The Unabashed Atheist

Assertive Atheism

2008-02-22T15:04:00.000-05:00

Assertive Atheism

LOLTheist: Blasphemy is Teh Funneh » Blog Archive » That means he is now the defacto god.

2008-02-18T15:14:00.000-05:00

LOLTheist: Blasphemy is Teh Funneh » Blog Archive » That means he is now the defacto god.

Heartbreaking and Powerful.

2008-02-18T14:11:00.000-05:00

Create Your Own

Atheist Media Blog: Richard Dawkins Debates Madeline Bunting | Guardian

2008-02-15T16:40:00.000-05:00

Atheist Media Blog: Richard Dawkins Debates Madeline Bunting | Guardian

Ms. Bunting squirms under the pressure of Dawkins' probings. She tries, but she just can't hold her end of the conversation against Dawkins' logic.

From the page: "Stephen Moss introduces a debate between Richard Dawkins and Madeline Bunting."

Sam Harris : 10 myths - and 10 Truths - About Atheism

2008-02-12T16:54:00.000-05:00

Open Library : Sam Harris : 10 myths - and 10 Truths - About Atheism

God's Heavy Handed Messages

2008-02-09T00:08:00.001-05:00

My cousin wrote to tell our family that her father was in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer that nearly killed him. But, and "God be Praised!", while they were shoving scopes up one end and down the other they found that he had a hiatal hernia that can increase his risk of cancer (she said it CAUSED cancer).

In her mind, he was given this horrific bleeding ulcer so that the doctors WOULD FIND A HERNIA. Good grief - why not just give him bad heartburn? Why not a note that says, "Go check for a hernia." Why do they thank god for a heavy handed message like a nearly fatal bleeding ulcer?

Good grief. ::head shaking::

Dueling Billboards.

2008-02-06T14:39:00.001-05:00

It's about time!

Georgia Primaries

2008-02-05T22:48:00.000-05:00

I'm both proud and ashamed of Georgia at the moment. That's the state I've called home for nearly 18 years.

Democrats went to Obama (yea!).

Republicans went to Huckabee. WTF? You have GOT to be kidding me. I mean, I knew Georgia was the proverbial buckle of the Bible Belt, but HUCKABEE? I am really beyond words. I had thought McCain (large military presence in GA) or at worst Romney (in spite of the fundies' fear of Mormons). BUT HUCKABEE?? All I can do is shake my head in disgust...

Hitchens Debate

2008-02-05T16:28:00.001-05:00

Always a pleasure. :-)

Go vote!

2008-02-05T16:27:00.001-05:00

It's super Tuesday don't you know. Well, not here in Texas. But it is in Georgia - my state of residence.

I voted for Obama via absentee ballott. What the hell. I figure he has a better chance of beating ANY of the Republicans than Hillary Clinton has.

Here's the thing, CNN got blasted for their web article about black women having to choose between race and gender. Sure, it was poorly written. I understand what CNN was trying to do: women have been waiting a long time for a female president. Blacks have been waiting a long time for a black president.

I've been waiting a long time for anything other than old white and male (and especially Republican) to take office.

But, like the black women mentioned in the article, I will not vote for a black or female just to get one in office. I'll vote for one that, I believe, will do the best job (by my own standards, of course).

I was torn between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama.

Sure, I wanted a woman in office. But did I REALLY think she'd be able to beat the Republicans? No, I didn't. Not because she's not qualified, but because so many people are sheep that they mindlessly believe the Republican-spread crap and lies about her. Her opposition is based on fear.

I want the Republicans to be split. I want them to lose power due to their lack of unification. I want the Democrats to rally behind their candidate, whether or not they voted for that candidate in the primaries.

Yes, I know. It may be wishful thinking. But I believe that Obama has the greatest chance of unifiying the Democrats, attracting some of the unsure voters, stealing some of the Republicans, and thrashing the Republican nominee.

I'm looking foward to an Obama/Huckabee debate. That's be epic. Fuckabee wouldn't stand a chance. And against Romney... well, Romney would come off as positively slimy. I think he'll turn off a lot of people. McCain? Well, I've already expressed my views of that panderer.

Video: Violence in the Bible.

2008-02-04T18:08:00.000-05:00

Pat Condell - articulate, intelligent, and damn funny!

Black Adder

2008-02-04T04:03:00.001-05:00

Okay, I know xmas is over. BUT, I love this video so I will share it.

It's from Black Adder's Christmas Carol. I've been watching Black Adder for a LONG time and was thrilled to find this tidbit on YouTube.

Video: The United States of Jesus

2008-02-04T01:56:00.000-05:00

United States of Jesus

Raising Atheist Children

2008-02-03T19:21:00.000-05:00

One of the things I haven't heard much about is how atheist parents raise their atheist children. Or, for that matter, how do atheist parents handle raising theist children? So here's an open question: how are YOU raising your children?

Here's my story:

When I was 20 I had my son. My hubby (at the time) was raised Lutheran (his father's religion) but really didn't care about religion one way or the other. His mother was Catholic - very Catholic. My father was Catholic - but a more typical Catholic. He had been told at the age of 14, by some abusive nuns, that if he had any impure (i.e. sexual) thoughts he'd go straight to hell and that'd be it for him. He looked them in the eyes and told them it was too late. He walked away and never went back. However, I still don't know if he believed in god. He simply never said. I don't think I asked. It wasn't an issue to me. My mother was raised a general "protestant". As an elderly women she joined the Methodist Church because she, in her words, "...missed the music..." I wasn't raised to either believe or not believe. Religion simply wasn't an issue in my upbringing.

As adults my sister became Russian Orthodox (her husband's religion). My other sister became an Episcopal and later a Mormon (the religion of her husband). She has moved away from the Mormons (after her divorce) and is looking into other denominations. Another brother is Ba'hai. The other brother never really seemed to believe (he used to run about the house yell "Odin!" at the top of his lungs), but has talked about joining the Russian Orthodox Church as that's what his wife has done (are we seeing a pattern here?). None are particularly devout - at least, not as of the last time I've heard about it from them. I'm the only open atheist, but I suspect one or two of the others may have leanings towards atheism.

On top of all this, I was raised in San Francisco, California. Need I say more? :-)

At the age of 20 I had been an atheist for 8 full years. I knew I wanted to raise my son without a religion, but I didn't want to dictate to him what his beliefs should be. I always made it clear to him that religion was solely his choice and I would love him and support him regardless of my own opinion of his choice. (However, when my father suggested I send him to a Catholic school I immediately recoiled. How could he, after how HE was treated??)

I've always been outspoken about my own beliefs, but when my son was young I tried to withhold my more...um... militant?... beliefs. I didn't want him to be afraid to tell me that he believed in a god.

As a small child he had a assumptive belief in god - like Santa and the Easter Bunny. Once he outgrew the latter, he dropped belief in god. I recall our conversation about Santa. We were walking around a department store doing some xmas shopping. He asked if Santa was real. I was honest and hold him no. Adults invented Santa and some used the myth try to control their children's behavior (like a good version of the boogey man), while others used the myth to try to bring a little more joy into the season. (I didn't get into the commercial promotion of the season - he was only about 7 at the time!) He accepted what I had to say just fine. In fact, when I told him that now he could help be Santa for his younger cousins, he was positively enthusiastic. Then I made a mistake - I made an offhand comment... something like, "...and you know, like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy..." and he just stopped, looked at me wide-eyed and said slowly, "You mean... THEY aren't real EITHER?"

Oh dear. I had stepped in it. So I explained them all to him (without going into any discussion of god). After that conversation his talk of god tapered off to nearly nil. A few years later he informed me that he just didn't believe. I have to admit, my heart leaped for joy in my chest. I asked him why he didn't believe. He gave me good reasons for his disbelief: he simply had no faith, he had never seen or felt god, and he saw no evidence of god.

I was prouder of him at that moment than I had ever been. He had come to his own conclusion based on his life experiences and based on logical, sound thinking.

What more could a mother ask for? I have a 15-year old son who is intelligent, compassionate, empathetic (oh, do not hurt an animal around him or you'll be in trouble!), and not easily fooled. He has what he needs to make it through his life.

Why Are Atheists So Angry? A Debate with Dennis Prager (Sam Harris)

2008-01-31T00:28:00.000-05:00

Reposted from Atheist Exposed2

Sam Harris

Why Are Atheists So Angry? A Debate with Dennis Prager

This Debate was conducted by email for the website Jewcy.com

Author of the thundering anti-theist polemics The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris may just be the Thomas Paine of an emerging movement to wrench religion out of American life. Prager is a nationally syndicated talk radio host who trumpets the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition… (www.jewcy.com)

From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: Yahweh Belongs on the Scrapheap of Mythology

I’d like to begin this exchange by making the observation that “atheist” is a term that should not even exist. We do not, after all, have a name for a person who does not believe in Zeus or Thor. In fact, we are all “atheists” with respect to Zeus and Thor and the thousands of other dead gods that now lie upon the scrapheap of mythology.

A politician who seriously invokes Poseidon in a campaign speech will have thereby announced the end of his political career. Why is this so? Did someone around the time of Constantine discover that the pagan gods do not actually exist, while the biblical God does? Of course not. There are thousands of gods that were once worshipped with absolute conviction by men and women like ourselves, and yet we all now agree that they are rightly dead. An “atheist” is simply someone who thinks that the God of Abraham should be buried with the rest of these imaginary friends. I am quite sure that we need only use words like “reason,” “common sense,” “evidence,” and “intellectual honesty” to do the job.

So many gods have passed into oblivion, and yet the sky-god of Abraham demands fresh sacrifices. Wars are still waged, crimes committed, and science undone out of deference to an invisible being who is believed to have created the entire cosmos, fine-tuned the constants of nature, blanketed the earth with 20,000 distinct species of grasshopper, and yet still remains so provincial a creature as to concern himself with what consenting adults do for pleasure in the privacy of their bedrooms. Incompatible beliefs about this God long ago shattered our world into separate moral communities—Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc.—and these divisions remain a continuous source of human violence.

And yet, while the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics. Yet the September 11th hijackers were college-educated, middle-class, and had no discernible experience of political oppression. They did, however, spend a remarkable amount of time at their local mosques talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise.

How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not merely a matter of education, poverty, or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is that in the year 2006 a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise. Western secularists, liberals, and moderates have been very slow to understand this. The cause of their confusion is simple: They don’t know what it is like to really believe in God.

The United States now stands alone in the developed world as a country that conducts its national discourse under the shadow of religious literalism. Eighty-three percent of the U.S. population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead; 53% believe that the universe is 6,000 years old. This is embarrassing. Add to this comedy of false certainties the fact that 44% of Americans are confident that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years and you will glimpse the terrible liability of this sort of thinking.

Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe. Some of them can actually get Karl Rove on the phone whenever they want.

While Muslim extremists now fly planes into our buildings, saw the heads off journalists and aid-workers, and riot by the tens of thousands over cartoons, several recent polls reveal that atheists are now the most reviled minority in the United States. A majority of Americans say they would refuse to vote for an atheist even if he were a “well-qualified candidate” from their own political party. Atheism, therefore, is a perfect impediment to holding elected office in this country (while being a woman, black, Muslim, Jewish, or gay is not). Most Americans also say that of all the unsavory alternatives on offer, they would be least likely to allow their child to marry an atheist. These declarations of prejudice might be enough to make some atheists angry. But they are not what makes me angry.

As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population. The plain truth is this: There is no good reason to believe in a personal God; there is no good reason to believe that the Bible, the Koran, or any other book was dictated by an omniscient being; we do not, in any important sense, get our morality from religion; the Bible and the Koran are not, even remotely, the best sources of guidance we have for living in the 21st century; and the belief in God and in the divine provenance of scripture is getting a lot of people killed unnecessarily.

Against these plain truths religious people have erected a grotesque edifice of myths, obfuscations, half-truths, and wishful thinking. Perhaps you, Dennis, would now like to bring some of that edifice into view.

From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: The Faith of Disbelief

There is one thing you and I agree on, Sam. You write that you are “quite sure that we need only use words like ‘reason,’ ‘common sense,’ ‘evidence,’ and ‘intellectual honesty’ to do the job.”

I agree because I am certain that use of those wonderful vehicles to truth make the case for God, not for atheism.

Yet you and other atheists—as opposed to agnostics, who simply claim doubts about God—appropriate words like “reason” and “common sense” to maintain a position that is hardly the fruit of reason and common sense.

Is it really reason and common sense that lead atheists to their certitude that everything, all existence, came about by sheer chance? That there is therefore no God, no creator, no designer? Unlikely. Atheist certainty and religious certainty are both faith claims that transcend reason and common sense. But at least religious believers have the intellectual honesty to admit theirs is a faith claim.

Nevertheless, I am not as certain about God as you are about no-God. When I look at the unjust world God created, I have questions, sometimes even doubts. But not atheists like you, Sam. No, they look at love and consciousness, at the grandeur of the universe, at the birth of a child, and they hear Bach’s music and conclude that all of this and everything else just came about by itself.

It is an understatement to say that I do not find that position intellectually compelling. And when held with certitude, it borders arrogance.

On the other side, we believers look at the evidence and believe that there is a God. In that sense, the atheist has considerably less intellectual honesty than the sophisticated believer. The atheist says he knows, despite the fact that what he “knows” is unprovable. The believer believes because he knows that what he believes is ultimately unprovable.

Now, of course, I am referring to the “sophisticated believer,” not to every human on Earth who claims to believe in God. There are many people with simplistic views of God, and many millions who have vile notions of God. If I and all other believers in God are to be lumped with Muslims who believe that slaughtering innocents gets you sex in heaven, then you must be lumped with Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung and all the other atheists who butchered more innocents than all the religious crackpots in history.

Do you not know about people such as Francis Collins? On June 11, 2006, the Times of London reported that “The scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome…now believes in the existence of God … Francis Collins, the director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man ‘closer to God.’”

Is Francis Collins irrational, lacking in common sense, unaware of evidence, and intellectually dishonest? Would you like to debate Francis Collins about God based on the scientific evidence and common sense? I doubt it.

Neither you nor I, untrained in the sciences, would even understand much of the evidence these and many other scientists offer for belief in God.

So, enough of the college dorm clichés about “no evidence” for God. You have not decided to be an atheist because of “no evidence.” As a non-scientist, you are unlikely to even know the evidence that believing scientists offer.

The Times piece quoted Collins:

When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion–letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.

Have you checked those 3.1 billion–letter instructions? I suspect you would understand them as poorly as I would.

In a future response I will address the other points in your opening statement. But I will respond to one now—your argument that Prager’s or Collins’s God is in the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. Did anyone studying the human genome ever argue for Zeus? What are you talking about?

I’ll answer that question. You are talking as if you are addressing fellow atheists who cheer all these lines that belittle faith in God. They think ridicule compensates for their ignorance of intellectually sophisticated God-belief. But unfortunately for you, in this dialogue you are not addressing fellow believers in atheism or people who mock religion. You are addressing a mixed audience and debating a man who knows his arguments. I heard them in high school.

From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: The Burden of Proof Falls on the Faithful

I should clear up a couple misconceptions you have about me. While I am very happy that you have admitted your own ignorance of the relevant science, there is no need to attribute this ignorance to me.

While my day job as an infidel has slowed my progress of late, I am in the process of finishing my Ph.D. in neuroscience. This requires that I actually understand recent developments in biology. Let me assure you that I am firmly grounded in the life sciences and am well aware of the kinds of contortions that people like Francis Collins make in the service of their religious myths. Your claim that I would be afraid to debate Collins is especially amusing, given that I offered to debate him several months ago, and he is still considering it. I’ll be sure to invite you to this event if it ever gets scheduled.

You are, however, quite correct to observe that many scientists do believe in God. I indicated as much in my first post (“a person can have sufficient intellectual ... resources to build a nuclear bomb ...”). But in the developed world this is an American phenomenon. And even in this benighted country of ours, faith in God virtually disappears among the most established scientists.

A recent poll of the National Academy of Sciences (our most elite scientific organization) revealed that only 7% of its members believe in God (compared to 40% of ordinary scientists and 90% of the population at large). Still, I would be the first to admit there is a debate to be waged and won in the scientific community on this point. The fact that 40% of American scientists believe in God does not indicate that there are good reasons to believe in God; it indicates that 60% of scientists aren’t doing their jobs. The faith of people like Collins is invariably propped up by terrible arguments of the sort you have begun to put forward. Let’s look at a few of them.

First, the atheist you have conjured—so chock-full of false certainty—is an utter straw man. This defense of religion is one that Bertrand Russell demolished a century ago with his famous “teapot argument.” As I can’t improve on it, and you clearly have forgotten it amid the many challenges to piety you successfully parried “in high school,” here it is again:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

If a valid retort to Russell has ever seen the light of day, I’m not aware of it.

The faithful do resist the bogus certainties of religion—when they come from any religion but their own. Every Christian knows what it is like to find the claims of Muslims to be deeply suspect. Everyone who is not a Mormon knows at a glance that Mormonism is an obscenely stupid system of beliefs. Everyone has rejected an infinite number of spurious claims about God. The atheist simply rejects one more.

Atheism does not assert that “it is all made by chance.” No one knows why the universe came into being. Most scientists readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not. One of the extraordinary ironies of religious discourse can be seen in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while condemning scientists and other nonbelievers for their intellectual arrogance. You have done a fine job of this above. And yet, there is no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: The Creator of the Universe takes an active interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell…

An average believer has achieved a level of arrogance that is simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.

You suggest that the existence of the universe demonstrates the existence of God. Why? Because everything that exists must have a cause. It is amazing how many people find this argument compelling.

Who is to say that the only thing that could give rise to the universe is a personal God? Even if we accepted that our universe simply had to be designed by a designer, this would not suggest that this designer is the God of Abraham, or that He approves of Judaism or Christianity. If intelligently designed, our universe could be running as a simulation on an alien supercomputer. Or it could be the work of an evil God, or two such gods playing tug-of-war with a larger cosmos.

If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God is uncreated simply begs the question. Why can’t I say that the cosmos is uncreated?

I eagerly await your display of “intellectually sophisticated God-belief,” Dennis. But you’re going to have to do better than that.

From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: Straw Men, Teapots, and Moral Confusion

Dear Sam:

I may have erred in assuming that you, like myself and nearly all other mortals, could not match Dr. Francis Collins—the head of the human genome project— in his knowledge of human genetics. So if, as a graduate student in neuroscience, you have already approached Collins’s level of expertise, I salute you and exclude you from the vast majority of atheists or theists who could not debate him about the science that leads him to belief in God.

My point remains valid, as you graciously concede. Scientific knowledge hardly invalidates belief that there is a God. On the contrary, there are more believers in God in the natural sciences than in the social sciences. This suggests that it is the virtual absence of God in education, not knowledge of science, that likely accounts for the atheism of academics.

I note that you did not respond to my dismissal of your comparison of Zeus-belief with God-belief. You were wise to avoid it. That argument is intellectually silly, and unworthy of serious atheist.

You write that “the atheist you have conjured—so chock-full of false certainty—is an utter straw man.” “Straw man?” Sam, there is not one honest reader of your first letter who could assume anything but certitude on your part. Your dismissal of belief in God as intellectually identical to belief in Zeus proves my point, because both you and I are utterly certain that Zeus is not God.

And if you really aren’t certain that there is no God, level with us about your doubts as I did about mine.

The teapot argument is entirely inapplicable to me. I never wrote that atheism fails because it cannot disprove God. Are you responding to what I wrote, or just assuming that I fall into your caricature of believers?

I am, however, grateful for your bringing Bertrand Russell into the discussion. Russell is a fine example of one major reason I reject atheism. In the West, people and societies who reject the God of Judeo-Christian religions are more likely to become morally confused and foolish than believing Jews and Christians are.

Bertrand Russell, the great atheist, was, to put it gently, a very morally confused man. Among his many confused ideas was to wage pre-emptive war (including, if necessary, using nuclear bombs) on the Soviet Union after World War II, and then, after the Soviet Union gained nuclear weapons, advocated that America and the West disarm.

Secularism usually produces moral and intellectual foolishness in people and institutions. My prime evidence is the contemporary American university, which is a place of intellectual and moral confusion so deep that one must look very hard to find religious Christian or Jewish equivalents.

That is why I wrote a column years ago titled “How I found God at Columbia University.” Professors where I did my graduate work, at the Columbia University School of International Affairs, were wrong on virtually every important issue.

To give but one example of the foolishness that pervades your godless, religionless, secular world, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, was forced from office by the Harvard faculty largely because he had the audacity to say that brain differences between men and women might help account for their different predilections for the sciences and math. As the Psalms put it thousands of years ago, “Wisdom begins with awe of God.” The lack of wisdom at the secular temple, the university—where America is the world’s villain, where women and men are regarded as essentially the same, and where Marxism was taken seriously for generations—verifies the Psalmist’s view.

So thanks for raising Bertrand Russell. Though his china teapot argument is irrelevant to anything I have written or believe, his morally confused outlook on the world helped me to understand how indispensable God is to morality and wisdom, about which (especially in light of your characterization of this country as “benighted”) I’ll write more in my next letter.

Take care,

Dennis

From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: An Irrelevant Argument and Its Imaginary Facts

This debate is fast drawing to a close, Dennis, and you have neither addressed my arguments nor presented any substantive arguments of your own.

I certainly did not claim that I possessed Collins’s level of expertise. I am, however, sufficiently conversant with the relevant science to know that Collins does not hold his beliefs about God for compelling, scientific reasons. You appear rather over-awed by the man’s academic credentials. Let me assure you that even very accomplished scientists can be terrible philosophers.

Collins, as you probably know, has just published a book-length defense of religious faith entitled The Language of God. It is a masterpiece of simple-mindedness. For instance, Collins describes the moment that he, a top-tier scientist, became convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ:

On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains…the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

A recent profile of Collins in Time adds a priceless detail: The waterfall was frozen in three streams, and this put the good doctor in mind of the Trinity! Earlier you wrote that I would not “even understand” the evidence that a genius like Francis Collins would put forward in defense of his faith. I confess you may be right about this.

I hope it is immediately obvious to you, and to every one of our readers, that there is nothing about seeing a frozen waterfall (no matter how frozen) that offers the slightest corroboration of the doctrine of Christianity. If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus is the son of God, then it can mean anything at all.

Let’s say I saw that same waterfall, and its three streams made me think of Romulus, Remus, and the She-wolf—the mythical founders of Rome. I just knew, from that moment forward, that Italy would one day win the World Cup. This epiphany, while perfectly psychotic, would actually put me on firmer ground than Collins. (Because Italy did win the World Cup.)

The reason science (especially in America) doesn’t better inoculate its practitioners against the belief that Jesus was the son of God (or that Joseph Smith received God’s final revelation on golden plates from the angel Maroni) is because it is taboo to seriously challenge a person’s religious faith in our society. I wonder what you make of the fact that some significant number of Hindu scientists believe in a plurality of gods. Does this suggest to you that polytheism has been borne out by dispassionate scientific research?

You also appear to have drawn the wrong conclusion from the statistics. There is little question that exposure to a scientific education reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God, and does so in a more or less linear fashion (about 10% of the general population are atheists/agnostics, 40% of doctors, 60% of research scientists, and 93% of National Academy members).

An article in Nature recently reported that no scientists doubt the existence of God more than biologists, followed closely by physicists and astronomers. I’m not aware of the data you cite on social scientists, but if it is as you report, and they are more atheistic still, it would not surprise me. After all, these people spend a lot of time thinking about things like self-deception, wishful thinking, cognitive biases, and the other enemies of intellectual honesty that keep religion in such good standing in our society.

Tell me why it is more reasonable to believe in Yahweh than in Zeus. I have little doubt that if Francis Collins grew up in a culture in which nine out of ten people venerated the gods of Mount Olympus, that frozen waterfall would have carried a decidedly pagan message (perhaps he would have thought “trident” before “trinity” and hit upon Poseidon as his favorite deity).

Your job is to either produce a rational argument for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition (one that reveals why one billion Hindus are utterly in error about the nature of the cosmos), or to admit that you cannot do this. I am willing to bet the farm that you cannot.

I raised the teapot argument because you accused me (and all atheists) of being certain that God does not exist, inviting our readers to appreciate just how absurd and intellectually dishonest such certainty is. Russell’s argument reveals why an atheist need never pretend to such certainty (as I don’t). The burden is upon those who believe in Yahweh, Zeus, or celestial teapots to provide evidence in support of their doctrines. Russell’s argument does indeed apply to you. And it will apply to your children’s children if we don’t get our heads straight as a civilization.

You wrote: “In the West, people and societies who reject the God of Judeo-Christian religions are more likely to become morally confused and foolish than believing Jews and Christians are.”

As you are well aware, the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence. It is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen-pregnancy, STD infection, and infant mortality. Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above miseries, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. Clearly, strong religious commitment does little to guarantee moral behavior or societal health.

But there is a far more important point for you and our readers to understand. Even if your claim about the link between faith and morality were true, it would offer no support whatsoever for your religious beliefs. Even if atheism led straight to moral chaos, this would not suggest that the doctrine of Judaism is true. Islam might be true in that case. Or all religions might function like placebos. As descriptions of the universe, they could be utterly false but extraordinarily useful. Contrary to your opinion, however, the evidence suggests that they are both false and dangerous.

I suspect, Dennis, that you and I agree about many questions of morality. I trust we both feel that slavery was an abomination, despite the fact that no matter how you squint your eyes the Bible tells us that it is okay to keep slaves. (Who decides what is good in the Good Book? Answer: We do. Our moral intuitions are still primary. It makes absolutely no sense, therefore, to think that we get our basic sense of right and wrong out of scripture). We surely agree that political correctness has undermined the intellectual and moral integrity of much of our discourse, both within our universities and elsewhere.

But the linkage you have drawn between immorality and atheism is spurious. And, needless to say, the taboo that got Lawrence Summers fired is the same taboo that would keep an atheist professor from criticizing the lunatic religious convictions of his students. What we need, across the board, is intellectual honesty—not more dogmatism.

It seems that your attachment to religion results, at least in part, from your abhorrence of moral relativism. I fully share your concern here and spend a considerable portion of my professional energies trying to free secularism from the dangerous nonsense with which it is often entangled. I strongly suspect that you and I have similar views of the risks posed to civilization by the spread of Islam. We probably draw some of the same lessons from the failures of multiculturalism in Western Europe: All the backwardness and barbarism that goes by the name of European Islam (the forced marriages, honor killings, anti-Semitism, hostility to free speech, and so forth) has to be reamed out of those immigrant populations or the whole continent is headed over the falls.

But it is clear from our debate that you and I differ on the location of the problem. In your view, the problem must be that Europe has lost the moral backbone that only religion can provide (and Islam just happens to be the wrong religion.) In my view, our world has been shattered, quite unnecessarily, by religion itself. As I said, even if you were right, and the only people who could summon the moral courage to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world were the religious lunatics of the West, this would suggest nothing at all about the existence of the biblical God. It would only show that a belief in Him might be politically necessary, in a given time and place, to motivate people to fight (as our inimitable President says) “the evildoers.”

I am reasonably sure you are wrong about this. But again, this is quite irrelevant to the question before us.

From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: Unhappy Correlations

Dear Sam:

Dr. Collins did not offer three waterfalls as an argument for belief in the Trinity, not even in your isolated citation from his book or in the single sentence in Time. All he said was that three waterfalls reminded of him of the Christian Trinity and that after observing such awesome beauty he became a believing Christian.

If a man says that a beautiful flower reminds him of his beautiful wife, he is not saying that the beauty of the flower proves his wife is also beautiful. Natural wonders often inspire a person to reflect on the divine. You see natural beauty and, for that matter, everything else in the universe, and see no Creator, just coincidence. I find that reaction at least as odd as you find seeing in nature evidence for a Creator.

The Collins comments simply indicate that he and other eminent scientists see science as arguing for a Creator God. If Collins had said that the existence of three waterfalls proves that there is a Trinity, I would then share your dismissive attitude. But these comments didn’t even imply something so preposterous.

You write that, “There is little question that exposure to a scientific education reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God,” a point I fully acknowledged in my last correspondence. But exposure to other areas of higher education, specifically the “social sciences,” further reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God.

We therefore have two choices about how to interpret these data. One is that the more one knows, the less likely one is to believe in God. That is your interpretation. I have another interpretation—that contemporary higher education increases factual knowledge but decreases wisdom. With some exceptions, I believe that the more time one spends at a university the more foolish he or she becomes.

Only among the highly educated are there still those who believe that men and women are basically the same. Going back a generation or two, support for Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was almost entirely confined in the West to intellectuals. German Ph.D.s were also among Hitler’s greatest supporters. The moral record of secular intellectuals—Lenin’s “useful idiots”— is the worst of any single group in free societies in the last hundred years.

I am therefore not quite bowled over by data connecting higher secular education with atheism.

You write that, “Your job is to either produce a rational argument for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition (one that reveals why one billion Hindus are utterly in error about the nature of the cosmos), or to admit that you cannot do this. I am willing to bet the farm that you cannot.”

Don’t bet your farm quite yet. I have in fact made the case for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition in 25 essays I wrote in 2005. Suffice it to that Judeo-Christian values alone gave humanity the notion of the sacredness of human life; linear history and therefore the idea of moral and scientific progress; universal standards of good and evil; the abolition of slavery; the scientific method; the development of democracy; equality of the sexes; the greatest experiment in non-ethnicity-based society (America); the greatest music ever composed; and the greatest art ever drawn.

As for India, I have traveled there a number of times and lectured there; I have a deep reverence for its people and culture. But India did not give us those contributions. Nor did China and certainly not any of the societies contemporaneous with the ancient Jews who gave us the Torah from which these values emanate.

Presumably you assume that all these world-changing values and unique achievements would have evolved on their own with no Hebrew Bible, no divine revelation, and no Christians to bring the Bible to the world. You are, after all, a believer that everything awesome came from nothing.

That is how you view the world: All things came from no thing; intelligence came from nonintelligence; order came from chaos. I cannot understand why anyone finds these beliefs rationally compelling. I can only conclude that it takes either a university education—the secular immersion that begins in grade school—or an antipathy to religion.

If you want to make the case for secularism producing better people in America, how about “betting the farm” on this: I bet you whatever sum we each can afford that the vast majority of murderers and rapists in this country were not religiously active during the time they committed their violent crimes. I would make a second bet that you won’t take that bet.

Here’s another real-life correlation for you to ponder. For the most part, secular Europe couldn’t tell the moral difference between America and the Soviet Union and can’t tell the difference between Israel and its enemies. Religious America knew the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” and believes that there is a moral chasm separating Israel from its enemies. And secular Europe, like secular America, doesn’t even reproduce itself. Secularism either makes people too selfish to have more than one child and/or shatters any belief in sustaining one’s society and culture.

Finally, I salute you for acknowledging the Islamic threat and for abhorring the moral relativism that pervades the West. Unlike most atheists, you do acknowledge that the moral courage to fight today’s greatest evil is primarily to be found among religious Jews and Christians. I credit that courage to the moral clarity inherent to Jewish and Christian beliefs and to these Jews’ and Christians’ belief in God. I have yet to figure out to what you ascribe the courage among the religious and the lack of moral backbone in secular Europe and America.

You are right that this moral clarity and courage among the predominantly religious does not prove the existence of the biblical God. Nothing can prove God’s existence. But it sure is a powerful argument. If society cannot survive without x, there is a good chance x exists.

From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: Three Ways to Miss the Point

Well, we seem to have arrived at the end of our debate without a true meeting of minds. I doubt either of us expected to change the other’s views on religion. Before signing off, I would like to point out that you have relied on a variety of maneuvers that do not (even in combination) lend any support to your position:

1. You have observed that some very smart people, like Francis Collins, believe in God.

As it stands, citing such good company doesn’t amount to an argument—especially when the reasons these illustrious people have for believing in God are risible. Unfortunately, it is your treatment of Collins that is “misleading.” The excerpt I provided represents his own account of the precise moment he had his doubts about Christianity removed. You are rightly embarrassed by this, given your reliance on him as one of the great lights of “sophisticated” faith.

I will leave it to our readers to consult Collins’s book and decide for themselves whether the man arrived at his belief in the risen Christ through the science of molecular biology or by some other route. You, however, would do well to observe that there is an enormous difference between (1) acquiring a picture of the world through dispassionate, scientific study, and (2) acquiring it through emotionality and wishful thinking, then looking to see if can survive contact with science. Collins has clearly done the latter.

The fact that evangelical Christianity can still survive contact with science (because of the gaps in science) does not mean that there are scientific reasons for being an evangelical Christian. And despite your gyrations on the subject, the fact that scientists are, across the board, less religious than nonscientists suggests that science doesn’t tend to support religious belief.

2. You have, rather frequently, ignored the plain meaning of words.

I trust that attentive readers will notice where you have misconstrued me (or rendered a tortured interpretation of Collins, polling data, etc.).

3. You have continually sought to make the case that belief in God is useful.

While the usefulness of religion might be worth debating in another context, it is completely irrelevant to the question of whether God exists. (It is debatable, of course, because the Judeo-Christian tradition, to which you ascribe so much of humanity’s progress, has also spawned much of the world’s misery—and even produced Stalin, the worst of the worst).

The fact that certain religious beliefs might be useful in no way suggests their legitimacy. I can guarantee, for instance, that the following religion, invented by me in the last ten seconds, would be extraordinarily useful. It is called “Scientismo.” Here is its creed: Be kind to others; do not lie, steal, or murder; and oblige your children to master mathematics and science to the best of their abilities or 17 demons will torture you with hot tongs for eternity after death. If I could spread this faith to billions, I have little doubt that we would live in a better world than we do at present. Would this suggest that the 17 demons of Scientismo exist? Useful delusions are not the same thing as true beliefs.

With regard to your wager about the religiosity of murderers and rapists—it depends, of course, on what you mean by “religiously active.” If you are suggesting that these violent offenders rarely believe in your biblical God, I will happily take this bet. The rate of belief among murders and rapists in the U.S. must surely exceed the rate of nonbelief. I would even be willing to handicap it: We can leave aside the thousands of ordained child-rapists in the Catholic Church (or weren’t they “religiously active” by your lights?).

I should also point out that you sealed your last missive with a fallacy. You wrote:

“You are right that this moral clarity and courage among the predominantly religious does not prove the existence of the biblical God. Nothing can prove God’s existence. But it sure is a powerful argument. If society cannot survive without x, there is a good chance x exists.”

No, Dennis, this moral clarity is not a “powerful argument,” or even an argument at all; please keep your x’s straight. If humanity can’t survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn’t, even remotely, suggest that God exists.

A further irony, of course, is that the civilizational threat that worries us both—Islamic fascism—is purely the product of religious faith, held for precisely the reasons (or pseudo-reasons) you defend. If Muslims didn’t think of themselves as “Muslims”, Jews as “Jews”, and Christians and “Christians”, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Let me assure you that “sophisticated” Muslims resort to the same rationalizations that Francis Collins does to prop up their belief in mighty Allah. Indeed, your “awesome beauty of nature” is one of the chief rationales for faith found in the Koran. How many more people will have to die because of this Iron Age response to the beauty of nature?

If nothing else, our debate clearly reveals how difficult it is to change another person’s mind on this subject. Perhaps some of our readers had their views shifted one way or the other. Whatever the result, I’m very happy we took the time to correspond.

All the best,

Sam

From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: Your Task is Far Greater than Mine

I will leave it to our readers to identify who relied on “maneuvers.”

To help them judge I will cite your words and not rely on paraphrasing your views as you have mine.

You write: “You have observed that very smart people, like Francis Collins, occasionally believe in God.”

I didn’t write that. I wrote that some eminent scientists believe in God and that some of them have come to believe in God through science. The issue was scientists and belief, not “very smart people” and belief. In fact, with no implication intended regarding you, I have almost never encountered “very smart people” who do not believe in God. The vast majority of atheists I have met had fine brain matter, but if “smart” includes wisdom, intellectual depth, profundity of thought, and moral insight, I have encountered such people almost exclusively among believers in the Judeo-Christian God. (For the record, I have also met fools who believe in this God.)

You write: “I trust that attentive readers will notice where you have misconstrued me (or rendered a tortured interpretation of Collins, polling data, etc.) and then pressed a false charge.”

I continue to defend my understanding of Collins—in fact, on my radio show I asked him about the waterfalls and he sustained my, not your, understanding. (The entire interview with him is available through my website.)

You never took my bet that the vast majority of violent criminals were not religiously active when they committed their crimes. Instead you redefined “religiously active” to mean belief in the biblical God. Everyone who uses the term knows it doesn’t refer to belief; it refers to being active within a religion, such as with regular church or synagogue attendance, Bible study, etc. You know as well as I do that such people are not proportionately represented among America’s violent criminals. So you redefined “religiously active” to avoid the wager.

You write: “While the usefulness of religion might be worth debating in another context, it is completely irrelevant to the question of whether God exists.” I agree. My argument is that unlike Judeo-Christian America, secular societies—generally meaning those of Western Europe—lose their will to survive (by not reproducing), and stand for nothing (they were largely morally worthless in the Cold War against Communism and are worthless or worse in helping to keep Israel alive against Muslims who vow to exterminate the Jewish state.) When people realize this, they may conclude that something that is necessary for society to survive—belief in the God of Israel—may in fact exist.

You write that the Judeo-Christian tradition “even produced Stalin.” I have to admit this is a first in a lifetime of debating atheists. I can only imagine that you are referring to the fact that Stalin attended a Christian seminary as a youth. So what? Stalin was a passionate atheist who murdered untold numbers of Christian clergy, destroyed virtually every church in Russia, and forced Soviet students to study “scientific atheism.” If those violent pro-atheism policies were produced by the Judeo-Christian tradition, then words have no meaning.

You write: “Useful delusions are not the same thing as true beliefs.”

That is certainly true. However, if what may be a “useful delusion” is responsible for Judeo-Christian civilization’s abolishing slavery, discovering science and the scientific method, affirming rationality, believing in progress (the Torah was unique in repudiating the cyclic view of life), elevating women’s rights, affirming universal human rights, establishing the sanctity of human life, and so much more, then I would be loathe to dismiss it as merely a “useful delusion.”

You write: “If humanity can’t survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn’t, even remotely, suggest that God exists.” This statement is as novel as the one suggesting that Stalin was produced by Judeo-Christian values. It is hard for me to imagine that any fair-minded reader would reach the same conclusion. If we both acknowledge that without belief in God humanity would self-destruct, it is quite a stretch to say that this fact does not “even remotely suggest that God exists.” Can you name one thing that does not exist but is essential to human survival?

You conclude: “If nothing else, our debate clearly reveals how difficult it is to change another person’s mind on this subject. Perhaps some of our readers had their views shifted one way or the other. Whatever the result, I’m very happy we took the time to correspond.”

I, too, am happy we took the time to correspond. But I never entered this debate with any hope that I would change your mind on this subject. The motto of my radio show is, “I prefer clarity to agreement,” and that is why I agreed to this. I wanted readers to attain clarity about the differences between atheism and Judeo-based theism.

And with that goal in mind, I will end with my re-wording of a superb summary of the argument for belief in God that was made by Rabbi Milton Steinberg (1903–1950), a rationalist (and non-Orthodox) rabbi: “The believer in God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for the existence of everything else.”

And that is why your task, Sam, is infinitely greater than mine.

All the best,

Dennis

About Sam Harris: Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. He is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of contemplative disciplines, for twenty years. Mr. Harris is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME , U.S. News and World Report, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, Der Spiegel, The Globe and Mail, New Scientist, Wired, SEED Magazine, and many other journals. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Several foreign editions are in press. Mr. Harris makes regular appearances on television and radio to discuss the danger that religion now poses to modern societies. His essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. He blogs for the Washington Post / Newsweek website: On Faith.

About Dennis Prager: Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show live Monday through Friday mornings from Los Angeles. Widely sought after by television shows for his opinions, he’s appeared on “Larry King Live,” “Hardball,” “Hannity & Colmes,” “CBS Evening News,” “The Today Show” and many others. Dennis also writes a syndicated column (Creators Syndicate) that is published in newspapers across the country and on the Internet. His writings have also appeared in major national and international publications including, Commentary, The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal. He has authored four books, including The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, which remains a paperback bestseller over 20 years after its release. Mr. Prager was a Fellow at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, where he did graduate work at the Middle East and Russian Institutes. He has taught Russian and Jewish history at Brooklyn College; and was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Delegation to the Vienna Review Conference on the Helsinki Accords. He holds an honorary doctorate of laws from Pepperdine University.

Uh... I'm going crazy.

2008-01-25T00:22:00.001-05:00

Uh... I'm going crazy.

Soooo... I have an appointment with a psychiatrist on the 31st. Haven't been on meds for several years now. But, I really need to be.

In a way, I'm looking forward to going because I've been going NUTS lately.

I rarely leave my apartment.

When I do go out, I'm not alone.

I have *one* friend that I get to see in person.

I've always been the type to go where I want, when I want. New cities, out into the boonies, cross-country driving - I've done it all, by myself, no problem.

But I can't handle crowds (that's not new). And moving to an urban area has ensured that I just don't want to go out. Too many people. Too much noise. Too much visual and audio stimulation. It drives me nuts if I can't tune it out. It's overwhelming, to say the least.

::sigh::

Bi-polar, PTSD, anxiety, and I'm suspecting Sensory Integration Dysfunction. That'd explain some of the problems I'm having with sights and sounds...

And it's STILL bloody raining.

One week from today...

Stay Thin? Or Stay Sane? Heath Decided For Me

2008-01-24T21:00:00.000-05:00

I have an appointment with a doctor on the 31st. For the first time in my life, I'm really looking forward to it. Being thin doesn't make me happy (but it sure doesn't hurt). What good is being thin if you're miserable?

Re-post from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-keenan/stay-thin-or-stay-sane-_b_83158.html

Stay Thin? Or Stay Sane? Heath Decided For Me
by Linda Keenan
Originally Posted January 24, 2008 | 07:58 PM (EST)

I canceled an appointment with my psychiatrist for today, and for that I have Heath Ledger to thank. That sounds a little crazy. So I'll explain.

Over the past month or so I have been putting on what I call my Huff Pounds: weight I have gained since I had the temerity to write recently about my spectacular, glorious weight loss, in "How I Lost All That Junk (Inside My Trunk)." I could tell myself that my waistline is facing karmic retribution from readers who didn't buy my diet strategy (this post's for you, ResidentCynic! I'm picturing you rubbing your hands together in glee, as is your right). But the truth is, I know why I've gained weight, and it's not because I'm eating more. It's because I recently doubled my anti-depressant. I was about to go to the shrink to either cut the dose, or switch drugs in hopes of shedding the Huff Pounds (and we're talking only a few pounds here). Enter Heath Ledger.

I didn't know Heath Ledger, obviously. I am not a psychiatrist. He very well could have died of natural causes. I can only tell you my gut reaction, which was that he was suffering from depression of some sort, and perhaps that will turn out to be wrong. Regardless, my instinct, warranted or not, drove me to put the Huff Pounds aside and take a rigorous account of my own mental health.

I know that many still believe that depression is a lifestyle choice for chronic complainers. I know they think that, because I used to secretly suspect that, until my son was born 3 years ago and I was so overcome by love, hormones and anxiety that I stopped sleeping, eating (a first for me) and feeling alive. I had had problems in the past, but this felt a few levels away from life-threatening. My husband said "you look dead. Your face looks dead." My baby's cries terrified me. I had panic attacks. I stopped returning phone calls. I stopped caring about watching McLaughlin Group (I'm serious, this is a depression litmus test for me). I only had the energy to care about one person's appearance, and that was my son's, not my own.

Within months, anti-depressants had saved me. The faraway stare was gone, the panic, at least part of the insomnia. But the tricky thing with the meds is that the better you feel, the more you begin to think you don't need them. About 2 years ago, I went off. I soon cratered again, and went back on a low dose. I vowed to never go off them again (and I won't) but at the low dose, I was still careening up and down. At a particularly bad time some months ago, I doubled my dose. And I haven't felt this good since before I had my son.

I am now sleeping better than I have in years. I am a peppy room parent at pre-school. I have been so productive with my writing work that I've been terrorizing editors on both coasts with my creative bounty (perhaps they wouldn't mind if I cut my dosage just a touch...). I've lost a lot of social anxiety, and what have I gained? A few measly pounds. Again, a forgetful arrogance began to sneak back in, the better I felt. Vanity is a sure sign that my mind is in proper working order.

I soon made the appointment to perhaps cut my dose or change the drug. I wouldn't go off the pills, ever. But changing them is a risk, for me at least. Even a few days of acute depression is a few too many. Then came Heath.

I focused in like a laser on bits of his story: his own mention of serious insomnia, that he couldn't stop his mind from racing. He was by all accounts besotted with his toddler and apparently very troubled by his separation from her.

I decided to go back and reread some of the emails from my "down times", as I call them, and they scared me, as well they should. I only found the energy to talk to a few best friends. I said "I'm down. I'm really really down. I can't sleep at all. I might need to see you." For a recovering Catholic, it takes a lot for me to ask for anything, especially help, even from best friends. Then I looked at a depression check list I made for my husband, what he needs to do if I have another "down time." The first item says this: "when I'm going down, help me call the shrink and push for a quick appointment. Make sure I get to the appointment, as in go in late to work if that's what it takes." I saw also that I noted in this file my down times from last 2 years, periods of a few weeks in which I lost and then gained back 7-10 pounds each time: Oct. '06, Dec. '06, Mar. '07, May '07, Sept. '07. Is this something I want to go through again?

The picture that moved me most in this Heath Ledger tragedy is the image of the name "Matilda" drawn into the pavement in front of the Brooklyn brownstone where Ledger first lived with his daughter and her mother. Now matter how Ledger died, the two-year-old will grow up without her doting and remarkably talented dad.

As for me, the meds are staying exactly where they are, because the most important man in my life doesn't care what I weigh. He's about a year older than Matilda, and his name is Frank.

Rain.

2008-01-24T03:17:00.000-05:00

It's been raining for weeks. Day after day after day. Especially at night.

Now, I'm not usually the type of person whose mood is affected by the weather.

But this is ridiculous.

I got to go to the park for one day in the last month - the weekend before last.

Other than that I'm inside, day after day after day.

I'm planning on going to the park this weekend. We're supposed to have a break in the weather and it's even supposed to warm up a bit by Sunday.

Because, you see, if I don't get to go out, get some fresh air, and see some trees, I think I'll go totally bonkers. I think I'll be damn near fuck nuts crazy by Monday if I don't get to go to the park.

Dammit.

Noise.

2008-01-23T15:35:00.000-05:00

Noise.

I hate noise. Maybe it's a part of being bi-polar, or maybe I have some sort of sensory issue.

I hate loud TVs. I'm in an apartment where I keep the TV volume just high enough to hear. If it's louder, it's because someone else is listening to it, or because I have to drown out the FREAKING neighbor's TV. WHY do they have to have it so loud that I can hear it AND feel it? Ridiculous. I've complained to management TWICE. Both times, the volumes have dropped. The first time only for two days. We'll see how long this one lasts.

I can't stand loud voices, either. Especially children's voices. Loud bass (like from passing cars) causes an almost physical pain. A baby crying or a toddler having a tantrum DOES cause physical pain.

Commercials with jingles make me nearly violently ill. Or maybe just violent. :-)

I hate repetitious noises... like clicking pens, tapping pencils... those will drive me batty pretty quick.

The only exception is music (that I like, that is!). I can handle that louder. Go figure.

I've been like this since at LEAST age 15 - so minimum of 20 years. At least, that's when it became a true problem...

Maintaining a Tenuous Hold On Sanity.

2008-01-19T16:13:00.000-05:00

The last 6 months have been pretty bad. The failure of my marriage, the fall-out from the choices I made, moving to TX and wanted desperately to move back home. Wondering if I should try to salvage my marriage. I just don't know what to do anymore.

I don't trust my own choices. I went from being decisive and pretty independent in action to being afraid to leave my apartment on my own and being unable to make any decisions. I'm turning into a recluse and I DON'T LIKE IT, but it doesn't really help to know that.

I have an appointment on the 31st to address various problems: PTSD, anxiety, depression and probably bi-polar.

We'll see what happens...

My BF sent me this:
"A good woman is proud of herself.
She respects herself and others.
She is aware of who she is.
She neither seeks definition from the person she is with, nor does she expect them to read her mind.
She is quite capable of articulating her needs.

A good woman is hopeful.
She is strong enough to make all her dreams come true.
She knows love, therefore she gives love.
She recognizes that her love has great value and must be reciprocated. If her love is taken for granted, it soon disappears.

A good woman has a dash of inspiration, a dabble of endurance. She knows that she will, at times, have to inspire others to reach their true potential.

A good woman knows her past, understands her present and moves toward the future.

A good woman has faith in her abilities.
She knows, with that faith the world is her playground, but without it she will just be played.

A good woman does not live in fear of the future because of her past. Instead, she understands her life experiences are merely lessons, meant to bring her closer to self knowledge and unconditional self love."

Time

2008-01-19T02:04:00.000-05:00

Staying up late once again. I enjoy the night hours. That doesn't help me sleep when I'd RATHER be awake during the night.

I "waste" a lot of time doing a lot of nothing. I often have nothing to show for my time. Lately I'm spending more time conversing with people - so that's not really a waste, is it? I'm spending more time cooking and cleaning than I've done in years - that's not really a waste, either. But still the laundry is piled high, and I really don't have anything to show for that time spent. But that's OK.

I have stitching to do. I've started 3 bookmarks, and I still haven't finished my sister's project. Now I want to start making seat cushions, too. But that last one is more practical. I'd like to have comfortable places for people to sit. I have a couch but my dining room chairs - well, only monks could appreciate those.

Instead, I write this. Not being in school means that I am not writing. I'm not creating. I miss school; I miss writing papers; I miss research.

I'm going to bed soon - or at least, I'm going to try.

Why are you people reading this?? Don't you have anything better to do with YOUR time??? :-)

Spending Time.
Wasting Time.
Time is Flying.
Lost Time.
Gained Time.
Make More Time.

All of these phrases are silly, really. Time is a human perception. It's just the present - this moment - that makes a difference. I don't mean that one can only live for the moment - that's very selfish. But really, once it's in the past there's no time for regret. So what to do? Make sure you don't waste time repeating mistakes. So spend time contemplating where you went wrong and you'll save time in the future.

Opinions

2008-01-19T01:57:00.000-05:00

Opinions are funny things. Have too many, you irritate people; too few, and somehow you become a non-entity; feel too strongly about them and you risk being labeled a bitch/overbearing, abrasive, etc. etc.

I have a lot of opinions on a lot of things. If I don't have an opinion on something, I'll tell you just that - and let you know that I'll look into whatever the subject is and see if I can form an opinion.

Some opinions are snap: I don't want to eat octopus. I haven't tried it. I haven't researched the pros and cons about eating octopus. I just don't want to eat it. 'nuff said.

I didn't have an opinion on the flat tax until I had to research it for an English paper. Boy did that open my eyes and show me how unfair that system could be!

The trickiest opinions are those deemed "personal" - political alignment, religion, drugs, relationships, how you raise your kids...

I have a LOT of opinions on those fronts. But, they are just my opinions. I recognize that others do not always share my opinions, and I'm really OK with that. Don't take my militant attitude about my own opinions for intolerance of other people's opinions. I really don't care if someone has opinions that oppose my own as long as their opposition does not suppress my opinion (and how I act on them) or hurt those I care about.

I love that the people I know do not think the same way I do. See the comments on my previous post. Fuck Life states that he doesn't agree with some of my opinions. But we don't need to argue about it because it's ok that we don't agree - that's what keeps things interesting.

A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away), I wasn't so tolerant. I let my opinion get the better of me. After all, if it was my opinion, it must be the best! ha! Ah, youth! Oscar Wilde said (this may be a paraphrase), "I'm not young enough to know everything." What a smart man! Opinions are not the final form of a thought - it's the form of the thought at that very moment and based on information which is only as good and current as the last source utilized.

I don't know everything. My opinions change as my knowledge and situation changes. Some opinions remain firm: I still don't like liars; I don't want to be around drug users; I still don't want to be around people who use others; I still won't eat octopus. But where once I would have crapped all over those who fill those categories, now I can tolerate them, even if I don't really care for them. I still don't want to be exposed to those things that I don't like, so I limit my exposure to that person. I try to not completely shun that person (as I've done before). However, I WILL shun someone who is a destructive force.

This is an on-going process. Tomorrow, maybe my opinion on what I wrote will change. That's the beauty of it.

"I have opinions of my own -- strong opinions -- but I don't always agree with them." - George Bush.

teehehehe!

Love.

2008-01-19T01:54:00.000-05:00

Forever.

Recently I had several conversations with different people with love.

One conversation dealt with love that lasts "forever." I am no longer a firm believer in this. I believe that it's possible, but I do not believe that it's typical. Love is, after all, nothing much more than a chemical process we experience. It's certainly possible to love more than once - I've loved three times. There were other times when I thought I was in love, but hindsight showed me that it was something else: dependence, loneliness, strong friendship, etc. Sure, some relationships last a lifetime, but could they last forever? Thousands of years? Doubtful. A lifetime really isn't that long. Of those I've talked to who have lasted a very long time, often neither is no longer "in love" but have developed a strong dependency on each other. Sure, this can be better than being in love, but we're talking about being in love, aren't we? More often than not, I hear that one or the other isn't really so in love anymore while the other partner is. This is hard on both sides (at least, if both sides understand what's going on!). One side is still head-over-heels, the other is tolerant of the love and devotion but stays for other reasons. To each his own.

True Love.
What I do know is that there is a "true" love. I felt that love when my son was born. That love will last forever, no matter what happens. He may become the next major serial killer, and I may not like him, but I would still love him. This is different from what a child feels for his/her parents. Plenty of people don't love their kids; plenty of kids don't love their parents. Plenty of people simply tolerate their parents. I'm more proud of my son than I can ever express. He's the best decision I ever made; he's the product of what is good in me - what little there is!

But I can love lots of people.
Leaving Georgia after 17 years has taught me that I loved my best friend more than I realized - and miss her more than I imagined I would. I want to cry just writing this.

Leaving James showed me that I can truly love someone I don't feel I can live with. This just makes me want to cry even more - for what could have been, for what was... the loss.

This summer taught me that I can love - truly love - two people at the same time. I never believed that before. Strangely enough, I don't feel confused over this. I've often thought that I wish I could combine these two loves. Yes, I'd love to have my cake and eat it, too. Who doesn't?

The Future.
I don't know what the future will bring. I hope there is still love. I hope someone loves me; I hope I have someone to love. I enjoy sharing and expressing my love. When I can't, I feel stifled, trapped, unhappy. I have to express my feelings in whatever way I can: cooking, caring for - whatever comes to mind. All I need is someone who will accept that from me.

eh.

Sleep... Beautiful Sleep

2008-01-19T01:48:00.000-05:00

Some of us take sleep for granted.

Personally, I love sleep. It just doesn't come easy to me. I have the opportunity to sleep nightly, but it simply doesn't come to me the way I want it to.

Most people get tired, put their heads on pillows, and fall asleep. I try that, but usually I lay - exhausted - staring at the ceiling. Sometimes I can keep my eyes closed, but my brain runs a mile a minute.

Lately, I've had more luck falling asleep faster, but the other problem remains: I don't stay asleep. I wake up frequently all-night long.

I've tried drugs (the legal type), I've tried soft music, I've done the sleep study (that confirmed that yep, I do wake up often but no one knows why!). Nothing really works.

Typical sleep issue for me: I go to bed late, am plenty tired, wake up all night long, get up early, stay up late again so I am plenty tired the next night - and still don't fall asleep until 5:30 AM. Sleep for one whole hour. Oh, goody!

The worst thing? Living with someone who can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. It's hard to watch someone else sleep when all you want is a little of what they are getting.

Sleeping...

2008-01-18T03:31:00.000-05:00

It's 2:30 A.M.

I've had 2 sleeping pills.

I'm still awake.

What gives?

WHY can't I SLEEP?