the skip

The Skip by James Fenton

I took my life and threw it on the skip,
Reckoning the next-door neighbours wouldn't mind
If my life hitched a lift to the council tip
With their dry rot and rubble. What you find

With skips is - the whole community joins in
Old mattresses appear, doors kind of drift
Along with all that won't fit in the bin
And what the bin-men can't be fished to shift

I threw away my life, and there it lay
And grew quite sodden. 'What a dreadful shame, '
Clucked some old bag and sucked her teeth. 'The way
The young these days.... no values....... me, I blame..... '

But I blamed no-one. Quality control
Had loused it up, and that was that. 'Nough said
I couldn't stick at home, I took a stroll
And passed the skip, and left my life for dead.

Without my life, the beer was just as foul,
The landlord still as filthy as his wife,
The chicken in the basket was an owl,
And no one said: 'Ee, Jim-lad, whur's thee life? '

Well, I got back that night the worse for wear,
But still just capable of single vision;
Looked in the skip, my life- it wasn't there!
Some bugger'd nicked it - WITHOUT my permission.

Okay, so I got angry and began
To shout, and woke the street. Okay, OKAY,
AND I was sick all down the neighbour's van
AND I disgraced myself on the par-kay

And then.... you know how if you've had a few
You'll wake at dawn, all healthy, like sea breezes,
Raring to go, and thinking: 'Clever you!
You've got away with it' and then, Oh Jesus,

It hits you. Well, that morning, just at six
I woke, got up and looked down at the skip.
There lay my life, still sodden, on the bricks,
There lay my poor old life, arse over tip.

Or was it mine? Still dressed, I went downstairs
And took a long cool look. The truth was dawning.
Someone had just exchanged my life for theirs.
Poor fool, I thought - I should have left a warning.

Some bastard saw my life and thought it nicer
Than what he had. Yet what he'd had seemed fine.
He'd never caught his fingers in the slicer
The way I'd managed in that life of mine.

His life lay glistening in the rain, neglected,
Yet still a decent, an authentic life.
Some people I can think of, I reflected
Would take that thing as soon as you'd say Knife.

It seemed a shame to miss a chance like that
I brought the life in, dried it by the stove.
It looked so fetching, stretched out on the mat
I tried it on. It fitted, like a glove.

And now, when some local bat drops off the twig
And new folk take the house, and pull up floors
And knock down walls and hire some kind of big
Container (say, a skip) for their old doors.

I'll watch it like a hawk, and every day
I'll make at least - oh - half a dozen trips.
I've furnished an existence in this way.
You'd not believe the things you'd find on skips.

why I am an atheist

Holly writes a concise and "accurate to my experience" rendition about how she became an atheist.

probably not benevolent, or anything for that matter

I see something like this and think about the marvel of natural selection and how we've evolved over time. The body has figured out how to isolate these nasty little bacteria and protect us from who knows what. No, I don't think that God made it this way. God can't be credited with everything amazing and then take no responsibility for the bacteria.

Some would posit that God gets the glory no matter what. The idea that our world was designed in order that praise be received by a god makes no sense to me. When I think about all the evil perpetrated upon innocents, suffering and abuse cannot glorify any kind of benevolent god. Malevolent is a more apt describer.

disbelief is not a choice

I did not choose to disbelieve. As I educated myself by reading and listening to science and theology related materials, which as a believer I would not have read, belief gradually fell away. This article from Psychology Today explains that people don't one day just decide they will no longer believe. It took some time before that day in which I realized I was no longer a believer. And I was okay with it. Actually it was a bit exhilerating to realize that I had so much to learn regarding things which I had ignored before.

Would believing be a better life than the life I live now? Perhaps. Could I do it again? No. I don't see it as possible anymore. That fairy-tale life has been extinquished from my heart (brain). How do you ignore knowledge and reality? Once the knowledge is inside the brain and understanding comes about things that most of humanity accepts, there is no reason to go back and believe what I previously believed. My worldview paradigm has shifted and I see things very different now than I did in the past.

me

 

 

atheist....

 

christianity threatened by evolution

This article by Paula Kirby says it perfectly. What she writes describes succinctly how I changed my mind about evolution and creationism. I read and listened to both of the books she mentions later in the article that were written by Dawkins and Coyne. These are two excellent books for a "layperson" to read who really wants to know about evolution. I never gave myself a chance to understand the theory of evolution during my days of religiosity. The word in those circles was that evolution was "evil" and creationism was reality. Now I see this as totally opposite.

Back in the day, I "believed by faith" what was taught in Christian circles. Belief requires no proof. I can no longer live using this mindset. (Too much faith gone bad I suppose.) The theory of evolution is backed up by proof. It is a scientific theory much like the theory of gravity or the theory of thermodynamics. The reason Gov. Perry says that it has "gaps" is because it does. Even though Perry meant it as a disparaging remark, I don't see it that way. Gaps are part of the scientific process. Scientific gaps do not beg to be filled-in with gods however. Scientists fill in gaps. That's what they do.

Since the theory was first introduced by Charles Darwin 150 years ago, the gaps have gotten smaller and smaller. They're being filled in over time by science. Religion attempts to fill in the gaps with an invisible unprovable god. This is the reason why creationism should not be taught in our schools as a science subject. Teach it in church if you must, but not in school.

Read or listen to one or both of the books...  The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins or Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. They changed my outlook completely. You do have to read with an open mind desiring to learn something new though. A closed mind never sees what it doesn't want to see.

10 commandments for the 21st century

1. Treat others as you would reasonably want and expect to be treated if your roles were reversed.

2. Never bear false witness to the young and incredulous.

3. Do not pass on traditional myths, manipulations, and superstitions as being cultural heritage.

4. Never imply to the young or naïve that you know what you do not know. They will respect you much longer.

5. Admit that in nature there are no mysteries, just temporary ignorance of natural facts.

6. Study and work with discipline to learn and then teach the great, beautiful, amazing scientific facts of nature.

7. Enjoy helping the younger generation excel beyond their ancestors as they stand on your reliable shoulders.

8. Do not be afraid of the truth learned in gentle, consistent, rational discipline. It will make you and your students responsibly free.

9. Teach your youngsters to use every available scientific tool to appreciate all of the real world.

10. When you offer your shoulders for your youngsters to stand on, be very careful not to face backwards toward the darkness of the superstitious past but rather forward toward the light of their future.

“These 10 simple guidelines can help you make our world better for having lived in it. Enjoy this life deeply.” Stephen F. Uhl, Ph.D.

looking back (a little)

In the past I've always hesitated to link to the first blog I ever wrote three and a half years ago. I called it Restoring Love, but the writings show more of a person searching for reality in a world of religious confusion rather than someone restoring love. My goal was restoration but the more I searched, the farther I moved away from where I had initially planned to go. It was about 15 months after the start of that blog that I transitioned to this one. Later in 2009 I threw off all religious belief and began living my life as an atheist. Since then I've been reading books which are helping me understand how the human brain causes people to do things that are not as rational or logical as we suppose.

How did I live in the religious world for so long without questioning it, without really proving to myself that it was the best path for me? I'm beginning to understand now. It was my human experience.

why dark?

April and May were dark as far as this blog goes. My step-father-in-law died and I've been a bit overwhelmed with all that follows from such an event. My husband's step-father was 89 years old. He lived a long, full life and was very involved in his business up until the end. The business has fallen into our hands at this time and involves time and energy and a learning curve which we are adjusting to. Hopefully a balance will be found soon between the new business, daily involving ourselves with his widow (my husband's mom), and maintaining what was in our hands previously.

I will write a bit about how this experience has reinforced my new found ideas about life and death, hopefully in the near future.

why some will never change

Thomas Paine's words: 

"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."

evolution happened in the past and continues into the future

We have no say.....

does it matter who wrote the Bible?

On my Facebook page this morning I saw this article referenced. Last week my husband and I went to hear Bart Ehrman speak at a local university. He was invited by the Religious Studies group on campus. For about an hour, followed by a half hour of Q&A, we heard his explanations of why many of the New Testament writers were probably not who they indicated they were. It was a fascinating evening. The topic is not one of which I am unfamiliar. For several years now I have been looking into what it is we can really know about the Bible. Because I had isolated myself from the more liberal theologians' opinions, due to my lifelong evangelical bent, I had no idea of the controversies that existed regarding the Bible and its origins. Truth is important. How much I can really know about this subject seems to be more and more sketchy.

why bad beliefs don't die

This article stood out to me because it explains why I believed the way I did for so long. I understand better now how I was able to rearrange my belief system despite overwhelming odds against change. The particular set of circumstances I was forced to face allowed me a rare human opportunity to examine much of my life and then decide to change things around a bit. For this I am grateful.

love is hard

we are not all the same

The world we live in is not equal... this story shows how true that statement is.

religion fails again

Another example of why religions fail humanity. It matters not which religion we talk about. All are filled with people who can't live up to their preachers' admonitions to be submissive (turn your cheek), to love, and be at peace with all. You'd think that if one of them was right we would know about it by now.

Oh, yeah, I do know that the opposite can be quoted from their holy books also, war and destruction to the infidel and heretic. History shows us that war and religion have had a consistent partnership going for a long time. It's not likely to change, I surmise, unless cooler heads prevail, that means thinking people.

clarification

My name along with my husband's was brought up recently on a Facebook thread, much to my astonishment, mentioning how we were "chewed up and spit out" of a local church some five years ago. I thought at the time that it was an amazing analysis, especially since I never spoke about the subject to the person writing the statement. Thinking I should weigh-in on statements referring to us, I wrote this:

"To clarify a bit, we weren't literally "chewed up and spit out". It felt more like passive aggressive shunning. Despite the roller coaster of emotions which I experienced during that time in my life, I look back now and can understand better what happened. Most people get hurt to some degree when they buy into the idea of the church as a body of believers that care and then find out from personal experience that it's not true. The safety net that I thought existed had many holes in it. The church is simply a group of human beings who purport to believe pretty much the same thing, thus "group think" is at work. If a person breaks one of the important rules of behavior, they must be disciplined, shunned, or "spit out". To a degree we felt disciplined and shunned, but we were not forced to leave. We left on our own free will and today are pleased that we did.

One thing that I've learned from the experience is that I will never again be open and honest with any "group" of people about my personal life. We were too honest and open with too many people. If I could do it over, I would have talked to people I knew and trusted. But even knowing who to trust would have been a bit of a conundrum. Most people are not equipped to handle difficult life situations in other people's lives. By nature we humans feel threatened when faced with other people's failures. "What if that happened to me?" "I'm not going to get too close to those people. There's some sort of 'disease' going on there." I don't blame anyone for thinking these thoughts. I'm sure that many people at (name of church) thought these things about us because I know I thought them about other people through the years. I'm learning that we all are simple human beings with lots and lots of inadequacies. Our shortcomings are not helped though if we refuse to recognize and admit to our human frailties and instead attempt to be super-human and ignore them. IMO, the church excels in encouraging people to become something they are not. In one sense that's good. But there is one thing we will always be on this planet. We will always be human. I think that if we deny that we tread on dangerous ground.

specks

we're definitely lucky

Anthropocentrism: All of God’s Special Little Snowflakes   (by Amy Peters)

My four-year-old has a book of science activities.  One rainy day not so long ago, my husband and son decided to pull out the book and complete a biology activity on classifying living things.  The objective was to cut out pictures of animals in old magazines and decide how they should be grouped together.  Should they be grouped by the number legs they have?  By whether or not they are plant-eaters or meat-eaters?  Sea or land animals? Daytime or nighttime creatures?

Let’s be honest here.  My boy is only four.  Even with my husband’s help, the project basically turned into playtime with magazine clippings, safety scissors and glue sticks.  By the time they showed off their final product, the animal photos glued on their poster weren’t even close to being classified in the right groups.  Mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles had all been mixed together on his poster board in a beautiful, biologically diverse, gluey mess.  For some reason, amphibians and those spineless invertebrates didn’t make the poster. Maybe we don’t subscribe to the right magazines.

To my rapturous joy, near the top of the poster was a picture of a sleeping Homo sapiens.  That’s right.  My husband had thought to include a picture of a human baby.  It was glued squarely between an ocelot and a rhinoceros (at least they got them in the same phylum and class, right?).  Still, I thought it was quite clever of my husband to use such a simple exercise to demonstrate the characteristics we share with the animals on this planet and, in doing so, show that we are animals too.

Parents expect their children to have short memories, and are thus caught off guard when something we think was overlooked or forgotten ends up being significant.  Several days later, I was pretty sure my son had moved on from the kingdom Animalia to more exciting things like trucks and candy. Out of the blue one day he asked me, “Mommy, are we animals?”  My mind immediately went back to the science activity he’d completed the week before.  “Yes, we are animals,” was my response.
“But, Mommy, we seem… different.”

There it was.  An uncomplicated observation from a very brainy boy.  There was no disputing it. He was right.  We are… different.  So how to help him understand our place in the animal kingdom?  I was taken back to my own childhood where I was raised in a very anthropocentric mindset.  Not only was I taught that human beings were the most significant and special of all god’s creatures, my parents took it even further than that. I was taught that I was god’s special girl, that god knew me before I was even born, and that god knew the number of hairs on my head at all times. Why this hair-counting, voyeuristic god didn’t completely creep me out at the time, I have no idea.  Maybe I wanted very much to hear how special I was and maybe the god myth filled that need.

Yes, humans are different, but are we supreme?  And if we are supreme, was it a god or gods that made us that way? The Bible would lead us to believe so.  Why, it is completely integral to the Genesis story.
Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ Holy Bible, NRSV, Catholic Edition

What does science tell us?  Well, for starters science in no way confirms the Genesis account.  Science tells us that we are very tiny life forms in a very, very big universe.  Compare your mass to the mass of the planet.  Then, compare our planet to our entire galaxy.  Then think about our galaxy in terms of the entire observable universe.  It blows the mind.  We are so tiny compared to all of that, how can one ever begin to feel special or significant?  We are not only tiny in size, but in time as well.  The age of the universe is reckoned at approximately 13.7 billion years. The Earth itself is dated at 4.5 billion years old.  Out of that 4.5 billion years, anatomically modern humans only originated in Africa around 200,000 years ago.  This means that for the majority of the life of the universe and, indeed, our planet humans have not been around. How then can we be supreme, the most significant entities in the universe, as Christianity would have us believe? The answer is that we are not supreme.  We are, collectively, a blip on the radar.  The earth will still be here long after we are gone.

How are we to go about the 80 or so years we have on this planet knowing how tiny and inconsequential we are?  The answer is that we are not insignificant.  We are living things!  You, reader, are the product of millions of years of gradual, inching evolution.  Every cell in your body is a triumph of nature.  You are incredible because you are here and you are alive.  It is not necessary to believe in a deity or that as humans we have something supernatural within us that separates us from other animals.  Our significance is our place in the natural world, and the fact that that place is only temporary.

My little boy is far too young to understand this, so my response was a visit to the new Africa exhibit at the zoo.  My overly-cautious little one looked on as I stood inches away from a chimpanzee, separated only by a pane of glass.  The chimpanzee put his hand up to the glass.  I held mine up to meet his.  His eyes met mine and we considered one another.  In absolute awe (and yes, a little choked up), I looked back at my tiny son as if to say, “See.  Not so different.”

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” – - Richard Dawkins, Unweaving The Rainbow, 1998.

 

religion: the ultimate tyranny

Towards the end of my life in religion, I was more bound up inside emotionally and mentally than at any other time in my life. The lie of freedom was exposed when I realized that I could not think clearly when faced with a life crisis. The emotional trauma that I experienced was more the result of religious concepts gone bad than the actual circumstances that I faced. I had to force myself  to think logically and rationally. It took effort, time, and much exercise to loosen up the cogs.


As humans we are limited. Not every person knows if they are free. I claimed to be free, but was not. I was bound to beliefs that turned out not true. 


This article, Religion: the ultimate tyranny, is a good one. The author, Paula Kirby, states...

"Religion claims to set its followers free, while all the time holding them in thrall and insisting they kiss the hand of their jailer. There can be no true freedom so long as religion still keeps the human mind in shackles."

ignorance, uncertainty, and fooling myself

Here are a couple of quotes I saw recently. The first having to do with the hope for life continuing on the planet and the other about the obstacle we must overcome (our brain) in order to accomplish it.

"It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man."   --  Richard P. Feynman 

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."   --  Richard P. Feynman

We are Lost in Thought

by Dr. Sam Harris, Neuroscientist; Chairman, Project Reason; Author, The Moral Landscape

"I invite you to pay attention to anything — the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair — for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything — even the feeling of a knife at your throat — for more than a few seconds, before your awareness would be submerged again by the flow of thought. This forced plunge into unreality is a problem. In fact, it is the problem from which every other problem in human life appears to be made.

"I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. Linguistic thought is indispensable to us. It is the basis for planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other capacities that make us human. Thinking is the substance of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. It is also the foundation of science. But our habitual identification with the flow of thought — that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as transient appearances in consciousness — is a primary source of human suffering and confusion. 

"Our relationship to our own thinking is strange to the point of paradox, in fact. When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill. But we all talk to ourselves continuously — we just have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. Our lives in the present can scarcely be glimpsed through the veil of our discursivity: We tell ourselves what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, and what might yet happen. We ceaselessly reiterate our hopes and fears about the future. Rather than simply exist as ourselves, we seem to presume a relationship with ourselves. It's as though we are having a conversation with an imaginary friend possessed of infinite patience. Who are we talking to?

"While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging "center of narrative gravity" (to use Daniel Dennett's phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.

"Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord's Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah.

"The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. 

"Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science.

"But we must first realize that we are lost in thought."

doubt the non-doubters

"Doubt is the adult attitude. And only people who refuse to doubt will ask that I doubt my doubts. Doubt is a filter that helps me sift out what to believe from what not to believe. I cannot do away with that filter and remain an adult person who thinks critically."  John W. Loftus

better to be honest rather than delusional

P.Z. Myers can be an acerbic sort of fellow at times, especially to those of faith. His Sunday blog post really hit a sore spot inside me. I used to think life was simple in my former "believer" state of mind. "Pray to Jesus and your problems will be solved." "Surrender to God and He will take care of you." "The 'simplicity of the gospel' is all a person needs to live." "All things work together for good." (This never seemed to work the way I thought it should much to my chagrin over many years of trying. These kinds of platitudes are rampant in the Christian world.)

This thinking is also simplistic, lazy, childish, and an irresponsible way to approach life. It mummifies a person's brain and the synapses that should fire don't fire. Problems that a person should or could be solving go unsolved waiting for their God to do it. How many times did I miss an opportunity to progress while waiting for God to move? How many relationships were harmed because I failed to act on behalf of myself or someone else while waiting for God to do something about the situation?

There will never be a complete set of answers to these questions. Many memories have already been lost by the brain never to be recovered. There are a few, however, that come to mind and those are regrettable, almost unconquerable events. The past is impossible to change. It contains circumstances that will affect me for the rest of my life, leaving a sadness which makes its rounds every once in a while.

I'm not any kind of an expert on these matters. This is just the way it seems to me. We all  need to make sense of our life story in order to continue moving forward. Better to be honest rather than delusional. Figuring out the difference between the two is the difficult task we all face.

any other way seems dangerous

Don't know if this will come as a shock, but I no longer can attribute any of my human experiences to the god that is described in the Christian/Jewish holy books. The process I went through to get to this place is complicated and at the same time quite deliberate. After years of consideration and study, it seems to me that "evil/wickedness/all the atrocious things that happen to people" must be equally attributable to this same god, which in turn makes him/her/it evil also. In my mind this totally undermines the idea of a loving, omniscient, omnipotent Christian God, which in turn shoots the whole thing out of the water.


I see religion as mankind's attempt to make sense of life. Cultural and geographical differences have created the thousands of religions and sects which we see around the world today. Our brain convinces us that our religion is the one true religion. Obviously not everyone can be right. And the idea that I think mine is right and everyone else is wrong leads to selfish, prideful living. So I've decided to live life from a very different place. If a thing can't be known for certain, I will not believe it. In other words, I won't believe because I don't have the evidence. Any other way to live in this causal world seems a dangerous way.