Frank Zappa on The Christian Right’s Growing Influence on Government
Here is an interview with Frank Zappa where he discusses the danger of the Religious right’s growing influence within the U.S. Government. It was relevant then during the Reagan era and it is just as relevant now.
This is hosted on my sister site, Freethinking4dummies.org. This a bit more personal than my blog here, so if you are interested about the guy behind Freethinking For Dummies, enjoy!
Religious Thinking Hits Home
A good friend of mine from my Army days has unfriended me on Facebook. He took issue with my post of the morality of sex acts. Here I present his message and my response. Other that my response to him, I don’t really have anything more to say about this, except that it make me very sad.
Ed Connor February 1 at 2:42pm Report
Jay
I saw your extremist writing on sex not being connected to morality. As a father and a husband, you should really be ashamed of yourself and deeply embarassed and you really need to get a grip on reality. I doubt that hurt spouses whose partners have commited adultery, or prosititutes whose lives have been destroyed or children who have been sexually exploited, or those suffering from aids or other veneral diseases would agree with your bizarre and warped views promoting sexual immorality on a wholesale scale. Your children are in deep trouble given your bizzare views. So given your criterea, I guess your ex “Holly” was justified in engaing in beastiality and other infidelities. I guess the the children victimized by pedophile priests are in the wrong and need to put up with having their persons violated by these perverts. I guess you want one big Soddom and Gommorah to prevail. I see through you and other perverts like you and that is this: You want a life of unrestrained immorality with no accountability or consequences. That is what you promote and I’m sure that is what you teach your children and you deride and insult any people AKA Christians, who disagree with you.
You are not the same person I was friends with and we have nothing in common and I want no part of what you espouse. As such, I do not want to have any further contact with you. Thanks.
Ed
Jay Walker February 1 at 7:32pm
You know, Holly cheated on me. She tore out my heart and ground it into the dust. But it wasn’t the sex, it was the betrayal of trust. It was taking me for granted.
I teach my children to respect each other and other people and to treat people as they would like to be treated (you know, that do unto others stuff from that bible of your). Most importantly I teach them to be honest, with themselves and with others.
I am all about accountability and consequences. I’m about adults being open and honest with each other about their feelings and emotions, their needs and their desires.
Immorality is lying, to yourself and to others. It is hiding the secret desires that you have and pretending that they don’t exist. When you are open and honest about everything then you can decide to act or not act on those desires, but if you do decide to act you must do so with the understanding and support and agreement of the one you love. If they don’t agree or support you, then you have a moral obligation not to act. The morality comes from your respect of one another. The immorality comes from disrespect, selfishness and disregard of other’s feelings and well being, not from the acts themselves. The actual act has no morality attached to it, only the intent and execution makes it moral or immoral.
I am sad that you choose not to have anything to do with me. I certainly don’t agree with your religious views, but I believe you have every right to believe as you choose and I would never let that fact that you believe in some things that I find disagreeable influence our friendship. Unless you have done me harm by believing as you do, then I have no reason to not be friends with you. You haven’t done me harm with your beliefs and I don’t see how I have harmed you in any way with mine.
You must do as your conscience tells you, but your reaction proves one of my main points about the religious: you may espouse forgiveness as a central tenant of your religion, but you don’t mean it and you certainly don’t practice it. The bible also teaches you to judge not lest ye be judged, but I don’t see much of that going on here either.
I don’t follow any book or writings and I don’t let anyone tell me what to believe so I don’t have anything to refer back to to justify how I live my life, only my espoused belief in honesty, truthfulness and respecting my fellow human beings. You may not agree with what I believe, but at least I have the honesty to live my life by own words. You, and those like you, on the other hand, don’t have the honesty to live by the words you claim to revere.
I’ll always consider you a friend, Ed, regardless if you don’t consider me yours. But I will respect your wishes and will leave you alone.
Of Skepticism and Love
I am going through my second divorce. The first one was five and a half years ago. That marriage lasted over 17 years. I have friends who keep telling me that the right woman is out there for me. Some say that as soon as I stop looking she will show up in my life, other that l am a loving, caring person and that I deserve to be happy and they are sure that prefect woman for me will come along.
I know my friends are trying to cheer me up and don’t want me to lose hope that I’ll find happiness. Hell, I want to tell myself the same things, because, yes damn-it, I do deserve to be happy, but I know that life doesn’t work that way. I don’t want to get into the gory details about what happened to bring me to this point. Suffice it to say that my love and trust was terribly betrayed to the point where, for a while, I didn’t believe in real love at all, but instead saw love as a selfish way for people to get what they want from someone else. Fortunately, I realized that I still had the capacity to give love without totally selfish motives so I figured that if I could do that, so could others.
Life is not going to give me what I want or need. The universe doesn’t care about my desires, or anything else for that matter. The universe just is. It follows laws that came into being when it did and what ever happens is merely a result of the interactions arising from those laws. The only one or thing that can fulfill my needs and desires is myself. Not in a hedonistic way, but by making the most of what life throws at me. Of course I have plans and dreams, but they are only guides, like a compass needle pointing me in the direction I want to go. How I navigate the landscape that is presented to me as I go is totally dependent on what I see in front of me. We dream, we plan, but ultimately, we react to what is placed in our path.
The good thing is that I still believe that real love, true love, is possible. I still believe that there could be someone out there who would fulfill all of my needs and desires, and I hers. I just think that the chances that I’ll ever meet someone like that are astronomical and I’m too much of a realist to think that there is some kind of universal justice that will someday give me what I desire. The universe is arbitrary and there really is no rhyme or reason to it. We, as humans, are evolved to find patterns where there are none and to assign agency to events in our lives where none exist. Unlike many, I actually find great beauty and solace in this idea. It means that none of us are anymore more special than anything else in this world, and that is a great equalizer.
A Short Hiatis
I have a ton of stuff going on at work and at home and I just haven’t had the time or spare thought cycles to devote to my writing here, so I’ll be taking a little bit of time off. I am hoping to be back to my regular writing schedule by the middle of next week. Until then, please visit these wonderful blogs, if you don’t already:
Bad Astronomy
Blag Hag
Fledging Skeptic
Greta Christina’s Blog
JREF
Pandagon
Pharyngula
Skepchick
What Surveys Can Tell Us About Ourselves
I took the Midwest Secular Survey today. The questions were pretty standard, asking your secular persuasion (agnostic, atheist, etc), how comfortable you felt about sharing your secular views with various groups of people, and how being secular affects different aspects of your life.
What I learned from answering these questions is that I do feel very reluctant to share my atheistic views with people who I have to relate to in day to day life, such as co-workers, neighbors and family.
Very few, in fact only two I believe, of my co-workers know that I hold secular beliefs and I don’t think the actually know that I’m an atheist. It is not something I would want widely known at my work. While I have never seen or heard of anyone being discriminated against because of their religious (or non-religious) beliefs, I do live in one of the reddest states and from overhearing conversations of my co-workers, many, if not most, attend some kind of church regularly. In fact, I block people from work who are on my friends list on Face Book from seeing my status posts because I just don’t want them knowing my beliefs. I’m not ashamed, but I do fear that it could cause problems for me if the wrong person at work finds out.
None of my family knows, at least if they do, they have kept quiet about it. This isn’t surprising since they aren’t really “my” family per se, but my first wife’s family, whom I keep in touch with because of my kids. They are all Armenian and the Armenian Church is a very big part of their Armenian identity. When I was married and living back there in Massachusetts I was the one who took the kids to Church every Sunday. I even taught Sunday school for a year. The church is so intertwined with the Armenian identity that it is almost impossible to imagine an Armenian who doesn’t profess belief in God. After all, Armenia was the first Christian nation,a fact of which the Armenians are very proud.
Most of my friends know I’m an atheist. In one case, this has come between myself and a very dear friend who is a devout Christian. We still chat occasionally, but there is a palpable strain in the relationship that wasn’t there before I let it be known that I was an atheist. This was very difficult and discouraging for me. Her and I had a real attraction for each other and we got along so incredibly well. Once she was divorced from her husband and I separated from my wife and was in the process of getting divorced, I was hoping to pursue a closer relationship with her, but now that is out of the question. Also, it seems that our relationship has lost the depth of emotion that it once had. This is completely due to her reaction to my writings and comments about Christianity. As I said, we still talk occasionally, but we never talk about anything too personal anymore and I mourn the lose of that very much.
All of these things came back to me as I read the questions on the survey and contemplated my answers. I didn’t realize just how vulnerable I feel about being an atheist outside of the skeptical/atheist community. I’ve tended to limit my personal relationships to people who share my beliefs. I know that this one of the most common things that people do; keep to their own, but I didn’t realize that I was actually fearful of revealing my beliefs to others outside of these groups. Considering I hope to work in critical thinking and skeptical outreach, I think that it is something I will have to come to terms with.
Socrates was certainly onto something with his method of instruction. Asking questions is one of the most powerful ways to get us to really think about an issue and brings to light our underlying feelings about it that we may never have realized we had.
The Only Life We Have
We just got back from the candle light service for the assistant principle who was shot and killed at school yesterday. Here are some pictures I took with my camera phone. I didn’t think to bring my good camera because I wasn’t thinking about recording it in anyway.
It was very eerie and unreal, with somewhere between 1000 and 2000 people gathered. They started off with the school cheer and then I couldn’t really hear much else, that was until the most poignant point, when they sang Happy Birthday for the woman who’s birthday would have been today. It was very emotional and very unreal. You see things like this on the news, but it is always somewhere else. To be actually standing there and realize that a human life has been needlessly taken, and seeing the hundred of students and faculty who’s lives have been so horrible changed in an instant is just beyond words.
My kids don’t go to that school, but my son’s girlfriend does. Tonight was actually the first time I’ve met her. Most of the kids I saw were either very quiet or they were acting like this was just another school event, but you could tell from the way they quickly looked away whenever they met someone else’s gaze that emotional turmoil was just under the surface.
The saddest thing to me was realizing just how many people were affected by this tragedy. Students obviously were directly affected, but you knew that their parents, who must have been panic stricken yesterday when the news hit, we just as affected. There too, were the faculty, all of whom must have known and worked closely with the woman who was killed. Even the look in the eyes of a couple of the reporters seems to show that even they were not unaffected.
As I said on my blog earlier today, it is things like this that make you realize how precious life is and how terribly quickly and suddenly it can be snuffed out. Tonight has made me treasure all of the people I know and love more than ever. A message to take away from this is to never, ever take anyone for granted because in the blink of an eye, they could be gone (or perhaps you could be). Our lives are all we really have in this world and it is the people around us who make those lives worth living. To take that for granted, to overlook this fact is probably the one of the greatest mistakes we could ever make.
Senseless Violence
Once again, a senseless act of violence has struck my city. If you didn’t hear or read about it already, yesterday a 17 year old student at Millard South High School shot and killed an assistant principle and then later shot and killed himself. The suicide note he left said that he was upset about being suspended for 19 days for driving on the football field and tearing it up.
Three years ago, another disturbed young man killed nine people and himself at the Von Maur department store at the Westroads Mall here in Omaha. Yesterday was a painful reminder of terrible day.
Tonight I will be driving my son and a friend to meet his girlfriend at a candle light vigil that is being held at the high school. His girlfriend is a student there. My thoughts will be with the family of the assistant principle and the misguided boy who ended both their lives.
I really can’t find the words to express my sorrow, plus this isn’t a time to analyze or opine about random, senseless violence and what may cause it. This is time to reflect on just how precious life is and how quickly and suddenly it can be taken from us.
Merry Giftmas!
It’s Giftmas Christmas! I hope you are all having a Merry Christmas, Happy Holiday, day off, etc.
The Walker household had a rather laid back Christmas. The kids got most of their presents before Christmas because I took them each out shopping and let them spend a pre-determined amount and pick out whatever they wanted. They are both teenagers now (well, my daughter will be 13 in a month and a half) and it was what they both asked for, so why not. It made them happy and they got exactly what they wanted. I did wrap a present for each of them, as a surprise, and put it under the tree this morning. We had warm brownies with vanilla ice cream for breakfast and vanilla coffee. We even wrapped three doggy bones for Bailey, who seemed to really enjoy opening his gift and eating them!
Yummy!
I hope you all have a wonderful <insert your celebration of choice here>!
Do You Require A Partner(s) Who Think Like You?
I’m just coming out of a failed marriage (#2 and the last marriage for me). A big part of the problem was that we really didn’t know each other when we moved in together and, later, when we married. I found that there just was no intellectual curiosity in her. At first, I was able to rationalize it away, but as I began to come out of my 25 year long shell after my first marriage, I returned to my intellectual and artistic roots, and I began to feel like a penguin in the Sahara Desert; lonely, lost and starving.
My embracing of atheism was certainly a part of the schism, although not directly, as she was not particularly religious and didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t (at least she never said as much). It did have an effect in the sense that a huge reason I came to my non-belief was that I had been reading, thinking and writing, engaged in a quest of intellectual exploration that required all of my rational and critical thinking skills, skills that had laid dormant for a long time.
For me, the conflict was not that of a non-believer versus a believer, but an intellectual versus a complacent non-thinker. While religion did not play a part in the dynamics of the falling out, the clash of rational and critical thinking versus passive acceptance of the norm did, and this kind of conflict is at the heart of any religious versus non-believing clash.
My question to you, my dear readers, is; how important is it that you have a partner who thinks like you? And by thinks like you, I mean someone who not only has the same general world view, but who also actively engages their mind in relating to the world around them.
For myself, I have learned that I absolutely must have someone was is at least my equal in the pursuit of intellectual inquiry and who shares the same skeptical, rational world view. I am eager to hear your thoughts on this question.
The Radical Male feminist
I was at a party a week or so ago after the first night of Skepticon. I was talking to Amanda Marcotte I told her that I consider myself a radical feminist. She asked me what I meant by that. It was a great question which I think I answered somewhat to her satisfaction, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since and I don’t think I answered it to my satisfaction.
If I am going to go around calling myself a feminist, especially a radical one, I need to be able to explain exactly what I mean by that. I know what I feel. I have always believed that women are equal to and just as valid as any man. But there is so much more to it than that. And the key, I think, is found in the often homicidal outrage I feel when I read about the innumerable, degrading, heart wrenching stories about women the world over who exist in virtual servitude. Those who have no control over their education, reproduction, their own bodies or even their own thoughts.
But that outrage isn’t reserved just for the obvious, glaring examples found in places like Saudi Arabia, or Eastern Europe, or Africa. The outrage is equally strong when I read about the everyday events that most woman in this world have to deal with. The sexists comments, the leers, the condescending attitudes from men who, for no other reason than that they were born with a penis, feel they have privileges over all the women in their lives.
There are so many examples to draw from and all are equally enraging to me. The parents who kill girl infants because they aren’t boys. The parents who believe that girls are property to be sold into marriage, or worse. The parents who refuse to educate their daughters. The men who believe that the women in their lives are property to be traded or controlled.
Add to this the insult that others, mostly men who are priests, pastors, doctors and lawmakers, vie for control of a woman’s body. The hypocrisy of this has started to become clear in the uproar over TSA body searches of passengers. Only when a man is suddenly forced to surrender control of his privates to other does he suddenly feel the anger and degradation that millions of women feel every day. This point must not be lost in the ongoing debate of the TSA policy as it speaks loud and clear to the indignities that all woman are expected to endure.
Then there are the little things, innumerable, that degrade and belittle women every day. Being expected to cook or do housework or take on the brunt of child care. To be a sexual plaything at the beck and call of her husband or boyfriend. These expectations are prevalent and real in the lives of many upon many woman the world over.
It is the idea of male privilege that has been promulgated for thousands of years to the point that entire religions have been constructed around the idea that women are just one more possession given to men by their god. They hold up their scriptures that they, themselves have written, as proof of their superiority.
The fear of woman runs deep in the privileged male psyche. Fear of impotence; fear of loss of power, fear of death. All this and more does the privileged male fear, and when he sees his obvious equal in woman, he convinces himself that she is the cause of all his misfortune.
I was lucky growing up. My father always treated every women with respect. I never once heard him say anything that could have been taken as derogatory toward women, unlike almost all of my friends’ fathers did. He treated my mother with the utmost respect, even when she didn’t deserve it. I never did ask him about his views about woman’s equality. It just wasn’t something that came up. All I have is his example and that speak volumes.
What can I do about this? There are several this I can and have done. I have raised my daughter, who is 12 now, to be a strong, self-confident young woman. She doesn’t take any shit from anyone and openly mocks anyone who dares to try to tell her she can do something because she is a girl. I take great pride in her strength and confidence, know that I have helped shape that.
I have raised my son, who is 16, to respect women and treat them as his equals. While we haven’t talked about it much, I have yet to see him do or hear him say anything bad about a woman solely because she is female.
In my conversations with others, I never let a sexist word or action go unanswered.
I am a feminist because I believe in the true equality of woman to men, not just in words, but in deeds, and that these rights must be written into our laws and all of our institutions. I am a feminist because I reject the idea of male privilege where ever it may show its self. I am a feminist because I reject every aspect of our society, no matter how minor or mundane, that perpetuates the lie of male privilege. Finally, I am a radical feminist because I refuse to stand still and stay silent while even a single woman in this world is marginalized, insulted, abused or denigrated. I will speak out, loudly and forcefully, against every outrage against women large and small.
None of this is new to me, but my decision to take an active part in fighting against sexism and inequality is. I won’t be silent any longer. From here on out, the focus of the blog is going to shift somewhat. In addition to my railing against the evils of religion and magical thinking, expect to see a much greater focus on feminism. I may get less than 100 hits a day, but if I can get my message out to even one person a week, that will make all my effort worth it.
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