More death

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As I deal with the remnants of my uncle's recent death, I can't help but worry my father might not be far behind. He's

My dad had double bypass surgery last year. At first, he improved his attitude about life and eating and exercise, but like with any supposed revelation, the effects were purely transitory. He quickly went back to his old habits of eating and drinking as much as he wanted, as often as he wanted.

If I believed in signs from God, I would say when he contracted an extremely rare, extremely potent form of food poisoning in the summer of that same year that landed him in the hospital numerous times over the course of five months, often because he couldn't even keep water down, that it was a sign from God. A sign that said, "Hey, stupid, quit eatin' so goddamn much! I already saved your ass once this year and if you're not going to start losing weight, exercising, and taking care of yourself, then fine, I'll help you this one last time, but you're not going to like it."

Naturally, since he could barely eat anything for months, he lost tons of weight but, for the first time in at least two decades, he was at a healthy weight. Once the bacteria and its effects finally worked their way out, it was the new year, a clean slate. Of course, rather than keeping the slate clean, he filthied it with grease and alcohol.

My uncle first ended up in the hospital in January. For months, the prospects were still hopeful. In March, my parents went to Detroit to visit and to try to look after some of his business. They stayed with Margaret, my mom's childhood best friend. A few short months later, my uncle passed away. 

In June, when we prepared the memorial, the family again stayed with Margaret. My mother and I stayed a while longer than my dad and my sister. One evening while my mom, Margaret and I were chit chatting, my mom brought up my dad's awful health. She mentioned how he can't stop eating and drinking and in fact, those are the only two activities he seems to enjoy.

Margaret, who has a heart of gold and would never intentionally say anything harmful, remarked, "Yeah, he looked pretty chubby when he was here. He looked pretty good last time but he's put on a ton of weight since then."

It turns out, in three months' time, he had gained between 30 and 40 lbs.


Although raised as a true Catholic, when the majority of the damage was done, my father is not particularly religious. Yet, he clings to the faith that there is some governing force out there, that there is justice in the universe, that if he suffers enough by "doing the right thing," in the end, he will be somehow rewarded. As always with the victims of religion, he refuses to see when he's doing the wrong thing, and has no problem idly waiting to be rescued. 

In one way, I believe this attachment to religion has preserved him because he knows that, by the laws of the church, if he were to commit suicide, he would surely end up in hell. Instead, the attachment to religion is killing him slowly and painfully. While almost all religions have a principle that suicide is the highest of sins, one so offensive that it sends the spirit instantly to Hell without passing GO to collect his $200, there is no specific clause about reckless endangerment. It seems he has a plan of eating and drinking whatever he wants, overworking himself, over stressing himself, failing to relax for even a moment, and never bothering to move his body other than say, from his bed to the shower, from the shower to the toilet, from the toilet to the closet, from the closet to the car, from the car to the desk, from the desk to the car, from the car to the couch, from the couch to the bed. In other words, no exercise whatsoever.

Not surprisingly, this pseudo-hedonistic lifestyle has landed him at the doctor's office numerous times, each time with a set of numerous medications, each medication with a set of numerous side effects. Naturally, as the faithful are apt to do, he doesn't blame his lifestyle on this new set of side effects. It's, "the medication making me sick." Of course, he remains blind to the warning labels of the medication, most specifically, the warning labels about alcohol consumption, then lashes out with derision against the family doctor and how he's, "trying to kill me."

I understand his pain. He has had a painfully disappointing life. Nothing in his life has worked out the way he had struggled and planned, scrimped and saved for. I also can't help but wonder if all of his self inflicted suffering is a subconscious and constant punishment for making the "wrong" decision at a vital time in his career. He worked in the IT department at Ford Motor Company and when Ford dissolved the department, he could choose a path in the auto industry or a path in the IT industry. He opted for autos and we all know how that story goes.

In any case, I can't shake the hope that if he would let go of God or karma or any attachment to "spirituality" and afterlife, that he would commit himself to a better life. I would hope he would realize that he only has a short time left and when it's gone, it's gone. I would hope he would cherish his last, remaining, autumn years and would go the extra mile to get a few extra laps around the track. I would hope that he'd understand his family's love may be all that's there for him, but that it's a precious gift worth savoring every moment of.

Instead, as stubbornness runs high in the family genes, he will insist that his falsely hedonistic, yet incredibly masochistic lifestyle is The Way to go. Thanks, Catholicism, for fucking up my life, yet again.

Image stolen from quickmeme.com, who probably stole it from someone else.

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Why atheists will never unite

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In a sentence, we're too busy getting high off sniffing our own farts. Atheists think we have a monopoly on intellect. We think that we are superior to folks who can't or won't or haven't yet let go of irrational thoughts. We think that anyone who isn't like us is obviously just a moron and not worthy of respect, and may be worthy of hatred and ridicule. We think people's experiences and perspectives are only worth something if they concur with something that happened in a laboratory.

What a bunch of pricks we are.

Of course, we soothe ourselves to sleep as we swallow a philosophical placebo of "freedom." We tell ourselves, only people that agree with us can be truly free because people who have faith in irrational things are slaves. Since slavery is abominable, we fancy ourselves as freedom fighters, crusaders for rational thought and intellect. We tell ourselves that the end justifies the means, so even if we acted like pricks high on our own farts, it's all for the greater good of the world. In this way, we absolve ourselves of our sins yet we don't realize that we've enslaved ourselves in that mindset.

The mindset of, "I am right, you are wrong and I get to judge and mock you for it. We will never be friends and I will never respect you because you're obviously too stupid to be worthy of my friendship and respect," might as well be concrete walls and metal bars. We're removing ourselves from the majority of society, forming our own little gangs, and making shivs out of scraps of what we think is wisdom.

Then, just like herpes, our overinflated sense of superiority spread to other areas. What started with non-faith has migrated to politics. Because we're used to thinking alike when it comes to non-faith, we're shocked to learn that not every atheist thinks alike. Not every atheist supports the same cause. Not every atheist is a liberal. Not every atheist supports abortion. Not every atheist supports healthcare. Not every atheist is against circumcision. 

It angers and confuses us, so we fight each other, because we've all convinced ourselves we're right and infallible, and anyone who dares question that is worthy of a hearty stabbing or two. So, the liberal atheist gang attacks the libertarian atheist gang. The libertarian atheist gang attacks the communist atheist gang. The communist atheist gang attacks the socialist atheist gang. Meanwhile, the one, lone republican atheist cowers in the back corner of his cell, fearing he will be outed as a right winger and that all of the gangs will unite and slaughter him unmercifully....and he's probably right.

Yet, somehow, even with all this internal conflict, we seem to think we can go to battle as a small herd of wounded cats and claim victory over 80% of the global population. Then we wonder why we make no headway and why religious folks think we're all angry, crazy, hateful, and dangerous, but not so dangerous that we have too much of an effect on things. Sure, one or two of us might bitch about a prayer banner hanging in a public school or make a controversial billboard, but, eh....who cares? We're all going to rot in hell anyway.

While Christians hypnotize themselves into believing think they have a monopoly on compassion, forgiveness, and cute little quote books, atheists should be perfectly capable of espousing those ideas. Yet, so often we don't. We quote their book and say, "Judge not, lest ye be judged," to them, just highlight their hypocrisy, but then we quickly turn around and abandon the principle when it comes to ourselves. Worse, we do it to each other.

There aren't a lot of us in the world, at least not that are "out of the closet," yet, we don't stick together. As much as we want to stroke ourselves saying it's okay to be different, we afford the right to be different only to ourselves, which breaks us up into smaller and smaller gangs and causes more and more dispersion. We scattered ourselves about the earth, and because of our self-proclaimed "enlightenment," there we shall remain, with closed minds and closed hearts.

But, hey, look on the bright side. At least we know we're always right.






Image courtesy of http://catmacros.files.wordpress.com/, who likely stole it from someone else, who likely stole it from someone else as well. Pin It

The Goddess Trap

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Like any other kid of reasonable intelligence who'd been raised Catholic, I began questioning Catholicism and Christianity in general pretty early on. As a kid, I never knew there was such a thing as an atheist. I never realized that it was possible to have no God at all. Had I known that, I probably would have realized the truth much sooner. Alas, I spent a lot of time seeing what else was out there. As a female who, at a very young age strove for equality, naturally, paganism, witchcraft, Goddess worship and all that jazz became my next stepping stone.

When I was very young, girls were not allowed to be altar servers in the Catholic Church. I was always jealous, not because I cared about serving Jesus, or assisting the priest, or sporting those ultra high fashion robes, but I wanted to play with those mystical toys. I wanted to ring bells after incantations, I wanted to carry offerings to the altar, I wanted to light and snuff candles. It seemed exciting and like it would connect me to something greater.

Fast forward a few years, the Pope announced that females could be altar servers, but by that time, I somehow wasn't interested anymore, probably because I had lost almost all interest in the Church. By that time I was sniffing around for a new spiritual home. It wasn't long after that I found witchcraft.

I'd run off with friends to bookstores and sneak pagan books home in my purse. Many of those books were written by men, but that didn't mean they were male slanted the way that Catholicism obviously was. I took great comfort in the idea of there being a feminine power that really controlled the universe. Of course, MOTHER Nature was not a dude and there's a reason people identify her as such.

I read all about the "history" of witchcraft, a lot of which was given a hippy accent, as much of it was revived in the 60s and 70s. I performed "spells," though I never asked for the selfish things most people would expect. I never once performed a love spell nor a money spell nor a revenge spell. I saw The Craft, I didn't want to be responsible for any poor bitches going bald in the locker room, no matter how nasty they were to me.

I did spells to achieve better enlightenment (or so I thought) or spells that thanked the Goddess, the plants, the animals. Though I did once perform a spell to encourage one of my school rivals to understand that being mean to people was harmful to herself and others....I was astounded when it appeared to work the very next day. She had always been rude and nasty to me, suddenly she was kind and polite. Ah, the Goddess listens, indeed!

A note about spells...they're not what you think. They're basically Sunday Mass for one. Depending on what you're focusing your energy on, you pick certain colors of candles, certain scents of oils or incense, certain days of the week or certain moon phases, place certain stones on the altar, say certain "incantations," or a prayer, ring bells at certain times, etc. There's really nothing magical about it.

It all felt very natural. Perhaps because Catholicism is so deeply rooted in paganism and ritual, I felt very comfortable with the tools of this new brand of spirituality I had found. Bells, candles, incense, chalices, tablecloths, all of these things were familiar and so indulged my inner child. I was finally able to be my own altar server and I didn't even have to wear an ugly robe. To top it off, I got to pick my own incense that wasn't the default Catholic Stank scent! How exciting!!

I stayed in this phase a few years until, like with most things, I got too lazy to maintain it. It got to be too much, maintaining a moon calendar, making sure I had all the right candles, scented oils, incenses, cloths, and whatever other embellishments I seemed to believe were necessary. It was all just too much.

I still have all my witchcraft books and even refer back to some of them once in a while. I do still find that certain scents, candles and stones seem to have an effect on my mood, and I enjoy having them around. There is something comforting about having a theme that stimulates all of your senses. I no longer believe I'm "channeling energy" or "casting spells," or doing anything else besides pleasing my senses, which should have always been good enough.

However, one of the main problems I had with witchcraft was the same as with Catholicism. I didn't feel "empowered" like I "should." Just like I never felt Christ's love burning in my heart, I never felt the Goddess' power coursing through my veins. I thought if I just worked harder on it, I'd be a better witch and would one day be filled with this blessing like so many others claimed to experience, but it never happened.

I think it all goes back to my inherently independent spirit. It's even a big joke in the family. Ever since I was old enough to have a sense of self, I've had one, and a very strong one. As young as age three, the family joke was, "There's the right way, the wrong way, and the the Katie way." My mother always joked that she should have named me "Katie Scarlet," after Scarlett O'Hara. My third grade teacher told my parents in a parent teacher conference that, "It's like Katie knows all this is bullshit." I didn't follow the beat of my own drummer, I WAS my own drummer. I had no need to follow or even to be followed.

This spirit is of mine is not interested in begging, beseeching, or humbling herself. This spirit knows that her values and her beliefs and her feelings are the only ones that matter. "Faith" of any kind will never empower this spirit for a very simple reason.

No one is empowered if she's always powerless, left begging, left pleaing, left sacrificing, left to be someone else's pawn in supposedly greater plan only to be discarded like an empty bullet shell just as soon as she's served someone else's purpose; left with the meager hope that someone else's use and abuse of her just won't be too painful, and left to believe that if it is, it's because she has done something unrighteous, or perhaps, regardless of how unbearable it may be, that she should still drop to her knees and thank someone else for making her suffer because she knows it's part of a higher wisdom that she is clearly too stupid, too small, and too insignificant to understand.

Goddess centered religions are no exception.

It's why I feel like so many feminists have cheated themselves by going into these Goddess centered belief systems rather than realizing the whole faith game is a trap. What's the point of giving a sex change to the one that holds you down? You're still beneath someone else, you're still someone else's pawn, you're still begging someone else for things that you could perhaps just as easily take initiative to achieve. If you were in jail for a crime you didn't commit, would you be so much happier being beaten by a female prison guard?

Some will argue that the Goddess is more peaceful and benevolent and doesn't encourage genocide, murder, sexism, racism, and violence, which does seem to be true from what I've read of her, but it's still a cult of the mind. There is no one, central definition of this Goddess, so how do I know? It's not like there's some kind Bible that tells us everything we need to know about her. Suffice to say, she still "has a plan" for you. She still plays favorites with her hurricanes and volcanoes. She still needs to be asked for basic humanity. She still answers extremely selectively. She still works in ways that are so mysterious they make no sense. Comparing God and Goddess is still comparing evils. Why bother with any evil when you don't have to?

Worst of all, it's all so painfully wasteful. I can never get back the years I lost to "faith," all that time I spent begging to be rescued or helped, wondering if anyone was listening and crying when no one did, enduring misery thinking that suffering somehow put me ahead of the game in the long run. All that time I could have been empowering myself to create the reality I wanted. So much damage, that years of counseling may never undo, has already been done.

Some will say that it's my fault, not religion's, for not knowing how to empower myself all along, but those that would are ignoring the self-imposed slavery that any and every faith encourages. Blowing the enemy doesn't make you superior to him....or "her." Pin It

ATTENTION CHRISTIANS: Prayer has ALWAYS been allowed in schools

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The recent news of the Florida legislature's support for prayer in school is enough to make any secularist's skin crawl. There is absolutely no constitutional reason that public prayer should be allowed in school. Christians can lament "oppression" all they want, but the fact is, prayer is something that is impossible to stop unless we become capable of prosecuting thought crime. No one sane, theist or otherwise, would support that.

I think most theists can agree that prayer is something that does not have to be done in groups, nor does it have to be done audibly, nor does it have to be "lead" by someone. It is something that can be done alone, silently, which is often preferable since not everyone likes to broadcast the intimate details of what's in their minds and hearts. So, Christians, let me as you something, and I mean this as a sincere question: even without pre-planned, lead prayers on the morning announcements and before footballs games, what is stopping a student from praying?

Even when I was Catholic, I somehow got the impression that no one could stop me from praying because I could do it without anyone knowing. In fact, I used to try to say the rosary WITHOUT a rosary....I always lost count and started over and then fudged the whole thing, but the fact remains, I didn't have to make any kind of public display out of it. Any student of any religion at any school in any time in history is now, always was, and always will be perfectly free to pray. No one can stop a person from praying. It's something you can do in your mind and heart that doesn't require being done out loud or in a group. If you want people to know, you can, but if you don't, you don't have to.

If you think someone can stop you from praying, then I hate to tell you that your faith isn't as strong as you claim it is. The second you claim someone has stopped you from praying is the second you become a performance artist, a show boater and a village idiot, which is what this is really all about, isn't it?

It's not that you can't have your faith, it's that you can't advertise it in the laziest way possible and be guaranteed not to stand out. No one said you couldn't pray to yourself, pass out Bibles and brochures, wear crosses, invite people to church, lead private prayer circles of your own, or even tattoo scripture on your forehead. But, those things would all take initiative and personal responsibility, which, if you had any of, you wouldn't need some poor, hippy Jew to die for you so you can just live however you want so long as you say, "Thanks," once in a while.

What you really want is anonymity behind yet another sacrificial lamb. You're afraid that, if during the "moment of silence," someone sees you appearing to pray, they might make fun of you, point fingers at you, roll there eyes at you, etc. However, if the quarterback "leads" the group in prayer, you won't be singled out. You'd rather see a bunch of your peers reciting insincere incantations, or at least go through the motions of such, than be thought of as a "freak" for your faith. You're the worst kind of coward. You're a moral crusader as long as someone else leads you in battle, but if your fellow soldiers were all struck down, you'd pee your pants and cry until someone either killed or rescued you.

Let me ask the religious folks another question. Assuming you're not Catholic, and if you are the answer will be, "Yes, some asshole in a hat," can any other living being talk to God for you about what's in your mind and heart better than YOU can? If the answer is yes, I'm sorry to reveal yet again that your faith isn't what you thought it was. So, go ahead, let someone else "lead" you in prayer since you apparently need to "follow" someone else's ideas of what God needs to be begged for. I'm sure the quarterback knows what's best for you, more than you do. Hey, maybe that's why he's the quarterback!

If you're going to believe in God and prayer, is it too much to ask that you believe in yourself? If you have this personal relationship with the Lord, why do you always have to txt him from somebody else's iPhone? If I were God, I'd be kinda pissed to keep getting prayers preceded by "Fwd:" from all my followers. I'd not give them what they asked for just to spite them for being lazy. Maybe that's why, despite Gisele Bundchen's mass prayer emails, the Patriots lost the Superbowl.

Just sayin.... Pin It

Catholic jewelry

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Jews seem to think they have a monopoly on claiming their faith is more than faith, but it's a culture as well. Muslims are increasingly squatting on this territory with their claims of "racism" toward people who think Islam is a big joke worthy of mockery (it is, by the way). Both faiths even get their own special words that are equated with racist bigotry, "anti-Semitic" and "Islamaphobic." Christian faiths don't get to make claims of culture somehow. There seems to be no such thing as anti-Jesusic or Catholiphobia. I guess it's because Christian holy wars are global and not centralized, so they can't be pinned on a particular race, nationality, culture, etc.

Nonetheless, Catholicism is very much a culture, especially if you attended Catholic school. Certain ideas are beaten into you until you think of them as normal, functioning parts of who you are. Many of them take real efforts to extract. Despite my current enjoyment of all things blasphemous, there are still things that I can't bring myself to accept.

I cringe when I see anyone wearing a rosary as jewelry, even as normalized as it has become. I think of how, if this were a Muslim holy relic, heads would literally roll if people were making a frivolous fashion accessory out of it. Why are people allowed to do this to "my culture," but not someone else's?

When I was living in Japan a few years ago, rosaries were all the rage in men's fashion. I hadn't fully actualized being an atheist at the time, but I still found myself at war with the concept of one of "my" holy relics being used as a simple accessory. It did look "cool" on a lot guys, but at the same time, it was sacrilegious to my "culture," even if I didn't fully belong to that culture anymore.

Tokyo is full of small boutiques and accessory shops. One of my favorites, which I'm not sure still exists, was a small ¥1000 costume jewelry shop in Harajuku. Everything in the shop was ¥1000, about $10US. A lot of the jewelry was uninteresting. Typical flowers and sparkles for girls, typical crucifixes and fleur de lis for guys, but there was always one corner of really unique pieces. Every time I visited, I remember seeing one particular rosary, both admiring and despising the brilliant blasphemy it exuded.

It wasn't a true rosary. It didn't have the exact proper arrangement or number of beads (yes, I counted), but it was designed to look like a rosary, so in my mind, the crime had already been committed. As if it weren't sacrilegious enough, purely for its existence, the beads themselves brought an extra line of offense. They were dice, black and white alternating dice. Worst of all, it was made in Italy, the Catholic capital of the world. Holy blaspheme berries, Batman!

Yes, I realize that the Catholic church is no stranger to gambling, but to combine the two in such a blatantly offensive way was unheard of. Yet, for some reason, I had to have it. The day I bought it, I couldn't stop taking out, looking at it, smiling a devilish smile, then putting it away. This continued for quite some time until I eventually threw it in my jewelry pile. I didn't have a jewelry box as I was living pretty much out of a suitcase with minimal furnishings.

I still have this rosary, it's in a box now, and every time I pull it out, that same devilish grin returns to my face. Still, I have yet to wear it. There are a few reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that I don't believe in wearing religious symbols for fashion in general, lest people get the wrong idea. The second is that it doesn't really match anything I have and my accessories are usually perfectly coordinated. The last, and least obvious to anyone that doesn't know me intimately, is that some small Catholic part of me still clings to that idea that it's disrespectful and inappropriate to wear this sacred yet sacriligious relic.

I don't know why I can't seem to let go of it. Recently, one of my few celebrity heroes released his own jewelry line and I found myself thinking slightly less of him when I saw a rosary in his collection (this is after I had already reduced my view of him for endorsing a rather run of the mill, douchey looking jewelry collection; in fact, I think he must have been inspired by the same cheap ¥1000 Harajuku boutique that I used to frequent, but I digress). He's not the only one. I see lots of celebrities, particularly men, wearing them now, and each one of them elicits a knee-jerk, negative gasp of offense from me. I try to reason it out of myself, but it rarely works.

I guess you can take the kid out of Catholic school, but you can't take the beatings out of the kid. Pin It