Help Wanted For the New Year

AD commonly refers to Anno Domini, Latin for "In the Year of (Our) Lord", and applied to years following 1 BC in the Julian and Gregorian calendars signifying the date of the birth of Jesus Christ.

I've never known why "our" Lord is added to this Catholic interpretation of the date since the "Lord" that is referred to is a Jew, and there is no record of the date of his birth. So why should Catholic clergy from  the Dark Ages be given any credit for veracity much less accuracy in establishing a timeline for the world?  Or for anything, for that matter?

Besides, 1 AD is not the beginning of recorded history even for the poor lost souls who believe every word in  the bible....words that have been misspelled, misinterpreted, made up and changed by monks and  others who added their own flourishes and "corrections" to the "holy word".... so it's irritating to have to calculate backwards to get dates for important things that happened before Roman Emperor Constantine decided to invent a form of Christianity for  his own purposes. 

This is just one of the inanities found in religion. And not limited to the Christian variety either. Jews and Muslims are equally misled by the unscrupulous, the ignorant and the fanatic feeble-minded to whom anything they can't understand is beyond the pale of  reasoned interpretation.

I have probably erred in recounting even this minimal religious history, and I'm certainly guilty of mocking things that many good people believe is gospel. I am not schooled in any religious dogma. What I know is what I have learned through sharpening my own intellect and the borrowing from others whom I trust and admire and find more credible than priests and adherents.

What I know in the very fiber of my being is that fundamental  religions are not just idiotic, they are evil.

My greatest hope for the New Year is that the populace will dismiss the ravings of the religious right and restore to office a man of reason,  intelligence and good will.

And after that, my hope is that we can begin to dismantle  all the trappings of evangelical lunacy in this country and help young people release themselves from ignorance and superstition. 

Sixty-three percent of Americans do not believe in evolution. How the world must laugh at us,  a country famed for its achievements in science and literature. We MUST remove ourselves from the mindless and deadening thrall of religion if we are to be great again.


We can start by seeing the following is relegated to the dustbin of history:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/1999/11/05/dinosaurs-and-the-bible

and this

A Scientist Visits A Creationist Museum

www.youtube.com

Scientist Colin Blakemore visits a creationist museum in Kentucky.

(The first you must copy and paste; the second is a live link.)

That old smartypants, Kierkegaard, said:

"There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what is not true. The other is to refuse to accept what is true."

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Radio and Religion as Red Ink Removers

When I was a little girl, many late afternoons and early evenings were spent facing the radio in rapt attention. Seems stupid, in retrospect, since there was nothing to see except, sometimes, a little green light that would occasionally change shape. (Funny....I still don't know what that was for.)

One of the radios I remember was quite large and stood on legs. I recall lying on the floor and resting my feet on the frame as I listened to the Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Captain Midnight or Bulldog Drummund: Tracer of Lost Persons. 

The pictures were always vivid and I had no trouble seeing the one-dimensional action play out on the screen in my mind. No question - radio was the theater of the mind. And possibly still is.

Now, in the 21st century, radio exists only in my car. I am hardly aware of it unless someone I am not related to accidentally moves the dial to a station Limbaugh is on, or, not quite equally chilling, until the day after Thanksgiving!

The calendar is still reading November and I find we have wall-to-wall, 24-hour-a day, non-stop Christmas songs ringing out across the ether. Was it always thus, and I've been unconscious? Or perhaps I just will myself to have amnesia once a year.

It's bad enough to have a whole month of listening to sappy lyrics like You Better Watch Out and Frosty the Snowman, but hearing Oh Holy Night and The First Noel in daytime traffic seems as though someone should complain about the sacrilegious aspects of using the baby Jesus, innocent angels and the unlikely virgin Mary for subliminal prodding to shop, shop, shop.

It would seem to my age-created caustically critical soul a better use of the predictable Christian bitching about people saying "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas" if they would instead object to this manifestly avaricious use of  "holy" music to help line the pockets of the commerce-driven.

But I shouldn't quibble. Anything these soldiers of god do would irritate me. This is just one of the pleasures of being an atheist.

Incidentally, my favorite Christmas "carol" is: Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer. What are the chances?

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Down With the Ipse Dixit Ditzes

While we are on Wall Street trying to right our ship of state, maybe we could expand the parameters to include ridding ourselves of those insidious, mind-rotting, soul-searing, science-denying peddlers of faith and self-styled morality.

Preachers, priests, shamans, witch doctors and, particularly, evangelical pastors should have preceded the Dodo bird but, unfortunately, superstition appears to have the upper hand.....still! 

Did you see and hear that little Texas pastor, Rev. Robert Jeffress, who addressed the gathering of the GOP faithful yesterday where he self-righteously made all those definitive declarations about faith and god?

His god. The god he is convinced is the only god. The god that he insists must be believed in before you can be elected to any office,  including dog catcher, or even before you can be considered a "bona fide" person. 

Who the hell ever wrote this on any rock, or edifice, or beating heart, or on a mind that contains all its working parts?
 

Unfortunately, it's hard for me to defend the obvious object of his criticism - Mormon Mitt Romney. While Jeffress is, to me, a vulgar, soulless little man who doesn't think Romney can be considered for office because of his cult membership status, I have my own criterion for a leader: a man who believes in magic underwear has an intellect that must come in for a fair share of examination.

I think I would crawl naked over glass if it would help to free mankind from this idiotic attachment to worshiping at the altars of man-made codes that have proved themselves fallible, evil, cruel, stupid and bloody at every instant of our history.

Further, the religious zealots appear to be getting dumber and meaner. Not to mention how many, on close examination, are sexually deviant.

What is it about the fundamentalist faithful that makes them so far from god-like, but so convinced that they can tell us - with no empirical proof - that they know what we must believe?

Resist,  thinkers of the world. We must overcome.

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Is Nowhere Safe From the Purveyors of Piety?

It could almost make you believe synchronicity is a law instead of a theory. You put something into the ether and, by golly, there is a manifestation!

Just when I blog that I resent people pushing their religious and moral points of view at me, two bible thumpers appear on my doorstep - with bibles in hand, and wearing lady-like-length dresses and shoes with two-inch heels.

It's hard to believe since I live in real country. No houses within sight or sound. They had to drive a half mile from the road to my gate, and then another half mile from my gate to my house. And it is 95 degrees in the shade today, with near 100 percent humidity. Is that a kind of self-flagellation?

What would possess anyone to do that?

I am sure my anti-religion fervor is at least as strong as their fundamentalist fervor, but not in my wildest nightmare could I see myself traveling to their doorsteps to tell them that religion is the root of all evil and ask them why they don't read about all the miracles of nature instead of those cruel and violent fairy tales they are addicted to.

What they need is a subscription to National Geographic or tune into the Science Guy.

But would I be rude enough to drive up to their houses and tell them that?
 Certainly not.

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