This is a little nothing-much, posted mainly to see how I feel about posting. If you’ve been following my recent exploits, you know I’m just a week into recovery from surgery – the minor-but-major removal of my gallbladder – and I haven’t felt much like writing. Or even turning on the computer.
But today I felt pretty good. Woke up at 7 a.m., lay in bed thinking and reading until almost 10 a.m., then got up and … well, got a great deal done. Continue reading “Nothing to See Here, Move Along”
Greta Christina recently lost her father.
My father died on October 1, 2012, at the age of 79.
My dad, like me, was an atheist. And when you’re an atheist and a non-believer, and the people you love die, you don’t get to tell yourself that they aren’t really dead. You don’t get to tell yourself that you’re going to see them again someday, in some hypothetical post-death existence that somehow both is and is not life. You have to accept that death is really permanent, and really final.
This may be surprising to many believers… but atheist ways of dealing with death and grief are not actually dire, or hopeless, or without consolation. I’ve been surprised, in fact, at how comforting my humanism and my naturalism have been during my grief.
Go over there and read it. It’s that rarest of obits, one from an atheist. Illuminating, uncompromising, and very, very touching.
(This is a repost, slightly edited, from 2008.)
Say you did something you thought was good at the time, but later turned out to be bad. You could admit the mistake. Or you could refuse to admit it.
Any sensible person would probably say the first option was the best one. If you can admit a mistake, you can probably do something to fix it, or correct your course so you don’t do it again. And you can move on.
The second option has some variations built into it, argumentative positions that might replace the simple “I didn’t make a mistake” with: Continue reading “Politics: Getting “Nailed” by Jesus, and Bush”
In his post “Value-free atheism,” Justin Vacula focuses on the meaning of the word “atheism” — making the point, as do so many others, that it means only one thing. The argument seems to be coming often these days following the appearance of Atheism-Plus. Vacula says: Continue reading “A Basic Motivation for Atheism+ … and for Beta Culture”
[ First read Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 ]
All the civilizations I ever heard of had this in common: Somewhere right near each one’s heart was religion.
It seems impossible to get away from. And yet it shouldn’t be. After all, it’s never been true that religion is ALL people do.
And it’s not as if religion is food, or water, or air. It’s just this … idea. Hideously embroidered, massively wrapped in confusing, fanciful language, aggressively forced upon people in their vulnerable years and moments … but still just an idea. If it’s possible for one person to be free of it, it’s possible for anyone – maybe even a majority of us – to be free of it. And yet, it seems, we’ve never really tried.
This may be the moment in which that begins to change. This is the “maybe” revolution I spoke of in Part 1. Continue reading “First Person Revolutionary — Part 4”
The fatal flaw of atheism? Actually, it’s a challenge atheism shares with religion. The difference between the two is that religion has found a solution.
So let’s talk about religion:
The weedy form of religion, superstition, arises automatically in each mind all on its own, simply by virtue of our need to create private theories – often wildly personified due to our ability to detect “person-ness” in everything from smiley faces to wind in the trees – about how the world around us works. But the fully-developed form of religion, that complex mess represented by, for instance, the Catholic Church … Continue reading “First Person Revolutionary — Part 3”
[ Read Part 1 first. ]
Atheism (more broadly, freethought) isn’t new, of course. Just in this country alone, it’s as old as Thomas Paine (although Paine was a deist, he was widely accused of being an atheist, and I’m confident he would’ve been one of us if he lived in a society in which it was possible to actually think about such things), and has had its bright sparks all along the way, right up to Carl Sagan, who published The Demon Haunted World only 15 years ago. Continue reading “First Person Revolutionary — Part 2”
Ever think about the revolutions in your life? The things that change, and change greatly, and then affect everything that comes after?
Boy, I do.
I’ll tell you a little one first, and then a big one, and then a maybe one.
The Little One
The little one – well, it might be a big one to you – is about music. Continue reading “First Person Revolutionary — Part 1”
When I was younger, I used to play with myself.
No, not like that. Okay, well, yes like that, but that’s not what I meant. (Too much information, huh? The hell with it, I’m leaving it in. We’re all sexy beasts here.)
What I mean is that I used to play with different parts of my body, to see what I could learn from them, to see what they would do. Continue reading “Visits from Dead People — Part 1”
I actually like Tony Robbins, and I lean toward buy-in to the basic concept of motivational speaking.
The difference between believing you can do a thing, and not do that thing, matters. I’ve had amazing successes at points in my life, and terrible failures at others. Some of those amazing successes were attended by a deliberately positive mindset, some of the terrible failures were attended by aimlessly negative ones. Continue reading “Toasty Toes at Tony Robbins Event”
