Blasphemy is Our Duty and Your Cure

The stories of people outraged over blasphemy in the USA are laughable, and more frightening than those of the Middle East. Freedom to worship what you want does not give you the freedom to place ideas ahead of lives, especially human lives.

But this is what we see more often than not in the USA still, and the law prosecutes those who blaspheme or mock religion as if they bombed an abortion clinic, but bombing an abortion clinic is treated like it's okay because it was his beliefs. The double standard is dangerous and will cause our country to fall behind even the Middle East in morals and ethics.

Many will attempt to call this a slippery slope fallacy, but we have seen it happen many times already. When ideas are given more value than human lives countries fall into chaos and war, innocent people are put to death without even breaking the insane blasphemy laws, and the land is taken over by religious gangs spreading their myths with violence and fear.

Here's the deal, all of you deluded enough to believe the myths told in books written thousands of years ago, if what you claim is truth truly had any value, it would be the inevitable outcome of any human logic. This means you would not have to teach it, especially indoctrinate children, nor spread it by force.

The very fact you have to protect your weak god with the use of force is undeniable proof your religion is nothing more than mythology and bad poetry. If your god were not weak, then you'd have nothing to fear when we deny the claim you make of him existing.

The irony of you creating laws to enforce arbitrary rules in the name of your god is evidence that either you don't know a god, or one does not even exist. The difference between an atheist and a theist is this: an atheist must justify our morals, religious people are never called to do that but they are the ones who would put a child to death just for insulting their doctrine or god.

The meat of this issue is that religious people prove their gods don't exist by their own actions, how they vote or why they attack others. They have no justification for their arbitrary rules, and when pressed they always point to the very books they never actually read, which is also a set of arbitrary claims.

So the irreligious atheists must ask for empirical evidence, and to date not one bit of evidence has been provided for any of the religious books. I challenge you to find some and present it for scrutiny.

Taking things on faith is admitting you don't know but just want to accept the claims to belong to a majority. The greatest thing about having a brain is that we can scrutinize everything to determine what is real, and what is just a shadow playing tricks on our mind.

Now people from the 80s and earlier are still naive and ignorant enough to forget that each generation knows more than the previous ones, we ride the shoulders of our elders to rise above their mistakes. So they complain about youth in the USA today being irreverent and unbehaved.

Let me remind you of what we did for entertainment in the 80s:

● My friends once got bored during Christmas and went through the neighborhood moving all the lawn decorations onto the roofs of every house, without the owner's knowledge. Nativity, cross, and Santa were all hanging out on the roofs of those who dared to make the neighborhood tacky with their manufactured crap.

● My brother, a few friends, and I snuck out in the middle of the night. After a rousing game of "hide/run from the cops" we decided to rip up all the temporary lines on the road, they were repaving and used reflective tape until they could paint it. We then made a huge peace sign in the middle of the neighborhood with them. It was even in the news, though no one knew it was us.

● Walking home from work was always risky, when I was 17. The gangs of the area made moving through the streets a life or death situation, and work was on the other side of several territories. I was accosted many times before I moved, simply for walking on their street.

● Downtown Seattle was worse when I was young. Many times you'd be mugged in broad daylight and no one helped because they feared becoming a victim themselves. In contrast to seeing even disabled and poor people today standing with the victim.

● Tucson was always overrun with weed smokers, I know, I was one of them. The cops could never catch us with evidence because we smoked it all up before they figured out we were high as kites. My friends there would regale me with tales of how the Wild West was still unlawful until the 90s. Even after the 90s we were certainly criminals, we just duked it out in video games instead of gunfire on the streets.

● Almost no one under 30 knew that an atom was made of smaller particles when I was growing up, and we also did not understand how chemicals reacted to DNA to produce the effect we call life. Today children in grade school are writing scientific papers, developing new technologies, and advancing our species beyond my generation's dreams.

So no, your religion does not deserve respect at all, and your delusions should be reason for treatment instead of a qualification for government office. But there is an easy and rather enjoyable cure for the delusion called god, learn the scientific method and apply it to everything in your life, you will see that learning this one tool will change your outlook for the better.

The Best Time To Live - Nostalgia Is A Lie

We, as a species, have a habit of lying to ourselves, a lot. We often regale each other with stories of times past, painting them in this memorable light of perfection, as if we really enjoyed that moment more than now. But it's all a lie, really, a lie we tell ourselves. Being an emotional species we have a tendency to recall the extremes more than other things, like extreme happiness, fear, sadness, or even anger. But our minds focus more on what makes us happy, what makes us want to live, basically.

On it's own, this lie is not harmful, it keeps us going, we try to repeat those feelings of joy and enjoyment. But in the long run it can be very detrimental, if we insist on living in the past times we felt this way, we may lose the drive to move forward. We see this problem very clearly in those who reminisce about things they don't even recall, times they didn't even live.

Renaissance fans are probably the most notorious, they paint this era as perfect and rosy. Yet that era was full of disease, everyone was dirty, and you were lucky if your own food didn't kill you. People killed each other in the streets, law was only for those who could afford it, and pests were your pets. People knew almost nothing, other than who not to piss off in their neighborhood. Most children were abandoned or orphaned at young ages. People were not kind to each other in any meaningful way.

There are people who think the 1980s were so great too, simple lives, with no care in the world. I grew up in the '80s, trust me, it sucked, it sucked so much I do not miss anything in my childhood. People were still pretty violent, and rude to each other. The music was just random noise set to a beat with random words for lyrics. Art was bland and often monochromatic. Computers were still bulky machines that were just glorified calculators. Illnesses plagued us, even the common cold could kill you. Also, people denied most of the scientific understanding we had then, which was still very little compared to the best time to have lived.

The 1990s were not much better, we did get a handle on violence. Video games offered us better entertainment. Movies improved, so did the music, but the art was still horrible. Slang became very strange, the word "like" was abuse more than any other word in the English language. Medicine did improve a lot, but still had some major problems, diagnosing conditions was less than adequate. Technology finally matured, we got connected, began filling this new world with every bit of information we could find. But it was still far from great.

The 2000s are the best, right now, here, today, this very second. However, that will change, next year will be the best, then the next year, then the next year. Our species is always improving, that's a given, it's the fundamental drive for all living organisms. So yesterday will never be the best time to live, because today is always the best time to live. In 2050, when I am old and growing tired of living, I will look back on this and smile, because even when I am tired of living I will still know that I am in the best time to live.

Oddly, this is the thought that keeps me going, keeps me working to live in spite of the problems I face. Who knows, maybe tomorrow someone will find a way to make my problems better, that's the greatest thing about tomorrow, you never know what will happen. So if you ever hear anyone say they wish they had lived in some past era, point out all the great things we have today, here's a list we have this very moment that should make you feel proud to be alive today:

1. This is the most peaceful time in all human history, ever, in all ways. Sure, we have room for improvement, some locales are having problems, but over the face of the Earth, humans are kinder to each other now than any time before. This is a trend that has been going on for as long as we have been paying attention, people want to work for peace.

2. Information is free, and almost complete. We have access to the answer for almost any question you have about almost anything you could ever need, at the touch of a button or screen, in an instant. Technology is constantly improving, being updated, modernized. People are always adding what they know to this great pool of information that the technology records for us, from videos to maps, science to opinions, everything ever known.

3. Survival is not a struggle anymore, for most of us. Our medicine, our science, has made survival almost too easy. We don't have to toil in the fields all day just to eat, don't have to hunt our own food. If we are hurt we can get medical aid to help us heal, when we need a friend for support we can text or call them at any time. We have enough time to enjoy lives, to play games, read books, explore our world without the pressures of nature hounding us.

4. Illness does not mean a death sentence. In times past ailments would often mean death, you had no way to defend against them. Today we have vaccinations to prepare us against the worst, and medical technology to make sure a broken bone heals properly, and doesn't get infected. We have access to these everywhere too, though some people are restricted access by their governments, we're working on that problem. But it's there, it's possible to survive things which would destroy you.

5. You will never vanish, there will always be a record of your existence. In the past billions of humans have been completely forgotten, never shall we know what they knew, felt, or thought. But today everything about you gets recorded, you are here forever, this world shall not forget you exist so long as it keeps spinning. That is the closest thing to immortality you can have, no memory of you will be forgotten completely, ever. A thousand years from now something you post online may become the most important thing that saves humanity from destruction, and you will be there for it, because you will be remembered.