To suffer or endure

There are some that believe success is the end result of suffering. That suffering is a gift, handed down from some unseen and benevolent master. I would ask these individuals to carefully re-examine the words “suffering” and “benevolent”. Suffering is not a virtue, nor is success always its end result. Those who would extol it as such and claim their success is the result sufferance serve to promote complacency and passivity and I for one find this insufferable.

I choose instead to endure. I am not, nor have ever been (and safe to say will never be) a praying man but were I such, it is doubtful that I would be the type to “give thanks” for the suffering that I encounter in what is unquestionably a difficult life. I would however, as a great man once suggested, pray for the strength to endure that life.

While I am aware that the words ‘suffer’ and ‘endure’ share very much the same meaning, as with any arranging and usage of words, the true implication of my statement lies in its context. For me, to endure is to be active amidst the opposition, to stand when forced to kneel, to speak when silence is insisted, to be ready once the offense has exhausted itself in the effort to overrun your barricades.

To endure is to stand immovable, to bend without breaking, to accept the flow of current without being confined, diverging when the necessity and/or opportunity arises. Not to be trampled, not to be battered, not to be stagnant. Suffering not a gift, it is not the parent of success, and it is nothing to be thankful for. Endurance is a choice, one that can be made without needing gods to beg or thank. A choice that can result in the strength, knowledge, wisdom and courage that comes from knowing YOU have done this and that you can do it again.

--Ryan Scales

June 2014

"We are unique in that we create ourselves"  --Han (Shih Kien), Enter the Dragon, 1973

A quick sharp rant

If I get a chance to travel to a foreign country I might just disappear as soon as I get off the plane…


I was just thinking that it takes too much out of you to make a life here…of course the same can be said of any place in the world, but here everything is structured to keep you pinned down…and so many of us just happily bend over recieve it, even rationalize it…I wish I had better words…We were supposed to be the generation that raged against the machine, not did routine maintence, buffed and waxed it.


I wish I were joking. but if my savings weren’t so low and I had the balls, I would’ve hopped on a plain to europe or brazil and took my chances by now. :/


End rant.

I’m An Atheist, And I’m Proud To Say It

I’m An Atheist, And I’m Proud To Say It

Random Thoughts #1

In her own way my mom was sort of a microcosm for religion.  She would talk a big game, make a lot of promises, but when it was time to deliver it was like ‘better luck next time champ’.

Richard Dawkins "Clarity is Threatening"

Richard Dawkin on Real Time 

One of Carl Sagan's most pertinent messages for humanity

Born Unplugged pt. 5

(Click here for PART 4)

In 1997 HBO aired a tribute to comedian George Carlin called 40 years of Comedy.  The special included clips from many of his classic routines such as ‘The seven dirty words’, ‘Football vs. Baseball’, and ‘The hippy-dippy weatherman’.  The program went on to feature the guest of honor himself performing a bit from his most recent special at the time, You’re all Diseased.  The finest moment of the show came at the midway point and would go on to be known as “Religion is Bullshit.”  This was the sincerest, most crucial turning point in my journey and the crux of this entire blog.

The set was mirroring almost the same exact words that were bouncing around in my head since grade school.  With this man on the screen saying it loud and proud, this is pretty much where the switch got flipped.   At first I was shocked and a little afraid. I remember thinking. ‘He’s allowed to say this stuff?’ but as he went on, the words just sunk in.  And I mean REALLY sunk in. Before all of this, I was always told about god and the devil, and while I never gave it any real credence I never questioned it either.  By the time that show had ended I had come to the somewhat partial understanding that A) I wasn’t wrong for thinking the way I did, and B) I was not by myself.  There was a great deal of comfort in knowing there was at least one other person who wasn’t “drinking the kool-aid”. 

There wasn’t a lot I could do to keep my mother from pissing money away when the collection plate came around or tuning into Bobby Jones gospel on BET which was a show that every now and then would feature half-baked musical acts that were offered as an alternative to mainstream music. I can recall one Sunday where I was called away from an episode of Biker Mice from Mars to hear a ‘rousing’ rendition of a gospel remix of the hip hop song “Jump” (FYI, having the exact same beat and rhyme flow, peppered with ‘god’ and ‘jesus’ and bible quotes isn’t all that original).  Fortunately artists like LeCrae (of whom I will unreservedly admit to being a fan) bring the subgenre of holy hip hop some artistic credibility.

It wasn’t until I sat reading the letters page of a comic book called The Savage Dragon that I finally learned the word for what I was: Atheist.  And that was it. There was no huge epiphany, no “I hate god for making the world this way or that”; as far as I was concerned there was no god to hate.  So I graduated high school and entered my adulthood perfectly comfortable not having a god, not going to church, very few worries and no fear of getting burned or jabbed with a pitchfork.  You’d think everything from there on would be smooth sailing.  Even when Bush thugged his way into white house there was no way things could get any more screwed up, at least that’s what I was thinking.  In my sophomore year of college I couldn’t have imagined how much the world around me would change when I woke up for class that one Tuesday morning (can you take a wild guess at what I’m talking about here?).  From then on it was more or less the circus Carlin predicted it would be.  Muslim and Christians muscling up to go at each other’s throats overseas, gas prices shooting into the mesosphere, the patriot act, etc…and at age 19 all I could honestly say about the situation was “What the fuck?”