Compassionate Heathen

Heretic's Lament

2010-12-28T15:30:00.000-08:00

Wrote some metal lyrics in a fit of insomnia.

Heretic's Lament
----------------------
Forced to trade reality
For your ancient insanity.
Wake each day to fear and dread
The conflagration in my head!

Malevolent indoctrination,
Counter with intoxication.
Wrath of God rush through my veins
Benediction of eternal pain!

I can't be forced into belief,
And hellfire offers no relief.
Punished for just how God made me
Superstition to enslave me!

Heretic!
I won't prostrate!
Heretic!
I choose my fate!
Heretic!
Banish confusion!
Heretic!
Faith is delusion!

Born of hatred, fear and strife.
Shattered remnants of my life.
Emptied out, put on the shelf,
A shadow of my former self.

Only seeking validation,
Met with holy consternation.
Curiosity must be hushed,
Your individuality crushed.

No choice now but to strike back,
The walls of faith begin to crack.
Build it up, but at what cost?
Your only son forever lost.

[chorus x 2]

Christian Hyprocrites

2010-07-08T19:23:00.000-07:00

Talked to a Christian at the theme part today who said we should build giant catapults for illegals to shoot them back to their countries of origin...pretty sick. I asked if it would be better to just keep them here as slaves, since at least they would still live, plus this is in accordance with the Old Testament...although I did ask why not take Jesus' stance instead and welcome the impoverished and homeless. The Christian's response to this contradiction of beliefs: Well, all humans are hypocrites.

Ex-Christian Experience

2010-02-19T09:29:00.001-08:00

When I say I had personal experience with Christianity, I mean I went through the salvation and baptism experience, experienced religious rapture, and felt what I considered at the time to be the presence of the Holy Spirit and a personal relationship with Christ. This started early, at about age 6, and continued with increasing fervor until I was about 16. I witnessed to friends at school and went on local missions. My loss of faith was not immediate but proceeded over about 5 years in fits and starts. It was jump-started by some very unpleasant experiences in the church when I was 16, then reinforced by my family, and ultimately confirmed by God's complete silence during all these experiences even as I was whole-heartedly seeking Him. So for probably 5 or 6 years after I lost my faith I still actually believed in God and Satan, but was angry at God and thought that the Southern Baptist's probably had it all wrong. I didn't really get back into church because at this time I moved out on my own and went through a dark period of depression, hospitalization with drugs, and being completely disconnected from my family.

It was at this point that I consciously started examining my beliefs about God and the cosmos in general. I started reading about every religion I could find. I took world religion classes at local colleges and Berkeley, went to meditate at Buddhist temples, read the Bible from cover to cover, and essentially went through all the steps and realizations common of most "seekers". This inevitably led me back to fundamental questions about the origin of the universe, the origin of God, and how a sentient and complex species like humans got here at all...or the origins of life. Since I hadn't found answers that really made sense to both me and reality at the same time, I turned my attention to learning everything I could about nature, biology, cosmology, evolution, and physics, essentially seeing what science had to say about the matter. I had nothing more than the standard high school science education, which I quickly realized was not really sufficient to understand the complexity of genetics, evolution, theoretical physics and all the more advanced academic subjects that are actually revealing how the cosmos seems to work. So after reading just a few of the basic subjects in science things really started to click for me. Not only did all this new information make sense and was internally consistent, it actually matched up with the reality we see around us perfectly. The more I read from every different time period and every different discipline of science, from the ancient Greek atomists to modern day theoretical physicists all corroborated an elegant and beautiful explanation of the universe and our existence. The picture is by no means complete, of course we have so much more to learn about the cosmos...but the picture that emerges from the pieces of the puzzle we have manged to fit together reveal something infinitely more astounding and awe-inspiring than any holy book or religion I ever studied, and all this applied directly to my reality, not some vaporous entity out there somewhere. At this point I finally shed any remaining belief I had in a personal god or gods. I reserve judgment on an uninvolved creator entity until all the data is in...so on this vague point I must remain agnostic, but I think that it is possible that someday science will be able to more accurately describe the cosmos outside and before our own universe happened. Anyway, I think science has a better chance of solving the big puzzle than super-naturalism, and for many reasons...but science vs. super-naturalism is a whole other discussion :)

Sharing the "love" of the Christian faith...

2009-12-10T14:03:00.001-08:00

It always surprises my how quick "Christ"ians are to spread hate and call names, and generally be as rude as they like...then they wait for someone to call them on it and then start screaming "you're oppressing me!" And nevermind about the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Witch Hunts, the attack on public education, the murdered children and gays in Uganda....blah...I'm tired of this religious hypocrites telling me how great Jesus Christ is, and then turning around and hating anyone that doesn't think exactly like them.

So, if I put up a sign that says "Screw Christians", then you'll still cheer for me?

Jesus was Wrong

2009-09-01T15:52:00.001-07:00

I've always loved the teenage son's character in the movie Little Miss Sunshine. I was also impressed by the t-shirt he wears, which simple states, "Jesus was Wrong". While I've immediately thought it was apparent what the shirt meant, it seems that some people are pretty confused (see this blog post: http://pspruett.blogspot.com/2007/02/jesus-was-wrong.html). Oddly, the author hits near the point in his '2nd assumption' but is incredulous about the implications.

So, I'll set out clearly why I think Jesus was wrong (indeed he was completely wrong on a number of points). If we read the New Testament to find what Jesus thought (and actually this is our only source), we will find that he certainly believed and taught a few things that turned out to be wrong:

1. Jesus taught that the end of time and the coming of the kingdom of God would occur within the time period in which he lived. He states on more than one occasion that there would be some of his peers still alive when the kingdom is come.

2. He, Jesus, would be the earthly ruler of the kingdom of God. This was not a heavenly kingdom, but a kingdom on earth. Jesus believed he was to be the ruler over all of earth in God's new kingdom.

3. Jesus teachings and ideology match this belief of an imminent end; sell all your possessions, forsake your family, spread the news as fast as possible about the impending destruction, and follow me to the end.

So anyone who reads the New Testament can plainly see that Jesus was wrong on at least a few major points. There is no kingdom of God on earth, and Jesus is not around now to rule it anyway. And even his message of sell everything and give it to the poor seems to backfire when the end doesn't come, the holy man passes away, and the family is now struggling to survive.

Okay MAC...we're friends now :)

2009-08-05T10:00:00.001-07:00

I've always been a staunch PC user. I started on an Apple IIe back in grade school and was force-fed Apple/Mac through school, into high school. However, because my father worked almost exclusively with PCs at work, we didn't have any Apple computers in the home...only PC. So early on I really learned the intricacies of both operating systems and really came to like DOS and Windows better and the Apple "System" (the OS was just called System 7 back then). I felt I more easily had detailed control over the DOS systems with the command prompt, and that I was locked out of all the lower-level parts of the Apple OS, which frustrated me.

Well, since I became pretty much an exclusive PC user about 16 years ago I've made it a point to give Apple a chance every few years. Since I have the extreme fortune of working at a tech company I can pretty much request a new laptop every couple years and not expect to be turned down. (I can't express how grateful I am for this privilege in life considering what a luxury it is...anyway...) So every 4 or 5 years I request the latest and greatest Mac system instead of a PC and force myself to use only that system for 30 days. My previous experiences have never been good. The longest I used one system was in 2002 when I got a Mac PowerPC tower that had tons of RAM and all the latest hardware. That lasted for all of 10 days. (No need to go into too much detail, but the system was slow, UI terrible, mouse and keyboard a joke, not much software support, etc. etc.)

Well, I'm surprised to say that the tides have finally turned. I recently got a MacBook Pro and it's really starting to grow on me. What's changed? Partially Mac and partially me:

- It seems that the software support for the Apple OS has finally gotten reasonably close to the Windows OS. I can now run pretty much all the software I want and all the files I transferred from my PC work, which has never been the case before, regardless of what the old 'switch' ads used to say.

- The OS is responsive and fast. Applications launch pretty fast and I don't feel like I'm being held back like with previous Mac experiences.

- The UI is still pretty inflexible and poorly designed to me, especially the windowing behaviors and the file system app called the "Finder". The Finder is extremely cumbersome and doesn't manage new windows, dragging and dropping files, or deeply nested folders well at all, and the application windows suck because they can generally only be re-sized from the bottom-right corner when I often want to re-size them from the sides and top. However, some improvements have been made to the scroll bar preferences and other minor annoyances, so the flaws have become tolerable.

- Windows changed me. I've been slowly weened away from the command prompt by Windows 2000 and XP so that I've become comfortable with never seeing it on the Mac now. (Ironically they now have a great Unix command prompt, only after I've finally stopped using command prompts for the most part.)

- The gesture touch-pad is pretty useful once you get used to it.

To be clear, there are a still a couple things I hate about this laptop, which may prevent me from permanently adopting it as my main system:

- The casing, while beautiful to look at, is not design with ergonomics in mind at all. The lip of the casing below the keyboard is a sharp 90 degree titanium-metal angle, which cuts into the underside of my wrists viciously whenever I type and rest my hands on the keyboard. (As I type now I have lines pressed into my wrists that look like suicide attempts...foreshadowing of ultimate Mac experience?) When it's closed the casing is all smooth and slippery, and since the laptop weighs over 6 pounds I'm constantly afraid I'm going to slip and drop it. It's as if they didn't care at all for human comfort when designing the casing, only how cool it would look.

- Proprietary input/output jacks. This kills me! I want to hook up a monitor to the laptop, but will it accept a standard VGA or DVI cable? NOOOOO! You need a separate 'dongle' to plug any display into this thing. Does it come with the dongle?! NOOOOO! You have to order it separately. It is the same dongle for last years MacBook as this one?! NOOOOO! I have buy a new one for every laptop...WTF? Is this some sick scheme to extort money from hapless fanatics? Some breakthrough new plug development I've never heard of? Come on...

- iCrap. The iSoftware suite that comes on the Mac is all crap, there's no nicer way to put it. It's not intuitive or easy to use. None if it functions how I would want apps of those types to function. I won't even go into it in detail...needless to say, it's a good thing that 3rd-party software developers are consistently publishing their apps to Mac now or else I would have gone back to PC already.

So, I may need to investigate some kind of keyboard padding or something to be able to really adopt this thing...in the end though I'm not as opposed to using the Mac for serious work and play anymore. To be clear, I'm no where near being a Mac fanatic and waiting in lines for new Apple products. And I'll definitely still use my PC every day for the base tasks like Exchange-based email, but so far I've done most of my work on the Mac for the past couple weeks and haven't been driven away in frustration...so I guess we can be friends now, Mac. :)

Doodles

2009-07-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

Was doodling in Flash last night and came up with this from a combination of other monkey cartoons. Feel free to take it and use it for whatever you want, however you want.

Oh Peaceful Islam, Allah the Just!

2009-07-13T10:36:00.000-07:00

Because Allah is so merciful and just, Sharia law dictates that any woman who fails to dress appropriately should receive 40 lashes. In case anyone was in doubt, the Sudanese police recently decided to violently enforce the Sharia law in a public restaurant. From the BBC article:

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, who says she is facing 40 lashes, said she and 12 other women wearing trousers were arrested in a restaurant in the capital, Khartoum. She told the BBC several of the women had pleaded guilty to the charges and had 10 lashes immediately.

The pain and humiliation was surely horrible for those women. But as a husband, I can't imagine how anyone would subject their wife to that type of law and still sleep at night or even consider themselves worthy of having a wife. Where is the moral outrage amongst the people. The women aren't even suppose to be out in public without a man, and they say this is for their "protection"? Where were the men to protect these women from being beaten simply for wearing trousers?

Sharia law is nothing more that sociopathic fascism, especially when it comes to women. It seems to me that the great nations of the world can't claim to fight terrorism, while at the same time bowing in respect to the evil religion of Islam.

I leave you with this wonderful quote from the Quran:

Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) that the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband's) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of annoyance), for Allah is Most High, Great (above you all). (4:34, A.Y.Ali)

Religious freedom and your tax dollars at work...

2009-07-06T11:15:00.001-07:00

Just read that State Representative Sally Kern, with other lawmakers, and civic and religious leaders, met at the Oklahoma State Capitol this month to sign the "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality." The full text of the proclamation is also posted in the news article here.

In the proclamation, the national economic crisis is blamed on gays, divorce, sex trafficking and child abuse, and "many other forms of debauchery". The solution: Christianity and the Holy Bible (it literally says this). The article goes on and on quoting historical figures regarding religion...just about everyone is quoted except the Constitution of the United States! What ever happen to the separation of church and state?

Just in case Rep. Kern forgot:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"

So proclaim all you want Rep. Kern, but as a politician you should keep your Bible and your gods to yourself! And maybe, as a politician, you could also find something more constructive to spend your time on than drawing up religious proclamations?

Added to Atheist Blogroll

2009-07-05T18:09:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Mojoey for adding Compassionate Heathen to the Atheist Blogroll! You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

The Strength of Your Faith

2009-06-30T10:45:00.001-07:00

I often discuss philosophy and religion with my Christian and Muslim friends. While some insist on quoting from their holy text, they also refuse to acknowledge any secular text that challenges their beliefs. Then they mistakenly think that their refusal to even read some secular texts is a sign of their great faith in God.

How strong can your faith really be if it can't even withstand reading a book? This blind and ignorant faith is the weakest kind of faith...and the most frustrating to non-believers who are simply trying to discuss things on a equal footing. (Similar to the frustration when the believer makes the divine excuse when cornered, "We can never comprehend God's will" or some such nonsense, basically short-circuiting the conversation by claiming their viewpoint can't be reproached because it is divine and inaccessible to mere humans.)

If believers are going to quote from holy books and insist that we read them, isn't it only fair to respond in kind?

Why handguns?

2009-06-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

I can understand hunting and home protection, but why are Americans so specifically infatuated with handguns. Those little firearms that fit in your pocket but can kill more than half a dozen people in a matter of seconds. Small devices with no other purpose on earth than to kill human beings. The Constitution of the United States protects the right to bear 'arms', but not any and every kind of arms. Certain automatic assault rifles are not legal to own or discharge. And I don't think it is legal for a private citizen to own a functioning nuclear weapon.

So we've chosen to draw a line on arms ownership somewhere...considering all the damage handguns do in our society, what is the specific and rational reason for not including handguns in the restricted group of arms? Is it not possible to protect your home with a long barreled hunting rifle or shotgun? Is it not possible to bear arms and protect your country or rebel against your government with the same rifles and shotguns? If we're going to ban assault weapons because they are dangerous, why stop there? Why not ban handguns as well? Or why not just lift all bans and let citizens own any and all arms?

I've heard and seen all the bumper sticker rhetoric from handgun owners; 2nd amendment, 'original homeland security', etc. etc. But do these people favor me owning an assault rifle or a nuclear weapon? They've also chosen to draw the line somewhere. The 2nd amendment doesn't specifically say handguns, etc. What is the real reason they won't settle for rifles and must have handguns?

Recovering Christian

2009-06-25T12:13:00.001-07:00

It's been 15 years since I left home at 18, and 18 years since I renounced my faith in Christianity. It's been long enough that I sometimes forget how ingrained the the dogma of Christianity is in my subconscious. I still have occasional fears about hell or what-if thoughts about God and his wrath, but they are usually fleeting and my rational mind overrides these fears fairly quickly.

I often discuss religion with friends, but usually from a more academic viewpoint, not really spiritual. I've also had Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses come to the door and was not particularly affected by the resulting discussions.

However, last weekend a Baptist Christian knocked on our door handing out invitational fliers for his church. The Baptist sect of Christianity was the one that I was raised in and indoctrinated into since birth. As soon as I found out he was from a Baptist church my heart started pounding and I was a little short of breath. This was totally unusual for me and I internally I was taken a little aback. Nevertheless, I politely stated I actually used to be a Baptist but was now an atheist and didn't really believe in God or the teachings of the Bible. He politely asked what had changed my mind. I told him that I had been reading the Bible and I think it was a very good book to live by and that I had studied some science, which led me to understand the improbably that God exists. (All this time I was also putting on my shoes and trying to get them tied...I was just getting ready to go to help my parents build a new deck.) I had to also tell him that I was just getting ready to leave, but that he was welcome back anytime. He asked for my phone number, which I was immediately comfortable giving out, but we agreed that he would come back next weekend and talk.

As the situation ended and I closed the door, my heart was still racing. I was completely disturbed by the subconscious monster that reared up from the past as soon as a specific trigger was present. Knowing that the dogma of Christianity can still hold so much sway over my emotions is scary. I'm not sure whether the Baptist will come back this weekend. Although it was a pretty uncomfortable encounter, I have hope that he will return to challenge and hopefully help solidify my worldview. If he does return, he will probably feel the same way...

Hello

2009-06-24T14:24:00.001-07:00

I have a couple other blogs that are topical, so I wanted to start this 'personal' blog for all the miscellany that doesn' t fit in the topical blogs. This is mostly my secular and atheistic musings; thoughts on philosophy, art, and culture, as well as anything interesting that catches my attention. (Since I live in a very religious country and city I'm inundated with religious ideology just about every day...)

For instance, I'm always hearing Christians talk about sin and being good, etc. But on the freeway, it seems that doesn't apply. I see a lot of cars with fish and crosses and Bible verses stuck on the back breaking like 5 traffic laws at once. Sure, there are cars without the stickers driving wildly as well, but then again they presumably aren't aware that God is watching them at all times.

So I started wondering, are traffic violations considered sins to God? Only if you're caught or cause an accident? Are Christians obligated to obey the law of the land, or only God's law? Since there is nothing about speeding and weaving on the freeway in the Bible, is it ok?

This led me to wonder about all those God stickers on people's cars, and also when people where a cross around their neck. If they are not willing to set them selves apart and actually behave better than rest of the populace, then what's the point of displaying the icon in the first place? You just taint the message of your religion by being a bad example of that religion's membership.

It's another small observation that validates the idea that morals don't come from God or religion at all, but from reasonable, rational human beings.