Wednesday, December 21, 2011

A Solstice rant

So here's something.




A little background first. I grew up in a very religious household and went to the Church of the Nazarene for my entire childhood into highschool. I started questioning things around age 17, considered myself a Christian until 21, and it took until I was 23 before I could comfortably identify as a Humanist. I've lived around people like our commenter here for most of my life. I know the arguments, I know the tactics, I know the type.

It's the winter solstice today, which is the basis for damn near every winter holiday, including Christmas. I was debating whether or not to do a post relating to it, but I think this rant will have to suffice.

Here's my problem with our Facebook commentator above: A comment that on its face appears to be helpful, kind, and caring is in fact ignorant, hateful, and full of malice. And this type of comment is so typical that the commenter may not even realize what she's saying.

Let's break it down:

My pastor just had a great explanation for this...

This is not an original insight by our friend that she's about to go into. I know this because I used the same tactic on people when I was growing up. She's a messenger, you see. This isn't what she thinks, this is just what she was told. The effect is that any counter argument you have cannot be had with her. You'd have to go talk to her pastor. She can preach, but you can't argue. The Bible citations that follow use the same tactic.

"God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes." Ecclesiates 7:29. He says that humans are inately bad, evil, sinful, and children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3)

One of my biggest problems with the faith is summed up here. But I'll skip that argument until another time. Just keep this passage in mind.

However, Jesus came to change our sinful nature and give us a new heart (2 Cor. 5:17). We can trust Him because he is the ultimate source of love, truth, goodness

Here we go. You have a number of mutually contradictory assumptions here. I'm going to argue from the Christian mythology here, because those are the rules we're playing by today.

IF humans are inherently evil, AND IF Jesus is the ultimate source of good, THEN all humans born before Jesus were inherently evil, sinful, and wrathful.

This means one of three things:

In Christian mythology, that means the entire 4000 years of humanity before Jesus was filled with nothing but evil and sin. This is true in spite of the countless examples of virtue and love in the Old Testament. Every human born before Jesus, every hero in the OT, is condemned to hell for eternity.
OR
Humans can be good only through Jesus, or, prior to him, the Holy Spirit. So every human who does not follow Jesus, even those who openly reject him, is either entirely evil, or is only capable of love and kindness because of a God they do not follow. This appears to make following God irrelevant, as God manifests whether we want him to or not.
OR
Humans are capable of love and kindness independent of God and Jesus. Humans are not inherently evil. Therefore there is no need for humans to be saved, which undermines the central tenant of the religion.

Knowing this has made me realize how special it is when people really do care and show us goodness/kindness. :-)

This 'knowledge' is as real to this person as the screen you're reading this on. Maybe moreso. I cannot emphasize enough how deeply these beliefs run to people who have never been wholeheartedly religious.

And that's what makes this whole thing so insidious. Our friend doesn't realize that she's telling the original poster (who is spiritual/agnostic at best) that he's going to hell. She doesn't realize that she's calling him an evil, hateful person. She doesn't realize that she's telling him that none of the good things he does aren't because he's a good person. Only the bad things he does are wholly his own. Someone else gets credit for all of the good in his life, and all of the good he brings to other people's lives.

And she and others like her get away with saying this like this because they really are trying to help. And that comes through in her presentation. It's a nice thing to say, as long as you don't think about what isn't said.

So I'd like to respond with my own cited advice, from a different story.

My girlfriend just had a great explanation for this...
The Younger Children of Illuvatar woke with the first rising of the Sun and communed with the Elves, but the lies of the Dark King brought ruin to their race (17 SIL). Bummer, right? But the blood of Numenor carried the light of Manwae through the ages to give us strength (1 ALK). We can trust the descendants of the Line of Kings because they are the ultimate source of courage, virtue, and righteousness. Knowing this has made me realize how special it is when people stand up for what they believe in.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Illusions of accomplishment

Something I'm just realizing that I struggle with is the illusion of accomplishment. It's come up during the last couple of weeks while I get back into a groove after a disastrous November, and the more I think about it the more I identify other times I've found myself in the same trap.

In November I ran some numbers, did some projections, and found out that all of the work I've been doing on my Master Plan is actually working. I'm still more than a year away from bringing everything to fruition, but I can see the end from here. It's one thing to tell myself every day for the last five years that I'm going to succeed eventually, and it's an entirely different thing to look at a pile of math and see that I will actually succeed by a certain date. There is still some projection involved, but there's also a timeline that isn't "eighteen months from now", like it has been for the last 5 years.

Realizing this threw me for a bit of a loop. I told anyone who would listen that hey, look, I'm not entirely delusional. All of these things I've been doing are working. And the feedback I got was universally positive and encouraging and made me feel pretty good about myself. Made me feel vindicated a little, that I've done something good.

But I haven't. Not yet. The amount of work I need to do between now and victory is staggering. More than I've ever done in that timeframe, honestly. And if it doesn't get done, that master timeline starts floating again.

And that part trips me up. See, it is awesome to tell people all the things you've done, and how successful you are, and how you have grand plans and grand ambitions and that you're going places with your life. And it is so much easier to tell people those things than it is to actually do them. You get all of the positive social feedback with none of the mindbending solitary work. You can make a couple friends at a party pitching a good ambitious line, and get heaps of love at the dinner table just for talking about what you gonna do.

And oh man, am I susceptible to that business. I get so wrapped up in my own schemes a lot of times that I forget how to make good table conversation. So if I get a chance to talk about my plans and be lauded for presenting them like they're a done deal, I'm all up ons. Once I start on that path, it's pretty easy to go along with all of the back patting. I start to relax a little, start to believe that I've done a good job. And that leads all to quickly to days and weeks passing by without making any progress.

It's ultimately illogical, that response. When I'm running a race, I don't start walking as soon as I see the finish line. No, no, that's when the afterburners go on (little, tiny, RC Flyer afterburners, but I use what I got). Logically, I should have looked at those numbers I crunched and braced myself for the whirlwind of work that I need to do in order to get over the top.

So I'm working on that part right now. Keeping up the pace I should be setting for a year+ seems almost impossible. I've never gone that hard for that long. Not even close. A month, sure. Three months even. But not five, six times that. But I don't have to know that. I don't have to acknowledge it. I just need to blitz the rest of today, and then I can go to sleep. And I'm pretty sure I can blitz tomorrow too. So I'm just going to focus on crushing my work today, and having a good followup tomorrow. Just like I've always done. It's crunch time, but I've done crunch time before. Until it's over, it's probably best to shut up about what I'm gonna do, and just get this shit done first.

Onward...

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Free books!


I reviewed a book called The Black God's War a couple of months ago. I really liked it; still the best book I've read this year. And today on Kindleboards, Moses Siregar III announced a limited giveaway to ring in the holidays.

I can give away a copy of this outstanding book to five people with a Kindle/Kindle app. First come, first serve.

Quoth the author:
"I just need the names and email addresses of anyone who would like a gifted copy of my novel through Amazon.com. Make sure to ask for the email address that the person has on file with Amazon. I can also send them other formats, such as epub, but I don't like to share pdfs."

Email me if you'd prefer to not post your email in the comments.

Monday, December 5, 2011

I have returned

November was a thing. People I don't know slept in my house, I ran a race, I got sick, I went to concerts, I got sick again, I ate more Thanksgiving dinners than a family of four, I drank a few bottles of whiskey which made me get sick a third time, and saw some friends I haven't seen since college. Along the way, I came up with a plan that will see me with six published titles by this time next year.

Here's the deal. I'm THIS many chapters from finishing the draft of The Nomad Wilds. If I continue kicking my word counts in the face, it'll be done by the end of the month. The first novel I wrote needs a new title, new plot, and a good once-over, but I can make edits on that in a couple of months once Nomads is done. That comes out in March. Six short stories need the same treatment and will take a week each and another week to organize them into a couple of collections. That puts me at the beginning of April. Start the edits on Nomads then, and I'll be working on the new non-fiction book I have in mind throughout. Assuming I am not delayed, both of those get out next fall. Six titles in time for the next Christmas spender bender.

As far as the present is concerned, I'm a little more confused. Battlesongs of Hope is still selling, even though I've been acting like it doesn't exist for more than a month. No forums, no promotion of any kind, and it's still plugging along. Hell, I haven't so much as updated Facebook more than twice in the last five weeks, and in November I had twice as many pageviews as I did in my previous best month. I don't know who you people are or where you come from, but I hope you stick around. Welcome.

But on to the important things. I mentioned a non-fiction book. Well. I has an idea. And since I think in words I'm going to be working through it here before it goes into book form. It goes back to conversations with Girlfriend and working through her myriad bits of individuality.

My current embryonic belief is that that the tendency towards positive or negative decisions is primarily a function of a person's relations to input and their perceptions of output. In turn, a person's inputs and outputs are affected by a number of paired relationships. I currently call the sum of these paired relationships the dimensions of discipline because they create a matrix in which a person can be highly disciplined in some areas and highly undisciplined in others. And the real kicker, the thing that got me to start this exploration, is that in a single given person, two IDENTICAL inputs in IDENTICAL circumstances can produce two entirely DIFFERENT yet equally logical outputs. Yet there is a pattern and predictability to those outputs, and I intend to discover it.

The factors at play are these:
• Long term vs short term
• Self love vs self destruction
• Peace vs progress
• Resting vs working

There may be more, but those are the ones that I'm working with now. I'll have more in subsequent posts; for now I have to do my squats because I have not lifted in several weeks and am visibly withering.

Onward...