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renegade4dio

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A not insignificant number of the rather loose worldwide community of Atheists have been engaged in a "civil war" over a relatively small group of mostly women atheists who have set up shop on FreeThoughtBlogs. They have decided that simple non-belief in a deity isn't enough, they feel the deep need to work on what they want to call Social Justice issues. I'm totally with them this far. There is still so much work to be done in the area of social justice that I'm totally in favor of anything that promises progress on this front. They have named this "new" combination of atheism with social justice issues Atheism+.

  The problems began soon after the group's inception. Some people questioned the use of Atheism+ for the group's name. The basic thrust of these questions was that it isn't remotely clear what Atheism+ might mean without further research, and those atheists who didn't agree with the A+ers on their social justice agenda felt that this was unnecessarily polluting the public definition of atheist, making their work centered on the core definition of atheism more difficult. Needless to say, the A+ers chose to ignore those complaints. They still call themselves Atheism+.

  But the problems only multiplied. I'm not going to try and recreate the timeline here to exacting detail, but here are some of the key following events:

  "Elevatorgate". This is the beginning of the big blow-up. As a speaker at an Atheist conference in Ireland a key A+er, Rebecca Watson, had an uncomfortable elevator ride with an attendee. He apparently was interested in her, possibly sexually, and in that confined space of the elevator asked her back to his room "for coffee". She declined, they parted ways, and in another world nobody would have heard of it. But Rebecca Watson felt the need to publicly chastise this attendee who'd had the gall to hit on her in the elevator. The video she made went viral in the atheist community. This viral video of Rebecca Watson became the introduction of Atheism+ to the wider atheist movement. It was my introduction to the story as well. When I watched it, I immediately identified with the man she was dissing. She came off to me as a mean woman who felt the need to not only say no, but to be nasty and belittling about it and then she took the extra step of taking him to task in public. I was shocked that such a person would be invited to an international atheist conference as a speaker, so I began to try and find out who she was and more about what she believed. What I found was that she and her A+ friends appear to blame men for every evil of civilization. Civil disagreement and discussion are not allowed on their forums. A middle-aged white man in the A+ world can only be an echo of their beliefs or he's immediately called vile invective and has every point countered with the vacuous "check your privilege". They have chased off as "misogynists" several of the greatest members of the world atheist community, including Richard Dawkins and Matt Dillahunty. I, being a middle-aged white man, am made to feel that they hate me long before they even try to find out what I believe. This isn't real social justice as far as I can see, it's social revenge. There is a difference.

  I believe the "Patriarchy" had it's back broken by the Women's Movements of previous generations. This was nothing but a good thing. What we have now is more rightly referred to in gender neutral terms, I'll call it "The System". It is now nearly as influenced by women as it is by men. The problem is that most of the easy and obvious things to advance equality have already been done. Right to property? Done. Right to vote? Done. Right to hold elective office? Done. Right to equal protection under law? Done. Equal pay for equal work? Officially done, though progress is still needed on the ground. Right to choose military service as a career path? Done, though again more progress on the ground in actual implementation is still needed. My point is that women have in the last 200 years moved from absolutely mistreated third class status to nearly equal in almost every key way. What remains are the difficult last few steps, and these steps are almost entirely social. By that I mean that there are few steps left to take in Law, and women can choose to take them now any time they choose. They have the key power: Right to Vote and Right to Hold Office, and women represented 53.5% of the national vote in 2012. It isn't men that women need to convince to implement any legal agenda, it's the women who are 53.5% of the vote. This is why I say what remains of inequality is primarily social.

  Lets go back to Elevatorgate for an example. Rebecca Watson hates being hit on constantly in the atheist community where she is a very rare find: an atheist woman actually involved in the community. That alone is enough to ensure that she gets many, many, of those hated propositions. And that's where the problem is. Since the atheist community is so gender imbalanced, possibly even exceeding 10:1, it's no surprise to me that standard male dating behavior results in what feels like a truly excessive number of propositions to her. The behavior of men can't change in general until and unless women in general change to go with it. They need to get involved and speak out, like Rebecca, until their numbers in our community achieve rough parity. That would be a start, reducing the proposition stream to levels roughly commensurate with the rest of society. But it would still leave the basic issue Rebecca has: Men hit on women constantly. We do it because if we don't, we'll never be in a relationship. We go through dozens, and if we're socially awkward or otherwise low on the potential date meter, hundreds of rejections for every proposition that's accepted. This is because women in general do not hit on men, they don't have to. They have a steady parade of peacocks hitting on them to choose from. This is not a system that one gender can change independently of the other. We ALL need to change for it to change to a more equal system. Individuals change very slowly, if at all. This is the kind of societal change that takes generational time to play out. One can already see it happening in the attitudes of younger generations, but I believe that we'll need at least another generation or two for the situation to play itself out until gender neutral dating practices are the norm. Until then, making enemies of all Middle-Aged White Men who voice any dissent from A+ ideas, no matter how close they might otherwise be to the A+ position, is only harming the A+ cause. To be fair, I understand why they've become so nasty. They have a mirror image group of men who call themselves "Male Rights Advocates", or MRAs for short, who are actively engaged against them using many of the same crappy name-calling tactics and often laying sugar-coated traps (aka Trolling) intended to get just the kind of crappy responses A+ers give so that the MRA's can point at it and say, "see look how bad they are!". I'm sure this has gotten so tiresome that they just lash out any time it even appears that someone MIGHT be an MRA. This understanding doesn't make their behavior any more acceptable than that of a man who constantly belittles women because some woman in his life hurt him.

 And finally, directly to the A+ers: I'd love to believe I'm wrong about you. I'd love to have a chance to have a civil discussion that doesn't devolve into pointless invective. And most importantly, I'd love to see a world where this discussion was a historical one, where real social equality existed and the fact that once men outnumbered women in our atheist community by as much as 10:1 as difficult to believe as the fact that we used to own slaves or that women couldn't own property, vote, or hold elective office. If you're an A+er, please comment below. I won't go back to FtB for reasons that should already be obvious. I consider them a "hate" website, of the same caliber as Stormfront. They just hate Middle-Aged White Men instead of everyone BUT Whites. If you can engage me with civility, I will happily return it. Please convince me that I'm utterly wrong about you. If you arrive with the bile you spout on FtB, I'll just ignore your comments, leaving them posted as evidence that your MRA trolls are right.
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The Ledge

2 min read
I'm an atheist.

For those unsure of what an atheist means when he says that, it means that I don't accept any of the fantastic stories told by the various religions of the world. They all look the same to me, full of emotional passion, short on facts,  and virtually impossible to square with the reality we can actually observe. It does NOT mean that I'm absolutely certain there is no divine universal creator. I just see absolutely no more reason to believe any religious claims than I do to believe the claims that unicorns play in hidden glades, sasquach walks the forests, and gnomes live in our gardens or the claims that the moon landing is a hoax, reptile aliens control our government, or 9/11 was a CIA operation.

Unfortunately for sanity, atheists in america are the LEAST trusted major group. There are more of us than Mormons. More of us than Jews. More of us than Muslims. And we're the only "religious" group unable to be elected to office in our "secular" democracy. Even homosexuals are less reviled, and can openly serve as politicians.

But, our time may be coming. Like "Brokeback Mountain" represented a major shift in opinion about the status of homosexuals in our society, I have high hopes for a new film, "The Ledge", to do the same for the atheists. Many people are claiming it's a great film, though I have only seen trailers. It played at the Sundance Film Festival, and is scheduled to open on July 8th. You can find more info at ledgemovie.com
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6/1/1972 - 6/1/2011 ... 39 years

"The memories of a man in his old age, are the deeds of a man in his prime.
You shuffle in the gloom of the sickroom, and talk to yourself as you die.
Life is a short warm moment, and death is a long cold rest.
You get your chance to try, in the twinkling of an eye: eighty years with luck or even less."
  -- Roger Waters, "Free Four"

The last gasp of thinking of myself as "young" dies this year. My daughter is a teen, exploring her first serious relationship. Most people that I meet in daily life are now younger than I am. It would be delusional to think that I'm not at the halfway point in my life,

I don't really feel any mentally "older" or "more mature" than I did half a lifetime ago. My body is another story. I'm not one of those who gained weight as I got old, I'm actually under my ideal weight by more than 25lbs (11kg). But for more than 20 years I have smoked, consistently eaten poorly, and generally exercised insufficiently. I feel the weight of that self-mistreatment acutely.

"And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking,
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines."
  -- Roger Waters, "Time"

What I regret the most, looking back at the first half of my life, is my consistent lack of ability to reliably complete projects. I've got hundreds, if not thousands, of "plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines" as the results from the vast majority of projects I've ever undertaken. I don't really have the answer, no gem of wisdom to fix my own problems and save the next generation from my mistakes. What I can say is that I'm not alone, that many people before me and I'm sure many after have had that experience that Roger can sing about so well.

Today I resolve to try and start fewer projects and finish more of them. One completed project is worth more than every half-page of scribbled lines in my journal.
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Smoking

3 min read
Smoking is bad. You wouldn't believe how totally, utterly, mind-bogglingly bad it is. I mean, you might think plagarizing Douglas Adams is bad, but that's peanuts compared to smoking.

The scientific evidence in incontrovertible: smoking causes cancer, emphysema, heart disease, strokes, fetal damage, and much more. Smoking kills thousands every year, and every year they are replaced by new smokers, young people who should know better but start anyway. Even with all the evidence of the harm smoking causes, a smoker keeps right on puffing. This is the single worst aspect of smoking: addiction. Even after having part of a lung removed and receiving a diagnosis of emphysema, I couldn't stay quit. "Just one won't make any difference," I told myself. Within days I was back up to over a pack a day, just like before the month-long stay in the hospital. That cigarette had become such an integral part of my daily life that I just couldn't bear to be without it. "Suicide Sticks", "Cancer Sticks", and "Coffin Nails" are a few of the colloquial terms smokers sometimes use. We are well aware of their effects, and yet we continue to smoke. This addiction is so powerful that I cannot imagine how to describe it to someone who has never experienced it, and by the time you've experienced it and understand it's already too late: you're addicted.

But this post isn't supposed to be just a rehash of what every smoker already knows and what every child should know about smoking. It's a totally unsolicited endorsement of a relatively new product in the smoking world: the "electronic cigarette". An e-cig is conceptually simple: instead of burning tobacco and inhaling the smoke, you vaporize a nicotine solution and inhale it. It's still an addictive drug. It's unlikely to be "safe". But, it is also unlikely to be as bad as actual smoking is, as there is no smoke, tar, carbon monoxide, or any of the thousands of other chemicals a smoker constantly is inhaling. The long term effects of using an e-cig are unknown. The product has not existed long enough for reliable scientific studies to be completed, so it's possible that it's just as bad as smoking a regular cigarette. However, my experience is that using an e-cig is satisfying enough to my addiction that I've gone from smoking 1-2 packs a day down to maybe one cigarette a day on average.  This is having a noticeable effect on my breathing. I'm not "hacking up a lung" every morning when I get up, I'm generally feeling better, I'm saving money, and possibly most importantly: I don't smell quite so much like an ashtray anymore.

In conclusion, if you don't smoke or use nicotine at all, please don't ever start. If you do smoke, quit. But, if like me you're so addicted that quitting seems impossible, I strongly recommend giving the e-cigs a try. You might be surprised.
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Harold Camping of FamilyRadio.com has predicted the Rapture to happen this Saturday, May 21st 2011 at 6pm. This isn't the first time Mr. Camping has predicted the Rapture. Given that you're reading this journal entry, Camping's last Rapture prediction, September 6th 1994, was obviously a dud. It's not really surprising considering the thousands of previous "End Times", "Rapture", and "Apocalypse" predictions that have all failed to pass on the appointed hour. What I do actually find a little surprising is that anybody is gullible enough to believe these "End Times" prophets. There are people who are so short-sighted, so eager for the end, and so ignorant of the history of these prophecies that they have dedicated their lives in the last few months to the propagation of this May 21st "prophecy", with some even giving away or donating to to Camping's "Church" their entire savings and livelihoods with the idea that being a pauper when Jesus returns will improve their chances for making it to heaven. I expect them to experience a repeat of the history they refuse to learn from, exemplified by the Millerites of 1844. I expect them to live through their own new "Great Disappointment".

I pity them.

Personally, I find it incredible that anyone who has ever actually read their Gospels could possibly believe these predictions based upon them:

"For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done. Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."
Matthew 16:27-28 KJV

"Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. But of that day and hour knoweth no [man], no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only."
Matthew 24:34-36 KJV

"And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power."
Mark 9:1 KJV

"But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God."
Luke 9:27 KJV

Clearly, if one accepts scripture as authoritative, no man can know the hour of the Rapture. But just as clearly, Jesus said his return would be within the lifetime of at least some of his followers. He's roughly 2000 years late. Why the @#$@ are they still waiting??
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Featured

Atheism+, FreeThoughtBlogs, and Social Justice by renegade4dio, journal

The Ledge by renegade4dio, journal

Happy Birthday to me by renegade4dio, journal

Smoking by renegade4dio, journal

The Rapture, May 21st 2011 by renegade4dio, journal