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 prescrib...
Posts
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,...
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 b...
Mindfulness I was orphaned at age 2, only my bare physical needs for survival were attended to by my widowed narcissist Mom for the welfare cheque. I have spent my life recovering from her abuse of neglect and its still ongoing. I’m 71. Doing things like marrying people similar to my Mom to win her approval will make you a slave. To approval. Addicted to love one psychologist called it. Along the way I have spoken to psychologists belonging to several schools and even trans-personal psychologists in a cult at a time when I was in transition and especially vulnerable. Most , with the exception of evidence based psychologists, implied covertly that I had something to do with the abuse. The latest was a member of the mindfulness school, based in the Buddhist/Hindu meditation, system of beliefs. “ Mindfulness derives from sati , a significant element of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, [7] [8] and is based on Chan , Guān , a...
Isolation She's Dead To Me Isolation This came to me in a dream last night, a remembrance about Rob and Rose, how they cut me off when I was recovering from a long term illness. I tend to blame Rose a very childish and therefore narcissist traits person. I was devastated, blindsided. I said goodbye to them and haven’t contacted them since. Then I started to look at the rest of my relationships where the same thing was/is happening. Yep there it is: childishness. So of course I’m going to get narcissistic behaviours such as isolation from them or partners. I thought of my marriage and that aspect was the worst for me, being cut off from friends and family. My sister has done this as well, cut me off. All the cut offs have been extremely childish people, mean like its bizarre, never cooking, getting obese from take-out, never cleaning hiring a Mom. Never doing the heavy lifting in any sense of the word, using their fleet of flying monkeys for that. Here...
First
The problem, for me, with social media, is that it has so few characters available. I was recently reading a first person, The Marriage Dividend by Laurie Stone in the Paris Review where Ms. Stone leads from one topic to the next and back again. From a spontaneous orgy at age 19 to being 78 and meeting a friend on the streets of New York. I fell in love all over again. I read my very first first person in the New Yorker while on a camping trip with my highly dysfunctional wife and her new age conservative friends. They disapproved of my choice of magazine and everything else about me as it turned out. I was 40 and going to art school to gain some formal credentials in academia in order to teach and get a career away from the very conservative transportation industry where I had taken refuge away from being a poorly paid contract addictions therapist. My transitional needs job. I like to drive and dispatch. It was hard to get jobs as I was too everything: smart and cre...