We Will Find Our Way

It's been months. I'm not sure how exactly these phases occur in which I'm so utterly compelled to rant and rave about certain topics, but they do. And sometimes, I fall silent and churn emotions and information over and over in my head until they form (somewhat) coherent ideas, and eventually/hopefully, into concepts. It seems the space I set aside here is most often geared towards these diatribes, thought sometimes I like them for praise of a work or a person. I've still been writing since Hitchens died, but most of it hasn't had any place here. Much of it has been in the realm of fiction, the slow toil over 4 or 5 stories that I've been working on for years. A huge part of my mind will not shut up, insisting that I work on these immediately and finish them, but another part won't allow it. It suppresses my motivation to create something out of mere words. It prefers instead to mull, to contemplate, to enact a gross tautology in an already cyclical and repetitive system: the brain. But the apparent drought here is not all bad. Instead of merely expressing my views to a computer screen, I've engaged in real life arguments and debates whenever the opportunity has arisen. I, like most people my age, were told to shut up as children, that if nothing nice could be said, to not say anything. For a long time I struggled with that, finding myself enraged when a person would preach bullshit and no one would call them out on it and confront their nonsense. Throughout my life, I relished those times when I was able to challenge ideas that I knew were clearly wrong. And fervently would I challenge them, never wanting to cede a single point to them (though I would if they were right). There are few greater feelings that vindication, to be proven right. However, in my prolonged observations of people, they will almost NEVER admit wrongdoing or wrong-thinking. Most often these days it amounts to either one of two phrases: "Well that's my opinion and I have a right to it" or "Well that's just your opinion". If you ever find yourself engaged in a conflict of ideas and the other person utters either one of those phrases, know you're probably right. These phrases are the final bastions for the wrong. The first one I often find said by the religious, who I not only have no qualms about challenging but find it desirable, who believe that regardless of facts in reality, their opinion (faith) is ultimately all that matters. Don't ever accept such solipsistic garbage. Know they are not conceding anything, know they are frightened by the truth and hiding behind what amounts to nothing more than an electrical charge moving through neural receptors within a fatty mass of tissue. As I've said before, if you want to believe fairy tales and junk science, feel free, but once you decide to bring that to the public sector, put it on a pedestal and bully others into accepting it, know that you are the enemy of free thought. The true believers of such things will promote death, destruction and chaos in order to protect their imaginary friend. And that...is goddamn frightening. To know that there are such an abundance of religious maniacs in the world who claim to love death more than we love life is a scary prospect. And the fact that society feels a need to treat those with such convictions as reverent and off limits to offense is dangerous outlook. Penn Jillette once said, "You don't have a right NOT to be offended". The media and many average citizens are terrified of the possibility of offending the religious, though that can occur with mere words or a drawing. Somehow, the outrage is directed towards the person who is merely practicing free speech in supposedly free countries. It's made me fucking sick over the years to see the utter hostility that the religious have towards those who express their disagreement or disdain of their beliefs. It's made me even sicker to see the defense of religious bigotry and the condemnation of the offenders. As nonbelievers, we are constantly offended by the religious and should, by all means, point out how they are fucking the world so badly. We should also consider ourselves lucky to live in an age and place where are ABLE to do such a thing, without fear of being executed in the most horrific of manners (stoning, beheading, burned at the stake, etc.). Oh how the religious are loathe to acknowledge their fetid past of absolute criminal treatment of innocent people. Now they are so certain of their moral high ground, though actions they would find to be repulsive nowadays are considered repulsive because of secular concepts that have arisen since the Enlightenment (concepts that also defined the USA in its creation). They keep changing their paradigms, their moral boundaries, their platitudes in order to obscure, in that desperate moment, the fear they have knowing they're might not be anything divine looking out for us after all, and that once the heart stops beating and the brain shuts down, that it's over. I've heard far too many times, even from people in my own family, that if you don't have religion, then it's impossible for you to have morality. After either laughing at how inane that sounds or quelling the rage inside of me, I point out one perfect example: the Chinese. How could the Chinese, whose society is based on the secular humanism of Confucius, build the most sophisticated and advanced society of the ancient world? They were halfway through their Golden Age, the Han Dynasty, when God supposedly sent his only son to be tortured to death for the world's sins. How was it that the "Holy" Land was in such a backwards state of unrest while the secular Chinese were more progressed than nearly any other culture on the planet? Perhaps because they valued education and taught their people how to read and write, experiment with medicine and science instead of allowing that only the priests could be literate and that were was no need for science because God is everything. Confucius had morality nailed almost 500 years before this Christ figure was fabricated. The ideas behind Confucian ethics are so incredibly simple and logical, that they could only be intrinsic: treat others how you want to be treated, think before you act, study the world and learn how it works, respect those who work for you and respect those you work for, show deference to those in power but don't blindly follow, change only comes from within, lead by example. See that? All very basic ideas that conform to an orderly and stable society and not one mention of the divine, for that is in no way conducive to the functioning of a healthy society, but perhaps to an individual. Faith, like a prescription, should come with a similar warning label: for personal use only.