As an epsilon of the “We”, noted as the first word of the preamble of the Constitution of the United States, my opinion on certain matters is relatively worthless. You should be aware that this of course has no bearing on my desire to spread my opinion, which I deem mildly superior to most. Undoubtedly, this will leave some to declare a nimiety of arrogance, for which I have no real rebuttal, save my disclaimer that I am always willing to change my mind when confronted with arguments coupled in deep intuition, operating within abstraction of concepts logically constructed. You can find me most often clashing with the shrinking “…pool of well-informed, clear-thinking Americans…” as the ever orotund Bill O’Reilly calls them, the clear contrast to academic professionals, scientists, writers, journalists, teachers, and the leaders in arts and entertainment. Indeed.

In the early dystopian literature of post 1905 we were introduced to the idea of totalitarian states, from Yevgeny Zamyain’s novel We (coincidental relation to the previous pronoun), Animal Farm , Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, to Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano. In these novels the idea of socialism is brought to bear on the consequences of lost individualism. The industrial statehoods that rule the lives of people reflect the conformity, unity, and stability wrought from the stagnation of rational men and women. The endless message of devaluation, of depravity undefined, a common enemy built from the masses, and collective fears forged by the power of mass media, control better than any removed power or government ever could hope to dream. When the message is imposed, by mental coercion, and the threat of physical coercion, it is as uncontrollable as the fires of a tire yard. The message hides itself among the detritus of cleverly forged words and meanings. Associations are abstractions, and concepts are abused. Like liberalism turned suddenly, in the span of twenty years to an evil word, and conservatism, the concept of conservation and preservation of values, suddenly means the power to repel change, and stagnate progress, so has liberty, the most important word ever created by humanity, fallen to destruction of imposed definitions and meaning. Liberty is the “freedom” to obey. Liberty is the signing of your life over to someone or something else. Liberty is obeying the marching orders of dead men and dead concepts, defined and instructed by living “medians” as links between the two. The words that are missing from the intent are shockingly apparent, like exposed women in a sea of soldiers. We, the “links” are the only ones who understand the “real” meaning of the Constitution. We, the self-defined “leaders” are the only ones who understand and speak the “real” meaning of God’s word. Absolute ideals forged in stone, translated by fools, packaged to idiots.

And on target, Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee delivers a sermon of servitude:

“When you give yourself to Christ, some relationships have to go,” he said. “It’s no longer your life; you’ve signed it over.”

Likening service to God to service in the military, Huckabee said “there is suffering in the conditioning for battle” and “you obey the orders.”

I’ll simply and unequivocally not stand for it. I’ll not be told what my life means to me, or what I will do with it. This is beyond my restive spirit, beyond my own frustration at the forces of irrational thought. This is a man who understands the closing gaps, and means to choke the last vestals of sanity from our once proud Republic. This isn’t just a call for a theocracy, a tyranny, a totalitarian statehood. It is the call, as it has always been, for the end of dissent and free-thought. The values of the our society are seeped in the essence of true liberty, of free-thought, of true freedom, and the very real thirst for knowledge and desires and passions of the minds of men. Beware always the disclaimer on liberty, the prepositions. Men and women who desire such freedom from tyranny will inevitably rebel against any definition of freedom that contains the words “always”, “must”, “for”, “from” and “through”.

Freedom is you. It is YOUR ability to establish YOUR values, with the respect and acceptance of OTHER’S values.

If we cannot define freedom, we must recognize what it is not:

Freedom must not include _______
Freedom is only from _______
Freedom is always ________
Freedom is for _______
Freedom is only _______

And you will hear it spoken, as a finality, and the stamp of your slavery, and your servitude in one way:

Freedom is only through_____ always for _____ and only from ______.

Your life truly is yours. You are autonomous, and you are the only master of your own person. Stand against the people who tell you otherwise. Stand against them or lose your only chance for freedom, the one freedom that hasn’t been taken from you… the freedom to fight for liberty’s very meaning.

A simple test to prove the desires of Christians to be the persecuted bunch, and their general utter lack of knowledge about their religion’s history, ask them this:

In the 4th Century, which religion in Empire of Rome was ultimately outlawed?
Of course, the answer is Paganism. By 391, Theodosius I had extinguished the eternal flame in the Temple of Vesta, Practices of auspices and practicing “witchcraft” became punishable offenses. The Vestal Virgins were disbanded and temples were considered abandoned. The last games of the Olympiads were played (I always wondered why the Christians don’t call for a ban of the Olympics). The subsidies ended for all non-Christian religions, and the whole of the Roman Empire was declared a Christian state.

A  funny thing happens when you ask this question to a Christian. You may think I’m joking, but try it. The responses are wild. I have not met a Christian in the past few days who has answered correctly. Only one had the sense to offer that he didn’t know, but thought that he was sure that the Christians were already strong enough to fight off any laws against them. All others have definitively pronounced that of course it was the Christians who were persecuted, because Christianity has always been persecuted.

The truth is, the early Christianity that was persecuted was a version that would be completely unrecognizable today. This version included a Messiah, not a god, and the concept of an everlasting blissful life was fallacious. By the 4th Century Christianity was a powerhouse, and it was a matter of time before that power stretched it’s tendrils across the landscapes of the former Roman Empire and ushered in an era of darkness, blood, and savagery. The arguments over the divinity of Christ had been going strong by then, and it was the Nicene Creed that served as the ultimate unifying body of unreason. The effects of which, besides unifying Rome under the Christian banner, ultimately lead to the outlawing of paganism, the worship of Christ as a deity, and the gentle ushering in of the Fall of Rome leading to the darkest period of human civilization.

Christians are not persecuted in this country. Go back to my home state, Georgia, and wear an “I don’t believe in Jesus” shirt. Walk down to the Big Shanty in Kennesaw, Georgia. Have breakfast. Seriously. I dare you. I may get away with an Atheist shirt here in Newport, RI, although rarely without a comment from someone, but a lovely Cross on a shirt is hardly a great risk of defiance towards anything.

Note: You probably shouldn’t. It is required by ordinance in my former city that each household carry a gun. WorldNetDaily once wrote about this fact, although their data on “No victims” of gun shootings is just simply false. I remember specifically a kid going into his dad’s closest and blowing his head into Elysium, while I was in High School. Not to mention the number of shootings right down the street in Marietta. My textbook in my honors biology class had a special yellow sticker around it, warning me that the school board was intoxicated. Seriously, Cobb County was one of the first anti-evolution counties. Look it up.

I have avoided it for as long as possible. It has been my own personal manifest destiny, that I would one day be ready to approach it. An anonymous letter yesterday confirmed to me that it was time. The letter knew what I did, that there is in fact a rare collection of intelligent theist who pose the common atheist a problem. They represent the intelligent responses to the average defense against the dark arts we share against the breed of Christian defenders most apologists fall under (CARM, C.S. Lewis Society, Calvinists), for which I am noticeably excluding the truly insane variants summed up by AIG. The fear; a sort of theology I imagine I would argue for if I were a believer, the insight and clever worldly knowledge of an atheist, coupled with the organization and rare clarity of a literature forged theist. The e-mail I received yesterday said it all, “Dane, when are you going to tackle D.B.H?”.

David Bentley Hart.

I mentioned this person only recently to Derek and Chloe. Few on AANR know, so the letter was someone who was familiar with my early papers, and my presence on one of the great defense forums, and probably recently finding my current writing. There was a time when I spent most of my internet presence with scholarly atheists only, the type who cared only for cases and defenses. This person wants to know if I still consider Hart dangerous now that he had a few years to develop, and do I have the ability to intelligently engage in a decent rebuttal to his general work…

Yes, to both. I have avoided Hart. I am not as an accomplished writer as I have intended to be at this point in my life, and with the activism, AANR, and work, I have mostly stayed away from arguments and debates. Hart, depending on his development in thought, was suppose to be a ongoing project, allowing him to speak enough to eventually expose himself in different fields as another failed Christian philosopher, impotent to modern philosophical and theological vision.

I was wrong, and now we, as a collective group of thinkers are far behind. Hart has gone unchallenged and uncontested deep into the fields of theological thought, and emerged in my opinion, as the sharpest modern theological mind living. This guy could cream me in a live debate, my own personal forte. Evidently, he is up the street from me, literally, as the current Robert J. Randall Chair at Providence College.

I have ignored my roots for too long. I will reply to Professor Hart, on here, publicly. Obviously, the dichotomy that exists for our mutual existence is based on two systems of a world view in stark opposition. I do not believe in any version of god, and David Bentley Hart argues strongly for the existence of the Christian God. He does not offer arguments for the existence of God, rather forges, in amazing literary voice mind you, theological arguments based on philosophy, most often about the Problem of Evil.

The first article, I have chosen randomly, and in it, a rant in common style by Professor Hart about the freedom Christianity offers from Paganistic Nihilism. The article is 4 years old, but his material is spread out wildly, and I have already mentioned that we are behind…

It is called “Christ and Nothing“. Read it first, my work and comments are forthcoming.

I am opening up this blog to the public. That includes joining several blogrolls, and engaging in the fiery discourse of relevant events apparent in my commentaries from The Second Enlightenment.

So, the comment sections are open, and the googlebots will soon be eating my insides. I have also joined Mojoey’s Atheist Blogroll. To the general public, welcome to my insight. My name is Dane, and I don’t believe in a god.

Despair, like the smoky avoirdupois of this turbid grey and dismal morning, hangs apposite to the integrity of this specific day. This day, as if the news would let us forget, is the six year anniversary of religion announcing her flagrant and holy right to destroy life. It is also the six year anniversary of the moment faith was unmasked for me. To explain to someone what it was like for me, staring dolorously at the large screen TV in the tenebrous confines of the Notre Dame student center, would be doing the ineffable experience an injustice. The potency of the event would come to fruition later, but as the world seemed on fire, the sudden realization that the thousands of people who die annually in equal brutal fashion around the globe were no different then my own countrymen, thousands having died that day. I was 20 years old, and I was introduced to the world. Everything was simultaneously closer and farther away. My brain, ripe with its’ developmental apex, seemed unable to filter the abattoir of thoughts and feelings.

I was there, standing, among my peers, yet I was alone. I watched the President’s devotional prayer, to the supposed creator of all life, me a skeptic, agnostic, only recently liberated slowly and painfully from indoctrination, watching the prayers of my school and the leaders of the country. It was then, at some moment between invocation and realization, that I vomited. On my knees in a men’s bathroom in a school dedicated the Our Lady, mother of the personal god of the Christians, I lost god completely.

Watching them, these people, praying to the same bloody creator who was invoked in the very destruction of life… the word irony was insufficient. My humility was gone, and my correspondence to my weakness was gone. I was no longer a skeptic. There was hard proof, and real life experiences that pointed to the most obvious fact in all of human existence: There is no personal god; there is no watcher, safe keeper, protector, or creator.

Years later and the facts would conclude this without a doubt. None of the manifestations of the personal deities of cultures made any sense… none of the ancient arguments held any modern philosophical weight, nothing was left of this god except the faith of the majority. The same faith across the globe, in its’ diverse representations. It was after this that I started reading the philosophies. In Alvin Plantinga’s class, I was introduced to what would later become the strongest argument for the existence of god to apologists, and needless to say, I left the class armed with certainty of the failure of the god hypothesis. I started reading different literature, from C.S. Lewis and then to Russell, and in 2004, picked up End of Faith, by Sam Harris, which led to pre-ordering of his second work, Letter to a Christian Nation, and Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion.

This is the modern epistemology of an atheist. It started many, many years ago, with my Catholic family background, my first encounter with evangelicalism, southern Baptism, going to school in the deep south, becoming “born-again”, and finally being brought by a close friend to a Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames production during the revival of the world’s worst youth movement. I was forged in the most religious parts of this once secular country, and I was introduced to what my life would be, what I would become, six years ago today.

Thought has become an impedance. Like a debilitating disease who keeps its’ host alive long enough to spread to others, eating away at the core of function. There is a never ending supply of floating radicals in the memesphere; mental flatulence, polluting the once thirsty and starving brain. I muse about the impeccable stability of ignorance that is held up as ideal in this bloated society. It has become a common tactic among indolent thinkers to flood peremptory reality and common sense with coercive stagnation. Reason is attacked, and the outer skin of rational inquiry is stripped clean of its’ flesh, gaping and flailing about like a tattered flag, ripped and stuck to a branch protruding from some distant mountainous terrain. Dialogue is not imbued or inspired by complete destruction of partially laid canon in thought, debate is not made stronger by philosophical gymnastics. I can see the problem, even feel its’ source, frothing from the depths of civilization; the potential Vesuvius of evolution.

New thought is forced to survive on two fronts, the regressive desires of fettered minds and aging defenders against progress; and the evolution of thought. The oldest ideas of our civilization have undergone the most strenuous and arduous of tests. Thousands of years of selection, and utterly unlike their natural, physical counterpart, the selection of thoughts hold no benefit. The conceptual God is as useless now as it has ever been. The only resort for thinking otherwise is the liberal acknowledgment of the general deindividuation and stupidity of our population. Religion has evolved for years, only sidestepping the inquiry of reason in so far as it needs to survive in the dullest forms. Every attack is simply met with a calm response about the imaginary benefits of the belief, and the hapless half wits march on, as if a great truth has somehow been discovered. Far worse than the constituents that make up the zombie horde of idiocy are the defenders of these people, the enablers that allow them their comforts. And at the very end of the spectrum, the leader. The priest, the preacher, the pastor; these people must always desire power, because the moral implications of their existence reach no farther than charlatans, at the first level of superficial greed. I am usually a champion of certain aspects of human greed, but the visage of service, of charity, of prizes beyond human grasp in order to demand slavery in the guise of comfort and obtain it willingly from the collective masses is beyond my ability to stomach. From the first tribal shaman to the stadium evangelical, humanity has been in servitude to the most willing master deceiver. Nothing in this regard has changed, only that aforementioned evolution of thought defending them. To fight them, humanity has forged within her loins men and women of extreme intellectual prowess, and so far their only contribution has been to pass the fight, the battle to the next generation of potential saviors. We are going to lose this battle. I spoke of the impedance of thought, a reality, explaining how vast and powerful the defense against reason has become… Every human can be taught to explain how the sun is not a god, the world is not flat, the earth is not 6,000 years old. The arguments become more refined, beyond the reach of science, and while she was dragging humanity on her back, the horde slipped in behind her, ready to knock her down at one moment’s weakness, beat her ruthlessly, defining her personage, as if she were a subjective nameless adolescent. Unprotected, she will soon be defined to include that which is untenable. The very ideal of anti-science, becomes science. A transmutation of thought, the poisonous gas of supposed supernaturalism and dogmatic metaphysics injected into her veins like cement mix in a forest oasis. We have gone from sun gods, to sky gods, to moon gods, to personable gods, to one god, to one spirit, to one personal god, to the closet thing to reality, a pantheistic, deistic god impotent to creation, and then, as if we were no longer able to offer the counter, violent regression towards primordial worship. Back to sun gods, back to cleverly hidden polytheism in the form of a triune, back to antediluvian myths, back to young earths, primitive geology, and ancestral ghost worshiping, back to blood sacrifice and cannibalism, back to tongue languages, and back to promises of paradise and eternal torment. Using the very defense against these things, the last known vestigial vanguard against the total domination of the lapsing tit for tat equilibrium; science. The very same people who must defend her become lost in a sudden maze of conflicts from the gathering hordes of atavism. For society’s intellectuals to have to stop and explain something as simple as the age of earth, while the concept of an eternal place of fire goes unchecked is immeasurably improvident.

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.