Choosing to Over Complicate Life

Literally...OMG! Really? Sinead O'Connor converts to Islam.

Is there something wrong with people who choose an overly complex way of living from what they have known all their lives? Or to switch to what is seemingly the opposite of who they always have been?

If it does them some good, if it makes their lives AND the lives of those around them better, well, that's what living in a free country is all about. They should be able to involve themselves in their choices as deeply or as superficially as they wish. Not to be murdered or even abused for "not doing it right." By whose judgment?

There is a concern today that some of us find it easier to change who we are, rather than do the difficult work on finding out why we can no longer be who we have been, and making that work. IS it better to destroy your history than to work with what is there?

It does sound very...Republican. Very, conservative. Lazy, even...childish. Counter-intuitive even, which conservatives seem to have a fundamental issue within their ideologies.

To destroy who one is for that which really isn't necessary or even, better? Doing what you have never done, sometimes does tend to sound better to immature, lazy or unsophisticated minds.

But that is separate from those who truly do have a reason and a need to do so. And they should be supported. There is a process, their are professionals whose job it is to help these indivdiuals and see they choose the right path...for them. Not you. Not me.

There is a curious thing about all that, however.

Because we are seeing some people especially on the conservative side of things, who have built up very complex mental structures within themselves, resulting in some very unsophisticated ways of thinking.

Essentially spinning their mental wheels, experiencing a massive amount of effort for rather simplistic ways of viewing life. Self-serving ways of viewing life. All at the expense of others who need help, while too many have rationalized their way out of offering that help.

We see it frequently anymore in the conservative mindset. It gives the illusion of one being better than, of being more knowledgeable than, of being more right than...even when reality correctly differs, and which to others, to outsiders, it is clearly seen to be incorrect.

I'm not saying Sinead is wrong in her choices. But it is interesting to note, as well as something we are seeing a lot of lately in Trump supporters and within the conservative and Republican bubbles.

It is indeed so much harder to change for the better what you have than to tear down and rebuild with the mentality, so often incorrect, that the "grass is always greener on the other side." It is often a misperception. Often the mindset that leads to marital affairs. Or to Republicans voting for someone like Trump, because "he's not the same old politician." Utterly disregarding the damage Trump could and has done. Or apparently, his entire business history.

The unfamiliar always seems different than, better than, the reality of being a part of it.

To many it is fearful. To some it is attractive.

Either way, its consideration does indeed add to the flavor of life. Certainly, for those who can accept themselves and better who they are, in starting from their foundation of a lifetime of experience and history, they are ahead of the game. Over that of always beginning again in a kind of ongoing dissociative state of mind and lifestyle. We all know those people who it seems every time you meet them, they are trying to be something they've never before been.

Am I against it? No, not really. As I said, we live in a free country. And that is incredible, awesome, we are the envy of much of the world because of it. We are also hated for it by some, mostly religious elements. ISIS comes to mind.

It's so much better than living in a restrictive country. To have the freedom to live however you wish to. To change as you like, when and as frequently as you like. Although we do live now in an America where one political party wishes to force all others to live how they see things are best. Which the rest of us see as truly defective and at times destructive.

But there is also something to be said for sticking with what you have, who you are, and making that better. Living as an example for those who cannot change. And to make better your culture, your way of life, over abandoning it to others to do the heavy lifting. That is a basic tenant of many if not all religions. So there may be something to it.

Of course either way, one must first make oneself functional and productive. Because if you cannot first achieve that, you will continue to flop around and spin your wheels going in circles and repeating the same questionable behaviors over and over again. Which we see in the conservative mindset so very often.

We need productive people who can add to humankind, to our country. So that whatever it takes, we need to become whole. To add to all our lives. And to our own.

Only you know what is best for you, or you should. Just be sure that you do, and that you are not simply taking, not just the path less taken, but the path best suited, for yourself.

As for Sinead? Well, don't be surprised if we find her changing yet again someday. Some of us just never can be satisified. And that, is our main goal in life. Because the journay really is the destination, and the destination, is inevitable. Whatever it may turn out to be.

God, Humanity, Religion, America

You must please forgive me, for I cannot help myself to not consider things and openly share them.

For it occurs to me that the ridiculous strictures upon Humanity by such things as religion, or the ten commandments, by conservatives, by the Republican party of late in blending so much religion with politics in a country that has forbidden that, have been so much a bane to our Humanity.

Having over-focused on so many of the wrong things, these and such things have led us to misunderstand our Humanity.Much as religion does from time to time. Think ISIS. Think GOP.

Remember that the ten commandments ignored slavery, domestic violence, child abuse, abuse against women, and why?

Anti Roy Moore poster

I don't see where blacks should be offended by that flyer going out (above). How very true is it first of all? Let's face it, this wouldn't even be an issue to dump Roy Moore if he were black.

So called Good Christians are actually going to vote for Moore. Confusing. Stupid. Some say because Trump, a man who has crass and base views in life, whose sense of class and style is brutish at best, was also accused repeatedly and more so of sexual harassment which he admits to, and yet HE became and is somehow still, president. Although his acceptance rating is at 32%, the lowest for any president ever in American history. Now there's a precedent, right?

Let's face it, none of what this says is a stretch

These are religious people? "Good" Christians? Racists? And let's face it, if Moore were white as he is but had been chasing after young black girls, he would lose his race hands down, not because they were young black girls per se, but because he was after girls who weren't white.

What can one say but... The South. And... Republicans. Conservatives. Silly people. Better a seat in the Senate than a Democrat, even if an old geezer was a young girl chasing child molester who had been blocked by the local shopping mall and YWCA because of those behaviors. But hey, better a pervert than a Democrat or someone liberal. Good grief.

"Forty years ago in Alabama, people could get married at 13 and 14 years old. My grandmother at 13 was married, at 15 had two children and a husband. If Roy Moore was guilty, if he was at the mall hitting on this 14 year old, forty years ago in Alabama,there's a lot of momas and daddies who'd be thrilled that their 14 year old was hit on by a district attorney." Southern focus group male member this week on Vice News.

OMG, seriously? That's the American South? And they admit it? In public? On national TV?

Okay, so Alabama admitting to its perversions. Things that it has recently been ruled on the world stage in other countries is child abuse and sexual molestation and needs to stop.

But in our American South, oooorah! Go get em Roy! Perve away on our young daughters. Woohooo! You old rascal! Just like our President! Nail that girl to the bedpost old sir!

#GOP is being pretty slimy....Republicans are still supporting perverts and openly and no one's gonna stop them! Remember decency? Yeah, it's fading.

Red is a good color for Republicans at this point as the blood of our morals leaks out as they are dying, all across America's Congressional floors.

In limiting our behavior and with due consideration to Humanity's sense of innate OCD, or of extremizing things, we have consistently misunderstood and denied ourselves of just who we are. Better of who we should be and what is best to try to achieve to be.

And so ridiculous strictures have sorely damaged us again and again as in our misunderstandings against such things as sexuality in just who we are. We have consistently misinterpreted these as denying any aspect of us.

Rather than our reveling in it all. Instead of merely having mature and controlled attitudes about it. Instead we have forced archaic and immature attitudes about it and shied away from more mature reasonings about it.

For instance rather than has self discipline and practicing not raping or abusing women, some cover women up hiding their appearance so men won't what? Really men, you can't act like mature adults? Grow up. We're not letting ourselves practice maturity. So how do we get people like Islamic terrorists? Huh, I wonder. It's been built in.We did it to ourselves.

Which was why I created The Church of the Pure Purple or Purpleism back some years ago as a reaction against not only the ridiculous in religion but also against the ridiculous and ignorant things forced upon us in our lives, by ourselves (as a species). The smartest (absurdist) religion in the world says:

First rule of Pulpleism is, no killing over religious issues! 

That, if there really were an all knowing all seeing God, should be the FIRST Commandment OF ANY and EVERY religion. But then again, a God did not set up any of these religions and so we see what we have seen for millennia. Ludicrous behaviors supported by those in power and abused all the way down the line to the most common and ignorant and then back up agains from the bottom.

Yes, yes good things have been done by religions throughout history too. But serial killers have also done good things. What's your point? If not for religions, more rational types would have done these things. So that's not even an argument. If not for religion, we'd already be out into the solar system and yet, we're barely now off this planet. You don't see that? Read history. Learn about all the science that was put down, destroyed, scientists through history murdered, all by religion. Yes, religion supported some science, but more so, it tried too many times to destroy it.

We have found because of established religions a need, no, a desire...to be interpreting things in the most ridiculous of ways. Such as in Islam covering its women up completely merely to protect men from themselves rather than teaching and requiring of them to have a mature sense of discipline about it. We have stoned non heterosexuals because they deviated from the norm. A norm to this day many religions deny. Then we have male religious leaders sexually abusing male boys. And hiding it in a systemic way.

In reality the norm is exactly what we have in their existing. Yet we deny reality for the status quo of defending and perpetuating the belief system.

We have ignored our inhumanity to one another over the worship of what we cannot see, over entities who have demanded of us even in their having been fully created by men, demanding of us our full and undiluted attention all while fully against reality and... one another.

What then is the true crime against Humanity? If not merely that of the considerations of our crimes against worshipped idols, regardless what it may deemed to be?

All we need to do for now is simply to drop religion form politics and vote sanity.

Vote Humanity.

Vote compassion and humane treatment of our fellow human beings. Vote, American. Vote our most basic of ideals in separation of church and State, in order to allow freedom of each citizen and that of their choice to suffer worshiping the ethereal in the sky.

Look. Enjoy your personal delusions. It's America. Just allow the rest of us, ours.

It's not rocket science people. 

Cowardly Islamic Terrorist's Final Religion War

Yet another attack this past weekend by yet more alleged religious mental defects, murderers and criminals in London. Wishing all the best to those in London who have been killed, harmed, frightened or who have to repeatedly put up with the assholes who think their victim mentality, their need for relevancy through foolish banal religious mindsets, through the sick theistic belief system of fools, cretins and underachievers gives them any kind of license whatsoever to do harm to others.

First off, Islamic terrorists are cowards, pure and simple. Sort of, Not so much perhaps in many of their physical actions in combat or even suicidal actions, but most assuredly in their inability to be a part of human society and achieve change through means that do not harm or destroy others. Especially those innocents and members of their own religion.

However, suicide murder can also be considered a cowardly act in that once one disregard one's death in the event, there is clearly then no need, no strife, no efforts, no thoughts needed in achieving the difficult issues of evoking a movement through slower and more acceptable forms of political and social changes.

In that, they are pure cowards, lazy, stupid even and all those other things Republicans tend to label the poor and non Republican types with.

Is this going to be how the final global Religion War to end all religious wars begins? It may not start today, or next week, next year, or even ten years from now. But someone will one day have to ask, is today where it all started?

Will it end religions around the planet finally evolving us into the future? Finally? Actually one could call this the Reality Wars, except it's not a war against reality, it's a war against unreality. We have to start seeing the real world how it really is and not through a filter of unreality in religious thought and those who have taken that to their secular way of thinking. Yes, it's a hot mess.

Not these vastly silly Middle Eastern desert religions eschatological end of times crap. But the actual end to the childish religious beliefs that have infected this planet since we first pulled ourselves out of the muck and the slime, looked up at the sun in the sky and began to worship it's power and majesty out of fear. Because religion was indeed bread from fear of an ignorant and ancient people. One that I would submit, began before we could think clearly, through out ignorance and fear of things like darkness and being within the food chain, and not at the top of it for a very, very long time.

After all, how could religions not evolve in that environment?

Religious Wars that begin from what will start merely as a lash out at religiously spawned murderers? Then when all religious and religious, especially Islamic followers and leader do not stand up and take action in order to support their reasons to exist outside of realms of science, of facts, of objective reality, then finally the rest of the world in all it's rationalist and atheists, then in one religion against another, those who can finally simply no longer take it anymore, attack the fantasy cults of Islamic terrorists and other religions not their own, as we then all devolve into utter and murderous insanity?

Before that happens w all need Islam, as well as all religious believers and leaders in general to express an ever viral allergic reaction to their way of thinking in any of those cultures who might be leaning in the directions of fantasy beliefs systems and especially the death oriented religions such as the Middle Eastern Death cults of Judaism, Catholicism and Christianity and Islam.

Is this the beginning of the end of all religions worldwide? Do we really want to take these immature belief systems into the stars with us? Is this why no extraterrestrials want to visit this planet because religion in their minds is simply too childish, too dangerous a belief system to allow contact with or to allow to expand into the cosmos?

Getting back to the hard facts, do we allow religions to continue, to allow these sick cults like Islamic terrorism to continue to fester and grow like a mold on our minds around the world? Are we seeing the beginning of how religion on planet Earth, ends?

Humans have a basic sense of OCD, of Obsessive Compulsivity which when it gets out of control turns into a disorder. We see it time and against in systems and processes that break down in human culture and business. In believing things like religion, we give a nod and a smile to the potential for some very bad things to happen.

Humans will turn anything into a religion, merely by their OCD leanings of turning anything into a religion, into a ridiculous belief system that goes beyond rationality to the ethereal. Our desire to believe that if a little of something is good or great, then much much more is fantastic when in reality is is typically death, pure and simple.

Even one of our greatest forms of thought like Buddhism, which is not and should never have been a religion has, by those raised in many of those Buddhist cultures, striven to turn it too into a religion. We have done this with sex, with money and economies. With just about anything if you give us a chance.

Even calling it in the western sense, Buddhism, rather than Dharma, is in a sense trying to turn it into something it's not, merely out of our ignorance of what it was originally meant to be. And even some of that original thought on it from the first Buddha was out of some degree of ignorance which with time and knowledge we could have honed to a sharp basis of reality and betterment and yet, has been turned into a religion.

Question
What is Buddhism?

Answer
The name Buddhism comes from the word 'budhi' which means 'to wake up' and thus Buddhism is the philosophy of awakening. This philosophy has its origins in the experience of the man Siddhata Gotama, known as the Buddha, who was himself awakened at the age of 35. Buddhism is now 2,500 years old and has about 300 million followers world-wide. Until a hundred years ago, Buddhism was mainly an Asian philosophy but increasingly it is gaining adherents in Europe and America.

Question
So Buddhism is just a philosophy?

Answer
The word philosophy comes from two words 'philo' which means 'love' and 'sophia' which means 'wisdom'. So philosophy is the love of wisdom or love and wisdom, both meanings describing Buddhism perfectly. Buddhism teaches that we should try to develop our intellectual capacity to the fullest so that we can understand clearly. It also teaches us to develop love and kindness so that we can be like a true friend to all beings. Thus Buddhism is a philosophy but not just a philosophy. It is the supreme philosophy.
From Buddhanet

The argument about how great religions are, have been countered by how horrifying they have at times been. It's not just all about finding the disaffected, but in finding the veins of cancer in these communities, in their advocates and religions, in the religious and the criminal leaders overall, and in religions themselves.

How do you justify the criminals who run mega churches and do not do what their religions teach? How do you justify the slut shaming , gender shaming, and other types of shaming by religions and their religious against their own for merely having a human nature? One their are taught to hate, to hate the basics of being human.

Eliminating these religious terrorists is not just about eliminating these terrorists, but in eliminating the hold religions have in a growing force of unreality and in eliminating these religions themselves. We have to divest ourselves of religions before we can grow beyond this nonsense.

As we have seen the only way religions are any good is when they are diluted, when much of what their tenets teach are ignored, when humans, pick and choose what is best to believe in what their religion has taught since the beginning. The basis, the foundation, the history of which is so typically ridiculous.

When are we going to grow up and see clearly what the problem is here, and it is not just that of those who take the worst of their religion and run with it, leading to death and destruction. And as in Muslim terrorists, typically the death and destruction of there own?

Wake up and smell the religious mayhem, the theistic sadism, the fantasy idiocy.

We can do so much better. But we need a massive change and real understanding of our nature of that of our universe. But religion certainly is not IT.

What to do with Sharia Law? Act Now.

I just watched a Vice News report on Indonesia and a segment about the implementation of Sharia Law.

This situation may need to be turned around and applied, to some degree, as the abusers are applying it.

We may well need a newly ratified world wide law and considered Human Right restricting ANY religion from imposing its will on ANY human being without their expressed desire or permission for it to be imposed upon them or their family.

Thereby on their discovery, the immediate disbanding of such an organization to involve if necessary, death.

Perhaps we are at that tipping point where we need to protect humanity against certain religions or sects? I know I for one am sick to death of hearing about these abuses on humanity and travesties upon human beings. I'm tired of others forcing their will on people they do not even know.

All because of a stupid and mean spirited ideology based on the ideal of an Idiot God as worshiped by a tiny minded, small sect of morons who are a very small part of a very large religion. And an idiot's view of their so called "prophet", Muhammad. Grow the hell up.

Guys, if you can't play nice with others, we can destroy you....

Are we witnessing the death throes of Religion?

Will Islam be the religion that takes us from nation state world wars (2 so far) to ideological world wars (seeing anything fomenting around you yet?). Finally pushing religion over the edge from its last vestiges post dark ages to utter obscurity and mere historical research topic?

Sure it may not look that way to believers, but these things happen and when they do, at times vast changes can take place in a very small amount of time.

Many Christians, Muslims, Islamists, religionists, theists, conservatives and even Trump supporters suffer from the arrogance of ignorance.

In that ignorance they call others out for that same thing because they have information that feels foreign or unreal to them. That behavior is a mainstay of the Republican party. A party that is not ignorant itself but guilty of their own actions, of purposefully attack Americans through government, out of their ignorance, and their desire for power and money.

Some out of a skewed desire to do good, but cannot see that within the environment they have built and allowed to be built, around them. In their desire to be their own entity outside of one they despise, they have allowed themselves to be further encased in their detached ideologies. And so other than the few bigots and racists in their party, they are very much a party desiring the best for America. No matter how many may need to die to achieve that goal.

When you have a bad idea (think, self serving Islamist or even Christian terrorism, or American conservatism) and you push it on others to the point of hurting them, of even killing them, what exactly do you think eventually is going to be the backlash?

When do people feel they have finally taken enough and what will they do about it? I'm currently writing a horror sci fi story, "The Unwritten" (soon to be out in my book, Anthology of Evil II) in which a parallel universe has had the Religious Wars and then from the backlash of that came the Science Wars. Science wins out. Because truth always will in the end, it just takes time. Religion was squashed over that of reason. With the demise of religions came the demise of conservatism, or the rise of reasonable and rational conservatism for what it was intended to be and not what it has been absconded and transformed into. The rise of reason and humane attitudes toward one another and the planet then inevitably takes over.

I am not and have never been against people, but against stupid mindsets that lead to ignorant behaviors. Believing Trump is better than someone who is obviously a better quality person in either (take your pick) Bernie OR Hillary; conservative beliefs of ludicrous anti people doctrines; murdering over stupid ideologies based in pie in the sky ancient beliefs of fantasies from ancient and ignorant cultures, and then formed those beliefs in such a way so as to disallow updating that knowledge base...because it destroys those fantasies.

An extremely dangerous and destructive habit to be sure in ignoring reality, in beleiving what is not real to be real. Just be aware of what could be coming. Because we've been setting ourselves up for failure and allowing it to progress.

Religion is also the mindset that leads to denials and one has to be careful about that. It has led to the American form of political conservatism, a cancer on American society and government. It has devastated many of our citizens leading now to a Donald Trump type candidate and no president elect.

Where DO YOU think this current form of conservative political movement came from? Do you not believe it came from religion? Specifically, Christianity? From Christian Evangelicalism? From a mindset born of religion, from their belief systems, from practicing constant denials of reality for the sake of perpetuating religious beliefs in revealed religions, of fear. Fear of a greater power outside of oneself and one's community? Fear of reprisals by a divine force who apparently actually hates you and wasn't considering loving after thousands of years until a historical figure in Jesus of Nazareth come into religious literature because of a failing empire of Constantine the Great?

Fears which conservatism is based in? Fear of knowledge? One has to ask oneself, why does religion beg it's believers to study it only and not its origins? Why is educations anti religion? Why does many of its adherents advocate avoiding education? Why are conservatives in Republicans so anti education? Why do conservatives act one way, then deny their actions, blaming those who had nothing to do with the results of what they have done. Over and over and over again?

Doesn't it all fit together rather nicely and we're not suppose to notice?

All that being said I've never been anti religion through most of my life. I don't mind people having their beliefs if they keep them out of my personal reality, including my government in a country designed to allow for all and not for one to control which we're seeing now in some conservative Christians in government abusing their positions in the Republican party to abuse our citizens. It wasn't until them, until terrorists that I started thinking we need to get control of religions. Trouble being you can't just control one or two, or just their bad parts because of their design. I find it sad for all that so few are ruining things for so many, both believers and non believers alike.

IS the current individual groundswell of attacks based in religious beliefs, white Christian domestic terrorism which we've seen for years graduating to international Islamic delusion brought real, physical desiring death?

It IS interesting to note that the oldest of these three religions in Judaism doesn't seem to be really bothering the world, perhaps because it is the eldest of the three brothers in religion from that area of origin?

Is this the beginning of the end for death based religions (life is better after death in a heaven), capitalistic religions (if I do now, I will reap the rewards later in Heaven)? Why do these problematic religions all come from the Middle East? From the ancient and harsh environment of the desert? With multiple religions based in a single location leading to discord and bitterness?

One has to realize that a single mind worm in a large entity such as Islam, a belief perpetrated by a group, can cascade down into death and destruction before one even realizes it and it's too late.

One has to realize that the end of something long lived, tough, that refuses to die can exhibit a massive amount of pain and destruction as it dies in order to fight for survival that it is losing, in order to appear more alive than it is.

Is this the end?

And if so, just whose end will it be?

We're living in interesting times, to be sure....


#Religion #Islam #Christianity #DesertReligions

Is it time we begin restricting religions?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for a burqa ban in Germany saying she could support a nationwide prohibition on Islamic veils covering the face:

"The full-face veil is not acceptable in our country," she told delegates in Essen, sparking rapturous applause. "It should be banned, wherever it is legally possible."

In considering this I'm wondering if it isn't high time religions begin to be restricted in, at very least, their more ridiculous contentions. I don't believe we in America can or perhaps should do that considering our constitution. However I can foresee a time in the future where the climate either has changed to the point that we can incur a change to our constitution about religions, or it will become unnecessary.

The danger in it becoming unnecessary and not changing the constitution is that it could one day come back around to bite us. Once you stop believing in what can be dangerous thought, when there are laws allowing that dangerous thought, those laws really should be changed to support the general beliefs and even paraphernalia.

For instance, the use of flags from the German Third Reich (1933-1945) is currently subject to legal restrictions in a number of countries. However, the public display of Nazi flags is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution which guarantees the right to freedom of speech.

Although certainly at this time in history, restricting religions is untenable in the United States, if certain elements of religions begin to be restricted in other countries, the mindset is bound to traverse the oceans and enter the United States. Even something as minimal as clothing in a religion, would open the door to other elements of religions, certainly the more ridiculous ones, to become restricted. If not by law, by peer pressures and by the Zeitgeist of a nation or hopefully one day, the entire world.

Our current laws have allowed for such ridiculous religions to exist as the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Seventh Day Adventists, Johovah's Witnesses, all of which have laid the groundwork for the more recent and truly ridiculous existence of Scientology. A so called religion that bullied its way through the US government to achieve tax shelter status, the gold standard in America of what is and what is not a religion.

Religion has caused serious issues in US government of recent years in a variety of ways. It has come up against science as not an alternative to science but some theist groups contend that science is actually an alternative to religion.

Since it has clearly been proven that when choosing between science or religion for governing human social structures that science far outweighs the productivity and reliability over that of religion, stopping religious belief, or as science would refer to it, magical thinking, something also involved in psychology regarding the mentally ill, it is necessary to restrict religion to personal belief and not management of groups of humans through a government such as that of the United States.

The US has clearly tried to have a secular government IN ORDER FOR people to be able to have their religion in a country with many religions. Not to prefer one over others.

Terrorism. Domestic or otherwise, all apparently in some way, religiously based. A base belief they hold, they say they follow, beliefs either based in a religion, or subverting a religion's teachings, that needs to be delegitimized.

They are not combatants in war. They are not even really criminals, but mentally ill individuals, associated with mentally ill groups, caught up in a mentally ill mind worm of a theistic based ideology.

And so we need to deligitimize their beliefs, their ideologies.

This is not about believers who mind their own business. Who do not try to inject the non observable into government. This is about the bad players, the dangerous, those who espouse what would in any other case be considered a mental illness.

Most of the time they need to be labeled mentally ill and put into mental institutions, under high monitoring and for the rest of their lives. Other times they should simply be labeled criminal.

The death penalty has been shown to not be a deterrent, but an antiquated and archaic revenge act by the state, a state that should never kill its own citizens.

If nothing else, we'd get them to stop blaming religion for their actions and admit it is about economic issues, cultural issues, or just plain greed and desire for power.

We don't need to treat them with kid gloves as mental patients, but we do need to treat their beliefs with disregard, disgust and disrespect.

We should also be calling out religious bigotry for the social if not mental illness that it invokes, the racist doctrine it promotes whenever it does (even if the religion doesn't teach that though it not infrequently does), the dysfunctional social irritation that it can evoke.

In a country that was in part based on religious freedom, the one thing left out is the insanity of beliefs in some cases. We meant to protect religious believers, but we never considered protecting those people from others who have taken up the ridiculous and the damaging.

Which scares religious believers. Why? Because you quickly come to see what is ridiculous and what is not.

It is high time we put religion in its place. That we call out what is ridiculous. That we do not kowtow to ancient beliefs just "because" or because they have been around for so long.

It's almost as if our children held silly beliefs as young children and refuse to dis-invest themselves of those beliefs as adults. And the fact that many others hold those same childish beliefs, validates their desires and so therefore, we all should give them sacred status.

Time to grow up.

Special Edition: No one calls Mohammed an ahole. Why not, his Jihadists are?

No one calls Mohammed an Asshole, or any other ancient religious leader for that matter.

But why not? Fear of offending him? Fear of offending others? Why? Because they will try to kill us, possibly? There is no need to fear non believers. There is no need to fear the death of Faith. Faith is not dying. Religions are.

The reason we are seeing radical Islam is because religion doesn't work.

Frustration in politics and religion for many Muslims have brought simpletons like the members of groups like Al Qaeda and ISIL to fruition, to membership and action. Sad, disaffected people who join, or as in San Bernardino, who randomly strike out on their own, do so because they find their lives unsatisfactory. Their religion doesn't do enough or anything, for them.

They lash out at non Muslims and Muslims alike. But they also kill other Muslims in their complete and utter discare of killing their own because they know very well, although they are too stupid to recognize it, too blinded by their dysfunctional ideology, that Islam, that Allah, that their silly man made religion, is false and quite useless for their purposes as radical murderers and previously as inactive Muslims.

So they act.

Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, you name the religion, it boils down to a silly group of people congregating to worship and ideology of disaffected people. When they begin to realize what a load of crap it all is, they act. But rather than act against their beliefs, which acknowledges they have been duped, that they have been stupid, they lash out from that point into the world.

We all suffer for religion still existing.

Long after it has served any purpose it may have once had we all  continue to suffer for it. It's high time religion finally just bury itself, pull he dirt over its own head, so that finally once and for all, Humanity can move on into a brave new world where we depend upon ourselves, to move off planet into the stars above, where religion has no reason to exist.

Whatever purpose religion once had there are now (actually always have been) other, better forms to take its place.

Regarding Islam, just where did it come from?

Christianity was an attempt by Emperor Constantine to control his flailing empire through the Nicene Council in creating the bible to get a handle on things that were out of control because of a splintered form of religion, Christianity. What about Islam?

Haven't you ever wondered why, thought it rather odd that the three major desert religions or the Middle East, all have similar holy places, so close upon one another? Coincidence? If so, what a very odd one. Try this on for size (video):

How the Vatican created Islam

Think that's all nonsense? I agree, it IS all nonsense.

Now can we move on? And if not, isn't it because of people stuck in their beliefs, infected by this insanity, as benign as it can at times be. Yet we'd be really so much better off without it.

Regardless, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of religions. And high time it is, indeed.

Here is a video of a debate between one of my favorite people, the late Christopher Hitchens vs Islam via Prof. Tariq Ramadan. Here is also to be fair, a video of Chris vs Christianity via William Lane Craig (another with Cardinal George Pell), and lastly a video of Chris vs Judaism via Rabbi David Wolpe.

Mr. Ramadan is very erudite but it's still a matter of fact that people have to pick and choose what they believe in, for what their religion states in it's religious books. Which itself, makes it dangerous and allows for things like the Christian Crusades, and Islamic Jihad.

Is it odd Hitchens doesn't really oppose Buddhism? I don't think so, although Buddhism does have foolish humans trying to turn it into a religion. Because that is what we do, by way of our defects in our make up.

Also another video with some of his comments on religion in general beginning with a joke about Buddhism. Finally a video with Chris Hitchens 2004: Genocide, Bamiyan, Buddha, Taliban, Al Queda, Rwanda

Chris takes a harder line on religion than I do. I'm not anti Islam, Christianity, or any religion in particular. I just think religion is overall a childish past time that has caused us a lot of grief and as we become more evolved, ever more problematic. Especially when there are other, better ways to live your life that are far more productive. Without religion, would we have landed on the moon in the year 1500?

I wish no harm against Muslims who are decent people. Or theists who are decent. But there seem to be so much religious scum floating on top of the social pool anymore that we have to act to stop it.

Just to make it painfully clear... I have nothing against Muhammad, Jesus, or any of those types of people. Just those types of people that slimy people worship. THOSE are the Muhammad's I find despicable. The Jesus who sucks. And so on.

We are actually experiencing the evolution of Faith as it evolves beyond the stupidity we've placed upon it for thousands of years. The banal foolishness of ancient old men, their housewives and scared children. That of religion, of useless rituals, of imagination counter to being fundamentally productive in any real or even if you prefer, spiritual way.

Some people certainly deserve for us to offend their religion, from how those people act. Islamic terrorists show us all, even other Muslims how their Allah, how Muhammad are mere people put into or manipulated to be in extraordinary circumstances, not deserving of the excessive respect they are afforded, little or none of the attention they get, or all the vain shoutings of "Allah be praised" by the foolish, the delusional and certainly the murderous.

Whenever you mention anything too much, you must know that it becomes diluted. That it begins to lose its meaning. All the shoutings we constantly hear of Allahu Akbar! Just how much meaning does that really have in it for those people beyond an affectation? Beyond mind washing?

You might say as Arthur C. Clarke did in Childhood's End:

"You deceived us." But no. I didn't and those few others who can also see clearly, haven't.
"You have deceived yourselves."

Look. I have nothing against any religion or religious people. Yes, ritual and religions are pretty silly and run through all young races. I have in fact, high respect for people who are monks, priests, nuns or similar types in any religion, including Islam.

If they are good leaders, and not recruiting murderers, not spewing pure crap to their followers, but are finding the truth, giving their people something in life to make their lives more than it is with what little they may have in their lives.

Mohammed couldn't read. Ignorant as he was, the so called unschooled Prophet, he surrounded himself at some point with people smarter than himself. Which I'll grant you, is not stupid, building a religion of hero worship upon something as silly as the Jewish religion and so even more so. At least Christianity was a call to more sanity at the time, but there too it went seriously wrong along the way beyond its initial inclusions of Buddhists elements.

Early Christians and Muslims didn't have enough education or historical insight to start their own religions. So they ripped off Judaism. But they were up against worse issues and what they did in creating a new religion probably made sense at the time.

There once again you have yet another man made God or Allah and religion. If these were such great religions how come their sacred tomes (Bible and Quran) have allowed for things such as the Crusades, and Jihads? If they are the literal Word of Allah, of God, well...we won't even go into the Christian Inquisitions, the Dark Ages, recent Jihads, and so on.

No one wants to speak out against religions because people get upset if you call into question what they believe, what they have believed since they were born, what their parents and ancestors have mistakenly believed...and unbelievably, even for thousands of years. At least Mormons, as silly a religion as that is, or Scientology, are young, and can be excused in some ways.

But no, no they cannot and they should know better.

And we shouldn't call into question their silliness? Really.

Let's talk about Abraham nearly killing his son because, "God told him to."

Uh, right.

We know now that it was a test, at least according to the old texts. God just wanted to see if Abraham was loyal and followed orders. But maybe later, God in a weak moment was just being kind. What IF what God wanted to hear from Abraham, a rational rebuke?

In using this situation as a metaphor for so many other religious situations through time, for Abraham to have just listened to what God requested of him (albeit as a voice in his head I might add, it doesn't sound crazy at all in reviewing it through more modern filters, right?), and then, sanely, for Abraham to have a pair of balls and simply to have said:

"God, judgement is yours. Therefore even if it is you requesting it of me, I cannot take it on myself to kill one of your creations, and my son."

Now that, would be a test! To deny God's orders to not do what he commanded? Utter Awesomeness. Now that sounds more like a God testing someone, doesn't it?

But no. Abraham pussied out. Just like Mohammed and his modern Jihadist followers.

The biggest pussies in the universe are Jihadists because they do not have the balls to refuse their own stupid mistaken beliefs. Or to realize they are stupid. Or that they are stupid, petty people.

They just like killing. Face it. After all, it's easy. It's satisfying and yet it's stupid. Just as Mohammed was an ancient anachronism having little or no meaning and less value today as does Christianity or Judaism.

Okay to be fair, Mohammed may have had good reason to say some of the physically based things he said way back when. Though the spiritual stuff certainly as it plays out over time, was just pretty silly and useless. Like flicking a Bic lighter a thousand years ago. You get ooos and awwws but really, what is it? Butane in a plastic container with a spark.

Not to mention, spending that much time devoted to a spiritual consideration, praying that many times a day when you could be doing something useful? It's a huge waste of time and energy for normal citizens and should be partitioned to special religious individuals.

Not to mention, having a callous on your forehead makes you look pretty damn silly. But then, it let's the rest of us know your somewhat scary orientation in life and the real world.

Spend that time actually DOING something, affecting change maybe, dildo.

Now I'm not saying that meditation isn't good, it is. Sure.

To mistake meditation for prayer is ignorant and an utter waste of time. Not to mention when you tie it to idiots like Daesh, or the fools and criminals in Boko Haram well, you've earned the biggest "Chump in the World" award. Or the Jihadist Favored Idiot of Mohammed Award. May your 72 virgins have syphilis when you get to your heaven and all be ancient old virgin crones only as you deserve. Grow up.

Look. #Daesh, #ISIS, #ISIL, #BokoHaram, you're all assholes. Deal with it. Get a real job. Work to affect change for your people through the systems that exist. Or make better systems, but don't tear down the world because you're unhappy.

I know. It's too had for your tiny minds to do that.

Killing is so much more fun, rewarding, satiating, empowering, and easy. Right? It's not hard after all to use an AK47 on a woman, a child, or an unarmed old man.

Try to start acting like adults and realize that no one wants or needs your silly fascist styled, ridiculous fundamentalist juvenile religious beliefs.

Humans have a reason for their inherent, built in pattern recognition skills and OCD style behaviors that make religion seems so satisfying. We need as adults to rise above those base, childish instincts.

Humans like masturbation, be it in stroking their genitals or in stroking their beliefs.

Religious ecstasy is very similar to sexual orgasm, just slower, less immediate most of the time. Face the facts. You're not good theists, you're religiously addicted Onanists.

Some people like to have such an intense orgasm they pass out (some even dying through auto-erotic asphyxiation). But you choose to blow yourselves up or die in religious fervor in "battle". Blowing up women and children in a city square or on a bus or a plane is not battle asshole, it's murdering innocents. You even murder your own Muslim people, moron and rationalize it is good. Like you're so important that you can be a judge.

How very romantic you are. What a child you are. The Bible says you must see through the eyes of a child. I bet the Quran says that too, cuz, you know... derivative.

Religion says you must ignore reality for your religion. Don't you get it? Don't you see what foolishness you have bought into? What has been perpetrated upon you for hundreds, thousands of years and your entire civilization has bought into it? Out of fear and feeling good?

No. Obviously. You cannot see how much of a fool you have been made by those you have followed. That is the bane of the theist. Allow me to help you.

Rule number one. Humans do not kill humans.

No, it's not worshiping God. That was just something some guy had told you God had told to him. Come on. Seriously? You really believe that?

Start "worshiping" your God, through taking care of his creations not destroying them. By the way worshiping a Prophet is after all idolatry, and in its crassest sense.

And again, stop being such an asshole.

Fear. Fundamentalists. Conservatives. We have them here.

The reason for conservatives being so out of control regarding their fears, just occurred to me.
If you hear a tiger in the grass and you react appropriately but find it's nothing, you're fine.
If you hear that noise and you think it's nothing, but it IS a hungry tiger, then you're dead.
Using that built in human dynamic inbred though hundreds of thousands of years, and not tempering it through appropriate personal experience, trial and error of your own, then you will come out just as how paranoid conservatives react to everything.
And so you see why we have the situation we have.
An entire stratum of society is paranoid because they haven't live appropriate lives.
We are all living in a very superficial and synthetic social construct.
Those who haven't challenged themselves in the right ways, or not at all, will find a terror behind every bush, building and door.
How can scary immigrants NOT be terrifying to these poor people?
They don't deserve our admonitions. They deserve our care and compassion.
And they as well deserve our not allowing them to be in control of the most powerful nation in the history of the entire human race and this planet.

Let me give you a parable.

Let's say there are three men. One prays, one meditates, both doing all the right stuff and yet (like you) are still lowlifes. They do all the right stuff and yet, they are still not good people. Religion doesn't necessarily stop any of that from happening, in fact research is showing it props bad behavior up. It's wishful thinking much of the time.

Leaders of ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda 

There are many loser religious types. Again, just look at Daesh, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda....

There is this third guy. Remember? I said three guys. He seemingly does all the wrong things. He doesn't believe in God, doesn't pray or meditate. Maybe he parties too much. Doesn't take good care of himself. He doesn't prey on the weak though either. Why? Because he thinks it's just wrong. In essence therefore he ends up doing all the right things, just because he doesn't want to hurt anyone.

He believes if you are just a good and ethical person people will recognize you are trustworthy. Because of that he acquires people around him who support him, who also are attracted to the Golden Rule, or Karma if you wish. Which roughly speaking is:

"Do onto others as you would have others do onto you."

The answer is here:

Be a good person.

It's not that hard. There is no reward in some fantasy "heaven". How capitalistic middle eastern desert religions are. Pay into this life for rewards in the next. Really.

Here on earth is your heaven, or your (our) hell. They are the heaven or hell you make of your life and others.

And you jihadists, you have made hell on earth all because of your silly make believe deities in the sky.

Grow up or die. Soon. Either way we, the people of the Earth do not need you or your ridiculous religious nonsense.

You are spawning right wing, fascist nationalism around the world and that is good for no one but some idiots who believe in a religion that they think teaches human beings to be death rather than life oriented.

Stop associating with those who hate human beings. Stop the self hatred. Stop worshiping a concept inn a god that also seems to hate us and disingenuously attempts to teach us that life is after death and not now when it actually exists.

What kind of person believes in mental tripe, in mind worm beliefs?

Surely no thinking rational person. Surely no "God" would ever think up such crap, only a human being could, or would. Only those who are lost or seeking to control their tribe. And then in as destructive a way as possible in attempting to control others' tribes too. And if they cannot, then they feel chartered to send their believers to kill them because they do not believe the same.

Can you really not hear how demented that is?

It's the old "you're different than me, I kill you!", mentality. How unevolved you are still. You make other Muslims look very bad.

Think, people! Try to think! Use your mind! What little mind you have left after religion has rotted most of it away.

I just saw an extremely moving Fareed Zakaria​ GPS show (12/13/2015) where they interviewed a woman who escaped from Iraq to Syria and then when the civil war started, to Turkey.

All her family had hoped for was to immigrate to the US. They thought they had it sussed at one point and then they were denied through a letter, snail mail. Yes, the US sucks sometimes. You can see how she feels this to her core and we were the ones who turned her down. Her and her family, after the horror she's been through, that ISIS and others have put her through. Over what? Religion? Allah, Muhammad, a piece of land?

The photographer and author who was responsible for her being on the show was also on the air and he nearly broke down in tears in explaining her story and that of others like her. He had interviewed twelve families previously who were accepted into America. A PhD and family, cream of the crop types. But this girl and her family, though they are people we'd be proud to have as citizens, were denied.

We worry (well some do), about our letting in a terrorist who will attack us. Are we really worried about letting in a killer. Or more so about being seen as fools, a seemingly far more pronounced idiocy in some people's minds?

We also have to consider the flip side of thinking that way. Let's shift my ranting at ourselves now, at my people.

What about those we turn down who DO become radicalized, who do end up hating us. BECAUSE in their hour (year, decade) of need, we DID turn them down. When they knew themselves that they were highly worthy of our acceptance and yet, we shat upon them and their family, their love of our ideals, upon their dreams and their needs?

Who then is responsible? More stupid humans.

I reject anyone's comeback in saying to me that they'd have become radicalized anyway since after all, that can be true. But just because it's possible doesn't mean it is how it is or always will be for everyone. It is just as true that we can be our own worst enemies. As we have been in many ways in spawning much of what is transpiring now in the world against us.

Some of those reasons Jihadists have used against us are real, accurate, even reasonable. Where we were at fault for the slights those people are feeling against us surely not all are true. And no we cannot in the twisted situation we've placed ourselves in, allow anyone to attack us either, regardless.

Therein part lay the conundrum. At some point someone has to stop the killing, the madness.

Surely it won't be Jihadists as that term defines madness. Stupidity supported by religion, false and fake gods.

We also have a responsibility not to do those things that reasonably give people reasons to attack us. Surely we should not sow those seeds, almost begging for people to attack us someday because of our own actions of greed and national desires and at all costs to others.

We must all stop the madness, on all sides. But your Islamic tribes have been doing this to one another for thousands of years. And yet there was a time long ago when you were at peace. But not the uncivilized among you. And that is what this is, you are who we are against. The uncivilized. The barbarians. Ask yourselves, how did you allow yourselves to devolve in such a way and who can stop it?

Only you. Only you....

These are the things I've seen in the news in recent years. Had another country done to us what we did to others, WE surely would have fought back. If we didn't have a military to use, we'd surely have done as we could with guerrilla warfare, with terrorist actions. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, right? To fight back in anyway available?

Bullshit. One's murderer is yet another's murderer.

So be careful in hating.

Because as some like to say,

"There but for the grace of Allah, go I."

Or in this case, we.

So. Think.
Act, responsibly.
Do, the right thing. Stop killing.
Or at least, try to.....try something.

JZ Murdock, who? A brief biography.

Who exactly is JZ Murdock? Who am I and why do I hold the beliefs that I do? How were they formed? Why does it even matter?

Well, it very well may not matter. I won't go into all of it, but perhaps some of it.

I am a writer. Not unlike many of us I have lived various lives, I have saved a few lives. I'm happy to say that I have gotten this far and have yet to kill anyone. Though I have had my moments when it may have been justified.

I am a published author (since 1990) with print, ebook and audiobooks available. I've studied screenwriting at my Western Washington University where I got a degree in psychology and I worked for years at another, the University of Washington. I'm still working on my screenwritings and I've started working again on film productions.

Cover art by Marvin Hayes

I wrote the horror sci fi book, Death of heaven. But why? How does someone come to be so against religions to even write a book titled as this one, where the "h" in "heaven" is lowercase. That "h" actually has more to do with the story than my personal beliefs. I spent the first half of my life surveying, studying, even though a university psychology degree going back into the origins of religion. How it came to be, how it could come to be.

Across the humanities and sciences, across the evolutions of religions, until I found what seemed the most reasonable explanations and I came to find it is simply a form of thought that can be far better achieved for whatever it has offered humanity through other and far better formats not requiring a deity or any consideration of ridiculous and far fetched fantasies.

Religions were invented by men. For all the good that religions have achieved, because of their format and structure they have allowed, at times supported, and overall allowed and put great evil upon the world.

For every point that theists point to how great religions have been, it all could have been achieved in a far more rational, safe and sane way; undercutting those claims of necessity, reality or relevancy by theists. Humankind has been addicted to religion and it's high time we grow out of our childhood mythologies and into our rational adolescence as a whole.

The story I devised in Death of heaven is quite a story and not for the faint of heart or the simple minded. It is a complex and hybrid tale told in a unique way, multi-layered with multiple-dimensions. An unusual book of fiction that I'm rather proud of. Aside from the obvious, there is nothing in that book that hasn't been done to humans or humanity by religions or the religious, at some point through our history.

I am against killing and humans causing other humans misery. Especially if it is through some form of belief, faith or religion. No one should ever die because of a religion. No one should ever die or be maltreated because of a belief system. Especially not one founded in myth and magic.

More Hard Hitting Words From The Dalai Lama About The Mass Brainwashing Of Society

If you've visited my Facebook page you'll notice a certain attitude against terrorists and abuse by one human or set of humans against another and that might make you wonder. How did that ever come to be? I've been very vocal against terrorists since 9/11 to a point that some have worried for me.

But we have to speak out against injustice and ignorance, foolishness and stupidity.

Light kills evil. Silence fertilizers it.

So how did this all come to be?

I had a pretty good but at times rather rough childhood. Partially because of ADHD. My parents weren't highly educated but bright people. Though my father was an electrician. Not a dumb guy but then, I didn't grow up with him after three, I only got his genes for the most part. My mother was kind of flaky at times but a loving if not occasionally somewhat nutty woman, though with a great sense of humor.

I got into trouble a lot. I got grounded a lot. So eventually I found books and the public library, including the adult section in fifth grade and then books by Aristotle and others. Something that was a great benefit to me overall but a great detriment in trying to fit into the 1960s as a child.

Some adults back then started to think I was nuts because I would say things that the world and history has long ago judged correct and brilliant. I remember in fifth grade saying something once and my stepfather, a harsh guy who wasn't my biggest fan, had said was stupid and asked where I hear that from?

I said, "Aristotle." He asked, "Who's that." Somewhat stunned at his ignorance and trying not to embarrass him and in doing so feel his wrath, I simply said, "A guy from 2,000 years ago." To which he responded, "He's an idiot."

Taking a chance and trying to restrain my irritation in  having already read what a boon to humanity Aristotle had been I said, "Maybe so, but people all through history, [I hesitated, then pushed it further knowing I was justified] all around the world have based how we think on his words."

That ended that particular "discussion". From that moment on I realized I was learning more than he knew about and it spurred me on. While he realized from then on I was someone to be even more wary of.

Some adults around that time started asking my opinion in making decisions in their own life as they thought I seemed for some reason to make a lot of sense. But not the family. Never my family who only thought as my sister liked to put it, that I was "weird". I was. I thought I was weird too. And I couldn't figure out why any adult would listen to me. A kid. I knew I must be onto something.

The downside of my childhood were all mostly mental issues really. Berating from those who didn't understand me, from teachers I couldn't satisfy, from a stepfather who according to my mother was jealous of me and found me a pain in the ass.

Having a father who was out of my life from when I was three and we were living in Spain didn't help things. I used to daydream he would come save me from my life.

Our mother picked up this new guy on the way home from Spain who got his jollies for years after in berating me so I learned to stay out of his sight whenever possible. After Spain, after spending a couple of years around our east coast family, our mother dated around and finally settled on this guy and married him.

They had a kid when I was five and brought him back to where I was born in Tacoma, Washington. Even though our mother had been born in Brooklyn, New York. Tacoma for me once we had left, was a place I never wanted ever to go back to. Certainly not after experiencing Spain, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York.

When we returned to Tacoma in 1960 it seemed even worse than when we had left.

The museum we had visited in Philly had a giant human heart you could walk through the ventricles of. They had a hands on moon exhibit where you could experience what it was like to walk in a lighter gravity. In Tacoma we went to a museum and it was in an old square wooden building with square glass display cases containing artifacts. At first I thought it was some kind of a bad joke. It was light years behind the museum science displayed on the east coast at the time.

We moved each year so I had trouble making friends and got to realize it was useless to anyway as I knew they wouldn't last. Much like a military brat but stepdad wasn't in the military. He just had trouble finding a decent job on a new coast after his having been a big band leader. I always felt sorry for him about that, even though we pretty much hated one another.

Mom had forced him to stop playing music. Who does that? And drinking. She never allowed him to spank us as his anger was too disturbing and she said he didn't know his own strength. I thank her for that. But that meant she was the punisher and would use his belts to whip me with when I was bad. But he's dead now. I recently sprinkled his ashes in the River Liffy in Dublin at my sister's request and against my personal desires.

I got taken down to a Karate dojo in 1965 by my mother because said she was tired of groups of boys beating me up for my big mouth. I'd had a big mouth because I hated seeing injustice and I spoke out whenever I saw it. I can't stand bullies, or people pushing their will upon others. Occasionally I took a beating for it, but it never stopped me speaking out. Not to this day.

My saying "Screw Al Qaeda, screw ISIL, screw ISIS, or screw DAESH", isn't a new thing with me.

They are all slim. Terrorists are scum when they kill, maim and abuse non combatants and they deserve to be called out about it. Their pathetic needs do not weigh a thing in light of the innocents they murder. Just as do the politicians and rich who abuse their status, as well as conservatives, Republicans, or anyone on the other side who abuse through their actions. But then too, there is only so much time in a day. I find I simply can't avoid speaking out when I see abuses.

Something that did however make my childhood... difficult.

I had been taken there earlier and turned down as the Sensei said he didn't take on children. But then we heard he had started to and she took me back. That led to my learning Asian philosophy and to pick up an orientation on how to kill quickly and in so learning that, in also having gained a responsibility to protect others from a confrontation with me to protect them from being killed.

In having gotten grounded a lot I discovered science fiction which opened my mind quite a lot. I'd be sent to my bedroom as punishment but after a while, whenever I got told that I had to try not to look happy about it. Because I would go from being outside or playing in the house where I would get into trouble to going to my room and traveling the universe. I always read only the best and they had good solid ideas to found my young personality on.

I got used to things seldom going right for me. Or of being my own worst enemy in my curiosity or lack of care in being punished for trying new things. I got in trouble in third grade once for repeatedly jumping off the roof of the house. The fall was fantastic even if the sudden stop at the end was a bit of a let down.

In getting poor grades in school I mostly got used to not living up to the standards of my older straight A sister. Years later I heard a CEO give a talk to us in college saying that he preferred solid C students over straight A types. Because he said, when an A student type failed they took it hard, but C student types were used to it and just pushed on through it. That was me.

I got to where I thought outside the box because I had to.

I also had an older brother, seven years older who we seldom saw but who always questioned things. I learned over the years from many of his mistakes. Things I would have done, that he did first, suffered for it and would share his experience to help me avoid duplicating his mistakes.

Our grandmother taught me to always listen to those older and more knowledgeable and not be like many kids who don't listen to their elders, to people who have done it all already. Why not build upon other's experiences and save myself the trouble, to put me further ahead of those who don't listen? That made a lot of sense to me.

My grandmother, my mother's mother, was a great benefit to me in learning critical thinking. She told me when I started reading to always finish a book once you start reading it. Just be sure before you crack that cover that it is a book you want to read.

To this day I can count on one hand the books I haven't finished reading. And I've read a lot of books though I always seek out the best authors and for that matter apply that to anything I did. I have my mother to thank for always seeking out the best teachers in anything I wanted to learn. Grandma taught her to choose experts wherever possible. And I've had more than few.

From that I learned to finish whatever I started and to learn the best forms available and possible.

In eighth grade I started in Civil Air Patrol. CAP is an official auxiliary of the US Air Force. It teaches its young cadets Aerospace technologies and search and rescue of downed small\light aircraft. I took ground school toward a pilot's license in junior high.

We learned base support in taking care of aircraft that flew to locate downed aircraft and locate survivors. We learned communications in two way and HAM radio in how to run radios professionally. We were taught first aid, first responder training. We learned LSAR, Land Search and Rescue techniques, how to travel in the mountains, to locate aircraft and crash survivors and find your way in and out, how to climb cliffs, and so on.

If my mother knew half of what we did she would have had a heart attack. After my first meeting I was told to learn the manual as next meeting they had just received so many new kids I would be in charge of a "flight" of them, half of that squadron. I taught them how to drill, to march in order.

I was raised in a blue collar Union family, Teamsters, as democrats. We were Catholic. Liberals I suppose. But it was a positive life affirming environment which I've only come to appreciate of late as I have learned what Republicans and conservatives are all about and I find it rather distasteful, based in a strange kind of reality that seems to fit only the rich.

My mother had said I was "gun crazy" as a kid in eighth grade. Which may be reasonable when you are adventure loving, mostly stupidly fearless and grew up watching 1950s and 60s cowboy, military\war and cop shows and films. With Vietnam on TV during dinner almost every night a gun seemed like a pretty good idea, even though I grew up in a suburb.

So mom called the police department to ask what to do about me. They suggested getting me access to burn out on my cravings and to learn how to handle guns safely with authoritative and appropriate respect. They suggested a civilian who had a gun club for kids who reloaded cartridges for the Tacoma Police Department to save them money.

They let him use their firing range downtown for his junior gun club and said he was well liked and highly respected and reputable. He was yet another in a long line of men who were second fathers to me, filling in where both of my "dads" had failed. It was in that club that I got my craze under control and learned how to shoot, handle firearms properly and see them as what they are. Tools, not toys. Eventually I got my high school sports letter from being three years on the Lincoln High rifle team.

During nights in high school I worked at a drive in theater where my step father worked as assistant manager. As long as I kept my grades respectable (no one expected As or Bs), I could keep my job and have some pocket money, and then a car in my senior year. I eventually became snack bar manager and worked the box office. I started there picking up the garbage on the field in ninth grade each day after the previous night's showing.

I had what three neurosurgeons said was a nervous breakdown and ended up in the hospital in twelfth grade. They said from what my mother told them it had to do with the tension in my home life and that I needed either to figure out how to deal with it or simply move out. They gave me a prescription of valiums and sent me on my way. I moved out the week after graduation at seventeen into my own apartment, having started a job the day immediately after graduation.

I was up for that job with another kid. I got the job because he wanted to go to graduation party and I underbid him saying I could start the day after graduation, thus killing my going to the Ocean Shores graduation celebration. I later found out that the kids that did go, got corralled by police for a caravan of drunk kids, hanging out of car windows driving around and their parents had to drive the couple of hours to the shore to get them all. So in the end I pretty much got the better deal.

Then I got very sick with bronchitis (something I got about every year) and the doctor required I stay away from the open garage doors of the drive in's snack bar for a month. So I lost my job in a rather underhanded way because the new manager didn't like how my employees listened to me over him. I've received that kind of loyalty from employees ever since, all through my life including in the military.

So that's about it. There is of course a lot more and where I was headed after high school. I've written a biopic, a true crime screenplay about a week in my life after high school where I was a bodyguard for the first (and not last) time, for a stip club waitress who witnessed a mob murder. I have titled it, Teenage Bodyguard. It was a well known murder in 1974. The waitress had a different story that the official one that holds to this day and I may be the only one with the true story of what really happened.

I graduated high school hating my K-12 school experience, because of ADD mostly I suppose. I decided I would graduate and be done with school and never have another thing to do with it. Happily, my life changed, I changed, and I ended up at a university after the Air Force. Eight years to get through four years of college. But then my Vietnam era benefits paid for college, something that otherwise would, could, never have happened.

I was actually talked into going to college by two high school friends who said they could get me into pledge their Zeta Psi fraternity at the University of Washington. But my mother said they simply didn't have the money for that.

There is a wonderful true scene where I spent a night there at the Zeta Psi house in Seattle during the Christmas season so I could take the SATs the next day. There was hardly anyone there, every one being home for the holiday break. The frat Secretary and President knew I was there and found me and pulled me into their room. We sat on the floor and smoked pot and listened to Simon and Garfunkel and talked. In the end I did miserable on my SATs and the UW wouldn't let me in anyway.

So I screwed around after high school from seventeen till twenty, through the nightmare of my little brother's death via cancer and into my engagement to my first wife. But I had no job prospects.

So at twenty I entered the Air Force as Law Enforcement. The other forty nine guys in my flight were from seventeen to nineteen and called me the Old Guy. At twenty, I was being called the Old Guy. Except there was one guy older than me at twenty four who had been a teacher. We called him The Teacher and Crazy for joining at that age. But he said he wanted to teach, in the Air Force.

I got booted out in basic because of flat feet but talked them into letting me stay. Demanded it actually as I was pissed off I went through so much of basic training only to lose my job and my slot. The base foot doctor, a Colonel whom I was bitching to about this liked me for some reason. So he told me to select another job.

I chose Flight Simulator Technician and as backup, Parachute Rigger. I had been a SCUBA diver since 10th grade and started skydiving just after high school. But I just missed the primary job and ended up as a parachute rigger. A field where they were nicknamed, "panty packers". Everyone seemed to have a nickname. "Riggers can pack anything" they told me.

Before I left the military I joined the OSI. That is a book unto itself. And it could have gotten me killed.

I got out and floundered for a year doing nothing, which I now see as a healing period. My older brother whose house I was staying at, talked me into using my military benefits and so I entered college where I found that my teachers believed I had a knack for writing. I had only planned on getting a two year degree but my girlfriend (another long story) wanted to get a four year degree.

So we petitioned universities around Washington state, visited all the campuses and both decided on Western Washington University where we eventually got our B.A. degrees in Psychology. UW turned me down yet again. They said not to feel bad because even straight A students got turned down. By this point I was extremely close to a straight A student, but not quite.

At WWU our Psychology adviser in the department eventually told us we were in the top 1% of the top 1% of all psychology students in the country. The head of the counseling department literally begged me to go into counselling as he thought I had a real feel for it.

I knew I couldn't emotionally handle dealing with other people's problems day in and day out and would eventually kill or drink myself to death if I had to take on other's miseries. And I wasn't a drinker, not after high school. By the time I turned twenty one in fact, I had pretty much tired of bars and drinking.

So yes, I'm a progressive type and have always been liberal in my approach to life, much more fearless than our conservative types from what I have seen, who seem to me mostly to be rather fearful people.

I see life for what it is, a calculated risk. Not something to hide from. Not a venture where you can take from others, or to have much that I don't need that costs others in taking from them, and so on and so forth.

I see this planet as a spaceship we're all riding on.

A world we owe something to for living on it. I don't think I have any right to impose my will on others unless they are harming others, or possibly themselves. Conservatives are like that, ISIS is like that, Republicans lately have been very much like that.

As the Examiner.com put it:

"Average Americans need to be more informed about what is going in the country, but also where to get their information. The argument isn't about holding a liberal or conservative ideology, it's about facts that are based on truth and not information based on twisted logic. Americans need to learn to dig a little deeper to find honest reporting, not just believe something that falls in their lap at the expense of a billionaire funded think tank or news organization."

I think we owe it to ourselves to be as honest as possible, not to lie, even if it is at the cost of our beliefs. If your belief is wrong, why are you holding onto it? Let it go.

We have many who don't care about the truth, just twisting things into their benefit. Sadly many of them don't even realize they do that. Critical thinking has become a victim.

I grew up testing myself. I've had plenty of opportunities to.

Someone once said if you run from your fears you'll run all your life from them. So I've tried to discover them and face them down. I also got the testing of myself out of the way at a fairly young age. Something I've seen adults doing sometimes late into life, much to their detriment and that of others around them or under their control.

A good man knows his limitations I was told and I've found many times in people making mistakes in life where they simply didn't know themselves, don't know their limitations. They incorrectly, over or under expect failure or success.

What I've found is many times, most of the time, when I go up against what I'm afraid of or when I take a (calculated) risk, it nearly always seems (against all reason sometimes) to work out in the end. If you have an accurate assessment of yourself, you can achieve great things. But one has to balance life and family, quantitativeness with qualitativeness.

If you give in to your fears you never find out what you can achieve.

Therein for me lay the defect in conservative thinking.

Want some irony?

My older brother has become a conservative and a small businessman. From having been a1960's hippy type, I have no idea how that happened. Other than he was mostly raised by his own father. Of my four siblings, we all had different fathers, except for my one still living younger brother where we have different mothers but grew up separately. He's the genius artist in my family. We didn't grow up together but I'm happy to say now we are great friends.

I think that gives you just a small idea of who I am and where I get my attitude and orientation from. I was raised Catholic, I was head altar boy at one point. I'm now what some would call an atheist, a humanist, perhaps a pantheist. Since the concept of God came after one not existing, I object to being called atheist as it means against something and one cannot be against what wasn't there to begin with.

I have learned that Aikido (I'm on the board of directors for our local non-profit Aikido dojo) and the Buddha Dharma (Buddhism for Westerners) has helped me a great deal. I'm not a ritualist though and I reject any religious orientation in my Buddhist thoughts. I became a Freemason years ago to see why my grandfather was one as well as a Shrine. Getting a degree in psychology has given me free therapy and helped me achieve a kind of cohesins in life. Raising two kids also gave me a wealth of reasons to be alive. To see them grow and become artists, musicians and free thinkers themselves.

I spent much of my twenties being bitter about my childhood until I realized to simply let it go (though there was nothing simple about doing so). To see things in the right light, makes life so much more worth experiencing. To want love over things, is so much more worth the effort. And to leave a positive legacy, such a rewarding pursuit over that of wealth, power or notoriety.

In the end I have only this to say to you all. Do your best in life to do no harm. To leave things better than you found them. To know that religion is never a good enough reason to kill but to kill those killing for the purposes of their religion are sometimes necessary. That killing is seldom necessary, though sometimes it is in order to survive but if you avoid it as best you can and still survive, you should have no guilt, only regret in not having seen a better way sooner to have avoided it.

May prosperity seek you out in many ways and may you deserve any gifts it bestows upon you.

Cheers to you all! Sláinte.

Life is risk. Calculate it. Risk it. Live.