The Fallacy of Faith

I, as an atheist, change the word ‘faith’ to ‘hope’. As an atheist I accept that the world is the way it is, and I would highly prefer it be different in some cases, so I seek satisfaction, my life’s purpose, in trying to effect change in some way. 

What the hell is intuition? ‘Intuition relies on evolutionary older, automatic, unconscious, and fast mental processing, primarily to save our brains time or energy. It also is prone to make mistakes, such as cognitive biases.’ — (psychology today) To say that I intuitively know something to be true is to fail to ask for the evidence for my beliefs. — (rebt network) Religion programs our intuition to assume we are not good enough and only religion will save us. Atheism deprograms our intuition and says the situation is not optimum so I had better work at dealing with it which includes ignoring it, such as a lifetime disability for instance. I hope my stroke affected arm gets better so I will do my prescribed exercises then ignore it so I can seek satisfaction using other strategies. Better than having faith that god will heal me.

This is the ‘The Age of Atheism’, I like that.

 

 

Bankruptcy and Inappropriate Guilt

All guilt is inappropriate. The definition of guilt according to Dr. David Burns in his cure for depression book ‘Feeling Good’, is feeling responsible for something you are not responsible for. Therefore I have had a love hate relationship with having declared bankruptcy twice, and due to a medical emergency that put me into long term care, for a long time, recently I walked away from most of my debt.

In 1992 I was a career taxi dispatcher and I had decided to upgrade my education for interest sake primarily but also to increase my wage earning power by joining the middle class through education.

After 6 years of full time university I qualified as a professional artist with a teaching certificate and 60 grand in debt, $500.00 a month in payments for years and years and years, a government sponsored slave to the bank, one of the richest oligarchs on the planet.

Artists, with no trust fund or rich family who have a debt to service, need a second job and I chose teaching, I love it and I’m good at it. Here is the thing, in Alberta and the US. it’s mostly contract work. You are paid $125 an hour with no benefits and no hours. You teach 1 class a week per semester. So you need a second job for your second job. Artists have whats known as blended careers. So I went back to logistics and subsistence wages and long hours, another slavery. No energy or time left over for art and teaching. No benefits. So I declared my second bankruptcy and wiped out the student loans because I now needed that 500 a month for food.

Eventually I had a stroke. The first bankruptcy was due to small business debt, after art school I was being financed by my local picture framing supplier that was acquired by a large American firm who promptly called the low interest loan. The idea being that you re-financed through them at a higher interest rate moving from 5% to 34%, shut down your low cost home based business model (not allowed as unfair competition) and move into a high rent storefront quadrupling your costs and increasing your prices eight-fold for a smaller margin due to fewer customers willing to pay a 8 times increase. This is indentured servitude to the home office in Alabama. Corporate slavery.

Ya no. So I went to KPMG accountants for a consultation and 20 min later I was bankrupt and free of debt.

My backup job now became my main job, driving courier as a contractor where they give you high priced rush’s occasionally but mostly low cost (cast) regular delivery’s so you were essentially on subsistence wages with no benefits such as dental. (Most contractors just have their teeth removed.) The upper cast drivers doing all rush delivery’s were the dispatcher’s personal friends/sycophants. So I was driving 60 hours a week stimulating constant high cortisone from spending my life in high alert in traffic until I stroked out.

The immigrants have all these jobs now as this is an improvement over 3^rd world conditions. This is the better life they came for. 

 

 

Response to The Conversation

 

Response to The Conversation

It's like I said to my aging and overweight depressed friend, "Being fit has nothing to do with age it has to do with being fit." I was regurgitating the excellent book by Dr. Burns, 'Intimate Connections'.

Burn's teacher, Dr. Albert Ellis, taught me that the purpose of life, if you need one, is satisfaction. "If you lose an arm, do everything you can to deal with it, then ignore it and focus on strategies for satisfaction; you may not have as many choices but you still have some."

Recently, I was rejected again for my age, which happens at all ages, so I have great skills at handling rejection as well as rejecting others not to my taste. Practice Practice Practice

I stopped watching Sex and the City mostly for its ageism and I have never seen the sequel. I imagined it to be, 'how to be immature at any age'. The author explains it "contributes to discourse on aging and the right of women to be visible at any age."

She is talking about media companies that are selling. I worked for an ad company that refused any proposal that didn't have white people 20-30 years old because that was their market. Capitalism, like ageism, sucks. So I have ad blockers on my computer and no cable TV. I was recently in hospital for a year, recovering, and in the common rooms they had commercial television on 24/7 so folks wouldn't feel lonely. I argued that media makes you feel lonely and isolated and I preferred communication companionship and sex.

Carrie Bradshaw is a painting of what that looks like but to get the real thing you have to turn her off.