amazingly, i do manage to refrain from bashing myself in the head.

my best lead right now involves waiting to replace the guy who’s currently fucking up that position right and left. he apparently needs one more major screw-up, then the two people over there i’ve spoken to will push me in front of their senior vp of professional services. i’m not normally one to root for someone else’s failure—not even in sports!—but it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and from where i’m sitting, there just ain’t enough dogs.

that’s a quote from somewhere, i forget where. meh.

i hate being in this kind of hold pattern, but sometimes it’s useful. there’s only so much job/contract-hunting a person can do during the day, and despite some other responsibilities last evening, i managed to watch the president’s address and all the surrounding bullshit. Kind of interesting on several levels. you never know if people are opposed to some things just because the man is black, or because he doesn’t share their specific political ideology, or whatever. it was nutty last night, and even a bit nuttier today. what i don’t understand is how anyone can be opposed to a system that provides more opportunities for all citizens.

which of course led me to wondering about the patterns of thought to which such individuals must be enslaved. what saddens me is how they, like our last president, fight so hard to limit themselves—their own well-being. it’s easy to call them witless dupes, but that’s also a bit disingenuous in this context, because they’re not merely witless dupes to the health care industry. they’re really witless dupes to a political and social ideology that defines everything from their family heritage to the marketplace in which we all compete.

which is, of course, exactly the problem.

i try to be understanding. i tell myself and others that these types of things aren’t their fault, because, after all, they don’t really know any better. they’re simply reacting to the world from the basis of their collective myopia and intellectual repression. but that’s rather disingenuous, too. such observations do nothing to solve the problem, and in fact, simply lend to an environment which facilitates the problem. they don’t make the world any better for my children or myself, and tolerance of their world view simply perpetuates an environment in which our own world view is repeatedly compromised.

i have a deep-seated, honest desire to want to help these people, despite the fact that i know how fruitless and impossible such a task truly is. there are certain minds so full of muck that digging it all out would destroy the person. and there are a lot of those minds around. but, just as pointless as trying to “help” them, is the idea of arguing with them. there’s simply not enough critical thinking going on in those muck-filled little boxes of ultra-conservatism for me or anyone to be successful in helping them change their minds about anything. as disappointing as that is, and even as depressing as it makes me, at least i can be glad they i, and mine, don’t suffer from that particular form of mental slavery.

but that’s a rather hollow victory.

so, where does that leave us? if it’s truly worthless to try to change their minds or reason with them, what do we do? well, in the case of healthcare reform, we have to inflict our worldview on them until it becomes the new status quo. Let’s not forget that in ten years, if the health care system needs some more changes, these same small minds will be the ones STILL opposed to change, but on the premise that the way it will be in ten years is “the way that it is”. their attention span is so short, collectively and individually, that within just a few short years of these changes, they’ll have forgotten how it was, anyway. so, what we need to do today is to encourage our senators and representatives to get this health care reform passed, with a public option. it falls on us to change the focus of what these unfocused minds perceive.

and the sooner, the better.

after all, not all the people living here are liberals, and living where they do, as they do, they need health care, too. they might be too mentally enslaved to truly understand their own dilemma, but they’re not going to fix it on their own by continuing to spout republican rhetoric. they need our help, so let’s make it happen. after all, the benefits apply to all of us.

NEXT: Un:Enslaved contributor and fellow twitter-whore, @MovingToMontana, has designed something that every card-carrying atheist needs: the card to actually carry. Download yours today, tonight, or at some other convenient time for you. I’ll eventually get that link into the sidebar, too.

and lastly….what i actually came here to do today….

Look. I’m fine if you want toworship a non-existent “God”, even if your only real reason for doing so is the gross combination of “that’s what you’ve been told to do” and “that’s the emotional crutch you need to have.” Really, it’s okay.

But. Each and every abrahamic religion is premised upon one common concept: FAITH. Without faith, your religion has no meaning, no purpose, no relevance whatsoever. And, functionally speaking, faith is the opposite of fact. So when you start spouting elements of your faith as fact, you have ceased contributing to the formative discussion. And worse, when you spout the “God is Love” stuff, you actively undermine the entire premise of your own faith.

Think about that for a minute. This isn’t a new argument from the atheist standpoint, but this is the exact problem with every abrahamic religion: your God is NOT “Love”. Your God is not even nice. Your God, according to your own Holy Books, is an insensitive, insecure, vituperative ass, wholly and exclusively interested in exactly one thing: the undying devotion and ego-massaging of vast numbers of human beings.

And what’s REALLY ironic about that is the fact (the proven, irrefutable fact), that the God described in your Holy Books is actually just a construct of human thinking. The irony is nearly overwhelming. You ultimately choose to believe in an imaginary God because certain persons from the Bronze Age who sought a slightly more insidious way to control the population (as opposed to simple, direct militarism) made up some quaint fairy tales for you to believe in. And worse than that, a lot of those stories are far from “quaint”. According to your Holy Books, your God is responsible for the deaths of millions, directly ordered the rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of women and children, and even struck down his own people for being as gullible as he supposedly made them.

Yeah, I know, you’ll cast that all aside and argue at me with the other self-contradictory stories from your book of fairy tales. And that’s okay. Just understand that when that’s all you do, when that’s the sum and total of your apparent ability to form cohesive thought, it becomes increasingly difficult for me to swallow the condescension. And yes, when you willfully confuse the concepts of faith and fact, I don’t even try.

Okay, actually, you probably didn’t see that one coming, but it’s about time I started some sort of meme over here, so T.M.R. (Tuesday Morning Rambling) it is! Besides, TMR is almost like TMI, but all piratey and shit. Truly, what could be better?

1. So, speaking of piratey things, I want to thank Cap’N Dyke for keeping me listed as her official “Snarkalopicus” (see her sidebar) despite my long absence from snarky things here, there, and really most anywhere other than Twitter.

2. Actually, related to the previous, be advised I am still working on fleshing out the blogroll over here. I’m being very prudent this time, however, and selecting those whom I already very much admire, whether I knew them from previous blog incarnations and have been reading them all along, or whether I met them more recently on Twitter. To be perfectly honest, to be in my blogroll here should “mean a lot”. Current listings constitute less than 5% of those whom I at least skim on a regular basis, and these ones, I read every posting every day. They are golden. Subscribe to their feeds!

3. If you, or anyone you know, are looking for someone with a couple of decades’ experience in Software Development from the Quality Assurance perspective, please put them in touch with me. Being who and what I am, I try to keep my professional life somewhat distinct from most of my online presences, and I would truly be peeved for this to stand in the way of that. Discretion is recommended.

4. Tune in this Sunday to the ThinkAtheist.com Weekend Podcast hosted by yours truly. Since it’s Labor Day weekend, I fully expect drunken discourse on virtually any topic under the sun, but the theme for the night is traditionalism.

5. Do you Twitter naked? Good for you!

6. I’m genuinely curious: How many of you are using social networks such as Twitter to find like-minded people in your local areas for friendship or romance? Is the process successful? And if it is, do you tweet to these friends/relations more or less since you found them? Answers in the comments if you would please be so kind.

7. Same question as the above, without regard to local proximity. In other words, if you use Twitter, etc to find friends/romance, is it all about location, location, location, or are you willing to move around a bit? Again, answers in the comments if you would please be so kind.

8. Do you blog naked? You fucking sicko! Put some damn clothes on!

9. Nine is actually the loneliest number. If you don’t know why, you don’t need to ask.

10. You all realize, of course, that what we really need is a national health care system, don’t you? Of course you did. Let’s make it happen, folks.

11. I see in the stats that some of you have begun browsing or even pulling feeds based on my categories/topics. That’s cool, but pulling in my old posts from the otherwhirled pretty much screwed all that up. After I get my favorite folks into the blogroll, many of the categories, and a lot of the tags, will be munged together a bit. too many is too distracting. You have been warned, hah.

Alright, that’s it for now. Peace, out, and remember, be careful out there ‘mong them xtians!

so, essentially what i’ve done is migrate MY (not the guest-bloggers) content from otherwhirled.com over to here. that went pretty well, although, there were 1,297 items in the import file and i’ve only got 933 here, i believe. meh. and i’ve tried numerous times to import the missing content to no avail. no WP error message or anything. meh, again. pfft.

at any rate, the oldest stuff (ironically being that which was most faithfully represented in the import) lost the attached images years ago. that was back before i understood that yahoo doesn’t cache news images, sorry. they’ve been gone at the otherwhirled, too, sadly….all this time. more recent works from mid-2008 forward or so, i saved the images on my own server, so those are still good to go. i’ve even got them doubled up.

so, for those of you who only know me through unenslaved.com and twitter, these old posts may provide some interesting insights into where i’m coming from. for everyone else, consider these old posts some blasts from the past. i will be trying to re-find some of the old, missing images on the more popular posts. i have a semi-photographic memory, but that will be an ongoing process.

coming up next is actually getting this blogroll going. yay, fun. stay tuned. peace.

All of which changed last week when I resigned my position. I’m not terribly thrilled with the prospect of having to choose between restarting my former business (19 months ago, I quit 16 years of self-employment to take that job), or putting my head back on the chopping block known affectionately as “job hunting,” but it was exactly this concept of mental slavery that prompted me to leave. I’ve never been totally thrilled with the idea of playing by the rules, and when the rules are written by people who really don’t understand the paradigm, following those rules becomes even more bogus.

And that’s about all I’ll say about work. They’re good people, but the industry they serve will hopefully go away with national health care reform anyway. My own bitching and moaning about our health care system was a bit duplicitous on certain levels.

Anyway, late last Thursday and most of Friday were spent in reflection on the various things in my life for which I have forced myself into strict and/or linear ways of thinking. I don’t have a set rule or methodology for this kind of self-analysis. Partly, it’s a bit of compare/contrast with similar past experiences and also between the various things I have going on right now. It’s also just a general assessment of where my mind is at, and how the thought-patterns I use when I’m teaching could be applied to other situations. In short, I discovered several aspects of my life weren’t exactly being approached in an unenslaved way, and that was quite frustrating for me. I try to be holistic about these things. They’re not just good ideas, you know.

Ironically, one of the most enslaved ways of thinking I believe I undertake is this belief that I don’t have time to blog. That’s really just not true, but I make it true, since I don’t take the time to do this very often. See where I’m going with this thought? We make our own realities; we enslave ourselves in these ways. At least, I do, but I really doubt I’m alone. But we do this all the time, in love, in activities, in all sorts of things. We tell ourselves that we don’t have time to do a thing when really, we’ve simply put other things first, or we want a rest, or….whatever. But since we repeat the lie of “not enough time” to ourselves so often, we believe the lie, so “not enough time” becomes real.

Which, of course, is quite easy to say, now that I do have the time. Except that I don’t. I take job-hunting pretty seriously, and when it’s done right, it’s like the most time-consuming job there is! Nevertheless, I’ve resolved to blog and vlog here more, hopefully with a semblance of consistency, because I do have several subjects that I want to communicate on. The trick for me will be finding a new job, or a set of contracts For example:

1. The…er…stigma of the word Atheist and how that simple word halts communication with certain mindsets
2. Getting people to understand that Agnosticism is not, in and of itself, a final conclusion
3. Working together with people who subscribe to disparate beliefs to affect social and governmental reform
4. Beginning to turn the tide of perception of those Atheists who work in the public sector, into a good thing. Away from the not-so-tacit ‘requirement’ that public servants be religious.
5. Remembering the works of freethinkers, humanists, secularists and atheists who have had a profound impact on our culture

Those are just a few of the things I hope to undertake here in the upcoming weeks. I will (hopefully) no longer hold myself bound by this get-nothing-done mental slavery.

Peace.

So, hopefully, the following video does a good enough job of communicating where my head is at today. It’s in several places.

As an Update: See how it works? my special person is actually doing just fine, and simply had IT guys trying to break her computer. Nothing wrong, nothing to worry about, and this is just how things go sometimes! LOL….

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following from the previous vlog, i address the issue of user’s avatars and what they do not, inherently, represent. there’s really not a lot of insight in this one, but i think it needed saying. i hear far to many comments about how “hot” someone is, when the person commenting really has no way of knowing if the avatar truly depicts the person. it’s kind of silly.

In case the object below doesn’t play well, you can also view it at twitcam.com

there is an element to social networking that some of us refer to as “the pretendy”. in essence, “the pretendy” is the fact that we never really know how much pretense lies behind what we place behind our online personas. not that total honesty is necessary or required, but when it comes to judging the quality of our interactions, “the pretendy” works from both directions and obfuscates things. i simply encourage you to give that some consideration.

In case the object below doesn’t play well, you can also view it at twitcam.com

This series of vlogs is about how atheists conduct ourselves on Twitter. Not that i think i need to tell anyone what to do, but because i’m a patttern-recognition guy, and i see certain patterns that lead to certain thoughts. i’m simply sharing those thoughts.

In case the object below doesn’t play well, you can also view it at twitcam.com

This is a thought that has been coming upon me for several days. Even with all the Twitter support for new elections in Iran, or at least a full recount of the vote, we are forgetting, if not simply outright ignoring, that the populace, in large part (even if proven not to be a technical majority), does not seek emancipation from its theocratic republic. All this outcry is, instead, the expression of a desire for a slightly more emotionally digestible form of theocratic rule.

Another way of saying that is: The protesters in Iran don’t want freedom. They are simply demanding that the shackles be loosened slightly so that they can scratch a philosophical itch or two.

And that, really, is it.

After some considerable consideration (pardon the redundancy), I changed my twitter avatar from a green one (Green is, as you might remember, the official color of Islam anyway), to a regular one a few days ago. In retrospect, I don’t support this Free Iran charade at all. Because it’s a charade. It’s pompous blowhardiness. Sure, if the elections were rigged, that’s wrong. Undoubtedly, if votes were ignored or uncounted, that’s wrong. But the desired end result is far too closely related to the status quo to be worthy of this much angst and bloodshed. How incredibly, unfortunately, disappointingly…

…ignorant.

“Save us from our self-imposed delusion with a slightly different form of self-imposed delusion” is precisely what this is all about. That ain’t freedom, friends and neighbors. That’s self-perpetuated willful enslavement. Iran will only begin to be “free” when the majority requires the government to remove the yolk of religious oppression. And it’ll still be a long way from there for them to go as a country.

And it’s this faulty, delusional presumption that makes the senseless, needless deaths, injuries, and property damage all the more depressing.

Humanity: the perpetually incessant bane of human progress.

I have no delusions, illusions, or conclusions that the type of “slavery” I refer to when using this metaphor in any remote way correlates to the various forms of tribal, racial, and societal forms of slavery which have been committed upon people throughout humanity’s inglorious history. By using the word “unenslaved”, my intention is not to demean anyone who is, or has ever been, subjected to the crime we commonly refer to as slavery.

That having been said, I want to apologize for the dearth of posts over the past nine days. for what it’s worth, I was in the hospital with pneumonia from June 11-15, and sick for several days before that. It was the first time—ever—that I have been brought so low, and that’s including being quite sickly as a toddler, shot in combat in Panama, and having sustained back injuries during Desert Storm, along with the relatively typical respiratory issues from the same. At 42 years of age, I’m still young enough to be grossly opposed to feeling helpless. It was not a fun week, and I’m still not at 100% yet.

Now, why my guest bloggers didn’t do anything, I can’t tell you. Lazy bums they are, off with their own domains and such! Bums, I tell you! BUMS!

Anyway, let me take a moment hear to explain what this site is REALLY about.

When I started unenslaved.com, the thoughts in my head revolved around many subjects, ranging from a simple celebration of not being bound by traditionalism, religion, and other forms of social oppression through to wanting to be a resource for people who are in the process of freeing themselves from the various forms of institutionalized social repression (which includes some forms of education, religion and sociological circumstances). Ultimately, I think I’ve settled on the former, with a willingness to help those who want it, in terms of the latter. As well, if something I manage to bust out happens to pique someone’s interest to the point that they begin to at least toy with changing the way they think, then I would be a happy man indeed. This is also why I’ve invited others to post here: more opportunities to get more neurons firing, after all.

You should be aware that I, and my guest-bloggers (at least I believe I can safely speak for them on this level), are all smart-asses, but we are are passionate about the things we have come to know as true. For myself, as a “de-convert” of original Christian upbringing, I often have a difficult time not belittling those whose thinking is woefully clouded by delusion, because my de-conversion was a function of my personal maturation process. While I have every intention of continuing my patented smartassery, I also intend to improve upon not talking like a smarmy asshat, or even internally believing that I’m “better” than someone else who lives under the veil of delusion. I doubt I’ll be perfect at it, but I’ll honestly try.

Anything else, after all, would be me imposing a particularly insidious form of mental slavery on myself: a belief that I am “better” simply because I corrected an error. Such things don’t truly make anyone better, they just make one less gullible. Just as many bad things can happen by virtue of one’s transfixed skepticism as by virtue of one’s gullibility, after all.

So here’s the challenge: I hope that those of us that blog here will continually challenge ourselves and each other to be true to the premise above: We are not inherently better than anyone else. Now, we might be better at some things than certain other people: things like critical thinking, analysis, etc. But we’re not inherently better, or more superior at least I don’t believe we necessarily are. Let us educate without belittlement, and let us communicate without condescension. I realize this is no easy task. The easy stuff isn’t really worth doing, though.

The challenge for those who come here to read these things is to at the very least attempt to be non-judgmental. You are neither expected to nor desired to agree with everything we put out to be read. You are certainly not expected to think like we do, believe what we believe, or frankly to be as self-reliant as we are.

Some are going to read that as a sidelong put-down, but that’s not the intent of that statement. Most people who believe in a deity are actually not quite as self-reliant as they tend to envision themselves. This is precisely where communications tend to get bogged down. The only thing I ask is that we make honest attempts to communicate as opposed to simply vociferating, pontificating, and jumping feet-first into the ad-hominem grab-bag of oneupmanship.

Thanks for your time.