My approach to things now and in the future

A few months ago I joined a movement that the media and a couple friends of mine refer to as the “Conspiracy Theorists.” Now amongst ourselves we refer to it as the “Patriot Movement” but that is the subject of a different blog post. As I started examining the “evidence” and arguments I started to get angry. I realized that I had bought into several lies for a number of years since 2001. But as I looked further I realized that I couldn’t stop at 9-11 because the lying did not begin with 9-11.

As far as my life is concerned, we’re talking about 40 years of lies, manipulations, propaganda and bad information. Much of this is pretty innocent on the surface. I do not believe that my parents and teachers were intentionally lying or trying to manipulate me or my thinking. However much of what they did disseminate went to serve deliberate programs created with just those purposes in mind. I’m saying they didn’t lie but ultimately they worked for liars and manipulators.

The same goes for church. I didn’t convert to Christianity until I was 19. Within every congregation I have ever been a part of there has been a mindset of following, believing because someone or book (Bible) says so. And as I look at the way many, myself included, have bought into lies and propaganda from politicians, it’s the same situation as the education system and the misinformation that people hand off to one another in ignorance.

So as I have gotten increasingly angry and disgusted with the status quo and things and people that make it their business to perpetuate the status quo I have lashed out, sometimes loudly and violently, in protest. For a lot of my life I have held my tongue when dealing with people and situations who deserved everything but that. I am learning to not do that as much. While that practice has allowed me to be seen by many as a “nice guy” it has not helped the situations I have been involved in because people have not understood that they were wrong and needed to check themselves.

So now and in the future I am on a quest to understand history and philosophy. I don’t intend to become an expert in either field. Frankly there is more out there than I think I could master in the next 45 years, assuming I can make it to 90. The overriding part to that is that I am questioning EVERYTHING. Wherever I have been taught something, especially any thing that has required a moral or other judgment I am questioning whatever was taught and however I responded. When I say EVERYTHING I mean every area of life including religion, psychology, history, humanity, sociology, economics and philosophy.

As I said before I have done and am doing some lashing out in anger. Part of the problem I have been having is that as I realize that I have bought into a lie I have become angry with the person who sold it to me, whether they did so intentionally or not. I have also started re-evaluating relationships with those people. Some relationships I have no problem allowing to continue. And I know that the only key to resolving this is to forgive those people and to forgive myself for buying into things, especially without questioning.

I am forgiving the family members and other adults who participated in this when I was a child. I am forgiving the school teachers who were mostly handing down what was handed down to them. I am forgiving the evangelical church leaders and members I was around in the past. They too were mostly handing down what was handed down to them. And lastly I am forgiving myself for buying the lies, manipulations, propaganda and bad information. In the beginning I was little and didn’t know any better. I am also a product of several left-brain indoctrination programs (public schools) and continued to buy into what was told to me.

I have been changing some of the relationships I have had with some of the folks I am talking about above and there have been and are going to be some hurt feelings in that process. On the whole I am not going to try to do anything about that right now. I am studying and following the information and it is leading me to different understandings about life and myself and I am not and don’t expect to be the same person I was before all this started. As far as I am concerned the sweetened-condensed-canned version of life is nothing but sour milk and is no longer digestible.

I shall continue to report here the different discoveries and new perspectives I attain. Some of it may come out in extremely strong language depending on what it is.

The Heresy of Self Condemnation

I have put up with this crap since 1983. That’s 25 years. That’s over half my life at this point. All the time when I was attending certain churches the message was that part of me has to go to hell so the rest can go to heaven. The church is full, front to back, with counter-intuitive psychology that is euphemistically called wisdom. If you question those in charge, they’ll tell you the holy spirit said it, which serves as a further coercion for you to obey. And people will quote verses like “…God has confounded the wisdom of the wise…” This stuff comes in the ears one way and filters through the subconscious as something quite different and much worse.

You don’t hear this every Sunday in every sermon. But. At some point you’re subjected to what amounts to encouragement to curse your self. I am splitting the word up because for this essay “self” is not part of any pronoun. Now you won’t hear the clergy or the other members of the congregation saying curse your self. Nobody says that, at least not out loud. I doubt many are thinking that. It might actually get their conscious attention and we can’t have that. What is said by many people around you is humble your self, deny your self, yield your self, surrender your self, give of your self, be selfless, die to your self, there is no such thing as self-worth. I wish I could say all this stuff goes in one ear and out the other. Unfortunately it goes in at least one ear, gets processed by the subconscious and comes back as self-criminalization. According to these doctrines the self is at war with God. And to put that in our pop culture lingo, spiritually we’re all terrorists.

For this essay I have split the word self from whatever associated pronouns it occurs with in the sentences. When people are saying it to others, they don’t. It gets read in by the subconscious as mostly “yourself.” If you don’t “robot” easily and since things aren’t explained well in the church, you tend to walk around with ideas in the back of your mind that you’re worthless, you’re nothing, you don’t matter and you have no value. Then to confound matters further, there is a separate message of self love. People will ask, “if you don’t love yourself then how can you love anyone else?” Right. Exactly. And how can you love your self if everywhere you turn it is being assaulted by religion? And not only is your self being assaulted constantly by religion, you’re being asked to participate in this psychological Gangbanger’s jumping in. Being worthless, nothing and not mattering are certainly not things I want to feel affection for.

There is a difference in this, between what is meant, what is said, and how it is received. If the message is don’t indulge your self to excess, that would be okay. But that’s not what is said. What is said is that self-indulgence of any kind is evil. If they limited the talk to things that cause harm to others, like engaging in some favored activity at the expense of one’s children’s needs that would be okay. If they’d take the time to describe these cases and why this sort of selfishness is bad, that would be okay. People could process it. People could understand it. But these speeches aren’t fleshed out enough to do that. Most sermons consist of how much can we pack into a 15-45 minute talk to get some message across. Whenever the self is being discussed in these speeches, prepare to get the ice packs out because you’re about to take a beating.

The self is just what it is, it’s you. It’s not evil. It’s not worthless. It’s not nothing. Evil is coming from the abusive authority figures who are telling you that nonsense. Overcoming this, and believe me I am just starting, is a subjective process. It’s internal. You’ve got to value your self enough to take the time to do it. You have to decide to do it for your self. Try picking out something you do well and taking credit for it. Try to think of something to love about your self. Start with something small. Light a match. Turn on a flashlight. As you continue to do that, the darkness will retreat.

I have to come up with other solutions because what I have been trying to do and what others have been encouraging me to do ain’t workin’. I am putting it up here for others to read because I know I am not alone.

The final exercise of mind, spirit and life

You are surrounded by 1 Billion dots of roughly random sizes and at roughly random distances from one another. Your primary task is to connect them by traveling from dot to dot carrying a white silken thread. The dots are all related to one another. Your secondary task is to discover how. Take all the time that you need, but we must warn you that at some point, if you have not completed your tasks by then, they’re all going to turn a gun-metal grey and come hurtling together to permanently trap everything and everyone in one geodesic-type super-dot. We cannot predict with absolute certainty when that time will be but we strongly suggest that you be somewhere, anywhere else when that happens. Your third task is to spread the word and encourage others to engage in the same connecting process. If enough people are able to string enough connections between the dots you will create a mass of fiber strong enough to hold them apart. This is the only way to defeat the sadistic elitists who set up this system. They hope you will find the task too daunting, that you’ll believe there are just too many, that you’ll become too stressed and whine and want to quit. You probably will. The elitists have gotten a tremendous amount of mileage out of people coming to just those conclusions and stopping. If we were to assign you a fourth task it would be to push past that point. Picture yourself leaving the next to the last dot and carrying the last length of silk to the final dot. The only other tip we can give you is that once you start to see how one dot relates to another dot, relates to another dot you’ll find it easier to understand the world you’ve been placed in and will find the task not so impossible. Good luck.

Cut The Line

When the millstone of incredulity reaches critical mass, cut the line. See and believe.

I was asked why

Because as far as information goes we are being fed a steady diet of double-thick milkshakes with truth only being dispensed as sprinkles…maybe a cherry…but mostly sprinkles.

That is not healthy.

I am here to give you your vegetables.

The Chimp

There was a chimp in a lab that took a tranq. dart gun from the researcher and pointed it at him. He had not processed things enough to know to pull the trigger. The humans put him down. What I admired about him was he took a stand. He drew a line. I know that’s an anthropomorphism. But eventually NO has to be the answer. The question is will it be the answer from enough of us before it’s too late?

The truth is

if your family is wealthy and its members only intermarry with other wealthy families, that constitutes inbreeding.

Holy Spirit Abuse

Early on in my time as a Christian I used to talk fairly regularly to a friend about God, the church and living a “Christian” life. I don’t do that anymore really. Life takes people in different directions and gives them different priorities. During one of our conversations she brought up the subject of following the lead of the holy spirit and allowing the holy spirit to guide her through her day. So I described how I manage getting ready in the morning and said that if there is a machine that I am running I start that and then go do something else that needs to be done. She said I should follow the Holy Spirit for even that and that maybe God didn’t want me to start that machine first. What that said to me is that I was wrong and needed to follow the Holy Spirit, puppet-like through my day. I think I might have tried this process once and felt after a few minutes like it was a silly, useless, pseudo-spiritual mental exercise and I never did it again. What’s the point of being raised by parents if all we’re supposed to do in life is suspend common sense and everything we’ve been taught about living and tap into some sort of Holy Spirit carrier wave? I’ve been dressing myself since I was about 5. I can look around my house and see when the washer needs to be run and I can manage doing the laundry pretty well on my own. I don’t need the Holy Spirit to tell me that stuff. I’m not going to go throughout my day like a human police scanner waiting for heavenly signals before I do basic things I know need to be done every day. I cannot say that I understand the concept of the “still, small, voice.” I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with waiting to be told to put your drawers on then your socks or your socks on then your drawers.

Life by Abstraction: The Status Check

Lazy people didn’t create databases but they’ve made ample use of them.

Anyone who deals with deadlines can relate to this. One of your duties is to submit work to another department for further processing. The deadline is within an hour and the person from that department comes to you asking where thus and such job is. You didn’t see it come in or go out and you might not have even known it was supposed to run. But. Instead of going and finding the specific item and making sure it is done you don’t even get up. You query a database and then tell them what the database says and then go back to surfing the internet or talking on your cell or whatever else you’re not being paid to do. So the next day you’re sitting in your boss’s office who is yelling at you because her boss yelled at her because her boss yelled at her because his boss, the Division VP got yelled at by the VP of another division which through a similar succession of bosses and subordinates leads to the department where you were supposed to hand off that job yesterday. The fact that you can prattle off how the system queries all say the job was complete and all the paperwork is dotted and crossed, initialed and signed in all the right places in triplicate is not going to stop you from having to sign the written warning form your boss just handed to you on a clipboard.

However the problem got to you; whether the job was completed and deleted from the system, or whether you can lay blame on some colleague who is notorious for leaving work for others, somewhere out there there’s a customer who is having to delay working and listen to protestations of apology and reassurance that she’ll have her product in the very immediate future. She doesn’t care anything about the efficiencies of your internal reporting system. She’s pissed. She wants her money back. She’d like to go take her business elsewhere but she knows that either you’re the only game in town or she’d have to start over with someone else and be that many more days away from completing her job.

That’s the example from the workplace. How many of us use the same method in dealing with our health or maintaining our houses and cars? We wait for indicator lights to tell us something is wrong or hold off getting our blood work done until we have chest pains. With the car the best example from my experience is the brakes. There have been several times when I have heard a wear indicator sound off, taken my truck to a service place and instead of hearing that the job’s done and how much it is and when I can pick it up I’m told that I have 30-40% of my brake pads left. Now we all know that the more worn out something is the more the service spot gets to charge to fix it. But let’s float the proposition that they’re being altruistic and genuinely trying to save me the cost of a repair that is as yet unnecessary. They shouldn’t get to charge me $20 or in one case $78 for pulling off wheels and taking a peek. In these two particular cases The $20 place told me I had 60% left and the dealership ($78) told me I had 40% left on the brake pads and at that point I was going metal to metal. Yes it’s a case of bad customer service. However if I had insisted that the first people fix the brakes I wouldn’t have found myself a few months out with grinding noises.

Instead of relying on others we have to get in the habit of finding things out for ourselves. If you’re being paid to know, then find out regardless of how inconvenient or difficult it is. If someone tries to get you to delay maintenance, they’re not to be trusted. Take the work to someone else. If you need to have a check-up, don’t wait until your body insists.

Economic Theory

They say it’s recession when it’s happening to someone else and depression when it’s happening to you. I think that’s too exclusivist. It creates an atmosphere of us against them and fosters more class warfare. Here’s how I view it:

It’s recession when they’re using a condom.
It’s depression when they’re giving it bareback.

That’s what’s happening in the world. Some folks like it. Other folks don’t.