Another post I had nicely formatted, but stinking Blogger had other ideaRs...!
Poor ol' me...
I seem to be behind the 8-ball again...!
As if that's not enough, now Blogger is becoming downright spiteful. It won't even honor ITS OWN FORMATTING commands. Not even simple shit like LARGE, which it now insists I want microscopic. It also enjoys adding and removing random line feeds and moving some of the content around unbidden.
Um, ex-squeeze me, but my job as a blogger is to post content, not fight tooth and nail with the steenkin' tools. When I spend more time arm-wrestling Blogger than I do WRITING my posts, I get pissed off. Tools are supposed to HELP me, not waste my time.
Apparently, Google has been hiring cast-off Microsoft programmers to devolve its Blogger user interface to this crappy level.
Cheez.
Again, I'm going to skip my favorite DKos and ANet headlines and post mostly videos today.
I hope to return to what's become my usual format soon.
Cheers, hang in there, and don't forget to
VOTE for BERNIE!!!!!
-- Dot Calm's shadow
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Make America great again?
So tell us, Money Boo Boo...
exactly which countries do you think
are greater than America right now?
...I thought so!
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And now for something completely different:
movies!
These videos will make you think!
Some weeks ago, YouTube suggested a wordoffakes video for me to watch. I watched it and thought that he made several good points. That's why I've been posting more of his videos.
For the record, let me sketch out my deconversion. I too believed the "word of faith" preachers and
televangelists. I bought into it hook, like, and stinker [sic]. Like the girls in wordoffakes's "Four lies
in the Bible" video below, I prayed and prayed for God to fix a very difficult problem. I had complete faith that He would, and, of course, I knew that He could. I knew that I was asking not for selfish reasons but for the betterment of another individual, so it wasn't a "little kid praying for a bicycle" prayer. I was all in. But...wait for it...nothing happened! For over a year, the situation became worse and worse until it finally became intolerable.
And then...my prayers were answered!
By ME!
Yes, friends--I answered my own prayers and took the action required to solve the problem. Myself. No deity needed.
That whole situation I had been praying about was the straw that broke the religion-camel's back in my case.
I had seen way too much of how Christians act. I saw the Catholic Church protect child-raping priests from their innocent victims and from justice.
I saw televangelists like Joyce Meyer, Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Jesse Duplantis, and Joel Osteen live like royalty, taking the prosperity gospel to extremes while their own followers suffered.
Robertson, Hagee, and Franklin Graham spew such hatred and filth from their mouths that I was amazed that they could even be considered Christian--and yet their followers revere and adore them.
And I saw people near and dear to me succumb to magical thinking, rampant hypocrisy, and self deceit, regularly blaming everyone and everything around them for their own shortcomings, failures, and misdeeds.
And if all that weren't enough, I was told to read the Bible cover to cover with a view toward believing it literally. So I did.
And that, my dear friends, was the clincher.
Not only did I realize that I couldn't even finish Chapter 2 of Genesis without glaring contradictions between the Bible and obvious reality, but I realized that the God of the Bible isn't something holy to be worshipped--He's a moral monster deserving only to be ridiculed and rejected.
Then, Lee Strobel lying for God and pretending to have evidence for Jesus (he doesn't) sent me down the path of investigating the historicity of Jesus.
It turns out that the evidence for the existence of the man is so thin that it's equally likely that he was made from whole cloth by the New Testament's unknown authors.
Oops.
Did you know that Paul wrote his portions of the New Testament before any of the Gospels were written? Hum.... (I'll be posting work by Bart Ehrman and Richard Carrier to back up that assertion in a later post.)
The last piece standing of my now-shredded faith was my personal experience of God. What if there was a natural explanation for that, too?
I looked back over my life and analyzed the history of what happened whenever I prayed. Being fully honest with myself, I realized that prayer's success rate is only about that of random chance--meaning that prayer had no perceptible effect in my life. I remembered the "milk jug" prayer test and tried it, praying to a beloved object (one of my favorite gifts to myself) over the course of a month and recording the answers. Yup--I received answers from the object just as I did from what I had thought was God, and they were exactly as accurate.
Whoops.
But why was I hearing what I thought was the voice of God at all? It seems to depend on how active
one's temporal lobes are.
Some people rarely or never have mystical experiences; some have them all the time. If you can get God from a helmet, then doesn't it stand to reason that these experiences are not external but internal to us?
Nothing supernatural at all...no woo needed.
We have all just been fooling ourselves because we have been programmed (per the podcast below) to from infancy.
Ah, if you could only watch yourself from the outside and see how you make your own brain malfunction over even the simplest decisions just by buying into religion and organizing your life around something that isn't real. I was embarrassed when I realized what I had done to myself all those years--how much I lost by not thinking straight.
But you know what? I would never have even begun the journey of examining what I believe and why if it hadn't been for a friendly atheist asking me the occasional question and making the occasional comment.
All I want is to be that person for you. I promise: life is soooooo much better without all that nasty
baggage of fear and shame.
Even losing a loved one is more peaceful, even if I do still mourn over the plans for the future that also died.
You wanna know what else? It's a LOT easier to be a good person without God!
I know, right?
I was shocked, too. I'm still trying to figure it out, but, so far, it seems as though I can focus on what helps the most people and causes the least suffering and do those things all day every day without the pressure of worrying about whether I'm pleasing Something I don't understand...whether I'm offending the Invisible and Incomprehensible...or whether, if I screw up, there will be hell to pay.
None of it matters any more. The only thing that matters is other people--what I can do for them in ways that make sense for my own life. And I can tell you, friends, it is pure joy to see the world from this point of view. I am peaceful, and I am free in ways I've never been either before.
And, of course, I want everyone in the world to have the same uplift and epiphany and to be free from all the bullshit, fantasy, and gross unreality that religion foists upon its followers.
So, yeah, I apologize if I come across as too snarky too much of the time. You'd be pissed, too, if you
realized that you've been lied to your whole life. You'd be pissed, too, if you realized that you've organized your whole life up to that moment around lies and superstition and watched others you love do the same and continue to do it. So, yeah, I AM pissed. And if I can get you to this point in your journey sooner in your lifespan than I reached it, then it will have been worth it to me.
To both of us.
Here's to you--
LONG LIVE YOU!!!!!
Why I became an atheist by wordoffakes:
Four lies in the Bible:
Slavery in the Bible, part 1:
Slavery in the Bible, part 2:
The Thinking Atheist "Programming" podcast:
Does God send you to hell?
Garden of Eden FAIL...isn't it amazing that God punished Adam and Eve for not knowing that it was wrong to disobey Him (because they didn't know right from wrong before eating the forbidden fruit) and for not understanding what "you will surely die" meant (because, as far as they knew up until God yelling at them, there was no such thing as death)? Isn't it amazing that, instead of owning up to His own responsibility, God blames everyone else? Is that where Christians get it, do you think?
Sometimes, I like to listen to one of Seth Andrews's podcasts while I'm doing other things. In this one, Seth investigates Scientology. I learned a lot from this podcast--hope you do, too.
If you'd like to find out more about scientology, here are some links from the podcast:
Tony Ortega "The Underground Bunker"
Tory Christman's YouTube page
Mark Bunker's Knowledge Report movie
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I have read that the class that enters kindergarten in 2016 will be the first where whites are a minority, making us just 13 years from the first ever cohort of voters where that is also true.
I think a lot of white people are plain and simply scared of being treated they way THEY have traditionally treated minorities.
-- Pauline Corzilius
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Until next time, don't forget to read these great independent sources of news and entertainment:
Daily Kos
AlterNet
Conservatives are Destroying our Future
Conservative Clown Car
Americans Against the Republican Party
Americans Against the Tea Party
Mrs. Betty Bowers
God, the Good Lord Above
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And now...a bit of fun!
posted by Dot Calm @ 6:41 PM
