A reminder:

Amendment 1
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment 6
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

If an atheist walks into a courtroom with this:

You are going to tell me that this doesn’t violate her right to a fair trial, and the establishment clause, especially seeing as this is the only display in the court?!

Bullshit. These same idiots who are going after the ACLU are the ones who used the ACLU in at least two cases protecting free speech:

California: A high school student, Tyler Chase Harper is allowed wear a shirt opposing homosexuality in protest of his school’s day dedicated to gay rights, the ACLU fought and won him that right.

New Jersey: The ACLU defended the right of an elementary school girl to sing a religious song at the school supported talent show.

I agree 100% with the rulings of these two cases, yet in the words of Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian anti-ACLU and civil liberty destroyer: “[The ACLU is] one of the worst attackers of religious speech in America,”.

Honestly, fuck you ADF. The ACLU is a protector of ALL civil liberties, regardless of who they come from… and you think they would protect Muslims more than they do Christians?

Think again you twisted half-wits. This kid has a constitutional right to flush whatever holy text he wants, and the ACLU is going to defend him as well.

So chill, the ACLU is out to protect you folks. Stop being ignorant, please.

How riveting could a political speech really be, if majority of what makes America so awesome are the same people who are not so inclined to listen.

I was sitting for lunch at a small sandwich place, musing, like the good little wannabe writer that I am, overhearing the conversation next to me by two friendly country loving, diesel trucking driving, construction working guys. They were detailing the procedure for  the Rhode Island vehicle inspection process and griping about the cost, “bullshit factor”, and time it took to have it done. Having personal experience of the subject on hand, I quipped about the traffic tribunal that met anyone who failed to obtain a waiver or passed inspection after 30 days. I was instantly accepted between them, and the two of them instantly turned towards me as if to subconsciously include me in their entire conversation.

The moment was inspiring. I felt a sort of bond with these guys, even though I had just met them. We shared something in common, something bigger than the greatest speech, exciting new policy, partisan rhetoric…

We shared hatred for the system. And honestly, what bond is left for the common man to share? With the diversity in careers, and world views, and  values, what else could guys like that, and the modern progressive, college educated, libertarian atheist share?

On the list of what is most important to those two guys, civil liberties are probably not anywhere in the top 20.  Who am I to assume that I could do it any better than anyone else…

The experiences that stack themselves on my moral foundation always paint a picture to me of the importance of expression, the importance of being able to bitch at the perceived injustice of the ruling class. This medium, not unlike the table in a small sandwich shop, need protection, if anything else. Regardless of what anyone else thinks is important, from the mothers actively trying to ban law abiding, but problematic child stalkers, to protesters on the streets of highways,  to Cheney offenders. We need to protect certain freedoms, regardless of how much others would rather not have them…

When you realize how many people are offended by the everyday things you do, you should understand the slippery slope of censorship…

Lately, Iowa has been the center several publicized religious battles. A veritable front-line for the culture war, we’ve seen The University of Iowa rule over tenure for a creationist astronomer, and give tenure to Dr. Hector Avalos, an atheist religious studies professor., something which greatly disturbed our drinking buddies over at Discovery Institute.  Soon, Freedom from Religion Foundation was invading Iowa and the University over a proposal to use a Christian Chaplain for the Cyclones football team, this is still an ongoing battle. At nearly the same time, a GOP presidential candidate faith forum was held there that ultimately on its’ exclusion of Ron Paul, fired up the freedom loving people of Iowa into the Revolution frenzy.

Now, Americans United is about to light the storm ablaze over the Innerchange Freedom Initiative (IFI), a recepient of the extremely unconstitutional general appropriations funds given to the president, known as the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, over their program’s supposed openness to all faiths. Bringing a lawsuit that claims that the IFI is in fact an extreme Christian evangelical organization that expects participants of the program to proclaim a faith in Jesus. There is an expectation that participants won’t get special treatment, (ie… better cells, tv, quality food, early release) but there is no checks and balances on that… The program is funded by the people, and ostracizes anybody not of the Christian faith, even as their philosophy points out: “InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) is a Biblically-based, Christ-centered 24-hour a day prison model that originated in South America.”

The fastest growing “religion” in this country is actually non-religion. Yet,  the presidential candidates have used inclusion of God to such a degree of success, the part that most champions a stringent anti-theocracy is now falling in suite to copy the success, as the always insightful Austin Cline points out.

It should be extraordinarily obvious to anyone that when two differing groups of people are invoking invisible spirits as sources of inspiration for their policies, that this supposed God is not talking the same language. There is a tremendous amount of blame dispersing going on in the theistic world right now… Everyone is pointing their finger to the other denominations at having caused the backlash, and often resort to the “No true Scotsman” fallacy, when describing how their version of Christianity isn’t the one we (the Atheists) are upset about… and as one member of RichardDawkins.net pointed out “Last I checked, hardly anyone was a Unitarian…” a reference that most of the critics of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris are of the type that believe in a vastly more stringent liberal theism than the purported followers  of the Judeo-Christian religions, unlike the type who would protest someone else’s prayer on the senate, perhaps.

The number one issue for me in this election is religion. Period. Religion caused 9/11, religion is now stripping our liberties and rights, and religion is a powerful weapon against freedom. Its’ coupling with our government is insanely dangerous, and there are few true watchdogs protecting us from ourselves in this regard… Supposedly intelligent, educated, and clear-thinking men, like Senator Brownback, allowed to get away with saying that the founders of this country intended the establishment clause, with its’ inflection on the word “RESPECTING”, only applied to keeping the state out of the church, and not the other way around…

I am getting frustrated, and I am not alone. There is a sickening and twisting decline of this nation towards religious theocracy. We are one judge away from the reality of it, and in the words of Dr. James Luther Adams, Harvard Ethics Professor of author Chris Hedges, we would be fighting the “Christian Fascists” by the time we reached his age at the time 1972,  (80).  That leaves a roughly 40-50 year approximation. With the amount of GOD you are hearing about now, do you think we even have that long?

If you are one of the types of people who constantly need your daily dose of information, this will resonate with you…

From Facebook, Drudge Report, Youtube, CNN, Digg, Wikipedia, and the BBC there is a constant endless supply of info for the News Junkie to sort through… Each representing a unique facet of the ever connected world, each plugging us into a place to find more info, and to ultimately decide for ourselves what represents the truth, what represents fact, and hopefully what ultimately constitutes the mendacious junk in between, for which there is a tremendous amount.

We are to believe strongly that our interests are protected by the freedom of the presses, our freedom of assembly, speech, and religion. Called collectively, the Freedom of Expression. We believe in the mantra we are told as children… you live in the greatest free country, we love our freedom, and be damned if you question it… To question…isn’t that a freedom we should hold dearest? The media, the vanguard for these liberties should protect us from this distortion, protect us from powerful interests separating and dividing the country between blue and red states, liberal and conservative.

In Newport, RI, my home town, a magazine once called The Mercury was published before the start of the revolution that forged this country, and it was, to say the least, a primer for rebellion, openly antagonistic, openly questioning, and openly calling out the injustice of government policies gone too far. You are not a patriot apparently, if you question the war on terror, you are not a patriot if you demand change, you are not a patriot if you don’t believe in the same god, you are not a patriot if you protest, if you speak up, if you cry out that something is hideously wrong…This mantra serves the lowest of us, and it is the media, the watchdog that should be protecting us against these thought crimes, and I believe that the media institution fails. Reporters Without Borders has rated the United States 53rd on an index of freedom of press.
Freedom of Press! What does this mean? It means that the media has been bought. Ratings rule, advertisers direct, and corporate interests churn the mood of the public…

For those of us who know better, who read the sources, who scroll the Blogosphere looking for the information that will verify our thoughts and passions, only to have to suspend our own opinions when wrong, this development is clear, and the pinnacle of way of life is brought into question when we realize we disagree completely with what has been shown and said, over and over… and the gentle simple reporting of all the major news outfits seems awkwardly juvenile, mundane, and without substance. Then, we are given the analysis, how we SHOULD think about what just occurred… The most recent example, the Youtube Debates last night, in which analysts immediately declared Hilary a winner, pointing to her leadership, her candor, her appearance… The resident experts were all but instantly shut up by the endless poll results, which declared, very unanimously, that Obama was clearly the winner in the debate.

Are they out of touch?

Perhaps, when the major news finally runs a story, it has already had a run on Slashdot, Digg, or a blogger somewhere has wrapped it up, with as much professionalism, publicly and popularly forged, as any person hired by the big companies.
People wonder why paper circulation is dropping drastically, like it isn’t obvious. Speed. That paper is literally yesterday’s news. If you are in the frontlines of the current culture war, you know where the issues are, you know what is important, and you know what the faces of each side look like…

On Facebook, you learn that Darfur, Religion, and the Iraq war rule the college age crowds. On Youtube, the atheists have the most videos of any other group of people, most with above 4 star ratings, and well into the hundreds of thousands views. Did you know that there was a religious/cultural war going on right now? I bet most of you didn’t. Did you know that the most popular video on Youtube, a meme of self publishing hand notes, shared values that were in fact seemingly universal… Peace, friendship, love, humanity, intelligence, reason, fairness, justice, and freedom… sweet, sweet, freedom. When you check Wikipedia for facts, you know when something sounds fishy, you search the source, you search the sources’ source, and you weed out the erroneous material to get your answer…

Finally, as the purest example of what the internet has done for our freedoms, the grassroots campaign of Senator Ron Paul, who although disagreeing with him on some issues (Read Separation of Church/State) has the most solid stance on what American’s really want from this government.

And the man is ignored in the media, utterly, as my friend Micah Nelson points out very clearly. If you are like me, if you are there, watching the videos, blogging, reading, searching, finding, sourcing, and feeling… you know that Ron Paul is bigger than what the general media is allowing to show… A poll broadcast on Fox News, the one that decided that “None of the Above” was the winner, well, it happened to a be a poll that didn’t include Ron Paul’s name… as if his campaign simply didn’t exist…

I am hit hard by the Ron Paul Revolution, because it is similar to the type of grassroots movement that is starting the second true enlightenment. It is gaining in the world of facts embedded within the matrix of information the internet presents. I think the man should stop pandering to Republicans, and run as a libertarian. With a platform that emphasizes maximizing economic freedom and personal freedom, he would be a contrast against dueling totalitarian parties on which freedom should be controlled heavily by the government.

Let me make this clear, I don’t support Ron Paul… yet. I find that the most important issue to me, namely the understanding of the first amendment, has simply been tossed by Ron Paul and his overtly Christian influences. He supports monotheism expression in the public square, something that regardless of how you spin it, ostracizes options A and C, namely No Gods, and Many Gods, which should be seen as a direct violation of the very first line in the bill of rights. his view is one of defining what the Founding Father’s meant, when the words are clearly opposite. Look at the word RESPECT again… His other view that Roe v Wade is unconstitutional, as precedence would say otherwise, for example, resonates strongly with the pro-deprecates, especially since he is a Doctor. This has absolutely no bearing or indication of what is important, as claiming because he is a Doctor he is correct would invoke the very solid fact that well over 90% of all OB-GYNs support Abortion in most forms.

But, to be fair, he wants to drive that issue to the state, where no doubt some states would ban it, and some would keep it…

Ultimately, it comes down to the type of judges Ron Paul would appoint to office. I am more interested in judges that I think represent the epitome of social progressive values of a living and breathing constitution, with an emphasis on maximized personal freedom… I am afraid, as are many people like me, of the Supreme Court loosening the promise of religious neutrality and freedom of thought in this country.

If you don’t notice what is going on… look closer, there is a movement, and the implications are bigger than you would ever imagine. Someone like Ron Paul could be voted in against the will of those that control the means of information. Imagining the faces of corporate media mongols as someone like that rises in the polls..

This is the power of the internet, this is our last few chances to make it right, and ironically, Ron Paul is the only candidate to support the continued freedom of the internet…

My choice may decide solely on that…

“Free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.” -Sid Meier

Nothing in the flashing moments of my past life are more profound to me then the images of my early years stomping around Cobb County in Bill Hall’s red Ford Explorer, my eventual falling out of my old friend, and finding love for the first time with a happy, excitable, and extroverted girl named Shelley. As my more private journals have already been allocated to the years of thought on the subject, I only bring her and Bill up now because I have been recently reminded of both…

Other minor problems aside, the primary reason for my loss of friendship with Bill was ultimately being with and falling for Shelley. As I sit here reading mail from my old friend, I can’t help but muse about the passing of time, how fast it really goes… I’m 25 now, Bill, is now married, and we have met again, nearly 8 years later in life. Shelley, my first love, and real girlfriend for four years has just given birth to a baby boy with her husband Leo, named Xavier.

I can’t truly explain how it makes me feel… I want to tell her how happy I am for her, but at the same time, I can’t bring myself to hear her voice.

I haven’t spoken to her now in nearly 3 years, and I hear much from third parties and old mutual friends.

I can’t help but wonder, think about this world, and how so much of it is tied together with the thinnest words, the most delicately laid memetic fabric. Every choice comes to sheer moments of will, flowing between thought and experience, suspended in fragments of time. The smallest change could have altered the world so differently, and that change comes in trillions of untold forms, from people you have never met, all part of a nearly endless evolving network of minds.

We are but the abstraction of constraints. The boundary layers of thresholds of movements, lying somewhere embedded in the vast space of design. How utterly different my life would be, had but one thing in a trillion happened or not…

What would your own life be like if you realized the depth of it all?

I would lie on my bed as a kid and pretend to float through space, infinite space, pondering and grasping the universal everything. I would battle with the tangled threads of causality, imagining how I came to be, and how ultimately my own mind’s “I” came to be… I would think of any concept, the infinitesimal firings of my neurons create an abstraction that represent general patterns, coalesced together to form a thought, one that is the product of mental representations passed on by every experience before that moment. Reading and understanding the concepts another, like the writings of Ayn Rand, is literally forming these representations in your own mind… experiencing them for yourself, in a different manner, a unique bond. I would fall, and physically respond to these thoughts as if I could feel them in my stomach, and hear, and feel, and see it all before me…

So is it with the physical aspects of our reality… Shelley is nothing more than fragments of my mind, representations, living soul shards of existence brought to life by my active thoughts. The instances of physical experience are no different than any story, any book, any fragment of mental abstraction. It is a wonder that these stories were subject to the whim of other past experiences, and the unending near infinite amount of choices one has in the deterministic realm of our short existence.

This is where I live, a frightened and confused young adult who can no longer float through space, but still dreams of those pieces, where does a story really differ from actual events? I was with Shelley for a long time, we were best friends, and for awhile, the only thing we each had… Now, I can’t truly quantify my thoughts and emotions on the matter, I can only remember, I can only relive some of those moments, and I recall most the illusions I had of what it would be like before it was… I remember lying face down, imagining I knew what it would be like to have someone to myself… Why I remember this now is underlying to how I feel… connected.

Shelley represents a wrongly healed scar, fading and forgotten on my own mental representation of what has become my life. The present is more alive, more vivid, and although I can’t forget the past, the stories and the reality, I have the dreams of the “what will be” to drive my passion. I am in love now, as I have never been before with a beautiful woman, I am active politically and socially, well educated, and driven. An entire life that I have yet to give up in dreams before me… More alive now than it has ever been…

I imagine I will remember this representation one day, what it was like to dream of having it… it is never really the same.

I hope Shelley dreams big still, she has a beautiful family to look after now, and I always wish her the best…

I laugh to myself when I think of Bill and I discussing these things as we once did, and now the chance to do it again, as suddenly what seemed like an story, blurred with reality, becomes the future again.

Stephen King once noted that a writer ought to contribute everyday to his work, as he averages something like 2,000 words a day, one can’t really argue with him. I tend to write only during a lunch break, and I can average about 600 words a day for the duration of the week. Today I have found myself staring at the open gaping wound of a chapter I had yet to resolve, a conflict in the lack of conflict. The scene is important, character development, verisimilitude, and the subtle undertone of the ultimate denouement. Yet, it is bothering me… something about the whole scene throws me off… I can’t write today, and ultimately, I have to disagree with one of my writing mentors on the necessity of writing everyday. Today I need some respite from the craft, the intentional, deliberate portion of it to help remind me that I still enjoy it, that I still write because I love to… not because I have to…

Derek’s suggestion of a Moleskine notebook could be chalked up as one of the most significant moments in my life. The notebook is, without a doubt, my most important material possession. In it, the source of all inspirations, the daily musings and ponderings of a fattened mind finally choosing to eat healthy while maintaining the ingredients to satiate the hunger. The notebook serves as the writer’s doula.

Turning to yesterday’s page, what do I see but a simple denouncement of a comment from ChristianPost.net. Indeed, somehow I seem flustered by the tortuously overused argument that the non-believer somehow must go out of his way to seek something that is not there in order to prove that it does not exist. Every Christian seems to lack the ability to really grasp that simple logic, and reading the passage I can sense my frustration on the matter… It should be, and always will be, the burden of someone who makes a claim to prove it… sometimes this proof can come in the form of a well argued logical rationale, most often it is one of the great scientifically valid approaches of testing, hypothesizing, observation, and evidence… no matter what is done to convince someone of the truth of a claim, the onus is really on you to prove it…

This is an interesting line of reason. The world today is not run by the sense of someone saying, there is no God, therefore act this way… instead, there is a tremendous amount of “There is a God, and he wants you to act this way” going on… this is a much different approach to the claim that there is simply no god, or there is a god. The positive claim is then used to garner action and behavior. Elections are decided by this claim. Governments are run by this claim. I am not saying to you so simply, there is no God, I am saying to you, your God does not exist, and therefore I don’t have to act on it.
If there is a secular argument for an action or behavior so be it… but remember these people invoke their God with issues of abortion, stem cells, and homosexuality. They have made the extension of the positive claim, they are asking us to act upon it… you cannot prove the non-existence of something, but you can prove the existence. If your version of God exists, and it is true that he desires the things you says he does, and I have any real reason to even obey this God… by all means, show me.

I have no fear alienating entire groups of people, especially in my own camp. I will offer it as much as I can, that an outright emotional and heartfelt appeal to reason is my only master. This should not be taken lightly, those who throw philosophical quandaries to present indefensible positions, these, the lay-agnostics, the ignostics, the apathetics, the cavilarians, the faux contrarians, the ironist, the puckish cynics, these groups of people who constantly make the progress of the intellect an upward battle, as I believe strongly of my own convictions, that these sorts are immeasurably clever and serve as nothing more than intractable warrant officers of reason, using tools of language wrought with malapropisms, pleonasmic fealties to discord, and barbed literary eddies of the most pervicacious kind.

These types use mostly questions, and never really answer or reveal their own stance on these matters. You will know them by their arrogance and their style. In the following example, notice as newly anointed champion of reason gets destroyed by one of these unsavory characters, ultimately leading to his own confusion and breakdown:

Confusionist: Ladies and Gentleman, I have a question for you of utmost importance, who among you considers that truth is of relative consequence? Who among you believes that truth has no absolutes?

Foundling: I suppose I think that truth is relative…

C: Oh, in this case let us consider gravity, the attraction of masses, will the mass always attract? Will gravity always pull?

F: I suppose so… but

C: Yes, an absolute, but this matters not, for in your formalistic tendencies you have allowed yourself the mistake of defining the absolute only when it suits your world view. Is morality also so versatile, can the moral underpinnings really be subject to the whim of your arbitrary logic? If gravity is always a force, cannot raping a underage woman, also be always wrong, always evil?

F: Wait, I don’t think I defined it like that…

C: Oh but you did see, with your logic I can now come to understand that the temporal spatial time problems that we have used and benefited from in science no longer matter, one cannot assume certainties to measure anything by, one cannot do battle with reason if one cannot accept that which is certain. Either you are certain, or you are uncertain… and by this extension how many things can you be uncertain about, would you dare take this uncertainty to the heights of the possibility of an overwhelming powerful being who is both existed in these absolutes that we take for granted?

F: uhhh…

You can see where this is going. Our battle is with the public, and it is finding ways to use the sound-byte world to defeat modern morons. This sort of battle is one taking place once the average theists realizes that Pascal’s Wager can only get him so far, or that once you admit to personal revelation as the sole source of your unconscionable belief system you look like an injured goat in Ghana. Suddenly, we have to do battle with these sorts, who are usually nothing more than defeated liberal theists who have allowed themselves freedom from the fear of death by invoking righteous indignation or a revamp of immortality. They come out of the woodwork, and by the time an intelligent rational person has responded to quell the frothing wordplay, the damage has claimed 10-20 good active atheist foundlings.

I feel like a clown. Trust me, at this point you could probably point to why better than I could…

This morning the neighbor’s obnoxious Hades bound child decided in his utter eight-year-old brilliance to use a shovel to create sparks on the pathway next to my window, on my property. Time, 7:05 am. This continued until he decided to call loudly to his friends next door, and to let his dogs out into their holding pens. Now with the new circus formerly joined together, what do you think they should do? Make more sparks of course, with more metal gardening tools. This time, as if to torture me for the ills of a past life, the dogs too added to the early morning chorus. Time, 7:36 am.

I stood up to get some kind of noise maker to ward off the offending brats, and in my struggle for balance I stepped on a 14inch blacklight I had placed at the end of my bed, shattering it into a thousand pieces that sprinkled into my clothes pile.

I am Dane’s shattered serenity. The mockery of my existence continued until I broke free from my room, in hopes of finding foodish things. To my utter horror, someone had pilfered my Cap’n Crunch Berries (In pirate shapes). I stared at the empty box for a good 10 minutes trying to figure out in what cruel twisted reality was it fair to place the empty box back into the cardboard. I heard the distance squawking of Ace, the annoying feathered decoration mocking me from the other bedroom.

My journey this morning left me without my belt, an infected particle between my eye and contact lenses, and a really bad neck pain from sleeping on the wrong side of my head. Contrast this to the empty pot of coffee upon arriving 15 minutes late this morning, 50 emails about the one of the main license servers failing, and reiterated ticket sent randomly to the void from a user who has forgotten that to serve others is the last mandate of government employment. The Matlab license problem is the current and most important issue, whoever has the most power, and the loudest voice, makes the rules… didn’t you know?

I also bit my tongue.

Enough bitching though, I got a good bit of work done today, the sort of work I will never get credit for… the fun kind.

On break I’ve started editing a piece called “The Tao of Dystopia” for the literature section. I can’t seem to consider conceptually the relationship between Strauss and liberalism, versus Strauss and neo-conservatism. I have found myself embedded in Project Gutenberg’s archives for the industrial dystopian works of We, Animal Farm, Player Piano, Anthem, and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Somewhere in here is the concept that I can’t grasp on the evolution of fear, the fear of the loss of individualism… how this relates to modern times, and the idea of a unlimited capitalist regimes matching exactly the concepts of collectivism (How can one have a free market without competition?).

Does anyone know if washing clothes with broken glass embedded in it is a good idea?

Meet theory A, supported by an unrelenting mound of evidence, tested by time, observation, and methodical precision, held to the highest standards of science. Theory A is a fact.

Meet theory B. Theory B fails observation, has no evidence, and is unobservable, and ultimately unfalsifiable. Theory B, isn’t even a theory, in fact, it is more aligned with a children’s story.

Some people in this country believe, honestly believe, that if theory A fails to explain instance Z correctly, than theory B automatically is the answer. (Theory A also tends to explain instance Z in a matter of a few years of study.)

No matter how hard Michael Behe whines, he is a failed scientist, and an insult to the academic establishment, a weakly enforced embodiment of good science that seems to be our only barrier against compounding ignorance in this country. Behe’s book is a joke, having just finished the last chapter, I can say that as Dawkins has called it, we should now pity this man, as the hole he has dug himself in is one of material reward at the price of everlasting scientific immortality in the hall of shame.