The blog generated a couple questions:

What do we do about those who would gain wealth by exploitation?

How does the free market mitigate greed and corruption?

Before I get to those, I want to make a point about the perceptions we sometimes allow ourselves to have of other people. I don't think I have ever met anyone, Socialist or Libertarian, who isn't searching for ways to improve the world. As a Libertarian, I am disappointed when I am called to defend exploitation as my world view. I assure you that it is not.

Although not a fair question, but by way of demonstration, I could ask of a Socialist: Why do want to give control of the country's resources to an elite few who have already demonstrated an eagerness to support the very type of exploitation you want them to fix? Why do you want more of that type of gross mismanagement?

Now, I know that those questions are full of invalid assumptions and misstatements about Socialism, and they do not represent the thinking of someone looking to make a better world. Assuming that a Libertarian is selfish or all about the individual or doesn't care that people are exploited is just as invalid. We may be wrong, but we're not bad.

The truth is, we are wrong, and so are Socialists, because whether you are looking for honor and goodness in the free market, or in the state control of the nation's resources, you are imagining an ideal world that is far removed from the one we actually have to deal with.

The trouble comes from the fact that people with extensive power and influence will control any economic model to their advanatage. That is, if production is owned by corporations, they will control the corporations. If the means of production are controlled by the state, they will control the state.

Or, as we actually have, both.

To believe that any economic theory can change that is probably not a very useful starting point. Rather, let's consider what form of society and economy can provide the most barriers to such exploitation and provide each of us the best opportunity to succeed.

But to the questions: What do we do with those who would gain wealth by exploitation? The answer is to prosecute them for breaking the law. If they are breaking the law the government has the ability to put them out of business. When control of production is in the hands of the government, and the government uses exploitation for whatever reason, who is there to shut them down?

Capitalism is not anarchy. For a free market to operate well you must have an agent, the government, to settle disputes and punish crimes and exploitation. When one company lies or uses intimidation or force to gain an unfair advantage, the government's role should be to punish such behavior specifically so that other companies, their competitors, may operate freely.

When government fails to prosecute corruption, or specifically allows and rewards it as happened with the bank bailouts, this mechanism is broken. This is specifically why encouraging the government to operate companies without direct oversight, that is Socialism, can be so dangerous.

But even the government can't be everywhere, which is why we want to have a system that is vibrant, free, and open enough that when someone feels he is being exploited by an employer, he may find a different job, get student loans and go back to school, or even start his own company.

And this answers the second question: How does the free market mitigate corruption? It does this by providing more options to more people. If one company is corrupt, don't do business with them. If the government is corrupt, you have fewer options. If a company breaks the law, you may bring a lawsuit against them and use the force of government, the police, and the courts to seek justice. If the government breaks the law, they simply write a new law.

But let's bring this to a more personal level. I think much of the debate is not about economic theory, but what it's like to actually live in the economy, especially during times like this.

Both Socialists and Libertarians are focusing on values. These values should not be thought of as contradictory, but perhaps complementary. Consider the issue of social help for those who need it, what we might call the distribution of wealth issue.

There is a spectrum of how much help to give and to how many people. Socialists and Libertarians place the point on that spectrum in different locations. Socialists tend to move the point toward helping more people, even at the risk of giving some help to those who don't really need it. This value says that we would rather have some people take advantage of the system to make sure that we don't leave behind the truly needy. Libertarians point to the grifter and cry foul.

The Libertarians will set the point farther to the other side, even if it will make it more difficult for some people to find the help they need. The value here is that part of being a mature adult in a free society is to have the motivation and means to care for yourself and your family, and that holding this as a virtue will lead to a stronger, more robust nation overall. Socialists point to the deserving poor and cry foul.

Where you place the point on this spectrum is a choice only you can make. I choose the Libertarian side, specifically because I believe that it provides a better mechanism for separating those who have genuine need from those who simply want to live off of the efforts of others. I believe it is more honest, more mature, and a more stable approach then depending on centralized planning to make equitable wealth adjustments.

I believe that freedom, in both the market and in our personal lives, actually provides more options for the needy and the poor, and that fixing poverty with money, rather than teaching the necessary skills to make and manage money, will tend to keep people more impoverished and dependent in the long run. It's not selfishness or greed, but it might be fair to call it tough love. I do truly want to see more people genuinely successful, and I believe Capitalism offers many more degrees of freedom and opportunities.

What we need to work on, together, Socialists and Libertarians, is doing whatever we can to undermine the ability of powerful individuals who are willing to exploit everyone else as much as they can. Considering the recent collusion between government and business, and the easy trillion dollar welfare to billionaires, I think the last thing we want to do is turn over our entire economy to these people.

Rather, we should be trying to limit the power of the federal government and putting more power back into the hands of the states and to the people. Some states will push the line more toward social help. Other states will push the line more toward corporate solutions. We have a unique heritage and opportunity for all voices to be expressed in these United States.

Bottom line: more freedom helps more people, and the role of government should be to limit and punish exploitation, not be a part of it.

Copyright 2010 Daniel LaFavers

For some reason, the word for the people on the other side of reason in this group has become "Libertarian", as in: .. then there are people who reject science and reason and the accepted truth of global warming, you know, the Libertarians.

Now, I'm sort of a Jane Goodall of Libertarians. I lived and ate and did fund-raising among them for several years, and actually I'm still one of them. But I'm not anti-reason, anti-science, and I'm not selfish. Nor are any of the Libertarians that I know.

So what's up?

There are a couple of factors at work here, I think.

The first is that when Libertarians try to express their ideas it is not always easy to see that they are speaking of a world very different from the one we live in today. This gap leads to a great deal of misunderstanding. More on that in a moment.

The second thing that's going on is that some people who no longer look for answers in God have done a sort of transference, where the ideas of goodness, compassion, justice, and security are now attached to government - or perhaps an idealized image of government, not unlike the idealized image of God that most people still have.

When Government is God, political atheists, which Libertarians often are, can be stereotyped as wrong, evil, backward, and close-minded. You know, the way religious people often think of atheists.

The irony is that the people specifically gathered to rally for understanding, reason, and truth against a barrage of ignorance seem to be subject to the same sort of zealotry and intolerance against which they are fighting so diligently.

The Libertarians bear much responsibility for failing to get their message out and properly understood. Often the things that they say, which make perfect sense to them and are grounded in a perspective that seeks to honor the greatest good in all of us, just sound bad.

For example, Libertarians often say that all taxes are theft. They are in favor of legalizing every drug, removing restrictions to gun-ownership, and eliminating the vast majority of federal programs.

These things sound horrid in the world of today, but are perfectly appropriate in a world filled with honorable adults who work together with reason, compassion, and responsibility. You don't need to restrict things when people use them responsibly. It may not be the reality today, but it is a reasonable goal. Libertarians tend to believe that we are a lot closer to that than we think, and it is only the agenda of powerful forces that convince us we are incapable of living in an adult, responsible world and all it implies, and that we are somehow bad people to even consider it.

What gets lost in the Libertarian message is the belief that we should seek a world where you don't have to manage or support people as though they were children and make up for their lack of ability to be a contributing member of society.

When I say "Taxation is theft" I'm not saying that I believe that police departments or schools are unimportant and should be left to rot as long as you keep your hands off my money. Yes, that would be bad.

What I'm saying is particularly two things. First, I'm saying that I believe there are actually better, more honest, more efficient, more innovative ways of meeting these social needs than what we have today. Second, I'm saying that I recognize the fact that government, as the agent of law, is in a position to hide behind the premise of social good while actually using money and influence to serve hidden interests.

Libertarians are not anarchists, but pragmatists. For example, if a restaurant is found to be unhealthy the government can revoke the license of that poorly run business. However, if a public school is found to be poorly run, the government can not simply shut it down and grant a license to another business. Rather, the people who are responsible for the mismanagement, the school board and principals, are the same people who make all the decisions.

So, when a Libertarian says something like, "shut down the public schools," he is not advocating the absence of education, but the betterment of education by placing government as the monitor, but not direct provider, of that most critical service. Also, Libertarians believe that schools provided by the free market would innovate more, become more efficient, and provide a better product to more people at a better price.

Discussing whether those conclusions are right or wrong is a worthy exercise. Dismissing the debate altogether as selfish and ignorant is not.

The old saying goes: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. In other words, there is genuine value in being capable, and willing to take care of your own life and your family. So you learn how to fish and another man doesn't. Then a third man takes your fish, gives it to the man who doesn't want to bother learning how to fish, then they both tell you that they are wise and you are selfish.

This is why Libertarians say that wealth redistribution is theft. Because if you're the one fishing, it can sometimes feel like theft.

If you feel that the people who benefit from social programs are really trying hard, deserve a helping hand, and that we're all better off for helping them, then certainly someone standing against that will seem wrong and selfish. If you see people as capable but unwilling to fish, working the system, then you will see those social programs as a type of theft to benefit the lazy.

There's a fair amount of truth on both sides of that debate, and your political beliefs will grow from where you place the fulcrum on the lever of that issue: lazy versus deserving.

I dislike government's handling of these sorts of social issues because it ends the debate. I am actually quite compassionate and giving. I am willing to find deserving people and help them, and I would give even more if my conscience wasn't being forced by people who place themselves above me, call me selfish, then take thirty percent of my money to give to foreign wars, bank bailouts, and thousands of people who never caught a fish in their lives and don't ever want to. Why would they when they have my money and your sticky fingers?

Again, I know that there are truly deserving people, and there are many government run social programs that change people's lives for the better. But as with the schools, that's not good enough for me. I believe that we can do better, that we can help more people in more ways than we are doing now.

It is the empty sanctimony of shallow social arrogance that allows government at all levels to pretend greatness while delivering good enough as it squanders money on wars and special interests that do much more harm than the good they actually manage to provide.

Do not give up one false god for another. Do not take the road of the zealot with your revealed truth about the ignorance and selfishness of people that you don't know.

As with all things, drive with reason and understanding. Learn to fish in the lake of ideas, and don't take the welfare of easy answers.

Copyright 2010 Daniel LaFavers

Well, it wasn't quite that passive. Getting a book into the Kindle format turned out to be quite a bit more tricky than I thought.

First, I decided to use the xhtml format, rather than upload a word file or one of the other options. I'm a programmer, so part of the whole fun was writing the program to do the conversion.

There were two main difficulties that I ran into. First, I don't have a kindle. Second, the file format that you upload is not the same as the file format that is loaded onto the Kindle. They have to do the transfer for you and then (for a fee) will deliver it to you Kindle (which I don't have.)

After many more searches than I expected, I finally found an ebook program that will generate the proper Kindle files. The program is called Calibre, and you can download it from http://calibre-ebook.com/download.

It sort of worked. It could make the .azw files and I could see them on the Kindle that I borrowed for a week, but the formatting wasn't quite right. It was trying to do too much for me. So I had a sample, but I couldn't depend on it.

The other think you can do is use the Amazon preview window. Upload your zip file with the properly formatted HTML and related images, and then look at it in the little Kindle screen. Nice, except that it didn't work right. The table of content link was grey, so I couldn't be sure that it was right.

This logjam was finally broken when Amazon finally released their Kindle reader for the Mac. Now I had a Kindle, or a much better facsimile than their crippled preview. But I still couldn't get my html files into the right format. For this, I thank the anonymous someone who posted the hack. On the preview screen is a link to download the zip file that you uploaded. If you copy the link, there's a format option. The hack is to copy the link and change the file_type cgi arg from zip to azw. The file still gets downloaded with a .zip extension, but all I had to do was rename it and drag it to the "My Kindle Content" folder and then, finally, I could check my formatting.

My converter program is a perl script that reads a plain text file, locates paragraphs and other simple markup, and then writes it all out. I have output converters for plain text, xhtml, rtf, and now Kindle. The Kindle one also makes a table of contents out of the level one heading tags, and does some other kindle-specific things.

I then wanted to get the book up on lulu.com before the iPad came out.

LuLu - Broken Mirror

I add to up the price a bit, because the you have to charge at least 1.60 before they start giving a penny royalty.

I made the deadline but I did it totally wrong. It turns out that there's yet another standard, similar to the Kindle format but not quite, called the ePub format. This comes in three parts: The content, the table of contents part and other metadata, and then the part that says put it all in a zip file. Plus, to sell on the iBookstore you need an ISBN.

So when I find the energy, I can write yet another output converter for my perl script to build all the pieces for the ePub standard and then do the iBook channel the right way. Maybe this summer, by the time I'm ready to think about getting an iPad.

The whole purpose of this exercise wasn't primarily to make money. The money side of eBooks is a whole other issue, one that even major publishers are having trouble with. I was wondering what the process would be like if I wanted to publish my full novel as an eBook, rather than submitting it to agents for traditional publishing.

What I learned about that is that having an eBook is about as easy as having a web site. For little effort you can have content available to the entire world. The real hard part, as it always is for every product, is getting in touch with people who might want it. There are billions of people with something to say, and they're all saying it pretty loud.

While I am quite confident that the full novel is of greater interest and value than my practice book, that's still a pretty big haystack for these little needles.

I'll probably stick to sending out letters to agents later this year. Another haystack. Another format. Another world. But if anyone wants to do a little eBook, I can make it Kindle ready pretty easy now.

Copyright 2010 Daniel LaFavers

Pants. David Letterman made the funniness of Pants famous when he formed his production company Wordwide Pants. We carry many precious things in our pants, starting with our sex and bathroom equipment and ending with whatever sticky thing you left in your pocket. Try adding "in your pants" at the end of fortune cookies. That'll make you crack a smile - in your pants.

Lick. When she was three, our young niece said, "Can I see that toy? I want to lick it." Maybe Hasbro plastic has a flavor I'm not fully aware of. Compared to more aggressive alternatives, "Lick Me" almost has a sweetness to it. You can drop it into regular speech, as in, "My brother just got some new toy, A Nintendo DS 2.5 Lick Me Whatever." I can't keep up with technology.

The word knob is even funnier without the prefix door. "So I'm looking through the dollar bin, and some knob left a bag of popcorn next to the clearance shamrock lick me I'm irish keychains" Knob used to mean hill, so on a map you sometimes see places like Floyd's Knob or Knob Spanker Meadow. When someone pulls a dumb-ass move with their car I usually feel better if I yell something like, "Nice move lickknob. Zip up and drive!"

I mentioned some of the funny words to Melissa, and she found another combination.

"Oh yeah? Lick my Pants! LICK MY PANTS!"

That's all for now. I hope all of you have a happy spring, in your pants.

Copyright 2009 Daniel LaFavers

1. I like to put nacho cheese Doritos in vanilla ice cream.

2. I, usually, use too many commas, when I write.

3. Atheist, Libertarian, and I don't trust most of what doctors say. I'm pretty much wary of organized bullshit across the board.

4. If we found out that aliens were real, I wouldn't be all that surprised.

5. I like to crochet blankets, but it takes me a long time.

6. I can play the piano by ear a little, but only in the key of E-flat.

7. I never got my pilot's license, but I can fly and land small planes.

8. I wrote my own programming language that I use at work.

9. I like to eat M&Ms and movie popcorn mixed together.

10. I don't own a lava lamp.

Copyright 2009 Daniel LaFavers

There's something about the 30's-40's. All of the old vintage stuff wasn't old and vintage, but brand new. It was a time when airline travel was glamorous and people wore ties and gowns to dinner. Even smoking looks fresh and new in the black and white films.

Where is the new today?

Our roads and bridges and buildings seem to be getting older and older. All of the new is small, electronic, and swimming just above the era of big, left-over industry. Factories stand empty and we spend our time in facebook.

Every era has its own new, its own contribution, but the transition from no movies, no phones, no planes, no television, to having all of these things, within a short thirty years or so, was more new packed into a small space than even we in our fast-paced modern world are used to.

It's hard to see your own time. I do remember a time before the internet, when Compuserve and AOL and email addresses were exotic. I remember a time when you had to actually go to the library or buy encyclopedias to look something up, a time before Google and Wikipedia.

But still, I want more new. I want new electric cars, new buildings, new factories for making the Next Big Thing. New cities. New roads. New ways.

How can a nation, a world, with so many people get stuck in such an economy, when the very breath of billions is idling like a planet-wide engine, ready to bring out the next big thing. If so much new invention came out of the post depression era of the 30's, then imagine what we are capable of today.

Great things are coming. A new era of the new. Or maybe that's just the fever.

Copyright 2009 Daniel LaFavers

Before you tell me about the wind - you don't see it but it's there, let me call "bullshit." The wind is the wind, and by that argument the wind can prove any sort of imaginary thing, from unicorns to leprechauns to papal supremacy.

It is well past time to stop dancing politely around the central issue. You say there is a god, then you prove it. It's not proof to me that you want to delude yourself into thinking that common meteorological phenomena or medical coincidences are proof of god. To me it only proves your delusion.

I mean it. Make a bush burn and talk to me. Walk on water. Open the sky, look down with that big eye and wink at us all. Until you can show that to me you're just part of the lie.

If I said I had an alien spacecraft in my basement, and that it gave me special powers and performed mysterious miracles, you would probably want to see it for yourself, and not believe me just because I have hundreds of well-dressed grifters making empty promises and taking your money.

This has gone on long enough. If you believe in invisible magical spacemen, gods, angles, or dragons, you are, quite simply and to the point, criminally insane, and you really should know this about yourself.

Actually, if your are like most Christians I have ever known I suspect that you already do know this, and most of your faith is designed to keep you from recognizing this central failure. If fact, that's the central definition of faith - belief in things unseen. How convenient.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I am the great and powerful God.

It is staggering that for so many years we have warped so many minds into an utter fantasy based on nothing but wishful thinking. To let such clinical insanity direct public policy must no longer be tolerated. If you want to direct a nation and tell us that this is the ultimate truth of everything that there is, then you have to show your hand. Cards on the table.

Where is he?

By the way, as an atheist, I know exactly where god is, but he's not quite where you think he is. If somebody tells me that I have a secret uncle and he will give me a million dollars if I build a boat in my basement, then there's a good chance that I'll be building a boat in my basement. Real wood. Real metal. Real ropes, put into form and shape over the idea of the invisible mysterious uncle.

God is not real, but the idea of god is very real, and has a very powerful effect on people's lives, their happiness and what they do with their hands.

So what do you do if this idea of god works only if people believe it for real?

We have to be able to discuss this like adults, and not like children watching a puppet show. We need to deal with the idea of god, goodness, compassion, understanding, hope, and trust as first-order issues, and not the by product of some real, but hidden, super being.

Stop clinging to the puppet show. This is the sort of distraction that causes people to devote their lives to evils such as jihad, televangelists, or preaching against gay marriage.

And even if we're going to live our lives guided by the idea of god, and to use that idea to bring about nobel, wise, peaceful, and good things, then why in pity fuck sake would you pick a jealous, vengeful, petty, bully as that image?

For most people the disconnect between their image of god as kind, loving, and pure, versus the strange and unfortunate stories from their bible, is a distant and dismissible distraction. But this disconnect is the central issue. It's what makes me an atheist. I know that my image of god is a fabrication, a mental model that guides what I should do to be the best person I can be. I have the luxury of not being preoccupied by all the utter nonsense of the bible and the parade of ridiculous crap you have to swallow to believe that it's really all true.

Dump the baggage. There's a better god in you than in all the holy books of the world.

Copyright 2009 Daniel LaFavers

Will Underwood was our spark, our driving motivation. He had an amazing vision, and it was a great thing to be a part of it.

We had a Betamax camera that we used for all the raw footage. To edit a scene, we would play the previous scene on the VCR, press pause, then play the tape off of the camera and press the record button on the VCR early enough so that the delay between hitting the button and the beginning of the recording was about where we wanted it.

We played the audio through a mixer and embellished with a small Casio keyboard for sound effects or background music.

The acting, plots, and writing are all overflowing with charming naivete of kids who simply loved what they were doing. It's far from great art, but there it is: a movie, a story, put together with the video equivalent of stone knives and bear skins.

What I want to know is, where did we find the time? Or were we just better at making use of a Saturday?

I miss the immersive exuberance of youth, where you're in the zone, getting it done, for uncounted hours, making something.

When you get older time does speed up. Every minute of your life is a decreasing percentage of your time here. Minutes and hours just aren't what they used to be. Somehow through age, because they're smaller, they seem less precious, and it's too easy to squander an hour before getting back to the page, when it should be exactly the opposite.

All of us who worked on these little stories continued in very creative pursuits in our adult lives, writing software, playing music, drawing, writing stories.

My creative energy these days belongs mostly to the company I work for. Our team has created a Unix/Linux software framework that includes a search engine, web server, our own programming language, file storage system with WebDAV support , server-side scripting language, RSS feeds, and a simple-to-use client server architecture.

But I miss hanging out with friends, remembering lines, making up stories. and editing together blooper reels.

That creative spark is still there. Writing a large software platform isn't quite the same as making old metal drills into space weapons, trying out a bad Boston accent, and working on getting a scene right in the middle of a snowy park, but I suppose it's my modern equivalent.

I guess that's why I keep writing, but watching these videos reminded me to connect again to the part of me that was able to spend countless hours swimming in the soup of my imagination. Here at the end of my Novel, I'm feeling the pressure of making everything fit and all come together, but don't ever let me forget how fun it really is.

Copyright 2009 Daniel LaFavers

Now what?

Of course there's still plenty to do in the area of dealing with people who want to replace science and public policy with their particular faith, but let's move beyond that for a moment and imagine a time when we don't have to justify giving up superstitions from the crumbling Roman Empire and the medieval dark ages.

Those of us who have managed to step out of the default of religion, and are able to look back and see it in its historic and social perspective owe it to the rest of the world to act as leaders into the new paradigm.

So, what is it? What does a post-deism society look like, feel like? Where do we gather? Is there anything like a church? How do we face the world as individuals, families, cities, nations, and a planet?

We have to consider our own sociology and understand our primate-driven imperative to establish rank within various social groups. One thing that religion has always granted is the sense of belonging. This is a powerful aspect of our human nature, and will encourage people to drink of the Holy Kool-Aid, whatever that is for a particular religion, political party, sport's team, or Nascar driver.

Should we promote Sunday meeting houses as an alternative to Church? Should we seek some kind of un-Church?

It is commonly suggested that religion is good, regardless of the message, simply because it brings people together in a community and encourages them to work together, help each other, and care about them. Fair enough.

So should we, the modern nonvangelists, create a nonchurch that fulfills this social and community role? Should we define a new denomination to stand beside the other churches, which can draw the fence-sitters and the default third-generation cafeteria cult member into a new era of rationalism and community organizing, the new Church of Christ the Unbeliever?

No, of course not. That's ridiculous.

We need a new paradigm, not a reformation of the old.

So again, what does it look like?

There are already plenty secular groups that fulfill this particular role. Habitat For Humanity, the Red Cross, the Peace Corps, are already well established organizations that help people help others. It would be reckless hubris to think that atheists should create some new church alternative to preach the gospel of atheism.

That would only serve to continue an already tired debate. We need to move beyond that to a world where we work together, not in denominations, but with a million voices.

There is one type of organization that I would like to see as one of the many. I image a group that is something like a combination of Tupperware parties, Trading Spaces, and Extreme Makeover, combined with numerous self-help leaders like Steven Covey or Wayne Dyer.

Television is full of make-over shows, and I don't think you can attribute all of them to the need to fill hours with inexpensive cable programming. There's something actually going on here. Now that our basic needs are provided for and we can easily buy pre-slaughtered meat and ready-to-wear brick homes, there's a need to move our survival energy into nesting, improving ourselves, our lives, and our world.

There are shows to help us organize our cluttered offices, fix healthier meals, and improve our personal relations. We are in the middle of a grass-roots movement to help us all be a better version of ourselves.

Society benefits when more people are contributing members of the world's infrastructure. The more people there are offering something constructive to the world, the better we all are. I think there's a role for a group, perhaps including weekly gatherings and a national organizational backbone, but focusing on smaller support teams and one-on-one training, to help us realize whatever potential we all have.

As we head into the future of dwindling hydrocarbon energy, planet-wide population growth, and more of everything, I think there is a real possibility that we could collapse under the pressure and revert back to another thousand years of superstition and tribal fighting.

We need to take the future out of the hands of governments, religions, pharmaceutical companies, and the advertising firms that help them all lie to us, and take it for ourselves.

When we are better organized, better prepared, educated, competent, aware, and happy in our own lives, we will be more likely to expect these things in the leaders we support and express those ideals in the companies where we work.

In a sense, it really does all start with cleaning out our closets. So why not a national make-over movement? Join, meet, visit new members in their home and help make over their kitchen and plan meals, or sign up for someone to help you make-over your dog's bad behavior. Join the Wednesday knitting club or weekend writer's group. Help make over a local park, or raise money to build a bike path, or give a weekly summary of what your city council is up to. I might even put money into a collection plate for that.

If we're going to change the world, we need to start with ourselves.

Copyright 2009 Daniel LaFavers

Christians love to tell you about Jesus and the bible, or what we're supposed to think, or be mad at. They sometimes drop bits of their folk wisdom into regular conversation, just to make a point in case you forgot that they read their bible every week.

For example, my lovely wife was talking with some people a while ago and the conversation wandered to California. Someone mentioned how lucky it is not to live in a place full of so much sin, after all, look what happened to New Orleans.

It's stunning what you have to believe about God to think that way, much less utter it on purpose.

What can you do if you find yourself on the other end of a tiny Christian commercial break? You can let it go and give silent sanction to the idea. You can face it head on and cause an argument, but I think there may be a middle ground where can we draw attention to the wrongness of such a statement without losing friends or causing a fight.

One way may be to ask questions to draw out the hidden sentiment behind such comments and put it on display. You don't have to agree with the sentiment, but you can voice your reaction to it in a subtle way.

Something simple like, "Wait, so you think God destroyed New Orleans because of sin?"

A sincere question is much less threatening than a contradiction, but keeps the idea from enjoying the sanctuary of silence. A follow up question might be something like, "How much sin does it take to summon a category five hurricane?" Or maybe, "Weren't there a lot of Christians in New Orleans?" After all, if he's enough of an authority to declare God's intention in the destruction of thousands of lives, he should be able to stand by his statement or admit that he doesn't really know what he's talking about.

You don't have to over do it. You don't have go all twenty questions every time someone mentions In God We Trust, but it's a way of saying, "Hey, I noticed you said something unexpected, can you really mean that?" Then you can take it as far as appropriate.

OF course, you can question or belittle anything, but that's not what' I'm talking about. Even an expert on the witness stand can be made to look like a fool by a clever lawyer who asks all the right question to feed the shadow of doubt. What I'm suggesting here is to use a question to voice disagreement, rather than say it outright, when doing so would be too controversial or unwelcome in an otherwise pleasant conversation.

But used well, it can be a very good tool to make your point. Being on the asking side always gives you a debate advantage, because you are setting the direction of the debate.

Some Christian's have a favorite rant about Creation. Is it really one day? What is a day to God? Maybe a day is like a million years to God. The next time you hear this, ask a question or two.

"So does the Bible say a day or a million years?"

"Do you really think God doesn't know the difference between a day and a million years?"

"Why would He say one thing but mean another?"

"Then are you interpreting what the Bible means, not what it says?"

"Is that common in the Bible, to mean one thing and say something completely different?"

"How do you know the difference?"

This technique was used pretty well by the maker of a documentary titled The God Who Wasn't There. The filmmaker, Brian Flemming, went to the Christian school where he grew up, and he talked with the principle.

The school has seven guiding principles about the truth of the Bible. Mr. Flemming asked probing questions about these principles, their basis, their evidence, and demonstrated that, of course, there isn't any. He then asked if maybe there should be an eighth item informing students that the others guiding principles are arbitrary and have no evidence.

That's when the principal asked to end the interview, and then after the camera kept rolling, he got up and left.

And that is really the only option left to most Christians when the questions get hard. Get mad and leave. And when you're on the other end of the questions, stay patient and answer them with confidence. Remember, you're not the delusional one.

So when comments are made, casually, in the middle of a conversation, intended to make everyone nod at the unquestionable truth of God, go ahead question it, even if only a little bit.

Copyright 2009 Daniel LaFavers

Bugs.

It is commonly said that if you're writing software, you're writing bugs. It is practically impossible to foresee all the subtle interactions and conditions. But I don't have to like it.

I had two bugs to deal with today.

First I had to track down why the (struct) cast in my script language wasn't doing the right thing when applied to an uninitialized sub structure member. That one was pretty easy. It was an eye-roller. I sort of had two if statement reversed, and it was impossible to get to the right place. The concept was right, but I missed the flow.

This other bug is nasty. I recently added thread control to the server object base class, which complicated the event model that it used to be based on. Now each thread runs its own event system, with the first event system taking control of signals and routing them as events to the other threads.

I already found one error that came from copying my global variables into the new thread_ctrl blocks, a place where I should have used a reference counted pointer but didn't. I still don't, but I at least changed the validate pointer function to check in the right places before dereferencing it.

This other bug is new, and may be related to the new signal handling I had to write in the event model after I saw that sigchlds were not getting delivered properly in some cases.

Luckily the system is telling me about a double free error, but the bug is never where it crashes. Some nasty bit of code frees memory or writes where it shouldn't, then some unsuspecting well behaved bit of code comes along and it blows it all to bits.

So I moved everything over to the older Linux system where we still have a license for purify, which is a bit of code that crawls all up in the other code's nasty business and waits for the land mind to be set. But I wasted a good hour tracking down ghosts because I forgot to compile everything with -g, and it seems to have been confused with the optimized binaries. Nice.

But overall, the system is coming together very well. You could think of it sort of like mod-perl running in apache, but instead of perl its my own script language, and instead of apache it's my own mini-web server, and there's also a rule/workflow server, a servlet harness, and dedicated search/retrieve/citation servers.

The idea was to move from doing everything in custom C++ and start implementing logic in the script language, with dynamic libraries extending the language to hook in to libcurl and imagemagick and such. But for that to work I need to stop tweaking the base classes and core libraries.

Overall, it's great fun, and we're doing some really good things with it, but deep down in the bowels of the system lies a horrid little bug.

It only takes one segv to stop the whole tangle of threads.

But I'll get it, with the help of purify, the -g flag, and several more hours squinting at hundreds of lines off cout statements.

Is it weird that I'm a little disappointed that Thanksgiving is going to truncate my bug hunt? I mean, I'm not actually saying that I want to forget about turkey, lock myself in the room with emacs, iTunes, and coffee until the bug is dead. I'm not saying that.

Stupid bug.

Fun times.

Copyright 2008 Daniel LaFavers

We all have ideas about how the world should work. That's great. One person focuses on helping people, another thinks about fairness and rewarding hard work. Both people are, in their own ways, following what they believe is right.

Some people look at candidates waiting to hear what they say about particular issues, and then they vote for that on issue.

Knowing what you believe about how the world should work and being informed about candidates positions is a good thing. Listening to candidates and voting your conscience is what voting is all about.

Unfortunately, it is mostly irrelevant.

I've heard this for a long time now, that we really have a single political party with two faces, that the policies are made behind closed doors, and the political stage is filled with a bunch of puppets who dance for our amusement and distraction. It sounds plausible some how, but it feels too cynical, too unlikely.

But as I get older and as I read more I am beginning to see not just the possibility of this, but specific evidence that explains it. Now, this is not really new to me. I watched The Money Masters years ago. I have my copy of Tragedy and Hope, The Naked Capitalist, and The Creature From Jekyll Island. I heard about the plans for the Ameri-Dollar and the American Union way back in the 80's. I remember when the European Economic Community was just a crazy conspiracy theory.

But still I valued my own Libertarian ideals, and I strongly felt that if we could just spread the word, people would understand that freedom and responsibility are as important today as they were when this country was new.

I still believe that if the people of this great nation decided to actually embrace freedom and responsibility, that we would have it in four years or fewer. But we don't. Of course one reason is that the money interests run the media. Wouldn't you, if you were in their position? But another reason is that the time we spend on political thought is often spent on abstract theoretical political positions like abortion, gun control, immigration, and such.

Now, those issues actually are important, and being involved with them can and will change lives, but if we look at issues only, and ignore the broader financial and geo-political underpinnings of What's Happening, then we're missing the forest because of all the trees.

Go to the book store and browse the political, current events section. All of the Bush insiders who wanted to tell their story have had their books published by now. Just read the flaps of a few and you will start to get the picture that there's more going on here than just another bad war.

It is well understood, after decades of practice, that to move a nation you need to shock people with a threat or perceived threat. Perl Harbor, the sinking of the Lusitania, Communism, Twin Towers. If you want to go to war, give people a reason.

To believe that the actions on September 11 were the result of independently motivated islamic terrorists is, at this point, to be intentionally ignorant and misinformed. If you think the War On Drugs is being fought in earnest, you haven't looked deeper than your own political theories. Try google searches: "CIA heroine" or "clinton cocaine". Information that US government agents have been involved in the drug trade, and that US banks have been deeply involved with laundering the money is easily available, and not just from fringe media outlets.

I'm reading one of the books I found on the current events bookshelf. Crossing The Rubicon by Michael C. Ruppert. He also has a website: From The Wilderness that chronicles his journey through international drug trade and the motivations of governments to chase the dwindling oil supply.

Do you really think Blackwater is just running warehouses and fixing jeeps, or Halliburton is really just there to put out oil fires? Maybe. But dig just a little and there's more going on than Katie Couric and Brian Williams are talking about.

Remember that, for the moment, you still live in a free country. You can still go to the bookstore and actually buy books that tell you all of this. There's a lot of crap on the internet, that's sure, and you can't believe everything you might read, but just because you haven't heard it before or it seems unlikely doesn't mean that it actually is unlikely.

After all, what good are power, money, and influence if you don't use them to rule the world and enslave everyone in a fantasy monetary system that keeps them under your thumb?

Did you notice something about a 700 billion dollar cash grab lately? Or was it just an accident that banks flooded the market with sub-prime mortgages and then suddenly constricted credit? And before you laugh and say, oh that's just crazy talk, think about it and do a little research.

There's a lot going on in the world that people don't talk about, but you can find out if you look around a bit. Is the Iraq war about oil? Yes. Duh. Afghanistan was about heroine and a gas pipeline, and the Taliban was about US support of islamic radicals to fight the Soviet Union in the 80's. We helped make Saddam Hussain to use against Iran.

People are pulling puppet strings of the world. Maybe they think they're doing some sort of good, shepherds of the people, pulling them into and out of war for their own good. But if you do evil in the name of good, you're still doing evil, and there's a lot of evil that is right at our own doorstep.

But we would rather argue about the political theories about abortion, guns, the merits of universal health care, and wealth redistribution.

Look again at that 700 billion dollar pay-off. There's your wealth redistribution.

Copyright 2008 Daniel LaFavers

First, you can't blame the current financial problems on capitalism. What is happening, and has been happening, is far removed from the competition and innovation of the free market. It is corruption at its most ruthless and professional. People acted carelessly, selling and buying worthless financial bilge, counterfeit paper promises, and got the government to take your money to pay for them. This is no more a failing of the free market than creationism is a failure of science.

But here's the second thing, the bigger and perhaps more troubling question is: can a free market exist without becoming corrupt?

I was an active member of the Libertarian Party for several years, and I came to understand how things can work in a libertarian system. People would argue, "That will never work," and what I heard was, "I'm to close-minded and unimaginative to consider it." Usually we were both right.

I was right because an open, free market is the most honest and effective means for achieving the greatest prosperity, health, and happiness for the largest number of people. Taking money by force and using it for someone's perceived social good is, in fact, a great evil. The idea: from each according to his ability to each according to his need, is a tremendous evil, because it encourages need and punishes ability and initiative.

The other person was usually right because they just didn't see how we could get people to play by those rules.

The whole point of Libertarianism is to reward innovation, hard work, and ability while punishing sloth, irresponsibility, and ignorance, you really can have a better society.

The free market thrives when the force of government is used defensively, as punishment for one party using force and lies against another party.

The idea is embodied in the pledge that all Libertarian members must sign: "I certify that I do not advocate the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals."

When this is the rule, and when breaking of the rule is punished, you can have a just judicial system, an honest government, and a legitimate free market.

But most people who want to succeed take a different oath: I certify that I will fuck you as hard and raw as it takes to achieve my political and social goals.

These people run for government. They get elected. They run the media. They run the country. They take your money and run.

Do not let corruption of one kind let them sell you on swallowing the deeper and more subtle corruption of socialism. They screw up, take our money, and the answer is taking more of our money?

We are going into a tunnel. More so even than before people will be defaming free market capitalism with even more renewed vigor. Even as the boa constrictor is squeezing the rat, the rat will cry for more compassionate snake intervention.

But keep the light alive.

Remember that we should want to encourage intelligence, ability, hard work, compassion, sobriety, and peace. We should want to discourage ignorance, incompetence, sloth, greed, addiction, and war.

Whatever you use to get there, by whatever name, seek out the good.

Socialism is not good, unless it is run by good people. Like any tool, it can cut. And I wouldn't trust this mob with limited representative federalism, much less a goodie bag full of trillions of our dollars.

Likewise, capitalism is only good in the hands of people who understand that limiting force and deceit is better than using them harder and faster than the next guy.

Just keep your eyes open, seek out the good, and seek out leaders who will do the same.

Copyright 2008 Daniel LaFavers

Simply, our opponents were playing to win while we were trying to be wise and good.

Consider two men. The first is a calm and gentle speaker who aspires to help you achieve the best of your life and all who are touched by your life. The second will happily beat him to death with a stick and then turn his attention on anyone who dares notice because the speaker doesn't preach the right things.

Who will win the debate?

The mob always wins.

People lie and cheat, because lying and cheating work quite well. Shake downs, cons, crash and grab - all effective means for thugs and governments to get the job done.

If you can convince billions of people to bomb anyone with an opposing point of view, you're going to win. Until someone gets a bigger stick.

As an atheist and Libertarian I am always searching for what is right and what will work. Sadly, those are often opposed to each other. We like to pretend that good will triumph over evil, simply because it is good and evil is bad. It doesn't work that way.

A mob of gibbering goons gets the run of the town. That's how it works.

But, strangely enough, thuggery must still masquerade as good to be accepted. We want to think that politicians and church leaders are wise and good, and then we let them lie, cheat, and steal from us, and we thank them and give them more money.

Might does make right, and being actually right doesn't matter one bit.

Christians love to denounce evolution. Does it matter that they are utterly and absolutely wrong? Of course not. They're right by definition, because everyone they know nods and amens them when they talk. Their opinions are extensively peer reviewed, and it doesn't matter what they say, as long as it's what the mob wants to hear.

But the tide is turning - Finally!

Christians are in retreat. It is becoming more and more difficult for them to talk about sneaky snakes, global floods, living inside a great fish, and salvation through murder, because the sane among us are starting to risk the inevitable stoning to say, "Wait a minute there. What was that about a fish?"

Christians get away with their nonsense only because they think they have a big crowd of people behind them with stones locked and loaded toward the heretic who would dare challenge them.

It's time to pick up our own stick, the one card at the bottom of their house of cards that causes it all to tumble down, and that is simply this: Make them explain.

For centuries they have demanded that unbelievers step up and explain why they dare believe differently than everyone else. "How can you say that there is no God? Everyone know God is everywhere. Isn't that right everybody?" Then millions of sheelple shout "Yeah!" and go in search of bigger and sharper stones to throw.

But now they're on the defensive, and it is not always as easy to look over their shoulder and find a mob of people willing to accept their pat nonsense answers. It's time for people making extraordinary claims to back them up with extraordinary evidence.

You say there's a God. You prove it. You say there's evidence that Jesus lived? Go get it and show it to me. You believe in miracles? Do one now. You say the Bible is true? Bullshit. It's nothing but a book. If you want it to be more than that, find some evidence. History? I want corroboration. I want the Egyptian side of the exodus story.

You say religion is a force of good in society? People need it? No. Religion tears people down, feeds them fears, teaches them to be intolerant and superior, tells them that they're right and good to do that, and sells itself as the cure to the fears it created. That's not good, unless you're the puppet master.

Here's the kicker: There is deeper wisdom, deeper grace and goodness, but it's not going to be found by lying to people about genetic science, history, or by drinking the blood of a two thousand year old god.

Your heresy, your disbelief, is the big stick. Just ask questions and don't back down, because -- believe me -- they have no real answers, and most of the time they're fighting every day to not think about those nagging questions themselves.

Ultimately, people believe because they believe others believe, and they don't want to be the only ones with their pants down. So run naked. Don't soft-peddle it. People who believe in the literal truth of any holy book are criminally insane, and they need to account for inflicting that insanity on others. Make them aware that people can't live inside big fish, and that believing that is no different than believing that a giant lives at the top of Jack's big ol' bean stock.

It childish and stupid and its eating our brain.

The world is being brainwashed, and if you are one of the few people able to see a world out from under the thumb of one of the three major Abrahamic religions, you need to help undo the brainwashing that is destroying the greatness of this nation and contributing to the instability of the world.

Just ask. Make them explain exactly what they mean, and don't play their games. You have nothing to explain.

Your doubt is a big stick because it is a mirror of their own. Place it upon the fulcrum of their own uncertainties and push.

Copyright 2008 Daniel LaFavers

I'm a little tired of always having to be a-theist, un-believer, and non-conformist, when actually I'm simply being non-insane, un-rediculous, and a-delusional. I think we are so often defined in contrast to the religious norm, and tend to look at ourselves this way, because many of us grew up with God's divine tit in our mouth and we had to move across that line in our own lives.

Maybe we all have to go through this phase. Maybe parents, Santa, and Jesus are steps to maturity that we must go through and overcome to be able to be fully awake.

But when the dust settles, when you get through the last lingering liturgical let-down, there you are, standing face to face with nothing, the big God Shaped Hole in the universe.

Now what?

The answer is simple, and you can call it the meaning of life, or your sacred journey, or just another idea in the soup. That is, to be the best person you can be.

Steven Covey called it Seven Habits. Dale Carnegie called it winning friends and influencing people. Religions all want to claim it.

I don't remember the actual quote, but this truest wisdom came from Basil Fawlty, John Cleese as the curmudgeonly inn-keeper. He was complaining one day, and his wife, his frigid frau asked rhetorically, "Well then, why go on living?" His answer, "I don't know. We're stuck with it I guess."

And there it is. The destiny of forefathers conspired, for reasons unknown and unknowable, to bring you into existence into a world not of your making. You are not responsible for the unimaginable nastiness of the world, unless you are somehow adding to it. You can't save the world, but you can change yourself.

At any moment, in everything you do, there is always one most perfect, most right, thing for you to do or words that you can say. Each breath you take can be placed in service to the best you can do in your life, or can be wasted in fear, anger, and other little things.

Peace. Joy. Creation. Love. Tenderness. Acceptance. Listening. Smiling. Your life is a marvel, and can spread good, or evil. You can be defensive and petty, or confident and grand.

When you do something that you know is not good for you, or for the others around you, you know it. You don't need anyone else to tell you to stop it, or to do the right thing. Eat well. Exercise. Read. Understand. Turn off the TV.

Life, every second of every day, is a marvel. Breathe. Take in air. Let the air fill your cells and carry energy to your muscles, and know that this is all happening so that in your little corner of the planet, in the space that your life consumes, there will be peace and a gentle glow of the good.

There will still be times when you feel threatened, or afraid, or impatient with the insensitive fuckmook who claims this highway in the name of his big floppy dick, but you can always retreat into the glow, turn up the music, and know that whatever some mindless animal does with his sports car or sloppy mouth could not possibly matter to you.

You are a human. You are the source of magic, and of light.

As long as you choose to be.

Copyright 2008 Daniel LaFavers

There are countless cultural icons that fall into our daily speech. If you tell someone, "That was awesome. You should have a cape," anyone knows what you mean.

To this day whenever someone is passing out cake, I can't help but say in Milton's voice from Office Space, "Last time I did not receive a piece," or, "The ratio of people to cake is too big."

"I love the smell of (fill in item of current relevance) in the morning!" In Apocalypse Now, the quote is about napalm, and there are times when nothing captures the sentiment better than drawing someone's attention to that moment in that movie.

Spend a night in the box. You boys are as dumb as a bag of hammers. I'll have what she's having. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. He's dead, Jim. How you doin'. Jane, you ignorant slut. And don't call me Shirley.

I'm sure you have your own movie quote list that you draw from the make a point or say, hey this is like that, without just coming out and saying it.

Movies are quotable, because they are a shared experience. People used to use Shakespeare, but we're post literate now.

Which brings me to tonight's word: Allusion.

This is the mechanism by which we can best understand the New Testament and the early church.

What happened two thousand years ago is actually pretty simple. There was a story to tell about self-discovery, which was told through allegory, parable, and allusions to draw people to the ideas. Once initiated they would be taught the symbolism and relevance of those stories.

When the Roman Empire transitioned from withering dictatorships to the Holy Roman Church, the initiate gospels were canonized, declared literal, and the original, deeper levels of the myth were forgotten.

The gospels that everyone knows so well are only four from a large group of other gospels, which when taken as a whole give a much richer picture of what was going on back in the day, particularly because of the jumbled mishmash of mythical retreads.

Just about everything that Jesus did, as told in the gospels, had already been done by pagan, Egyptian, and Greek gods. In fact, if you take away from the Jesus stories all the events and allusions to other myths, there's practically nothing left. (This is the so-called Jesus Mysteries theses by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, from their book The Jesus Mysteries)

The gospels seem to be an attempt by mystics to teach their brand of spiritual growth and transformation to the Jewish people, and to relate meaning and symbolism they used traditional Jewish motifs. Moses wandered forty years in the wilderness. Jesus mirrored this by wandering in his contemporary wilderness for forty days (Numbers 14:33 and Luke 4:2 for those keeping score at home.)

Bible scholars often look to common passages in the bible, or between the Old and New Testaments, as some kind of proof that the old stories were prophesies that later came true. Take a look at Psalm 22:15, and that part about having his hands and feet pierced. When in John 19 we are told of the details of the crucifixion, is this the witness telling us of facts foretold long ago, or is the story teller making a literary allusion to an earlier Jewish writing?

If you get caught up in trying to understand all this symbolism, metaphor, and allusion as some kind of factual history, you just end up chasing your tail.

Why else would Jesus have his lineage traced to David, if not as an allusion to an old prophesy? Because it's actually true? But Jesus isn't actually the son of Joseph, unless Mary wasn't really a virgin, and even if she were, the lineages in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 are completely different.

Why? Because they're stories, people. Stories for another time and another people. Stories meant to teach something to people long ago.

The literalists took over and then persecuted the very people who came up with it all in the first place, and then stomped them practically out of history until all were left with is the empty husk, images stripped of their intended spiritual meaning and presented as some strange history that we're supposed to believe in.

It has led people to embrace crazy and bizarre ideas that in any other arena would be delusional ravings of the criminally insane. To believe without evidence or reason is a testament of their faith, and most people don't even have a clue that most of those stories have been told and retold, packaged and adopted to new cultures since it was Dionysus performing miracles with wine.

Everyone's worshiping a discarded snake skin. And they call me crazy.

Copyright 2008 Daniel LaFavers

What is it about all this god stuff that makes people so crazy?

In a nutshell, it is because humans are primates, and we naturally seek out an alpha male to follow. In fact, a great deal of our daily motivations are related to our little lizard brain and the furry monster around it.

We seek status and dominance within our peer group. Our social structures, from work to the cliques we build, are hierarchical, and we are constantly seeking to find our place within that structure.

Do people look up to us? Do they listen to our opinions or return our calls? Do they include us in their thoughts?

One of the reasons crazy conspiracy theories stick like tar (apart from the fact that the crazy theories are often more true than you know) is that people would rather believe that a cabal of evil overlords and Bilderburgers are running the planet than all this chaos and misery be accidental.

We want someone in the driver's seat, and if there isn't anyone there, we'll just go ahead and make it up.

Can you think of a deeper and more entrenched conspiracy theory than Christianity itself? We love these Big Lies, and we love to cuddle up under them like a favorite blanky.

When I was a more active Libertarian, I often encountered people whose alpha god had migrated from god to government. To be libertarian is more or less political atheism, and people's reaction was often very much the same.

Who is it that maintains order, punishes the wicked, provides for the general warfare, and rewards unfettered procreation? God! Government!

We are an alpha-seeking species, and to paraphrase Mr. Orwell, some people are more alpha than others. People seeking power will use and propagate whatever tool they can. Businesses, governments, and churches are all pretty much looking for the same thing - your mind and your money.

Being atheist shouldn't stop with god. If you find your faith moving toward government, or the free market without understanding the mechanisms and trade-offs, you have only changed onw god for another.

Power seeks power, and you must seek your own. Politicians, CEOs, Priests, and you boss all want you to think they have everything well in hand, so you can just sit back and do as you're told.

I think ultimately you have to pick one. Are you going to lead or follow? There's not much of a middle ground. Once you start leading, even a little bit, people will throw themselves at you. All you need to do is act like you know what you're doing, or be a young movie star.

A wise Bob once said, reality is what you can get away with.

That pretty much defines the world, and once you really get this you can be pan-atheist, and stop believing in all of their vast and thickly spread bullshit.

So what's really real? Your an ape. Have a banana.

Copyright 2008 Daniel LaFavers

I'm sure there are religious people who get the mythic imagery. As Joseph Campbell once said, that's not Jesus on the cross, that's You. Maybe the Jesus Freaks get that on some level

The point of the Blood Of Jesus Christ isn't that your Lord And Savior is taking your punishment for you. That's the cookies and milk for spiritual kindergardeners. The so-called Good News that the Christians can't help regurgitating is just the barker outside trying to get you into the tent.

The whole point of the crucifixion is that taken together with the resurrection represents a transformation from one state to another, specifically the state from being a confused animal (the death of the body) to being a creature of enlightenment (resurrection as spirit). This is the ritual performed through baptism where Christians, like Jesus, are transitioned to enlightenment, i.e. born again.

The gnostic traditions that became the early Christianity of the brutal Flavius Valerius Constantinus, I mean Saint Constantine, sometime after he murdered his wife and oldest son, seem to be focusing on these transformations, ritualized through a series of baptisms (water, air, and fire). (See The Jesus Mysteris.)

What else might be lurking behind the misplaced, mistranslated, and misrepresented ideas of the early Christians that could actually have spiritual value, despite the tangled years of European dark ages and superstition?

Could God Himself be in there somewhere?

There is something tenacious about these Abrahamic religions, as though the adherents sense there's something really there even though they can't put their finger on it and the only thing they get from the Bible or the pulpit is a bunch of bedtime stories, fear tactics, and the cosmic guilt trip.

The point of my last post was that, whatever there might be left for science to discover about the possibilities between the quantum foam, you're never going to find it looking at the bible stories as history lessons.

Where do you go once you abandon the facade of Christianity? Atheism, of course, but there has to be more to Atheism than being against something. The very word presumes the existence of theism, and then describes us as being against that.

I also don't believe in leprechauns or volcano gods, and the only reason I'm not called an amagmist is that there's not millions of people running around knocking on doors telling us all to go throw money into Kilauea, (because there's no way to spend that money on tax-free property).

If there is anything to all the ravings of the religious rabble we have to look forward to science, not backward into the twisted history of Jesus and Mary Magdalene or by continuing to bicker about irreducible complexity, for crying out Darwin.

But even before cracking open the quarks and delving into the subtle mechanisms of how consciousness manifests and reflects amid the aether, there's a simple starting point.

Bottom line: You are God.

That is, you are able to imagine and then execute. You are God because you can think of a new patio design, and then build it. You can hum a tune and put words to it. You can think a thought and write it down. You are the creator. The more of that you can do, the more in the "image of God" you are and the better and more enriched your life will be. If you don't bother to think, act, plan, and all that, you end up in the pit of unrealized mental potential energy and your life, money, and relationships will crumble.

The whole gambit is to get you to give your power away, to the Church, to the political machine, to the fear-mongering of drug companies, or the cheap promise of get-rich-quick, no-money-down flock fleecers.

Keep your power and take care of business.

What I don't know is how deep this mystery goes. Sure, it's easy to say, "I should cut the grass," and then go out, cut the grass and not notice that you have done something deeply magickal and profound.

When we write music, blogs, and stories, when we make things with our hands, we are doing great magick.

The real magick starts inside us with imagination, and I think the whole point to Magick is being able to focus our intent in such a way that we perceive new opportunities.

One of my favorite examples is Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker. This has a lot of examples about how poor people think differently about money.

Is wealth really as simple as thinking differently about money? Mostly, yes, because when you start thinking differently you start learning differently, and then you start acting differently. If you know you're poor, you're right. If that's just the way you are, then okay, be broken. You don't have to be. That's the secret.

In all things, how you see yourself controls or liberates you, and getting a hold of that is the purpose and magic of Magick.

Like the man says in Cool Hand Luke, you just got to get you mind right.

Copyright 2008 Daniel LaFavers

One exchange was a question put to the Christian community about why God would choose to create an animal kingdom full of suffering where animals have to kill and eat each other.

The answer: (This is precious!) Perhaps God made all animals vegetarian, and only after the fall by Man into sin did they start all that nibbling upon one another.

Interesting. Maybe the serpent should have tempted Eve with some baby back ribs.

All of this and similar proud nonsense is bred from the mistake of interpreting an essentially mystical allegory as literal history. Once you try to make sense of it as a real thing, you just look more and more ridiculous.

Christianity was originally built upon early Gnostic teachings that retold Jewish stories to represent various states of mind, life transitions, and spiritual perspectives. When this is reduced to literalism and placed beside the cold, resolute determinism of science, the result is the unending parade of excuses and general unmitigated balderdash that makes up the bulk of religious debate, and to be quite honest, we really wish you would all stop it.

Let me see if I get it. You want me to believe that God came to earth as a man to teach us new law (because apparently he screwed it up the first time), that he was murdered by crucifixion, that his (somewhat temporary) sacrifice grants a place in heaven for anyone who believes that his sacrifice grants a place in heaven for those who believe, and that after being dead for three days he came back to life, told everyone preach his gospel, and then rose into Heaven to sit next to God (who was himself) and that we need to celebrate this with a ceremony of ritual cannibalism, in which we are supposed to eat crackers that become transformed into human meat and drink grape juice that becomes transformed into blood, but to enter heaven we must first have had water sprinkled on our forehead or have been dunked under water. Good luck.

All of these things are actually symbolic rituals with mystical connections to our lives and society, not historical things that actually happened. There is some value in discussing Christianity as a mystical journey, and even in considering the spiritual subtext of these very stories, but there is no value remaining in continuing to consider these stories as being remotely historical or factual.

Different disciplines of Christianity peel back different layers of the mythic onion. Some ardently believe that the Garden of Eden really existed, while other sects see it as a story. Some understand Noah and the flood to be a fable of enduring through great hardships, while others are still running about looking for old ark wood on mountain tops.

But always, for any Christian to be Christian, God and salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ must be seen as actual realities.

Here's the thing, if you want to take all of this, God, Jesus, Creation, Salvation, as literal things, you need to deal with the what this actually means.

For example, God is either all powerful or not. If not, that really blows the pooch, so let's not go there. When you see God as actually and fully omnipotent, then everything Satan does is utterly condoned and accepted by God.

If you insist on seeing God as real, the all-powerful creator, then God created and allows evil. Maybe for some unknown purpose, but it's all by His will.

God created Hell, when as an omnipotent being he could have invented any number of ways in which souls might have been brought into existence to interact with one another. Is it impossible that God might have created universal knowledge, peace, and Goodness? Of course not. He just didn't want to.

Knowing that God had this choice, but instead chose to create a place of eternal torture where we will reside if we don't listen to his human puppets, suggests that the Christian God is really some kind of sick sadistic monster who likes watching his beloved children writhe like a worm on a hook, forever, by the millions. You go ahead and worship that.

And one of my favorites: If Jesus died for me, why isn't he dead? God didn't give his only begotten son. He loaned him out for a bit of a show.

Basic observations like this never make it through to Christians, who usually are so utterly filled with doctrinal explanations pounded into their heads week after week, that they don't seem to notice these most obvious disconnects. One of the favorite excuses we hear on the board is that suffering and Hell exist because we have to be able to choose right from wrong, good from evil, and otherwise we would be robots with no free will.

First off, free will with a gun to your head is not really all that free. "Love me, worship me, or so help me Me, I will pull this fucking trigger."

Second, I love how this argument places Christians as defending the serpent in the Garden of Eden. "Come here my pretty. You don't want peace and love and eternal happiness in this beautiful garden. Here, eat of the knowledge of Good and Evil. You don't want to be a robot, do you, Eve?"

Until Christians can wake up and throw off the oppressive mantel of literalism, there's really no way for us to relate to them except as spiritual children.

You might want to check 1 Corinthians 13:11 again.

The whole point of religion and a spiritual path is to help us deal with this crazy planet with as much grace and civility as possible under the circumstances. If all it means to you is to be right, despite everything your reasoning mind is trying to scream at you, it's just in the way.

Thinking of any part of Christianity as literal or historical sets you on the wrong path from the very beginning. Go back. Throw away your religion, and when you try to rebuild it from the ground up as a reasoning adult, without excuses, fear, or pretzel logic, you will find the same thing everyone finds when they do this.

It's sad, and traumatic, but it's the only way to begin to grow spiritually.

Copyright 2008 Daniel LaFavers