Everyone Needs an Enemy

Posted on April 20, 2013 | 65 Comments

Everyone needs an enemy. That’s what we saw last night when the second suspect was caught in the Boston Marathon Bombing. It took the “other” to bring us all together, to unite everyone in a common cause. The night was reminiscent of the comradery we felt after 9/11. Too bad it takes a tragedy.

But as a parent, especially one like me with teenagers, it’s especially troubling to know the suspect was a teen, one who was considered a good kid, a kid who played sports and hung out with his friends just like your kid and mine. He was some woman’s baby, some teacher’s second-grade student. Where did we go wrong, I’m wondering. And how can we keep our kids tight to us, as parents and as a society, so they don’t wander off and become criminals? (I would not call these brothers terrorists, though they did terrorize a city.)  Say what we want, but that younger suspect, Dzhokar Tsamaev, who was well-adjusted and liked by so many of his peers, must have taken some serious influencing by his brother to turn him against the friends and neighbors of his city. As he lay on the ground, handcuffed, his shirt exposed a skinny, smooth belly that still belonged to a boy.

The parents said their children were good kids; they were in disbelief that their sons could have committed such crimes. That would be my reaction, too. My next reaction would be, where did I go wrong? I would be so angry with myself for letting loose into the world children who could cause so much harm and suffering for others.

A recent Unicef report said that we’ve created a violent society for our kids: we have the 3rd high homicide rate among developed nations. Parents fear for their kids’ safety, even at school, which is supposed to be a safe haven for our children. But it’s kids who are killing us, children as well as adults. This recent tragedy– and it’s 19-year-old suspect. In Newtown, Adam Lanza was 20. In Colorado, James Holmes was a 25-year-old grad student, with a nurse for a mother and a father who is a mathematician a PhD. These are pretty typical young Americans who are terrorizing us. Maybe we need to stop worrying about our kids as victims and start worrying about our kids turning into killing machines.

The CNN headline this morning reads “The Terror is Over.” Until the next time, that is. I know that a bombing is not an every-day occurrence here in America, fortunately, but violence against others is. Whether a person kills one or many, it makes no difference. We need to understand what is making our young Americans so angry and disenfranchised that they feel the only way to get our attention, to speak to us, is through horrific acts of violence.

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Holy Communion!

Posted on April 10, 2013 | 107 Comments

One more thing today….It’s a little strange that some Catholics believe that, “Catholics who promote gay marriage should not try to receive holy Communion.”

…the archbishop of Detroit, Allen Vigneron, said Sunday that Catholics who receive Communion while advocating gay marriage would “logically bring shame for a double-dealing that is not unlike perjury.

Let’s get this straight. The church is riddled with priests who either participated or covered up pedophilia, and they can take communion and give it, too? Then there are the annulments granted (for a price, of course), birth control, and the usual sins (some of them deadly) pardoned over and over and over again. Whether you’re a priest leading mass or you’re a parishioner sitting in the pews, isn’t everyone rejecting what the church teaches on a daily basis? I mean, Jeez. They’re making my head spin with the hypocrisy here.

It seems to me embracing two people who love each other–and who are harming no one with their love–should not be considered sinful. But who am I to say? I’m just a lowly woman who wouldn’t be allowed to offer up my voice even if I did believe.

So, who doesn’t “double-deal”? I just don’t understand. Does accepting gay marriage somehow emasculate the church? Through communion, Catholics believe they are actually eating another man’s body. How gay is that?

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E-mails

Posted on April 10, 2013 | 56 Comments

I really get irritated when an acquaintance forwards stupid emails. I don’t say that, of course. I just delete them. They won’t understand. That’s why I’m posting here with this community.
It’s frustrating to read that people think we need “GOD back in our lives and in school!” That’s why we have so much violence, so many problems. (Never mind the example we set as adults or how we’ve desensitized our kids to violence via movies, television and music.) We’ve “failed to understand” that we need God!  Not: We, as parents or as a society, failed to teach or reach our kids. Not: How can we fix this. Instead: Allow us to mindlessly chant and worship and impotent God. Can I say the f-word now?
Why can’t people connect the dots? If your God is so wonderful, why does he allow your kids to be killed? Why not just kill the nonbelievers or the people who have kicked God out of the classroom? God is in Christian schools and those kids are not exempt from heartbreak and tragedies. God is in your churches and bad things happen. Priests molest. Children get cancer. People steal. Couples cheat, even those who have been married in your churches. If God’s presence matters, shouldn’t we see some sort of correlation. Hello?
I’m not going to berate the people who send me “Wonderful and meaningful poem and understanding of what realy needs to be done, GOD back in our lives and in school!” (Their bad grammar, not mine.) They are obviously buried under years of bullshit. As long as we keep God out of schools (well, as best we can), I won’t begrudge people for wishing, for wanting less violence. But you’d think at some point, they’d go “hmmmmm.” This God thing isn’t working. What can we do?

 

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Good games

Posted on April 7, 2013 | 7 Comments

Two things I wanted to share…What does it mean to be a nonbeliever? Not that we go out and try to convert others to think like us; just that we go out and try to be as kind as possible as often as possible. Right? Isn’t that the crux of it? (As saab93f says, we follow the Golden Rule.)

And I thought I’d share this with you if you don’t already know: http://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com. We learned about this program through my older kid’s AP Physics class, and my 14-year-old loves it, too. It’s a great investment, especially at $23. If your kids, no matter the age or gender, love video or computer games, this one is fun, educational and nonviolent. It’s a “physics-based flight simulation” that flies and crashes as it should (as it says on its site). Players can build a rocket and launch it into space. But let me tell you, it’s not easy. You have to build the thing correctly, so it will fly, and there’s always the chance that you might be able to launch it, but it won’t be able to orbit. This is not an advertisement; I know nothing save for what I’ve seen watching my kids use the program and from reading the info on their site. I’m just giving you my humble opinion because I think other parents want to provide as many positive learning opportunities as possible.

I rather teach kids how to think and to create things that help man rather than to destroy…

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Nice Christians

Posted on April 3, 2013 | 191 Comments

This is why we have so much polarization between believers and nonbelievers. Not one person who comments regularly on this blog, believer or not, has used this kind of language. Britney, from Ashburn, Virginia, decided to insert herself into this conversation. She wants to show us how a true believer behaves. I could have deleted her comment and sent her a private email at her Hotmail address, but I thought her message to us is important.

It’s a shame that she gives her fellow Christians such a bad rap, but people like Britney need to coexist peacefully with those who don’t believe. She does not represent her fellow believers well.  I sure hope she isn’t passing along her intolerance to children….

She writes:

You ungrateful dog woman.How can you be so ungrateful to God who made you, although you are a disgusting and stupid creature, and speak against Him..at least be tankful for your existence!I’m sure you and your ugly repugnant brainless son will have a great godless future together..maybe when this idiot grows up you and him can fuck together behind your hubby’s back, you love him so much don’t you bitch, after all there is no God watching you..remember, it’s ok to curse a godless whore like you..hope you and your lover-son have a miserable life filled with terrible diseases and unimaginable suffering and that you die a nasty violent death…further that you two worms rot in HELL for eternity, bitch.May the wrath of the JUST God find you,slimy whore and remember don’t just support gay marriage, support incest too and show it by marrying & mating with your godless creature-son! And don’t forget to delete comments like these bitch, and put on only the idiotic ones…you are a nobody who deserves to die tonight! What makes you think the opinion of a nobody like you matters anyway, godless fool?

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Good Friday

Posted on March 29, 2013 | 39 Comments

I’ve told my kids to say no to a lot of things that might hurt them. I never thought about this.

Yesterday, as soon as I saw my 14-year-old, he immediately tells me about a video one of his teammates at school played for him and a friend. Kids see a lot of sh*t on-line and on their smart phones (though mine still does not have a smart phone), so you know they get exposed to a wider range of things at an earlier age than we did.

This video was different. It was a snuff video, and I honestly didn’t know a video of this sort could be accessed on-line. Naive, I guess. I thought they were illegal. I’m writing this now so you can forewarn your children, if you don’t know, and save them the horror of seeing man at his most evil. The kids call it “three men and a hammer,” but the killers are also referred to as the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs. Tell your kids if someone wants them to watch, say no thanks. Or, if your kid is like mine, you ask, “Do you want those images forever stuck in your memory? What do you think you should say?”

My son was disturbed by it. Throughout the rest of the day, he kept returning to the same questions: Why would “those guys” do something like that? Why do people murder? He said he couldn’t get the awful images out of his head. “It’s not like when you watch a movie. This was real. This guy was really being killed.” He told me it was the worst thing he’d ever seen. His friend, who my son had never seen get upset, was troubled by it, too.  This was a good thing: the more kids disturbed by evil, the better.

How do you explain wickedness when you have no devil to pin the blame on? I remember asking a college professor about the problem of evil, and he told me that evil was a necessary contrast to know good. This might be true, but it still is not an answer to the fundamental question of why evil exists. If you’re Christian, how do explain that those three guys, given the chance to repent and accept Jesus as their savior, will be saved by God? Just like that. Or, if man is created in God’s image, what does that say about man’s creator? I know, some will say that’s a simplistic way of looking at God, but it seems to me, if it’s a simple question, there must be a simple answer. (Mine would be, it’s yet another nail in God’s coffin.)

As in an earlier post, when bad things happen, you have to tell kids that bad occurrences are few and far between, that most people do not harm others. It’s important for kids to know that evil is a choice. They can always choose to do the right thing. A campaign at Northern Illinois University showed that college students who thought their peers drank in moderation, drank less, too. Rather than tell kids that binge drinking is the norm and that they should avoid it, researchers presented students with evidence (and made it known on campus through a campaign) that most of the students drank 5 drinks or fewer at parties. (Still seems like a lot of drinks to me—I’d be hugging the porcelain goddess at that point.) This idea has other applications. If we tell our children most people do the right thing, perhaps we can raise the next generation to believe that they live in a world where most people choose good, and maybe the world will become that. Wishful thinking? Perhaps. (I say this as Kim Jong Un is throwing a hissy.) But if you have a better suggestion, I will follow.

And so, on Good Friday, we are reminded that people, for thousands of years, have ganged up on and killed a lone man or woman. Where someone had the power to step in and stay, stop, no one did.

As much as things change, they stay the same.

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Jesus didn’t tap out

Posted on March 18, 2013 | 33 Comments

You wonder when you travel out-of-town for a week or so, if you will return to the same life. Will my house still be here? Will someone have broken in? (That’s really happened to me before, and it’s a strange feeling.) Will we all come home alive, uninjured? Will something or someone be forever changed because we took this trip?

As humans, we crawl all over the planet, and we do dangerous things like jump out of airplanes or ski fast through a stand of trees. We live on in spite of the risks we take, yet we can also be so fragile and quickly pulled under: a ruptured appendix, a samonella-laced burger, a bump on the head on the ski slope.

But I digress. Our long drive through the rural (read: desolate, lonely) areas of Colorado, Texas and New Mexico proved that God is alive and thriving. Churches are big business no matter how poor or how small the town. There were billboards, posters and church signs that read “God Loves You” and “Anti-God is Anti-American” and God this and God that. My kid, the one who I think never pays attention, was a veritable spout of religious sayings by the time we got home. Jesus didn’t tap out. He loves you, my son said. I saw that sign, too. In Clarendon.

And I started thinking about it. You know, across the board, just about every parent will tell you that they have a parental instinct. Hurt their child, and they’ll put a hurting on you. What kind of father would watch a group of men beat the living sh*t out of his son and nail him to a cross? What kind of father doesn’t step in and tap his son out? And since when did an MMA saying come to represent a man who promoted peace, not fighting?

Of course, you and I know the answers, but I’m only wondering why the folks who put these signs up don’t take pause.

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Parental Rights

Posted on February 19, 2013 | 61 Comments

It’s kind of ironic that, here in Texas where citizens scream that they want big government out of their lives, that the government is always welcome 1. in the bedroom; 2. in a woman’s uterus; and 3. at the gun range. So it’s not surprising that a 16-year-old girl, who cannot support herself and is remaining unnamed because she’s a minor, is suing her parents for putting pressure on her to abort her fetus. You can read more about it here.

What strikes me about this article and others I’ve read is the very sad fact that these teenagers are being used by this organization, Texas Center for Defense of Life, to promote their cause. The Center, which is affiliated with the Alliance Defending Freedom (the largest Christian legal group) contacted the young woman and offered her free counsel. A quick look at board for this nascent organization shows that its long list of supporters include Texas judges. Last year, it took on the legal battle for a 14 year old girl.

Most likely, the 16-year-old girl and her boyfriend will need support in order to keep and raise their child. A Texas judge ruled that the girl’s parents must pay half the hospital bill if she is not married to the father. (Wait a second….The parents have to pay for someone else’s baby in a state that openly rejects Obamacare?) I know, you’re probably wondering why the Texas Center for Defense of Life doesn’t have to pay since they have pitted the girl against her parents. And who will pay for the child after the understandably resentful parents have done their duty to pay for half of the hospital bill? Certainly not the girl’s parents, who are being sued. The boy’s parents? Perhaps. If they can afford to take on the support of two minors sans high school diplomas and their baby. Most likely, the housing, feeding, clothing, education and health insurance for that child will fall upon taxpayers. And in Texas, we don’t want to support welfare moms. Or, maybe we just don’t want to support welfare moms of color. I’m not sure which. But I do think it’s incredibly hypocritical.

Minors cannot enter into a contract, yet they can sue their own parents? That hardly seems right. This is not a case of abuse. This is a case of parents advising their child what they believe is best for her. Why hasn’t anyone brought in the “statutory rape” bomb which is so often employed by angry parents? Statutory rape laws state that a person under the age of 18 cannot legally consent to intercourse because they are not emotionally, physically and financially ready to make adult decisions, such as having a baby and raising a kid.  It just doesn’t make sense. If she can’t decide for herself to have sex under the age of 18, if she can’t even be responsible for her own medical bills, then should she have the sole right to determine if she can keep her fetus? But wait….it’s really not the girl or the parents who get to decide here. It’s the people with a cause and the judge who agrees with them.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is just wrong in so many ways. I’m not taking sides on whether abortion is right or wrong or when a fetus becomes a baby. I’m taking sides with the parents, who have had their rights yanked from them for no other reason than they put pressure on the girl to get an abortion so she can continue on with her adolescence. (Because, you know, the Texas Center for Defense of Life is a 100% unbiased organization.) Now the girl’s mom and dad have a parent/child role with the court as they must bend to the will of the judge. To promote an agenda, and for a few minutes of fame, the Texas Center for Defense of Life has intervened in a (not uncommon) family crisis and caused rifts that will, no doubt, change the dynamics of these families forever. That daughter, those parents–they are not just a few clumps of cells–will they ever heal their relationship?

Why do some believe that their way must be everyone’s way? Can they not see the hyprocrisy of their words and their actions? Why is it that those of us labeled “liberal” are sometimes more conservative than conservatives?

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The Pope Divorces

Posted on February 13, 2013 | 104 Comments

So Pope Benedict has given up on the Catholic church. It’s become too big, too bad and too ornery for one old man to control. He’s has finally been worn down by the unruly priests, butlers and anyone else affiliated with the church and by the constant battle to keep believers in the same conservative, unchanging mindset. It is an indication of the health Catholicism when its CEO says, it’s too much for me. So much corruption; so many troubles.

I used to think that religion was necessary for some people, that some folks need religion and God to live moral lives. Yet just a glance at Catholicism–or any religion–will offer proof that there is no correlation between morality and belief in God, unless your morality is lying, cheating, stealing and abusing. In fact, Catholicism has the opposite effect because, no matter what you’ve done, your ever-loving, omnipotent God the Father (who lets children be sexual fodder for priests) will forgive a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g.

Humans are not so forgiving, and life here on earth, at least in our country, demands that you follow certain rules of humanity. If people were accountable to each other, here and now, perhaps there would be less bad behavior.

As many nonbelievers know, mainstream religions preach that, without God, you and I cannot have morals. It’s frustrating to try to explain to a believer that religion is irrelevant because the idea that religion=morality is so deeply ingrained in some.

A few weeks ago, a commenter on this site mentioned Ted Talks. If you have time, here’s an interesting video about the morality of primates and other animals.  And they have no god.

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The Sex Talk

Posted on February 8, 2013 | 71 Comments

Christians have made a mess of sex, and not in a good way. They’ve created a Schizophrenic attitude toward a completely natural, human desire. They teach abstinence and guilt and unhealthy attitudes. Sure, blame it on the Puritans, but all of America’s big religions are culpable.

If you think about it, the entire Adam and Eve story is crazy. A lonely God created Adam, who was also lonely. So then God decided to make Eve, only to set them up for a fall with a manipulative snake, a phallic creature that outsmarted Eve. OK. So now they know about s-e-x. They had forty-seven children, but only two boys survived. And you know the question that everyone asks next: Well, how did they have children?

Somewhere along the line, man started figuring out how babies were made. And the guys started to realize, hey how do I know this kid is mine? And the gals started to ask, hey how do I know who my baby daddy is? And the Stone Age came along and man knew that he could fashion weapons and tools so that he could 1. Make stuff and 2. Kill people to take their stuff. So they started “stuff accumulation.” But they needed to know who to give their stuff to when they died. (Bear with me.) So that’s when people needed to know exactly whose baby belonged to whom.

Whew. Then church came along: The Roman Catholic Church, which was not, of course, the only church, but it was sure big and powerful. The more kids parishioners had, the more members the church had. And the more money it had. But that worked best in families, where there was income that could be used to support the family as well as tithed to the church. The church became adept at controlling women: no, you cannot participate in the service; you cannot be a priest. You cannot use birth control. You cannot decide to terminate a pregnancy—any pregnancy. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You have to model yourself after the Virgin Mary. Pure. Chaste. Not slutty like those prostitutes in the Bible.

So, that is the very, very short version of why we have so many issues with sex in our country, which has since been aggravated, as I mentioned, by our Puritanical roots. So how do we help our kids develop healthy attitudes about their bodies and about sex, especially since we don’t have religion to throw at them?

I agree with Christians on one thing—our bodies are temples. I’ve told my kids this over and over and over again. It’s the same for boys and girls. You have to respect it—not only in the way you treat it, but how you feed yourself and whom you share it with. I started this talk early because I didn’t want my kids to learn about sex from someone else, a kid in class or some stranger in the park. Sex is serious business. It is good business, but something you should not enter into unless you’re an adult. By then, you will have (hopefully) established good relationship skills. By then, you should be able to list out the reasons why you like a girl or a boy. Christians got it right in teaching their kids to save themselves—but not because it will keep them “pure.” Because sex is not bad or dirty. They should save themselves because sex is emotionally costly and physically risky. You do not want a kid you’ll have to live with or a disease you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life. These are the things I tell my children.

I hope they will wait until they find someone really special. Because they want to share this experience with someone they know and really like, not just share an experience with a stranger. Sex is not something given or taken, but shared. For both genders.

Feel free to share how you do it (the sex talk) at your house.

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