I’m listening to multi-award winning SF author Robert J. Sawyer on the SciFiDimensions podcast (I’m on my iPhone so you’ll have to google for a link), and he’s asked why so many award winning and critically aclaimed SF writers come out of Canada and the U.K. His answer: socialized health care.

There’s an addage that anyone who can spend 10,000 hours at something will become accomplished at it and can start producing quality after that. When you have socialized healthcare you can start your writing career at young age because you don’t have to worry about the cost of illness and injury. (Author and technology guru Cory Doctorow (Canadian) after living in the U.S. for many years, moved to the U.K. with his wife to start their family and has said he’ll never live anywhere again where there’s not socialized healthcare.)

Listening to Sawyer explain how socialized healthcare is the greatest gift a society could give to it’s people and the arts in particular brought up angry tears. My life since undergrad has been all about working for that “gift” of American for-profit health insurance. Every job I worked, every job I overworked, jobs I desperately wanted to leave, decisions not to work jobs I wanted more, have all been predicated on making sure my family had health insurance. My desire and drive since childhood to write has taken a back- to non-existant seat to slaving away for g–d– health insurance.

And the freakin irony is even with the generous and patriotic boon of for-profit health insurance, we’ve still had to pay thousands in medical bills and premiums and deductables. And even with god’s gift of health insurance upon the only modern nation to not have socialized healthcare, should my family become visited by a little more significant of a health issue, we could become broke, bankrupt, broken.

I’m middle-aged now, barely able to eke through the beginnings of my 10,000 writing hours, and I’ve done shitall except work 40+ hours a week as a drone at mind draining jobs for the gift of health insurance that’s STILL a financial drain on us. I fucking hate capitalism.

If you’re someone who believes in the holiness of Easter, you don’t want to read something that critiques the holiday this weekend–don’t; it’ll be a buzzkill. But, if you are interested in looking at the story of Easter with an open mind, interested in its reasons and rationale, and don’t mind looking at the story with a critical eye, come on back on Monday! It’ll still be here.

The issue of Salvation is arguably the most important aspect of the religion of Christianity–a cornerstone. The foundation, I would think. For, if the issue of the accuracy and validity of Salvation through Jesus is undermined, the very basis in belief in Christianity falls apart (from a religious standpoint. Nothing stopping someone from “believing” in Christianity from a philosophical standpoint…but why would you, when Christianity is rife with intolerance and cult-like attitudes and demands, and illogic? And I’m not just talking about Christianity today, but the very stuff printed in red in the NT).

It’s this issue of Salvation that really first made me question full-time and turned my corner from ultra-liberal Christian to Deist. (Like that’s incentive for the believer to keep reading!) My actual beginning of questioning started circa 1988 when I actually read the Bible for myself, but this issue of the logic of Salvation began somewhere around 2001-ish. And it went pretty much like this:

1. Why was it necessary for God to demand a blood-soaked human sacrifice to forgive sins? Can’t he just…forgive?

2. Wait. If Jesus is all man and all God, is God incarnate, then, he knew from the beginning the “sacrifice” was going to happen. And he had to have known, after all, he supposedly prophesised it, that he was going to rise a couple of days later and ascend into Heaven and return to the Godhead. So, technically, what did he sacrifice? What did he give up? He basically just gave up a weekend and indeed had a painful death. But, he got his life back anyway and returned to being God. Is that really a sacrifice?!

3. Who’s really responsible for sin anyway? I mean, did God not create humanity and all humanity was capable of? At the very least, isn’t God omniscient (all-knowing), so he had to have known before creation what was going to happen to humanity and the world–filled with perdition and death and destruction and “sin.” And since God’s the one with all the power and knowledge, isn’t it ultimately his responsibility for there being sin and evil in the world?
To let billions suffer cruelty, disease, cancer, for the mistake of one man is like if I had a young child, not even aware of the difference between right and wrong and so unable to understand that it’s “wrong” to disobey, did something I told him not to. So I punish him severely by…cutting off his arm. Then, decades later, he visits me with his family. I go up to his own granddaughter, and I cut off her arm. My excuse is it’s because her grandfather once disobeyed me. Would I be just and loving and merciful, worthy of worship?

4. Wait, I haven’t believed in Adam and Eve since I was a child. From whence did “evil” come from, then? If it is supposedly the work of a Satan or something, does that mean God’s not capable of thwarting him? Or is he not interested? Is the excuse “Well, humans made their choice, that’s free will,” really the excuse of an all-loving and merciful “father”? Is the command “You have free will, do as you want–but if you don’t do what I want, I’ll torture you forever” really a gift?! Is free will at gunpoint still free will? Would I be considered a “good, loving, just, merciful” person if I saw a rape-murder in progress, and I had the ability to stop it, but I did nothing, and my excuse was “Well, the rapist made his decision, it’s his free will”?

5. Same question, related to the innocents. Is it the work of a just and loving and merciful father to have every generation of human (not to mention animals) suffer this supposed evil that is another’s responsibility? If Adam was real, why is it just that children get raped by the parents that are supposed to protect them, why do millions die needlessly from starvation, why is there torture and insanity, because of the actions of one man and woman? Is that just and merciful and loving? And if it’s the work of an adversary that has infiltrated God’s Earth, isn’t it his responsibility to put a stop to an evil doer who’s causing great harm to his children?

6. If this is what we have to be saved from–how does that work exactly? How does God’s murder/suicide of Jesus actually change the rules about eternal punishment/reward that he set up in the first place? Why can’t God just change the rules? Heck, he’s God–we wouldn’t even have to know he changed them, he could just fill us with gratitude for the change and there’d be no need for a blood-lusted murder worshiping aspect to the religion, that doesn’t make sense.

7. (This one was my big kicker for my weakening belief…) And, so if Jesus is indeed the one and only way to Salvation, why would a loving and just God give that method such an incredibly inefficient and cruel method of transmittal. That is: All people are destined for eternal punishment (by God’s will). But to avoid that, you have to believe in Jesus. But the only way to know about Jesus is to have another human tell you about him. He was introduced to a handful of humans in a tiny speck of land in a planet that already had millions all over the world. And humans have to transmit the Good News by hand and mouth around the world, thus making sure that countless billions of people will live and die and presumably burn in hell because of the bad luck of being born in a time and place where a human didn’t reach them with a Bible. In fact, today, 2000 years later, there’s an estimated billion people alive who have not even heard of Jesus and will die having not. And this is the result of “For God so loved the world”?!

It would be like my having a big family, and I told one of my children, “When you all sleep, if you don’t wear a hat to bed, I’m going to kill you. All you children and grandchildren…everyone. But, I’m only telling my plan to you, and now you are responsible to go tell everyone else. Oh, by the way, I love you.”

At this point in my reasoning, which took a couple of years to really develop and for me to fully understand, I realized the God of Christianity simply did not exist. It’s impossible. Not to say maybe a god didn’t exist–I was still too much a believer…in something…to completely eschew the supernatural, but it was impossible for the God of the Bible as an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving and merciful creature to possibly exist. And this is where I got on my own, before I read any books on the subject, before I listened to podcasts, before I even knew the “new atheists” existed.

It was later, though, when I found out that everything about Jesus came from earlier myths from Egypt and the near and middle east. Everything, including every aspect of the nativity, and every aspect of the Easter story–all borrowed from existing myth. Look up Mithra and Osiris and Dionysus, just to name a few.

So, I end on this note from Lee Randolf’s blog post: As You Celebrate The Horror of Easter

- The principle that all of us have done things so egregious to warrant the death penalty is itself egregious. Name one thing that you have done that you should be put to death for.

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(OK, last post for tonight…)

I have a love/hate relationship with the blog “Classically Liberal“. I couldn’t agree more with his analysis on the failed War on Drugs, the criticisms of institutional education, his disgust for the encroaching police state, police abuse of power, face-palming frustration at the destructive and absolutely absurd criminalization of sexuality, and pretty much anything having to do with civil rights. But his hatred of socialism based on as terrible misunderstanding and misrepresentation of it as the creationist “understanding” of evolution, really crinkles my spleen. His economic libertarianism is based on a very elitist, self-righteous, belief in immutable “human nature” and the inherent existence of an objective sense of “the good the true and the beautiful” in class-defined artistic production.

But, I have to say I’m really starting to agree with his criticism of this horrific spending-spree the government is on in bailing companies out. I wish I could remember who I heard recently say: “If a company is so big that it can’t be allowed to fail, then it’s too big for the ‘free market’ and must be broken apart.” Yep.

Anyway, check out this alarming video he has linked on his site under Spending our Future: The Bailout Crisis:

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(OK, only a couple more of blog posts in this surge.)

BoingBoing has an article: “Marx was right!” in which the author discusses his move from being a dot-com capitalist to a return to a respect for Marx’s criticism of capitalism. (His wife, who said of his return to Marxist studies that it’s “worse than your reggae phase!”, could commiserate with mine!)

[quote] The work of Karl Marx is ultra relevant to understanding the world’s current financial mess, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Marx has become intellectually indispensable to me again, as if there ever should have been any doubt. It’s fascinating to consider that during the time period when Marx was writing “Capital,” there were few factories in England –it was largely an agrarian society still– yet somehow Marx was able to see clearly the mess that we would be in today. He’s the most accurate prophet in all of history, there should be no doubt about this. Marx viewed history with a very, very long telescope. How he was able to see so far into the future is a mystery of his particular genius, but Marx accurately extrapolated how capitalism’s endgame would play itself out at the very birth of the system. Marx saw how utterly destructive this system would ultimately become. Look around you: Marx was right.[/quote]

(On a related note, Richard Metzger posted a followup: “Marx was… second???” about Thomas Jefferson’s essay on “fictitious capital” decades before Marx wrote about it.)

Well, I could write for a long time regarding my thoughts and history in Marxist studies, but you don’t care, do you? Instead, let me link to this great page that helps explain both Marxist and anarchist theories in ordinary terms that speaks to the common person:

Questions about Capitalism and Class

Yes, it’s Chumbawamba’s Web site. They live the spirit of anarcho-socialism, and their answers to common questions about materialist criticism of capitalism is really fantastic! I really encourage you to read at least this one page I just linked top to bottom. That’s it, all I ask.

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(Drawing of Marx and Engles stolen borrowed from http://www.hermes-press.com/distinctions.htm)

Continuing my surge of quick, browser-tab cleaning posts…. (and thesis work procrastinating…)

BoingBoing (yeah, love that site…too bad I’m still banned) recently posted an article about this video:

Fake People Tell Fake Stories About The Threat Of Gay Marriage

Seriously? Get a load of how over-wrought and concerned these actors (yes, actors) are in their description of how the evil tentacles of the Gay Agenda are threatening to take away the rights of oh-so-tolerant Christian fundamentalist who only want to protect the Sanctity of Marriage®. Gahkh!

Meanwhile, the extremely faithful and religious “Quiverful” Christians have probably a better understanding of the traditions of marriage than anyone today (no irony). To them, marriage is nothing more a means of moving property (including the wimins) from one man to another, and to procreate herds. Friendly Atheist has been reporting on recent reporting on these faithful keepers of the traditions of marriage:

Scary Excerpt from Quiverfull: Part 2

“I never told her ‘I love you,’ and I never told her she was beautiful,” explains Peter, “two things that I thought would insert an emotional flutter, an emotional element. I wanted to withhold before I made a commitment.”

and from another excerpt:

When godly people stop having children, we are wasting the godly seed. So today, we are facing a very, very serious threat: the threat of Islam. They are outnumbering us seven to one. And there’s eight million Islamics here in America. When you think of Osama Bin Laden, he is one of fifty-three children. He has twenty-seven himself. So between him and his father, they’ve fathered eighty children. What about his fifty-two brothers and sisters? How many have they fathered? Say they’ve only fathered or mothered twenty each — less than him — but in the thousands when you think of their grandchildren, who would now be having children today.

When I talk to parents today and ask how many grandchildren they have, they tell me, “Oh, we have two! Isn’t it wonderful?” “Two?” Is that going to impact the world? Two? When you get someone like, say, Osama Bin Laden, for example, he’s just representative of so many Islamics, well, you see how they’re populating.

Now that’s the kind of sanctified traditional outlook of marriage that makes my marriage stronger! Not that evil gay marriage that’s only about love and devotion–hat’s the kind of marriage that threatens mine. (Now you can read irony.)

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My apologies in advance: I think I’m going to be posting a few (hopefully not too long) blogs in succession to try to make up for the fact that I can’t blog from work any more, and school work (and the desire to not be on a computer after a day of work) after coming home have been preventing me from blogging like I used to.

BoingBoing has been following the issue of a new surge of British “fear everything” posters:

David Byrne’s snapshots of UK police posters.

London Police poster mashup (in which people have ’shopped their own versions)

And my favorite so far:

Make your own paranoid British terrorism poster!

The fine print in that one’s dead-on.

(Whew! Finally, I can close those tabs off my browser!)

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