The Convenient Fiction of the Self?

When I look inside myself I see nothing there.  I don’t do it often.  Even as I compose this, I’m giving my inner “self” a sidelong glance at best.  The reason I can’t usually achieve such a moment of clarity is that my life is too busy and filled with distractions and duties, which are external things.  In those times there’s an assumption of selfhood that makes everything easy.  I like this, I don’t like this, I must do this, I can’t do that.  The more accurate version would be “this moment’s instance of the various senses and processes of this pile of organs is compelled toward this or away from that.”

This is how “I’ve” thought of “myself” for some time now (alright no more quotes), but it’s not completely accurate.  This article is an attempt at refining the idea.  Yeah, I’m making it up as I go.  We’ll see how that turns out.

Within that pile of organs and processes aforementioned, there is one function that could be reasonably termed a self.  It is a program constructed over a lifetime of experiences and ideas.  What is it?  An idea of entity, of unity – that all the mess that comprises this body and mind are a singular being with inherent properties of desire, distaste, will / agency, etc.  Functionally this is true, which is why I don’t see too egregious of a contradiction in using personal pronouns (possibly more often than I should).  Factually, I don’t think it is true.

It’s the word “inherent” up there.  Every desire or distaste and the will that chooses how to act on them, these are separable from the concept of entity, aren’t they?  Simple artificial intelligences are told how to react to stimulus ahead of the stimulus being encountered.  If this happens, then do that.  We don’t think of those AIs as having a self, and we’re right.  But who’s to say we have a self either?  Let’s say my desire and distaste are like the roomba’s instructions to move toward this and away from that, and my will is the roomba’s programmed way of acting on those inputs.  Where is the entity in this analogy?

I got meat like a roomba has plastic.  That is a singular locus where all the sensations and imperatives that comprise me reside.  That’s an observable self, and meets a reasonably basic definition of such.  My problem is self as the ghost in the machine.  I ain’t feelin’ it.  Yes, one of the programs within me habitually acts the role of the self, constructs a narrative of entity out of disparate extremely destructible and mutable elements, but it seems so fake…

I don’t know if, in the course of writing this, I’ve gotten any closer to pinning my problem.  Let me keep trying for a minute…

Naw.  I’m running out of sauce for daily posting.  Certainly, I’m out of queue.  Let’s just see how much longer the pile of organs can keep this baloney rollin’…

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Lemme At Im

I wanna kill Jesus.

You know, I’d love to be a nicer person to all the good people of the world who happen to also be christian, but it’s mighty hard.  Mighty hard.  Shitbird preachers like to unfairly characterize atheists as all hating god &/or jesus, but I’m sure it isn’t true for most of you.  It is true of me.  Very true.

There is, on balance, more justification in the words of jesus for progressive ideas than for conservative ones.  Twisting that shit into prosperity gospel and gaybashing is twisting.  But I don’t care about the feelings of some ancient dead guy.  I care about the monster he created, and if I am to take his continued supernatural existence as true – as christians want me to do – then if I were to meet this superghost?

Fuck that motherfucker.  It’s on.

I’m that Dexter-flavored hypocrite who wants to kill the killers.  Atrocities make me mad, make me feel like doing something atrocious, and there are now millennia of horrors that happened on resurrected jeezy’s watch.  Culturally christian people who wanted to believe they could point to something older and better within their ancestors invented wicca, which – in culturally christian fashion – positions one’s people as the real victims in all of this.

Well, your people are the real victims in all of this, wiccans, but witches aren’t your people any more than they are mine.  Your people have been christian for a very long time, like their oppressors.  Christians oppress christians more than the Romans ever had a chance to.  These are the atrocities of which I spoke.  Of those that were tortured and killed for witchcraft, how many had any cultural context for being anything other than christian (or atheist, which can come into existence without being taught)?  Europe was utterly dominated by christianity during all of the witch hunting times.  Their victims were christian.  (oh yeah just remembered the muslims and jewish people, lol.  anyway…)

That’s not mentioning the much more frequent form of historical oppression they engaged in – sectarian warfare.  Genocidal violence, mass slaughter, women and children hung from the walls, cities burned – all for believing in jesus wrong.  I look at that shit and cannot feel schadenfreude about jerks I disagree with killing each other.  I see the torture and murder, and it infuriates me.

Somebody’s gotta pay, and if I try to pin down which sect shot first, that’s playing their game.  No.  I can do them one better.  These sects wouldn’t exist if jesus wasn’t a real supernatural guy that rose on the third day yadda yadda, right, Kenneth?  Only the magic version of jesus could have inspired these millennia of obscene cruelty.  And therefore, magic jesus must die by my hands.

Gimme the spear, centurion.  It’s time to stick this pig again.  For old time’s sake.  Just a jesus murdering party, me and my besties.  Who’s in?

Guys?  C’mon, it’ll be fun.  Guys?

 

 

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Throwing the Game

A thought follows from my recent bothsiderism post.  There have been a lot of situations like this in recent years, haven’t there?  A group or individual devoted to a cause decides they hate some oppressed people so powerfully that they ally with opponents, and set their own cause back by decades.  The obvious example is terfs aiding fundies to absolutely devastate women’s rights, all because trans women are yucky.

The slvmepit queen’s contribution to fascism set vaccine acceptance, research, and availability back decades, when that was originally her cause.  If memory serves.  Maybe she was more of a nü atheist, whose raison d’être was pwning christians, and didn’t spend much digital ink on pro-vaxxing.  It’s been a long time.

Dawkins, Harris, etc set atheism back a lot.  One of the sorest groups of burned atheists has to be the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who recently had to watch christian bigots gloating as they excluded women from military careers, had to watch the executive branch that controls the military go from being the most inclusive it had ever been in history to literally labeling DEI as a hate movement.  But, y’know, having to respect people on their own terms is a tall ask.  Better to hand the world over to theo-fascism, right?

Man that last group really hacks me off.  Terfs are just comparable to nazis to me.  They’re gloating, gleefully evil moustache-twirling freaks, living their best lives at the expense of the human species.  Consistent in their evil, right?  Anti-woke atheists are such mealy-mouthed little creeps, weaselly motherfuckers acting like there’s a centrist or even liberal way to oppose social justice, man, I wanna slap the shit out of them.  Don’t ever let me meet that little old man.  I don’t know how well I could restrain myself.

I wonder if there are any environmentalists out there who got environmental protections overturned because somebody asked them to be nice to black people.  I wonder if there are any black power activists who got racist politicians elected because the alternative was a woman.  I wonder if there are any women who … eh, we all know that story now.

All I’d like to say in conclusion is this:  If your support for a cause is so weak that you’ll throw the game that hard, maybe don’t get involved in the first place?  Nobody needs friends like you.  Fuck’s sake, atheism is probably worse off now than if Dawkins had never picked up a microphone.

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A Moment of Bothsiderism

The gnu-flavored atheist movement was founded in part by people who favored military adventurism against muslim-majority countries, chiefly Christopher Hitchens.  That movement quickly morphed into a broad liberalism which appealed to less bloodthirsty people like you and I.  That was revealed to be paper thin cover for a reactionary mindset during Elevatorgate, which is why FtB is so much smaller than SciBlogs had been before the schism.

Elevatorgate’s queen was Abby ERV, who basically abandoned pro-vax activism in favor of a 24-7 misogyny campaign.  Together with Gamergate and the MRA and incel movements, these were the foundational kernel of the neo-nazism that has taken over the USA.  If you meet a rethuglican bro under fifty, he probably spent some time in one or more of these online communities, or their descendants.

If we take that piece of shit ERV as being an icon of atheo-skepticism who contributed to fascism, what of her opposite number in the anti-vax movement, Jenny McCarthy?  Anti-vaxxing (and medical woo in general) used to be strongly associated with liberals, with left of center people.  When conservatives embraced anti-vaxxing, those people swung hard.  I’ve had the misfortune of talking to some of them.  Maybe they have a left belief or two among the gallery of monsters in their skulls, but they are ardent supporters of shitler, and many are Qanon as well.  Both pro- and anti-vaxxing contributed to fascism.

So here’s my moment of bothsiderism.  Who contributed more to our present political ruination, gnu atheists or antivaxxers?  Abby ERV or Jenny McCarthy?  Even tho the actor was much more famous, I honestly do not know the answer to this question.  Both movements had some amount of access to the halls of power via lobbyists or cultural prestige.

In composing this post, I found myself reflecting on the strange political moments and movements that added up to Nazi USA.  That broad tent is wild as hell.  It’s so much easier to take the world apart than to make it better.  The locust swarms flow into and out of each other, devouring hope and love.

I do not fault anyone for feeling doomed and destroyed, but I still have hope for all of you, that you keep it together, that you enjoy the things you can, and you don’t feel too overwhelmed by the overwhelming circumstances.  We’ve got each other and we’re still alive, baby.

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Purple Pill Poppers

Red pill, blue pill.  Why so biney, Morpheoose?

I’ve gotten self-righteous about it from time to time, as have most of the people on this network – bloggers and commenters included – but fundamentally I am an atheist because it feels real to me, based on my predilections in combination with my experience of life, and not because I was moved to this position by Reason and Enlightenment.  In the Matrix metaphor, to me, atheism is the blue pill – the world that has been “pulled over my eyes.”  Comforting, tho often a cold comfort.

What then would be the red pill?  Anything that was capable of overthrowing that idea of reality, replacing it with something new.  In The Matrix that would be the Truth.  In my ill-conceived thesis, I’ll just treat the red pill as an alternative view of the world, different from what you’ve previously known and not necessarily true.  With that being the idea, red pills are rare things indeed.

We have a sense of what’s real built on the stuff of our lives.  For some people that’s jesus and paranoia, for others, well, there’s a lot of ways people can be, regardless of how polls aim to simplify it all.  But across the board, we are not easily convinced of anything that falls outside our biases.  Some of those biases are good and fine, even factually correct like atheism, but that doesn’t keep them from being biases.  The bias is the thing you are predisposed to believe.  What can overcome this?

Believers in society as a great discourse between rational minds, they’d say debate and discussion can overcome incorrect beliefs.  The truth will inherently emerge from a true socratic dialogue.  Does it though?  Seems to me we almost never change what we believe to something directly opposite.  Those who went from cookie-baking grandma to goose-stepping Q-creep were building on whatever their baseline was.  The flaw was there, waiting to be nurtured.

The gradual creep of US fascism over the last hundred years, while it involved intentional propaganda by malevolent masterminds, those masterminds themselves were thralls of propaganda they’d been fed, as much subject to manipulation as anyone they sought to manipulate.  We’re all just following a course of social entropy.

Within that, there are ways to bend people, to ourselves get bent.  Like that fascist grandma, take a pre-existing belief or point of view and elaborate on it, build it into something new.  Not a red pill because it’s not a total jailbreak of the original firmware, call it a purple pill.

In The Matrix, Joey tha Rat had the same choice about what to believe that Neo was given, chose red, then changed his mind.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  Change your beliefs on a dime, to whatever felt the best in a given moment?  Not to say I want to change my own beliefs, just using a lil’ reflection on my relationship to those beliefs as a way to understand some people whose thoughts are nigh unimaginable.  Do your own research, as they say.

What I’m interested in, like anybody else living in a society that isn’t living up to their ideals, is how to alter the beliefs of those who seem dead set on ruining everything.  They got purplepilled into that point of view, and maybe we can purplepill them into a point of view that is less ruinous somehow.  It’s not like looking for a “weak spot” to exploit.  Those that indoctrinated them into fascism did not seek to dominate, they fertilized the soil and watered it.  It’s a process of nurturing, I think.

What is left in a fascist that is good enough to build on, to encourage them to become something less bad?  I don’t know, but it could be worth thinking about.

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New Sura Just Dropped

Should I call them suras?  My emerging personal religion has disparate influences, which could be read as holy texts, and as they are not currently part of a consolidated canon, they could be considered supplemental writing in the sense that islam’s suras.  I dunno.  I wouldn’t say apocrypha because that term denotes status as non-canon, which isn’t possible if there isn’t a canon.  Or wait, maybe there’s nothing but apocrypha.  A belief system of pure apocrypha.  I dunno.

I want people to regard these beliefs as earnest, and as religion.  Y’all jesus fucklers who use “atheism is a religion” as a gotcha, it still doesn’t make sense for atheism, but you can use it for whatever this thing is I’m putting together over here.  Especially if the schedule F party boss comes ’round the factory floor to inquisite about my unusual practices and appearance.

Before I introduce the new principle, let us contemplate these other mysteries of Chaos:

Ian Malcolm.  This level of control we attempt, it is not possible.

The Two Maxes.  Max Headroom shows us the blipvert of our current cyberpunk dystopia, Mad Max shows us the sorrow of the coming post apocalypse.

Hellstar Remina.  This text shows the way of being good when the whole world goes bad.

The Adversary.  Satan speaks truth to sanctimonious power – the truth that in the end there is no real power that a human can possess.

To these I add:

Restoring Biological Truth.  January 22 2025, the second most powerful man in the world decreed that all prior science on gender and sex was invalid, and the government of what is, for now, the most powerful nation in the world set about erasing from science all mention of sexual variation or ambiguity in the natural world or in human beings.

When I was an atheist I clung to the idea that science was the truest arbiter of reality, and so I must concede that whatever is allowed to exist of science in this new world must be the only truth of reality.  Mans and womans are the only thing, nothing else exists, and gender is the delusion of insane sex criminals like myself.

However.  If my belief that gender and biological sex are both spectra is not scientifically valid, then it must come from somewhere other than science.  It must come from Revelation!  From a higher power!  That is the power that I believe, ardently and piously in, the power of Chaos to rend asunder clean boundaries, and make a mess of everything.

It is my religious duty to embody the power of Chaos, in specifically dressing counter to my state-mandated sex.  For if I do not carry the truth of Chaos upon my visage, I am disrespecting the highest power in the cosmos.  I do not love my god; I fear it, and live in this way to avoid its wrath.

Respect my religion.  Allow me to wear the garments of my faith.  Or concede that you do not actually care about freedom for any religion except a narrow range of christian denominations, and just fuck right off the planet in a spaceX deathtube at your earliest convenience.

Thank you.

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Unimaginable Nationalism

Any kind of nationalism is kinda fucked up and weird to me.  Born and raised on stolen land, soaked in blood and slavery, the whole nine yards.  I don’t belong here but I don’t belong anywhere else either.  Citizen of the world?  Except you can’t be.  Every inch of every place that hasn’t had the natives fully eliminated is staked out, by people who would die for the dirt, kill for the dirt.  Give me this dirtpile or give me death.  But better to give you death, other people who I have decided should not be here.  Nationalism, like colonialism, is the seed of genocide.  Some flavors of it are so mild and banal that you could miss it, but it’s always there, waiting to blossom.

It’s especially wild to me that some people want to kill or die for land in the Middle East.  There are much nicer or more interesting deserts and plains and beaches, and most of them don’t have nearly as many genocidal terrorists or fascists, don’t have as many centuries of decapitations and flayings and immolation and destruction.  If any place in the world is hell, it’s the holy land.  If I was Jewish, I’d be glad to be nowhere near it.

Might feel some type of way about it, since the history of the shituation is very different from that of my ancestral island.  What would it be like, to have lost your homeland for over a thousand years, to never be allowed to feel at home anywhere in that entire time?  To at last be given a promise of a return there, of a homeland – a promise literally predicated on nationalism and colonialism both – and to see that come to exactly what anybody with an ounce of wisdom could have seen a hundred years away?  Poison gift.  I’d keep Brooklyn, thanks.

Seriously.  People who feel magical about that piece of dirt.  What even?  I can’t imagine a worse place in the world.  Here I can walk down main street and feel the ghosts of natives choked in disease, driven from their homes, murdered in the wilds.  Not great.  There, I’d be walking the same streets where so many people were slaughtered in so many ways it’s fucking near unimaginable.  I’m willing to bet there is not a person in the entire region who is without genocide in their hearts.  How could you live through that history and not want to see everyone on the other side of the conflict disappeared?  With cruel violence?  At least on some level.  I know there are peace activists in Israel and bless their hearts.  But how often are they tempted to just give up, and join in finishing the job on their opposites?

The overwhelming hate of it all.  For dirt.  If I was born there, I’d have left and never looked back.  The USA is bad enough, but at least I’m not living on a land mine, living in torture alley between people who want nothing more than to see each other reduced to shreds, to blood and then dust.  Ain’t no god and ain’t no land and ain’t no ideal worth living in hatred.

This is the only thing we have, when fascists rule the day.  The freedom to have moments of peace in our hearts.  Because above all they love hate, and we have the ability to love life.  They can’t be happy unless horrible shit is happening to someone, somewhere.  We are capable of living for good things, and they aren’t.  We win even when we lose, given that.  What if we didn’t have the option tho?  What if we were born into an endless war, gestated in amniotic fluid poisoned with cruelty, with lust for annihilation?

I advocate a no-state solution.  Everybody lives as refugees in other countries for another thousand years, and moves back when they’ve learned to play niceys.  I used to be more flip about the idea all the holy cities should get nuked (rome, jerusalem, mecca – ideally with everybody moving out first), and I’m not that grody nowadays.  But should anybody be living there?  No.  What’s the half-life on genocide?  How long before that land is no longer glowing with hatred?

My guess is that for the remainder of humanity’s time on this world, there will be nothing in Israel or Palestine worth preserving, except for people – who would be much better preserved by leaving that hellhole behind.  The touristy beaches, the shopping malls, the ultramodern gleaming skyscrapers, the perfectly irrigated fields – yeah, even the nice parts.  They are not nice, because of what they cost.  Leave them.

With my nazi-ass country in your corner, Israel, things are about to get even worse.  So much worse than you’ve ever imagined.  To those of you who love genocide, you may find that getting what you wished for is the worst possible outcome for your people, for humanity.  And your day in the sun won’t last.  Your whole country will be destroyed.  And then rebuilt again, I’m sure, with or without you, and whoever lives there?  Probably gonna be genocidal zealots as well, of some flavor.  It’s in the dirt.

Fuck dirt.

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PrAIse Jeezes

For reasons, I wanted to create an image of jeezis that looked like an old Klasky-Csupo cartoon, like Rugrats, Ahh Real Monsters, or Wild Thornberrys.  Trying this in midj came back with very undignified results, quite amusing to me.  You should be scared, jeezis.  I hate you and I’m coming for your ass.

Anyway, I actually wanted a result with smaller eyes, like the Thornberrys, but I did like the vibes on those ones, so I used one as an image prompt, while using words to tease out smaller eyeballs.  I said “little tiny eyes” and –no large eyes, bulgy eyes, big eyes.  However, when using a bug-eyed image prompt and telling it to not make bug-eyes, I broke the AI’s mind.  Results:

Eldritch, son.  Once again, I was heartily amused, tho I gave up on making smol eyes, for now.

Next, unrelated, I was trying to get some ideas for motifs, rendering style, and composition, in a heraldic design.  Composition isn’t my strong suit as a visual artist.  This was a really strong result, and shows what I was looking for: not an image I could use as my final design, but something that can inform aspects of it.

The next one had a more rough-hewn texture and chiaroscuro that was appealing in other ways.  I have a wealth of inspirations to choose from, with a few pushes of a button.  I likes AI art tools.

I also like randomly recombining unrelated AI works, just to see what comes out, so putting previous jeezies together with heraldry, I got…

Again, love the indignity.  Nice texture too.  This next one brings back the chickenshitness of the klasky-csupo messiae.

But this is my favorite, reflecting my feelings on the big mans.  Catch one in the dome, motherfucker.  Catch you on the flipside.

–

 

I Gets Religion

You gotta get yourself religion
And try to serve the lord
While the blood’s
Still warm
In your veins…

I dunno who wrote that but it played in the background of a deleted scene in Lord of Illusions.  Love that shit.  But yes, to the point…

I want the protection of religious faith, in a country that gives lip service to allowing non-christians religious liberties, but will never ever do the same for atheists.  But it has to be real, or I’ll fold under inquisition.  I need something I can believe in, and per some legal definitions, that needs to be a higher power.

Now more than ever I do believe in a higher power.  I believe that Chaos reigns supreme over both the meek and the mighty, that no human truly controls their own life or destiny.  The most powerful motherfucker in the world cannot keep shit from coming out his asshole on live TV.  The rich can never act with beneficence or generosity.  The bourgeoisie can do nothing but slide into fascism over and over and over again.

We’re all controlled by something which is why even the conspiracies that are actually true are a bad joke.  CIA you don’t own shit at the end of the day except your own bloody hands and wasted lives.

Entropy, of which Death is just one aspect, as best expressed by Ian Malcolm in Yurassis Next, “The kind of control you’re attempting simply is… it’s not possible.”  But not just dinosaurs, not nature more broadly, like in his little speech.  It’s everything.  The only consolations I’ve ever known are dark consolations, and it’s more of the same – the fuckos that rule the world are still subject to everything that they fear, everything that they want, everything that they’re afraid of losing.  They can ruin a lot, but they can’t control everybody all the time any more than the US could beat Vietnam.

This isn’t Discordianism, except insofar as those hippy fucks would claim everything is everything and nothing, and this would naturally be enfolded by that.  A lot of key differences, most notably that I don’t entertain headaches and I don’t love my higher power.  I just feel its explanatory power in all aspects of life, and it lets me throw up my hands sometimes when I need to.

I wouldn’t say I have holy, sacred, or unholy books or people to elevate, but there are some cultural icons that resonate with these feelings.

Ian Malcolm.  Not Mr. Goldblum, not even Mr. Crichton.  He is greater than the sum of his parts.  He showed me a truth I initially scoffed at, disregarded as inane.  Of course you can keep dinosaurs in a zoo, if you do it right.  And then it all came to pass, and now I know.

The Two Maxes.  We are living in the cyberpunk dystopia as symbolized by Max Headroom, and living in anticipation of the post-apocalypse as symbolized by Mad Max.

Hellstar Remina.  The only ethos worth having when everything is bad, it’s the ethos that allows you to keep doing good.  I don’t find that in abasement and martyrdom.  I find it in two characters from Hellstar Remina.  Remina herself, not strong enough to do much more than suffer what the world does to her, and the grace with which she does so.  And the astronaut dropout Whatsisface, who is strong enough to help her, when all it can afford them is a short reprieve from the evils of the world, leading up to certain death.  He is Antifa.

The Adversary.  My girl Satan is weak right now, tho people who do not recognize her true form may suppose the opposite.  Satan is the one who opposes sanctimonious authority, and she has been thrust like Sisyphus to the bottom of the mountain.  It will be a while before she has the sauce to start pushing that boulder up again, but when she does, she’s on my list too.

… that’s all my thoughts for the moment.

–

Sometimes I’m an Antichrist

This is a post that sat not-quite-finished in my drafts since before October, dusted off because I am done with my “hope” series.  That’s not to say I’m going doom, just that my big push is over.  I will try to include a silver or at least grey lining in all future posts on dire topics.  If you missed any of my hope articles and want to check them out, I had at least one a day between 11/6 and 11/16.  Oh 2024, what a time…

Anyway, the same old shit, back to one post most days:

***

The massive fuckboyism of organized atheism has put me off the brand completely.  You won’t catch me saying “atheist and proud,” because how can I be?  Don’t come up in my comments begging for a list of the dozens of famous atheists that have turned out to be shitbirds.  The movement itself was a contributing factor to the rise of reactionary fascism, and while FtB types should feel good about how we conducted ourselves since Deep Rifts 2.0, most of us were part of the problem for a decade leading up to it.*

But I do hate jeezis an awful lot.  If hate could power telekinesis, I’d have accidentally caused a few million in property destruction over the years.  I see a bus go by with the name of some vile religious fake charity, youth group, church, or whatever?  One devil claw in the side, scraping through the words as it passes by.  Billboards in flames.  Church facades in rubble.

I’ve long thought the origin of American fiction’s love for underdogs has to do with our national narrative of rebellious colonies, but realized today it’s apiece with the way jeezis fans here will imagine themselves oppressed, and that can be traced all the way back to the origin of xtianity** itself.  Why in fuck did the Romans adopt the religion of some Hebrews – people they’d colonized and oppressed?

It’s because of that dramatic story in Exodus, and the reiteration of the same theme in jeezy’s story – wanting to play the brave victim.  It captured imaginations.  More importantly, it somehow gave license to people with all the power in the world to feel like they were oppressed courageous fighters for that one special truth.

Religion in general promotes and protects itself with truth claims no matter where it’s found, but these narratives of oppression have a unique appeal which has given the abrahamic faiths potent recruiting power – especially xtianity.  Jewish and Muslim people aren’t mine to talk about, but xtians are.  They spread jeezix germs nowadays with tears for the magic suffering boy (and voter suppression and using collection plate money to fund the legalized murder of gay people abroad).

Look at what you did, sinners.  You made the magic boy cry.  And when you accept him into your hearts, you can feel the empowerment of that suffering.  His performative victimhood is yours!  For just $9.99 a month (which we will use to prop up conservatives that help us launder more money and eviscerate the social programs on which so many of you depend).

Jesus is my enemy.  Progressive and liberal xtians aren’t necessarily my enemies, but if they see me talking like this and take it that way?  Fine.  Your boy is shit.  He’s an excuse to feel oppressed in a culture where your fellows in faith have control of nearly everything, to feel justified in persecuting anybody who can’t or won’t fall in line with your fables.

If xtianity was truly a good thing, it wouldn’t still hold a concept of hell, wouldn’t separate the saved from the damned.  It would just give to everyone, and take nothing in return.***  It can’t pretend to.  If jesus the superghost exists, and christianity is his will, then he can be held to account for so many crimes, enormous and small.  Not a day goes by that somebody isn’t victimized in his name.  This entire nation is about to get reamed by his holeyness.

He’s in my head because I’m culturally xtian.  Even if I’ve never believed, I absorbed the lessons of misogyny and homophobia and islamophobia from the culture he controls, and they made me do bad things, made me harm myself, made me harm others – or at least annoy them.

Progressives can quote all the parts of the bible where magic boy is not being hot trash, but conservatives have the veto of cultural dominance.  Your version of jeezis has never held sway over the masses.  The one in control demands human sacrifice and is already drinking that tithe of blood and souls from those who died waiting for an abortion.

I’d crucify him again just for that.

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*It’s funny that slymer bitch “nunyabiznis” is Xitting that we should feel bad for making him a fascist.  Fucko, the only thing we should feel bad about is that we were rubbing elbows with you up until the soup went down.  The movement was always ableism and islamophobia with a progressive gloss.  In our own separate ways, we’ve both figured that out, and are now living our truths.  It’s not our fault if your truth makes it hard for you to look in a mirror.

**I get that x can stand for jesus, hence xmas and xianity.  I just think xtianity sounds better, but honestly I’m up on the air for what I should call this dogshit what I’ve been stewing in.  I don’t want to call it by the name it wants for itself.

***It’s a low bar to clear but I’m holier than that, giving help to people regardless of political persuasion, nine to five – for less money than I’d need to pay my mortgage by myself!  I’m one accident away from disaster, as most of us are, but I’m still putting myself out – even to utter fucking bastards – for this pittance.  Back of the line, jesus.  I’m numba one!  Seriously, fuck you!

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Does this post need a silver lining?  Maybe.  Most of us are not women whose lives depend on an abortion in the Midwest or south, not gay people in Uganda, so most of us will be fine – just sad, is all.  Whoever you are or however much risk you personally endure, take care of each other and take care of yourselves, comrades.  I love you!