Mythless

Sex and God. It occurs to me, a well meaning atheist, that there is little difference between how individuals treat their sex life and their religious affiliations. For the most part they are handled the same way, a sort of benign and almost embarrassed afterthought that is really nobody else’s concern. It is not, in general, discussed unless you are in a sort of frat party situation where great exaggeration are the norm, seriously. Think about that kegger moment when you and your co-believers got tanked and started making those absurd claims of my dick is bigger than your dick! Or at the local mosque, temple or church when the minister full of himself and the Holy Spirit declares that his god is bigger, nastier or flat out better than all other gods. As the tempo escalates you can bring in “proof” of the most absurd kind and very often those discussions degenerate into physical violence. We all know, especially the women, that the differences are very small, that they mean ...

Guilt Tripping Over Dead Issues. Recently the Governor of Virginia discussed Civil War Month and he seems to be re-visioning history once again. My approach to that whole period is that it is history and whether I am an African American, a Georgia cracker or a Boston Banker, it has NO, repeat, NO effect on me. I am neither guilty or even involved in any of what happened so long ago. My genealogy wanders upwards into Belgium and Germany on one side and Ireland on the other. We probably sold and bought slaves through the Roman conquests and went into the Congo for harvesting rubber and people. But in my particular situation, I can only say, not guilty nor even aware of any guilt. You know, I sold my last slave about a year ago and I am now pretty much clear of all that guilt and pain. But it still rankles that the South has issues admitting that they killed, maimed and enslaved a bunch of foreigners. I mean, the whole illegal immigrant issue was bypassed by simply selling the Africans t...

My Fatwa A fatwa in the Islamic cult is a legal opinion or ruling from an Islamic scholar. It is that simple and that deadly. So when you hear that somebody in a remote village of some far off land has issued a Fatwa that legalizes the killing of an individual, or a whole nation, it is actually one man's opinion expressed as a statement wrapped up in some sort of undefined Islamo Legalistic wording. Notice that the definition does not specify who can issue Fatwas, and what the criteria of support really are. A Fatwa, in reality, is one man's opinion based on his very own interpretation of the holy books that Islam revere as the word of their peculiar God, in this case called Allah. Having studied Islam these last thirteen years with growing concern and contempt, I wondered if I qualified as a Scholar, and if yes, could I issue a Fatwa? After consulting with a Muslim friend, and speaking to an Imam who will remain nameless, we concluded that in reality anyone can issue a...

Living a mythless life. As we grow older we tend to gravitate in one of two directions in everything we do. The first is to reassert and conserve the old values, beliefs and thoughts we developed at an early age; the other is perversely the opposite as we dig deeper and deeper into unresolved questions that bedeviled our youth. In the first case, the assumption is that we have received all we need to know about a certain facet of our lives and are content to ride that information trail to our death. In my case, I find myself reliving the music of the sixties, and enjoying the feelings it brings much more than trying to wrap my head around new versions of old tunes, from classical to hard rock. The same applies to really enjoying mechanics on classic cars, or the simpler joys of a three speed bicycle. I am of an age when I mastered those skills a long time ago, and am now become the master of the art, transcending the skill into an art form. But the second mindset gives me no rest b...