Thinking Unenslaved

I don’t yet know which of our great co-hosts we’ll have around for the show, but the show will be dedicated to discussing the various ways that sciolism defeats discourse.

Two things:

One: that last phrase is willfully plagiarized from my (Synthaetica) old post by the same title, which is basically the inspiration for tonight’s show.

Two: Sciolism: 1. A pretentious attitude of scholarship; superficial knowledgeability. 2. Rare The practice of opinionating on subjects of which one has only superficial knowledge. 3. A superficial knowledge, especially when pretentiously revealed.

You can probably imagine where I’m going with this. I recently was doing some maintenance on my website and came across some old posts on this topic which I did for the Blogswarms Against Theocracy back in 2007 an 2008. The subject matter still rings true today, and in fact, as I have more and more “discussions” with theists hell-bent on saving our godless “souls”, I see it as more and more of a problem: and one that is actually rather multifaceted.

Show Title: The Stupid. It Burns

Who (tentative): Dawnne Gee (@Synthaetica), Paul Fidalgo (@PaulFidalgo), Kile Jones, Zach Garland (@Zachsmind)

When: 10pm EST, Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Where: BlogTalkRadio.com/Synthaetica

What: The Stupid. It Burns.

My previous posts on this subject:

How Sciolism Defeats Discourse
The Roots of Sciolism
Because Theocracy Leads to Permissive Extremism

I hope to gather some additional insight from other authors/bloggers prior to the show. If you’ve got something to say about the subject, please don’t be bashful! Use the comments below!

On next Wednesday’s segment of Thinking Unenslaved, I’m holding a small contest for blog submissions on the topics noted below. Our panel will read the entries aloud and discuss (no, not necessarily eviscerate if we don’t agree) them on the air in our Round Table format. We’ll choose one (possibly two if it’s too close to decide) recent blog post from the following categories:

Submission Categories:

• Atheism (note: this category is not open to Agnosticism)
• (Secular) Humanism
• Religion
• Sociology
• Philosophy

Minimum Requirements for Consideration:

• Article is “recent” (December 1, 2010 or later ~ exception might be made in deference to kick-ass authorship)
• Article is comprised of at least 600 words
• Article contents contain at least 75% unquoted content

Pretty simple, huh? Authors of the blogs chosen will be asked to come on the show. Show participation is not mandatory. There is no monetary award for being chosen. Submission Guidelines and Deadline:

• Submit link(s) to blog post(s) in the comments on the Segment Website
• Maximum of 5 links per contestant
• Deadline Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 10pm EST.
• Selections will be announced Wednesday, February 23, 2011 by 10am EST.

Join us Wednesday night for some unique and dynamic show content

Last week, we concluded our discussion of Secular Humanism in Western Society. Unfortunately (and as is often the case), the discussion really got going just as the show was ending. Ryan (@NewYorkCreator) joined in with Zach, Paul and myself in a conversation that actually extended well past the end of the show.

So, at Ryan and Zach’s request, we’re going to have another Round Table this week, but a slightly different format. As many of us co-hosts as are available are going to dial in Wednesday night, along with Ryan (and hopefully @AntitheistAngie). We’re going to cover a lot of hot-button topics for between us, and may or may not take callers as time permits. I’m hoping that Zach, Ryan and I can somewhat replicate our post-show discussion from last week. It got pretty interesting.

Some things we’re planning on discussing include, but are in no way limited to:

• Anti-abortion politics
• Intelligent Design education
• Free speech versus verbal masturbation
• Draw Muhammad Day
• Atheist Morality

The last topic there is a segue to next week’s show. I’m setting up an interview with Martin Pribble in regards to a recent poll on about.com which he was leading until it got pharyngulated. The poll results are now meaningless, as they do not inherently reflect the about.com readership, nor do they necessarily accurately reflect the beliefs of those who take the poll as much as they reflect the ability of poll-takers to submit the voting form several times just to make PZ Myers look more popular than he really is. Don’t get me wrong, I have much respect for the man and even consider myself a fan of his. And while online polls are inherently flawed in concept, there’s no benefit for us to prey upon each other even in the most innocuous of forms.

Tonight’s show is another round table with Kile, Paul, Zach and myself. The general theme is Secularism in Western Society: I’m hopeful that we can … er … “faithfully” represent the European perspective and not make the mistake of equating “western society” with “the silly stuff we Americans do.” Perhaps we’ll get lucky and have one of our European friends dial into the live show.

I’ll be twitter-begging for participants throughout the next couple of days. Other topics we may also address include: the problem with religious-based public education, and relationships between theists and non-theists. Please listen in for a lively discussion of pertinent topics this Wednesday night at 10pm EST. We’d love to take questions and comments from persons of alternative points of view, so don’t be bashful! Give as a call and join in the discussion!

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.

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.

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.

I believe it is relatively clear that our European allies, especially Great Britain, live in more secular societies than we do here in America. Especially where Great Britain is concerned, there’s a significant amount of irony involved in such progressivism: our founding families fled such places because of religious oppression at great personal risk, and a couple of hundred years later elements of our own government desire a steadfast adherence to religious edicts, and already have systems in place by which non-Christian business and organizations are disallowed participation in certain government-sanctioned areas of business. It’s ironic, and of course from my perspective, it’s considerably depressing. I believe the story of the American Revolution—pretty much all the stories of the American Revolution, in fact—is a grand tale of personal commitment, courage in the face of imminent threat, and indeed, the fundamental precepts of honor, perseverance, and integrity.

Of those, it is integrity which bothers me in this seemingly continual struggle for religious domination of our government. For the desire for religious domination is promoted as Americanism when it is, in fact, one of the most extreme of un-American acts that can be perpetrated on the populace outside of mass murder. The lack of self-integrity that it constitutes is also troubling for me, because the individuals who promote the redefinition of America as a “Christian Nation” are those who set themselves as examples of good behavior to the rest of us. Setting aside the fact that dogmatic belief in biblical stories is a nefarious form of delusion (and self-delusion, to boot), they cherry-pick their own religious doctrine in the attempt to make their desires real.

I once considered running for a local political office. After two days of discussions with local Party officials, I was finally contacted by the State Democratic Party and told in no uncertain terms that they would not support me as long as I refused to attend church. In other words, unless I was willing to violate my sense of self-integrity, I wasn’t a solid enough candidate in their minds to support. I lacked the personal funds (and the time, to be honest), to aggressively compete against the individual who sponsored the anti-abortion legislation that was so controversial on the national circuit (South Dakota’s Proposition 6), and even though the state party abhorred both the policy and the man, they simply weren’t willing to fight him from the opposite religious extreme. And as an already-established dynamic member of my community, heaven forbid that I would have brought some logic, critical thinking, and personal insight to the matter (the personal insight being that I was adopted and had a child placed for adoption and was in contact with my daughter from a previous relationship, whom i didn’t get to raise).

While I found this personally offensive, the concept wasn’t hard to understand. Even a cursory view of politics today shows how intrinsically it is tied to religion. Political candidates take great pride, it seems, in opportunities to speak at churches, and are generally careful to show themselves as supposedly-honorable members of their religious communities. Beyond that, in many locations, voting is done at the local church, although I don’t protest this too much, for in many small communities, the local church also serves as the community center, and hosting elections there is a more than just a matter of convenience or even preference. And yet, as a self-proclaimed agnostic atheist (I don’t view atheism as a religion, in other words, nor do “practice” atheism dogmatically), one of the things that I wish candidates wouldn’t do is pander to this presumed need. There are, after all, over 30,000 separate Christian denominations in the world. Pandering to one offends another, and I think, shows a that a supposed leader is incapable to effectively lead, resorting instead to the appearance of conformance to a relative minority of the voting public.

If candidates approached this issue logically, I don’t think they’d stoop to the church-hosted photo-ops. To the critical-thinking crowd (many of whom, in certain terms, actually exist in the religious crowd, too), the demonstration of a limited world-view, a relatively intolerant mindset, and a dependency on rote superstition should be quite unattractive. As well, the explicit deference to a minority (and active, participating Christians ARE a minority in this country) should be no more acceptable to the logical mind than the undue influence by any other political lobby. And the critical-thinking crowd shouldn’t be afraid to ask pointed questions to their candidates. Why should we allow such candidates to lead us? Why must we invest our own forms of faith in the good behavior and ethical conduct of those who show, time and time again, the willingness to defer to delusional thinking? Should we ever have to define the “best” candidate in terms of the admirable qualities that they lack? In many ways, those are unfortunately rhetorical questions. The status quo, after all, is a difficult thing to circumvent, let alone redefine. But I fear that if we do not manage to do some day, that even under progressive or liberal control, we will find ourselves living in a Christian State, rife with intolerance and dedicated on converting the world. And when that day comes, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

And to bring this back to the title, the real problem with this is basically just visual. On the left side of the political aisle, you know these aren’t the types of people hell-bent on changing the Constitution to make this a Christian Nation, or even personally dedicated to “saving” all the people of the world. But as such, the very appearance of their deference to these ideals, the very appearance that they take the teachings of their religions seriously, creates a logical disconnect from which it is almost impossible for the likes of me to step aside. I respect and even admire their personal faith, but the mere appearance of a need to even make religion an issue in today’s world is simply silly to me. Even when I was a steadfast, devout conservative Christian (yes, I was, once upon a time), I still had many questions and problems voting for candidates whom I didn’t think I could trust to uphold our rights and protect our freedoms simply on the basis of our citizenship, which is exactly how it’s supposed to be.

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

cross-posted to Mock, Paper, Scissors under my other pseudonym, “commander other”. coming up next: Easter celebrations in the otherwhirled!

Look, this is a real simple thing. The country was founded by mostly-Christian individuals who were possessed of the foresight, maturity, and wherewithal to understand that the edicts of the religions and religious denominations had no place with an operable role in government. In fact, they made incredible sacrifices to distance themselves from their European church-states. In fact, they made great sacrifices, including their livelihoods, the lives of their family members, and in many cases their own lives, to ensure the separation of Church and State. The Mike Huckabees in the world that want to interject specifically religious dogma into the the Constitution have it exactly wrong, and every time they spout those desires, they prove that their eclectic version of America is not what America was founded to be, or has ever been. It’s not the America that our soldiers have fought and died to preserve. And it’s not an America that would have any hope of participating in a future in which the human race survives.

The Blogswarm Against Theocracy starts today and ends this Sunday. I will be attempting to have unique posts on these four blogs:

1. the otherwhirled
2. perpetual dawnne
3. synthaetica
4. mock, paper, scissors (thanks, Tengrain!)

{this opening post has been cross-posted to my three blogs as a way of saying “yes, i’m here, and no, i’m not going to let the bizarre mortgage triangle we currently living under adversely affect my ability to post this weekend!}

Subscribe to the Blogswarm’s official feed here:

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

The premier liberal/progressive blogging event of the year is just EIGHT SHORT DAYS AWAY! If you’re interested in participating, catch the details over at BlueGal’s site or at the blogswarm’s blog. And if you haven’t already, make sure you bookmark the Blog Against Theocracy website so you can easily stay in tune with the swarm throughout the event (and after!)

The logo above is provided courtesy of Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors. He also has a presized “sidebar” version for your convenience. Tengrain reminds us:

The theme, like always, is the Separation of Church and State — we are for it. But the variations on the theme are many, and we scored the widest range of responses. This is not a bashing of religion – peeps can believe what they choose, however they choose — but it is a reminder that the Government should keep out of religion, and Religion should keep out of the government. A great resource for ideas can be found at our good friends, First Freedom First. Many of you know FFF already. They are not sponsors of the Blog Against Theocracy swarm, but they should be beneficiaries.

I will go one step further to point out that the anti-theocratic movement is one point of agreement between atheists, agnostics, humanists, and persons of various religious beliefs, all of whom recognize and appreciate the need for government’s firm separation from specific religious doctrine and preferential treatment. Not only do I firmly support the premise that this blogswarm is not about bashing religion, but I hope to see a strong community grow out of this endeavor over the years: A global community of like-minded critical thinkers who can respectfully, but adamantly, argue against the practice of inserting any form of preferential treatment for any religious belief into our governments.

I will be participating in the blogswarm from the otherwhirled with my usual image-based snarkery (because it’s okay to be snarky about this, provided the snark isn’t meaningless or antagonistic), from perpetual dawnne (with some real-live bona-fide actual thoughts written down and stuff that I’m already working on because it takes me that long to write meaningful stuff), and I am also hoping to participate photographically from Synthaetica Digitography (because, seriously, why do anything but blog? blogging is all there is! blog!!! blog!!!) Some of my contributions will be cross-posted to Mock, Paper, Scissors, but I am also hoping to write at least one unique thing for the mighty SCISSORHEADS.

I hope that you all will make some time to participate and read the many insightful posts that the swarm will have. You’re welcome to use the button below to subscribe to the blogswarm’s feed!

(cross-posted to the otherwhirled and Synthaetica Digitography)

photo credit: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

President Bush proves once and for all that enforced Christianity is retarded on many levels.

And the band played on, waiting patiently for the imminent fall.