And to continue from yesterday....

What's most frightening is the complete and utter disconnect in people's minds. What used to be extreme is now commonplace; and I mean the forms of evangelical and fundamentalist christianity where items such as the rapture and revelations are discussed openly and rationally, as if they are rational subjects rather than the frankly insane topics that they are. But these are just the most extreme. I am always amazed at the lack of historical background people know about this supposedly sacred text...that Paul the apostle did not know jesus, that instead several decades after the death of said son of god he had a vision of him on the road....or the millennium long rule of the catholic church and what it became, or the traveling preacher who derived eschatology from the bizarre allegory that is revelations....they only know what some whackjob preacher tells them...they know nothing of basic subjects like geology, microbiology, or frankly even frontal systems in weather. The wealth of ignorance abound in an ordinary group of people could fuel an empire for centuries if convertible....and I am not speaking of a wrestling audience.

Ostrich people.......


Living where I do, I am constantly surrounded by ignorance, superstition and that truly scary phenomenon called modern christianity. It is placed in such importance that grammar checkers don't like it spelled with lower case as in this case. But I am tired. I am frustrated. I am long since beyond anger having at a young age tired of debating the morons who sat outside of my yard attempting to debate me while I shot baskets. I would sit alone in class as the rest would leave school heading to confirmation. Lately, I've been surrounded again. God does this. God does that. God is wonderful. God thinks this. God thinks that. I just broke up with someone after they had highlighted biblical quotations denouncing homosexuality and passed them on to someone else. I am no longer tolerant. It is time to end this drivel.

At every point of a former causal explanation formerly attributed to god, investigation has shown the cause to be material. Every disease that used to be caused by evil spirits was found to be either completely false ( as in witchcraft) or with some other cause...i.e. the bubonic plague. Despite this, we still have arm waving, jesus praising, snake handling sycophants praising the lord and begging for the rapture and salvation...to the tunes of billions of dollars in property and cold, hard cash. They will happily solve addictions, paralysis and solve marriage incompatibility. All this while driving off in a limo. Now, many will say, that is only a minority, and look at the good it does....a simple question is this.....why wouldn't the same resources be just as effective doing good for the sake of good, justified by real explanations? Why does it have to be done in the name of a 2000 yr old dead jew whose own people said was obviously not the messiah, who no one who spread the word about later on actually knew ( Paul, decades after the fact) and also showed a mean streak.

There are entire communities with megachurches who somehow tie jesus in with the ability to drive suv's and purchase cheap goods paid for by essentially slave labor at walmart. When you observe this, it is obvious that the enlightenment has not affected much of the U.S. It is a bizarre combination of overt materialism, jesus worship and the tenets of the whackjob right of the republican party. There was more intellectual honesty during the american revolution than now.....more later......