September 30, 2008
in my last few blog posts I've been running through the list of God arguments and how religions can mistake mythic imagery as literal fact and get twisted beyond all recognition.
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?
September 08, 2008
In Star Wars, the soldiers of the Empire are called stormtroopers. Stormtroopers were German special forces from world war one, trained to attack trench positions. Using this term for an American film tells you everything you need to know about the soldiers in the movie. There are countless cultural icons that fall into our daily speech. If you tell someone, "That was awesome. You should have...
August 27, 2008
One of the questions I had to answer along my journey out of thrall was, if there is no god, why does everyone think that there is? 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...
August 25, 2008
In my last blog post I went through the usual exercise of pointing out how a literal translation of the Bible is next to meaningless. It's hard to resist. It's a time honored tradition and so damn easy. 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....