Changing old habits – part 2

I had no problem at all understanding and relating with the dynamics of the issues that Jane and her family were going through, as I sat there listening to Jane telling me about all of the problems that her niece was having because of her drug addiction, and her telling me about how much of a negative impact that her niece’s problems, where having on the rest of her family. The main differences in our two stories, were how we had become drug addicted, and the impacts that our addictions had on both us and our families.



In the case of her niece - there was a drug fad that had started back in the mid 1980s and early 90s, and after the introduction of crack cocaine. Some of the marijuana smoking teens and young adults, had started sprinkling crack cocaine on top of their marijuana, and then smoking the two substances together (this was called smoking primo). And some of them, even started melting both crack cocaine and black tar heroin together, and then smoking that mixture together with the marijuana – this would then sometimes lead to cocaine or heroin addiction, and sometimes like in the case of Jane’s niece, she became addicted to both heroin and crack cocaine. In my case, what led me to the path of drug addiction was the excessive use of pain medications after I had suffered a lower back injury, and had received bad advice – real bad advice from the doctors that were treating me. After about five years of suffering with chronic back pain, and injuring and reinjuring my lower back, it was then suggested (recommended) that I have back surgery, and have 3 of the disks in my lower back fused together. This sounded real great at first, until after I had done some research – not only was there no guaranty that this would end my pain – fusing the 3 disks in my back, would have also severely limited the range of motion in my back – I decided: fuck having this surgery done big-time!


The only other option left was to continue treating the pain. So I simply continued treating the pain with nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and narcotic pain meds; and hoping that just like every other time before, that the pain would eventually go away. Months turned into years, but I was still taking the drugs and still suffering from the pain.


Then I had an event that sent me to the ER, the NSAIDs had caused my stomach to start bleeding. The combination of the NSAIDs, and the weak narcotics had been working extremely well in controlling my levels of pain – but now, because this event had been somewhat life threatening, my doctor stopped prescribing the NSAIDs, and he then increased the dose and the strength of the narcotics that I was taking – towards the end of my treatment, and before my doctor had retired, I was having difficulty filling all of the prescriptions that he was writing for me (he was giving me prescriptions for 30 days worth of 4 different narcotics every week). I ended up going to 4 different pharmacies each week; I was visiting at least 10 different pharmacies a month, just to get all of my drugs. By the time that my doctor had retired, my life was a real mess, and I had already started obtaining most of the drugs that I was taking, from a friend of a friend’s sister, who was also a methamphetamine dealer (drugs like oxycodone, oxycontin and other powerful narcotic pills, trade just like cash in the illicit drug world).


About one year after my doctor had retired; I was now spending between 600-800 hundred dollars a week on narcotic pain pills; and I was now totally depended on these drugs; and I was totally unable to function without these drugs.


The funny thing about all of this was, that everyone who was around me, and who knew what I was doing, could all see that I was getting myself into big trouble….that is, everyone except for me – just like being under the influence of any other intoxicating and mind altering substance, one’s perception of reality becomes seriously distorted (I thought that everything was going great, that was until my supply of available pills had been delayed for 5 days).


24 hours without popping pills was not really a big deal – the longest that I had gone without pills in the past was about 48 hours, and no problem at all. However, this time, on day 3 when I awoke, I found myself in full drug withdrawal, and I had never felt as bad as I was feeling, ever before in my life (this has to be the closest that one can get to being in the imaginary place that the Xtians call “hell”).

Later that day, I called my dealer and told her what I was going through; the first thing that she said to me was: “I told you that you were becoming a junky, I warned you.” She then offered to make some calls to see if she could find something that would help me until the pills arrived. She then called me back about ten minutes later, and told me to come over to her house. When I arrived at her house I was sick as “hell,” she introduced me to a Mexican guy that I had already known for many years, and I had also known many other members of his family – however, I never knew that they were a family of heroin dealers – she then handed me a syringe half filled with a brown liquid, and said “sorry baby, but you’re sick, and this is the best that I can do for you right now.”


As I sat there holding this syringe in my hand while talking to our Mexican friend, I learned that his family had been involved in the heroin trade for over 20 years, and that they were involved in every facet from growing the poppies to manufacturing the heroin; and that they only wholesaled large quantities of the drug. He then assured me that I was holding the best heroin that money can buy, and that I didn’t have to worry about that “flesh eating shit.” I had no clue what he was talking about, but I was so sick that I was almost willing to try anything just to feel better.


Still sick as “hell,” and sweating and shaking, I found a blood vessel in my hand, and inserted the needle, and then started injecting this shit into my body. The rush was almost instantaneous, I stopped sweating and shaking; and within 5 minutes, I was feeling better than I had felt in many years. I then looked at the syringe (still sticking out of my hand) and said out loud: “what the fuck, so this is heroin – where have you been all of my life.” I felt as if I had fallen in love again, and for the first time in a longtime; and this shit was a hell of a lot cheaper than the pills that I had been buying; I could buy enough of this shit to last me for a year or more, if I wanted; I had just found the answers, for all of my problems…or so I had thought.


The next 2 years or so just seemed to fly by; I had managed to hide my addiction from my family, and all but my closest friends (who all thought that I had lost my mind….and I had lost my mind!). It was in about the 30th month of my heroin use that my life started falling apart. Before I had managed things by prioritizing the most important things, and then shifting everything else that I had to do, to a more convenient time – the only problem was that my addiction, had started taking priority ahead of most of the other stuff in my life, including all of my main enterprises.


In short, what I was trying to get Jane to understand is that it doesn’t matter how one becomes a drug addict – in the end its all still the same….and what does matter the most is the choices that one makes after they recognize the fact that they have a problem.






The road to recovery from any type of drug addiction can be a long and tough one. And if one doesn’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on a rational treatment program, then that road to recovery can extremely long, and most often than not, one will simply find they’re going in circles and ending up right back at the place that they started from – and I’m not all that convinced that many of the expensive treatment programs, are all that better than the irrational ones are. But in the end, what it all really all comes down to is the willingness of the person to change their behavior, and being provided with the right tools to make the change.


The biggest challenge to my recovery was accepting the fact that I had a problem. The next problem that I had facing me was the fact that I didn’t even have a clue about how to began to address my addiction; moreover, I still wasn’t willing to admit to my family that I had a drug problem, and least of which, tell them that I had a heroin addiction. Then the first mistake that I made, was asking the advice of another addict while we were waiting to score some heroin from a dealer – I simply asked him, how in the hell does a person get off of heroin. He looked at me as if he was dumbfounded by my question, and then he replied: “just go into treatment – I’ve been in treatment more than a dozen times, and it has always worked for me – and it will work for you too” he then gave me the phone number to the local detoxification center; he then said: “just give them a call, and they’ll even do all of the paperwork for you.”


It took me a few more months before I made that phone call – I believe that I just couldn’t get past the part about him going into treatment more than a dozen times, and yet, he was still using heroin??? However, nothing in this world of drug addiction seemed very rational to me at the time.


The Detoxification Center:


The staff at the detoxification center was extremely polite and very professional. And despite the fact that they all claimed to be Christians, for the most part, most kept their proselytizing to a minimum. The place was divided into two parts – one part was for “medical detoxification,” and the other part provided a safe place for the addicts to await placement in a treatment program – the staff did an excellent job of finding placement in programs for most of the addicts, considering the limited resources from which they had to work with. And just like the guy who had suggested going to this place as a starting point for my recovery, I was also in and out of this place many times before I was finally assigned to a “treatment program.”


The Treatment Program:


The day that I walked into this program, I had the highest expectations; that I was going learn about all of the new science in our current understanding of chemical dependency; that I would have all of my 40 plus questions about the effects that opium derived drugs have on the body and the brain answered; and moreover, I believed that I would leave this place, armed with at least some kind of new found knowledge, which would help lead me to the path of recovery from my addiction. However, in the 89 days that I stayed at this place, the only thing in which I encountered that could even be considered, as even remotely intuitive in dealing with the issues of addiction, was an old video of a priest talking about alcoholism, and based on information that was from the 1940s and 50s. After the video had ended, a staff member asked if anyone had any questions about what the priest had talked about in the video, no one raised their hands. The only question that popped into my mind was: “I wonder just how many little boys had this guy fucked in the ass in his career as a priest?” but I also remained silent as well.


However, what I was told about drug addiction, was that drug addiction is a “disease,” and that drug use is a moral issue, and that the one suffering from the drug addiction, can never be cured of the “disease” of addiction – and that only some higher-power (Jesus Christ) can treat this disease, and that one can only pray this disease into remission through belief in a higher-power, again: Jesus – they were using superstition, ignorance and stupidity, as the only means of “treating” a very real and serious medical condition. And I was told, that the only way that I can ever be free from my drug use, was by accepting Jesus Christ as my higher-power, and as my Lord and my Savior (I thought that up to that point in my life, that I had seen and heard almost everything; however, at that moment, I realized that my State Government and my tax dollars, had sent me to see a pack of delusional fucking Witchdoctors, for the treatment of my chemical dependency).

Needles to say, I didn’t learn anything useful in this drug treatment program at all – and I soon fell right back into my drug use again. And within a few months, I was right back at the same detoxification center again, and then again – and then one more final time before I realized that I was simply repeating the same old bullshit over and over, and that I was somehow expecting that something would change (magic, higher-powers, and Jesus are not real). I realized that it was me that needed to change – I knew that there just had to be a rational way for treating chemical dependency; and although, I have many friends who are doctors, scientists and other highly educated professionals, but to my surprise, none of them, knew jack-shit about chemical dependency and drug addiction.


Then one of the doctors that I knew, just happened to mention the problems that I was dealing with to another doctor: and according to my friend, the doctor instantly replied: “I know just the person who can help your friend.” So it took about 6 weeks before he could setup a meeting. The day of the meeting, my friend who is doctor with his own office and practice, hired a doctor from a temp agency to cover for him, so that he could personally take me to meet this person. The person that we were meeting that day was a retired doctor from the State of New York, and who was also an addiction medicine specialist.


As I was explaining my problem to him, he cut me off and asked me if I was currently using anything other than heroin – I then told him that the only drug that I was using was heroin, and that I had been using it for about 3-4 years. He then said that was all he needed to know. He then explained why I had failed in all of my other attempts at rehabilitation. He then asked my friend about my background and my level of education, my friend replied: he’s a scientist. He then went on to explain how he had got into addiction medicine – he said that he had been contracted by the U.S. Military go to Asia and help treat military personal who had become addicted to heroin while serving in the Vietnam War – he said that the military was having such a big problem in finding effective ways of treating addiction, and that they didn’t want to deal with the embarrassment of all of these heroin addicts returning back to the States, so the government started a policy of not allowing the addicts to return home from Asia until they were cleaned up.


He then said that all of the other methods that they were trying to use in getting these men clean, had all been just a big failure – like AA, and all of that other hocus-pocus, superstitions and delusional religious fucking bullshit had failed – and the failure rate was well over 90 percent until we got over there with real science and real medicine – he then said:”we turned a 90 percent failure rate, into a 95 percent success rate in just a little over 6 months – and how do you think that they thanked us for all of our effort, they made us sign an agreement not to talk about any of this, once we returned State side” (at that moment, I started crying uncontrollably, I’m not really sure what had caused this emotional outburst, other than the fact that I had finally found someone who I believed could help me).


He then explained how the program works, and how with the help of my friend that I could do the whole thing as a type of self-help thing.

In less than 8 hours that day, I had learned more about heroin addiction than I had learned in the whole of this fucking nightmare. And now, I fully understood why I had failed every time that I had tried to get myself clean, and why Jane’s niece, and why almost every other type of drug user will fail using the first methods that I described. Although it took me almost 2 weeks to read and reread the material that he had gave me, before I fully understood the process, it’s really quite simple – using drugs like heroin, cause changes in the chemistry of the body. There are compounds that can be easily made, that will rapidly cause the reversal of these changes.


I then told Jane that no amount hoping, wishing or praying was going to help her niece turn her life around. And most important – the niece has to want to take the first step towards her own recovery. The main issue in dealing with heroin addiction is the fact that most addicts don’t live long enough to recover from their addictions – and the niece has now been using drugs for about twice as long as I did.


I also explained to Jane the sobering statistics that had really opened up my own eyes – less than 10 percent of the addicts who partake in these superstition based treatment programs, manage to keep their sobriety for the first year – and the ones who manage to keep their sobriety for the first five years, is less than 1 percent – and more than half of those who have managed to keep their sobriety for 5 years or longer, have done so by making their sobriety the paramount facet of their lives (this is not a rational way of recovering from an addiction – but if works for them….then good for them).


I believe that the hardest part of rationally recovering from a drug addiction for Jane to understand, was when she asked me what I was doing to remain drug free – I simply told her that I was doing absolutely nothing; that I had come to realize that only I had the power to end my addiction – and that I had simply made the choice never to abuse drugs again. And that everything that she had been told about drug addiction by those ignorant superstitious morons was simply just a big crock of fucking bullshit.


She then asked me to have a talk with her niece – I reluctantly agreed, and I did in fact talk with her niece (coming in part 3 of this story).



Today, I have been completely drug free for almost 6 years, and I have also learned simple back stretching and strengthening exercises that have been keeping my back pain free for nearly 10 years.






Knowledge combined with rationality, critical thinking and reasoning, will always prevail over religion, superstition, stupidity and ignorance – simply because they are all just different forms of the same thing.






John

Changing old habits – part 1

Earlier this year, and as the date of the “rapture” was fast approaching, I wrote in a post about how I had become a little concerned over whether or not any of the Christians that I personally knew as friends, had fallen for Harold Camping’s latest of delusional “rapture” cons. One of the friends that I called, who I will call Jane for this post, was extremely shocked over hearing from me. Jane’s sister had told her that she had heard that I had overdosed on drugs, and that I had died about 10 years ago (after joking with her, that I was calling her from “heaven,” I then told her that only part of that story was in fact true – obviously, I am still very much alive, if I am calling you on the phone). Our conversation ended on sort of a happy note – she was very happy to hear from me, and I was happy that she was still around and doing well; however, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t find anyone that I knew, who was even entertaining Harold Camping’s “rapture” bullshit – I was looking for stuff to blog about, and a new story to add to a book that I am currently writing.


Then a few weeks later, as I was checking my voicemail messages on a phone that I seldom use, I found an assortment of new messages from Jane – as I was sitting there in my car listening to her messages, I started wondering just how in the hell she had gotten my phone number. I didn’t remember giving her any of my phone numbers, or her even asking for my phone number, and I thought that my phone was setup to block my number from caller ID?

In one of her messages, she said: “if this is the John who rose from the dead, call me back, Jane.”

Just as I was deleting the last one of her numerous massages, my phone beeped – it was an incoming call from a blocked phone number. So I answered the call, it was Jane – she didn’t even say hello, she started the conversation accusing me of avoiding her calls. I then explained that I seldom even use the phone that she was calling me on, and that I only check for messages about once a week or so, or if I am expecting someone to call.


As she started into her next rant, I realized that I had left the air conditioning on from earlier that day when it was hot, but it was now night, and the air was freezing cold. And for some reason, I said out loud: “man, this fucking AC is freezing my balls off.” Up to that point in “our” conversation, she really hadn’t responded to anything that I had said, but she decided to respond to my freezing outburst.


She replied: “I wish that I was there with you, so that I could warm up your freezing balls” – followed with a deep chuckle.


She then asked me if I could have a look at her car’s AC, she then said that it had quit working last summer about a month after her car’s warranty had expired. I reluctantly answered: sure, and we then made an appointment to meet a few days later.


I arrived about an hour early for our scheduled rendezvous; it wasn’t that I was really enthusiastic about seeing her again after more than ten years – I was more or less trying to decide if I truly wanted to see her again. Although I have known her for more than 30 years, and we had once been real good friends – she was also a part of a chapter in my life’s past, that I prefer to leave behind me. So instinctively, I decided to park about one block away from the location where we were meeting, and then walk back to the place, when I returned back on foot to the location, she drove right up to me, and asked me why I had left the parking lot where we were going to meet (she had arrived even earlier than I had, and she had already seen me).


As I stood there looking at her sitting in her car, she said: “you look almost the same as you did ten years ago” (I thought to myself, you sure as hell don’t look the same as you did the last time that I had seen you). It was at that moment that I realized that it had actually been almost 13 years since the last time that I had seen this woman. She then said: “you were just trying to be slick, weren’t you – you still think that you are so slick, don’t you – now get your ass into this car, boy.”


I then had her drive me back to where I had parked my car so that I could get my tools and start working on the problem that she was having with her car’s AC. I started by looking at the most likely causes – like a blown fuse, a missing belt.., etc. then I used a long wire to jump voltage to the clutch on the AC compressor – the AC came on and worked like a champ. In the end what I had found that had caused the problem, was that she had been pushing the AC switch so hard, that she had damn near pushed the switch through the dashboard (the switch had simply fallen apart). Luckily, I found all of the parts for the switch, and I was able to put it back together.


Her AC was now working again, and she was real happy. As I turned to get out of her car and leave, she said: “wait, wait, and let me pay you something.”


I replied: “no, that’s not necessary, that’s what friendship is all about, isn’t it?”


She then tried to hand me a one hundred dollar bill, and saying, take it, the shop was going to charge me 400 dollars! After I refused her hundred dollar offer, she then said: “well, at least let me give you fifty.” As I sat there silently deciding what my best exit strategy might be, she then grabbed me in sort of a hugging way (like being grabbed by a starving grizzly bear as food) and then she started tickling me – she then shoved the 50 dollars down the front of my pants (I thought, what in the hell does she think that I am – one of those male pole dancers at some damn striper club, or was she just making good on her offer to warm-up my balls?).


As I reached into my pants and started pulling out these bills that were wedged between my leg and my balls, and handing them back to her, she said: “well, at least let my buy you dinner. She then said with a wide grin on her face: “after we eat, we can go to my place and have some drinks, and talk for a while” – (I really used to like this girl, and years ago, I would have done her faster than a cat could lick its own ass; however, at that moment, I felt like that I had just finished wrestling with a 300 pound horny gorilla, and that I had won – I’ve just never been into the big ones).


I then told her that I had already eaten earlier, and that I had quit drinking a few months ago.


She replied: “damn, you don’t do any of that bad stuff anymore – you must have found Jayzus” – (at that moment, I felt like lying and saying: yes, I found Jesus, and that I had also joined the priesthood – so keep your hands off of me).

I then told her that I hadn’t found either “Jayzus” or “Jesus,” or any other fictional deities, and that the only thing that I had “found,” was a way of rediscovering me again.


She then got this real sad look on her face, and she started telling me about how her niece had started using drugs and alcohol at about the age of 16 and just how fucked up her life is today. She told me that her niece had been in and out of jails and drug treatment programs many times over the last 10 years, and that she had only managed to stay drug and alcohol free for short amounts of time, and only when she was attending church and working her 12 step AA/NA program. But then as soon as she stopped going to church and stopped attending her AA/NA meetings, within a few weeks, and just like clockwork, she would always start back using drugs and alcohol again. She then said that both her pastor and her AA/NA sponsor, had told her that her niece has a disease, which can only treated through “Jesus’ love,” and adherence to the 12 step program of AA/NA. So both Jane and her sister are currently trying to get the niece back into treatment again. 




She then asked me if I am still an atheist, then just how had I gotten myself off of drugs, and what was I doing today to stay drug free, and if I had any advice that might help her niece stop using drugs, and help her stay off drugs.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results." Albert Einstein.






How I recovered from my addictions, and the advice that I gave Jane:

(To be continued in part 2 of this story).

This is only the second time that I have revealed this story to anyone. The first time was when I asked the advice of a friend if he thought rationality might help someone who carries the mind-virus recover from drug addiction. His only comment was: “John, you are a pussy – if I were in your shoes that day, I would have taken the 100 dollars – and I also would have fucked that fat bitch.”


I believe that he was just being evasive of the question that I asked???

My Christian friend is becoming rational – praise the “lord”

I recently called a longtime christian friend, to wish him and his wife a happy holiday. His 2 children are both about the same ages as ours, and they played and all grew up together. I’ve known this guy and his wife for almost 25 years; back when I first met this guy, and after him and his wife, had gotten over the shock, that they were living next door to a family of atheists, (we were the first atheists, that they had ever met) we all became good friends. He became the kind of friend that you talk shit with when you guys were alone with each other – the kind of friend that when he see’s you working around house, or fixing something, he always has to put in his two cents worth – he always has a better way of doing things; and the kind of friend that if you overheard us talking to each other in a hardware store, you might not think that we were friends at all.



In the summer, we would load up the children, camping gear and the ATV’s, and then convoy to the Ocean together – both of our families were very close, and we had a lot of fun together – but then came all of the invites to attend church with them, and all of the proselytizing. Both he and I were making a hell of a lot of money back then, and despite the fact that I was out of town a lot of the time, him and his wife believed that we were excellent parents, and had great children, and that the only other thing that we needed, was “jesus” in our lives. This guy and his wife were also real close friends with their preacher and his wife, at the church where they attended. There were times when his proselytizing would put a great strain on our friendship, and I would unload on his ass about his deluded belief in a ghost raped, little virgin-born bastard-savior, named “jesus” – I never attacked him personally, but to him, attacking his fucking “lord,” was the same as attacking him – his wife would always say: “he’ll come around to jesus.”


The last two times that I had talked to this guy, I didn’t even notice that he didn’t come at me with his christ-speak and deluded christian-talk – so I asked him: “you’re not trying to save my heathen soul anymore, you fucking asshole - so what gives here?” he then told me, that after their children had dropped by the house on their mom’s birthday, and both of them were proclaiming that they were now agnostics, and parroting a lot of the stuff that I used to say (I never talked to his children about their beliefs) he and his wife started thinking about what they believed in as well. He told me that neither he nor his wife, still believes in all of that made up bullshit in the bible, like the talking-snake, and the virgin-birth of jesus, and all of the other magic and bullshit about christ’s life and death – he said that today, he can’t understand just how he ever believed, that all of that bullshit was true; however, he said that both him and his wife, still consider themselves christians. He said that they now only follow, the christian teachings – like do unto others, help the poor and other stuff like that… he even apologized to me, for all of his past proselytizing.


I didn’t even know what to say at that point; I thought that I should have felt something, or even started gloating, and talking shit or something – but the only thing that I said was again, enjoy the holidays – he then invited me and my family to his home for a New Years Eve party.


I’ve never been religious – even as a young child, I found the story of christ simply ridiculous – the ghost raping the little girl, all of the fucking magic – walking on water, turning water into wine, raising the dead – a dead for 3 days, stinking and rotting corpse arose, and then walking among the living – and simply believe all of this silly and mindless bullshit, and you’ll live forever somewhere in the fucking sky. So I just can’t get a grasp on what this guy and his wife are going through. And can someone still be a “christian,” without believing all of the supernatural bullshit? Or is this just the path that some christians take to avoid the atheist stigma? What do you think about this?

How do we as atheist deal with life’s problems without God(s):

I was having a tough time over the past few days. This was in part because I learned 3 or 4 months ago that one of my children had joined an outreach organization as a volunteer. This organization helps provide food and medicine to poor people living in places like Africa and in other 3 world nations. As his mom was telling me this story, I started wondering why he didn’t tell me about this himself when I had seen him this past summer; then his mom tells me; Oh by the way, he’s been taking flying lessons in both airplanes and helicopters – apparently this aid organization uses aircraft to reach poor people in remote locations. News of this took me back to all of the stress that a close friend and I was having when his son that’s in the Air force, was learning how to take off and land jets on aircraft carriers – I mean, he wouldn’t even answer his cell phone when it rang, he would let it go to voicemail, and then call and get his messages; his son did in fact survive all of his training, but man, was this ever a stressful time for the both of us – I love his son, just like if he was my own.




In my sons case, I started thinking about the day, when I awoke to the sounds of kids screaming, and then looked out of the window, only to see that my little heathens had built an 8 foot ramp, to jump an old bike into the air, then grab a rope, and swing over to the pool, and then drop into the pool – our kids could be very creative in finding ways in keeping both their mom and me, on pins and needles. When I asked these guys just what in the hell that they thought that they were doing, they said: “this is fun, you should try it dad!” I think for awhile back then, they must have thought that they were part monkey or something.



Then this past week, I learned that the father of this Air Force pilot, who is a Firefighter, was injured when a wall of a burning building fell on him. This guy has been my friend for way over 30 years, and I love him just like a brother. At first I became mad at him, because he’s also been a Firefighter for more than 30 years, and he should have known better than to be standing next to a wall of a burning building – then I discovered that he had walked over to the wall, to warn a rookie Firefighter that he was standing to close to the wall, then the wall fell on him; he probably saved the life of the rookie Firefighter.



I guess that I just don’t handle the stress to well, when it comes to the health and safety of my children and my friends – I spent the past few days thinking about just how wonderful it must be for Christians, who pray to “god” and “jesus” and ask “them” to protect their loved ones and their children; however, to me that’s just the same as doing nothing.



It has taken me a few days to get over this dread that I’ve been feeling over what has happened to my friend, and what my son is doing (the flying thing). I awoke this morning feeling pride over what my friend did at the fire, and what my son is doing so that he can help people in need – I’m sure that he remembers when he was growing up, his mom and I going to the 7/11 and buying money orders, and sending them to those organizations who claimed to be helping the poor in those poor nations like Africa; and I am so proud of him for taking a more hands on approach. But I’m still having an issue with the flying thing – I guess that I just can’t let go of the fact that he’s not a baby anymore.



I’ve been like this for most of my life – how do you as atheist deal with issues like these, just writing this post has made me feel a little better about this – how do you deal with the stresses like this in life – the Christians simply have their god(s) to pass them off too. What do you do in situations like these?