Satan's Apostles - YOU

For all of you religion persons out there, I've been doing a little reading and a little thinking (I know - thinking and religion don't normally go together) and I have come to the conclusion that when you become a member of a religion, you are doing the work of Satan. This is concluded from what I have been able to read from your own favorite book of non-facts, The Bible. According to the Bible, God, Heaven, and the angels all existed before God decided to make the universe. God made everything then decided to create Man. When he created Man, he decided to give him a wonderful gift. He gave Man "free will." He gave Man the ability to actually think and reason so that he could work to make a Heaven on Earth. Satan and his followers were angels and they became angry that God gave Man free will because angels did not have free will. Okay, forgetting for a moment the fact that angels without free will would not have been able to make this thought or act on it, let’s just pretend that maybe Satan and his followers were some sort of heavenly middle-management team with more rights than the bottom tier angels. Hey, it makes as much sense as anything else in the bible. Anyway, they got pissed off and started a war in Heaven in order to oust God. You remember God, don't you? This is the diety that the Bible says is all-knowing (he didn't see THIS coming) and all-powerful (didnt stop Satan from attacking him). Anyway, the Bible spins it that God won the war but that can't be true because Satan was still around, and, God gave concessions to him. This story sounds more like the battle was even and the sides compromised in order to stop the fighting. God got to keep heaven and the free-will-less angels, but, Satan got his own kingdom from where he could torment humanity. This may have stopped the war, but the underlying issue that caused it (giving Man free will) remained. Satan then tricked Man by pretending he was God and told them he was "angry" and "jealous" and demanded that man worship him or they would be sent to eternal torment in Hell. Man responded by creating religion in order to worship God. Satan laughed because religion became the vehicle for bigotry, intolerance, hate, exclusionism, war, the Dark Ages, and every other major evil in the world. A historical researcher has concluded that religion has been responsible for more than 85% of all the war-related deaths on the planet since historical records were kept. Satan could torture and hurt the people whom he hated so much by making them hurt and torture each other. But the best part (for Satan) was that religion was the vehicle for Man to VOLUNTARILY give up his wonderful gift from God, free will, and turn mankind into mindless followers of the religious elite. How Satan must laugh every Saturday and Sunday when more than 95% of the Earth's population walk voluntarily into houses of worship where they are told that everyone that is not in that particular house of worship is not a "true believer" and should be disregarded, ignored, hated, excluded, punished, or (as in the case in the religion called "Peace") just killed outright since they are an "offense" to God. What’s more …. YOU ALL BOUGHT IT! Hook, line, and sinker. Because you are all so AFRAID of the threat of Hell, so afraid of the unknown of death, and so selfish, you will do anything, including murdering others, torturing them, and making their lives living hell, in order to try to save YOUR OWN SORRY ASSES. Truly loving and peaceful people would never have invented the torture chambers of the Inquisition or burned other humans alive. God must be up in a very lonely Heaven wondering how you can all be so F*ing stupid. He gave you free will. You ought to be smart enough to figure out how to make your lives better, not worse. How to help and comfort others, not hurt and kill them. What brilliant revenge. Take a wondrous and marvelous gift, given to Man by God to create peace and harmony, and twist it to create death and hate. I can hear that evil laugh now (queue soundtracks from South Park). So all of you religious nuts can continue to go to church and hate me for not, but, in the end, you are going to have this revelation, as you stand at the turnstile waiting your turn for entry, that Hell is a really crowded place, full of people who all believed they were doing their evil "for God." Hope you don't mind the crowds. Take a fan.

Mom Update

The deterioration continues but in fits and starts. I'm pretty sure that even on her best days she no longer recognizes me as me. A couple of times she has called me dad, at least when she could still talk, which isn't much anymore, and not in sentences or thoughts. This makes me believe my cousin, she told me she had a picture of my grandfather from the military and that he looked a lot like me. Strangely enough, my aunt, her sister, died a month or so ago. Even though she had terrible emphysema, I thought she would outlive my mom. I still visit, but the visits aren't usually long or frequent. All I can do is watch her continue to fail until she dies. Terrible and depressing.

Doctor Doctor - It Hurts When I Do This ....

I'm trying to understand why medical doctors still have to take the Hyppocratic Oath. It's a joke. In today's modern medicine it is much more imperitive to get you hooked on medication for the rest of your life than to heal or cure you. Every little ailment has a powerful drug that will TREAT THE SYMPTOMS but will not eliminate it. And every drug creates more problems via side effects, but, it's ok, because, you understand, there are MORE drugs they can give you to treat THOSE symptoms. You can walk into a doctor's office with a hangnail and end up on $1000 worth of daily medications for the rest of your life ........ in order to improve your quality of life. The Hyppocratic Oath's pledge to "do no harm" is broken by every doctor every day, voluntarily. They should just change it to a pledge of allegience to the big pharmaceutical companies. A promise to make sure every patient is diagnosed with as many problems, and prescribed as much medication, as their insurance companies will pay for .... or more. At least it would be truthful and realistic.

The Path to a Good Life

To my religious friends.

Do you want to know how to live a good life? The answer is in your Bible, but it's damn tough to find in all of the wordy nonsense. I know, I know, your religion(s) have taught you that athiests and agnostics are worse than rapists and murderers, that we never look at a Bible or think about God, we don't know what religion can do to save us, and we are probably out stealing neighborhood pets and children for Satanic sacrifices. Well, just like 99.9999999% of everything else religion has told people over the millenia, that's another lie. There is some truth in the Bible, but it is perverted and buried amid mounds of stinking religious self-servance and interminably conflicting stories and parables. Not to mention tons of questionable history. In reality, the Bible does not need to be a big book with which religious people can bash others, the whole thing could be condensed to an index card.

The way to live a good life can be found in your ten commandments. Not all of them, though, You have to discount and throw away all of the religious threats and nonsense that was added by religious leaders to better enslave their flocks with fear. It is found in the other commandments. I don't even know why they had to have ten. If you look at all of the other commandments, they all distill around three simple rules. The rules for how to live a good life. Want to know what they are?

(1) Love, respect and honor your family
(2) Love, respect and honor others as though they were your family
(3) Live peacefully. Do not cause others any intentional harm whether physical or emotional.

That's it folks. Nothing difficult about that or any need to shroud it in threats of eternal damnation and other religious hullabaloo. Don't need special buildings for it full of people in strange clothes who make you feel guilty and inadequate. Don't need to bleed people of every dime they make so you can fill those buildings with gold and silver statues and huge pipe organs. Don't have to dress up for it so you can try to impress others. No special songs or ceremonies. No hats. No cups. No special wine or wafers. No reason or need to denegrate and condemn others. No reason for crusades, or to burn anyone at the stake. No need to invoke mass murder in anyone's name. Just simple and efficient rules for a good life.

Put this on a card, have it laminated, and look at it every day so you don't forget and you will live a good life.
Enjoy.

True Confessions

I hate visiting my mother. Not because I don't care, but because I do. I go because I should and (at least for now) she still knows me. But this is not really my mother. This is not the woman I grew up with and it is painful to watch this deterioration. The woman I grew up with had a quick wit and a great memory and a humorous inclination. This woman is not her and I don't particularly care to see her. If I would stop, of course, my relatives would once again turn against me as a heartless fiend as they did when my sister spread her lies. Not that this would really hurt me. I generally have stopped caring years ago what my relatives feel about me. But the bullshit would slosh over to my family since most of them are so judgemental, and that would make me angry and probably start some things I can do without for now. So I do my duty periodically by seeing this woman who looks like my mom, but isn't really anymore.

Lettin the Mind Wander

So many people spend so much time turning into liars and idiots because they have decided that they will do whatever they need to do, no matter how bad, because they feel they want to be known as a certain type of person or belong to a certain group. They mold themselves into an image so that others will think of them and accept them in that image. But deep down, they know it's a lie. They know that this is not them, that it's wrong, and even in some cases evil. No matter how they revel in their carefully crafted image, there is always a little part of them that whispers that it's wrong and this gnaws at them throughout their whole lives.

They have failed to learn that the only person you can be, is yourself. The only person you should be trying to impress, and compete against, is yourself. The only person who can improve you is yourself. And the only person who can love you for who you are, is a person who gets to see the real you, not your carefully crafted image.

Personal integrity. Personal responsibility. Personal honor. Those are the only things that can make you a good person and a good citizen. All the rest of the junk like money, power, influence, control, may make you believe you are making your life better or are making you a more important person, but it's just a trap. It makes you the worst kind of shallow, thoughtless, self-deluded clown. A clown who will stop at nothing, hurt anyone, break any law or contract, just to feed their own selfishness. And that makes you the worst person you can be, not the best.

Want to be the best you can be? Be yourself.

Lookin For the Silver Lining in Every Dark Cloud

A couple of short traveling stories.

During my first trip to Arizona in the 70's I decided to cross the Navajo reservation on my way to Window Rock. I was behind time as I drove across the reservation and decided to spend the night in a rest area along the road. As I was getting dinner ready, the tribal police pulled in with their four-wheeler to see if I was ok. They were probably just checking on me anyways, but, they told me it was because they wanted to make sure I wasn't broken down or anything since it was fairly far from civilization. We talked a little and they liked my van and said they'd stop by again on the return trip from their rounds. Sure enough, a few hours later they pulled back in and we sat around the fire for a while talking about my trip and they told me a lot about the Navajo people and gave me some great pointers for things to look for and see. Really nice people and I had an wonderful time.

A few years later, on another trip, I was stopping in Latimer County Oklahoma as a representative of our family. My grandfather did a little land speculation and when he died he still had a 20 acre site in OK. No one in the family knew anything about it and my grandmother never sold it. When she died my aunt and uncle wanted to know about it because an oil company wanted to buy it. So I stopped and checked it out. On the way out of the area, there was road construction and they routed us through an ungodly old back-country road. The van was in dire need of gas and there was nothing around. Suddenly I came across a little mom and pop store with two old crappy looking gas pumps). I pulled my hippie van in to the pump and waited with my long hair as a classic stereotype hick came out of the store towards the van. Half toothless, white t-shirt with cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve, flat top, and a couple of bad tatoos on some skinny arms. I'd seen Easy Rider. I knew I was in trouble.

Well, this guy came out, looked at the van and smiled. Asked if he could look inside and we had a great conversation for about a half-hour while he gassed up the truck and did all of the manual maintenance that gas stations generally stopped doing in the 60's. We had a good time, shook hands, and he wished me well as I left. I smacked myself for letting my fears and misconceptions run loose. Just another wonderful encounter with good people while traveling. I've had many and hope to have many more.

Catching Up

I am still working out. At the beginning of this year (2011) I started doing P90X. I now do two workouts a day and I have lost a NET 65 pounds since I started in January of 2010. I feel really good, at least physically, and am becoming much stronger. I really recommend P90X. Tony Horton has a good attitude about the program, is realistic in how people should approach it, and he's pretty funny to watch.

My daughter has just recently started P90X too and I hope she continues so that she can improve her health too. My son got me interested in this and he is continuing the program also.

My mother's Alzheimer's is getting much worse and she has had to move to a new rest home because the old one couldn't handle patients with her level of severity. The issue now is that her behavioral problems are increasing and she's becoming a problem child in the new facility. This is, of course, stressing out my sister and I and it's very sad to see our mother going downhill so fast, and so far. We'll have to see what happens.

Social Nutworking - Final Grade

After a little more than a year on Facebook, I give social networking a D+. It would have gotten an F but I did reconnect with some "lost" friends and family which was a positive experience. However, I also had to cut off and disconnect from many people. I have come to realize that the "promises" of social networking are just empty buzz in most cases. People really don't want real conversation and discourse. All they want is a forum so they can spout and feel superior to others. If you actually post contrary arguments or question them they turn into angry bullies and try to denegrate and humiliate you to put themselves back up on their imagined throne. There are a lot of people out there who fall into the category of social networker that I feared all along, the "neurotic with no self image" who only feels alive when they can post every little thing they do in their entire pathetic lives and wait for people to respond to validate them. The worst of these is the "unknown questioner." These are people who post stupid bits like "this is horrible," with no other information, in an attempt to see how many people respond in order to feel important because "X" number of people are apparently waiting by their computers for any word from these conceited neurotics. The other big annoyance are the people who post crap and then INSIST everyone repost it. Who .... bloody .... cares. If you really want to make a difference, get out of your house, away from your computer, and volunteer and help. Posting some shit on Facebook doesn't change or help anything. But for those few who actually want to keep in touch with each other and want real conversation, the medium is a very nice way to do it .... as long as you can get over the fact that Facebook itself considers you, and everything about you, and everything about anyone you know or have contact with, as sources of revenue and don't give a crap whether they spread your information from here to the spammers of Russia. So ..... that's my final grade. I will keep using Facebook to keep in touch wit ha handful of good friends and family. For everyone else. You can have each other. Why aren't most of these people in therapy?

Praise God and Pass the Ammunition

A few thoughts about religion.

If God loves me and I am his child, why does he subscribe to cruel and inhuman punishment?

The big threat from every religion is that if you are not good, you will go to Hell "FOREVER." Let's look at this as a punishment. If we decide that "forever" means the life of the universe as we know it, and we are currently in the middle of the universes' life span of 30 billion years, that means that forever, currently, is about 15 billion years.

So ..... religion tells me God loves me and cares for me and wants the best for me, but, if I somehow screw up during my measly 80+ year life span, God will sentence me to at LEAST 15 BILLION YEARS of pain, torture and anguish. That seems to be quite an overreaction and quite a punishment for someone you "love." The whole concept is rediculous.

Plus, isn't God supposed to be all-knowing and all-powerful? Isn't Heaven supposed to be the place where you will go to earn your "perfect" reward if you are good?

Yet, Satan and his followers were angels in Heaven. They turned against God (because he gave Man free will and angels didn't have that - wait a minute - if angels didn't have free will, how could Satan have turned evil and decided to challenge God? Oh that's right, I'm not supposed to question that). They started a WAR IN HEAVEN and tried to take over. If God is all-powerful, why would Satan have even tried to challenge him? Why didn't God just make them all disappear? If God is all-knowing, why didn't he see this coming and just prevent it? (God seems to be surprised and angered quite frequently for an all-knowing being) And notice that God didn't actually defeat Satan. They actually came to an agreement to stop the war where Satan and his followers got their own country. And they were then allowed to torture mankind. Doesnt sound like a crushing victory for an all-powerful being.

If you subscribe to the idea that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, then nearly every story in the Bible makes no sense. If you believe the stories in the Bible, then you have to accept that God is, at best, maybe just "slightly" superior. But certainly not all-knowing and all-powerful.

This is why religion makes no sense and is bunk. The stories and the rules are completely contradictory.

The purpose of religion is to pretend you are doing good for others so you can convinve your religious leaders to tell God you are good to save your own ass from going to hell. In the meantime, religion fosters intolerance, hatred, elitism, and the persecution of anyone not "of the faith." Thou Shalt Not Kill .... this is a COMMANDMENT .... unless your religious leaders tell you God said it was ok to kill "this time."

Rediculous.