A Bit Of A Mess Of A Post-Anniversary Post

I am not big on remembering, nevermind noting anniversaries.  So I totally forgot the anniversary of my first blog post earlier this month.  But, in response to last night's hate mail, I thought I'd take a look back. Indulge me a bit.  I will note that I still intend to write a political blog though when I began I had no idea where that would lead me. 

If it were left up to me to guess, I'd think it's been approximately fifteen years since my intense engagement with the writing, the thinking, the babbling and scribblage of atheists started.  As I've noted here and elsewhere, it began with a blog commentator who styled himself Woody Guthrie's Guitar at Eschaton declaring in the style on a village taproom atheist of the 19th century that science had proven free will was bunk.   Immediately,  when I saw someone on a blog then considered an up and coming lefty venue of sorts (at least by the more naive of those who frequented it) making that claim, I knew that that belief was a total disaster for the left, invalidating literally the very foundations upon which egalitarian democracy, claims of a right to equality, equal justice, economic justice and I also knew that "science" had not only not done such a thing, it could not achieve the level of knowledge for such a declaration to reach the level of proof.  I believe my attacks on that materialist superstition began immediately though I started writing long comments on that topic and, from there others, which is what led me to start my first blog.  

I didn't realize at the time how much these issues would come to take up so much of my time.  My intentional theme was to try to figure out how "the left" the side with the facts (something I still believe, but not in the same way I did in 2006) and who favored the welfare of the destitute, the poor, what I then thought of as "the working class" so consistently lost in American politics.  I knew that a lot of that failure had to lie within the left because one of the things that it consisted of was our constantly playing sucker for the right.  I will note that one thing I remember reading Barney Frank said stuck with me, I read he noted that the time the left spent defending the pornography industry was time wasted that could have been spent on pursuing economic justice.  I also remembered Molly Ivins, in her obituary of Barbara Jordan said she never wasted her time on a hopeless cause.  And there was always the practical example of one of my great heroes, Shirley Chisholm who would lobby even the flagrant racist George Wallace to further economic justice for poor people.  

I continued on with the issue of materialist atheism and its extensions as I became the weekend blogger at Echidne's blog and continued engaging on the issue in blog brawls at the blogs and comment boards that atheists frequented as well as reviewing the writings of many of the big and not so big names in atheism, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Huxley, Ayers, and down to the level of Paul Kurtz and Corliss Lamont, Robert Ingersoll and ol' Maddy O'Hair who turned out to be a total sleaze bag*, not the hero that other atheists like Barbara Ehrenreich had sold her as being.  

That engagement, especially with such figures I had been educated to revere such as Russell, shattered much if not all of what I'd been told in the secondary, tertiary literature and theatrical and film treatments.**  Though it cleared the path to more clarity about such things as I write about now.  

I don't think I would ever have been able to see that Marxism was not the polar opposite of Nazism but just another variety at the bottom end of gangster government.  Once I realized that Jefferson's youthful idealistic statement about democracy being the only legitimate form of government and that ANY government which was not an egalitarian democracy was ruled by gangsters, crooks, thieves and murderers,  I was well out of the secular-lefty delusion of my youth and most of my adulthood.   When I realized that his 18th century British style "enligthenment" libertarian-liberalism only got you as far as the slave ridden, patriarchal rule of the antebellum United States, I began to realize that an adequately informed electorate wouldn't produce equality, the very substance of democracy.  That required a specific kind of morality that could only be founded in a belief that Jefferson's other formula was right, that people are endowed by God with inalienable rights, the reason that that first line of argument of the Declaration of Independence is that declaration of the origin of equal rights.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

That is a logical argument.  The first axiomatic statement that human rights are endowed by God leads to the statement defining the only legitimate form of government is derived from that start.  I will point out, considering where I started, that without the belief that God also endowed us with the possibility of free thought, you can't even get to where Jefferson started.  The idea that automatons made of meat have the possibility of freedom is absurd - given what I said about my engagement with the literature of atheism, the materialism that it is inevitably based in leads, always, in the end, when things are argued out to their end point, that human freedom is a delusion or an illusion or non-existent. 

Materialism, even in its manifestation that doesn't engage in anti-religious invective, inevitably leads to the denial of equal rights.   The utter and total failure of Marxism over the 20th century to achieve more than a Potemkin Village false front of that in each and every case, before it, inevitably it would seem, devolves into a gangster capitalism on steroids, harnessing the power of the state as a ruling collective of billionaire investors.   At best, Marxism has proven to be a ruling elite that more evenly distributes misery and hardship, slavery and death to a mass kept in control by a culture of terror and intimidation that becomes the predominant culture of any country which was subjected to it.  You would be free only to pursue innocuous and frivolous interests, if you could afford them, that is until some connected gangster found some way to steal it from you.  

What the allegedly even-handed, freedom-allowing secularism as administered by judges and Justices educated in doctrinaire secularism has meant for the United States was the insane legal  position that liars had a First Amendment right to lie combined with the power of the gangster class of owners of the electronic media to corrupt and lie We The People out of the possibility of egalitarian democracy.  It was not really different in the direction it led to from other forms of gangster enablement, but that's where we're headed with the help of the post-Communist world master of gangsters, the former KGB guy, Putin.  That post-Communist Russia got there before we did wasn't a shock.  As was brought up this past week, their manipulation of Trump began even before the fall of the Soviet Union, after his trip there in 1987, he began to take out ads attacking NATO and taking other stands that were favored by the gang Putin belonged to and who dropped the guise of Marxism in favor of a more overt form of gangsterism.  

I'll end this by pointing out that one of those venues of secular lefty leftism that I kept reading way too long, The Nation, still posts propaganda not far from some of Trump's written by the husband of its owner, Stephen Cohen.  Considering his own rather odd past as a Sovietologist who was eventually excluded from the country, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there wasn't some motive we don't know about behind that.  And he's far from the only member of the secular left I grew up and old with who is peddling that line.  Only, now I know that that left was never a real left and I should never have expected more from it than it has produced.  Defeat for equality, for democracy, for the truth. 

And then there's science in all its varied levels of reliability, but that will have to wait for another post. 

* I'll say this for ol' Maddy, in her sordid, immoral life and horrific grisley death (reportedly brought about by her perverse attraction to hiring people who had been convicted of murder such as her assistant who murdered her, her pathetically loyal and totally dominated son and her sadly captive and dominated granddaughter), she might have been disgusting and somewhat repetitiously superficial but she had some show-biz savvy.   

**   I'd say "quarternary" at this point but I think even octonary might not be low enough in ordering for that crap.  You don't find truth in the movies.  The role of movies and TV shows peddling manipulative lies to substitute for as much of the history of important things as even people who are allegedly educated will know is something I've also come to see as important in this entertainment addled society. 

Update:  Madalyn Murray O'Hair was a monumentally selfish, manipulative, dishonest crook and petty dictator.  Her son who stayed with her, Jon Garth Murray, and granddaughter Robin Murray O'Hair were probably her most damaged victims, and that was true even before her greed and freakish taste for associating with and dominating convicted murderers, her foul mouth and dictatorial personality got them all murdered.   Her personal PR as I was exposed to in the lefty-magazines and other media of the 60s - 00s was almost entirely a lie.  

The deeper I got into her real life, things such as her attempt to grab hold of the millions left by one of her rivals for the title of Biggest American Atheist Asshole of the post-war period, James Hervey Johnson who hated the scumbag as she hated him, was nothing compared to the damage she did to her son and granddaughter as she cruelly dominated and controlled them.   

Those would-be heroes of the atheist would-be left and others who propped up her legend are really not reliable.   They clearly lied for her.