defacto7
defacto7's JournalI had a recurring dream over a few month period
some 20 years ago. It always started as I walked into a large church reminiscent of a protestant fundi church much like I attended as a child. But as I walked into the sanctuary the people were all dead, as a matter of fact they were piled up waist deep throughout including the isle. I continued walking into the sanctuary and with every consecutive recurrence of the dream I ventured farther up the isle climbing on the dead corpses and walking over them. I was never scared nor did I wake up like in a nightmare but I was very disturbed and hated being there. I noticed some were half dead just laying there looking up at me. Finally after many recurrences I got all the way to the platform where the ministers were dead as well. I turned around and looked at the bodies in the audience and said with a very calm but deeply moved heart, "I do not need to be here". The dream ended and I have not had it since.
Over time, I think my psyche was struggling with a deep seated unsettled issue that played out in this dream. It was my past, growing up in a religious environment, attending churches like this as a child, struggling with the religious teaching that never satisfied my curiosity about reality.... and that it was no longer necessary to be confronted with it. It was the point where it was finally put to rest. The past was dead and I no longer needed to connect to the contradictory religious teachings of my past childhood. I was finally free of it.
When someone really, really, really needs to have a belief system to survive,
and their entire paradigm is found teetering on facts, there's no doubt that denial, strawmen, dismissal, and blame will be their only salvation.
You can't expect a scientific approach to reason to come from a person who can't stop drinking the booze. The addiction isn't like physical addiction, it's their entire being/self/ego that's at stake. Until they can begin to break the habit or addiction to the sum of their fears and see that there is life (and death) after truth, they can't budge and must find a way out.
I see it another way... If we were once steeped in religion, and we were able to come to the realization of our mortality and still find freedom from fear's lie, we atheists were very lucky.
I can really go along with this point of view.
Truth is hard medicine sometimes but we have to face the reality that everything has already changed and either we are able to see it and remould our lives and policies to the necessities that this change invokes or we prolong the process of stagnation, or maybe worse, we empower the destroyers and hoarders.
The American Dream is not a sacred emblem of worship, it was an idea that had it's time and under a better humanity it may have been able to work longer. But when that dream lost it's sense of the oneness of humankind, it slowly evolved to become each man for himself and with that came it's own demise.
The vices of humankind are deep in the root of our brain. Hunger and sex and the will to survive are very close to the drive of greed. It is no wonder to me that greed made it's way through the ranks of power to become the 20th/21st century sum of all vice. If not checked we all have the greed drive working against us through the sensuality of survival which is a corrupted form of survival. Sex sells, whether the sale is logical or not. Hunger sells and we can be provoked to eat what we are given when there is nothing. Greed sells, because it is the pretty shiny thing twinkling and compelling.
We need to break the bondage of greed and cultivate the oneness of humankind again by discerning the difference between the twinkle and reality.
I am behind the idea 100%
But there is a time to be in people's face and a time to go the subtle route. There are also times to be cautious. Wars and battles are not always won by overt actions. On the contrary, most things in life are accomplished by thoughtful decisions and respect of other people. I don't mean respect for their beliefs necessarily but respect for the persons themselves and what they are able to grasp.
I put atheism in a totally different category simply due to its absence of a "thing". Religion is in your face because of its addition of a "thing". Because religion has to add something they wish to think it has to be defended and even promoted to exist. Atheism does not need to defend or promote because you can't defend or promote nothing.
As an atheist, I promote those things that advance humanity and life; those things do not require atheism but only require a human being. That being said, I would rather promote the causes and qualities that atheism allows me to understand, not atheism as a thing... because it's not a thing.
Thanks for the run everyone. It's time to move on.
I have come to appreciate many of the posters here and I have also seen the face of ugliness. This truly is a microcosm of America which includes all the differences and forms of humanity in every code. I do appreciate this but I just don't fit into a microcosm of anything so it's time to hit the road. Looking through my posts won't reveal much as this has been coming for some time.
I am a believer in rules and regulations as long as they promote the better good and don't stifle common interests and dissemination of information. The rules here don't seem to promote this end and actually undermine that outcome in many ways. In the rough and tumble, good information is lost, bad information is promoted, some people are advanced due to linguistic popularity and others are wished into purgatory for the socially incorrect and basically the site descends into a condition I call "forum grooming" which separates the ins from the outs even among the politically like minded. Can this be made better? I doubt it. But step by step, if the administrators promote a laxation of controls on information and pull the reigns on social extremism as well as insider trolls it may help. I really don't know the answer. But I don't wish to be brushed off only to be allowed a voice under the constraint of a socially correct agenda or dismissed just for sheer nonsense; that's wasted effort. When rules become the enforcement of rules for the sake of rules we have stagnation. Human systems are complicated and require nuance... grace, if you will, that make systems work for people, not people for systems. On DU, there's little I can do to help as an "out", I just have to put up with it like so many others.
I would like to make a conjecture that there may be a few individuals who have access to either administrative or sub-administrative permissions who use them for passing personal information to others who do not have those permissions or that use those privileges for less than acceptable control of participants. That may include the jury system. It's only an observation.
Be well. And thank you again for the ride. No hard feelings whatsoever because any issues I have with DU are minuscule compared to the excellent contributions of a few of you who have added greatly to my experience. In the words of a highly respected and profound DU persona, "... until the inevitable return..."
I am, Defacto7
Profile Information
Name: Defacto7Gender: Do not display
Hometown: Portland, OR
Home country: not sure anymore
Current location: depends on which proxy I'm using
Member since: Wed Aug 1, 2012, 01:44 AM
Number of posts: 13,485