Intro

This is the first blog I’ve done on these types of subjects.  I have another blog under my real name, but it’s about nerd stuff, comics, horror, sci fi, etc.  I may open this up to my real name, etc in a year or so.  I have some personal stuff I have to flesh out before I can just put this out there as I am.  This is also assuming anyone reads this and/or gives a crap about what I have to say.
I was raised in a couple of General Baptist churches in southern Indiana.  Both were in or around a small town called Tennyson.  Since my childhood this place has fallen into ruin.  There’s a building that my dad used to work out of that’s either fallen over or was knocked over and no one has bothered to clean the fallen building mess.  I hadn’t been there for years before I visited it earlier this year.  It was heart breaking to see my home town turn into sh*t.
The churches I went to were two completely different animals.  The one in town had a pastor that was an okay guy, but the congregation was pretty much insane.  At ten I had an argument with my Sunday school teacher about whether dinosaurs existed.  She was talking about the story… the fictional story about Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden.  I asked out of curiosity, when did dinosaurs exist?  She said that they didn’t.  I laughed at her.  She didn’t like that at all.  She said that anyone who said that dinos existed were lying to me, at which point I laughed again.  I then proceeded to outwit an adult about scientific data at ten years old.  This seems to be the way I feel now when I debate a creationist or a fundamentalist.  It almost doesn’t seem fair, because they are operating on an intellectual level that I could decimate them at when I was in elementary school.  I loved dinosaurs and watched anything dino oriented when I was a kid (or now).
The other church had a bit of a jerk for a pastor, but I had friends in the congregation.  This is where I spent my teen years.  I may have actually became an atheist when I was in high school, but after not going to church after about a year and a half (due to what I suspect was the craziness that I encountered at the first church), my mother made me go back to church at 14.  I went there for 5 more years.  There are a lot of reasons why I started to enjoy the experience at the time, but I’ll get to those in another blog post.  It will more than likely have to do with more moderate/liberal versions of christianity.
I ended up leaving at 19 due to a disagreement that my family had with the pastor.  It had to do with the treatment of a family friend and things fell apart… so on and so forth.  I spent the next five-ish years trying to stay a Christian, but my intellectual side kept picking away at my faith.
My wife had been an atheist forever basically.  We didn’t talk about it and since I was barely religious at the point we met, it didn’t matter.  One of my best friends at the time came out to me as an atheist, my wife (girlfriend at the time) said she was too.  I had been on the fence for about a year at that point.  I said I was a Christian, I thought about it, and said nevermind, I’m an agnostic.  This was at the point that I didn’t realize that agnostic and atheist weren’t mutually exclusive things.  This was the point I started watching Atheist Experience and watching Sam Harris videos, so on and so forth. 
Five years later and now I’m coming to terms with the fact that more of us need to speak out.  Within a year I have to come out, with part of my family, I don’t talk about it.  I wouldn’t lie about it, it just doesn’t come up, or hasn’t at this point.  My workplace, which I hate anyway… trying to fix that, is full of extremely religious people.  I’m a little worried that it could get me fired, but I’m not so sure that would be a bad thing.  I’ll get into the specifics of that at a later point also.
As far as the liberal part goes, since 2004 I’ve been a liberal.  Since the Iraq war went to crap, and I was 19 at the time, I started paying attention to politics.  I always had liberal leanings, but I never paid attention to politics until this point.  I was 16 when Bush was elected the first time, and I was like, “Oh his dad did an okay job… blah blah… I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
I saw the way that they ripped Kerry up for being a war hero.  I saw how they demonized better healthcare systems.  I saw how they called anyone who questioned the war un-American.  I hated them for that.  When we discovered there were no WMDs, I lost it.  I wouldn’t vote for another republican after that.  I might vote for an independent under certain circumstances.  I do have problems with the Democrats in some regards, but that’s another post.
The GOP has just gotten worse since then.  They have lost their minds.  They want to burn the government to the ground and live like a fictional cowboy.  This is what they said they want.  Maybe Mitt Romney doesn’t want to go that far, but he’ll set the fire and put it out when there are a few cinders left.  Santorum or Ron Paul would just let the rest of the burnt reminisce disappear.  Sometimes I can’t believe how far they want things to go, but as the debates showed us, the base will cheer poor people dying due to not having healthcare and boo a soldier just because he was gay.
That’s my intro, and I’ll be posting more info about myself as well as my opinions and facts about topics of the day.