RagingRev

Its Black Friday, and this is my post:

Yesterday was Thanksgiving…. I don’t get into the sappy family thing much but here are some things i am thankful for:

1: My wife–she is pretty cool most of the time

2: Freethought–it has brought me to the happiest point in my life thus far

3: A job–as much as i hate it at times, alot of folks are without them currently

4: This blog–i would be nuts without some sort of place to air my greivances (get the Festivus reference there?)

Since i feel the need to complain just a tad today, some things I am NOT thankful for:

1: Christmas–I hate christmas

2: The war on Christmas-Yea, im sick of it—just to annoy those of you that take up this cause every year because someone wants to say Happy Holidays and be all inclusive IM gonna call it Xmas—there it is, X mas…no jesus there haha!

3: Christmas Music—if you like it then you may be worse off than first thought

4: Christmas lights— gaudy and wasteful

5:Christmas Shopping—its just …i hate it. People, like my wife, right now, blackfriday shopping with money they dont have buying things they and I don’t need or on credit they cant afford.

Read more: This is a letter to the editor i wrote last year @ xmas time

Relavent Rhino has a good post about the war on christmas–check it out (!Language Warning!)

The Blog My Life as a Mother and Single Parent has nominated RagingRev for an award! She didn’t say why, but i can only reckon that its on account of how awesome and humble I am. So thanks very much.part of the award is that I have to provide 8 facts about myself as well as nominate 8 others for it.

Facts:

1: I have alot of animals in my house-2 fish, a turtle named Gilbert, 2 female fancy rats (Sniffy and Sneezy), and two poodles-Libby a black toy about 3 years old and Grandma Luna a silver/grey Mini poodle about 3 years old whom happens to be very very strange.

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Just wanted to give a big thanks to all of those that answered the request to Blog about the plight of my friend Dan Silverman.

It doesn’t matter if you believe him or not—belief is irrelevant here—information is all we have and we must fight to get information out there. I am going to attempt to put a link to all the bloggers that were willing to do this for me, if i missed anyone, i probably didnt see it yet, just comment and let me know.
Cetta

Aimey

RevRuss (The only Christian that took me up on that –thanks Russ—shows a lot of character!)

Mike aka Monalithma  LINK FIXED thanks mike

did i miss anyone?

once again, thanks. Knowledge is power.

Keep it up please and tell more people about this.

A few months ago at ex-christian.net a man named Dan Silverman started posting on his experiences as he was leaving his faith, his church, his ministry, and breaking this news to his wife and family. All the details of this struggle can be seen on his website and blog–but to make a lengthy story short-Dan has been accused of a crime that I do not believe he committed, it is believed that his former pastor – possibly in collusion with his wife have influenced the accuser to make the accusation. Dan is awaiting trial currently and during this time can’t see any of his children or his wife.

Dan was a minister at Heritage Baptist Church in Vinton, Virginia-a few months ago he stepped down because he didn’t want to mislead the church since he had lost his faith—he didn’t believe the things he was teaching any longer. The pastor seems to have been angered by this and it looks as if he is trying to dismantle this man to a state of desperation, just to get him back into the fold. This is religious, spiritual, and emotional abuse.

This is my challenge to ALL of my readers–ESPECIALLY the Christian ones–because controlling a man’s family and causing turmoil in his life is not the job of the Church and I expect better—My challenge is for you to 1: Blog about this and LINK TO HIS SITE, 2: Put him on your blogroll or something like that 3: READ his site—this story goes much farther than I have talked about here and we need people to be aware of what is happening, and 4: tell other people about it and as a bonus 5: Digg, Fav, Stumble—whatever you can this story, we just want to get the story out there to show how dangerous a Jim Jones type church can be—and this church is heading that way.

I just want to help this guy out…I’m not asking anyone to determine guilt or anything like that—we just want people to know the dangers of a fundamentalist extremist mentality and what happens if you ever question that establishment. Dan, nor myself, are out to harm Christianity or the Church—Dan just wants his family and life back. Please help

Dan is found at the following website: http://allforfreedom.blogspot.com

Please do this. Everyone that reads this blog. No prizes, no pats on the back–just do it for the sake of helping someone out.

Edit notes: Changed name of church to Heritage Baptist

I found a new blog advertising network, seems to be better than Project Wonderful so far—which is currently earning about 1 penny per day per ad for me…worthless (alot of people seem to screw the system to get free ads out of you). The ad nework is called ADGITIZE and if an advertiser joins the network from your blog, you get 5 bucks—thats alot in blog terms-and for every month that that advertiser has an active ad somewhere on the network—another dollar.

so click above, join, or become an advertiser, or do both. I will let you know how my first payout goes in a few days.

The Atheist Experience is a weekly live call-in television show sponsored by the Atheist Community of Austin .

In the following sound clip a Christian calls in trying to support the idea that God (YHWH of the Bible and Jesus) is morally superior to mankind….I think the hosts of the show make some wonderful points here as to just how that might not be the case. Enjoy!

The Atheist Experience-Morality

Cetta responded to my recent Bloggers Block post with this request:

I’d really like to see you try to rationalize the supposed power of the occult, without anything to balance it out (like say, Christianity, or even just God in general).

I think this is a really good request–its something I have been mulling around with for quite some time-you see, I experienced a lot of things that most Christians had barely even heard of-very real things that are difficult to reconcile without having some semblance of faith. So here I will attempt to do that.

What Cetta knows, that a lot of my readership will not know, is that I was an exorcist just a few years ago. Without giving away far too much detail, I performed the ritual of exorcism with many clients under a lot of different situations and ailments. Sometimes the event itself was rather dramatic. IE: convulsions, vomiting, hearing the voices of the “evil spirits” speaking etc—almost anything you would see in The Exorcist or The Exorcism of Emily Rose movies. All this, along with my own very radical experiences with the “holy spirit (or ghost as you pantycostals say)” like speaking in tongues, being “slain in the spirit”, visions, dreams, prophesying, and etc. Cetta wants to know; How does one, once he loses his faith, reconcile those events?

Warning: May be triggering past this point-if you have experienced emotional trauma or are undergoing any sort of exorcism or therapy for ritual abuse or other reasons.

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First things first, Im gonna start doing Top Droppers every month, this is just a way to say thank you and to generate more hits and visitors to the sites that take the time to drop on my site. If you are unfamiliar with Entrecard, If you are unfamiliar with Entrecard it is a free link exchange website for bloggers, you earn credits by dropping your card on other members sites that you then use to buy advertisements on other members sites. I have been dropping 300 cards daily, which is the max. Its a good resource, most of my hits are currently comeing from entrecard, and despite some conversation about how the hits have a high bounce rate, most of my regular commenters come from t\here, i have met quite a few friends on it.

so here they are,  top 10 droppers for October:

Mind Relaxing Ideas

From the Eyes of my Heart

Nice2All

Money Ning

SEO Tuneup

Let Us Talk

Where the Long Tail Ends

News Vids

My Notes

LiveLife365

More changes after the break

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I can now say that I am so glad to be wrong.

My prediction was that, if Obama didnt win in a landslide electoral victory that McCain would snatch it up. MY understanding of this whole thing was that McCain was only fighting for plausible deniability.

There are alot of things about Obama that I am not in love with- I just don’t trust politicians, but maybe, just maybe his goals and aspirations are true. Maybe his CFR connection won’t be his first priority. Maybe the troops will come home. Maybe we can be diplomatic again with other nations. Maybe we won’t be drafted to invade the Just and Good people of Iran. Maybe the Patriot Act will be repealed.

Maybe Americans, especially those in my more direct vicinity will begin looking past skin tone and religion and just begin to love other people. Maybe we can see each other as people again. Maybe I will never have to hear the N word again.

Good Luck. Bush will leave you with a mess that rivals anything history has ever seen…and he has 3 more months to make it even worse.

So, heres to Hope, Change, Freedom, and Progress!

In my perpetual  need for inspiration to overcome my bloggers block I asked for some folks to provide with some questions or topics of interest….I’m gonna hit all of the replies as i go along, but this one seems like the easiest one to answer, from Frigga:

I could suggest a few topics and definitely ask a bazillion questions… but I haven’t read your archives, so you’ve probably covered lots of stuff so far.

I’ll ask one anyway. I’d be interested in reading about your journey to becoming a Christian, and then your journey away from Christianity. What was it that made you believe so strongly, and then not believe so strongly?

Do you have any doubts that you could be wrong?

Firstly, anyone can feel free to ask or bring up any topics of interest they want to, rehashed or not, because if it is something i covered more than probably a year ago, it was still with some semblance of Christianity left in me. So really anything is fair game.

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