My Life Has Taken Over + Meme

Readers of my blog have probably noticed I haven’t been around much.  Things have gotten extremely busy for me and I have not had the time to my previously normal twice weekly postings.  I do check in and read my favorites, but I just haven’t been able to write lately.  As any blogger knows, it can be time consuming, and writing articles about atheism, creationism, evolution, and religion can take some work.  I tend to be at least a little meticulous about making sure I at least appear to know what I am discussing, and finding the time to research to write a good post has been unavailable lately due to an increased workload and having two school kids in extracurricular activities (and a hyperactive 18 month old) have left me exhausted.

Evanescent tagged me with the latest meme going around, and even though I am late to this particular party I will give mine.  Hopefully this will light a little fire under my butt to be sure I at least get back up to weekly posts. 

When I started my blog I had no intentions of discussing atheism, religion, and my wife’s beliefs.  It just kind of ended up that way as you can see below:

1.  At first I tried to be cute and all of my titles were lyrics from songs, mostly heavy metal but I mixed in a Beatles tune.  My first post on religion and atheism was really my 5th or 6th overall and it was titled The Orders Came From High Above They Say.  Reading it now, it really is a very simple post, but keep in mind I had not read any blogs concerning atheism at this point–I didn’t even know that world existed.  I was just writing random thoughts.  The key to this post and why it was important was I used wordpress’ tags.  After I published that post I did a few searches with my own tags and found blogs like de-conversion (then agnosticatheism), The Friendly Athiest, and Evanescent.  Suddenly I realized that there were many others that were writing about atheism.

2.  After a few weeks of reading dozens of atheism blogs and posting a few of my own, I made the post That’s How I Got Where I Am.  Here I went into how I became an atheist in my youth because I actually read the bible trying to understand it’s mysteries.  Rereading this post you can see I have a few ideas that will come up in later posts.  This particular article made it into the 3rd The Humanist Symposium.  This was my first atheism post to start receiving a good number of hits and I realized I had an audience.

3.  My blog had now “evolved” into an actual atheism blog.  While I enjoy reading a lot of the more militant atheism blogs as the debates are entertaining, I knew my style of writing wouldn’t be a good fit for that type of blog.  I decided to write a lot about my relationship with my Jehovah’s Witness wife and how we cope with our differences in belief.  I feel as if there are a lot of blog writers out there that have better biblical and science knowledge than myself, and I knew I would write better about what I know.  A few posts into this decision to write about myself and my wife and I wrote A Blood Problem.  This post gets a number of hits every week, I am assuming from someone wondering why JW’s don’t accept blood transfusions.  Hopefully that article has been at least a little helpful.

4.  Now I was fully enveloped in the atheism blogosphere.  I actually was becoming quite addicted, reading and commenting on other blogs and writing my own.  I started paying attention to politicians views on religion, and researched more on religion and history since I had been in college over 20 years ago.  On July 1 a murder-suicide happened in my city, and it was pretty big news as the perpetrator was a prominant dentist in town.  On July 3, my local newspaper ran an article claiming the perpetrator was a “good Christian.”  I read this article at lunch and then wrote Dentist Found Slain With Wife Was a Good Christian, which was also the headline in the paper.  No other article that I have written to this point gets as many hits as this one.  The day I wrote it and the day after my hits spiked 1000%.  I still get 35-30 google searches weekly on this article and local individuals that knew the parties involved have commented as recently as last week.  While the comments have now spiraled into a different topic, I think the original concept of why I wrote it, that labeling people based upon their supposed religious beliefs instead of their actions, stands up very well.

5.  I haven’t written a post in a few weeks, but my last real post, My Awakening, pretty much sums up where I am at this point.  I have 3 posts halfway written that I will get out there soon, including my post on Julian, for those in suspense. 

An interesting sidenote that I hope I will continue to discuss over the next year or so.  I think my wife is gradually realizing the faults of Jehovah’s Witnesses and religion in general.  I cannot say for sure, because she has a hard time talking about it, but I can tell you that she has went to only one meeting (sermon) since July, and previously she would go weekly plus go to at least one bible study a week.  My children have only went when they have stayed the night over at their cousins, which has been maybe twice.  I do not know for certain if she will stay this route.  I am not trying to influence her as I want the decision to be hers.  But I can tell something clicked in her a couple of months ago, and I am hoping we have another free thinker on our hands eventually.

That’s all for now, and I will try to get back to my own posting and commenting.  I won’t forward this meme as the blogs I read most have already been tagged.

A Blood Problem

I have been working on this topic for a couple of weeks, but a post by The Spanish Inquisitor about Indoctrination jump started me to finish this post.

One of the biggest arguments my wife and I have ever had was about blood transfusions.  As previously mentioned, my wife had gotten out of The Truth when we were first together.  By the time she was pregnant with our second child she was once again involved in her religion.  I was still new to JW’s and what they believed, and one day she made a passing statement that if anything happened in delivery that she couldn’t have a blood transfusion.  This was the first time I had heard this and it was baffling to me.  She brought home some literature for me to read about it, and it is still as baffling to me today as it was then.

The Bible verses they claim support this belief are Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 17:12-14, Acts 15:20 & 29, and Acts 21:25.

Now, I am not the expert of the Bible that some on a number of blogs I read are.  I am not a reformed Christian that read the Bible for a number of years before realizing I didn’t believe it.  I read it when I was younger and decided I didn’t believe in it, and rarely picked it up after that, until I met my wife. 

First and foremost, I don’t believe the Bible so no matter how many verses she would show me I would disagree.  But to me, even if I was a Christian, it seems obvious to me that the verses are talking about different things occuring in a much older and different world. 

Gen 9:4 “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat“–seems to say that you cannot eat meat with blood, or basically eat raw meat.

Lev 17:12-14 “You shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh“–where they get this to mean blood transfusions I have no idea, and while it says flesh, which by itself in our terms today would seem to mean human, the verse before is talking of beast and fowl, which clearly implies (to me anyway) when you hunt you must cook the meat. 

Acts 15: 20 & 29; 21:25 ”Abstain from blood“–This is very vague.  But two thousand years ago, blood transfusions were not even thought of.  Taken into that context with the verses from the OT, it seems to be a reinforcement to not consume animal blood.

From these verses the main point that gets across to me is the consumption of blood.  If you go to the Watchtower website they have an absurd article discussing the history of blood transfusions.  They probably had a lot of support during the 80’s and 90’s with many news stories of tainted blood with AIDS and hepatitis.  And, without belittling the people effected by these tragedies, many lives are saved by blood transfusions every day.  The Watchtower Society was also against organ transplants for a number of years, claiming it bordered on cannibalism.  Yet, in 1980 they quietly revoked that decision and now even praise it.  Some JW’s are coming out against the blood transfusion decision and are trying to get them to change their ways.  If you are a JW and you question these issues I highly recommend this site.

This brings me back to the main focus of this post.  At the time, I could not convince my wife in a worse case scenario to get a blood transfusion.  This was a little worrisome.  Even though realistically blood transfusions are rare, one of the more common instances where they are performed is on mothers during a baby’s delivery.  Fortunately, we found a doctor who was willing to go a bloodless route if necessary, and it was unneeded anyway.  But now there is the next argument.  What happens if one of our children ever need a transfusion?  Once again, statistically they will probably not need one as a youth, if ever.  But as a parent, you always have it in the back of your mind.  What if?  And the last thing you want is a husband and wife having a throw down argument in the middle of a hospital.  After some research I found that until the age of 12, most states will get a court order if needed in such situations to allow hospitals to get blood transfusions.  But even before I layed that out, my wife conceded if the situation were to ever happen, she would allow the transfusions until they were baptised in the Truth, and then it would be up to them.  Another small victory for me.  And because of the non-chalance of this writing, it may seem as if this was an easy win, but this was a large fight with a lot of screaming.  By my wife of course, I am a mellow easy going dude 

However this still brings up some issues I may have in the future with my wife and children.  The Indoctrination post mentioned above got me thinking about it.  Am I doing my children a disservice by not being more proactive in their early religious development?  While my wife has conceded some points, my children are still being raised as JW’s even if they have an atheist dad.  I haven’t previously had a large problems with it.  My wife and her family are very good moral people, and I think The Truth does help them with that to some extent.  I always thought I could kind of show my children my beliefs as they got older and could understand more.  Yet, the longer this goes the harder that gets.