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atheist blog Or An Fleak Or En Phlyque. Or whatever. Which ever way I would write it I would be wrong. It's all about generational identity; I'm not supposed to get it. Sometime during the late 80s my younger sister and I were at a stage performance somewhere in our small little hometown. She was about 18 so I was about 25. The stage set background had all kinds of hep symbols and things that made the show (which was a very old show) look edgy and cool. Among the words and symbols on the set pieces was the round-shaped word Phish . I asked my sister what that was and she said to me It's an underground band; you don't know who they are . My rude but obvious reply was Well, there it is. The fun's over; I know about it now . I assume that most recent generations of teens have their own identifying secret codes, language, music, fashion, etc. My own generation had the cave paintings at Lascaux. We know what that shit means, but we ain't saying. There are hidden symb...

atheist parent I'm one of those lucky mothers. I have a son who is so lovely, lovely in such a way that I must reach my hands over to him to outline his cheek, run my fingertips over his arm, touch his hair. I'm drawn to him. To the smile in his eyes. To the gentleness of his ways. to the way he pulls me in close and puts his forehead onto mine. To the way he looks into my eyes as though I am the only person on the planet. He makes me laugh every single day. He makes meal times the best time of day. He sits near me and holds my hand. He softly whispers to me I love you, Mom . His heart is so like his father's heart. Incredibly kind, incredibly good, incredibly guileless. He is sensitive. He is confused when others are careless with feelings. He sees my moods, just as his dad does. He brings his sunshine and his pain to me and offers it like a rare gift. He is my boy. When he and I talk he asks me about my day, how I am, what is on my mind because he really wants to know.  H...

atheist blog I've been doing some reading and research tonight for a project that I have started to work on, when a sudden thought came to me; something that change EVERYTHING: my deconversion from religion actually affects my descendants! Being an open and determined atheist means that my children and my children's children and their children will not have their eyes closed by belief. It means that they may never have to endure the process of breaking out of the mental shackles of religion. I'm absolutely thrilled knowing that my difficult deconversion may have set up future generations to have freedom and open minds and most importantly, the absence of mythology that blocks reason and logic. I am giving the beloved children of my descendants the freedom to choose what makes sense to them instead of having the burden of an inherited belief system. They won't know it. These beloved scions won't know that my husband and I have given them this gift. But that...

atheist blog If reading this blog has, in any way, interested you in the music genre' of K-pop, then you will appreciate my newest project. Elizabeth and I have been working together to write a book about K-POP, available now on Amazon.com for PC or Kindle. We have been working hard on getting this darn thing right. I've been making many mistakes as I learn both the Adobe products and the formatting for Amazon. I think we've finally gotten it right. K-POP Biased for PC K-POP Biased for Kindle available in 24 hours And, hopefully, properly formatted If you are interested, here are a few links you might find interesting, some of Elizabeth's fan fic .

atheist homeschool Maybe you are a great homeschooling parent, already familiar with and using OpenCourseWare, or maybe you are like me, unfamiliar. Let's look at these programs. OpenCourseWare (OCW) are lessons, lectures, textbooks, teaching materials, and more created by universities and published online in digital form for free access. Projects to provide free access to educational materials of this nature have been around since the 1990s. I don't know where I've been. Tonight I ran across information about OpenStax , a global collection of educational materials completely coordinated by volunteers and maintained by generous donations by philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates, Andrew W. Mellon, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and others under the auspices of Rice University in Houston. The entire collection is available completely free of charge. It can be downloaded in various digital forms and can also be remixed and edited. WOW. Make sure you check out Open...

atheist homeschool We're all looking at changes in our upcoming schedules as we approach the end of a wonderful summer. And with that change, John John and I are beginning to plan our fall travel plans. As he will be starting college courses in January, this will be the last time he and I can take this kind of trip together. Our plan, at this point, is to go to Washington DC for a week or so, maybe longer if we decide to visit friends on the east coast. Our plans are not set in stone, but we do want to spend a day or two at the Smithsonian...maybe take a drive to Virginia...and the many, many places to visit in DC. I do plan on getting White House tickets...who do I need to contact here in Missouri? Our governor or something? John is not as excited as I am yet, but he will be once we do some more history and geography lessons and other prep work.  ;)

atheist blog We are the lucky ones because we get to be alive at the beginning of the World Wide Web, the WWW, the internet. Don't take it for granted...it's amazing. It is a wonder. It is the beginning of something I can't even begin to imagine. For the first time in EVER people can look it up, compare it with their neighbors, connect with people from nearly every corner of the planet. We are the first generation EVER, in the entire  history of this planet, that gets to learn ideas outside of our tiny little square of homeland. We are the first generation EVER that gets to find out how to do it ourselves, that has information available to us at the touch of a finger, that no longer has to worship at the alter of whoever holds the knowledge, that has it within our ability to learn how to improve ourselves and our community right here and right now. We are the first generation EVER to have the necessary information available for free or for next to nothing.  We are the first...

atheist blog A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about human beauty called Beautiful . In that post I talked about how I personally respond to beautiful people and how humans in general tend to give extra credit to those people who are considered truly beautiful.  I wondered why no one commented on that post; it is because such a confession is too weirdly TMI? Is it because it's an awkward reality that many of us can relate to but prefer to not discuss? Is it just that the post wasn't interesting or didn't seem relatable? Anyway, I haven't stopped thinking about beauty and human attractiveness. We all know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that beauty is also a cultural phenomenon. What is beautiful here in St. Louis might not be the same beautiful in Mali or Uruguay or Nepal or Finland or Siberia or Unalaska or Laos or Hokkaido or Kyrgystan or the Ivory Coast or Djiouti or Patagonia or the Maldives or Egypt or Togo or Turkey or Tunisia or Texas. But I wonder if ...

atheist blog Guest post: Lizzie Wants World Peace A couple of months ago in April, Lacey and I went to Chicago to see a Korean pop band called B.A.P. While the concert and trip itself were AMAZING and worth an entire post or eight plus pictures, there was one part of the concert that really stood out to me. There was one part of the concert, somewhere in the middle, when the lights went red and the word "WAR" was on the screen, large and clear for everyone to see. Af ter about a minute and a half of looking at the word, it gets smaller and suddenly all of the wars from the past 100-150 start scrolling past nice and slow. There are a lot, and past the mid 30's or 40's the scrolling speeds up and there are STILL more and more wars. I just kept going and going until the 2000's, where there were more names. The list was staggering. Every time you thought it was going to stop, it just kept going and going. In the documented history of humans there ...

atheist blog I'm no longer really finding it necessary to find atheist/secular homeschool materials, so this blog's function in that direction is at an end. I'm no longer struggling with finding my way as a first-gen atheist parent in this very Christian culture. I'm moving into a different phase of my life. So why am I still blogging? Because I still have some things that I want to accomplish, some objectives to this fairly public venue of a blog. One goal I've had, more of a drive, really, is to stay openly atheist. To be THAT person who can be counted on to call it out: I'm an atheist and I won't sit by quietly, not speaking. So many atheists or doubting believers live in quiet places, places where they feel absolutely no freedom to be honest about their skepticism. And why? Because people would treat them differently, badly. I know people who are completely in the closet about their apostasy for fear of how they and their children would be treated. YES, ...