Category Archives: philosophy

August 26, 2022 · 2:29 am

Irreverence

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It is a difficult thing to be an atheist who believes in God.  Sometimes it takes an oxymoron to find the Truth.  And you often have to go heavily on the “moron” portion of the word.

The thing I find most distressing about faith is the fact that those who have it are absolutely convinced that if you don’t agree with them and whatever book of fairy tales they believe in and interpret for you, then you are not a True Believer and you do not have real Faith.

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I remember being told by a Mormon girl in one of my classes that I was her all-time favorite teacher, but she was deeply distressed that, because of my religion (I professed to be a Jehovah’s Witness at the time) I was doomed to burn in Hell forever.

Hey, I was raised in Iowa.  I have experienced minus 100 degree Fahrenheit windchill.  I am among those who think a nice warm afterlife wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

But I am no longer actually a Jehovah’s Witness.  So I guess that helps with the whole Hell-burning thing.  The Witnesses are a religion that claims to understand the Bible is full of metaphorical truth, and yet insist that it is literally true.  They don’t believe in Hell, which, honestly, is not actually mentioned or explained in the Bible as we have it now.  But they do believe your prospects for eternal life on a paradise Earth are totally contingent on knocking on doors and telling other people that they must believe what you believe or experience eternal destruction.  I have stopped being an active Witness and knocking on doors because I got old and sick, and all the caring brothers and sisters in the congregation stopped coming around to visit because number one son joined the Marines, and the military is somehow evil hoodoo that cancels out any good you have done in the past.  Being a Jehovah’s Witness was really hard work with all the meetings (5 per week), Bible reading (I have read the entire Bible two and a half times), door-knocking, and praying, and you apparently can lose it all for saying, thinking, or doing one wrong thing.

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According to the Baptist preachers, Jehovah’s Witness elders, religious zealots, and other opinionated religious people I have known and dealt with in my life, if I do not believe what they believe and agree with them in every detail, then I do not know God and am therefore an atheist.  So, okay, I guess I am.   If I have to be an atheist to believe whole-heartedly that everyone is entitled to sincerely believe whatever the hell they want to believe, then I’ll wear that label.

On a personal note, my favorite verse of the Bible has always been 1 John 4:8,  “He that does not love has not come to know God, because God is love.”  That is why I claim to be an atheist who believes in God.  I know love.  I love all men, women, children, animals, sunrises, artwork, paintings of angels by Bouguereau… everything that is.  And I even love you if you exercise your freedom to tell me, “Your ideas are totally wrong, and you are going to burn in Hell, Mickey, you bad guy, you!”  Mark Twain always said, “I would choose Heaven for climate, but I would prefer Hell for company.”  I am not going to worry about it.  I will be in good company.  Some things are just bigger than me.  And trying to control things like that is nonsense. Sorta like this post.

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August 3, 2022 · 7:36 pm

Don’t Give Up!

Yes, I am philosophically a pessimist. I expect always that the worst outcome is the one I will have to live with. Hence, I was not as devastated by Donald Trump’s election as some who were too confident that Hilkary would win. And the climate crisis seems to be good reason to prepare for the worst that can happen. Some of it is already happening, already here.

But you really should listen to what this career futurist has to say about it.

The near future is, as documented with evidence in the video, far worse than we think it is. “Just doom, nothing else,” as Robin Williams declares. But too much pessimism at this point is the death of us. We have to keep trying. We can’t just give up.

A cheerleader who is not me.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not the right person to be elected head cheerleader on this issue. I have given in to despair and weeping on more than one occasion already. Since the election of Trump, the conservative pillaging of the Supreme Court, the roll-back of EPA guidelines and restrictions, the erosion of fundamental voting rights (soon to be followed by other rights,) the mismanagement of the economy, the Covid crisis, wildfires in the West, the insurrection after the election of Joe Biden, and more and more things that signal doom and possible Armaggedon, we have to battle the urge to lie down and die.

Here is where the optimism of the Reverand Peale is critical.

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, also definitely not me.

If we stop trying, our loss and subsequent death is insured. It is only by continuing to fight that we will have a chance to save ourselves. And this is beginning to happen everywhere.

In 2020 we turned out against the Evil-Clown President in record numbers. We wrested the control of the government out of the hands of the corrupt elephants and put it back in the hands of the hard-working but mostly stupid jackasses. Biden’s donkey-like devotion to following through on the work that needs to be done got us through the rest of the pandemic, getting ourselves vaccinated and acclimated to life with the reality of the new deadly virus.

We need, like the faun, to be one with our environment.

We have tried hard and kept at it to achieve much-needed climate-control legislation. The fossil-fuel industry has made it difficult, and we nearly gave up on the Build Back Better program, but it seems through perseverance that we may have finally gotten a critical piece of that over the hurdles after all.

One thing definitely indicated is that we will need to turn out to vote in the midterm elections again this year. If we don’t, the elitist elefantiasis party will take away all our gains and punish us again, playing their golden fiddles while the world burns.

We will never have the magic we need if we don’t try to conjure it.

But despair is still not warranted here. We know what we can do to solve the problems that face us. We have done similar things before, with the Cold War, World War II, and the hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s. What’s more we have the tools we need already, and what we don’t have is quickly being developed. There are plans in the works for mountain-sized storage batteries, massive solar-power arrays, and wind farms (many of which are already built and operating.) We can rebuild and upgrade the entire power grid, not just in the USA, but for the whole world. It needs, of course, to all be weather-proofed, meteor-proofed, solar-storm-proofed, and, hopefully, greedy-Republican-idiot-proofed.

We are not beaten if we don’t give up.

And as the futurist tells us in the video you didn’t watch, pessimists prepare us for disaster, but only the optimist can make us successful in living through it to a brighter future beyond.

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July 28, 2022 · 7:15 pm

What We Are About to Lose

The world is on fire. The heat is getting worse than it has ever been (in the time we limited sentient creatures have knowledge of.) There is a very real chance that the end of life on Earth is actually a short time away in the near future (a thing some religions have been predicting unsuccessfully for thousands of years.) What will it actually mean for us to be at the end of time (realizing that we are only talking about our pale blue dot in the near-endless universe?)

Here’s what we face. The greenhouse gasses, particularly carbon dioxide, are keeping the heat from the sun from radiating back out into space. Temperatures have already passed what a few years ago was described as the point of no return. The permafrost in the northern hemisphere is melting, releasing increasing amounts of methane, an even worse greenhouse gas, and creating a feedback loop that makes the problem overwhelming. The glaciers in the north and the ice shelf in Antarctica are melting, and sea levels are rising. Major coastal cities are not preparing fast enough for being underwater. Huge populations will be displaced and become refugees. Food-production systems will break down due to drought and unrest amongst workers in both farming and the distribution of food. The mounting expenses of battling these unbearable problems will destroy economies. More wars will break out to add to the misery Putin has already caused by war crimes in Ukraine. Eventually, nuclear weapons may cool the Earth with nuclear winter and stop the production of carbon dioxide by obliterating all manufacturing and depopulating the northern hemisphere. The cockroaches will inherit the Earth. Hopefully, as the dominant species, they will do a better job of managing the environment. But one never knows how they will handle it once they reach their own industrial revolution.

The probable next dictator of the American Fascist Union of Republican States.

Politically, the party with the power denies the existence of the climate crisis. They are concerned with expunging any record of white-people guilt for any crimes against racial groups caused by slavery, Jim Crow laws, genocide against Native Americans, lynching, and any of the other fruits of racism from the history books. They are, after all, quite comfortable in all-white conservative bubbles of thought, and are easily offended by any defense of the Black Lives Matter group. They also focus on removing any suggestion of sexual ideas or knowledge from school books and libraries, because anything but Bible-touted notions of love and sex is pornographic, perverted, or somehow related to lifestyles they certainly don’t want to have anything to do with and prefer to legislate away. So, every effort they are willing to make to avoid the things in that previous killer paragraph involves loudly saying “No!” to any possible solutions to the problems that are going to kill us. Hopefully, the cockroaches won’t become Trumpist Republicans when they take over, giving their rise to intelligence and civilization a better chance of thriving.

It is probably still within our power to stop this relentless life-extinguishing future from happening. There are definitely people who understand both the scientific challenges and the value of all the things we will lose if we sacrifice the entirety of our future for short-term corporate profits (the things all the Republicans we will continue to elect will vote for because of where their priorities really lie.) The human population has shown repeatedly throughout history that they are resilient and inventive, and can overcome all sorts of evil if the will to do so is truly there.

I am a pessimist, which means I always prepare for the worst possible outcome. Fortunately, that way of thinking means I am usually pleasantly surprised at the outcome, and if it does turn out bad, at least I am prepared for that outcome.

So, if we are going to destroy our world and ourselves, I have to ask myself, was it worth it for us to have ever existed?

Can you look at the smiling face of a child and say the existence of the human race on planet Earth was not worth the effort?

And there are reasons to be glad we are here and we have a history that came before us. The Civil War and World War Two were both terrible things. But one eliminated legal slavery. The other eliminated fascist genocidal regimes from Europe and Japan.

We are able, as a species, to laugh at our own foibles, to create humor and music and literature and poetry. We were able to produce Shakespeare, Mozart, Rober Frost, Red Skelton, Robin Williams, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Beethoven, Kurt Vonnegut, the Beatles, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Elvis, Goethe, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, T. S. Eliot, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Julie Andrews, Johnny Carson, and the list could go on for days…

We were able to rise up from the ground, fly through the air, and eventually land on the Moon.

We were able to survive the Black Death, Small Pox, Ebola Virus, AIDS, and Covid 19.

We unleashed the power of the atom. We observed and learned about the far reaches of the galaxy and the many other galaxies in the greater universe beyond the Milky Way using only telescopes, mathematics, and the scientific method.

Is it enough to justify the existence of our race? You tell me. I foolishly think we are worthy to live on into the future, even if I myself will soon no longer be able to keep living. I hope to die of non-climate-crisis causes with peace in my heart. But I realize, too, that it depends on a lot of other people besides me. And I do not have confidence in all of them.

If there is a God who can help us, He is certainly welcome to make an announcement in the comments. But barring Divine intervention, what are you willing to do to move the question forward? I am doing what is within my power.

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July 27, 2022 · 9:15 pm

Playing to an Audience

After five years of bankruptcy, I have finally started collecting dolls again. These are purchases since my debt was put to rest.

As a writer, I am often asked what kind of audience I think I am writing for. “Who, Mickey, is going to read your silly fantasy stories?”

To be perfectly clear… I started out as a writer intending to be a YA novelist, writing for more mature middle school and high school readers, probably more female than male. But any good YA writer writes stories that appeal to the adult, even if it is only the adult part of teenagers. Books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Giver, The Hunger Games, and Ender’s Game are well known because of the adult readers who read, love, and praise those stories. I’m not saying you can’t intentionally write for a young adult audience. But I am saying you can’t write down to those readers, or you will certainly offend and lose them before the end of your story. You have to understand that they are becoming adults.

Uh, oh! I forgot that there is also a doll of Wanda, the Scarlet Witch. Now she wants to murder everyone with magic. Is Batman immune since he comes from DC rather than Marvel? Does Marvel Magic work on DC heroes?

But you can’t please all readers. Two readers who left devastating reviews on two of my books basically over-reacted to what I wrote, and let me have it with both barrels of their “Save-the-world-from-icky-Mickey” crusades. One thought Sing Sad Songs was reprehensible and evil because two of the characters, young Valerie, and Francois, the boy from France, experience sexual attraction to each other, and then both have to deal with the emotions it causes by talking about it with friends and families. The reviewer insisted that children should not talk or think about sex in a story. That was a moral violation according to her, even though no actual sex scene occurs in the story beyond a French kiss. The other lady reviewer objected to depictions of the nudist Cobble sisters in The Baby Werewolf. She claimed that the depiction of the girls, particularly Sherry, was entirely too “creepy” even though the book is a horror comedy and built on creepiness in the central conflict. Authors apparently have to have a thick skin, as every kook and prude is entitled to their own opinion.

On the positive side, though, I have gained a lot of readers who are nudists because of the Cobble Sisters and their status as at-home-on-the-farm nudists. Particularly in the companion book of The Baby Werewolf, Recipes for Gingerbread Children. The idea of nudist characters and naked people in a story makes many potential readers turn up their noses, assuming it is something perverted or pruriently sexual. I think, though, that I have successfully depicted nudists as they actually are, having been a part of the Texas nudist community, at least on the fringes. They are definitely not perverts and sex fiends, as the girls are routinely explaining to their non-nudist friends.

But I can basically describe my personal philosophy of writing for a target audience this way;

I write with an imaginary member of my target audience reading over my shoulder. Sometimes they sock me in the back of my head for things I have written. But I am not writing for him or her. I am writing for me, the things I want to write, like to write, have to write, and need to write to live.

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July 24, 2022 · 5:58 pm

Take Time to Deteriorate More Slowly

I am only going to be 65 years old for four more months. Then I will be 66… even if I croak off this mortal coil before my birthday. It is heck getting older. My eyes and memory and joints all work far less well then they did a decade ago, even a year ago, heck, even last week. They don’t tell you this when you’re young, but you don’t have to be dead to start decomposing. And that doesn’t mean un-writing this essay, though maybe that would be a good idea based on that last sentence.

It is inevitable that the longer we live, the more our aging bodies are going to gradually break down, work properly with more difficulty, and cause us pain and loss.

And as we age, our minds drift back to childhood and days long gone. We obsess about little things. Especially the little things we have lost.

The sense of adventure is mostly gone from our daily lives. Things have settled into a permanence, and the limits of fame, fortune, and future expectations have all been irreversibly set. All we can do to reclaim any of that is to reflect, to remember, and to tell stories about it.

I had a recent story idea that I have begun calling by the title The Haunted Toy Store. It is about a small-town store filled with antique toys that nobody ever buys. And the store owner is very creepy and quiet and does practically no business. People wonder how he makes a living. But there are definitely ghosts in the toy store. And in the long run, it is discovered that the true customers are the ghosts. And the toys are actually the people that are lured in, especially the children, that the ghosts play with. It is not a horror story. It is a comedy adventure. But, like any good story, there is conflict and a number of scary moments.

Why would I even consider telling a story like this? Well, because I am old. There are certain truths, certain experiences, and a lot of goofy observations that I still need to tell about my life, and pretend that somehow it all adds up to wisdom. I am growing old, walking around naked more than ever, forgetting where I put my glasses while I am still wearing them, grumbling to myself like a cereal killer (I did not misspell that, I mean killing boxes of high-fiber cereal,) and arguing with the dog about whether or not dogs can talk, or if I can trust her to write another blog post or not. I will probably be losing my mind soon. I keep forgetting which box I put it in last night when I wake up in the morning and need it again. So, I better slow down and try to do it all the right way.

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July 20, 2022 · 6:32 pm

Thinkology – Positive Thinking

Back in the early 1980s, when I was a single teacher living in Cotulla, Texas by myself because I was teaching there, I used to visit my parents house every weekend. They lived in Taylor, Texas, more than 250 miles away. And on the long, lonely drive on Sunday evening, after the football games were over, I listened to Norman Vincent Peale on the radio preaching his philosophy of positive thinking.

“Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. Talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet. Make all your friends feel there is something special in them. Look at the sunny side of everything. Think only the best, be as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own. Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. Give everyone a smile. Spend so much time improving yourself that you have no time left to criticize others. Be too big for worry and too noble for anger.” ~ Norman Vincent Peale

There it is, naked before God, a good example of Bunny Foo-Foo Philosophy.

I am not saying it doesn’t have value. In it’s way, the unqualified optimism of cock-eyed optimists calms the fears of victims in crisis and gives hope to the hopeless. But it is not the magic bullet for killing monsters that Reverend Peale thought it was.

To be fair, President Ronald Reagan, an advocate of Peale’s philosophy, was good for this country in that he made us look at the sunshine available instead of the dark pollution of the soul that had been boiling in the American public’s cauldron since the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate Scandal. His Grampa Goofy-Grin persona gave Ronny Ray-Gun the ability to make people believe problems could be solved by eating a jellybean and aiming Star Wars space lasers at Russian ICBMs. He reassured us with magic-bullet solutions and actually positioned himself to be declared the winner of the Cold War. And people believed he made things better to the point that things actually got better… at least in a visible sense.

There are definite benefits to counting your blessings and cherishing the good things about life.

But you cannot carry that to extremes. Republican billionaires whose wealth is built on the fossil-fuel industry, want to believe that climate change problems are only a hoax by the scientific community committed for nebulous reasons of funding when their own fossil-fuel-funded scientists were among the first to tell them that the problem was real and life-threatening. Positive thinking makes you feel better about problems, and may help keep you on the problem-solving path. But being a pessimist makes you prepare for the worst, and when the worst happens, it gives you the actual tools to solve it.

Kurt Vonnegut was a very wise guy.

Here is the truth about positive thinking.

The thing that is most true about it is that you need to believe that when things are at their worst, you can dig down into the deep places within you and find the solutions and the powers you need to win the moment. If you don’t believe that, you are truly lost.

Beyond that, choose to be happy. You don’t make things better by adding blame, bullets, and bitching to a bad situation. Laugh in the face of what ails you. It can, in fact, work like the best medicine.

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July 18, 2022 · 5:18 pm

Thinkology – How to Think for Yourself

It is important for your mental health and well-being in the present age to question everything. As I laid out for you in the previous Thinkology post, the world is full of mental mousetraps, and evil thinkers are anxious to do all the critical thinking for you. If they can influence what you think is true, they can control you.

To start with, you have to look at yourself naked in the mirror. Now, I don’t mean this literally. The illustration is intended to be a metaphor for self-examination that goes deeper than how you look in your everyday dress…or tutu… or business suit… or even birthday suit if you like and are good-looking like the boy in the metaphor (after all, I have come to believe I am a nudist now, and am supposed to like the idea of birthday suits.)

What you are looking for is not how unsexy your massively fat-inflated abs are, but those things you believe that may not be completely valid (and mentally fattening.) Things that are true (not mere opinions or even supported opinions, but provably true facts) are backed up by measured, calibrated, and repeatable observations and experimental evidence. This means more than one other qualified observer has seen the same proofs as you have and agrees that it is factual. Yes, that’s the scientific method. And as a scientific way of evaluating truth, it is continually questioned and re-examined.

Any news source that you are thinking about accepting opinions from needs to be someone you can trust because they do actually vet their facts and sources. (Not the FOX news sort of vetting where it’s true because Tucker Carlson says so, but vetted through multiple reliable sources.) It helps too if your source is intelligent. Do not take the word of Louie Gohmert of Texas, Greg Gutfield of FOX News, or Mark Levin of talk radio for anything. These fools are clearly brain-damaged idiots or evil people spouting nonsense for evil reasons… or both. But also don’t take the word of Rachel Maddow, Bill Nye the Science Guy, or Niel DeGrasse Tyson without corroboration. While they are usually more intelligent, they are imperfect humans too and sometimes get things wrong. No one is perfect 100% of the time over 100% of the issues they are talking about.

Again, question everything.

Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters could not have written all of Shakespeare’s plays.

The actor and theater owner, William Shakespeare, did not write the plays of William Shakespeare. The man could not even spell his own name successfully on public documents, left no handwritten manuscripts behind him, had no personal library, and never left England for any of the places in Italy he referenced so beautifully in his plays. Yet, there are many coherent arguments in favor of the glover’s son from Stratford written by dedicated true believers. And one cannot ultimately declare someone else the author of the plays. So, I have to admit that my belief that William Shakespeare is actually a pen name is only a supported opinion, not a fact. I choose to believe the actual writer was probably Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford, aided by Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, and other Elizabethans determined to establish English Literature’s place in the world. What I choose to believe is representative of my ability to think for myself… and my ability to weather ridicule from friends, relatives, and random Shakespeare experts who leave comments poo-pooing my blog and my intelligence. I know how to think and evaluate evidence.

So, think for yourself. Question everything. Weigh the evidence with care. And don’t take my word for it. I am probably crazy. Try it for yourself and see if it works.

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July 17, 2022 · 5:14 pm

Thinkology – Who Thinks for You?

I know you will responId right away, “I think for myself!” After all, everyone believes this even when it is not true.

Ideally, we first learn to think from parents, grandparents, and other significant family members (actually related or not.) Not everyone is lucky like I was in that regard. Especially among poorer families that tend to fracture, be violently unhappy, and often malnourished. And also among obscenely rich families who tend to isolate themselves in self-indulgence and ignore and even disdain others. Their children tend to be raised by servants, friends, and television (or YouTube and streaming services for today’s children choking on silver spoons.) I was lucky in the family I was born into, but I have to confess to being significantly impacted by television, though I lucked out there too in that I watched the simpler, more positive TV world pre-Kennedy Assassination and pre-Vietnam War and pre-9/11. It was a time that was far less cynical and less filled with anxiety and anger.

As we grow, we are influenced too by the educational experience forced upon us by society. We are supposed to learn how to think for ourselves in school, though the opposite is actually true. In your third-grade classroom, you are supposed to learn how to add and subtract, multiply, spell correctly, read at least at a third-grade level, and understand the fundamentals of science and social studies. In truth, however, the school experience spends most of its time teaching you to be obedient. You are expected to sit at your desk in orderly rows, open your various textbooks when you are commanded to do so, study and do worksheets quietly, and generally accept that what the teacher tells you is true and should be remembered.

That, of course, is not how children learn. Children learn by doing, playing, and interacting with others, things teachers spend a lot of time punishing. I found as a teacher that you made more progress in educating kids if you do things, talk about things, and turn lessons into playing around with ideas. Basically, allowing children to be themselves, choose which direction the lesson takes, and answering the questions they ask as truthfully as I could without using bad words. These, of course, are things that most principals hate to see going on when they walk by the classroom. Schools tend to be conformity factories, getting kids to think alike, be obedient, and accept what is considered normal, making them perfect future MacDonald’s and Walmart employees.

Happy Walmart employees (a rare species in my experience) only do what their managers tell them to do. And the managers do only what the policy handbook tells them to do. And problems are solved by corporate. Nobody has to think very much.

And there are people who very much want to control what little thinking is done. If you watch news shows, especially on CNN, MSNBC, and infamously, FOX News, they give you a host talking to panels of experts, talking heads that are happy to tell you what to think.

a malevolent, manipulative monkey

CNN and MSNBC attempt to give you a panel of experts with representatives of three or four different positions. A range of people who will gladly give you opposite opinions of what to think.

FOX News gives you a panel skewed towards the radical-conservative viewpoint with “liberal” commentators present in order to mock them, or, if they are real liberals, gang up on them.

All of these are trying to do the thinking for you. A good word for that is “propaganda.” But if they are honestly providing you with a range of competing ideas for you to evaluate and choose between, they are not as toxic and dangerous as the unabashed propagandists behind the radical-conservative movement.

Conservative media is now highly organized into funneling machines which collect non-thinkers and direct them to the ideas that will make them more supportive of top-down control (in other words, fascism.) This is what allows a political group (ultra-conservative Republicans) to dominate the government and create laws and tax breaks that go against the best interests of the general public and impose an order on the country that a majority of citizens don’t want.

The following video explains how the malevolent, manipulative monkeys do what they do.

So, the next question to be dealt with is, obviously, “How do you think for yourself?” Ah, another post on another day.

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July 11, 2022 · 7:52 pm

Thinkology – an Introduction

We each only know one thing for sure. I am here. I am aware. I know that I, at least, exist, even though everything around me could be a complete lie… even a lie I tell myself.

You will have to forgive me if I give you a second introduction. Or, rather, an intro-Duck-shun. You see, the opposite of Thinkology is Daffology.

I don’t THINK, therefore I am Daffy.,

So, even though practicers of Thinkology like me often overthink everything, the important thing is that we do think. If you don’t think, if you are a Daffologist, then you will probably vote Republican on issues that make your rich Congressman richer but will leave you poorer. And Daffologists believe in UFOs just because the guy with the hair, Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, says they were the ones who resurrected Christ.

A Thinkologist like me will believe in UFOs, and I do, based on numerous statements by whistle-blowers, photographic evidence, credible reports by credible witnesses, and personal encounters. but will never be able to say with any confidence that UFOs are real. (Although they are, but I can’t prove it, so I can’t say it without the caveat that maybe the entire American government is engaged in a misinformation campaign to make me believe something is true that really isn’t so they can somehow do their secret evil deeds to my detriment without me actually knowing it.)

When a Daffologist learns that he has been duped, he jumps up and down, swings his fists, says the worst swear words and profanities he knows, and dissolves in incoherent rage. Likely also stomping with his webbed Duck feet.

When a Thikologist learns that he has been tricked, he may utter his favorite swear words and profanities (because it helps the thinking engines to blow the soot out of them), and then rethinks what happened in the hopes that next time he will be less gullible and will have learned something important about protecting himself from falsehoods.

So, I am saying, to be a good Thinkologist… doubt everything.

If you are determined to be a Daffologist instead, then, by all means, accept everything Tucker Carlson says without reservation. Better the Republican People-Eaters feast on your children rather than mine… WAIT A MINUTE! I can’t think that either. Nobody’s children should be preyed upon for reasons of greed, Capitalist manias, or tasty meat! I need to work on identifying what is actually evil, and find a way to curtail it.

Now you know what I think Thinkology is all about… I think… subject to further experiment and evidence… and so, once again I am giving you fair warning about what I am probably going to post about in upcoming essays.

“Ah, if I only had a brain,” said the Scarecrow. “Then I could do some Thinkology about witches.”

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July 10, 2022 · 8:12 pm

Why Nudists are Necessary

I don’t expect you to accept my thesis whole-souled and become a nudist if you are a lifelong textile enthusiast. I understand the problem. The post-Victorian-era Christians, especially the fundamentalist extremists who think Adam and Eve’s nakedness is a sin after the fall from grace, work hard to put the fear of nakedness in everyone… from childhood onward.

But I have definitely learned in my older age that being nakedly open to new ideas is actually a good idea, not a sin. Human beings do not have to wear clothing to be mentally and physically healthy. And often, it is the very repressive nature of religion that causes the perversions and health problems that fire-and-brimstone preachers warn against.

The main stumbling block to a world where nudism and naturism are accepted as not only natural, but essential to a happy life, is the association nakedness automatically has with sexual activity. Pictures of naked people, especially naked and attractive people, are almost automatically considered porn. The average viewer of naturist and nudist materials assumes that the purpose of such material is to reach a sexual, and therefore evil, outcome. How nudist materials can actually affect the sex-lives of any but religiously repressed teenaged boys, I cannot effectively explain.

You may have noticed from being both a parent of your own children and a keen-eyed observer of other people’s children (only to prove you are a better parent than they are, of course) that it is harder to keep clothes on young children than it is to get them to take their clothing off. Kids enjoy swimming, playing, and running around in giggly circles completely naked. That urge to do such things that are inherently offensive to elderly church ladies has to be carefully trained out of them.

Being naked, though routinely trained out of us as a furless species, has provable health benefits. Vitamin D, acquired by spending time exposed to sunlight, is crucial to emotional health, and low quantities of vitamin D in the body result in a susceptability to severe and life-threatening depression. People are also attracted to other people with a healthy tan (not eaten up by skin cancer or constantly peeling from sunburn, but a healthy tan.) And I can testify from experience with nudism, if you are comfortable enough with the people around you to take off all your clothes in their presence, (family, doctors, other health professionals, and fellow nudists you both know and that show a reciprocal comfort with being nude in your presence,) there is a culture of trust, respect, and love around you.

And this portrait, recently done by me, of my young friend Naomi, demonstrates that there is no privacy issue from participating in nudism. This portrait of a young girl is not porn. She is not engaged in any sexual act. Her most private parts, though exposed, are not the focus of the portrait. She was using the pool when she saw me sketching things and offered to pose for me. I had her permission. I had her mother’s permission. And they both approved of the result, though Naomi thought I did not get the breasts right. I was given permission to share this picture, as long as I didn’t tell you the girl’s real name. It does not look enough like her so that her school friends will know that it is her if she doesn’t tell them. She is happy to now own the original, and there is really no way for you to track her down or accuse her of being an exhibitionist. There are many far more concerning pictures of girls her age on the internet and social media. It ends up simply being a work of art.

People need to see other people naked more. It gives you confidence that your naked body is no uglier than anybody else’s. It makes you feel like those naked people you are seeing are holding nothing back and are far more open and honest than the average politician. especially Senator Ted Cruz. (Special note to the world: I personally feel that Senator Ted Cruz is the one person on this Earth that you do NOT want to see naked. Not every nude body is a good thing.)

I myself regret that I waited so long to embrace nudism. I had chances as far back as age 28. But I had a traumatic experience, a childhood sexual assault, to overcome before I could ever have a positive body image. And now that I have come to a place of peace and self-acceptance, I can finally recapture some of that naked joy we all had once as a young child. Adam and Eve were supposed to be perfect in the eyes of God when they were comfortably naked in front of Him. It was only after the fall when they were wearing clothes that they were sinful.

So, now that I have not convinced you that you should become a nudist, I hope I have at least given you something to think about. And think about seriously. If you don’t believe the naked human form is a work of art, then I should warn you… don’t go into art museums and galleries.

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Filed under autobiography, battling depression, commentary, humor, nudes, Paffooney, philosophy