Monday, December 23, 2013

Special Holiday Message

Yesterday was the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and now we celebrate the days getting longer again and the anticipation of Spring in the new year.

2014 will bring the final blow, the tipping point that brings rage from the cold and hungry. The cessation of unemployment benefits, cutting off food stamps, sequestration, austerity, harsher prison sentences for lesser offenses; these policies might finally get enough concerned citizens to vote in this mid-term election season, if they are allowed to vote.

The Brennan Center for Justice recently reported that laws putting harsher restrictions on voting were introduced in more than half of the United States. Laws have been introduced in several states since 2006. North Carolina was one such state. So giddy was one GOP official he couldn't keep his big mouth shut and got fired for his enthusiasm. 


Now leaving the Goodfellas-GOP metaphor for reality, if the voter turnout for the upcoming mid-term election is not improved because people aren't properly educated about the political system and are not afforded the time necessary to vote because they are afraid of losing their jobs, they will be motivated to violence this time when the election results don't match the demands of the vast majority of the population.

Democracy is majority rule. If you're not with the majority you have to suck it up and let them try it their way for a while. Don't be afraid to point out what's wrong with what they do; as long as you are honest and rational about it you could win them over to your side.

 It serves everybody's best interests to get everyone who should vote to vote. It's a nice country, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it.

If the upcoming midterm election has less of a turnout than the last, we are in for a full blown class war.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

What is Normal?

How do we define what is "normal?" I assume that normal is defined by a scientific consensus, but this is clearly not the case as we can see by the current state of the economy, ecology, social and political structures.

The term "normal" is currently based on belief systems contaminated with faith, because faith is easy. "Normal" is defined by mob rule instead of scientific consensus.

The will of the masses be damned if we are going to save our planet. We are going to base our decisions on pure scientific research in spite of the marketplace which tunes itself to insatiable and destructive appetites which make up the majority of people.

After years of observing atheists attempt to plea, negotiate, bribe, debate, insult and criticize believers it has become clear that there is no reasoning with the faithful. A pattern of futility is emerging in the discourse between reason and faith. The evidence seems to point toward a subtle difference in neurological development which tends to further validate theories of Jean Piaget.

Normal is skewed because the wrong people are allowed to "be fruitful and multiply" without consideration for the availability of resources such as food, shelter and employment. The minority of people capable of reason are culpable because they are lured by profit into maintaining an economic structure conducive to indiscriminate overpopulation. Thus is born the cycle of poverty.

Exploration of Semiotics with Cognitive Development may provide key information necessary for examining the critical thinking skills of an individual prior to wasting your time in futile discourse, or lending support to an organization that perpetuates flawed thinking.

Eugenics has been vilified because it was attempted under flawed thinking. I'm not trying to start a master race of rational thinkers, I'm only suggesting that rational thinkers stop enabling those who are irrational and destructive.

Since atheism is a direct consequence of highly developed rational thought, it's a pretty good starting point to convey this important message of disengagement from support of the rest of society. I don't mean to suggest isolationism. We still need to get the word out to everyone about secular society, we just need to stop wasting our time debating with religious trolls whose only purpose is to distract us from engaging with potential atheist converts.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

The importance of Semiotics

First, here's the Wikipedia entry for Semiotics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

My power went out yesterday so I started reading Semiotics: The Basics by Daniel Chandler. This should be the very first book read by students of Communication. To get a taste of what's in store for you, visit http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html for Semiotics for Beginners by the same author.

The section I'm currently reading in the 'Basics' book describes anthropological language studies of primitive cultures and language development in children. The important part of this regarding atheism is the development of distinctions between things and the words that represent them. I found this quote on page 284 of my ebook:

Thus for the child, words do not seem at all arbitrary. Similarly Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole found that unschooled Vai people in Liberia felt that the names of sun and moon could not be changed, one of them expressing the view that these were God-given names (Scribner and Cole 1981, 141)
The anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl claimed that people in primitive cultures had difficulty in distinguishing between names and the things to which they referred, regarding such signifiers as an intrinsic part of their signifieds (Olson 1994, 28). The fear of 'graven images' within the Judeo-Christian tradition and also magical practices such as Voodoo are clearly related to such phenomenon.
The author goes on to describe "...in the Middle Ages words and images were still seen as having a natural connection to things (which had 'true names' given by Adam at the creation). Words were seen as the names of things rather than as representations."

Semiotics: The Basics by Daniel Chandler describes ways in which we perceive and identify the world around us. There are numerous studies cited throughout that allude to mental development of perception that may be inhibited in some people, which I suspect may explain why some people refuse to dispense with their religion.

I'm beginning to more readily catch myself making false assumptions about things or when I take things for granted. As a writer, this book helps me understand the more fine details of abstraction in writing that allows me to defer more accurately, details of a story to the imagination of the reader and I'm only a third of the way through the book.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

It Is a Duck!

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc., then it's a duck. Another word describing qualifications for being a duck is Criteria. Criteria is defined as "a principal or standard by which something may be judged or decided."

Who gets to decide the criteria that defines everything we encounter in our lives every day, religion or science? You cannot have both. Why is religion at odds with science? Why does religion consistently ignore the outcomes of actual physical conditions that result from scientific experiments and observations of nature that show the age of fossils and climate change? Religious doctrine clearly states their stand on reality and members cannot deny their laws by cherry-picking concessions. They cherry-pick concessions to outsiders all the time as a means of deception (Taqiyya).

It doesn't seem to make sense unless you reverse engineer the process of affinity-seeking behavior in people. The subliminal distortion of innocuous information in our every day lives is a constant effort to herd us into the control of one organization or another.

If you raised a child without ever mentioning the subject of religion, but everything you taught that child was based on religious doctrine (whether you knew it or not), when that child reaches adulthood, he or she will most likely seek similar-minded individuals who will eventually seek an establishment where they feel most comfortable. A political or religious organization.

Our education is a rat's maze with invisible walls, guiding us by conditioning how we define and value everything we sense, ultimately guiding us to organizations that enslave us.

Many psychologists refer to it as "Reality Construction." The invisible walls are made up of the smallest every-day mental constructs such as specific words, clothing styles, activities, entertainment and even architecture; efficiently assigning emotions of fear or comfort as a mental cattle-prod along the path. The strongest fear we have is the unknown, but that's only when we recognize a path toward the unknown. Instinctively we turn away.

Religion is the progenitor of laws for human civilization. The original contributor to creating an invisible mental wall of superstition and subjective reality that differs from objective reality, or just plain reality. You and all of your ancestors were controlled into following a path throughout your whole life that benefits those who control you, more than it benefits you personally.

Try to imagine what you don't know. You know there are things of which you have no clue. There are side-streets you pass on the way to work you will never see your whole life. I wish I knew what the billionaire bankers know. I'm not going to delude myself into thinking money can buy happiness because happiness has nothing to do with money. Money buys comfort. You are born with your level of happiness, it's genetic. Who ever told us that money can't buy happiness was in reality trying to dissuade us from the pursuit of money.

Rule-of-thumb: Doctrine created to dissuade you from a goal was created by those competing directly for the same goal.

The first step to breaking down the mental barriers is recognizing the barriers. First recognize who controls the flow of information to you and who conditioned your exploratory behavior: Consider along your growth from infancy to adulthood, the order in which you were exposed.

  • Parents
    • Mass Media
      • Television
        • News
        • Politics
        • Sports
        • Weather
      • Radio
      • Print
    • School
      • Sports
      • Creative activities
      • Friends
    • Church
      • Friends
      • Creative activities
      • Sports
    • Neighborhood
      • Friends
      • Creative activities
      • Sports
Then along came the Internet. After your limited exposure to the world through control by your parents, your school and your church, what do you know of the wider world beyond your socially constructed walls? Would you even know how to search beyond? Do you even have the vocabulary to look? How do you know for sure?

Try this exercise: Each day pick a letter from your alphabet and do an internet search with just the letter, but instead of starting from the top, randomly pick somewhere near the far end. Pick a word you never saw before, but instead of clicking on the link, test in with Google Correlate to see what pops up.

What worlds would be revealed by searching randomly with nonsensical letter and word combinations?

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Religion and Residual Emotional Memory Distortion.

There are many examples of the way religion influences our thinking in other aspects of our lives. The most important being that we often take many things for granted, which I call Faith Conditioning. Growing up as a Christian I was conditioned to associate feelings of shame with doubting or questioning the Bible. We have all heard of Doubting Thomas, right?

We learned from the Iraq War in 2003 that we are all susceptible to the fact that a lie (Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq) can be eventually accepted as truth if the lie is repeated often enough. This is especially effective just prior to an election, where voting is an annoying, time-consuming task away from work, for which you wait in long lines. By the time you vote, your feet and your head hurt, and you must go to the bathroom. (This is why I love Washington State because we vote through the mail and receive complete information about our candidates.) In Illinois, my polling place was at a Catholic school during a work day.

Memory distortions

There are two parts to our memory, the details of the event, and the emotional context of the event. As time goes on, certain portions of what we remember fade faster than others. (This may not be true for many people, but it is for me) The most important connections between the details and the emotions we remember from an event are 'who' and 'where.' The 'what' portion of the memory for many fades away first.

As a survival mechanism of Natural Selection, we most strongly remember the location of a bad and good experiences, and what or who was the protagonist or antagonist of that experience. We learned to stay out of certain predator territories and go where we found food. Here is a more current example of this conditioning with not-so-good consequences:

In school you might be hanging out in a small group. Let's imagine that you're just one of the members of the group, but not part of the inner circle. Imagine that the leader of the group singled-out another person off in the distance, perhaps on the other side of the cafeteria, and made fun of that person, not openly, but quietly telling only you and your other members jokes so the target person can't hear.

You don't know that person, but you laugh at the jokes because they are genuinely funny. But, laughing at the jokes makes you feel uncomfortable and somewhat guilty. The jokes were a one-time event and they are forgotten by the end of that day.

Now, one or two weeks go by and you don't see the target person, then one day you are partnered up with that person on an assignment. You likely will feel hate toward that person, but if you stop and think about why you hate that person, you may be one of the lucky few who can remember that someone else told a joke, and you felt guilty for laughing at the joke, and every time thereafter you saw that person you felt bad, and because that person made you feel bad every time you saw him or her, you began to inexplicably hate that person for making you feel bad.

This dysfunction of memory is one of the fundamental building blocks of propaganda that keeps groups focusing trust inward, and paranoia outward, resulting in separatism, bloody religious conflicts, a distorted sense of entitlement, irrational self-destructive sacrifices of quality in favor of affiliation, such as cronyism, nepotism, political or religious patronage.

Always take the time to stop and ask yourself why you feel the way you do about things and people, and let Reason be your guide.

Did that person really do something to you personally?
Who exactly is responsible for why you feel they way you do about people you don't really know?
Do you really hate someone, or do you hate the way that person reminds you of your own problems?
Are you really being personally attacked because of your beliefs, or is someone trying to help you escape from an irrational way of thinking?

The myth of a separate church and state

The idea that religion is separate from politics is a lie. You can argue that it exists but that's not how human behavior works with regard to seeking affinity, seeking validation, operant conditioning, among many psychological scientific finding.

Just because someone thinks that political parties can have members from different religions is false propaganda designed to make religious influence on politics appear innocuous. Political party affiliation has always been in name only. Why?

Territories or congressional districts dominated by one religion or another find regulatory easement for their religious symbols and privileges on property supported by taxes paid by citizens who are not members of their religion. This fact alone debases the value of political parties such as Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, etc., as utter deceptions against the people.

Support of political parties must be immediately terminated until political parties openly admit that their policies are influenced directly by the policies of the religion that has the highest membership in the political party.

All political parties must submit for public view the exact numbers of its members affiliated with each religion.


Thursday, September 19, 2013

Choosing your battles

Steve Shives recently posted a new 5 Stupid Things episode about YouTube (06:20) and raised a point about "Comment Wars" about trivial disagreements and "Drama" where YouTubers get bogged down in distracting diatribes about other YouTubers.

This raised some general questions about how much energy we spend broadcasting our points and exercising our debate skills. The Bible has been thoroughly debunked and science prevails, yet the religious keep coming at us with the same unswerving thoroughly debunked claims. Which of these are actually seeking a perspective and which are simply wasting our time?

Some of us love a good argument we already know we will win. Science is like that because it has evidence. What is stopping us atheists from simply ignoring religious claims and not participating in further debate is the danger religion poses to the education of children. Atheists must defend science against the relentless ignorance, bigotry, bullying and violence of religion.

Unfortunately from my perspective most of the battlefields are being chosen by the religious. I continuously see trolling in social media where it's easy to get lured into a time-consuming debate in the comments.

What many don't seem to realize is the people we need to reach are not here in our little enclave on the Internet. Each community, page, circle, group, or whathaveyou is a bubble composed of a material completely invisible to everyone except those who know the correct search words to find it, and is populated by members who are already fully aligned with Reason.

There are too few examples of heroic public efforts to spread atheism in the real public sphere, and here is a really good start: AaronRa (Communicating Atheism)


Monday, September 16, 2013

Religion and Science Together? Really?

To be an Atheist is not only about rejecting theology, it’s a rejection of all the magical, irrational reasoning that goes along with it; all the magical, irrational reasoning that is applied to defining words in our dictionaries and subconscious psychological barriers that prevent us from making accurate scientific conclusions in research.

Religion has led us to accept ideas without thinking about them, such as the existence of a soul, (which was never proved,) and especially leading us to have expectations about the behavior or other people that put ourselves at risk of being duped or worse.

I recently heard that science and religion are working well together. This claim was not backed up by any evidence. I refute this claim and supply no evidence of my own because the burden of proof lies only with the claimant.

Religion only offers common sense derived from simple empathy, stolen repackaged laws and philosophy from other ancient cultures. The historical accounts in the Bible provide sparse and mostly inconclusive comparisons to other archaeological records. Most artifacts are found to be counterfeit when complete analysis is allowed.

The notion that religion in any way contributes to science is ridiculous. It barely if at all contributes to an accurate account of history. One who attempts association between religion and science should be aware that one is discrediting one’s self.



Sunday, August 4, 2013

Strict Rationalism: Separating fantasy from reality

The dictionaries we use for the English language have a problem. The definitions often inappropriately mingle supernatural phrases with phrases grounded in reality. Take the word belief. I pointed out before to zero fanfare that some religious zealots refer to atheists as non-believers while others call atheism a belief system. People have gotten into the habit of distorting meaning in language and this inhibits intellectual progress for everyone.

Belief, Merriam Webster's dictionary states "1. a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing. 2. something believed; especially : a tenet or body of tenets held by a group. 3. a conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence."

Faith, According to Webster's includes "a firm belief in something for which there is no proof."

Fact, according to Webster's dictionary, once you dig down beyond the "archaic" descriptions, is described as an actual occurrence, actual existence, a piece of information having objective reality."

Truth, as defined in Webster's dictionary has become so convoluted and homogenized that it includes religious references and phrases outside the scope of physical reality. Until you click on the link called "truth defined for kids" then it strictly refers to facts and evidence in the definition.

The official dictionaries carry far too many words emotionally tied to social stratification that have no benefit in reality. Jargon that it exclusive to certain groups of people that reinforce cohesion and barriers between people.

Is it the purpose of dictionaries to accumulate words simply because they are made up and used by people regardless of their functionality, or should dictionaries serve as an anchor to logic and effective critical thinking skills?

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The real public education.

I never questioned the way kids treated each other in school. I thought it was just normal that everyone paired off into their subcultures. The group that stands out the most is made up of student star athletes followed by their entourage of team members, cheerleaders, etc. What makes certain groups of students special is the privileges and impunity they are given by the adults. Therein lies the tools of social governance at a sports-oriented school.
Sports at school is the embodiment of training in discipline, order, distraction and unquestioning loyalty. Such a school that emphasizes athletics over academics is for creating a workforce that is trained to follow instructions and apply a specific skillset. Such a school trains job-seekers instead of entrepreneurs, with very few rare exceptions (mostly due to outside influences).

While most of the students are not athletes, the social influence of special students is astounding and completely outside the scope of reasoning.

The rest of us simply looked up to students selected for special privileges, such as extra latitude for misbehaving, allowances for skipping classes, school jackets, pins, access to especially beneficial classes,  even the appearance of authority over some teachers.

This kind of values learning that works against the interests of students in their futures is found mostly in consumer-driven economies. The highest paid employee of the entire state of Washington is the Coach of the University of Washington. Why else would professional athletes get such high salaries?

It's well-known that students learn more social skills, including a second language, from their peers rather than from formal instruction. Students see the special treatment of athletes and other socially affluent throughout their formative years and derive a distorted set of values based on those privileges, in the hopes of achieving a similar status.

What they don't realize is obtaining such status looks much easier to achieve than it really is because you don't see first-hand the exact moment when someone is handed his or her status and privileges on a silver platter. We all just think they do the same things we are doing and it happens to them and it almost--but does not happen to us. It makes us feel like failures because we don't know that those people were already targeted for help up the social ladder by their inside connections. It makes us clamber thoughtlessly in the same direction and they profit from our effort. It's time to stop following.

Take your academic subjects seriously enough to find alternative sources than those just handed to you at school and look for what is missing from your curriculum. Learn the skills of those who delegate tasks, not those to whom tasks are delegated. Probably most importantly, turn off your television and your game console because your lifetime is being stolen by those things. Never stop learning.

Monday, April 1, 2013

The first book(let) is out.

I published "The Atheist Insurgency: In a War for Intellectual Freedom" at Lulu.com and for Amazon Kindle. I may make a little money on it from the Kindle sales but it's going out at cost on Lulu as a pocket paperback even though it's a little more expensive.

It deals with the wider implications of atheism than simply rejecting the supernatural, like throwing away the word "supernatural" and all its associated words. Redacting all references to fantasy from educational material. Dealing with the real cause of our problems and not just the symptoms. Once we clear away the cobwebs

Here's the kindle link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Atheist-Insurgency-ebook/dp/B00C4CHLZO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364852613&sr=8-1&keywords=the+atheist+insurgency

Here's the lulu link: http://www.lulu.com/shop/fred-slocombe/the-atheist-insurgency/paperback/product-20950103.html

I will probably bring down my old blog posts as they represent a gradual process that culminated in the published work and are superfluous. Not that anyone pays attention, but one never knows.

Monday, March 25, 2013

The book

I've been trying to write a book entitled The Atheist Insurgency. Every time I think of a direction to take with it, someone else was already there. Atheism is all about the virtues of pure reason and the study of long-term consequences, rather than simply following the dictates of unsubstantiated Bronze-age mythology.

I witnessed a lot of effort in criticizing religion and debunking pseudo-science quackery. There is a lot of exposure to abusive religious power structures, and religion's inroads into secular politics and government. People have written about religion's direct connection to genocide, torture, institutionalized robbery and discrimination.

Everyone knows how religion has taken over holidays and traditions not their own, such as the Winter Solstice, Spring equinox, marriage, etc., and then attempts impose their own rules and exclude others. The Christians took over the Winter Solstice, called it Christmas and now they tell non-Christians they can't celebrate and they must say "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays." Then Christians have the gall to claim a "war on Christmas." or a "War on Easter" or the "Sanctity of marriage."

Countless complaints have been lodged against religion imposing itself on individual human rights to privacy, literacy, a decent and accurate scientific education, family planning, the freedom to choose what one does with one's own body, the freedom of consenting adults to do what ever they want as long is it has no negative consequences for others, the right to die and be buried with dignity.

Religious zealots use the power of their authority and the threat of eternal damnation to drain the estates of elderly congregates, sexually abuse children, philander emotionally vulnerable women. They have so much power that they can will other church members to enforce their dominance. They use their authority to impose political influence in violation of church-state separation, by such behavior as denying certain elected officials "Communion."

The behavior patterns of persistent repression of education, and the spread of false information indicates a Machiavellian type of collusion among private, public and religious sectors in our culture. There are whole sectors of industry that depend for their own survival, on the false information that religion has to offer. Abstinence-Only sex education results in the spread of disease and too many unwanted children that grow up to over-supply the workforce bringing down wages, fill prisons for slave labor, and create a need for food banks, homeless shelters, and charitable organizations that advertise a need for more food instead of a need for birth control.

I'm trying to piece together as much as I can and it's very slow going, but my biggest fear is that I will be reinventing the wheel, and someone else already came up with the idea for writing about all of this. If you know of something written already about this in one project, I would love to know about it. I could just link to it.

I may not need to write the book after all, if everyone understands that religion is a crime against humanity, dividing everyone into groups and pitting them against one-another, maybe they could just stop it. Just stop religion. You're only human after all.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Clues to organized human rights violators in the U.S.

What might appear to be individual police officers using excessive force against protesters in the Occupy movement, is not.

Analysis of excessive force response behavior patterns of police indicate a nationally organized effort among state governors and their law enforcement subordinates.

National organizations of state institutions such as Governors Associations among others, are operating to suppress dissent in a fashion that gives the appearance of some shadowy federal organization.

The flow of information up the chain of command from local law enforcement field operatives appears to jump across state lines to other local law enforcement organizations, more rapidly among Republican controlled territories.

Narrow your focus to the nearest nationally organized civic organization, and there you will find the pipeline of communication feeding tyrannical instructions.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Atheism, Cultural Conditioning and Sexuality

The consequences of sexual repression

I said repeatedly that simply saying you don't believe in a god is not all their is to atheism, and that you must reevaluate your perspective on everything else that was influenced by religion throughout history. Sexuality is one of them.

In Western society we were taught that sexuality should only be limited to procreative activity between a man and a woman bound in a monogamous life-long relationship sanctioned by the prevailing authority. Until such a legal relationship is established, no sexual activity is permitted.

Oddly in the United States, there are differing legal ages for marriage and differing legal ages where a person is considered mature enough for consensual sexual activity. Not many people know much about those laws, nor do many of them follow those laws.

Unfortunately, too many humans are driven by the instinct to engage in sexual activity for pleasure alone, ignoring the long-term consequences of their actions. Typically this occurs in young people who do not understand the price of immediate gratification without planning: sexually transmitted infections (STI), pregnancy, financial and social costs of raising a child for sixteen to twenty years.

Young people are deliberately kept ignorant of this information, but why? What is it that compels parents to be so embarrassed about discussing this topic with their children? The law? The dread of realizing their children are growing up and they can no longer live vicariously through their innocent children? I don't have children myself so I don't know, but I do know that our planet is vastly overpopulated.

Why is there resistance against reproductive education? Religious organizations want this because empathy for starving unwanted children fuels their stream of income from donations. Free-Market Capitalists want this because overpopulation, especially lacking skills, keeps the cost of labor down. Government social services, law enforcement agencies as well as their private contractors want this for profitable prison labor and job security. Not to mention the health care industry, pharmaceutical industry, wedding planning industry, toy industry, etc. Basically, the term "economic growth" has nothing to do with economic sustainability, but simply an increase in the number of consumers as rapidly as possible.

This rapid increase in consumers is fueled by ignorance plus sexually explicit or implicit mass media that venerates having as many children as possible without showing the true consequences. All those romance movies and children's stories about princesses and their knights in shining armor. Then it becomes "nights in white satin" followed by trips to the Food Bank for about a decade.

Sexuality apart from gender-role distinctions and reproduction


Bonobo Chimpanzees have distinguished themselves from other primates as their sexuality appears to serve a more prominent social role, such as resolving disputes, strengthening social bonds among other things. The Evolution Library at PBS.org has more info on the Bonobos. Wikipedia has an extensive entry on animal sexual behavior research which continues to raise questions about what is considered appropriate in nature.

The arbitrary lines between heterosexuality and homosexuality are fading rapidly with each new generation. There may come a time when sexual preferences between males and females becomes a non-issue, and related derogatory terms fade from our lexicon.

What remains are the health risks of promiscuity in the denial of proper education and protection through contraception. Businesses and religious groups are fighting the portion of the law that mandates birth control and contraception be provided under health plans.

Disinformation and distorted thinking


The drive to maintain the status quo is characterized by lobbyists in federal, state and local governments pressing their agenda to strike down health care reform that provides birth control, yet supports insurance coverage for Viagra; the pressure to remove explicit books from the public and school libraries while allowing similarly harmful but implicit materials; making unsubstantiated and ill-informed claims in the main-stream media that attempt to relate homosexuality with bestiality; educating children toward roles of dominance, submissiveness, other forms of social stratification and hierarchy and dependency with an emphasis on gender, race and socioeconomic background.

You can thank those that gladly claim credit for creating our "civilization."

Friday, January 25, 2013

Reality and the limits of our perception

On the road to gaining true consciousness I study the process of what makes up reality. What we think we sense is not reality. The character Morpheus from the film "The Matrix" explains how all we experience is "nothing more than electrical signals interpreted by the brain."

For example in reality there is no such thing as color or light. Our brains are merely interpreting the presence very tiny waves of electromagnetic radiation 400-800 Nano-meters wide. One Nano-meter is a billionth of a meter.

Inside the human eye, the rod and cone sensory neurons that convert the radiation into nerve impulses, actually lie beneath a thin layer of other cells. Imagine if your sensory neurons were on the surface of your retina, would you see more, or would your vision be disturbed by flaws in the vitreous humor or the lens?

It's a staple of elementary science to learn about the blind spot in the eye, and do the blind spot experiment. Try it first before reading on.

It's assumed that the blind spot is filled-in with surrounding image materials, but more elaborate testing with multicolored cards indicates this not to be true. It's actually a Cognitive Void. You cannot see the blind spot because your brain receives no signal from that spot. The second experiment where you believe the line becomes solid when the empty space is occupied by your blind spot, is simply a belief, a cognitive delusion, hence our slogan "Belief is a delusion," similar to looking at a photo of a house with the rooftop cropped partially outside the frame, and assuming that the roof lines converge to a peak.

Most seeing people believe that blind people see darkness, like when your eyes are closed, but now that you identified your blind spot, it's impossible imagine what blind people are doing with the Occipital lobe of their brains, without the presence of optic nerve signals. Here's an article to get you started on the subject. http://voices.yahoo.com/the-role-occipital-lobe-brains-the-163627.html

Our other sensory neurons, such as our sense of touch, smell, taste, and hearing are similarly limited by evolution, to only what was necessary for rudimentary survival, and only sense a tiny portion of reality.

Imagine what you might see if you could tune your vision to a specific EM frequency, like an FM radio station. It might appear as a light source. Things that FM signals pass through might appear to be transparent like glass. The pigments and colors that reflect FM radio wavelengths might appear as a normal rainbow, but reflecting in strange ways. You could color-shift a rainbow, like in Adobe Photoshop, or you might not see it at all. The ocean and sky would be perhaps more bizarre than ever, especially if you could see into the murky depths of the ocean as clear as daylight.

The technology is available to convert some near infrared or ultraviolet light to a false visible light, as well as thermal imaging. I wonder what kind of material would be suitable for a lens that could refract radio waves into a conversion technology.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Fake Atheists

A real atheist cannot help but be skeptical about everything. I was raised in a Presbyterian church which is a nationally organized but moderate sect of Christianity that is abnormally tolerant relative to predominant Christianity. Church just didn't get under my skin. My parents attended church more for social appearances than anything else.

I can't remember how I reacted when I found out Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were not real. The Santa issue probably was the turning point when I decided to focus my attention on other claims than merely whether-or-not someone existed or if magic was real. I wanted to know how truthful people were generally.

Recently some individuals expressed annoyance at my insistence that atheism is more than just not believing in a god. I think it's important that everyone who claims to be an atheist thinks about everything in their lives that was created, either directly as a result of religious influence, or inspired by the notion of supernatural intervention.

I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication from the University of Illinois. There I learned much about cultural influence, social engineering, marketing, public relations, propaganda, psychology and behavioral conditioning.

Religion has infused itself into every culture over so many generations that we have been conditioned to take many things for granted, such as leaders who claim divine justification for activities like Manifest Destiny, imperialism and the Crusades, activities that were rationalized as efforts to "save the savages by conversion to Christianity," or to take property divinely entitled in scripture. This is the tip of a very bloody iceberg.

Religion is responsible for more deaths in the world than any other cause behind which people organized. We behave in our daily lives in ways that really don't make sense if you think about it, but we do them automatically. I still cannot identify most of them, but I do know that Groupthink, organizational hierarchy and marriage are just a few parts of society that have been manipulated by religion in one way or another. I'm sure there are many atheists out there who can identify even more and please add comments of you can.

Now the fake atheists which are really no better than the Unitarian Universalists I covered in a previous post. 

Atheism is defined in a revered document created in our culture as simply not believing in a deity. If you want to follow the literal meaning in that document and ignore all the baggage that came along with generations of belief, then maybe you really shouldn't consider yourself an atheist.

The revered document that so finitely defines the word "atheism" also contains thousands of definitions for words that have nothing to do with reality. I also  find it strange that people say they can be atheists and not be skeptics. You cannot have one without the other. Atheism and skepticism are not optionally exclusive. These statements raise a red warning flag that agents provocateurs from religious-based organizations are suppressing the exercise of free inquiry by claiming that your lives are just fine and all you need to do is not believe in a deity.

Really? Arguing that atheism is nothing more than not believing in a god sounds like something a creationist would say.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Attempts to diminish the value and meaning of atheism

A lot of recent posts and comments were made that atheism is nothing more than simply not believing in a god.

Atheism is much more than this. It's about changing one's perspective on a world dominated by religion in one form or another since the dawn of humanity.

Atheism is much more than the simple dictionary definition. Communication students in their second semester should start to see this if they stray from the assigned textbooks and delve secretly into behavioral research at the library.

Skepticism and atheism are inextricably linked. One student's essay claimed that one can be a skeptic and not be atheist, this is impossible as true skeptics deploy a scientific method of inquiry to determine facts. Anything beyond facts, evidence, and reproducible results is speculation, and conclusions based on speculation require faith, which has no credible place in the scientific community.

Claims that something is true simply because it is written down in some ancient book is madness. Claims that because some common-sense truism was written in an adjacent paragraph, a paragraph written about some scientifically impossible event must be true, is also madness. This tactic is called "proximity rationalization" and is a classic writing strategy used by fiction authors to assist the reader in suspending disbelief.

Another author of a recent essay discounted the value of atheists because they have no discernible organization or leadership. Organization and leadership in a belief system is required because the members must be managed enough to refrain from escaping the corral of their beliefs. Atheists are guided by the purity of reality constructed of only facts, evidence, and reproducible results. No leadership is required in the realm of reality.

Adopting atheism isn't just about denying a god. It's about calling into question everything that you have accepted in your life so far, including authority figures, especially those who surround themselves with and appeal to, religious groups.

Atheism is about revisiting the value of everything in your life and culture, and reassessing your whole value system.