Being Judged
I honestly can’t think of anything that fans the flame of narcissism more than being judged. When someone judges you they are signaling that there is something about you they didn’t like. Generally they don’t tell you what it was or they say some bullshit thing that isn’t true. The point is you obsess over what part of you it was they didn’t like and if there is any way you could change it so you didn’t get judged in that manner in the future. This whole process is constant thinking about yourself, you are being rejected for something about you so you can’t stop thinking about you!
Also when you’re judged it means there is generally one less person in your life and the resulting alone time is often spent in your head having narcissistic thoughts.
Older generations like to judge our generation and declare us consummate narcissists and they can go ahead, this judgement is just fanning the flames of our narcissism. If you want us to stop being so self obsessed and dwell on anything but ourselves then you have to accept us and point us to something outside ourselves that we could think about.
Judging as You Are Judged
Really interesting TED talk about judging your thoughts the way people judge you to quell the like/dislike monster. The book he references Evolving Beyond Thought has you memorizing Sanskrit philosophy to help quell the storm of thoughts in your skull.
The two questions you need to ask of every thought are “is the thought useful” and “how does the thought behave”. These are basically the two questions people ask of you when they judge you. So it’s turning the whole judgement on its head and holding your thoughts up to the standard others are holding you up to when they judge you.
I don’t know if this would work for me but I like it.
The Isolation of Suffering
I think one of the best arguments against the existence of a personal god is the fact that suffering is so isolating.
God’s people dropping out of your life like flies. Me and many others on the bottom experience is that the people who claim to be closest to God are the ones that get the furthest away when things turn permanently worse. They do this all while parroting the romantic notion of suffering that things are going to go according to “God’s plan”. Well they’re not and you are part of the problem. Religious people will trot out their “free will” theodicy trump card when confronted with the problem of evil. But then they put it away when their free will is frustrating God’s supposed “perfect plan”.
The fact that for a lot of us suffering turns us into much less of an everyman than more of one. One of the things those of privilege selling suffering say is that it will somehow connect you to a greater experience of humanity. While that happens for some lucky people for most of us suffering cuts us off from enriching people and activities we need to actually become what they claim suffering will make us become. I have noticed in my life that I’m not even empathetic to people who have gone through the same things as me (mental illness). This surprised me. I’m just stretched so thin myself I have nothing to give. Plus there is this thing with mental illness called negative symptoms which actually eat your personality away which flies in the face of anything positive coming out of suffering.
The idea of drawing “meaning” out of suffering helps less people than you would think. Highly principled people may concoct backstories and astroturf the bad things in their life to things make sense in hindsight but that requires an expensive brain that can play good mental gymnastics. I want dignity and relationships, I don’t give a rip about meaning. Suffering actually robs my life of meaning because I found meaning in dignified work and relationships and what I suffer robs me of both.
Experiences of God going AWOL. The part of your brain synthesizing “experiences of God” is likely to go down if you suffer enough. Part of this is suffering and skills to cope with it make you emotionally numb and religion (or whatever they are calling Christianity these days) largely transpires on the seat of the emotion. Nobody wants to admit this but the way it’s sold (especially in contemporary worship) is all about emotions. Anything that makes you emotionally stunted is going to torpedo your interaction with “God”. This is partially why so many people on the spectrum are non religious because we don’t have the emotional toolbox to interact with a god.
The fact that a lot of us turn to the internet for refuge. When the world shuns you the internet raises you. Many forms of suffering like disability narrow people who will interact with you beyond reduced functionality mode to a subset of people which you find online. For example with me if someone doesn’t have a disability and/or mental illness the chance of a relationship happening is just about zero. Unfortunately for religion the internet is not a community friendly to religion partly because a lot of the people seeking refuge on it were already rejected by the church so they carry that with them. Also online interaction is not incarnational the same way real life interaction is so it’s less conducive to spreading religion.
Money in Your Brain
I want more money. Money in the real world lets you go on all kinds of fun trips (at least pre-COVID) and gives you all kinds of health and security.
Money in your brain does something similar, you can spend it to produce beliefs in happy delusions. That’s why religious people refer to faith as a gift. It’s actually not a gift, it’s paid for by money in your brain.
Just as it is hard to make money in this economy that is going to Hades, it’s hard to get money in your brain. You have to have had a lot of positive experiences or have a brain that is really good at playing cognitive tricks.
The younger generation is less trusting and religious and more mentally ill so I surmise that they don’t have much money in their brain.
Some poems:
learning how to think critically
can actually deplete your brain of money
because happy delusions melt away
(assuming you didn’t have an abusive childhood
you start out with a lot of money in your brain like monopoly)
the way to be saved by “grace”
is to have looks in your heart
and money in your brain
if you have money in your brain
you can buy astroturf, to astroturf the bad things
so things make sense in hindsight
you can buy the ability to play cognitive tricks
so you can make lemonade out of cyenide
Material Support for Black Lives
I can’t advocate to save my life. But luckily that’s not the only way to show we care about black lives. We can offer material support which, when done hand in hand with advocacy, multiplies the help.
Give to charities that support the poor, especially ones that put money directly in people’s pocket. GiveDirectly and RIP Medical Debt are my two favorite charities for these because they have low overhead and thus can help more people. It’s obvious that donating to charity won’t only help African Americans but since they are disproportionately represented in the poor a lot of it will. Also poverty among whites is one of the things that fans the flames of racism so anything you do to lift up a poor white person is actually helping ease racial tensions.
Vote blue. There are things in red states that really hurt African Americans like the failure to expand Medicaid which a lot of them rely on for healthcare. Lost in the narrative of Republicans acting racist is their actual policies which in and of themselves severely disadvantage the poor. What’s really sad is poor whites will vote against their interests because they would rather forego free healthcare then let minorities have it.
Provide a regularly updated resource list for your community. If organizations could become less siloed and share a list for their community with updated information on the latest resources for helping the poor that would really help. For example there is a tool that lets you write and send pictures to people in jail for free. I actually started a list like this on my local food pantry’s website. The list will be different for each locale though some of the items are national.
Give your time and consideration. Often times you won’t get to know people on the margins until you help them. Give rides. Obviously COVID makes this harder but often the thing someone of color could use is a ride to work or the grocery store or the doctor. Buy a struggling brother an air conditioner window unit. Heat breeds anger and an air conditioner can contain this. If your church is truly into racial reconciliation it is probably already offering you opportunities to materially help minorities. In this way you will build a rapport you couldn’t in any other way. If you find your self reaching a struggling youth stay in their life even if it impacts what you planned your life to be negatively.
Team Effort
Religious people don’t like it that I don’t have any trust in God. They wouldn’t either if he had told them to drink piss, kill them selves, and date people out of their league. I have found that when I make my trust in God a team effort the truth really comes out. People (especially Christians) have dropped out of my life like flies and refused to come in showing me that they are incredibly skeptical about what God is doing in my life. Guess what, I am too!
Don’t encourage faith with your words and then discourage it with your actions! Because I only listen to the latter.
More Lockdown Poetry
I do not claim to possess any doctrinally sound beliefs but I will say God is good is a reflexive relation. God=Good, Good=God. Goodness and love are detectable by the most hardened of atheists, the person of the lowest intelligence, and the individual in a completely psychotic state. Today is my sixteenth anniversary of my psychotic break where I was in the mental hospital for ten days. The one person kind to me besides my parents was nurse Jim. I was absolutely nuts but I still remember him fondly. Believe it or not part of my psychotic break was pondering the salvation of the Jews. I don’t believe in salvation any more but their view of God is more accurate than the one I was raised to believe.
pleasure in food is a zero sum game
you can either have things that make you immediately happy
while you are eating them
or things that do so more gradually afterword
I like Gregorian chant
and video game sound tracks
liturgy of then
and liturgy of now
Happiness often doesn’t come from feeling good about yourself
it comes from experiencing others’ goodness
even if it doesn’t materially benefit you
(like New York City Jews donating convalescent plasma to treat COVID patients)
(our job isn’t to make everybody happy,
it’s just to instill in people a will to live)
the difference between mania and joy
is in mania the pathology creates the reason
where in joy the brain is working correctly overtime
to create it
for thinking millenials and gen z
it’s not it’s 5pm somewhere, lets drink
it’s 3am somewhere, let’s think!
(we’re not afraid to ask hard questions
others shy away from)
we also seamlessly switch contexts like tabs on a browser
so we don’t have to be looking at the stars late at night
to ask the most forbidden hard questions
the opposite of Evangelical Christianity is not atheism
it’s mental illness
(that’s why youth pastors strongly discouraged you from listening to
Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral)
an inner voice you can’t trust
hope you don’t feel
experience of a totally chaotic supernatural
people social distancing from you (even before COVID)
poor countenance and physical appearance
failure to be independent and prosper
or ever cobble together a redemptive life narrative
(the narrative in its worst case, suicide)
SO the very act of you living your life
is calling an Evangelical Christian a liar
don’t be surprised when they reject and try to erase you
when you are worse at your brain
than your brain is at you
religion partakes of you
instead of you partaking of it
(so God becomes enemy territory)
people’s bad side is lower down than their good side
that’s why those lower down see the former more
forget about the lack of pain keeping life from having a “story”
if there wasn’t pain there couldn’t be power
pain is a necessary condition for power
power just boils down to “I can hurt you and you can’t hurt me”
psychology might be a young science
but it’s a very old religion
personality tests are like any other test you take in school
there are right answers and there are wrong answers
a lot of people believing something doesn’t make it true
it just makes it cool
and resisting something that’s cool is much harder
than resisting something that’s true
an uncool belief will be held to a higher standard of evidence
than a cool one
(that’s why no one believes in prayer snatchers
but almost everyone believes in God)
the difference between a lion and a person
is the former is forthright
about their desire to devour you
if religion were a movie you were going to see
the internet would be the spoiler
sanity and insanity
are like land and water
one recedes to reveal the other
imagine a not too far fetched scenario
where you don’t have enough money to keep up your streaming service subscriptions
so you lose all your music
and all your movies
well that’s what losing your faith is like
when you unsubscribe everything disappears
why would you assume
that those who went through suffering
with their powers of articulation intact
would speak on behalf of those who didn’t?
just because a lot of my emotional damage has been self-inflicted
doesn’t mean it wasn’t carried out against my will
Man is needed
for Satan’s hate to incubate
because good comes commensurate with evil
but the devil can only be the latter
Some people think we are caterpillars and will emerge from this lockdown butterflies.
I don’t buy this. We’re moth larva anyway.
As far as video games go
Judaism was Counterstrike
Zorasterism was PUBG
and Christianity was Fortnite
perhaps the American capitalist system’s greatest strength
is the (patently false) notion it puts out
that it can be beaten
time is an act of mercy
because it keeps all the bad
from happening at once
and destroying you
men and women are like the US and China
they depend upon each other to function
with the crudest of bonds amidst the acrimony
the difference between truly believing a happy delusion
and just pantomiming it
is the difference between someone else scratching your back
and you just doing it
if you have to cut someone out of your life
to maintain your beliefs
that means those beliefs probably won’t stand up to scrutiny
trusting God is a team effort 🙂
if Christians who were close to you are dropping out of your life like flies
it means they intuit that your life isn’t going to God’s plan
so they must cut you off
inorder to keep their views of God’s goodness intact
(but their pleas for you to trust God ring hollow
when by their actions they aren’t trusting him on your behalf!)
Christians are trying to shoehorn my traumas into stories
with redemptive narratives
judging from the Christians dropping out of my life
and none coming in
i have to say you don’t have a leg to stand on
you need one of two things
actual goodness of God
or actual goodness of brain
to play the cognitive tricks needed
to pretend God is good when he’s not
you ask me to find God
well, he’s either inside your brain
or he’s not
but they don’t have instruments to detect him!
(they don’t advise mentally ill people to do shrooms
to have those transcendent spiritual experiences
so chances are if you aren’t mentally healthy
he isn’t inside your brain)
the lack of evidence for a personal god
is out in the open and can be shown by science
where the lack of evidence for God inside of a person
must be hidden because of how much weakness in betrays in them
as long as reasons for accepting religion
can be trumpeted without consequence
while reasons for rejecting it
need to be kept confidential on pain of destroying your reputation
religion will always thrive and spread
(people can share their favorite Bible verses without repercussions
but not their worst traumas)
remember, if you aren’t one of the elect
God is as unbelievable to you
as you are to him
when i was at my worst
God was not there
but sometimes good people were
that’s why I’m a humanist
not a Christian
people are different than the coronavirus
because they don’t get down in your lungs to kill you
they get up in your head
if we were all given God’s strength than it would be ok that everything
would happen “in God’s time”
i only knew God when i didn’t know i didn’t know him
when i was six climbing tall pines i had no internal concept of God
and did not need one or have it occupy my head
i just communed with nature and played with my siblings
once i knew i didn’t know God things changed
(the “age of accountability” for me was just
when i failed to build an image of God in my head that helped me function)
the only time I “found God” in my adult life was when i was psychotic manic
after my psychotic break i was left with the pieces
deciphering things that felt so real
but now these things had to be split into what i was told wasn’t real
(delusions about the color orange)
and what i was told was real
(religion)
but just as i couldn’t feel the difference between the two in mania
i couldn’t in depression either
so i lost my faith
I remember on the way to open mic standing by the bus stop and hearing Losing My Religion in car stereos two different times. I miss the sunset through the Mayan Buzz font window.
My facial expressions have always been awkward so now I can be smiling behind a mask and nobody can tell the poorly times smile is happening. It’s strange.
I think the class of people who have really let us down the most are fortune tellers. Mid 2019 was their time to shine, telling us to ramp up producing hand sanitizer, N95 masks and ventilators.
in this day hope is just conjecture
but we still call it hope
because that sounds more romantic
and heart warming for old people
courage might roar like a lion
but delusion laughs like a hyena
your Christian witness
in really glib terms
is status times goodness
my arrogance growing up
was the witching hour
banking on the sun coming up
if the darkness takes turns with the light
you might be all right
but if all the darkness happens at once
you’re fucked
the coronavirus is taking the lives of the old
and making the lives of the rest of us
not worth living
we are all living our worst trauma all the time
on a deep subconscious level
that’s why for some of us to rise above it
is like a mountain rising from the bottom of the ocean
our peaks are just barely land
they don’t look majestic like mountains
but that doesn’t mean it didn’t take so much
to just get where we are
when you make a really bad decision
like I did in 2018 not seeing my grandma in Costa Rica one last time
some people have the audacity to tell you
you had the wisdom inside of you
to make the right one
a good brain
can play the cognitive tricks needed
to pretend there is a good god regardless of what happens
a bad brain, not so much
some people think that because i ask something of love
i don’t believe in it
would i convince you i believed in love more
if i asked nothing of it?
I’m going to get through this trial
but part of myself will stay behind
never to be seen again
life is like a candy
it derives much of its sweetness
from the brevity of its experience
Things That Point Toward Materialism Being True
I’ve been over exposed to religion my entire life and I try to believe in all that stuff but it’s like an algebra problem you suspect you got wrong but you don’t know why you got it wrong or have the intelligence to derive the correct answer. Materialism is the idea that the world we can taste touch and see is all there is. Some reasons:
The colossal failure of prophecy. I don’t care if it comes from a parishioner rolling in the aisles full of the Spirit or a wizard sacrificing a goat in the middle of a flaming pentagram, accurate prophecy from the Dream Team or the Mean Team would go a long way in convincing me that there was something beyond this existence. If someone the beginning of 2019 would have heard a word from the beyond that we need to make two billion N95 masks and they could make a killing doing so, that would have been great. What passes for prophecy is usually as vague as a horoscope. Like “you’re going to meet someone interesting today”.
The lack of scientific evidence for the supernatural. If there were angels, demons, or ghosts it seems like it would end up on social media as most of us can whip out a camera from our pocket at a moment’s notice. We have elaborate scientific instruments to measure basically almost anything from gravity waves to subatomic particles. Incidents where the supernatural has been seen like with Prophet Yahweh seem to point to certain actors able to leverage glitches in the simulation rather than a world whose rules are governed by what our major religions tell us.
The fact that suffering is so incredibly isolating. The problem of evil is correctly on every atheist’s checklist but I think just is big of a problem is people’s orientation towards those who suffer. As a hedge against the idea of chaos and senseless evil Christians try to concoct a redemptive narrative around suffering and pain. Unfortunately this ends up backfiring on them because in order to keep this narrative intact they have to cut anyone out of their lives whose narrative doesn’t end up redemptive, proving that this narrative was a lie all along (just like in quantum mechanics you can’t measure without modifying). When tragic things have happened in my life the people who believed in “God’s plan” were the first to exit. During this time of plague it’s becoming increasingly clear that the people romanticizing suffering and the ones doing the actual suffering are worlds apart. Poverty in the best of times causes incredible isolation (especially as people get past 45) and now Coronavirus is killing these older poor people which is heartbreaking.
The fact the people on the spectrum are generally not religious. I have stated that the brain has to do a lot of heavy lifting to get religion working through/for you. The same social skills one needs to interact successfully with people are needed to interact successfully with a deity. And just like we do communicating wrong (according to society) we are even gaslit for our expressions of religiosity. When I was Christian I had this crazy theory about the color orange being really redemptive and that got pretty laughed out of the room. God is sold as being near those on the margins (as most autistics are) but our experience bears the opposite, not being able to build an image of God in our head that helps us function or being able to be accepted in a community of believers. Granted not every autistic’s experience is this but I’d say a majority are and mine definitely has been.
The observation that the content of Near Death Experiences are more a measure of the person’s mental health than anything else. People pushing the supernatural generally point to Near Death Experiences as proof that there is a heaven. What evidence they don’t admit is there are also hell NDE’s and these are pretty arbitrary, not contingent on people’s virtue or religiosity. The fact that that when they did a study on people’s reaction to shrooms they screened out those with bipolar and schizophrenia is telling. People who believe in the supernatural want us to believe these experiences are more than our brain’s regions communicating with each other differently.
a dark Holy Saturday
I miss the open mics. I miss hugs and gentle touch. I miss restaurant ice cubs at the bottom of a diet coke that you can suck on without the middle tasting like chlorine. It seems like the world has been burning so long it’s hard to remember a time where we could just ignore the News and there was no consequence for doing so. Or hear another headline and just be stopped in your tracks. Also whenever I get an alert tone on my phone that used to be for Amber alerts but now is for governor’s alerts I think this is the big one, this is the time the nukes from God knows where are headed for us.
hard times
produce soft dicks
When someone you love cuts you off
It’s like never getting to finish a good book
people are the opposite of prisms
because it’s beams of darkness
that bring out their true colors
people for whom life is to be enjoyed
push this idea for those lower down
that one is conscripted into life
and you should just shut the fuck up
no matter how bad things get
people who romanticize suffering
never romanticize its byproducts
dole, derision, desertion, and death
evil is like taking a shit
it feels good to you but no one else
people tell me “anything can happen”
as if that is a good thing
the worse your mental health
the more your religious expression
either rounds up to psychosis
or rounds down to deism
GOD IS IN HEAVEN?
WE COULD SURE AS FUCK USE HIM DOWN HERE
God didn’t die
they were STOLEN
God’s despair is cathartic
Even as religious people say ours is sin
I know
i was poor in all of my past lives
and whatever ends up happening to me
i will be poor and with fellow messed up people
on earth, in heaven, in purgatory, and in hell
living in the moment is difficult
when you know the worst is yet to be
we aren’t begging for a loaf of bread
we just need a trail of crumbs
to lead us out of the cave
we call it daymares
when your waking moments
are worse than anything your feeble mind could conjure in sleep
in the back of our minds we always knew it would end
but it’s still hard when it’s ending this way in front of our eyes
when you fire up the news
looking back on the destruction
it turns you into a pillar of salt
i have this convention
from my journals as a kid
that the easy times are written about marker
and the hard ones in pen or pencil
in 8th grade
in the recess area that was all cement
and in the locker room in gym class
being pushed into a urinal on two different days
i have always been a poor example for Christians
because i never learned anything from suffering
only the light let in sustained me
like the Krakle and Mr. Goodbar every week
on the welcome mat for hungry 8th grade paper boy me
or an acquaintance sticking up for me in the locker room in gymn class
these small kindnesses
were the harrowing of hell
we may melt away
before coronavirus does
night is coming when no one can work
but come to think of it
we didn’t really appreciate the day
so its nautical twilight
to a truly dark Holy Saturday
the Father was the sun
the Son was the sunrise
and the Spirit was the atmosphere
that held in the warmth and breath
and spread out the light
(and this is the one I sometimes read at the open mic when it is Maundy Thursday)
the thief comes only to kill and destroy
do not fear those who kill the body and after that have nothing more they can do
who touched me, i felt the power go out of me
be clean
even the hairs on your head are numbered
she has done what she could. She poured perfume on my body to prepare for my burial
are you going to leave me too
how i wanted to gather you in my wing like a chicken gathers her chicks
my children, i will be with you only a little longer
where i go you cannot come
she has done what she could. She poured perfume on my body to prepare for my burial
i lay down my life for my sheep
wash my feet with your tears
Why do you seek the living among the dead?
i saw the devil fall from the sky like lightening
how i wanted to gather you in my wing like a chicken gathers her chicks
Looking Good
During some of the worst parts of my life I have had some strange desires, mainly to LOOK BETTER! I know this is shallow but I have been so lonely for so long and looking better was the main way you got a girlfriend (especially in my early 20’s when I felt this the most). I don’t think people appreciate looking good for all it’s worth.
It sucks that I’m turning 40 and I never had a girlfriend. And a lot of that is due to the fact that I don’t look good. Now in my early 20’s it was directly due to that but now it’s indirect, due to my visible physical disability keeping me from being a vocational success (which keeps me poor and undesirable).
We are socialized with this myth that “it’s the inside that counts” and that does come into play in keeping a relationship going but to get it started you need to look good and make decent money.