Religion, the oppressive master.

One of the mistakes people make about me is believing because I'm an Atheist, then I must live in some kind of empty, immoral and inconsequential world. They believe this because religion has created a wall between them and the world beyond things. Unlike those who live behind this wall, I have no problem seeing myself as part of the greater whole that is nature, that is earth and sky, that is me in everything and everything in me.

The believers try and claim this sense of wholeness by calling it "the world god created." To me this is putting oneself in the position of renter on the planet instead of an inseparable part of it. No god created me or any such nonsense. I AM just as a tree is, just as a mountain is.

The advantage to this is huge because it means I can't be disconnected from myself by something as shallow as religion. I can't be led around by prejudices about the world to the point where scientific evidence is dismissed to pacify superstitious nonsense. I can't be swayed by material rewards or pacified by the promise of a life beyond the reality of the present.

That makes me dangerous because if I can't be bought then I am neither for nor against. If I can't give up my ferocious hunger for peace and justice for the lie that my perfect world exists somewhere I have to die to see it, then I become even more dangerous because I am never satisfied with platitudes. I want actions. I want tolerance. I want equality.

Most of the people in this country right now have been fed so much divisive crap they can't even consider anything but their place in the herd. Everything outside it is a threat, complete with color coded fear levels. Everyone who isn't them, who doesn't go to their church, who doesn't believe exactly as they believe, is somehow defective, wrong, or gasp! a socialist leftist terrorist who aspires to nothing more than sitting on a death panel that will get to off grandma.

I don't know if we can ever come together again as a country, as a people, as a nation. Maybe America is still too young. Maybe this country is like a belligerent teenager who has to say no to everything to establish its independence, no matter how much he or she needs what they are rejecting.

We've created these caricatures of human beings in people like Sarah Palin and her Paliban followers. We've scraped the bottom of the human barrel and out came the Becks, the Limbaughs, the Teahadists and their hateful rhetoric fed to them as talking points with no substance to distract them from what their masters want them to believe.

Maybe America is the stupidly materialistic hell where all the dumb people who valued things over anything else, ended up to wallow forever in their misguided ignorance. Maybe we're all dead and this is how it ends, buried in a landfill with all the insignificant crap we were convinced meant true happiness. Maybe hell is that house we over-bought to impress who the hell knows. Maybe hell is everything in that house, in its closets, in its garages that were supposed to buy happiness but failed miserably. Maybe hell is the pile of discarded relationships that lost out to the things mattered more than love. Maybe there really isn't much hope for us as a species. Maybe we're a worthless pile of failed ideology that someday will be studied and used as an example of how not to live a life.

Or maybe we will wake up and realize how badly we've all been manipulated, how efficiently we were taught to hate with no facts to back up the reasons for our hatred. Maybe we'll realize that we allowed ourselves to be led and herded into like-minded groups so we would never become dangerous, never explore outside our comfort zone, never accept anyone different than ourselves, never demand that our leaders lead instead of herd. Maybe one day we will turn off the TV, throw out the hate radio, use the propaganda that passes as newspapers to start a great big bonfire we can dance naked around together and start over as a species.

And maybe, just maybe we'll come to the realization that religion was and always will be the problem. Not god, not spirituality, not dancing naked in the forest, but religion--that evil, dogmatic chain so many willingly strap around themselves. On that day, a whole lot of people will finally understand that the best way to make someone your obedient puppet is to lead them around by their hate, and that religion is what mainlines the hatred directly into the human being. And hopefully the desire to escape, to finally live free and by their own terms, will allow them to throw off the shackles of religion forever and grow that perfect world without having to die first to see it.

Chess Skeletons by orsobear
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Religion, the oppressive master.

Sunday Atheists

For most of my life I've lived among those who thrived on the outskirts of civilization. Many of them in my early life did well, especially the musicians, artists and dancers who learned that nothing comes to those who do not work and work and work. My model of success was based on making a go of whatever you call your art. I didn't know there were people in the world who couldn't succeed. I saw no models that told me differently until I was a grown up adult-aged woman. I saw only people who were independent, freethinking, hardworking artistic realists who believed success was within reach if you worked hard enough.

As I grew up and went to college I met those who would devote their lives to Universities and other perilous academic flesh parlors. They managed to make a decent living, influence a few strangers, and not slit their own throats upon realizing the ideal was nowhere close to the reality.

I learned to mourn from those who didn't fit in either group so they floundered and were lost in wars, accidents, bad relationships and diseases that didn't even exist while we were growing up. By the time I reached young adulthood I had a world of new knowledge and painful scars that healed on top of the wounds that came with those lessons.

But it was the immigrants within my own family and in my neighborhood who taught me the most important lesson: those who dare to leap do so alone, against all common sense, and in spite of the bleating herd--but the rewards for doing so are magnificent. If they didn't believe this, I'd be writing this post from Europe because they would not have uprooted their lives to break away from the stockade, the comfortable pasture, the herd of like-minded creatures, the holy institutions of church, school and some twisted biblical version of marriage, to come to a land where they would starve for the first few years, endure ignorance beyond belief, work hours and jobs no one wanted, and still never be completely accepted by anyone except each other.

I took these lessons with me when I moved north for Graduate school. I mistakenly believed, as many foolish youth believe, that my world was the same as everyone else's. I didn't want to be swallowed by the Academic trap that caught my friends and made them safe and sane and far less interesting than they were when words didn't matter so much. I wanted something familiar and yet something different. I didn't want structure and organization. I wanted free form, freethinking, and a minimal amount of rules based on judgements of the few.

These desires led me to gravitate toward the "new age" community because it seemed familiar in the sense that it had the right words when applied to people: artist, musician, rebel, outlaw, different. There was an aura of creative energy that had the familiar smell of childhood much as a loaf of freshly baked bread evokes memories of special times.

I thought I had come home, but I failed to see something I never expected to see in those who smelled so familiar: the stench of dogmatism. I missed it because I wasn't familiar enough with the smell to recognize it. I didn't go to church as a child or as a young adult or as an old adult. I went to nature instead. I camped out in the desert, in the mountains, the hills. But not my community, not the family I thought had adopted me as one of their own. I soon learned the community lived in the attic of a house whose foundation was something far more restrictive and dangerous to me as an individual: religion. And I also learned that because I wasn't trained in churchiness, in mandatory meetings, in standing as a herd, then I was dangerous to them. They could never own me and that meant they could never accept me.

Now you have the understand the situation here. I am a blatant Atheist. Always have been. Always will be. But I'm also someone who doesn't dismiss someone's beliefs or lack of them without having a damn good reason for doing so. That's why I went to their circles, their dances, their suppers, their gatherings, their rituals. I wanted to see how they were different, how they had left behind the past they claimed to have left behind.

I didn't see anything different. I saw the children of middle America being the children of middle America. They had their ritualized Sunday suppers that were only for "family," which was great if you were part of the family and awful if you were not. I was told that the line had to be drawn somewhere, that some people had to be included and others not. But no one told me how the decisions were made, who made them, or why I was included in such an aberration. I quit going to dinners.

They had parties and special events that were invitation only that were private and ritualized. People heard about them and once again were hurt and asked me about some of them and once again I felt bad as if it were my fault that my friends were becoming their parents. Once again it was us and them, once again it was a community of traumatized children reliving their past and inflicting wounds of vengeance on others to lessen the burden on themselves. I quit going to "events" that were closed.

They had meetings with rules and rituals and formalities that were stricter than any religion they escaped from. They had a code of community do's and don'ts that were based on nothing more than the noisiest voice generating the most acquiescence...very much like the loudest tantrum sets the agenda. And they punished, shunned, and discredited anyone who did not believe, who did not attend their churches and meetings, who did not hate and distrust those they hated and distrusted.

My circle of friends I trusted became small enough to count on one hand. And that's the moment they came after me just like the Puritans went after the witches...except they all saw themselves as witches and still do. They came after me because I refused to fight back, because I didn't see any of their issues as serious enough to give it much thought, because I trusted them with the loyalty of one who was raised to trust only her friends.

In the end, I'm proud to have been shunned and shut out by those who did so, just as I am proud of the deep and lasting friendships I have formed within the community with those who were shunned and shut out like me. I deliberately sought them out because I saw the value that the ritualists failed to see in them. And I was raised to believe it's the black sheep of the herd who are the most interesting. I've made a life of finding the blackest sheep to be part of my heart. We don't go to church. We don't go to rituals disguised as church. We don't go to mandatory meetings that exist only to decide who is in or out that week. We don't pretend we have the one and only truth squeezed into our way to tight back pocket ready to whip out and beat non-believers with.

We appreciate each other for being different, for liking and understanding and appreciating Mathematics, Science, Logic, Computers, Art and Literature...and also finding our own truths within new age spirituality. But mostly we appreciate each other because we know that not going to church on Sunday doesn't automatically make one an Atheist. It just makes you someone who can't see your own face in the mirror and therefore can't see your past sneaking up behind you and strangling the life out of you.

(bumpersticker available at: http://www.cafepress.com/ursinelogic.102805214)

Sunday Atheists

Love In The Ant Farm

Imagine an ant farm, a very large, lavishly decorated ant farm. Lines of ants work steadily, hauling minute crumbs from the piles throughout the farm. Busy ants balancing bits of twig and bark as they keep perpetually busy building nothing, but always in the process of preparation should the need ever arise. Their motivated little teams take breaks in unison by the human made still pools of water, so they can rescue the ones who trip over the tiny rocks scattered here and there, when they fall into the water.


But even in the ant farm, groups separate themselves from the others. The corners of the farm are not common territory, and what boundaries there may be, are visible only to the ants, who attack in their industrious warrior teams the minute that unseen line is crossed. How these decisions to group are made, is impossible to discern, even after hours and days and weeks of watching, hoping for some clue, some insight into their little ant minds. It is possible they do not even know themselves.


Now imagine one particular group of ants in one distant corner. These ants are different than the rest, not in appearance, but in something else, the something which brought them all to the same corner. They do not just work; they work and philosophize. They work and speculate. They work and dream. And as they do so, they create in their minds that which they imagine.


But imagination, once set loose, demands a physical response, a real world thing which can be touched and known and felt. And within this restlessness, this desire to move the twig a bit off balance, or to take it perhaps on a different trail, emerges one particular ant, the most restless of them all. This ant cannot traverse the same trail day after day, always carrying the load on the same shoulder. This ant cannot be satisfied with an accidental fall into the pool; it must immerse itself day after day in the hope of tasting a different, previously untasted drop of water.


Now imagine this ant one day, realizing its life was impossible, its world too small, packing up all its dreams and expanding beyond the invisible lines of its own safe boundary. But instead of terror at encountering its first different ant, its first ant from one of the other corners, it approaches this stranger with respect and curiosity. It offers a taste of its dreams in greeting.


Since ants rarely travel alone, it meets a response not in the first ant spoken to, but to one hidden in the group, way back down the line holding the end of the stick. This ant at the end, hears something in the stranger ant's dream. It hears its own unspoken dreams. And since these particular ants who work on the fringe of the accepted group boundaries are generally fair to diverse opinions within their own group, they take the stranger ant into their own corner simply because one of their own saw something they could not yet see.


Now...imagine the whole process started from the beginning, only this time it is in another corner of the ant farm, and it will be a different ant who will go forth and seek out yet another corner to explore. Eventually these groups will interconnect and become one group because in each group will be an ant from home, a familiar ant who will bring in those who saw something it could not see.


This is what it takes for change to take place in the world.

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Love In The Ant Farm