Monicks: Unleashed

Tag: Atheist

  • How Do You Do?

    Listen to this song keeping in mind that Shakira, the singer/songwriter, is a Colombian young lady who has always been Catholic… apparently she is questioning her beliefs and trying to utter these questions in this song. Very popular in Latin America and Europe, although I find her voice a little strange.

    The content of this piece is what caught my attention.

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyVv1uFHVO4]

    How Do You Do?

    Shakira

    Oral Fixation

    Lyrics –

    Forgive us our trespasses
    As we forgive those who have trespassed against us
    Give us this day our daily bread
    Daily bread, daily bread

    Gloria Espiritu Santo

    What language do you speak
    If you speak at all?
    Are you some kind of freak
    Who lives to raise the ones who fall?

    Hey, would you tell me why
    The cat fights the dog?
    Do you go to the Mosque
    Or the Synagogue?

    And if our fates have all been wrapped around your finger
    And if you wrote the script then why the troublemakers?

    How do you do?
    How does it feel to be so high
    And are you happy?
    Do you ever cry?

    … I sometimes cry …

    You’ve made mistakes
    Well that’s OK ’cause we all have
    But if I forgive yours
    Will you forgive mine?

    Hey, do you feel our pain
    And walk in our shoes?
    Have you ever felt starved
    Or is your belly always full?

    How many people die
    And hurt in your name?
    Hey, does that make you proud
    Or does it bring you shame?

    And if our fates have all been wrapped around your finger
    And if you wrote the script then why the troublemakers?

    How do you do?
    How does it feel to be so high
    And are you happy?
    Do you ever cry?

    … I sometimes cry …

    You’ve made mistakes
    Well that’s OK ’cause we all have
    But if I forgive yours
    Will you forgive mine?

    Forgive us our trespasses
    As we forgive those who have trespassed against us
    … Mehila …
    Give us this day our daily bread

    … Mehila …
    Daily bread
    Daily bread
    Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory
    Amen!

  • And just like that, I was dead.

    No, seriously! I was dead, just for a few minutes, but dead nonetheless. Long story short, on Sept. 25th an allergic reaction to a supposedly innocuous pill, caused my throat to close, shutting off my breathing and within minutes I was dead, literally.

    But this rant is not about my ordeal from that night, which I can’t deny, was scary and surreal, and ultimately ended up with me waking up in the hospital, incredibly tired, with a sore throat and an extremely bruised chest, after 7 minutes of CPR.

    This is about how this event has triggered on my friends and family a relentless determination to pervert me… I’m sorry, that should have read, convert me.

    As if I hadn’t had enough with what I went through, now I have to endure the endless preaching of my family and close friends. Their arguments would be amusing if they weren’t so recurrent and therefore annoying…

    “It is God’s way to let you know that He loves you” Yeah, he was showing some luv, sure. I mean, seriously?

    “You must have had a near death experience…? You probably don’t remember but you must have!” Nope! No NDE for me. But we all know that NDEs are natural chemical reactions to Ketamine, and if you didn’t know that, you have some serious reading to do.

    “Jesus wants you to accept him into your life.” Accept him? The king of kings? That’s quite conceited, isn’t it? Given that they worship Jesus, shouldn’t they be ‘begging’ him to come into their lives, or rather their delusional minds?

    “This has been a warning; god wants you to appreciate the life that he has given you…” Of course, now THAT makes sense, right? Newsflash! I didn’t appreciate life before any less than I do now; and, the life that he has given me? Come on!

    “God is giving you a second chance…” Yeah, a second chance to die! Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t make such a big deal out of this event, but it wasn’t pretty. Those few seconds right before passing out – which are the last that I can remember, were horrible. Try to picture this, being unable to breathe, actually suffocating, watching the terrified faces of the ones around you and being fully aware of it. One shouldn’t have to go through this kind of experience more than once, really!

    And my poor mother, who is the only one who doesn’t annoy me so much, and was probably the most affected of us all, keeps praying for me to believe in god as she has done since I was 5 years old. Oh yeah, that’s when I told the priests and nuns in my catholic school that their stories did not make sense to me, that I couldn’t understand, that I needed rational explanations; their responses were something like, those are the holy mysteries and that’s what ‘faith’ is all about – believing in what you cannot see or understand, which made me want to say “you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!”

    If you know me a little, or if you’re following me on Twitter, you’re probably wondering, is this the same Monica that baits theists and tries to make them think rationally? I know, right? Well, when it comes to theists on Twitter I’m fierce and heartless, but when dealing with the people that I’ve known forever, my loved ones, I can’t be blunt and tell them to stop (which has crossed my mind in terms of “why don’t you all leave me the hell alone!”)

    I *AM* an atheist in a foxhole, or rather was in that moment. I was dead only for a few minutes, but endured the process of dying for much longer than that, and not even once the idea of god crossed my mind.

    When I was done and couldn’t stay awake any longer, while giving in, my last thought was for my mom, for whom my death would have been such a terrible loss.

    Putting aside the agitation and the pain, this is pretty cool, right? I mean, how many people do you know that have died and come back to tell their story?

  • Ten Bible verses on family values

    It appears that some people are in doubt as to how the Bible says one should treat their own children. Someone “highly doubts God would condone murdering a 19 month old baby for not saying AMEN” and thinks that I should reread the Bible, praying before and after every single passage. Someone else complains about verses being taken “out of context” and others just say that they don’t “live by Old Testament ways,” despite Jesus’ firm command to the contrary.
    One of the many cultural myths with which I would like to do away is the notion that the Bible is somehow a sturdy moral foundation for our lives, particularly where families are concerned. To that end, I have compiled ten of the meatiest verses from both Hebrew and Christian Testament on the treatment of child and family. Of course, as these are the rules of an extinct ancient theocracy and not a modern society, they are appropriately barbaric. They are so over-the-top crazy that no sane person should assent to them, and I sincerely doubt any “Biblical literalists” are so evil as to obey them, if they are even aware of them:
    10. God deems it good to punish Babylon by smashing her infant children to bits on the street, so right off the rod we know that the slaughter of children cannot be a priori an evil thing in Biblical morality. (Isaiah 13:16)
    9. Jesus himself will cause your family and your household to be torn apart, so now we also know that it can’t be a priori an evil thing to ruin families in Biblical morality. (Luke 21:16)
    8. The sexual enslavement of thousands of children (32,000, to be exact) is OK, as long as God has already told you to murder their families, so we also know that neither genocide or the sexual torture of children is a priori an evil deed in Biblical morality. (Numbers 31:17-18)
    7. If you mock or disobey your parents, the birds-of-prey will devour your eyes right out of your head, so the disfigurement of your own children also cannot be a sin. (Proverbs 30:17)
    6. If a ruthless dictator doesn’t manumit his slaves at the request of a single random soothsayer, the morally good response is to murder the children of everyone in the nation, even if they have never even heard of Moses or his god, so for the Bible moralist it is morally good to punish people for deeds in which they took no part. (Exodus 12:29)
    5. A superficial (read: literal) reading of the story of the binding of Isaac makes it clear that your moral duty to obey a pernicious command from above far outweighs any love you might have for your own offspring. In Bible ethics, then, standing up for your own bloodline is not a priori a morally good action. (Genesis 22:2-13)
    4. If children make fun of your bald head, the appropriate response is to have them massacred by bears. This way, we know that in Biblical morality, punishments need no proportion to the crimes. (2nd Kings 2:23)
    3. If you don’t hate your mom, your dad, your siblings, your children, and yourself, Jesus is wrong for you. So in Biblical morality, a cohesive family unit is a moral aberration. (Luke 14:26)
    2. If a child is disobedient and doesn’t listen to his parents, have the entire town get together and execute him The Lottery-style. There is no exception made here for “19 month old babies who don’t say AMEN.” (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)
    1. And of course the most famous father-son relationship in the Bible is God’s own: God loves us so much that he would torture and murder his own son to save us from God’s own wrath.
    So, we have learned (1) that the murder, torture, rape, disfigurement, and ritual execution of children is morally permissible in certain cases, (2) the very existence of a loving family structure is morally impermissible, and (3) and annihilation of entire cultures is OK so long as the young children are spared to fulfill the victors’ sexual lust. All this is the case, unless either God is not good, or God is not the author of the Bible.
    We are very fortunate indeed, then, that virtually all so-called “Biblical literalists” are either unaware of or too morally good to follow the commands to slaughter and torture written about in the Bible. While I have a great deal to say on this question, particular on the pertinence of these arguments to the Euthyphro Dilemma, I feel the point has been made so I will let it rest.