"No one expects the satchalen disquisition!"
hallo and greetings all. new here on the forums, obviously, and before i started churning the butter, i thought i should introduce myself first. introducing myself is not something i am accustomed or wont to do, mind, so do forgive me if i happen to royally suck at it. i have been known to ramble, i should warn you, so grab a coffee and adjust your keister accordingly.

getting to know me.
pt1: i am an idiot
first and foremost, and by general consensus, i am an idiot. i did not go to college; i have no degrees. truth be told, i never even graduated high school. i have not read kant or heidegger, and i consider sagan and rand philosophers. though i have spent some years on forums championing the rational cause, i occasionally have to google shit like "anthropic principle" so that i can gain some semblance of knowledge on the topic and prove my idiocy with flying colors. i figure if i'm going to be an idiot, why stumble?

my idiocy is no deterrent in my quest for knowledge, however. after all, here i am, yes? objectively speaking (no, i am not an objectivist, but we're getting ahead of ourselves), i am smarter than most, but dumber than many. but i am also more honest than most, and lie less than many.

my favorite color is black, my favorite band is the smashing pumpkins (which is somehow co[s]mically fitting, as i hate pumpkin pie although won't begrude you a slice), and i like staring at the stars until my brain hurts.

getting to know me.
pt2: what are you doing in england?
what is my name, what do i do, a/s/l? none of your damn business. i will say only that i am quite good-looking, romantically adroit, well-paid, multi-talented, and insufferably humble. ladies, know that i am also happily married to a beautiful and intelligent woman who has, with some help from me, created two beautiful and intelligent little boys what share my name: flirting behooves you naught.

getting to know me.
pt5 (3 sir!): ok, honestly
i am also somewhat sarcastic, smarmy, distemperate and unlikable.

getting to know me.
pt4: genesis
yeah yeah, i know, genesis should have been part 1, and should begin with the words "in the beginning". color me iconoclast (a putrid shade of green, methinks). anyway, my own search for the truth began at the age of 13. i had moved in with my aunt and uncle due to problems on the homefront that may have mitigated my chances of seeing 14, and was wearing the scars of that environment on my sleeve. or perhaps better: as a chip on my shoulder. i.e. i was emo. boo-hoo satch.

now a good friend of mine was adopted, and he was the happiest little 13-year-old you could ever hope to find, so i wanted to know his secret. his pops was choir leader at the church next door to his house, and it was proposed to me that the answer lay within those walls. eureka! i had, after all, been baptized methodist as an infant, and though i'd never set foot in a church for anything other than a wedding, or said a prayer for anything other than a new bike or the bully-of-the-week to fall down a fight of stairs, was it not fated, or at the very least pro sequitur, that i return there for the answers?

summarily, tragically: no, it wasn't.

nor was the next church. or the next. so i tried other churches: catholic, jehovah, joseph smith's progenitive sparkly-tooth soldiers of light (aka LDS, which is comically similar to LSD), the tongue-speaking aisle-lurching forehead-slapping church of god (where i was called satan), and myriad others. the more answers i sought, the more questions arose. and when i say questions, i mean "glaring logical quandaries", and when i say "glaring logical quandaries" i mean "wtf?" i wtf-ed so often that i had considered legally changing my name to wilbur theodore fleetwood and tattooing my initials to my palm as means of introduction. but the name wilbur isn't quite as cool as it was in north carolina circa 1903 so i abstained, and i digress...

when formal collectivist truth-seeking had run its course and failed, i turned to books, and read more of them than i can recount, albeit far less then i wanted. islam and scientology made me laugh and cry equally. paganism, huna, and the celestine prophecies were a nice counter to the stressese of modern living, but lacked something which i to this day cannot place my thumb on. truth perhaps? meh. buddhism felt pretty close to where i wanted to be, but i wasn't big on the whole asceticism shtick; i like me a nice dodge viper for my 60-hour work week, tyvm. i discovered sagan, and thought i'd made my peace, until i read a fantasy novel by terry goodkind (hsba) called "wizard's first rule". the gist of it: "people are stupid; they will believe anything they want or fear to be true". this lead me astray of philosophical secular humanistic astrophysics and into the realm of sociology and psychology, where i learned about such nifty things as the id, ego and super-ego, and googled shit like cultural paradigm and zeit geist. more importantly, goodkind's (hsba) objectivism introduced me to rand, which marked the beginning of the end.

i shinied up my objectivist badge and began to rant and wail on behalf of reason in forums across the internet. i ranted and wailed so well that i became the programmer and one of the administrators of terry's (hsba) official website. unfortunately, i also ranted and wailed so loudly and with such fervor that terry felt i represented him poorly and booted/banned me thus. so i put away my objectivist badge, adopted a philosophy of hsba, and began to read people other than terry goodkind (hsba). what is (hsba)? homage to the muslims' pbuh. "hypocritical smarmy bastard anyway". he was, after all, an objectivist. what else should i have expected from an admirer of howard roarke and john galt?

getting to know me.
pt5 (five is right out): teh end
after reading a smidgeon of hume (i.e. parusing some clif's notes in barnes & noble over a venti mocha frappuccino), and understanding only enough of it to discern that free will is a tautology, i came then to other realizations: that one could not apply aristotle's identity principle without violating heisenberg's uncertainty principle, that the word "supernatural" is paradoxical, that nihilism is some scary shit, and that man will one day be able to google a successful answer to the meaning of life (this after googling kyrlian photography one day and stumbling onto a wackass physicist/psychologist what presented the brain as a matter-wave system capable of telepathy)... all of which inexorably led me to a place of utter dejection (read:sweet epiphany) from which i have no recourse nor repent:

atheism.

it's not that i lack belief nor that i don't want to believe, it's more of a... wtf should i believe? and by "w" i mean "who" and by "tf" i mean "the flying fuck". the obvious answer, viz the fine and succinct mr. william of ockham: nobody knows yet. now i have taken the liberty to add the "yet", because my objectivist lernin' taught me... er, objectivity. that is to say: none of the answers currently proposed are satisfactorily sound -but that doesn't mean that the answer is not available; we simply haven't ascertained it. yet. so in the words of equally succincent and nearly equally as fine yogi berra: i'll believe it when i believe it.

getting to know me.
pt6: i believe
yeah yeah, i know, "teh end" rather signified the end, and yet i continue to ramble. that's why i used "teh end". it's a play on words, you see, and not the actual end qua end, and i digress...

what this all boils down to for me is a complete annoyance with the words "i believe". the very utterance subsumes a lack of knowledge, and knowledge (at least in this context) so precipitously lacking can't really be called knowledge although i'll grant that "i hypothesize" is rather clunky. "i think" is a reasonable substitution, perhaps, but there again one implies a lack of evidence in so stating. for me, then, atheism means simply "i don't agree". no, it's not the dictionary definition, but we're speaking in the spirit of the term, not the letter, ok?

to wit:
i don't agree with a positive review of pumpkin pie, and i don't agree with jennifer connelly's decision to have a breast reduction; i am a pumpkin pie & breast reduction atheist. these things may well be real and may well occur, but i ain't buyin. with me? so then.

i don't agree with the concept of gods. i don't agree with the concept of souls. i don't agree with the concept of an afterlife. i don't believe in messiahs. christ in a chrysler, i don't even believe in the need for a messiah. i don't believe in magic or ghosts (but i do believe that professor snape is a good guy, and that the island is somehow [viz desmond's visions] correcting a divide by zero error in fate by bringing everybody from oceanic flight 815 together there). i don't believe in sin and i totally fucking don't believe in original sin, sharia law, blood atonement, and other such preposterous mythos and notions.

what i do believe is that jesus christ lived on this earth and died on the cross. the end. i believe siddhartha gautama suffered from terminal iconoclasm and died on 'shrooms. the end. i believe muhammad was an idiot and a schister. the end. joseph smith too. i would say the same for l ron hubbard, save that he was the only of the aforementioned group that died stinking rich, and had he lived today no doubt could have been driving a nice dodge viper but for his mental condition (how nietszchean, that, eh?)

i don't like the idea of abortion, but i don't think "human being" is quantifiable where human brain waves are undetectable; anything prior is the choice of the woman first, the man a very very very distant second (condoms > withdrawal, morons). i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with polygamy, but i doubt i would be as happily married as i am had i taken on two beautiful and intelligent women. i don't think killing somebody who's killed somebody equates to justice, but nor do i think convicted killers should be given the opportunity to strike twice; take a life, serve life; simple math, mitigating circumstances notwithstanding. consenting adults presuppositional, i don't think it's anybody elses' business who we do or don't fuck and how, but i admit that i find two hot women sluicing and sliding all over each other far more appealing than were it two men.

and it bears repeating: i don't think pumpkin pie tastes good in a box or with a fox, and no amount of cool whip can overcome. miracle whip is right out.

...

but most importantly, i think that religion is a tumor on the pages of mankind. it was a chink in the design of society, and has grown to a level whereupon it needs to be removed from the body. sure, it offered answers where the minds of the era of its inception failed, but currently is proving time and again to be obsolete. i find it comical, enfuriating and despairing how prevalent and engrained it continues to be on our planet, and i am convinced that we will not reach the next plateau of understanding until we have shirked the bibble (i.e. "bible babble&quot and embraced reason, or at the very least the three laws of logic: identity, excluded middle, contradiction. but wtf, at this point, i might even accept a simple pass/fail of sagan's baloney test.

but what do i know? i'm just a googling idiot.

getting to know me.
pt7: shaddap shuttin' up
and so i say unto thee: hallo and well met! i hope to come closer to the end of my quest here, and depart thus upon the next, which is to author a book for my fellow atheists. my research has been long and arduous, but my notes are compiling nicely, and i have a working title: "the atheist's bibble"! here's to hoping you'll be enjoying it over a grande mocha frappuccino in barnes & noble one day soon.

thanks, r3sp3c+, kudos and ten points to you if you've read this entire idiotic meandering soliloquy. don't spend all those points in one place now. after all, god loves the thrifty! just ask rev falwell...

oh wait. nvm. 

edit: egad! the blue it burns! changed the colors of the font so as not to promote internet blindness (e.g. yucky-ass blue color on steel gray background = headache)