Good day to you all.
I’m having a big morning coffee (with milk and sugar). Slept well. Although I injured myself at the gym yesterday. Went too deep with the dips. Pulled some weird inner muscle somewhere in back/neck. Ugh. Annoying. I will have to rest and recover for a few days. I do mostly calisthenics with full range of motion.
This week has been magnificent. I draw a smiley face on my calendar every day with three options: smile, frown, neutral. The first one is in green marker, second one in red and third can be a mix. If it’s a really bad day i just color the whole square in black. But none of those this month. I’m batting about .500 regarding happy days so not bad! And this week I have been flying high now for 4 days since my intellectual re-awakening + 41st birthday on monday.
Re-reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Such a great book. I remember when it was published in 2006 and I had just moved to England, aged 23. Until then I didn’t really know what I believed in. This book helped me clarify what I quite certainly did NOT believe in. But for some reason I lost my way. I’ve been deep in all kinds of intellectual/spiritual rabbit holes for the last 5 years or maybe longer. What a ride its been. No stone left unturned. But I finally had enough. I wanted to understand what people actually believed in but often at the price of my own sanity.
I never really took any of it too seriously or at least in the sense that I never committed to any cause or ideology. Was just curious. I infiltrated the secret societies and cults but I discovered it’s all mostly just complete bullshit and hot air! And often just well-meaning but ignorant gurus/influencers selling a dream to profit from desperate fools. Attaching a profit motive to ones truth claims is always cause for concern. As the saying goes, those who have discovered the way dont hand out business cards.
I’ve never been too crazy about herds, clubs and communities for the simple reason that humans tend to get more and more stupid in crowds. I think a lot of people are just lonely and looking for somewhere to belong and this causes a severe lapse in judgment and reason thus compromising their intellectual immunization towards bullshit. Of course some are just hopelessly (or willingly) dumb.
It was time to come back to reality because I’m sick of playing dumb. Now here to report my findings. I’m just glad I got out. Some never do. Atheism is the only sane option if you want to have integrity as a moral, decent, intellectually rigorous human being. Yes we are emotional creatures but it is our capacity for reason that enables us to thrive. Religion is a dead end.
And Christopher Hitchens was right: religion poisons everything.
