Thinking Unenslaved

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.

….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.

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.