There’s a certain segment of people who are allowed to succeed no matter how badly they fail. Wall Street CEOs come to mind. But one such sector is found among the leadership of the evangelical right, they thrive best in the least literate states, and such was the case in South Carolina last night: [Read more…]
Some readers didn’t get a chance to kick in and asked for the donation page, there’s the link, address is darksydothemoon-at-aol-dot com. But the homelessness crisis and eviction woes are taken care of this month. Well, here I am, up at 4 AM working on job number two, or in Romney speak, mooching.
Update: someone I’ve worked with extensively in the past wants to explore some commissioned writing work at a more than fair rate of pay. Best of all I’ll have extreme latitude on the topic; when and if this comes to fruition and I link it here, any clicks would be as good as paypal gold to me.
I avoided eviction with hours to spare. I had to persuade my bank to look at the paypal transfers but they consented and loaned me the 1200 bucks it took (The money will show up tomorrow, for that I’ll pay about 50 bucks in interest). I’ll have a little left over too, unless they find ways to get that.
I’ve sent each of you thank you letters, not a mail merge, a custom written email. But I wanted to get this wider attention, despite the less than unimpressive light it portrays me in. Here’s that diary that got tens of thousands of hits last night:
“The headline read: I May Soon be Homeless. and it wasn’t a joke, I wrote it and it’s about me. (This is not a plea for money; my atheist peers have already taken care of that or I wouldn’t have posed this, and offers to help are greatly appreciated, they warm my heart, but in my view it’s not appropriate for a front page writer to be asking for money. It’s not unethical for a diarist or a politician or an activist, but the FP is a different deal imo)
It’s common fare to read at a religious site that atheism is a hot bed of callousness, dog-eat-dog, no morals or ethics to guide them. Conservatives masquerading at Christians on the other hand hold themselves out as the epitome of generosity and selflessness. They and only they hold the keys to decency and love of their fellow man. The rest of us are one step away from sociopathy and Nazism, or so legions of young are taught in conservative Christian Madrasses.
A few years ago I suffered a personal loss. It happened right when the economy sputtered and plunged over a cliff after years of conservative deregulation, the bills and economic fall out were ruinous. Self professed evangelicals like George Bush wasted no time shoveling truckloads of tax payer money to bail out the heretofore free market and preserves the multimillion dollar salaries and bonuses of those who engineered it. His cohorts have spent the ensuing four years dong everything in their power to prevent those of us who cosigned the loan to save the rich from any relief that catastrophe wrought on our lives.
I was one of the millions of those casualties. After losing almost everything I had worked for the better part of half a century to earn, I moved halfway across the country to take a job paying less than half of what I used to make. Within months of taking that job the career ladder the firm had developed and used to recruit me was broken into firewood and burned so that Bill Lumberg’s stock would go up a quarter point. Things were grim, I took a second job to make ends meet; the ends that include nothing but a tiny filthy studio apartment. It was brutal, I barely hung on for a year or two, and yet I succeeded at work, quickly becoming the most productive person in my 300 person department and winning an award for it.
Then one day, sitting at my desk, I suffered a massive widow maker heart attack. I was lucky to survive, luckier still to be relatively unscathed. But even though I had bought extra disability insurance, living on less than half my usual really bad pay ($12/hour) was simply impossible. During the time I was on disability I fell behind on everything; trust me, if the choice is between heart surgery and cable TV, the choice isn’t difficult.
I managed to barely scrape by, for a month or two. But for complications I’ll explain another day, I’m now facing eviction. Late charges and other add ons turned my measly 500/month studio into a $1200 proposition. I live in Texas, there was no financial aid, there were no government programs that would help. By the end of April I would be living on friends’ couches for as long as that lasted, then in shelters or under a bridge I guess. I stressed out so bad one night my heart went into an irregular beat and I had to go to the ER, adding another huge copay on my back.
It was then that I shamefully turned my reg readers on an atheist site, FreeThoughtBlogs, and virtually panhandled. They come through, some were so strapped themselves all they could give was five bucks, but it added up. Enough that I won’t be homeless this month. I get choked up just thinking about it.
What struck me about this was how the so-called followers of Republican Jesus turned me down at every request, in person and in the State and Federal level, even Congress seems more enamored with austerity and than life and family. Bear in mind, I work two jobs, when most of these happy conservative Christians are asleep, I get up at 4 AM and start working. Then I go to my office job and work from 10 AM to 11 PM, I do this 24/7. I have no vices, no dating life, no hobbies, I don’t even smoke or drink. But it’s just not possible to support recovery from heart surgery and cover all the drugs and copays on 60% disability or the full pay I resumed, it’s a stretch to do it on my regular pay. Which I guess makes me one of those 47% moochers Romney was referring to.
I really have to wonder, who are the ones with morals, and who are the ones who lack them? My experience is the atheists are the ones who cared about me, the progressive Christians are the ones who serve their fellow man and community. I don’t know what moral coda the social conservatives follow, but it bears little resemblance to anything Jesus taught, it bears little resemblance to the basic human decency amply demonstrated by my godless amoral peers.”
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Abstinence, it’s all the rage. And you know what we call young couples who rely on abstinence? That’s right, we call them parents. So it was that the abstinence only tide swept bottom feeding grifters high into the sweet hills of West Virginia this week, using the phrase God’s Plan for Sexual Purity (It seems God has a rather perverse interest in who puts their whats in where … or at least the people who speak for him do …) except one local high school girl wasn’t taking their nutty shit laying down. Naturally, her principal allegedly retaliated: [Read more…]
I’ve always thought the communists made a big mistake, especially the Soviets. Well, they made a bunch of mistakes in retrospect, not the least of which included the transfer of power. That was never worked out very well, paving the way for allegories like Animal Farm and real-world tyrants like Stalin. But another mistake — purely from an experiemtnal history view mind you — was the exclusion of religion. Suppose, instead of becoming the global face of a perverse form of atheism, Lenin and Marx had embraced those elements of religion that supported their ideology in the same way fundamentalists here and elsewhere have done for capitalism? Suppose, instead a state sponsored link had been established and heavily hyped between the Sermon on the Mount or analogous words found in the Koran, uniting the teachings of Jesus and Mohammed, bearing on the benefits of socialism as seen by down trodden peasants, promising social justice and economic equality for all? It might have been a very different cold war, leading to a very different outcome.
We’ll never know … or will we? [Read more…]
I’ve said and it it’s hardly an original thought: it would be a lot easier to believe in any god if said god would hang out more with the common man under controlled conditions and do godly stuff that only gods can do. But Pat Robertson knows why his god doesn’t do that anymore, at least in modern nations under carefully controlled conditions: [Read more…]
As the waning gibbous moons races toward the western horizon and dawns break east, a brief period of mass hysteria will grip Christendom the world over tomorrow, in fact it has already begun. Zombie resurrection may be the center of ancient ceremony, but here in the hallowed chambers of Godless HQ, we know what’s really important: family, food, and easter eggs! On the later there lays two intertwined tales, one with tails, one without, and a story of love right down to the flowers and sweets.
It begins a long time ago in this galaxy, but back then it was far, far away. If you could travel back to that time and place, about 150 million years, you’d be well advised to watch where you step! Saurian monsters abound, hungry eyes watch from ambush. With all that to worry about, it would be easy to miss the most important new organism to arise in ages, standing low amid the tangled ferns and towering conifers. [Read more…]
That’s not what Michael Gerson started out with in his latest opinion piece, and, well, I’m not even sure if that’s what he’s going for, it’s quite a word salad. He starts out by recognizing the ranks of the non religious have swollen, takes a back-handed swipe at Dawkins, basically states the polls are skewed and a big chunk of the twenty percent reporting as “nones” are really religious — including presumably a Godly number of you lying atheists and agnostics. Then finishes up with this head scratcher: [Read more…]
Here we go again. Baldness is a hair color, not collecting stamps is a hobby, and here’s another tired word jumble where a theist tries to comfort themselves by claiming atheism is a religion: [Read more…]
Ever since the heart attack I’ve been asked, from time to time, if it changed my religious views, a couple of people have even hit me with Pascal’s Wager. It’s mostly from friends and family, and they mean well. But of course that hasn’t changed and it’s doubtful it ever will. I’ve been trying to come up with a polite and honest response. So far that’s been a waste of time. But I have an explanation that you, dear skeptical readers, may find familiar and compelling. [Read more…]
Excellent op-ed by Susan Jacoby in the NYT. The gist of it we need to step out of the shadows and come out not just as atheists, but as fellow travelers who grieve, and who can provide comfort to the grieving: [Read more…]