Hey, it’s Russ again. I guess Aggie wants a break, and who can blame him/her? So, I’ll be minding the store. Expect no new posts until he/she’s ready to post again. I’ll be moderating comments and keeping the lights on, but expect no new posts for the near future.

So, I guess I’ll take this time to ask just one question of the readers of this site. I am considering removing my posts from the past (not Aggie’s), or at least making them unavailable. It’s a tricky proposition, it’s not about hiding the past at all, but it’s not where I am anymore and while I’m sure it serves a purpose, I’m not sure I want to keep them there. So what do you all think? Value, or not worth it? Or would it make more sense to just compress them up somewhere and make them available to those who really need it?

A year ago, almost to the day, I decided to create a blog that would allow me to express all of the pent up anger and rage I had at how I was brought up. The blog served very nicely, and, a year later, I feel that I have a good handle on the anger and rage, and have mostly succeeded at expunging it.

For me, this blog has served its purpose.

It has also become clear to me that Aggie and I are at fundamentally different places now. Where at one time she and I were working at the same purposes, I feel that now we are starting to work at cross purposes, and it is becoming time that we part ways.

Thus, I will be leaving this blog in Aggie’s hands from now on. I ask that she leave my posts and the comments thereon untouched, but other than moderating and responding to comments on this posts I will have no further editorial involvement with this blog. Aggie can run it as she sees fit.

Don’t fear, though, I am not gone. I have created a new blog that reflects where I am now – it’s called Holy Mighty Atheist. While it will have the same commenting rules as I have on my posts here, the emphasis will no longer be on the anger, on the rage, on the past – though I certainly will cover those things – the past has not gone away. But the emphasis will be on the moving forward instead of the past. ISA, this blog, is about letting the anger define it. And that’s great. It has a place, and I hope it continues to thrive. But I am not about letting the anger define me any longer, I am about defining my anger.

I am moving on.

I hope that those of you that like what I have to say will continue to follow what I have to say there.

Thanks, everyone, for making this blog what it is, and I am sure that Aggie will do a fine job of continuing it.

Christians aren’t the only silly ones.

Observe… the kaaba.

I had dinner with someone tonight – someone whom I met through this blog, believe it or not. We discussed a lot of things, had a back and forth, and it was a decent time.

But it served to bring something to the fore that I was not… presently aware of.

Here’s the thing, right. The WCG taught us that things were supposed to be a certain way. You were supposed to behave a certain way, yes, but that things were a certain way around you. That the world was to be looked at through a certain prism, and that everything around you was to be viewed through that prism.

It is one thing to get rid of the WCG from inside you, but when you are taught all these things all you life – sometimes, that prism stays.

This applies to quite a bit, but what I am applying it to at this moment is… women.

The WCG taught us that women were to be a certain way. And for my formative years, women were indeed that way. At the very least, subservient. Good at putting on a front. Always nice… basically pretty, cowed doormats.

The problem is, only women who come from a cult will fit this bill. But guess what? Women in the “world” don’t fit into this little mold, do they?

So no fucking wonder I don’t know how to be around them!

Perhaps it’s time to drop every assumption that I have and reexamine it fresh. Stuff is still being filtered through that WCG lens, and it’s fucking everything up.

After I got out of the WCG for good and started therapy, I started on the way to finally healing, but there is one thing that I have yet to actually figure out how to deal with.

How do I deal with the shame of who I was?

I am not ashamed of my time in the WCG, because I did not really have a choice in that. I am, however, ashamed of some of the things that it made me do, either actively because I was taught to be a religious asshole, or passively because I either didn’t know any better or simply wasn’t emotionally equipped to make the proper decision. And sometimes these feelings come back and I just stop what I’m doing and cuss to myself under my breath, because I just can’t deal with the reality of what I had done.

It’s the little things, really. Just the little things. A little shame here, a little shame there, it all adds up into a crippling mass that comes back at the most inopportune times. The relationships that could have been and were nipped in the bud before they even had a chance to conceive, much less hatch. The friendships that I wrecked without even meaning to. The many little social faux pas’s (I don’t know how to pluralize that) that all added up into me being one of the most socially incompetent people – even now – that I know. And the knowledge that there’s not even a condition or syndrome I can blame it on – it’s all me.

How do you let go when you look back on everything that shaped you, everything that you did, everything you said… and can count the number of things you’re truly proud of on two hands? Sure, they’re rather large things, I supposed… I learned to play the piano at least acceptably, I somehow against all odds managed to learn a fucking trade (and I truly mean against all odds)… I somehow managed to stay independent, well, mostly. I guess these are things to be proud of. I guess.

But by and large when I look back on my life I see a tornado ravaged town, with houses and bricks and canned goods scattered everywhere, and children wandering around looking for parents that no longer exist…

I’m sure those of you from the midwest are very familiar with severe thunderstorms. They are certainly awe inspiring. There is nothing like the way the air changes as the storm approaches, and the lightning stabbing to the ground, the thunder crashing all around… the ancient Greeks even made Thor, the god of thunder, out of it.

Thunderstorms, particularly the severe kind, have a specific structure. They consist in their most basic form of a rotating updraft, typically tilted forward. There consist specific features called “vaults” or “BWER” (for Bounded Weak Echo Region), where the updraft is just too powerful and the radar echo is weak. There are Forward and Rear flank downdrafts – the FFD is where the air hits the thunderstorm like a wall and heads downward, and the RFD is caused for entirely different regions.

A thunderstorm is formed because humid, warm air has a lot of latent energy. Every small parcel of evaporated air has something called “latent heat”. Think of the piece of air as a storage unit. When it evaporates, it sucks up a little bit of heat (this is why you feel cooler when you come out of a pool on a hot day), and when it condenses it releases this heat. Also, warm air wants to rise, and cool air wants to sink.

So, on a warm, humid day, the air heats up and wants to rise, but sometimes cold, drier air has moved over the top of the warm air. The warm air wants to rise, but is kept pinned down by a “cap”, or a layer of air that prevents the warm air from rising. But after the warm air is warm enough, the energy of the air is sufficient to punch through the cap, and hits the layer of cold air.

Remember what I said about condensing water releasing latent heat? Well, as the warm air hits the cold air, the condensing water (think of a glass of ice water on a humid day) releases heat, and further warms the parcel of air, thus making it want to rise further. The parcel of air rises faster and faster as all of the latent heat is reduced, and assuming there is enough warm, humid air underneath to feed it, eventually hits the tropopause (a layer of cold, but stable air) and spreads out as if hitting a ceiling. The height of the ceiling is different depending on where or when, but it can be anywhere from 30,000 to 65,000 feet high.

As the warm, humid air keeps feeding it, it continues to rise and condense. The condensed water falls to the ground as rain. As it does so, it creates a downdraft, which in any ordinary storm serves to eventually quench off the heat pump. However, in the case of a severe storm, a strong wind shear (the speed of the wind varying with height) serves to “tip over” the top of the storm and push the updraft out of the way of the downdraft.

When this happens, the updraft lasts for as long as the fuel supply does. The updrafts can reach speeds of a hundred miles an hour or more, and is pushing up billions and billions of tons of air and water, while releasing energy in the form of heat and wind that is equivalent to a small nuclear bomb.

It is incredible to observe, awe-inspiring, and gives you a appreciation for nature and her ways.

But it is a completely, utterly, and toally natural process. At the core of it, it is simply the atmosphere righting a wrong, fixing an imbalance, and using the energy contained in the fuel to keep the process going until there is no more imbalance to correct.

The thunderstorm can act like a living thing sometimes. It can seem like God has come to earth and is smiting indiscriminately. But… no God. Its just nature.

I have no reason to believe that any other natural process, anything from the origin of the earth, the origin of amino acids and cellular processes, our bodies, the sun, or anything, is due to anything more than other natural processes at work. Awesome? Sure! But as natural as the laws of thermodynamics. No God here. And really, who needs one, when nature is right here in front of us, is clear in its processes and indiscriminate in its power, and gives us much more life and fulfillment than any God ever has in the history of mankind?

Consider the thunderstorm.

Gavin has a post up stating the holy days for 2009:

For the curious, the committed and the de-converted, here are 2009’s traditional holy days dates in the former WCG tradition.

* Passover: April 7*
* Feast of Unleavened Bread: April 9-15
* Pentecost: May 31
* Feast of Trumpets: September 19
* Day of Atonement: September 28
* Feast of Tabernacles: October 3 – 9
* Last Great Day: October 10

I think… I will celebrate these days. I think I will celebrate them by, on each of them, doing something that is completely against “God’s Law”. I will eat shrimp, have premarital sex, or who knows. But whatever it is… it’s gonna be fun. And I’m going to flash my middle finger at anyone who is celebrating these days (figuratively) while I’m at it.

Happy unholy days, everyone!!

Over on James Bradford Pate’s blog is a comment that shows why it is nearly impossible to have an intelligent conversation with a believer. I will post my response here, as I don’t know if James will accept it, and besides, it’s so silly it deserves a little immortalizing.

Mary Lane, you are a true example, in my view, of someone who is so busy plucking the motes out of he eyes of others that you can’t see the beam in your own.

Oh, look. I made a biblical reference. Not bad for a silly ol’ atheist

Your argument strikes me as eminently silly because it’s not an argument at all, just an unfounded assertion. It basically seems to boil down to “Be a Christian because it’s the only thing that will give you eternal life”. Even the smallest amount of critical thinking can rapidly pick out the holes in every one of your arguments. Just picking a couple at random:

Rom.10:9 states that if we confess Jesus Christ, and believe(have faith)that God raised Him from the dead, we shall be saved. That is a promise.
Muhammad, on the other hand was a false prophet, and promised nothing that has actually happened to give an afterlife to any who followed him.

That is pure silliness, because you offer absolutely nothing to found your assertion other than your assertion. It’s a tautology, essentially, “the bible is true because the bible says it’s true.” and…

So you tell me, since Muhammed is now not really revealing himself that much, and Christ is now living, which truth is actually truth? and there were those who actually witnessed Christ’s ascending into heaven.”

Wow, at least two statements in that paragraph that are not founded at all.

Sorry, James, I have a hard time giving silliness a free pass. Not knocking belief, but knocking non-arguments and question-dodging… I’ll x-post this to my own blog just in case you decide not to accept it…

As I pointed out, this is utterly and completely silly. This person is trying to argue logically when she is not capable of doing so, has no concept of what logic actually is, is using tautologies and other pure silliness to get her point across, when it is not actually a point at all – it’s circular reasoning at its finest.

Sadly enough… I don’t think any better arguments for Christianity exist – she’s pretty much just blew their wad. She just doesn’t know enough to try to mask it in something a little more plausible sounding.

I watched a movie last night called “Sleepwalking”. In it, there was a scene where a man and his niece were stuck with his father, and that father was extremely abusive. Finally, the man snapped and beat his father with a shovel until he was dead.

I have never seriously considered doing anything like this. But last night I had a dream, and in that dream, my brother (who was, oddly, represented by a coworker) did the exact same thing to my father. And I had to call the police on him. I did, but all the while secretly glad. A pall over my life was gone.

My father is not dead, to my knowledge. But I got to thinking about what would happen when he actually does die. It will likely be a bittersweet day, filled with both grieving and celebration. I will not grieve for my father in life, because he did very little that was deserving of it. But I will grieve for what he could have been. What he should have been, and yet, wasn’t.

He did try. He always did what he thought was right. That much I have to give him. But there is a certain point at which, even though you are doing what you think is right, there is so much evidence mounting to the contrary that if you don’t look back and think “something’s wrong here”, you are responsible. Especially when you are playing with other peoples’ lives, “I tried” is not enough. It’s not satisfactory. And if that is coupled with a stubborn refusal to even entertain the notion that there are other people on the planet who matter other than yourselves, well… you’re beyond hope.

My father has been beyond hope for many years.

The WCG preyed on my father. But my father used the WCG. They knew exactly what they were doing to each other, and they preyed on each other. The WCG used my father as a loyal tithe-slave. And my father used the WCG as justification for abuse.

They deserved each other.

I will party when my father dies. I will party, and then I will likely cry. Because even though he has been dead to me for many years… I would have liked to have a real father. Not the one I had… but a real one. He had the chance to be one… and he failed.

He failed, and I am left to pay the price.

I would have liked someone to truly tell me about girls, instead of the two pieces of advice he gave me.

“When a woman says No! Don’t! Stop! she means No! Don’t stop!”

and who can forget the priceless…

“When a woman says no, she means yes.”

Actual quotes.

I would like to have had someone who would take the effort to figure out what I want to do and help me do it, instead of making it clear that the world was going to end soon and it wouldn’t matter anyways..

I would like to have had someone who knew enough about how to be a man that he could show me.

I would like to have had someone who would accept me for everything I was, instead of everything he wanted me to be.

That is what I will grieve for. I will not grieve for my father. I will grieve for what he was not.

What can I say, I like pie.

So there’s an 800 pound elephant in the room that even today I find it difficult to talk about, and frankly I really don’t want to bring it up here. But I do so for two reasons. Number one being that I have to talk about it somewhere, somehow – and the other being that there’s no fucking way in hell I’m the only second generation ex-member of WCG who’s trying to deal with this. I have discussed this before on a slightly more intellectual level, but I feel the need to discuss this again from a different angle.

Frankly, this post is against my better judgement and I hope I don’t regret posting it. But I have to. Because if I don’t, things are never going to get any better.

I have had five girlfriends in my life and five partners (the set overlaps but is not a one-to-one mapping – there was one girlfriend I did not fuck and one partner whom I spent one night with (this was, I think, close to seven years ago)). If I’m to be honest to myself, of the combined set of six women, I was only truly attracted to two of them. And none of them were accessible in a drive of less than a day.

I do not hate any of them – while in many cases the parting was somewhat acrimonious, in all cases but one it was indeed completely my fault and I take responsibility for them, at least in my own heart.

Because when it comes to matters of romance I am the biggest fuck-up that I could possibly imagine being, bar none.

And I am angry.

I am angry because even though I am a fuck-up when it comes to matters of romance, this does not mean that I don’t desire it. Even though I don’t have the slightest clue how to approach a woman I’m attracted to, that doesn’t mean I’m not attracted. Even though there’s a large part of me that wants to find a woman and fuck her senseless, guess what. I don’t.

And why don’t I. Well, that’s the question, isn’t it.

I could go into lots of reasons, I guess. I’m not going to. I could go into how my parents basically told me for reasons I’m not going into that no woman would ever want me. I could go into how I was taught that it was a sin to date someone outside the church, and guess what? No church now! I could go into how I was snubbed and hurt by some of the girls in the neighborhood when I was a teenager. I could go into all of these things, but what fucking good does it do, really? It’s the past. And even though I’ve been dropped off on the side of a desert road that stretches for miles with nothing in sight… I’m not going to get anywhere if I don’t start walking.

The simple fact of the matter is, I don’t have any idea what to do about it, and it frustrates the fucking hell out of me.

There’s more to this, but I suppose there’s only so much I can put even here. There are things, believe it or not, that I don’t want to put in public.

It’s the gift that keeps on giving.