadio), I contemplated switching it to a video-format, YouTube-based show. Several things stood in the way of that (not the least of which was the lack of time), and ultimately, I was rather fond of the general format of our show: free-form, unscripted live talk. Obviously, I chose not to vary from that format.

As I said, there are a few audio podcasts that I really like: Skepchick, Skeptoid, Freethought Radio, The Atheist Experience, and others, but these also have their quirks. Freethought Radio in particular rather disappoints me: These are good, intelligent people, but the format is over-commercialized, and the participants, at least in the few shows I’ve listened to, appear to be so committed to “staying on time” and “sticking to the point” that their interviews can be stilted, one-sided, interruptive, and often have an annoying tendency to sound far more patronizing to the interviewee than informative or instructive to the audience.

To be clear, I must point out that Skepchick and Skeptoid don’t fall into the description I just gave (that was for Freethought Radio alone). I love their shows, and just wanted to make sure I linked to them.

To refrain from picking on shows from organizations that I otherwise admire, suffice it to say that I find myself in that position where I listen to something (even several somethings) and I realize the opportunities missed, the messages not delivered, the discourse left behind, and it reminds me that the emotions engendered by sitting around and noticing that could be better served by my getting off my ass and doing something about it. Not that I believe I would consistently do better, but I’d certainly try. And I’ve had much encouragement of late to do so.

As well, our guests on the old ThinkAtheist Radio Show had this interesting tendency to ask us if they could come back on for another interview, and this held true for the very short run I did with my own show. Our shows were dynamic, and a modicum of topic-wandering was not only welcome, but expected. There was no agenda for us as interviewers to keep in context: I’d have been just as happy (from a show perspective) if one of our participants suddenly announced his or her undying fealty to Jebus as I would if we had spent 60 minutes talking about his or her escape from organized religion. But the bottom line for me is that my guests enjoyed what I did well enough to ask to come back. I was obviously doing something right.

I halted my own show largely for a reason that has now resolved itself. That reason essentially boiled down to time. When I stopped the show, I was doing 12-16 hours/week at our TaeKwonDo academy, 10-18 hours/week on the soccer fields, and whatever time I could get with my children, atop a typical 40-50 hour work-week. For other health reasons, I’ve had to stop doing TaeKwonDo, and now that we’re in the winter months, soccer is only 2-8 hours/week, and I’ve already let the various administrations know that I can do as many games in the future as I’ve done in the past. I’m kind of enjoying having time to myself, and to date, and those kinds of things.

And I’ve discovered that I miss doing the show. Which is funny, because for a while there, I wasn’t missing it at all. Time works wonders, I guess.

So, at the repeated prompting of a few friends, and a general round of acceptance from the community at large, I’m reviving Synthaetic Synapse as Think Unenslaved. I’m waiting on some new equipment, and I’m setting up some intro and interstitial music, and even some commercial plugs for communities of which I’m a member and national organizations of whom I’m fond. I’m lining up some occasional co-hosts and guests, and putting a bit more organization around the show as a whole. I’ll consider reopening communications with ThinkAtheist (I re-subscribed to the site last week) and seeing if they’d like to “sponsor” the show (without pay), but I will retain my independence regardless. The show format will be very much as it always was: which means that there will be three major classifications of shows.

1. Co-hosted show: Myself and a co-host would cover international, national, and local news related to the atheist/agnostic/freethought community as a whole. The topics selected will lead to discussion between the two hosts. We’ll limit that segment to approximately one hour, and have similar material prepared for the second hour should callers not fill up the second segment.

2. Solo show: This is where I diatribe on one subject or another for a while (this may either be live or in a pre-recorded/edited/prepared format and replayed). Related to that subject, I’ll have a live guest or two with subject-matter expertise on that and related topics. This segment will last 60-90 minutes, with an open-phones segment at the end.

3. Round-table show: This is a pure round-table format, possibly with a co-host/moderator, and with multiple (3-4) guests on hot-button topics of interest. The round table will spend 15-20 minutes per topic on up to six topics, taking callers for one or two questions during each segment, and solving all the world’s problems in a single two-hour show.

I anticipate kicking off the new show over the first weekend of December, 2010. Check back on this site for updates over the next few weeks, and be sure to follow my Twitter and Facebook posts for show times and additional information. I’ll continue to run the show from it’s current location at Blog Talk Radio, but un:enslaved will serve up supplemental information, associated content, the show archive, and those types of things too.

Nothing ever goes as planned. And nothing stays the same. And it’s very funny how things change.

If you have any curiosity about the oddity that is me, or any interest in my specific internal approach to things not necessarily involving humanism, atheism and agnosticism, read: dawnne.com.

i have reconstituted this domain because doing so is easier than trying to suck in individual posts from here in there. as well as certain individual posts from previous blogs.

although, i still need to do that. meh.

so, things will get back rolling over here. not that anyone will give a shit, but the way i look at it is….fuggit.

peace.

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

….but still….

so, essentially what i’ve done is migrate MY (not the guest-bloggers) content from otherwhirled.com over to here. that went pretty well, although, there were 1,297 items in the import file and i’ve only got 933 here, i believe. meh. and i’ve tried numerous times to import the missing content to no avail. no WP error message or anything. meh, again. pfft.

at any rate, the oldest stuff (ironically being that which was most faithfully represented in the import) lost the attached images years ago. that was back before i understood that yahoo doesn’t cache news images, sorry. they’ve been gone at the otherwhirled, too, sadly….all this time. more recent works from mid-2008 forward or so, i saved the images on my own server, so those are still good to go. i’ve even got them doubled up.

so, for those of you who only know me through unenslaved.com and twitter, these old posts may provide some interesting insights into where i’m coming from. for everyone else, consider these old posts some blasts from the past. i will be trying to re-find some of the old, missing images on the more popular posts. i have a semi-photographic memory, but that will be an ongoing process.

coming up next is actually getting this blogroll going. yay, fun. stay tuned. peace.

Yes, I know, this blog is supposed to be about freeing oneself from mental slavery, and ironically, the bulk of my efforts here to date have involved the stuff we do on Twitter. It’s funny how that works, yes, but there’s a reason why it’s happened that way. It’s not just my own mental slavery to Twitter, but the several types of mental slavery that essentially equate to gainful employment and taking my job seriously.

All of which changed last week when I resigned my position. I’m not terribly thrilled with the prospect of having to choose between restarting my former business (19 months ago, I quit 16 years of self-employment to take that job), or putting my head back on the chopping block known affectionately as “job hunting,” but it was exactly this concept of mental slavery that prompted me to leave. I’ve never been totally thrilled with the idea of playing by the rules, and when the rules are written by people who really don’t understand the paradigm, following those rules becomes even more bogus.

And that’s about all I’ll say about work. They’re good people, but the industry they serve will hopefully go away with national health care reform anyway. My own bitching and moaning about our health care system was a bit duplicitous on certain levels.

Anyway, late last Thursday and most of Friday were spent in reflection on the various things in my life for which I have forced myself into strict and/or linear ways of thinking. I don’t have a set rule or methodology for this kind of self-analysis. Partly, it’s a bit of compare/contrast with similar past experiences and also between the various things I have going on right now. It’s also just a general assessment of where my mind is at, and how the thought-patterns I use when I’m teaching could be applied to other situations. In short, I discovered several aspects of my life weren’t exactly being approached in an unenslaved way, and that was quite frustrating for me. I try to be holistic about these things. They’re not just good ideas, you know.

Ironically, one of the most enslaved ways of thinking I believe I undertake is this belief that I don’t have time to blog. That’s really just not true, but I make it true, since I don’t take the time to do this very often. See where I’m going with this thought? We make our own realities; we enslave ourselves in these ways. At least, I do, but I really doubt I’m alone. But we do this all the time, in love, in activities, in all sorts of things. We tell ourselves that we don’t have time to do a thing when really, we’ve simply put other things first, or we want a rest, or….whatever. But since we repeat the lie of “not enough time” to ourselves so often, we believe the lie, so “not enough time” becomes real.

Which, of course, is quite easy to say, now that I do have the time. Except that I don’t. I take job-hunting pretty seriously, and when it’s done right, it’s like the most time-consuming job there is! Nevertheless, I’ve resolved to blog and vlog here more, hopefully with a semblance of consistency, because I do have several subjects that I want to communicate on. The trick for me will be finding a new job, or a set of contracts For example:

1. The…er…stigma of the word Atheist and how that simple word halts communication with certain mindsets
2. Getting people to understand that Agnosticism is not, in and of itself, a final conclusion
3. Working together with people who subscribe to disparate beliefs to affect social and governmental reform
4. Beginning to turn the tide of perception of those Atheists who work in the public sector, into a good thing. Away from the not-so-tacit ‘requirement’ that public servants be religious.
5. Remembering the works of freethinkers, humanists, secularists and atheists who have had a profound impact on our culture

Those are just a few of the things I hope to undertake here in the upcoming weeks. I will (hopefully) no longer hold myself bound by this get-nothing-done mental slavery.

Peace.

Okay, so I’m not doing any better, time-wise, about blogging here. Work is up, work is down. And as soon as I sat down to write this, I got swamped with more of the work-centric “down” that is ever so up. Go figure.

So, hopefully, the following video does a good enough job of communicating where my head is at today. It’s in several places.

As an Update: See how it works? my special person is actually doing just fine, and simply had IT guys trying to break her computer. Nothing wrong, nothing to worry about, and this is just how things go sometimes! LOL….

the next in my mini-vlog series at twitcam.com.

there is an element to social networking that some of us refer to as “the pretendy”. in essence, “the pretendy” is the fact that we never really know how much pretense lies behind what we place behind our online personas. not that total honesty is necessary or required, but when it comes to judging the quality of our interactions, “the pretendy” works from both directions and obfuscates things. i simply encourage you to give that some consideration.

In case the object below doesn’t play well, you can also view it at twitcam.com

in preparation for turning this site over to something that suits me a bit better, i have begun toying with some mini-vlogging over at twitcam.com.

This series of vlogs is about how atheists conduct ourselves on Twitter. Not that i think i need to tell anyone what to do, but because i’m a patttern-recognition guy, and i see certain patterns that lead to certain thoughts. i’m simply sharing those thoughts.

In case the object below doesn’t play well, you can also view it at twitcam.com

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.

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!

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.