Beachbum

This is how the horses and ranch hands saw me. At the time of this photo, I was a ranch manager for an outfit of working draft horses on the Big Island of Hawaii. Horses are something I know well. I grew up around them before my military career. Being an animal lover, I am fully aware of the responsibility we have with all life on this planet in regards to suffering, especially in a domestic context. I am not, nor will I ever be the someone to use another life without mutual beneficence, without mutual benefit and  fundamental compassion that results in better living conditions for each party in the domestic environment, the relationship is no more than abuse. I have 12  Draft horses (2000 lbs babies) that want me to pick'em up and cuddle, or hug (you haven't lived until you've been swarmed by 24k lbs. of horse wanting your undivided attention). When they're not pulling carriages (perhaps 15 hours a month), I exercise them by play tag in the jungle. The rules are a little different. I'm always it, and they all want to catch me. It looks much worse than it is. They are very gentle animals, but clumsy in the Hawaiian bush. I've scared more than a few tourists traveling around the ranch by busting out of the jungle in a full-on stampede with a dozen wild-eyed giants chasing me. You would have to see it to believe it. And to be clear, the hollering allows them all to find me in the thick brush--most of the time (24000 lbs. of hug at a gallop).

I am an Atheist

I am a complex intellect who has rendered very complex topics and philosophies down to their simplest form since I was very young. I value logical consistency, facts, evidence, and the network of substantiated facts that combine to convey knowledge and support a universal truth that we will likely never know much of. I am a science minded thinker-philosopher and writer built from a cowboy-Indian warrior poet. My life's goal was, and still is, to experience everything. I don't waste time on brain candy (it puts a cavity between your ears), but I read voraciously, teach because it helps me learn more, and I hate the suffering in the world. Some might say I have a hero complex.

If one still questions my position I will refer him to how George H. Smith defines atheism in his book "Atheism: The Case Against God":which I think is as acceptably well-researched and succinct as any I've seen to the date of this writing.

"....The prefix "a" means "without" so the term "a-theism" literally means "without theism" or without a belief in a god or number of gods. Atheism, therefore, is the absence of a theistic belief. One who does not believe in the existence of a god or the supernatural being is properly designated as an atheist. Atheism is sometimes defined as 'the belief that there is no God of any kind' or the claim that a god cannot exist. While these are categories of atheism, they do not exhaust the meaning of atheism—they are somewhat misleading with the respect to the basic nature of atheism. Atheism, in its basic form is not a belief, it's the absence of a belief. An atheist is not primarily a person who believes that a god does not exist; rather, does not believe in the existence of a god."

The reason I am an atheist, is simple on the surface, I was born that way. The reason I am an atheist activist is just as simple, without the wool pulled over my eyes, I can see superstition, religion, and the way these anthologies of ideologies are used to exploit all sentient life and the world it poisons. Theism is a worldview born of ignorance that feasts on the fear it produces.

Most Freethinkers have a stance on the philosophical position of atheism that rejects the common believers depiction of what a humanist, secularist, freethinker, et al., is on the basis of its religious framing. Discounting the evil atheists eat babies claims as deluded propaganda, we are still left the false framing portraying atheists especially, but also secularists, humanists, and freethinkers to various degrees, as the ones denying reality; or, more subtly, religionists claim we deny evidence, evidence they neither understand  nor produce, for an imagined deity they claim created this universe and everything in it. 

The quickest way to falsify their god-fraud is to ask them to explain where this entity was when there was nowhere to be. Or ask what this deity made the universe from when there was nothing. But, the best way is to ask how that-which-does-not-exist can create itself, from nothing, in nothing, while being nowhere. Of course, their inability to answer, let alone support their answers to these questions with evidence, shows their imagined entity is merely the latest in a long list of mythical deities. Yes, I just used logic to show creater gods cannot possibly exist, and I will do the same for all god concepts, ghost like entities, spirits, devils, demons, supernatural this, that, and the other thing. I will also show that supernaturalism is, like all ideologies, a baseless fiction. I do this because these baseless fictions turn otherwise decent people into a mindless stampede of stupidity, a threat, a source of power for the exploiter caste. Hero complex.

But, far worse, is the reality created by this pious political club prevents these people,  cum livestock, from rescuing themselves or their offspring from a life of servitude, from being fleeced, fucked, and fed upon by the scum that rises to the top in this religio-political socioeconomic system of ideological manipulation and technocratic and bureaucratic limitation conserved (think conservatism) by the plutocrats. And they preserve (again conservatism) this misbegotten, thoroughly discredited, superstitious worldview a la explanation extraordinaire (think sophistry), on the basis of a lack of evidence and arguments from ignorance (you can't prove a negative, that gods don't exist). Oh, but I can. In reality, there is evidence in insurmountable quantities that supports many converging theories from our origins to the purpose of life in its totality, without positing a supernatural explanation or inexplicable supernatural properties. Only, this is far too subtle for brains saturated in pious pus. I have developed proofs, Euclidean style proofs, logical arguments, that prove gods cannot exist. It wasn't even difficult. 

I'm Learning the Blog Thing

I have written on my exploits and travels before. This blog thing cannot be that different. Everyone back on the Mainland hang-on, this will get wild. I have been thinking about Blogging my antics in Hawaii for a while. I am sure other people are out there writing about the Big Island, but I think they may be writing for the tourists, or worse, some white privilege, patriarchal, nationalistic vision of Hawaii. Something that belongs to others, under their ideological constraints. There is a depth to Hawaii that is insulted by those post cards of a beautiful girls in a grass skirts. Only this is merely the inspiration for the attitude of what I plan to write herein. Allow me to narrow the focus. 

The multitude of religions here, made it hard to push a single religion as dominant or definitive, therefore their political power basically canceled out while the ornate ornamentation is akin to an obnoxious car commercial. In contrast, we have two indigenous mammals on the Islands, a bat and a seal, we once had many species of birds, but invasive species wiped most of those out. We have small reptiles and large insects, it gives the invasive feral species of cat and mongoose something to do when they're not eating the birds along with the rats that can climb palm trees for more than just the eggs.  All this makes the hidden, the out of sight, like the sea life, the most interesting aspect of Hawaii for me to explore.

I write for people who want answers, perhaps the answers I have mined from critically assessing objective evidence anchored to the world around me. What it is like to live and play here? What do palm trees have to do with philosophy? What is it about living in the playground of the world that informs my understanding of the rest of reality? What does driving on the roads that are shared with many people from all over the world say about my sociological interests? The conflicts, contrasts, and commonalities between indigenous peoples and colonists, locals and migrants, the capitalists, the imperialists, the fascists calling themselves neoliberal, or the oxymoronic neoclassical, anarcho-capitalists and rightwing libertarians--yes, narcissism now has its own brand ... of Pampers.

I will write about what I think I see in the world that bothers me. I will write about those topics that I think should bother everyone else. Hawaii brings many cultural concepts into stark relief. I write about the big questions that have such embarrassingly simple answers. I write about topics that take four big words and hyphens to delineate. Use my superpower to take complex subjects, reduce them to components, rebuild them with a respect for evolutionary processes, and simplify the relationships within the networks of universal truth. 

A downside of Hawaii is that the distractions can be insurmountable at times, but I will give this endeavor the attention it is due.