Atheists Can Get Up Early Everyday

I like this post, but Amanda's footnote on the atheist benefit of being able to sleep in on Sundays made me think....

I get up early on weekend days, no matter when I go to sleep. For instance, last weekend, I went to sleep around 3:30am. Four hours later, I was fully awake. You could probably find other evidence of my early morning weekend habits by looking at my Facebook activity.

What's more, I actually like that I get up this early, and I like having things to do on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I just don't need to listen to the same old ancient stories told over and over again, followed by meaningless comparisons between modern events and misinterpreted hallucinations.

An Open Letter to the Guy Who Laughed When My Friend Said She Couldn't Stay Because She Had Therapy

Fuck you.

Do you think it is funny that someone has mental illness? Are you going to laugh at me for going to therapy? What about when I tell you that part of the reason that I go to therapy is lasting effects of a brain injury from a car accident that I don't even remember and that put me on life support, jackass? You think its funny? Fuck you.

Background: While tabling for SANE on Friday, two smug, middle-aged men came up to me and started asking me about the sign I was holding, which stated "God is a myth". Sensing my inability to explain myself very well without ample preparation time, a friend came over to where I was to take over the duties of dealing with annoying middle-aged men on a college campus. At one point, another friend of ours walked up and we shifted our attention away from these guys as she stated that she could not stay and table because she had to go to therapy. One of the smug bastards chuckled, and I wanted to kill him. I didn't say anything though, and its eating at me.

To Sister Lauren

On an otherwise stupid post about "New Atheists", filled with comments pointing out the flaws in the article, was a comment from Sister Lauren about the abuse she suffered from many of us "New Atheists". Her emotional trauma sounds real, and although she is a religionist, I recognize her as a generally compassionate and good person.

I wondered why, when I set out to start a new religion based on freedom, "new atheists" regularly made the argument that I was insane and should be locked up in a mental institution. That is not a lame threat, that is a very serious threat. I found it well enforced and positively life threatening.
-Sister Lauren

Some of what she says sounds, without me having additional evidence, paranoid. However, what most people fail to grasp is that many paranoid people would have their fears eased greatly if someone sat them down, listened to them, then explained why their fears are unjustified with facts.

I may think Sister Lauren is misguided in her attempts to find reason and meaning in the universe or in her religious beliefs, but she's a human being. I'm really sick of the internet atheists who think any good is done by calling otherwise good people who have God delusions "stupid" or "crazy". It represents a massive lack of maturity on their part and it is not what atheists should want to project. It just shows that atheists, just like religionists, can be d-bags too.

My Atheism, Part 2

Religionists often assume that atheists must have an important text like the bible. They will often pick the Origin of Species. They ask who we worship rather than cope with the reality that atheists do not worship. Atheists are not the opposite of religion, we are completely foreign from religion. Atheists also understand the underlying concepts of religion and find it to be lacking in providing any kind of benefit.

To boil it down to a bumper sticker, atheists prefer to know the truth rather than simply believing in a story written a long time ago.

My Atheism, Part 1

Even in the worst of times, knowing the truth of the situation was always better, and the sooner I knew it, the better. For instance, my recovery from my brain injury was actually an enjoyable experience because I understood what was happening, thanks to science. This, my brain injury did not affect my worldview, like many assumed that it did.

I knew three things when I was recovering from my brain injury. I knew that I was a vegetarian, I knew what I was going to school to do, and I knew that I was an atheist. I recovered very well from my brain injury, which caused some "survivor guilt", for lack of a better term. I wondered why I was recovering so well and considered that it might be something supernatural. When I explored my thoughts and what I knew about my accident, I realized that there were natural factors to my recovery, the most significant being that my injury simply was not bad enough to cause permanent harm.

This did nothing to support my ego, like thinking that I was better than other people or that something mysterious had an affect, but I was proud to be able to apply reason to my situation and find an explanation that can be tested*.

Two atheists I know have chronic illnesses that will eventually kill them, one possibly in the next couple of decades (24 year-old). The other one (20 year-old) may have more time. These are two people around whom I feel comfortable stating my actual atheist viewpoints, like that the bible is just another [damned] book, written by people. I'm comfortable stating that there is no afterlife around these people, knowing full well that their lives are likely to end much sooner than my own. These are atheists in foxholes.

* Imagine you were able to create a brain injury in others in increasing intensity and monitor their recovery. Conducting this experiment, however, would be painful and occasionally deadly. The loss of life for some and the loss of mental capacity for pretty much all the other people in the study is unacceptable to me because I assume that there is no afterlife, which is an important thought in my own atheist cannon.