It might have been good that I never got the chance to marry the man I wanted to marry because I'm really terrible at remembering anniversaries. Though I think he'd have been as bad at that as I am. I'd thought the 10th of May was the date of the first blog post I posted but it was only the day that I put up my first blog, I didn't get the nerve to post to it for several days after. Not that I expect anyone would think that was a banner day in amateur publishing, I certainly don't which is why I probably don't bother to get the date right.
In deciding to no longer take comments here, comments which far more fill the spam file than are suitable for posting, I looked at the statistics that Blogger keeps on what I do here, don't know when the last time I looked at those was.
On this blog I've posted more than 9000 posts, most of which are actual writing by me but a fair few are videos and links to music and other things I've posted. It would be a very minor sort of fun to claim that I've written 10,000 pieces and I may have because the statistics show that I have more than 1,000 drafts that I never chose to post or got around to posting. I don't know how many posts are at my original blog because I lost control of its dashboard way back when either the e-mail I used then or Blogger changed something that I never figured out. I also don't know how many pieces I posted at Echidne of the Snakes when I was asked to be the weekend writer there, most of which I didn't cross post to my own blogs.
This little trip down a path you're probably not interested in, my memory lane - though when I look back there are things I don't remember having written - isn't going to end up begging you for money. At least not yet. I know the large majority of people are facing hard times, being from the blue collar class, brought up to constantly remember there are those worse off than I am, I'd encourage you to give to those people. That's the difference between someone like me and a white-collar, trust-fund type of blogger. I find blue-collar types are far less likely to expect someone to give them money than the rich are.
I've mentioned here before that in the theme I chose for my blogging, why the left so consistently lost out to conservatives, led me in a number of directions and to conclusions that I'd never have guessed I'd come to twenty years ago, even more so if I could go back to thinking the way I did forty years ago.
One of the things I've learned since I first went online and started reading the thinking of the non-journalist-non-writers of the college credentialed of the English speaking world and others is that modernism has in most cases devolved into the kind of adolescent mindset that you see on display in old Dr. Who scripts. At least the ones I watched from the 60s and 70s. I have no idea what they've been like since then. But also George Carlin's shtick, others who turned atheism into a substitute for substance.
Rather shockingly, the atheist mindset which loves to bill itself as "skeptical" and "rational" seldom applies those skillfully to ideas they oppose or to those they favor at all. Far from being an emblem of intellectual rigor and sophistication, I've come to conclude that "skepticism" which is really just a cover for atheist materialism is a certain sign of uncritical thinking, atheism as well, in so far as it become ideological and scientism an outright form of severe intellectual dishonesty.
Contrary to common credulity, they are also far more likely to lead to vulgar materialism than to actual, traditional American style liberalism. They are more likely to lead to juvenile libertarianism, another thing which is also wrongly associated with any liberalism worth caring about.
My exercise in personal nostalgia has also led me to look into the soon to be emptied spam files of this blog to see what issues I might have answered but didn't at the time. One of the recent ones mocking my series going through Hans Kung's thinking about the Resurrection and eternal life gleefully anticipates me, at the point of death, being enormously disappointed that I was wrong, that there is no God, that there was no Jesus and that when we die we rot back into the molecules that were the only real thing about us. Gleefully anticipating my horror, facing the void.
I could come up with a few incidents of that in C-level popular TV and movie scripting and novels rehearsing that atheist's glee, it's not one of the most often repeated and copied scenarios but it would seem to be one that atheists love to imagine.
My answer to that is that until we die we have no way to know that but it's clear that belief in God and an afterlife and in Jesus, too, affords fewer chances of being disappointed and if I will be disappointed in the way the atheist gleefully anticipates, it won't last for long.
But an atheist who holds that position doesn't seem to be able to imagine that he (it's generally a he, in my experience, men being more prone to shooting their mouths off) may as well have a surprise coming for him. He may at the point of death:
A. find that he fears his own possible extinction far more than he now pretends in his tough-guy, macho, cynical self image of his, usually, soft-handed, white-collared self. In which case he has as good a chance of being disappointed, dying in terror of his own imminent obliteration as anyone who believed in eternal life.
B. He may find that he was wrong and their is an afterlife which could lead to several opportunities for disappointment,
1. He may be humiliated for being such a chump of atheism his entire life, being cynical and arrogantly certain of possessing an intellectual correctness that was delusional.
2. He may not like the idea of eternal life,* especially if he finds that those who warned about eternal damnation or even a period of painful correction are in store. There are religious believers who would share in that disappointment, too, probably many who as stupidly believed in their virtue in this life as the atheist might in his intellectual superiority. But they didn't send me a spam to respond to.
3. He may hate heaven, all of that love and eternal being in God. Which will mean that he's made his own hell of it. The dope. Though if near death experiencers are right, it could certainly lead to an obliteration of their current selves - wouldn't they hate it if love conquers all, something I haven't thought of before because I don't lovingly dwell on anticipating their pain. I can't claim that about people like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Trump, Betsy de Vos, etc. I sort of wish there were a hell for someone like William Barr. Though I suspect I'll be disappointed.
I could go on. My point isn't that the atheist should live in trembling fear of either eternal damnation (don't believe in that myself but I suspect there is something more like purgatory which isn't something to hope for) or that they're going to have to put up with all of that love which they despise so much but my point is that the jerks should grow up and look as critically at their own claims as they demand others be looked at. I have never found an ideological atheist who did that. Not even someone as atypical as Stephen Jay Gould. They are as bad as the worst fundamentalists when it comes to facing the possibility that they are wrong.
When I wrote that first blog post about why liberals should stop allowing themselves to act to a standard that conservatives were never expected to, I never thought I'd spend so much of my time for the next 14 years criticizing atheism, secularism, anti-Christianity, Darwinism, multi-verse cosmology and other things like that. And modernism, in general, as bad as any reactionary demand that we return to the past. Modernism is as limited as those religious sects who want to remain in a lost past or which demand a return to one. Though these days they seldom have the same tendencies to violence and gangsterism that secular, materialistic, scientistic modernism does. I never thought I'd be going into that often but I have come to the conclusion that all of those contribute an enormous amount to why traditional American-style liberalism, a liberalism of egalitarian democracy, equally sharing in the good of life and the protection of the biological basis of life has failed so disastrously after the Warren Court took that modernist stand of moral even-handedness and allowed lies to flourish with impunity. I have come to the conclusion that the atheist scholar Jurgen Habermas did that Christianity, far from the Brit-atheist style pantomime entity, being a guaranteed reactionary force in opposition to freedom and equality and justice are, if not the exclusive source of that in terms of political life, its main source of sustenance. I certainly never expected to come to that conclusion early in May 2006 but that's what Ive found.
That's where 14 years of thinking hard about that has brought me.
* I do rather like the story of how, as he was dying at the age of 91, the Brit author Somerset Maugham asked one of the foremost atheist celebrities of the time A. J. Ayer, to come and reassure him that there was no afterlife. Ayer did so but apparently when Ayer almost choked to death when he was very old he had a near death experience that led him to tell the doctor who revived him that he was going to have to revise his life's work because he'd seen God. Though he later denied that the doctor steadfastly said that's what he told him and unlike Ayer, the doctor had nothing to lose by telling the truth about that. Reportedly his wife said Ayer was much less of a jerk after "he died" which is a common observation made about those who claim to have had a near death experience. I can imagine most of the atheists I have encountered, especially those online would just hate that with a passion. Being nice, that is.
Update: Anticipating someone being pissed off at the blasphemy against Dr. Who, I was thinking in particular of the character who cries out to Xoanon to save him before he dies. The Face of Evil written by the ideological atheist, Chris Boucher who is merely typical of the Brit atheist type who flourish in TV writing. Several of the Dr. Who writers I recall were of that type, Douglas Adams, certainly. It's rather funny how something that its adherents love to believe is a signal of intellectual superiority so frequently devolves into non-intellectual fandom. I liked those Dr. Who episodes 40 years ago but I grew out of them. Even the wonderful actor, the beauteous David Tennant couldn't bring me back to it.
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