Random Journey

Reality Check, Animals

2010-06-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

We've lost touch with reality. And while I will admit that living in fantasyland is more pleasant than truth, it represents a dangerous delusion; and you can thank modern civilization for your delusional status.

Civilization is a good thing because it gives the majority of us some freedom from the truths of existence but it also allows us to lose touch with the true hierarchy of importance that is our invisible reality.

***

My little side hobby for the past few years has been the rescue, care and feeding of feral cats. Even if you hate cats, you still need to read this....

It all started when my idiot sub-human neighbor let his dog kill my pet cat in my yard. We brought that cat across the country and she was the most loved thing in my daughter's life. Remarkably, the neighbor is still alive; I channeled my grief into rescuing strays and wrote about it here.

An important point I need to mention is that these cats aren't really strays; most of them were born wild. Some are dumped former pets - and they have the toughest time of all. Most do not survive for long.

Remember that cats were brought here by people from their native environment in Asia and Africa. So you know that every wild "house" cat you see is a descendant of a companion animal. Those companion animals knew the comforts of domesticity and civilization. Their descendants know only hunger and fear.

And while the hard realities of life have taught feral cats the basics of survival, those among their numbers who were born into civilization as pets and then were dumped on the streets by thoughtless humans really have no idea how to survive. Their days on earth are painful, violent and short.

The feral cats are animals. Eighty percent of cats born in the wild don't make it out of kittenhood but those that do have honed survival skills and are as adept as a cat can be at finding food and shelter.

The dumped pets (so-called 'strays') on the other hand.... well, they're still animals. They just don't know it. They have to learn to survive by trial and error. And nature doesn't offer many second chances.

That's how it is in the animal world: If you are alive, you are going to die. If you fail at the basics of life and/or you are just plain unlucky, your lifespan will be very brief.

Of course, all these animals have an instinct for survival. Not all of them are good enough at it. The former pets will try to be civilized again - they will try to hook up with humans, the only comfort they've ever known. Given the cruelty of mankind, however, often that is a fatal mistake. Yet they can only try to do what they know, as that is the nature of existence.

***

We are animals. Us ...humans - although we do our best to try to forget that. We want to maintain our existence at all costs, just like the feral cats. And this is the nature of existence: we need food, most of all, to keep us going. Once we have food, we need shelter for warmth and safety. If we secure food and shelter, then we want to reproduce. Anything above or beyond that is optional, just as with the feral cats. It's the same with all living things. This is the hierarchy of existence.

So are you know thinking to yourself, "Well, thanks a lot, Doctor Obvious. Duh!"? Think again....

This is how you know you've lost touch with reality: You spend your time obsessing/worrying /daydreaming about things that are not in the hierarchy of existence. You have taken for granted the only things that actually support your continued living - and now you are in danger.

Billions of people - the majority of humans on earth - are living at a basic level of existence; they don't really have time to worry about anything bigger than food and shelter. Here in the first world, though, the essentials of existence are generally assumed as a birthright. And you know you are in that class of humans because you are reading this web blog post.

You are beginning to understand the danger now, aren't you?

The truth is that anything can happen at any time. Our lovely high-tech civilization is constantly hanging by a thread and things within our control like wars and beyond our control like giant solar flares are not only statistically possible but inevitable. Civilization is a house of cards - one thin premise stacked upon another - and a single surprise event can bring our fantasy world to an end; bringing us back to the reality of our struggle for existence.

To find peace you must learn this essential point: There is no birthright to the basics of existence. Indeed, there are no true "rights" at all. Such things are privileges that a well-organized, stable civilization can afford to impart. And they can vanish.

In a moment - from an unexpected place - we will become acutely aware of our basic nature as creatures of the earth: Struggling for the bare essentials of survival with the thoughts of new televisions, cars, and vacations long forgotten..

Most of us will not make it. We have learned this lesson from the other animals around us. If you want to do yourself a favor, then, you might start by learning to be content with food and shelter - a fortunate privilege rather than a right- learn to relish what you have and know that someday it will be gone. We're all feral cats.

The purpose of this post is not to strike fear into the hearts of readers but to remind them: Our existence is tenuous and limited - and if you have the essentials of food and shelter, you really have it all. You've got it made.

There is nothing more.

---
Learn more about the hierarchy of human needs and desires: Maslow's hierarchy of needs. However, read with this Caveat: Maslow was wrong to a degree, in that he overstated what constitutes a "need" versus a desire. A "need" is a thing we must have to live. A "desire" is something we want in order to make us happy.
Our true NEEDS consist of food and shelter. Everything else is a desire rather than a need, however strong that desire might be. And this goes to the root of our problems: Thinking that things we strongly desire constitute our needs. And of course, this error has been used to manipulate us for centuries. Therefore, think of this theory as "Maslow's heirarchy of desires" - a more accurate description.

More On Meaning and Life

2009-10-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

A note from my dearest friend contained a link to a story about a photo left on the moon. It was intended as a long term monument, of sorts, to the astronaut's family. The note from my dearest added, "Man, I wish I could do something like this before I die."

You can see the story here ... What you are seeing is the picture Charles Duke left on the moon. This image is not from today but was taken with another camera and brought back to earth. Despite the implications of the article, that photo would no longer exist and hasn't existed for decades.

Ultraviolet radiation destroys the dyes that make up photos as well as anything written. Even here on the earth, we have to take steps to preserve photos: They are kept out of sunlight and (at least artwork quality photos) are kept under UV glass away from direct light of any kind. On the moon, ultraviolet radiation is hundreds of times stronger than here on the earth. That photo probably didn't last a year.

Yet most of us feel that burning desire expressed by my friend - frequently kept to ourselves - that our lives might have some deeper, broader significance than this all-too-brief span. The thought that our little flame of existence is so short and - once extinguished - will not have mattered one bit is in many ways the ultimate dread. In other words, we fear that our lives are meaningless.

It is true that little or nothing that we make with our hands will survive for long and that our most prized possessions will turn to dust just like that photo. What we actually leave behind, however, is the influence we've had on others. That influence may be as direct and immediate as our children, but we've known and influenced others as well, touching lives without awareness with consequences we cannot comprehend. The little differences we make may go unnoticed, the work of our existence may remain unseen, yet the influence is there. Those we have changed in our little ways also go on to influence others' lives - and so it goes.

You see, whether we realize it or not, we are here because of the actions and influences of people who came before us, most of whom we never knew: Not only our direct ancestors but also non-relatives who made the lives of our ancestors what they were. Thus our existence is owed to thousands upon thousands who lived and died in anonymity yet who created our world as it is.

Likewise, there will be future generations who will never know us whose lives will nevertheless be what they are because we were once here, and we did stuff.

So our lives, however we live them, will echo down through generations and even the least among us will cast a long shadow into the future. That must be enough.

"Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried." Edward Abbey

My Basic Guidebook for Life

2009-08-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

I've been tinkering with finishing my book, as many of you know... I don't know if I will ever get it done or not. And really, does it matter?

In the meantime, here are 20 reality checks based on 'If you Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him' by Sheldon Kopp. Starting with the original list, I have excerpted the salient points and added my own take on it all....

20 Reality Checks

This is it. I know you were expecting more from your life and that you have big dreams. Everyone feels that way but they still end up having to live in the real world where dreams are seldom more than just that.

There are no hidden meanings. There is probably a lot of stuff you don't know - about why things are the way they are. But when you find out, the answers will turn out to be every bit as mundane and prosaic as the stuff you already know.

We are already dying, and we'll be dead a long time. If you aren't living here and now, living in the moment, living what-is, you are not alive.

Nothing lasts! Life changes like the weather; sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but always it changes. And all things come to an end.

There is no way of getting all you want. If you get what you now crave, there will just be another thing that you have to have.

There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things. Life proves over and over again that success comes partly from hard work and partly from luck, despite the desire of successful people to attribute their success to their own moral superiority. The reality check here is that you must accept the fact that success in life is like a sweepstakes; your hard work and dedication is your entry fee ...then there is a random drawing.

The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there's no compensation for misfortune.

You have the responsibility to do your best nonetheless. Remember that you are the product of ten thousand generations - people who lived and struggled and died, yet somehow succeeded in life else you would not be here. So in honor of their efforts, your best is the least you can do.

It's a random universe to which we bring meaning. Meanings and beliefs about meanings are held with great fervency by billions of people - each one completely assured in their minds that they have the true answers. Nevertheless, my meaning may not be your meaning. Just accept that.

You really don't control anything.

You can't make anyone love you.

There are no truly great men. Anyone may be 'great' or awful, depending on circumstances. Hitler could have been a famous painter. Time, place and circumstances make heroes and villains.

Everyone lies, cheats, pretends. (yes, you too, and most certainly myself.) It is human nature. Try to follow the Golden Rule and treat others as you would wish to be treated - and don't be surprised if they fail to reciprocate.

Progress is an illusion. Things get better for a while, and then they get worse for a while. Learn history and you will see that this is true.

Evil can be displaced but never eradicated, as all solutions breed new problems.

We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that's all there is.

All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data, yet we are responsible for everything we do.

All significant battles are waged within oneself.

If you begin to feel like your life has a special, Divine purpose and that you have been Chosen by God to perform a great task; consider having yourself committed to a mental institution before you hurt someone. This is the path of horror and destruction; from Stalin, Hitler and Mao to Charles Manson and Timothy McVey - they all firmly believed themselves to be God's chosen instrument and all left ruin in their wake as a result.

That said, you are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.

The Verdict From Corvallis

2009-06-02T18:16:00.000-07:00

The judgment is in; I will not be a featured artist at the Corvallis fair. Oh well. It's pretty much their loss and a mixed blessing. For me, there isn't a lot of money in this sort of thing. It's about a break-even proposition, only done for exposure. For them... well, they missed out on the most entertaining art show they COULD have had.

General Web and Life Updates

2009-05-31T19:01:00.001-07:00

As usual for this time of year, I'm juggling a few things at once. I don't know yet if I will be performing at the Corvallis art fair or not but I should hear something in a few days.

In the meantime, I've pulled out the pastels after all this time and have done a couple of little landscapes. Nothing exciting but at least doing them made me feel good.

I'm also trying to get back to practicing quick face drawing so I can do more live events. It's hard when I don't have a lot of free subjects wandering around, though. It's just not the same working from photographs.

AND, as you may have noticed, I've completely revised the look and feel of my blogs - well, half of them anyway. Hopefully it will make things easier to find. Let me know if you like the new look.

UFO Festival Parade

2009-05-16T14:18:00.001-07:00

Storm troopers

Alien Gummie Bears

2009-05-16T12:13:00.000-07:00

Right next to my spot at the festival.

Old folding Apache

2009-04-03T14:35:00.001-07:00

It's a 1970's era folding camp trailer. It is so cheap that I'm tempted but it's also pretty beat-up.

General Life Updates

2009-03-29T10:53:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking about how I haven't posted to this blog in a while, so I guess it's time!

You know, I read several personal blogs and occasionally even comment on them. No one ever comments back ... and that's fine. But it occurred to me that perhaps my comments on the blogs of others are unwelcome. Who knows?

I could put it like, "Hey, I don't know these people in real life and they don't know me. Obviously from their lack of mutual participation, they don't give a shit about me. So why should I give a shit about them?"

Perfectly logical, except I DO actually care about people I don't know in real life. It's probably pathetic to do so. I've ALMOST commented about 5 time today... and then stopped myself. After all, with no indication that my comments are particularly welcome I may just be causing needless trouble/stress/whatever. So I'm going to try to stop caring quite as much....

On other fronts, I've been working on consolidating some of my art back to Chriss Pagani .com ...I'm not sure why. Originally, I thought one shouldn't mix different kinds of art, that it might be a search penalty. And that may be true! But I also get tired of maintaining ten blogs. I've left The Painter of Oregon site as basically just an online gallery. I still have contact/resume info over at Roadside Artist, though. And of course I have my Feral Cat Rescue Blog 'n such.

And I'm still feeling like.... what's the POINT?

I don't have an answer.

I've also been thinking about doing some caricature-cartoon work at a few art fairs this coming season - which is INSANE because I'm not that good at it. But then I think it's the only way I'll ever get to be good! I'm sure I'll regret it if I go ahead. I don't know, I keep thinking about it anyway. *sigh*

You can still Facebook me btw ... although if I had to take bets I'd have to bet that nobody WILL.

Clouds And Water

2009-03-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

Tillamook Barview Jetty area. I just liked the mix of clouds, water and rocks.

Abstract ... Something...

2009-03-06T18:30:00.001-08:00

Crap-cam cell phone photo, with interesting objects, light and shadow. Hillsboro, Oregon. I guess we all need something to obsess over hmm? You can also visit my abstract blog for paintings and philosophy about that.

Here's Your Sign

2009-03-04T14:44:00.001-08:00

I have new car signs. Hopefully they will help?

The (UN)News in Me

2009-03-03T19:33:00.000-08:00

Oh yes, that's me staring uncomprehendingly at cat food. I can't decide what to buy. You know, come to think of it, I've had trouble deciding much of anything lately. I like the way that the mass of stuff around me makes me look small and insignificant ..mostly what I am. Feeling down, I guess. Not entirely without reason.

Here are some of the main reasons:

1) My art is amounting to nothing or at least not progressing. Art is better as a hobby than as a business and I would never recommend it. I'm just stuck with doing it for money... and lately, there hasn't been much. I was a bigger deal about 5 years ago than I am today. Of course, there were a million designer jobs several years ago and now they've all been outsourced to China and India (cuz Americans love to work but we can't survive on $2.00 an hour like the Chinese do). I've done everything I can to amp up my t-shirt business. Nothing. Basically. I know the economy is dead now (thanks a lot, George). But still....

2) I have no friends. No, it's true. This is in part by choice because people disappoint me much too often. It's also part situational.... I'm kind of a freak show, I admit, and that has cost me a few friends. My refusal to cave-in to popular false belief systems has cost me more. But I'm basically harmless. And I'm an angel for feral cats. But they don't surf the web. If you are reading this, you are just a person who happened to wander through. You don't really know me. And I know that because I know that I don't have any friends.

3) My web site traffic is down everywhere. Now this is a problem almost everywhere because of the neo-fascist^* economy but I can only deal with my little corner of the world. I posted before about being stretched too thin, what with the abstract art and philosophy site, the Oregon paintings site, plus the blog about same, cartoon t-shirts here, stupid word art t-shirts there, and we're not even mentioning Facebook and Twitter ...and the blogs found here about art and feral cat rescue. But what difference does it make when nobody cares? And maybe it's just too much for me to deal with.

4) Things are not going to get better. I've told myself that a break is just around the corner for so many years I've lost count. I'm finally starting to admit that I'm just fooling myself. Sure, if the fascist contingent of American politics doesn't manage to re-gain control of the government then things will improve eventually, but that will take a long time and may be long after I'm dead. Especially as far as the most critical thing; universal health care. The neo-fascists will fight that to the bitter end. They don't care how many people die every day because of their policies. It's always profits über alles for them.

5) I suspect that if I think about 1,2,3 and 4 for much longer, I will stop caring. And I'm torn as to whether I want to stop caring or not.

Yes, I know I wrote a while back about changing my attitude For all I know, that's where I went wrong. Maybe I was better off being pissed at humanity for being so stupid and so mean - and now I don't care because I've given up trying to fix it. So... that's the news in me. Thanks for tuning in.

---
Fascism, for those who don't know, is the marriage of government and corporate power, so that they basically become one thing. Neo-fascism is my own coined term for a certain variety of big-government "conservative" politician who sees it as his political mission to put corporate profits ahead of the national interest and the interests of individual Americans.
This type of person always claims to be for "limited government" but he doesn't mean it in the sense normal people would understand. In in the big-government neo-fascist world, the term "small government" only applies to government having any power over corporations. He/she loves big government when it comes to intrusive regulation of PEOPLE and monitoring of the lives of individuals.

2009-02-25T11:37:00.000-08:00

Well even if you don't hear much from me I'm still around! I meant that whole thing about changing my attitude, btw... it's just hard to do. But I'm working on it. The Oregon art projects have been frustrating for me so I've been procrastinating and cartooning instead.

I've also spent some time (probably too much of it) updating the Toonz.me t-shirt store with new cartoons and word art stuff. It's fun but not profitable considering the amount of time I invest.

And what's the deal with tastes in t-shirts these days?

Pacific City Library Thrift Store

2009-02-24T14:39:00.001-08:00

Small, compact and friendly - this little second hand store supports the local library.

Homeless Haights, A Family History Snippet

2009-02-16T18:56:00.000-08:00

Among the influences on my life, being homeless as a child ranks near the top. It's an old family inside joke: When asked where we were from, we would say, Bel Air. It sounded kind of cool, I suppose, or at least represented a feigned normality. And it was partially true - because we lived in a 1956 Chevy Bel Air coupe. There is really nothing cool about being homeless, though.

You see, my family was often homeless due to alcohol and drugs, and our lives seemed to wallow in violence and addiction. I was a kid at the time, though, so I didn’t exactly realize that this wasn’t normal.

Perhaps my never-ending search for the meaning of existence stems from those times. Or perhaps it comes from being the progeny of extremely brilliant but emotionally unstable people - being in my own way crazy as they were. In any case, my dramatic early life shaped who I am and the stories themselves can be rather hard to stomach for some, but this blog is about my art, not my suffering. I just thought it might be worth knowing where I'm coming from.

When homeless, we usually parked somewhere in the woods/forest whatever…. I had several birthdays while living in a car or tent in forests.

Here we see a picture of me on my 6th birthday. I think the area is the woods outside Red Bluff, California, which is where we were living at the time. We didn't call it being homeless, we called it camping. We just didn’t have a home to go to.

But back to living in the Chevy.... Later, in this very car, my dad would blow his brains out while sitting behind the wheel. After that, my mom just gave that car to someone - so we didn’t even have a car for a while.

My father's suicide would probably be the number one life-changer in my history. It makes homelessness a distant number two. If my father had not killed himself AND I had lived, it would be a very different life. Note that I said, "if I had lived" because my father threatened to kill my mother and me on more than one occasion and he most certainly had the street credentials to do it: Growing up, I never had a pet die of natural causes. By age 5, I had seen the business-end of a pistol in my face more times most people will see in a lifetime. But instead of killing me, he killed himself.

In retrospect, I am nominally grateful.

I will credit the homeless years with my early introduction and experience in street art. And while I am aware that some people are horrified by the things that have happened in my life, to me they are just part of my history and part of what has made me who I am.

If I were to deny these things and wish they had been different then I would be wishing that I was whole different person from who I am. I find that unacceptable; for better or worse, I have no desire to be someone else.

So now you know where I'm at. Homeless? Not exactly. You see, for me, home is where my art is.

Downtown Astoria

2009-02-16T15:24:00.001-08:00

While wandering the coast... I just like the look of this building. It's obviously very old. A lot of Astoria is old. And that is really cool.

2009-02-15T09:07:00.001-08:00

Cold and wet today, which is pretty typical for this part of the world at this time of year. It's just that lately we've been lucky and haven't had to deal with quite as much bad weather as usual. I don't really mind it that much; it cuts down on outdoor activity but I always have things I need to do inside, too.

I realize that some of latest posts seem a bit negative... well, only here on my personal journal. It's where I kind of let a stream of consciousness take over so I don't do much self-censoring.

In reviewing, I feel that I've let people with small minds get to me a little too much. It's something I need to work on. I mean, why do I do that? It accomplishes nothing and only makes me feel small.

Understanding the true pointlessness of life can be depressing or scary, it is true; but it can also be liberating. Yes, nothing matters in the big picture. Whether that is good or bad depends on how you decide to take it.

2009-02-01T15:01:00.001-08:00

I think I found my new mobile art studio. Well, except I don't have the 1,800 dollars yet. It's a 1987, one ton, full standing headroom. What do you think?

I have a feeling it will need too much mechanical work for me, but I can dream, right?

New Original Music

2009-01-30T11:57:00.000-08:00

For do-it-yourself clubbers, I just posted the latest original Pagani mp3 at Chriss Pagani.

Have fun!

Signs of the times

2009-01-28T13:23:00.001-08:00

What shows our future more than the little guy who has given up hope?

Overexposed ?

2009-01-26T11:43:00.000-08:00

I don't know, maybe I'm at TOO MANY places on the web. It's certainly hard enough for me to keep up with so perhaps it is just too much for anyone who might be interested in me. What do I do?

The weird thing is that about five or six years ago I was called a "rising star" in the art community. But instead of hooking up, I ended up feeling more alienated than ever. The result is that it's been a bit of time since anyone has written about/talked about my work. I DO have a piece in an upcoming art book, but that's another story....

Maybe I'm just feeling sorry for myself.

Because I've always wanted to experiment, I recently added a blog about sumi-e style ink painting. My own version blends sumi with Chinese ink painting and often involves India ink for greater permanence. I don't know where I'm going with it yet but it is both challenging and fun.

I've added mobile blogging for this blog, too - so I'll be in touch on the road and perhaps send a few pictures along the way. Oh and you can follow me over on Twitter as well. It might be the best place for general non-blogspot updates.

Last but not least, I hope that any Facebook users reading this will take a moment to friend me over on Facebook.

In the meantime, I'll try to think more about how to consolidate all of this! :)

New Year

2009-01-04T10:49:00.000-08:00

Well, I made it through another year...although there were times....

If I were the type to make New Year's resolutions... besides the usual one about losing weight, I'd like to resolve to stop worrying about what other people think of me...to stop fearing their judgment (which seems uniformly negative) and to just live my life. I'd LIKE to do that, but I probably won't.

That said, I'm sure glad I'm still here! Even with being an oddity to some and freak to others... my family loves me. AND, I always remind myself of my motto: Everything that has happened to me in my life - whether good or bad - has all worked together to make me who I am today. And there is no one else I'd rather be.

Christmas Updates

2008-12-26T09:37:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a while. I'm working on a larger scale painting of the Sand Lake area and I will post it at the Oregon Painter blog as soon as I finish it. It seems like I've been working on it for a MONTH now...wait, I have! Sheesh. I just have too many things going, I guess.

We've had snow and a lot of freezing weather and impassable roads. The phones - ALL OF THEM including Cell phones! - were knocked out for a while. You had to walk or drive to a fire station if you needed 911 service. But around here, there's probably no one there either. But we're starting to get back to normal and will have Christmas late over the weekend I think.

Merry Christmas!

Objective Error - the Faith of Libertarianism and Objectivism

2008-10-20T11:47:00.000-07:00

For more background, read the post Random Journey. There, I explained my journey of faith and how I got to where I am.

While I no longer trust in doctrines and personas arising from fantasy fiction, I find myself unable to go along with their opposite-twin of objectivism, either.

For me, objectivism is just atheism that has found a new deity. The movement was founded by Ayn Rand [real name Alissa Rosenbaum], an ex-Soviet refugee who was rabidly anti-communist even as she kept the anti-religious element of communism intact. Known first as a fiction author, Rand became the leader of her own cult thanks to being relentlessly promoted by the anti-Communist red-baiters of her era. They did this because she deified capitalism not because they gave a shit about her, personally. Without the promotional work of these fascist government types, "Rand" would have remained an obscure novelist and nothing more. But with their help, her philosophy achieved the status of a true religion - one with at least a couple of denominations, as we shall see.

Unfortunately, I find exactly the same faults in objectivism that I find in mainline, fear-based religions; that is, worship of false gods created to control people. The gods in this case are dual; "Self" and the magical all-powerful "Free Market."

First, being self-centered is the deification of self and is no better than believing in some other false deity. Yes, that is a subjective statement but I can make a case for it - particularly the "false" part....

In case you haven't noticed, none of us exist apart from or above society as a whole: We eat food we didn't harvest or kill, we live in houses we didn't build - and we earn and spend money that gains us possessions and power ONLY because it happens to be valued by others. The inescapable conclusion, then, is that the idea of the supremacy of self is no different in kind from the supremacy of imaginary beings. The totally independent, self-sufficient "Self" does NOT exist. It is mythical, high-sounding vaporware.

As for the other false god: Libertarians, as the bastard children of objectivism, worship the deity of "Free Market" - a thing with magical powers to self-correct through "enlightened" or "rational self-interest." This super-being of "The Market" will work for our benefit in the most incredible, mystical (and contradicted by the REAL world) ways.... if we would only trust in it and believe in it and give ourselves completely to it. Sound at all familiar?

This is where the libertarian movement (think the opposite of what its name implies) and the objectivist movement meet and have sex. Therefore I will kill the two evil anti-freedom birds with one stone at this juncture. Although anarchist and socially conscious libertarians exist, their worship of a mythical free market brings them all back to the same place. And of course the super-capitalist libertarians are also the only ones that get the big corporate funding for their think tanks, so they're the ones I have to address. (I always found it amusing that libertarians and objectivists often seem to be at each others' throats; like Sunni and Shia Muslims, it's two slight variations on the same religion competing for the the right to grind humanity under its boot.)

Non-believers in this Market-worship religion immediately see the first fatal flaw: As soon as you talk about self-interest but have to modify it with something else, you have left the real world behind. In the real world, self-interest is regulated by society through government and religion. Enlightenment has never been a particularly significant factor in the lives of human beings and that is not going to change.

You can't count on something working through "rational" self-interest or enlightenment of any kind. How many times do we have to learn this lesson? Free of the restraints of government regulation (something that SOCIETY creates as a collective force), corporations acting on behalf of their power-elite owners will do whatever benefits the current quarterly bottom line - again and again. Fuck the rest of us. And fuck the future. It's been shown in the REAL WORLD again and again. We see it every day - and more so as societal controls continue to weaken.

Unregulated "free market" capitalism leads to disaster because the rich and powerful always have the upper hand against the masses - and will use that advantage to further empower themselves. It has nearly destroyed the American economy.

If you haven't thought much about this, you might ask me why power-elitists, being super rich, would want to destroy an economy?
Short answer: Greed - and the fact that wealth (libertarians always seem to forget this) is completely relative to poverty within a given society: One can be super-rich by controlling 90 percent of the wealth of a nation (mission accomplished, free market!) but how do you graduate from being merely super-rich to being royalty? Or Gods? You accomplish this by driving everyone else into poverty and servitude, of course. Again, real world examples abound despite libertarian blinders.

You'll notice that Libertarians will never mention examples of true libertarian paradises such as Somalia and Abu Dabi as proof of the truth of their religion. Oh, everything is private there and the government has no real power to speak of. In Somalia, even the police and army are private. They SHOULD be pointing to these countries as examples of what privatization can do. And I think we all know why they don't....

Finally, while there may be a hundred other reasons why libertarianism = no liberty, number 101 is another point proven over and over again in the REAL world: You have no rights in the private space of others.

Have you seen any of the stories about people being thrown out of malls because they wore a t-shirt with a saying that was critical of George Bush? Or an anti war slogan? Yes, it happens regularly. They either leave quickly, or they get arrested.

That's because malls are private property. That means that the mall owners get to decide what you can wear, what you can say, what you can eat, and how you will behave on their property.

Their rights to control you in this way are absolute and they don't really care if you don't like it. They can operate just fine without your business. Libertarians will try to tell you that, "oh..um.. yeah, but that's because SOME regulations still exist, see. If we just got rid of all regulations protecting average people from the rich and powerful, they would drop their fascistic tendencies and suddenly allow you to be free... just because... well.. you know, rational self-interest will change that...someday... eventually. It will just work...cuz it has to..."

Reality shows us otherwise.

The owners of private property decide what rights - IF ANY - you will have. To be more accurate, as the above example shows, you have no rights on other people's private property - only privileges that can be revoked at any time and for any reason. And in libertarian paradise world, every square inch of ground would be private property.

Not YOUR private property, of course! Your streets, sidewalks, parks and waterways may be owned by Disney or GE or Pepsi or AIG ...or maybe the Unification Church. Since you, dear reader, are almost certainly NOT a billionaire or multinational corporation, you won't be the one buying up all the public spaces.

As the non faith-blinded can clearly see, one thing we know for SURE about a Libertarian paradise is that whoever decides what privileges you may have in formerly-public spaces, it wont be you making those decisions.

Multinational corporations will likely acquire most public spaces, and they certainly have their own agenda - one that has absolutely nothing to do with your personal liberty. But there are even more sinister organizations with lots of cash and the will to use it: If the Unification Church buys up your town (and they certainly can afford to do so as a very rich worldwide religious organization!) then you can say good-bye to any right to criticize the Reverend Moon or question any of his decisions. Which brings me to another of the libertarian self-contradictions....

Libertarians tend to feel as I do about religion. But under libertarian universal privatization, did you ever think that maybe some rich religion like the Catholic church might just buy YOUR town? No? They have the money. Privatization means the highest bidder gets it all.

And once again I remind you that the owners of property have an absolute right to determine what privileges YOU have on THEIR property. So that's the end of your ability to criticize Christianity.

Oh, you can say whatever you want inside your little apartment, I suppose. But don't step outside and say it. What are you going to do? Use the the power of the mystical almighty Free Market to stop this by refusing to support the Catholic church? Hahaha... yeah I bet they'll really sweat that one out!

All of the above is flawless in its logic and totally based in reality rather than a faith of ANY kind. But I know that libertarians and objectivists are true-believers in the religious sense and can never allow themselves to grasp what I am saying. It's the nature of being a believer; you must never allow any question about your predetermined conclusion into your mind. You must attack! You must obfuscate! You must deny! Never examine and never never never give up your faith!

When I first realized this fatal flaw of libertarianism I laughed out loud. As indicated, I was once attracted to the idea of libertarianism because of its presumed loyalty to reason. Heck, they even call their magazine "Reason" - sounds great! Right? But I soon learned that the Libertarian fealty for reason stops at a rather infantile level: They are very proud of themselves, for instance, for identifying obvious transparent bunk spewed by other religions - yet they remain unable to apply the same real-life lens to their own beliefs.

Of course, like other religions, their beliefs are perfectly consistent and rational within the little world they've built for themselves. It is a world where everything has a free market solution and the evidence from the real world and real life only matters when it can be used to support this predetermined world view. As long as you can ignore/laugh-off/deride the real life examples I have cited, it's great!

Their love of logic and reason is shallow, therefore, and completely lacking any level of self-realization. It reminds me of the saying, "bright as a dime and about as deep." Or to paraphrase from another popular religion, "having a form of wisdom but lacking the substance thereof."

Sadly, it seems like everyone in the world has been taken in by one form of bunk or another. I wish it were otherwise.

There is no place for me among these true believers.

---

If you find yourself somewhat confused as to what the difference between these two religions might be (objectivism vs libertarianism) I don't blame you. You may wish to read a further comparison here.

NW Haight Genealogy

2008-10-08T19:46:00.000-07:00

I had previously written about my search for relatives on my other site, the roadside artist, but since I intend to shut down that site at some point (to save a few bucks) I figured I should discuss some of my findings here.

I have a tree at geni.com, a very short version of which is represented here. To see the whole thing, I think they make you join - but it's free so why not? And if you have any questions you can always ask me...

View more of C. L.'s tree | Get your own family tree at Geni.com

For a basic summary: you have Sylvanus Haight born in NY in 1838. He produced A LOT of kids! Included: George Haight, Clarence Haight, Frank Haight (1868 - who had MANY children too), Althea, Bertha, Florence, Elmer Haight, Manny DeForest Haight and Bowker Haight (1884) ..possibly others.

The Minnesota branch of my family tree includes Clarence Haight, his wife Ruth, and daughters Lucille (1949), Beverly (1951) and Cynthia Ann (1953).

Now as to the children I know about from above:
Frank's children included Pearl, Raymond Haight, Harold, Joseph, Maude, Gladys, Earl Haight, Frank Haight Jr (whom I believed died in infancy (1910ish) and David Haight (about 1913). <- There MUST be children still around from ONE of these families, right?

I would like to find some current family members.

Clarence Haight married Nancy Downs and fathered George Elmer Haight. George (who often went by just Elmer Haight) married Alma Gibson and fathered Stanley Gibson Haight. Stanley moved to Minnesota, Married Ruth Hennesy, and had three daughters: Lucille (1949), Beverly (1951) and Cynthia Ann Haight (1953). ..Haven't found them yet but I bet they're out there somewhere.
Elmer Haight married Jessie Meade and had a son named Clifford ..and Clifford is MY father. And I have two children; Cliff and Christa Haight.
Manny DeForest Haight produced Rollin Haight, who fathered Suzanne Haight Pittson the current Jazz vocalist star - and her brother Randy Haight, who lives in California.

You can see that we haven't brought up most of the family lines to the present day... only Manny/Rollin/Suzanne and Elmer/Clifford/Me. THERE MUST BE MORE OF YOU OUT THERE! CHECK YOUR FAMILY TREE!

Think you might be a descendant of one of these Haights?? Comment below and tell me what you know! Any help is appreciated, as both Suzanne and myself would love to find some more cousins/second cousins.

Random Journey

2008-10-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

The title suggests that I have come to some conclusion about the meaning of life, or lack thereof. This is not really correct but i have grown to suspect - more and more - that whatever meaning we assign to our lives is totally artificial and doesn't really exist in an objective sense.

Now, I spent most of my life being devoutly religious. So much so that I went to seminary and became an ordained minister. I pastored a church for a number of years and I really truly believed in what I taught. But religion has grown to disappoint me; from the hope and love of the past it has turned into a pro-war, pro-violence kind of thing where the term "pro-life" applies only to zygotes; once your born you can go #&&# yourself. I can't support that, sorry.

So because religion has turned so dark and evil, I've had to consider the alternatives. Presented below is the case for non-meaning, for whatever it is worth. I do not endorse a particular viewpoint. I am not an atheist. It's just hard to be some other thing at the moment, either.

The Reality of Meaninglessness - Part 1

I used to be very religious. I'm not anymore. Perhaps I am a spiritual person - I feel that I am, but I also have come to learn that religion is unworthy of my trust. And all of that came about because of a simple search for truth.

As a pastor, I wanted to make sure that I was teaching people the RIGHT thing - that I wasn't misleading them. I had noted even as a child that there were MANY denominations of Christians, many of whom believe and teach that all the other denominations aren't really Christian at all. That always bothered me.

It was the search for - and the acquisition of - knowledge that eventually led me away from traditional religion.

It's difficult at times because I'm a naturally spiritual person - a characteristic no doubt found in brain wiring and evolution rather than a representation of an unseen reality. In fact, the knowledge that spiritual or religious orientation can be identified in a specific area of the brain kind of shoots down the self-satisfied sense of moral superiority of the religious folk among us, doesn't it?

Just to deal with the fundamental problem of Christianity, for the moment; it is completely self-referencing. Lacking objective evidence, you are told to believe this or that because other people (who supposedly know more than you) believe it. And if that isn't sufficient, then here it is in the Bible - and the Bible is God's word. So it must be true.

And how do we know it is God's word? Because it says it is, silly! And if that's not enough for you, look at all the prophecies that the Bible tells you were fulfilled within its pages. If it says it predicted "something" and later that same Bible tells you that that "something" really happened, it is fulfilled prophecy and it must be true!

This is the error of self-reference: The thing you seek to prove is the thing you refer to in order to prove it. Of course, this sort of thing is the basis for all religions - it's just that people don't usually stop to think about it.

In the case of the Bible, actual real Bible scholars (rather than preachers) will tell you that the books of the Bible were written long after you THINK they were written - basically "after the fact." For example, Jesus' semi vague prediction of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple ("not one stone will be left upon another" - could be a prophecy but it could be an observation that this was already the third temple and you can't expect them to last forever!) may sound impressive if you are sure he said it in 30 AD and that particular temple was destroyed in 66 AD... AND you are sure he meant what interpreters today claim he meant. But it become rather mundane and pointless when you realize that the book you are reading wasn't written before 70 AD and it was written by a person trying to get you to believe in something.

Having fulfilled prophecy is actually pretty easy when you don't have to write down your predictions until AFTER the events happen. And without such "independent evidence," all you really have is something your told to believe in because others believe in it and it will make you feel good. That's a pretty flimsy thing to build ones life upon!

It's more than enough for most people, however. Part of that is caused by the fear of death: People are willing to cling to anything that tells them that they matter and that their existence will continue after death, despite all evidence to the contrary.

None of this proves that there is no truth behind Christianity or some other religion, of course. It only shows that there is no trustworthy, independent evidence to suggest that these stories have any more reality behind them than Harry Potter or King Arthur's Tales.

Without such evidence there is no compelling reason to select one religion over another - except perhaps personal comfort. And I empathize with that. In which case, I strongly suggest that one select a version of your favorite religion that strives to do as little harm as possible; one that eschews bigotry and extremist politics. As in the first rule of medicine, strive to do no harm.

As a philosopher and Bible scholar who wants and wishes to believe, this is not a satisfying answer. However, my dedication to TRUTH rather above comforting stories keeps me from going further.

What I would like is to have people learn to move beyond preconceptions and pre-formed conclusions so that we can come to terms with what IS instead of what we want to believe.

And yes, I know that will not happen.

***

The Reality of Meaninglessness - Part 2

Everyone with an IQ above a houseplant wonders about the meaning of life, at least occasionally. Many have made a career out of it ... Including this artist. Having studied religion, gone to Bible college and become doctor in the subject, I've kind of come to the conclusion that we are asking questions beyond our ability to answer. Oh, we can always take some OTHER person's answer; they can tell us that they know because God told them - and if we believe them then their ideas in effect become settled truth. But if we start asking how they really know what they claim to know and IF we are willing to investigate those claims, it starts falling apart.

There are no answers grounded in reality and objective evidence that will satisfy... at least, not real answers. Lovely and wonderful story answers abound, however.

Because it is my area of expertise, I will deal with religion here - and Chritianity in particular.

The first purpose of religion is always social control: Do this, don't do that. God will punish you. It isn't coincidence that religion teaches you to not ask too many questions, to not investigate for yourself and to just accept whoever is in authority over you without question.

Religion is also the human way to explain instincts and the mysteries about the how the world works. Religion gives comforting answers to uncomfortable questions - as long as you don't want hard, objective proof of those answers. However, it is important to remember that religionists' stories are stories; as far as anyone can objectively determine. If you want facts and proof, you will be very disappointed . From a purely evidential standpoint, the stories of religions have no more substance to them than Harry Potter or Bilbo Baggins - and they all come from the same place in that people have a desire to feel like there is something more to life than the struggle for existence and to reproduce.

Most damning, although you hear a lot of talk about morals and "family values," church-going people are at least as likely to commit crimes, cheat on their spouses and even support war and war crimes as non-believers. So religious people sit on certain moral high-horse that turns out to be nothing more than vaporware.

Yet, the need for meaning and the fear of death drive people to religion and silences them from asking uncomfortable questions. What happens when you die? That's the question all religion is created to answer. All the moral stuff is thrown in to justify human instinctive behavior and to control it. Really, religion is always about death - which means that it is ultimately about fear.

So what is death really about? Unless you have an insatiable need for the truth, you probably should stop reading here. I'm an expert in religion, not biology, but I can tell you a few things.

I can only deal with what is known. There tens of thousands of religions with tens of thousands of stories. They worship a thousand gods - all of which you are most probably atheistic toward... except your own. So I am only going to talk about the known facts here, not the many many stories about those facts.

Here is one thing about death that can be easy enough to grasp: We all have a little taste of it in dreamless sleep. Of course even in sleep, consciousness actually exists on a low level because people who are asleep still have some sense of passing of time. And of course dreamless sleep is periodically broken up by REM-state dreaming, but in between is a lot of nothing.

A better example would be that of deep anesthesia. Here, consciousness is reduced to a point where even a sense of the passing of time is lost. Now remember that these examples happen with a fully functioning brain. Here we see that even with an intact brain you can have a kind of peaceful nonexistence. But people would like to believe something different; they would like to believe that when the brain ceases to function completely, all of a sudden we will be more conscious than when we were in deep sleep. UH-huh ...we all wish!

And maybe there is something to that - but we don't have any evidence. All we have is what people would like to believe... and belief is fine, maybe some of those beliefs will even turn out to be true. But without a shred of evidence, who knows? Stories about various deities are written to assure us that somehow we really matter to the universe and that we will therefore be kept around forever. But they are still just stories, written by people who may have been well-intentioned but who really didn't have any secret inside information - only their own ideas about things.

Well, I have ideas too.

Moving on, some people put their faith in near death experiences to support the otherwise unsupported beliefs. I've studied NDEs and I would like to believe there is something going on there. The obvious problem here is that those experiences always take place with a functioning brain deprived of oxygen. That's the same state, by the way, people get by inhaling spray paint and glue. The stories sound interesting but don't really prove much.

Furthermore, NDE advocates betray their bias by purposely leaving out experiences that don't fit into their arguments; my favorite from this category is the surprisingly-common "Meaningless Void" near death experience, a typical example of which is cited below - which occured to a 28 year old woman during a medical crisis:

"I was aware ... of moving rapidly upward into darkness. Although I don't recall turning to look, I knew the hospital and the world were receding below me, very fast.... I was rocketing through space like an astronaut without a capsule, with immense speed and great distance.

"A small group of circles appeared ahead of me, some tending toward the left. To the right was just a dark space. The circles were black and white, and made a clicking sound as they snapped black to white, white to black. They were jeering and tormenting—not evil, exactly, but more mocking and mechanistic. The message in their clicking was: Your life never existed. The world never existed. Your family never existed. You were allowed to imagine it. You were allowed to make it up. It was never there. There is nothing here. There was never anything there. That's the joke—it was all a joke.

"There was much laughter on their parts, malicious. I remember brilliant argumentation on my part, trying to prove that the world—and I—existed.... They just kept jeering.

"'This is eternity,' they kept mocking. This is all there ever was, and all there ever will be, just this despair....

"Time was forever, endless rather than all at once.... Yes, it was more than real: absolute reality."

I think you can quickly see why death-survival advocates never mention these stories in their evangelical works. If interested, you should read more on hallucinatory near death experiences.

Sometimes people tell me that near death experiences have happened to people who are brain dead, but there are at least two problems with that.
1) I don't know of a a case of someone who has ever come back from being truly brain dead. As far as I know, that's not possible. What I think they are really talking about is people who are in such deep comas that brain activity drops below levels that can be measured by an electroencephalograph. Problem: The EEG is not terribly sensitive and only measures electrical activity detectable at the skin surface.
2) Second problem: If a person is unconscious at a deep level for hours, days or weeks - they really don't have a concept of time passing. If you've ever had to go under anesthesia, you know this. So who is to say exactly when they had their visions or feelings of floating or whatever?

Well, I don't want to go on and on about this right now. I understand how millions of people desperately need to believe in their religion, to the point where they will threaten violence when you point out that they have built their lives on stories and myths instead of reality. That's a very strong need, isn't it?

But needing to believe something doesn't make it true. And at the very minimum the fact that you recognize the need to believe in something in order to carry on with life - and that this need is what drives you, not reality - should give one pause.

I confess: I'm one of those people who has a need to believe. So I understand how it feels. I totally empathize! The problem is that I know too much about life and I know too much about religion to just wallow in the fantasy. That makes life tough for me, I know, but that's who I am.

Now maybe the news isn't all bad, and I will opine more in future posts. I can't always give you what you want, my friend. Sometimes, all I can give you is the truth.

***

The Reality of Meaninglessness - Part 3

Religion is the inflatable love-doll of rational thought: It fills the meaninglessness of reality with pretty and high-sounding but vacant explanations of why things are the way they are. Although many need these stories survive, their desperate need in no way transforms plastic into flesh and bones.

Having said that, however, it is also important to realize that religion is built-in to human beings. Faith and religious thought has its own center in the human brain. We will always have it with us because it is part of who we are. The question is, what should be done with it?

I remind you that I am not an atheist and this is not an argument about the existence God. What I would like to do is to bring faith and reality together, if not for a melding then at least for a peace treaty. You will find a working assumption here that some god or "bigger thing" exists. This isn't a provable assumption, but it is the one I'm working with.

The problem isn't with a god's existence but the nature of such a Divine Being and how people use beliefs about "Him" to bend the world to their way of thinking.

Please don't write to me in an attempt to enlighten me: I'm an theologian and ordained minister - having wasted my youth on advanced theological studies. I know all the arguments inside and out. I've heard them all and, frankly, even invented several.

Please read this entire discussion from the beginning before passing judgment.

For those who have been following the discussion, you've seen by now that there are various arguments which push strongly against any particular religion being labeled as "The Truth".

Among these arguments, there is the Parsimony argument. The short version is this: a God who is pure good, all knowing, and all powerful could not be in charge of a world where 50,000 children starve to death every day (to give one example among a countless sea of horror). This does NOT prove that God does not exist, however, as some have attempted to claim. It merely means that whoever or whatever God is, if you assume "His" existence, must be re-thought if one wishes to deal with reality rather than live in a fantasy world. For more, see The Problem Of Evil discussions elsewhere.

Attempted counter-arguments typically begin with free will, but of course nobody chooses of free will to get cancer or be in the path of a tsunami. These are examples of things that just happen to people. Oh yes, I can hear some zealots saying that some people must choose cancer or to be wiped out in a natural disaster. Whatever.

Are you prepared to argue that ALL such people including infants make this choice? If not, then you lose. Even one person who is an innocent victim disproves your assertion.

Sometimes sin is named next, but it's always tough to try to argue that every baby who is born with a fatal illness is that way because it or its parents were big time sinners. And if you are going to argue THAT, then why not say that every aborted fetus was killed for some sin too? If you must make a heartless argument, at least try to be consistent with it!

And then there's the problem of saying everyone you know who gets cancer or dies unexpectedly must have been especially sinful.

Clever theologians try to muddy the waters of this discussion by prattling on about the difference between moral evil and natural evil. It doesn't matter, either God created everything or he didn't. If he did, he made evil. If he didn't, he's not the God you have been told that he is. This also has nothing to do with the free will to love or not love God, another smokescreen sometimes raised to divert ones attention from the real world.

As pointed out, babies are not free will agents and do not choose the bad things that happen to them. Alas, all of these arguments are intended to obfuscate and cloud rather than enlighten. A really good theologian can drone on for hours about free will and choice without ever dealing with reality and what we can see with our own eyes!

It just doesn't work, so then the defender is left with nothing but "we can't always understand God's purpose." This is a non-argument, of course: It simply means that you can't think of any further rationalization for the horrors of the world so you simply declare it off limits to discussion.

If you are a Christian, of course, you DO claim to know God's will, and you tell people on a regular basis that they must conform to what you say God's will is. If you don't claim to know God's will then how can you tell others how to live their lives?

In reality, you think, act and vote on the assumption that you DO know exactly what God thinks and what God wants. Only when you are caught trying to defend the indefensible do you resort to the no-knowledge cop-out.

That's okay, friend, I realize the one thing you can never allow yourself to think - even for a moment - is that the founding premise of your life might be faulty. It's just part of human nature and I will not hold that against you.

This is the unfortunate but inevitable problem encountered by those who start with a conclusion about the world and then try to bend the facts to fit. It is part of human nature to do this, but it can be a very hurtful part.

You have to reach a point of being genuinely tired of being bullshitted and lied to by people with an agenda of control before you can really get beyond this point. Few people get that far, preferring to close their eyes to what is really happening in the world around them. And I admit, ignorance is far easier than facing reality.

In this discussion, we start with the known facts and try to draw rational conclusions from them. This flies in the face of human emotional makeup, as I am well aware. I struggle with this problem every day. My emotional nature wants to abandon reason and logic and sometimes it gets the better of me. ..But not at the moment.

At this time I do not wish to get into discussions about the existence of God, or lack thereof, nor do I wish to expound on other phenomena such as psychic powers, ghosts, or reincarnation. We can save that for another time. Instead, let us consider what real, observable facts tell us about a Supreme Being.

First of all, we should deal with the question of evil. It's easy enough to blame the Devil but of course God created the devil if you believe the Bible or the Quran. Some will say, yes, but God just gave the devil free will. But free will does NOT have to include evil. This is a myth that religion uses to try to explain away the horrors of the world but one can observe from nature that many people act in good conscience without having to live in fear of a vengeful daddy-deity.

And free will/choice does not explain all the diseases and natural disasters that kill millions of innocent people every year. Clearly, evil is built in to creation itself. And while God is called our Heavenly Father, what earthly father would stand by and allow these horrible things to happen to his children if he had the power to prevent them?

I think what I'm beginning to suggest here is that God, if he exists, does not particularly love humans in the way that we practice love ourselves, nor does He display compassion in a way which a sane human would understand the term. Quite the contrary, if a creator of the universe exists, he must be rather indifferent to suffering in a way that would be considered at least callous if not sociopathic by human standards. Which is not to say God is callously indifferent, as you should note that I said "by human standards".

This isn't good or bad. If God exists then "He" is what he is, not what we wish "Him" to be. My objections stem from the fact that religionists continue to sell God as the loving father figure in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We can see why such an image works on the human psyche, but we should look deeper for its real meaning before deciding to try to shove it down everyone's collective throats.

So how do we do this? Putting aside the fact that religion is built-in to the human brain, one should examine the milieu in which current major religions were formed. Here are some pertinent facts:

1) In the period in which the major religions were founded, the average life expectancy was somewhere between 30 and 40 years. This means that people had a very limited opportunity to get a handle on life: they needed pre-packaged and simple explanations for everything.

2) As recently as a few generations ago, the average person would know only a few dozen people in his/her entire lifetime, and most of those people would be relatives. This is very important to the understanding of how it was possible for God to become a loving father figure. If you only know a handful a people, it's probably much easier to accept the idea that God really loves you, like daddy, and all sickness and death comes from some kind of sin or possibly demon possession, from daddy who is displeased with some of his children.
If you are unaware that somewhere else in the world, thousands of children are starving to death or that others are wiped out in an earthquake, you don't really have to struggle with the moral questions. You can accept the simple explanation that God has a specific intent for each act, even if it is hard to discern. No doubt this helps explain why so many religious people today intentionally isolate themselves from "worldly" news and current events, accepting only a heavily filtered Christian version of reality.

3) Back to our discussion of historical context, Holy Men and storytellers were once as common as McDonalds employees today. They were often considered important as entertainers as well as moralizers. Time, however, makes us lose this perspective. We tend to see the storytellers of long ago as somehow imbued by God in ways we would never attribute to today's prophets and philosophers, who are now more commonly seen as crazy.

4) The Holy Men storytellers of long ago were people just like today, with similar ideas and agendas, and their words were refined by their followers long before they were written down. Therefore, it is impossible to know for sure what Jesus or Mohamed actually said with any great degree of accuracy. We only know what their later (a generation or more later) followers wanted us to believe they taught. Because of this, even the casual observer will note that much of Christian teaching seems to be revisionist Judaism with a Roman frosting, just as Islam refines and repurposes Judeo-Christian teachings. Inconvenient old teachings were thrown out while new ones were added to deal with what were then present-day issues.

The refining of teachings continues, although this has become more difficult because we now work with written text instead of oral tradition. Now we rely on preachers adept at twisting words and re-interpreting texts.
For a common example, the New Testament clearly shows that mental illnesses and neurological conditions such as epilepsy are caused by demon possession. It couldn't be more clear on this point. This belief continued unchallenged for centuries until we began to discover biological causes for mental conditions. Initially, the church fought this - as it has always fought the advancement of knowledge. After all, if Jesus says epilepsy is caused by demons it must be caused by demons, right? Jesus was God incarnate so he couldn't have been mistaken.
But today, orthodox churches have surrendered to science on this point due to overwhelming evidence backed up by decades of research. Where once we called on an exorcist, when a parishioner has a child with epilepsy TODAY they go to a doctor.
Yes, the words are still in the Bible, but people try hard to ignore them, since it is impossible to construct an argument whereby a disease that was caused by demons in the first century is caused by biological conditions in the twenty-first.

Still, we all need something to hope for, don't we? I've had believers tell me that if anyone could prove conclusively that there was no God so that it became an inescapable reality for them, they would kill themselves. Without fully realizing it, they have found the true purpose of religion and why it is built into the brain: It's part of the survival mechanism as well as the chief agent of social control.

I certainly don't want those poor people to kill themselves. Instead, I would like/dream/hope for a new paradigm for faith - one based on reality, reason and logic. I suppose this still comes out to some sort of religion, but perhaps we can come up with one that doesn't cause as much harm as the present versions.

Ultimately, this is the bottom-line source of my objection to present day religions: They leave a trail of bodies, both figuratively and literally, that is unacceptable to me. The faith that proclaims love and forgiveness practices judgment, condemnation and even outright violence. And there's nothing loving about that.

Look to the stars.
Let hope burn in your eyes.
And we'll love,
And we'll hope,
And we'll die...
All to no avail.
All to no avail.

-Muse