What does it mean to be an athiest?

There is no god, no life after death, no stories of how we go here, or how earth came to be, no rebirth, no reincarnation, It is not negative, it is just the truth. Anyone who believe any of those things believe in supernatural things which do not exist except in your minds. Fiction.

Now that we have those negatives out of the way, We start to build. I have only this life to leave my mark on the world. I am responsible for leaving this world as a better place, so it is up to me to educate those who want to understand the truth. If they do not want to know, they can believe whatever they want. The prime directive applies.

The purpose of human life is to flourish as a species. Individually, anything that aids flourishing is a value to the society. Positive psychology is the model of behavior I think is the most logical.

Morals are simply what is the best for our society, and for all involved. We can search these out as what is common between the better religions, but there is so little common in details. In general though, most suggest that we live virtuous lives, and eliminate vices. Which are virtues, and which are vices, though is not so clear. If we merge Stoicism, Buddhist, and Confucianism together, the best outline for a good life emerges.

It starts with do not unto others as you would not permit to be done to you. There is space between the that and the do unto others as you would they do unto you. The virtues look like; proper behavior, rigorous honesty, truth, compassion, justice, courage, fortitude, nonviolence in civilian population (excludes police and military), and a long list. Vices include faith, hope beyond opinion, violence, theft, fraud, and a long list. We are responsible, and therefore I want to not do any harm to others or myself as a objective. This puts me in a more moral position that many religious persons who follow brutal old traditions. 

We must think before we act. I am responsible, so I want to know the reason I do things, not blindly follow without reason or without thinking. Anyone who will not give reason should not be followed, and if there reason is bad, it should not be followed either.

I need to stop at some point, but there is a book of reasons and discussion. But what do I know?    

disenfranchised youth

I got into a discussion where "disenfranchised youth" term came up with respect to our natives. This is the wrong term so often. Nobody has taken the vote away from them, they have chosen not to participate in our society. Any one who chooses not to be part of our society, and to follow our society's rules of behavior  could truthfully be called many things but disenfranchised youth is not one of them.

We see the same term being used for the Muslin,  "disenfranchised youth", to describe terrorists. It seem all terrorist are Muslin, but not all Muslin are terrorists, but what is it about the Muslin's that make them easy to convince to become terrorists? Is it they are not rational, and believe what there ancestors and elders tell them? They cannot separate bullshit from reality?  The problem is that they, and in most religions cannot separate bullshit from reality and speculation? 

We have a problem in English language and our current culture. We allow odd meaning of words that are less offense that the truth. The Trudeau government allowing banks to steal our money with "bail-in" for example. The government is allowing banks to exchange our money for there worthless shares. All it what it is, bank fraud, and see how far they get.

Once we get down to rigorous truth, all religions are bogus, man made schemes of "ways of thinking" that distort reality into a more pleasing "reality" and we each live in our own reality. Once we get down to rigorous honesty and truth, we become a group of individuals who do not tolerate others reality very well, especially if their "reality" is not real.

This all is making my head ache. Rigorous honesty and religion are incompatible. But what do I know?   

  

You are backing Trudeau

Trudeau has slipped a bail-in. So now the banks and the government are safe and the depositors/creditors are on the hook. Long term creditors are the depositors. Now what? We are  unwittingly backing  this ludicrous spending of the Trudeau.

If you are in debt, it does not matter, but in early retirement, our reserves should the highest of our life, even if some or all is tied into long term investments and land. 

Paper Page 223
http://www.budget.gc.ca/2016/docs/plan/budget2016-en.pdf



Here are the links:

Did you see what Justin Trudeau slipped into the budget this week, hidden away on page 223?

It’s called a bank “bail-in regime”.

That means if a Canadian bank starts to fail, it would be allowed to seize your bank account to pay its bills. Seriously.

It’s what they did in Cyprus three years ago, when bankers there made risky loans to Greece. In a back-room deal, politicians and bankers decided to pay off the bank debts by just seizing 10% of everyone’s deposits.

The country had a melt-down. Banks closed, ATM withdrawals were limited. It was a disaster. Of course, well-connected insiders got all of their cash out in time.

It’s all right there in black and white in Trudeau’s budget. Click here to see for yourself.
This outrageous proposal is not yet law. But if Canadians accept it in silence, it will be.

We’ve got to fight back now — or face legalized theft like they did in Cyprus.

Sign our petition now by clicking here. And please forward this e-mail to all your friends.

Yours truly,

Ezra Levant

P.S. We’ve set up a website at www.HandsOffMyMoney.ca. Please make that your Facebook status, and forward this e-mail to your friends. Don’t let the banksters raid your savings, like they did in Cyprus!

The old way

http://theawesomer.com/making-a-bow-arrows/361056/

the new way

http://www.bow-international.com/features/technique/the-thinking-side-of-archery/ 

and here is one more on an unrelated subject
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/18/10-key-excerpts-from-pope-franciss-encyclical-on-the-environment/ 

Pope is infallible is bullshit, we are authorities, control freak thinking. He is not rational on this point. So the pope does not think it has to to with population? Bullshit. It is largely population. If we look at the detailed carbon content, it is confusing, but since the late 1960, the population has doubled, and co2 has gone wild.
Here is a typical https://claudiocassardo.wordpress.com/2013/05/
or http://www.planetforlife.com/co2history/

Population control will be the only solution that will work, long term. We need to return to something 3-4 Billion to survive long term. We need to get rid of religion/passion based thinking and get to logic based decisions. We need to lower the demand on our planet, and the system will correct it's self. If we do not, climate change will be nature's response, and just watch those in the hot dry climates die off. We can slow the growth of carbon dioxide production, but do you think the developed countries are going to allow their lifestyle to be drawn down to third world levels?

Note that seasonally carbon dioxide varies, and declines in the summer seasons.

The only way to get to a negative population growth is through education and contraception. One Child is too much, but a world one child policy is the way to start. We will go through a population aging phenomena, but that will pass. It will be painful, but doing nothing will be worse, for there will be more that die off if we do nothing.   

But what do I know?

and then this fine piece of Stoic re-definition shows up

1. Wisdom (sophia), (concerns appropriate acts) knowledge of what one is to do and not to do and what is neither
2. Courage (andreia), (standing firm) knowledge of what is terrible and what is not terrible and what is neither.
3. Justice (dikaiosyne), (distributions) knowledge of the distribution of proper value to each person, and
4. Temperance (sophrosyne), (human impulses) knowledge of what is to be chosen and avoided and what is neither

Policy against violence

Any policy with the aim of ending violence must ultimately address the root cause of said violence. So what is the root cause? Injustice, religion aka beliefs, thinking you have wronged, ideology, religion, power, wealth, fame, religion, control of land and people, religion, did I include religion? You get my point, religion plus a bunch of other things. Included in religion is a belief system, even Marxism, Communism, and all those other belief systems that put the system before people.
The cause is ignorance of the fact that we are all on this earth only one time; when we are dead we are dead; we are flourishing to well as a species; we can no longer think tribally but we need to think global cosmos. We need to understand reality, not some bronze age tribal religion. We need to update all religions 20th century and current knowledge.

Trump, after Brussels has said a bunch of stuff about dealing with terrorists. Waterboarding, torture of any kind, is just torture, it will encourage the subject to say anything to end the pain. It does not yield the truth, it yield what the torture wants to hear. Torture is only useful if the person being tortured actually knows something and is willing to tell it to stop pain. Compartmentalization, or headless disorganization is the answer to this, both of which Islam are noted for. Torture is not going to bring out much good information. Violence will not end violence. It must be a change in thinking, aka philosophy of life.

A better treatment would be forced watching and testing for retention of atheist videos. They might actually learn a few things. We need to indoctrinate them, against there will to reality. Torture will not do that, only seeing and understanding reality will do that.  That cannot happen against the will but must be befriended. Isolation is the best way, that is isolation except for what we want them to learn. It is old style deprogramming after cult involvement. Religions are just big popular cults. Much of history is just one persons opinion of the events, often the facts are made more memorable through story telling. These must be taken in a general way of the thinking at the time. Nothing more.

Recovery from any problem of cult indoctrination is a long and slow process of selecting the best concept available and holding onto that until something better comes along. It is piecemeal disassembling of belief systems, and through discussion and examination, picking the best parts. It is discussion, not brow beating or dismissing of the dissenters, that the process will work. It is the art of separating facts from popular beliefs of the day.

Consider the garbage concept that you can be anything that you want to be. It has so many restrictions. First you need the intelligence, skills and personality to pick up the knowledge and skill necessary, and your choices must be real and suitable to the rapid change that is occurring. By the time one graduates any course of study, the field may have changed or disintegrated, if it really existed to start with. The demand may just not be there. Education was, at one time a virtual guarantee of employment, now universities are in the business of selling educations. It is up to the consumer to pick one that there might be use for in the future, and to pick a school that is up to date.

So is that belief fact or fiction?

Just something more to think about. What do I know?       

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is essentially opinion, not any form of science. Statements like "eat more fiber" have the hallmark of pseudoscience since it is made with ignorance of how much fiber I am currently eating. There is a optimum amount of any ingredient in any one persons diet. Without knowing how much, it is only opinion. 

Pseudoscience is often written to look like science. It may as well be published in the Onion. It is often nothing more than restatement of public held misconceptions. It is equivalent of stating the results showed something and withholding the data or filtering the data to remove all extraneous results. It like this editor I am using, it gives a choice of justification of the text, but regardless of the setting, everything is left justified. Henry Ford, you can have any color you want as long as you want black. 

So why am I on pseudoscience today?? https://authoritynutrition.com/caffeine-and-exercise/ and
https://authoritynutrition.com/coffee-good-or-bad 
and https://authoritynutrition.com/top-13-evidence-based-health-benefits-of-coffee/

All less than true, or unbalanced. Caffeine is also an appetite stimulus for some of us, n=1 test anyway. WTF. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. 

Nut-bars

http://www.metronews.ca/views/metro-views/2016/03/16/we-cant-let-terrorism-in-canada-drive-us-to-hate.html

Does Islam collect or attract more nut-bars than other religions or are they more violent, or does Islam create violent nut-bars from lesser forms of nut-bars? Yes to all of the above.

Allah told me to do it!!! The cry of the Islam nut-bar. Hearing voices and acting on them is a classic paranoid delusional, and because they are Islamic, it is let go as religion. It is Islam that turns the delusional into irrational killers, and as such all Islam should be abolished, along with the non-violent religions. Islam is the worst of the lot.

So they do not want Islamophobia. I am not fearful of those crazy bastards, but I will speak out against any state sanctioned idiocy including all religious delusions. I am fearful of the government favoring Muslin emigrants, and their ignorance of rational reality. We are here for this life only, so we need to make the most out of this life. That is all we get.

Mother Teresa is to become a saint. Whoopy ding. She looked after the dying in Calcutta. She has a attitude that I find troubling. Why fix a problem if you can accept it? Teresa is big on accepting of the "rich are in control", there is nothing we can do. Not on fixing the causes of the poverty. I ask why accept a problem if you can fix it. First, you need to see the problem, to see a real fix, and then do the fix, not just aid comfort to the dying.  The Catholic Church and there mouth piece, Teresa, did not treat the sick, but house them so they could die in a bit of comfort... well some comfort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65JxnUW7Wk4 
But she does not go about blowing up things.

Why accept a problem if you can fix it. Giving up is not a good attitude, nor is acceptance that within your power to change. In fact, I consider acceptance a vice, in this case a major vice. The Catholic Church has been rendered cowardly by their vices. "Faith in God" is another vice that all humanity needs to eliminate.

We need to fix our own issues before we preach at the third world, even if there problems are easy to see and fix. We have plenty of problems, inner city issues, natives, and small town poor. And then there are all those who whine about hunger, but are unwilling to pick up a spade and hoe. Leduc offers free garden plots, and only about 1/4 of the land is in use, yet the food bank is always crying for more. I had a half ton extra spuds one fall that they did not even want. Oh well, that was the end of my support.

By my standards, all religious are delusional, aka, believing in fairies, or other deities. Islam encourages violence from it's nut-bars, both in the Qur'an and later writing from the Ottoman period. Some of there leaders do not promote the violence against non-islamists, but other do. Internally, some of the sects preach peace, within the sect. Few speak out against the external violence. That is the problem, if they do not speak out against the violence, they permit it. They either permit violence or support violence, that is the problem. They cannot and do not wish to control their peoples.

Humans need to keep on evolving into peaceful reasoning culture. The world population needs to be reduced, through voluntary and if necessary forced birth control, one child policy, and allowing those in pain, emotional or physical, to die if they wish. Allocation of resources to the poor by offering services, not money. If they do not wish the services, they can do as they like without my concern. 

Enough. I wish you all success with honesty, truth, and justice for all who seek it. What do I know anyway?

 

Abolish Theology

and replace it with philosophy. Religions do provide a meeting place where rituals like a welcoming the young infants into society, coming of age ceremonious, marriages and deaths, gatherings to celebrating the changes seasons can occur. These are great events and should continue in some form. It is through these that we get to know our neighbors and there charterers. It is through these that music, and the rhythmatic art of chanting, both of which some people loose themselves into can occur at a community level. The arts in general find some support as does compassion within the community. Local level consideration of issues can also be part of the social effect if orchestrated into the cultural fabric of the place. None of the good parts of religion have anything to do with theology; all the bad parts are theological dogmas.

Dogmas are beliefs without foundation. They are not facts, not knowledge, just blind and often wrong beliefs that cause untold damage.

We humans have a good ability to make sound judgements. We can use something like the seven or nine point scale to rank truth and false statements to separate knowledge from wrong beliefs. We can use dialectic questioning to get down to a real understanding of what is and is not, what is important and what is not, and to understand the human mind is what has previously only been dreamed of. We humans have judgement first, we have impulse and desire to get to the bottom of things, if we have the will to do it. It is within our ability. We just need to align our will with understanding the real nature of the human problem, with the human condition. It is my belief now that we humans have everything we need at our disposal to lead more understanding lives if we choose. We have long been miss-guided by religions, culture, human innovations and communication of false ideas. 

We know much physics, ethics, and with a bit of dialectic effort, the world is our oyster, or at least points the way to the oyster. Often people do not like to think, for they see the stupidity of some parts of life and feel something they would rather not look at. If they look at it, they may feel compelled to do something. Oh, well, nothing needs change. We can go through our lives living next to tremendous danger and not know it. Fort Saskatchewan sits on top of tremendous salt removal caverns that have been filled with natural gas. If they were ever to stoop to the surface....and as a geotechnical engineer, I will say it is inevitable, but the when is in doubt. Soon or a million years, I do not know.  Is anyone else concerned?

Dialectic questioning is an art form, that once understood produces clarity of so many things. It should be taught in schools or first year university or colleges, along calculus and biology. Note these are at least high school subjects, and a more mature mind is better at this. Dialectic questioning is method which we can come to understand things beyond our wildest understanding. It can be irritating when we just want other to blindly accept what we are saying, and it also requires that the questioner actually hears, understands and accepts at least part of the answer, and truth. It is not uncommon that more question arise, until we get back to what is fact, knowledge and opinion. Those who do not accept logic as being the solution or do not know logic, have other issues. I am sad to say that many do not understand basic logic concepts, like mutually exclusive and unable to prove false does not make something true.

Science and philosophy change opinion based on the total weight of evidence, and we are willing to change our minds based on evidence, included in the Frye standard. Documents like the bible and religious texts are out, however individual ideas expressed in the document may be accepted if supported by study or conversion. We do not believe something because the holy book says it, but if it stands the tests, we may accept it, and live up to that standard.

Perhaps we need an Abolish Theology Movement similar to the occupy movement. Go camp out in a public space for a while and irritate government.    

Illegal

contrary to or forbidden by law, especially criminal law.

So what we have is a group of people have come together and decided that "something" is not permitted within a "Jurisdiction", and have given another group of people the right to take physically action to hold the a body, and to confine that person until another group of people have time to review the actions to verify that in fact x did do the said action. If he did, he may be given to another group to hold by force until a specified amount of time has passed. We do not encourage torture, but do permit it from other detained.

And thinking and actions of people makes it so, and legal, aha, permitted and paid for by the government at the behest of the people. No one person does it all, so no one person sees the total treatment, for if they did see, they would instinctively know that something is just wrong with parts. No one (few) comes out who is not bitter, disenfranchised, damaged, and has much hope of not re-offending.

Now consider what is considered wrong by our culture. Our ancestors decided some thing should or should not be done, for what ever reason, and passed this "law" down through history, without the reasons. This group delusion may be either right or wrong, but until we look at it piece by piece, we will not know. This is religion.

And thinking makes it so. So when we take this "law" apart, what do we find? A lot of bullshit, some wrong, some right. So what do we need to do. Salvage the right from all religion, and abandon the remainder. And thinking makes it so.

But what do I know?  

half of the people are nuts

Yesterday I was at the grocery store. I parked way back in the parking lot, one space over from the last car, an employee car. I need the exercise of walking and the lot was mostly empty. Some Arab comes along before I could even get out of the car and pushes his big old luxury car into a tiny space that his door could not open, nor could mine. I had to move to get out myself. Nuts I say, for the lack of a better term.

Now I know that Socrates said that people do wrong out of ignorance, but I doubt that often. Some do wrong for quick profit, and some do wrong for there enjoyment. In my mind the Arab is one of those, just to make others life difficult. How can one respect them when they are unable to fit into considerate society that we have in Canada?  At best they are ignorant.

All I can say is expect considerable blow back against Trudeau for that decision. We were already overpopulated here. Oh well, government shit happens.

I am coming to hate people.

Respect, truth, non-violence, moderate compassion, and moderation in self control.... But what do I know?     

Yah Sure

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9835

The Mormons tried it, and how well did that go?

Could they take that home to Mother and Dad?

You can espouse this as much as you like, but it will work about like communism,  in theory and occasionally, but once dollars of modern child support come into play, not so much. Do you think many will support a child that is not his. Yes some do, and then they don't. They will support mother and child, and then they do not, oh well, on to the next women. 

I think history shows that one man, one women works best, as long as they are both loyal to the plan of one man, one women. Yes, there may be a claim of exclusivity, but if one does not want that, the relationship is doomed. Oh well, you can believe and try what ever foolishness that you like.

I could never go for such foolishness. I would rather be single than that. It comes down to the relative strength of the need for sex, attachment to others, and money. 

For a marriage to work there must be respect, common values, cooperation, passion, commitment, and intimacy. With my biases, anyone who would be involved in such a relationship would be, well, a person non grata.  Oh well, what do I know?

 Respect, truth, non-violence, moderate compassion, and moderation in self control.... But what do I know?