Shuffling Off The Mortal Coil
PZ Myers (yes, him again!) has some interesting thought provoking things to say about death. In this post he compares his experience with near-death to that of Ray Comfort’s (he of the banana-as-proof-of-god fame. Look up “ray comfort banana” you youtube for inane hilarity). Ray, it seems, wishes his last words on this earth to be ones that implore those around him to accept Jesus as their personal savior so that they can have enternal life. PZ’s likely last words? A bit more mundane. Please read his blog post to get the full appreciation.
I just want to leave you with a quote from the end of his post (yes, this is the third time I’ve linked to the post. Can you tell that I really want you to read it?):
“So I rise from the not-quite-dead-yet, but having taken one step down that path, and I can tell you that as the darkness descends, there will be no gods or angels rising to judge you. You’ll be alone, no matter how crowded the room, and the only judge you’ll face is yourself. There will be no authority looking over your shoulder and telling you whether your life was worthy or wasted, and if there were, it’s opinion would be irrelevant — all that will matter is that you can look back and find happiness and accomplishment. We live our lives for our life’s sake, rather than for illusions about rewards and satisfaction after we’re dead.
If your last thoughts are about haranging everyone else about their theology, you’ve been living that life wrong.”
No More Fun of Any Kind!
PZ Myers hands us another pearl. This time he is going on about how religious conservatives are trying, again, to legislate sexual morality. He quotes from a Catholic blog where a reader asks the question, “Are unnatural sexual acts moral to use as foreplay, prior to an act of natural marital relations open to life?”. He quotes from part of the answer to that question. I’ll just quote from PZ’s blog entry:
“The expression ‘that use which is against nature’ refers to unnatural sexual acts, such as oral sex, anal sex, or manual sex. Saint Augustine condemns such acts unequivocally. He even states that such unnatural sexual acts are even more damnable (i.e. even more serious mortal sins) when these take place within marriage. For God is even more offended by a sexual mortal sin that takes place within the Sacrament of Marriage, since this offense is not only against nature, but also against a Holy Sacrament.
Dang. Well, at least Augustine didn’t explicitly forbid rubber wetsuits, fuzzy handcuffs, vibrating crucifixes, octopus, ceiling-mounted swings, clamps, chocolate pudding, flavored lubricants, Wonder Woman costumes, rubber chickens, exotic headware, whipped cream, video cameras, Silly String, roller skates, trampolines, nitrous oxide, balloon animals, feather boas, ball gags, or bungee cords, or I might be going to hell.”
I’ll just sum up by adding a few things to PZ’s list he missed that I feel are esential: Anal beads, whipped cream, step stool, garden hose, two-speed massager, rubber bands, hair clips, plastic mattress cover, confetti, fluglehorn, purple paper hats, five medium-firm pillows (with plastic covers), slip-n-slide, and one gallon vegetable oil (or KY if you perfer, but the vegetable oil is way cheaper!)
The Latest Altmed Insanity
“And then there’s this headline, “I’d lost my baby then somehow fell pregnant thanks to acupuncture“. There are clear and unambiguous causes of pregnancy — “somehow” isn’t usually a word associated with the process — and, well, acupuncture isn’t any of them. Although I suppose it could be an insulting reference to her partner’s penis size.”
My New Personal Blog
I’ve started a new blog, Parenting, Relationships, Love, and Sex. It’s an outlet for issues that are important to me and that I hope to generate discussions on, but don’t fit here since they are of a more personal nature. Please feel free to visit if you like.
My Faith-based Divorce Support Group Experience
I wrote back in my post about secular mental health options that all of the divorce support groups that exist in the entire Omaha metro area are faith-based. I was very hesitant to attend any of them, but was encouraged by several friends to at least go to one to check it out. At the best, they said, I might get something positive out of it. At the worse, I’d have something to write about on my blog. Since I’m writing about this here, you can probably guess how things went.
Before I begin my review of the meeting, I must say something about the people who ran the meeting. These people are truly trying to do some real good for people in need of help. They are sincere, caring, and supportive, and some of the information they had to offer is good, practical advice.
They gave me a workbook titled Divorce Care. The book had a lot of different sections such as Facing my Anger, Facing my Depression, New Relationship, and Kid Care.
We started out the meeting with a video titled Financial Survival. It contained a lot of good advice about how to manage a budget and how to prioritize your expenses. It discussed the importance of accepting the life stye chances that inevitably come with divorce, especially about doing what you have to do to meet your and your children’s basic needs first. They explained that this requires making a lot of sacrifices. You may have to sell your house, car, unneeded belongings like T.V.s, stereos, computers; get rid of the cable and internet, possibly even the phone if absolutely necessary. All of this makes sense because these are choices that very well may have to be made to keep a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food in your stomach. They mentioned how there are state services that can help you out if you need it. They also mentioned help from the church, family and friends. Never be afraid to tell people you are in need, we were told. Good advice. I just did that very thing by borrowing money from family to buy a car I needed.
Up to this point I was feeling pretty good about things. Sure, there were plenty mentions of praying for help as a way to help you cope, but I felt i could overlook this since I was getting what seemed like good, practical advice. And then came the the last part of this section. Tithing.
They said, “Tithe on top of your budget and God will take care of you.”. WTF!? You just told us that we’d have to give up all these “unnecessary” things, even a phone (employers always love it when they have no way to get in touch with you). Now you tell us that we absolutely must continue to tithe to the church even though we may be facing foreclosure, eviction, lawsuits, and having to go on welfare?!
I almost walked out at this point, but I decided not to be rude. That and I realize at that this was great blog fodder and I was sure there was more to come. I wasn’t disappointed.
Most of the rest of the video was just giving out information which was mostly practical. Then came the last section, God wants to help. Yes, we were told, you are not alone. The magic sky man is always watching over you. No mention of why, if he was always watching over me, I was in this position to begin with, except to say that it was part of the continuing creation. Huh?
Now came an avalanche of testimonials one after the other until we had a veritable Grand Canyon with walls filled with strata after strata of confirmation biases.
“All I had was Christ. You cling to it!”
“I prayed and I saw the results as things got better”
And this strange quote, “God is the father and the husband in this family.” Well, hell, what about may family? Is god going to be the mother and the wife? I’m pretty sure that almost all Christians agree that god is 100% male and he sure as hell isn’t gay.
Then came time to wrap it all up.
“Look beyond people to God”
“You can’t get through a divorce without Jesus Christ”.
Fucking hell! This was exactly what I feared would happen. In the end, it would be all about putting your faith in god and damn the consequences, because with god, there would be none!
The final take away item that different people in the video repeated again and again:
“God (or Jesus, take your pick) is faithful”.
I don’t think I’ll be going back. Although, I am tempted to go for the section, Single Sexuality. That one ought to be a hoot!
The Hubris of the Religious
Over at Brick Window, I read two posts that show rather grievous examples of the hubris of many religious believers. In the first post, the author explains how she lost a friend over the following quote by Dan Barker:
“I know what love is, and that’s why I can’t be a Christian. Love’s not self denial. Love’s not blood & suffering. Love’s not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love’s not a wrath consigning billions to eternal torture because they offended your ego or broke your rules. Love’s not obedience or submission. True love is respect, compassion & kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.”
The friend referred to the above quote as hate speech. WTF! Are we reading the same words here? In explaining what love is, or at least should be, Dan offers a beautiful definition of love that I think we would all hope to aspire to in all of our relationships.
In the second post the author tells about how her daughter was being bothered by her ex-boyfriend at a Young Life group meeting. Young Life is an Christian ministry organization that offers places where teens can gather. The mother asked on Facebook if there were a Secular Student Alliance in her area. For this, she was unfreinded by the boyfriend’s mother who told her that she was “antagonistic and hostile toward religion.”.
Cognitive Dissonance obviously is at play here, but so too is an arrogance that comes with being a part of the majority; the supposedly “good and decent” people. What these examples show is that it is the believers here who are antagonistic and hostile. It is they who are spouting hate speech when they automatically label anyone who isn’t a believer as evil, depraved, and morally deficient for no other reason than that they don’t believe in god(s).
To hear people like this who are not only offended by what they see as “hateful speech”, but also have the gall to claim that they are being persecuted! Holy Fucking Zombie Jesus! Christians make up something like 80% – 87% of the people in the U.S (that is a guess based on a survey I saw sometime in the past year, so please don’t quote me on it). They have more political control than every other religious, political, and social group. Their beliefs and rituals are so ingrained in our culture that it would be impossible for that culture to survive intact if they were all removed.
There must be a word somewhere for what to call it people who have all the rights and privileges, but yet claim that they are being put upon and persecuted. I can think of a few (like motherfuckers, cocksuckers, and assholes), but I’m looking for an acceptable word, something that can be used in polite conversation or on news broadcasts. If anyone knows of such a word please leave it in the comments. I’ll also accept suggestions for new words to describe these people (and please, no new rearrangements of many of the various curse words that I know you are thinking about!)
Heaven & Hell
John Shook has a great piece on the Center For Inquiry blog about how religion isn’t about hope, but personal wish-fullfillment, control, and our secret desire for revenge. Here are two paragraphs that nicely sum up what I want to talk about today:
Heaven and hell are more about enforcing moral retribution upon everyone, and not about loving consolation for everyone. I said earlier that religion personally is largely about private wish-fulfillment. But at the social level, religion is mostly about imposing a public moral system. And not just any moral system – religions with heavens and hells have moral systems about obedience, vengeance, and retribution. With heaven and hell, private wish-fulfillment nicely pairs up with public moral-expectation. God delivers love to us because we feel deserving of that love. God delivers vengeful retribution upon others because we wish we could do it to them ourselves.
When believers say, “My God is all about Love!” what they are actually saying is that God really loves them and doesn’t love others. These are the kind of people who can’t feel truly loved unless someone else doesn’t get that love. Such a childishly selfish attitude, barely tolerable from the three year-old pushing the older sibling away from the parental lap, is entirely despicable from adults. Yet religious societies take this to the public level, effectively frightening members into obedience, and warning outsiders not in that good company that they will suffer for it. Join our religion, the message rings out, or else you’ll get hell for it!
I’ve read several blog posts today about this subject of heaven and hell and how you can’t have a heaven without a hell. Except for Unitarian Universalists, all most no religion, especially forms of Christianity, has a concept of Heaven without a corresponding hell. The problem with this, besides the horrific fact that so many people seem to take pleasure at the potential eternal suffering of others, is that hell just doesn’t fit in with the concept of a god of love. God is seen as a parental figure, someone who makes the rules and rewards or punishes and who we always want to try to please. What parent would willingly send their child somewhere where they would be tortured and tormented? Only an sick, sadistic parent would. So if there is hell, then god is a sick sadist.
Religious belief like this is, as John says, childishly selfish. It has pain and punishment for those we are jealous of built right in. The only real love there is the love for those we choose to love and for ourselves.
This is why I take a humanist approach to life. Humanism has at it’s core the wellbeing of all people, everywhere. When you put all people on a level playing field and treat them all equally, then you can’t help but act in the best interests of everyone. Of course we have to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, but humanist ideals say that we shouldn’t do that at the expense of others.
As John sums up in another of his posts on the same subject:
Give me a morality, a humanist one, that finally centers on the one life that we all know we have.
Pray For Japan. Or Maybe Do Something That Actually Helps.
I’m getting sick of seeing “Pray for Japan” signs and slogans everywhere on the Internet. How is praying for Japan going to help? If god actually cared about Japan in the first place he wouldn’t have allow the earthquake and tsunami to happen so why ask him now to help people he obviously was intent on destroying in the first place? Unless he didn’t want the earthquake and tsunami to happen, then he is not all powerful so why bother asking him to intervene? If he didn’t have the power to stop it in the first place what makes you believe that he can do anything to help now? Ah, you say, the earthquake and tsunami were his will. Well then, if it was his will, the why try to get him to do anything since whatever is going to happen is also his will so prayer wouldn’t make a difference anyway.
Prayer by its very nature is an attempt to get god to do something that we want him to do, or in other words, to try to get him to change the outcome of a future that he has already planned out anyway. In this case then, prayer is useless. God has decided what will happen and asking for things to work out differently than what he has planned is useless, so therefore prayer is useless. The only reasonable course of action in a universe with an all-knowing god is to just go with the flow. If you pray and it works out how you wanted, it was going to be that way anyway so your prayer effectively had no effect. If you pray and it doesn’t work out the way you wanted then it wasn’t god’s will and again, your prayer had no effect. Praying does nothing to help or change anything because god has already decided what is going to happen anyway. Of course all this assumes that an all-powerful, all-knowing god even exists. You all should know by now how I feel about that.
If you really want to help Japan, donate time or money to organizations that are actually doing something to help. Pray if it makes you feel better, but don’t assume that your prayer will in anyway help anyone.
The Shame of the Shame of Sex
I had an amazing, day-long conversation on FB with an old, dear friend and a new friend of hers that she introduced me to. The conversation was about sex. It ranged from the innate beauty of the penis, the importance (or lack thereof) of penis size, the the sensitivity and depth of the vaginal canal, female ejaculation, what constitutes real intimacy, the consciousness shattering of shared mutual orgasms, to my new friend (a woman) giving me male masturbation advice that included interesting and clever devices.
There was mutual agreement that the shame associated with sex in our society is almost always motivated by males trying to maintain their supposed privilege where they feel that they have control over women, especially their sexuality. This we all also agreed is complete and utter bullshit.
I’ve said it before here, anything that happens between consenting adults, regardless of gender, orientation, or numbers of people involved, is perfectly OK and, more importantly, perfectly natural.
In the end, intimacy, both physical and emotional, come down to the following: openness, honesty, and respect. One of these lovely women mentioned to me that she had problems with men because they viewed her openness as a invitation to hit on her. She said that she never could figure out the rules. I told her that I have three rules, which are stated above: openness, honesty, and respect. And those rules apply to all relationships of all types, not just sexual ones.
It was one of the most fascinating and stimulating (pun intended) conversations I’ve ever had. I found it so refreshing to be able to talk to women who were so comfortable with their sexuality and so confident in themselves. They are both also very articulate and intelligentand they showed great respect to myself and each other. I find these traits in a women to be irresistibly attractive.
The problem with many men is that they find these traits in women to be highly threatening. They can’t deal with a woman who is so secure and comfortable in her sexuality. I believe it truly frightens them. It is because they have this false sense of privilege that leads them to believe that they must control the women in their lives.
Personally, I find it liberating, fascinating, and beautiful.
Oh and I learned something else very interesting in the discussion yesterday. One of the women has studied the sexual practices and mores of ancient societies. Did you know that women in ancient Greece loved small penises? They considered large penises grotesque. As Spock would say, fascinating!
How comfortable are you with your sexuality? How about with the sexuality of others? Comments are most welcomed and encouraged.
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