Workers of the World: OCCUPY WALL STREET

Sexuality and Relationships: A Book List

and the most important one is the one I will link to:

 

What being a Naturalist means to me

I tell people that I am an atheist to all religion.

With some respect due to Pascal the man, but none due at all to his wager – which he came up with to make himself feel better about becoming religious and his wager does not reflect any of his former mathematical or intellectually integrity – because Pascal was at first, a gambler and a mathematician second – and religious last – and it was in this final end of sad tragic days – that he came up with the infamous wager which is only compelling to people who think that the God Pascal worshipped was the same god that they worship.

Because it’s a false thing to say that either there’s a god or there’s not – and assume that there is only one god possible, given the plethora of equally credible gods and goddesses and non-human dieties and demi-beings that have been just as passionately worshipped as any modern version of ancient tribal gods.

I mean really, I have to ask – why do people not understand that the only difference between a cult and a religion – is how long the cult has been around and whether it attracted over time, enough followers to promote said cult to the status of a modern mainstream religion.

So in the modern day – a small group with a new belief is a cult that hasn’t been around long enough to turn professional and become a religion.

Now, the problem with cult/religion is that they are all about humans. What humans wrote down, how they decided people should be and how people should behave – and worse – what was written down was a reflection of the society at the time of the original writing.

So the early Christians were not one cohesive group, but a number of groups each following a different alleged disciple but certainly a cult leader under their own “Disciple” name brand.

To put that in modern terms – exactly how Elvis fans are divided between the various personalities that make up Elvis’ Memphis Mafia group – maybe hating Red and Sony West – the cousins behind The Bodyguard Book – or maybe liking Joe Esposito and Jerry Schilling and Marty Lacker for being employable guys outside of Elvisworld who seemed less like hangers on than others and who then tried to do their best under difficult conditions or liking Marty Lacker for his online Elvisworld participation or supporting Elvis’ cousin Billy Smith but Lamar Fike disliker or who/what – ever.

Aside: If you read only the books written by the Memphis Mafia guys, it’s not hard to figure out what kind of fun Elvis had playing these guys against each other – because you have to consider that anything they said about Elvis being less than honorable, went double for them – because Elvis was their leader and they all obeyed or they were simply no longer invited. It astonishes me when people “tell all” that they never realize what “all” that they are revealing by what they don’t tell.

Each of the men who wrote the texts that were later edited together to form one comprehensive approved cannon – known specifically as “the Bible” (trivia: this formerly most printed book worldwide has been out-printed worldwide by the Ikea Catalog, which to my mind is the most lesbian pornpgraphic magazine in the whole world) – and leaving out the text that did not serve the agenda of the committee who decided what was cannon and what was fodder, or later committees who revised the material for social, political and scientific updates.

For example – the Greeks loved geometry and the Romans loved engineering and had no other use for math but they loved to conquer people – so they subjugated a lot of nations – peoples – and they demanded tribute from the leaders of their new subjects ….

No one had invented statistics and math was only used by the Romans for Public Works Engineering projects and inventory of tribute arriving from conquered peoples.

So, Mary and Joesph couldn’t have gone to Bethlehem for a Roman Census – because King Herod had already died before the year designated 0001 AD, had been only consumed with killing off blood family rivals and why the population didn’t like him being propped up by the Roman Empire so could never have gotten away with slaughtering peasant babies, and none of the secular documentation – the massive amount of secular documentation of this extremely well documented era of history -

I mean, if you think that the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton dumping Eddie Fisher who had dumped poor Debbie Reynolds scandal was huge – or in modern terms – Jennifer-Brad-Angelina or whatever current so called reality show bimbo is on the tabloids this week was socially significant.

Cleopatra marrying Julius Caesar in Egypt then showing up in Rome with an illegitimate son while Caesar’s barren wife had stood by him for decades and he puts up a statue of Venus that looks like Cleo……

Then Cleo blows town, Julius is killed just as he’s crowned emperor of Rome, who needs no kings, being a republic that falls into factional disarray – and Cleo doesn’t support Julius legal heir – Octavian, a slip of a boy, barely a man – and instead – throws herself at Marc Anthony – another married Roman General and married him and has more illegitimate children and funds a Roman Civil War….

So Romans, being Roman, supported Caesar’s legal heir – Octavian, now styling as Augustus Caesar – because it didn’t matter how hot Cleo was – she was the last pharaoh of Egypt that Julius had propped up as an independent state instead of as the conquered province that Romans wanted it to be.

So there’s a lot of sex scandals in history to make movies about – and the lives of celebrities now are pale imitations to the political sexual scandals that underwrite the history that we make movies and tell stories about.

- so King Herod – a minor player in the Cleo-Caesar-Antony vs Caesar Saga – he never counted his citizens for the hated Romans, any killing babies was strictly kept in the Royal Extended Family and counting done under Herod was for inventory of the tribute that he sent to Rome, a thank you for making him King of the Jews while Rome was abuzz over Egypt – in the person of Cleopatra.

Rome counting how many peoples they subjugated and expressed the wealth of the peoples subjugated by the amount of treasure and slaves – they did not care how many people each subjugated peoples were compromised of.

More than that – the mathematics needed to conduct a population census hadn’t been invented yet. The first known national census was done in England for William the Conqueror – and he only had acres and livestock counted.

Because that’s what the king owned – the land and the resources – the first census was to count the treasury inventory – not peasants. Peasants came with the land they they were permitted to squat on.

But the idea of a census of peasants followed the development of the mathematical theory and techniques – so once we had a new shiny tool – we had to use it.

And the need to count and quantify people came with government as a civil service – because once taxes were budgeted for social infrastructure – military, public works, roadways, and we had a need to account for migration and population, when taxes were no longer the treasury and private domain of the king – but became the means by which the government created physical or social infrastructure – and peasants began to attain person-hood under the law – than you William the Conqueror and the 1066 establishment of a code of law which set out social rights and responsibilities and personal freedoms – when peasants were no longer subjected to the will of the king or the nobility.

Basically – once there was a middle class below the nobility but above the peasants – and it’s money that determines which socioeconomic class you are in – well, peasants paid taxes to be left alone, the middle class pays taxes in exchange for government services.

With this new social arrangement – the mathematics of accounting, budgeting, statistical data collection and statistical analysis of data – that was all invented after William the Conqueror but before King James and his bible 2.0.

And it’s bible 2.0 that all modern American bible versions – and I have no idea what number they are up to – but the Mormons added a whole new testament for Bible version 2. 1.0.

So by the time the King James bible was being revised – the stories updated for the then modern sensibility – the crafters of the bible needed to make the 17th century population relate to the old stories that took place in entirely different social and political times – and they took the basic story and updated the emotional values of the story by adding modern grievances to universal stories of peasants subjected to the whims of the king.

Must have been nostalgic for King James – who knew he was more figurehead than king compared to the kings of old who didn’t have parliaments or political parties or social/political movements supporting political parties to deal with.

Submitting to a government census was by the time of the 17th century, a socially understood concept and people quite rightly bristle at the government collecting massive data without a clear purpose as to the why and what and how come they are entitled/demanding said data.

Whew.

Sorry, stream of consciousness tangent.

So I am an atheist to the Monotheistic Abrahamic Trilogy Religion – and to Pantheon religions who posit a multitude of deities and demi-beings, because – again, the intellectually and mathematically honest Pascal would have smacked religious Pascal’s wager right out the window and onto the manure pile where it belongs.

The probability of there being a single god is as close to zero as it’s mathematically possible to get – however, it’s true – as long as the probabiliy isn’t actually zero – then, there is a chance that there might be a god.

But which god, there’s 7 billion people on earth now and population statistics estimate that there’s been about 104 billion humans over the course of all of human history – so combined with how many more humans will be born – that means that there’s a one in (7 billion  + 104 billion + X more humans) chance that you are the one person who’s won the god-lottery and picked the right god.

And I don’t know about anyone reading, but given the odds – Practically Zero and then the 1 in (110 billion plus X) chance of worshipping the right god – given the plethora of all possible known currently gods -

I think not worshipping any one is a lot safer – because at least, when you die and there turns out to be one – it would probably not be as forgiving to those who worshipped a false/competitor god than someone who said – well, I would have worshipped you, but I didn’t get a clear memo that you were the go to god.

So, at least – hey, I didn’t obey a bunch of rules written by humans and instead – I made sure that my carbon footprint was small and that I left everyone and every place that I went to in a better condition or as good a condition – as when I encountered it.

Because – I don’t understand people who assert that following the revealed true word of god is more important than being a caretaker for said god’s creation – the Earth and all the creatures and people on it.

But, I am not religious, I don’t beleive that there is anything like the gods created by religions.

I am a naturalist – the study of nature is science and the practice of nature is something that can’t be quantified with science but occurs in harmony with nature.

Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto and other eastern philosophies that revere nature in all it’s forces – whatever the source of the forces – it’s all nature – all the way down

Posted – somewhere – on a Facebook group of more than a quarter million

and here’s something else that I posted in the same Gay Rights Equality Group – in response to some else asking if gay marriage is worth fighting for:

Book Review: Mister God, This is Anna by Fynn

Mister God, this is Anna

You can find it on the Christian section in any general bookstore

The Amazon description is: From the moment Anna and Fynn locked eyes, their times together were filled with delight and discovery. In her completely frank and honest way, Anna had an astonishing ability to ask–and answer–life’s largest questions, and to feel the purpose of being. You see, Anna had a very special friendship with Mr. God.

I read that book at 17 in 1985 – not knowing it was the same year the book was published – as it is set in England, following The Blitz.

And it does not – in any way – belong in the religious section of any bookstore – and is in fact, the Ultimate Science Fiction novel in which no aliens or starships appear.

Because while Anna – who’s 5 with a huge crush on her friend, Mister God – Fynn, the narrator character, is a young man – who found an orphan in the rubble of The Blitz and the whole world was recoiling from the horrors of inhumane possibility unchecked by logic or reason – but driven by religious zealotry with an assist from co-opted and misunderstood science – and thus, misapplied and misused science.

Because while Anna’s understanding of the world is that it’s all down to Mister God – what Fynn does is to tell the story science – and make it understandable to a 5 year old, who’s been abandoned in a cruel world, but who is sure, that Mister God is watching out for her

and, the first line of the book is:

Anna did not live to see her 6th birthday.

and Fynn teaches Anna all about how to understand the universe through play – with prisms to show how light separates and Anna becomes even more enchanted by Mister God – when she sees how much magic and wonder that he has hidden in the universe……that humans don’t, even now, have the ability to see and understand – at least, not at a quantum level…..

and Anna has to die – because, if she grew up, she’s know, she’d learn that Fynn had been teaching her pure science and she would have had to turn away from her special friend – Mister God – whom Anna was sure, was always watching over her.

and I thought, when I read it – at 17 – back in 1985 – that I was prepared for how – Anna dies.

I wasn’t – I screamed NOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooo

and hurled the book away from me and let it alone for a whole week, before I finally came to terms with – not the ending that I knew was coming – but the way – the horrible and pure way – that Anna does die – so that each of us – no matter what we beleive – can enjoy Anna’s playing with the universe in her quest to meet Mister God, face to face.

and I have bought many many copies of that book for people over the years

and it’s the one thing that I haven’t written that I most want to make into a movie

and not change a single thing about the book and especially, not the ending

Because I also want to produce – The Well of Loneliness – and that is an ending of a book not written by me – that absolutely MUST BE CHANGED for any Movie made in this century.

so – If you are like me – Don’t read anymore – because I am going to tell you now that you know that Anna does in fact die – and that her death is absolutely critical to understanding her relationship with her Mister God, who is not the god of any religion practised by anyone or at any time – Mister God was Anna’s alone:

Anna falls out of a tree she’s climbed too high in

wanting to get a little bit closer to Mister God

(you might want to stop reading now, it gets worse)

and she falls

(I am crying right now)

onto a metal fence,

(seriously, stop reading)

impaled

(I don’t think I can write anymore today and I was supposed to be writing the pilot for my TV Series – Beaus and Eros)
too loving and open to the universe

to live in this world

unmade by the adults and their wars

because they are all fighting for Mister God’s attention

and none of them, are paying attention to the children

Letters from a Skeptic – Letter 1 – 3 of 30

In the first letter, the father raises the issues of historic church crimes – Inquisition, Crusades, Supporting or Ignoring the Holocaust, whichever interpretation you prefer.

Now, the letters were exchanged in the early 1990′s – and the father did not touch on the systemic raping of children and the administrative cover ups that followed over decades and in every country where the Catholic Church operates.

Nor does the father raise the issues around characters like Mother Teresa, who socialized with the worst dictators, never publically accounted for the massive amount of donations, which were not evident in her hostile warehousing of sick and dying, suffering people who were not treated by doctors or nurses or with medications, but were cared for by nuns – the sole purpose of the warehousing the ill was to concentrate suffering so that Mother Teresa could feel close to a god that she no longer felt but was carrying on as if were real.

This fetishistic view of suffering is part of what’s psychological kinky about religious belief. The contradiction between our drives to live with creature comforts and spend our time in pleasurable pursuits and our succumbing to advertising pressures that play on our insecurities and fears – as religion does.

Because really, if advertising can convince you that you are an incomplete person unless you buy their branded product – what mental defenses can we have against religion, ingrained into tradition over centuries, sleazes into our premises about ourselves and our value, that says we can’t even be good people unless we brand ourselves with the correct religion.

Whew, okay, step back from the brink and return to the book.

Basically, the father is disconnected and discounting religion – but from my reading of his letters, the father is not a skeptic in the same sense of skeptic as I am. His analysis of religion is not deep, it’s vague and easily countered as a result.

Specific objects are not easily brushed aside, as Dr Boyd does with his father’s vague disgruntlements the Free Will Dodge and a variant on the No True Christian fallacy.

Letter 2.

The father isn’t totally convinced by the Free Will answer to why people can commit evil – and the original question of why would a loving god not do something when humans chose to do evil under the banner of god’s will, is not answered.

Because there isn’t an answer to the charge that if god is real, and is a compassionate and loving god, then it makes no sense that each of our own free will would allow a person to arise through the social power structure and then slaughter millions of people in their god’s name.

At the very least, it’s not good PR for god – it’s hard to sell a loving image over the sounds and sights of genocides and the systemic sexual exploitation of children over decades and spanning nations.

Which doesn’t mean that there’s not an attempt to sweep these concerns aside with blanditudes.

The Free Will Dodge, used to explain why people get to be or do evil is then applied across society. By adding personal responsibility to the Free Will, the apologist attempts to avoid getting god splashed with the evil of humans individually and collectively.

As an aside, there’s a certain tone in the book – and I realize that the correspondence was between a man and his 70 year old father, so there was a lifetime of familiarity – but also a reminder that these letters were edited for publication to an unknown degree – which is not to cast any doubt on the sincerity, the obvious caring and love or the father’s eventual conversion.

I maintain that the father was more a disgruntled customer who was able to be soothed back into the fold, than a person who grounded themselves in natural reality and rejected a religious reality.

But what I found particular cloying was the tone of the son’s letters, all the hallmarks of active listening when you are trying to lead someone down the garden path – positive feedback, compliments that step outside of the discussion so provides a pat on the head patronizing tone within the warm fuzzy feelings and fuzzier logic – that anyone lacking a grounding in naturalist reality would probably not detect. Because anyone existing in a reality were the religion is deemed real or may be real, isn’t seeing the apologist reality with an outside of that reality perspective.

It gets back to being socially capable – being able to take a block of information and compare and contrast it to other blocks of information.

The discussion between father and son is within the realm that the religion may be or is real. The son is a christian, the father has lapsed – but while he rejects the religion for himself, his allowing that it might be real and his acceptance of it as real is dependent on it being made palatable.

Not dependent on religion being credible, logical or consistent with world history and reality as people who are socially capable of coexisting with diversity understand reality.

But on the religion being made palatable and blameless for the harms and evil it causes in the world – by separating the actions of people from their religious motivation for their actions – and claiming that’s where Free Will puts the responsibility on people for bringing about genocide or systemic sexual abuse of children while protecting the priestly molesters. Indeed, sending them from one parish to another until they could find a parish who were willing to offer their children as sacrifices to the priests or be promoted up the ranks to protect those perverts who came after them.

Funny how they want to love the sinner and hate the sin, as if it is possible to separate sexuality from personal identity in the case of gays and lesbians. Worse, acting as if sexuality is no different than criminality as a behaviour.

As a final dodge, the son waves the patriot flag – we have to tolerate evil or else be nothing more than programmed brainbots – and what is in it for god – even an all knowing god – if we just go around as he programmed us.

Without any realization that forcing people to adhere to rigid gender roles or a moral code that’s handed down from on high and leaves a lot of wrongs on the table, like slavery, women as chattel, child molesting, and all the other stuff in the bible like wholesale genocide save for one family not drowned in the flood.

Apparently, we have to want to act as if we are programmed to show how good and deserving we are – our lives are supposed to be some emptying our will to follow the unknowable will of god, unknowable except for all the representatives on earth who tell us god’s will, without a thought to how nicely it is that god’s will allows these leaders to live in luxury and material wealth while most followers have to scrape and scratch to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

The battle is one of whether you live your life how you think god wants to you live, based in what you’re told by authority figures and what’s tolerable to you, vs what you have to struggle to accept.

It seems to me that the battle is within the religion, keeping the fold folded and so occupied with rituals and rules that they never take the time to ever think about what they are being told and asked – especially when asked to live in a way that is not consistent with your own desires or understanding of the world and your place in it.

It’s what I kept coming back to while reading AJ Jacobs, the Year of Living Biblically.

There were so many rules to juggle and follow that there was no time to really live, it hadn’t been for modern infrastructure and on top of adhering to the daily religious routine, AJ had to deal with crops and livestock and property and household management, the slaves unionizing and the wife spending longer and longer periods of time in the menstrual tent with the other unclean wives….there would have been no book at the end, because his whole life was consumed with the necessities of life and worship.

The father calls the son with this argument that I summarize as “evil being the cost of free will not an acceptable answer”

But the father’s skepticism and world view is not large enough to pull the son into the natural world for debate, and is instead, sucked into the false reality discussion wherein there are only two possible answers – “religion is real” and “you continue to resist reality.”

Surely an all knowing god would know what the risk of free will and allowing a few people to cause suffering on the scale of millions in the modern world – numbers not even guessed at at the time of the original followers.

Which is part of the natural world understanding – the world of the bible was a geographically small one with a handful of player nations.

That the world is so much larger and more complex than the bible would have us beleive, because the bible occurs in a very small geographical region in very few countries – the universe of the bible is but a subset of the universe that we have available.

It’s like saying of all the books that have been published, I am going to only read one and assume it contains everything that I will ever need to know.

Which is fine if you live in a world that the book describes – but we do not anymore.

Our world is vastly more complex than the world of the people who wrote the texts, who edited the texts, translated the texts and eventually compiled the texts, re-edited and distributed the texts so people could not read them and be told what they contained.

The answers that made sense 100, 500, 3000 years ago, are unlikely to make sense now, with the facts on the ground as we can and do know them.

The reality is that the cost of freedom is that evil will and can occur – but it’s not freedom that’s bestowed upon us that we have to prove ourselves worthy of through the quality of our obedience and conformity.

Freedom and Free Will are mutually exclusive with religion predicated on worship of a deity – if the cost of using your free will to determine morality based in your rational mind and socio-cultural context is to be punished with eternal damnation, then you may as well have no will at all.

Obey or suffer consequences, is not loving or compassionate, is not allowing freedom, it’s forcing a choice – submit or die.

This is the basis for the crusades, the inquisition and the spread of religion by the word or the sword.

Submit or die is not the basis of a complex, multinational, multicultural coexistence.

We have to be able to coexist – we have to chose to coexist on a daily on-going basis as individuals and as nations.

Because if we cannot respect that each of us has a right to exist just because we were born, a right to exist without fear of being murdered for a cause or belief we do not subscribe to, a right to exist without fear of being abducted, harmed, killed by strangers because they physically can without consideration for legality or morality, if we cannot agree that human rights are the rights that we allow for each other in order to peacefully coexist – which is why the withholding of equality is as an attack on a population group.

If we can’t agree in principle that we are going to coexist with all the diversity that humans are capable of, then existence will continue to be pointless and plagued with evil, corruption and waste.

The cost of not changing is the continued destruction of habitat and lives from one person up to whole populations of people.

So, if we are going to have the discussions, we need to be having the same discussions.

Religionists and Naturalists are not speaking the same language and are not having the same discussions. We need to not be having discussions inside religious realities – leave those for those who beleive.

The discussions we need to have are in our shared reality, grounded in facts on the ground and dealing with the world as a natural world in a natural universe.

Because even with the whole of human history, all religions have the same evidence to support their supernatural agent claims – that is no evidence at all.

Just so religionists don’t feel alone, if we’re going to save the health care system, it needs a facts on the ground shake up too – and any treatment that doesn’t end in a measurable health improvement and who’s impact is not empirically quantifiable or explainable and is never ending – needs to not be deemed a medical treatment.

This means chiropractic, homeopathic, anything that’s been invented by one person who is unschooled in biology, medicine, chemistry, genetics whatever, is not funded by employer offered medical plans or  government in the case of universal health care.

If there’s no basis for it, don’t fund it from taxes – let users pay for unproven and unscientific treatments and give them no sheen of credibility – by acting as if they might be real or that the false comfort and false hopes they engender are worth being defrauded for placebos.

If ever there’s a product or service that should be decided by the impersonal marketplace, it’s the fraudulent ones.

Which, religion is a placebo for the brain, it’s something that people find comfort in, to accept the small and large injustice in the world, to think that They Will Get Theirs in the end – because if we miss the bad guy, then god will get them.

So perhaps the real harm and evil of religion is that it allows people to tolerate injustice and unfairness – because it allows believers to be intolerant and unjust, excusing it with sincerity of belief to be sorted out in the afterlife.

Not a comforting thought to those of us who don’t accept the premise of an afterlife and who do not find it so easy to tolerate injustice and unfairness – especially when we see how much of it is created by or in the name of, religion.