Evangelical Athiests.

Okay - you guys know me. I love science. I love nothing more than to snuggle down with a Carl Sagan book and get ready to have my mind utterly blown at the staggering awesomeness of the universe. You also know that I believe in a naturalistic, ineffable spirit God that we humans can't comprehend without going insane, so we have to digest It in bite-size gobbets of wisdom, hence, differing religions and thought processes (science).

I am utterly respectful of one's right not to believe in God. I also know that morality is separate from belief and that you can be a perfectly wonderful human being and not believe in anything other than what can be proven with logic and science.

Then you get people like this. Or Richard Dawkins. People that have taken it upon themselves to view what they call 'religion' as some kind of scourge of society that needs to be wiped out. To them I say: Who the hell asked you?

One of the first things a person has to learn in life is that each life is that own person's journey. It's their trip - you can't understand it. You can empathise, but you can't know it. You can't take someone's spirituality away from them. You'd be crazy to even *try*. It's one of the very things that define humans as a species - the tendency to have a belief system based on supernatural beliefs. And I'll agree, a lot of shitty things have been done in the name of religion. I've been a victim of that, being a queer woman and all. Do you see me calling for the whole-sale phasing out of religion? No. It just seems crazy talk to me. It's getting a little too much like the scary fundamentalist religious sorts that want to convert the whole world to their religion.

Here's a tip for free - it ain't ever gonna happen, yo. It's just not in human nature. Humans are a varying, kenspeckle, eccentric bunch of sentients that will disagree just because they can. Rebellion is second nature. Free will is our greatest asset and eradicating one of our rights kinda goes against that very tenet.

Religion is a reality - people believe in crazy shit. Athiests like skepchick need to relax and get the fuck over it.

Dyscalculia

I think I might have Dyscalculia.

I'm always very careful of self-diagnosis, but the symptoms are me, up, down and sideways. And it's right throughout my family, too. If this is what I have, it'd answer SO many troubling questions for me. Like why I did so bad at maths in school. And why I can't remember phone numbers or dates or times. Or why I get lost in places I've been to hundreds of times before, or why I am terrible at learning complicated rules of grammar. Or even the difficulties I have playing card games that are more complicated than snap or poker!

The list is absolutely endless.

I've always felt like I'm stupid. My brain stops working once things get to a certain level of complication with numbers or maths. It's just white noise and I can't cope with it.

But if you give me visual problems, space and shape and two-dimensional stuff, I'm great. I'm brilliant. That's why when computer games made the jump from 2-D to 3-D, I got left behind. I played HUNDREDS of computer games on the Commodore 64. It's why I'm so comfortable with the Nintendo DS. It's shape with the stylus! I'm also really good at Wii games because I don't have to figure out the controls. I just make a movement, and it's really intuitive. No complex steps or rules or anything.

It also explains a lot of my difficulties with dancing. I never had a problem doing the steps themselves, just remembering the order of the steps and the different kinds was impossible. Even easy dances like the can-can run at the end of "Wild and Untamed Things" in Rocky Horror. Yet I can do the box-step, years after learning it, because I remember the shape of the dance step.

I'm pretty good with music, but I often hit a wall when the music gets too complicated. My brain can't handle it. I just have to remember the sound and the action, not the numbers involved.

Anyway, I've spent years feeling stupid, and if there's a reason for my difficulty, then I might be able to work around it somehow. And not feel guilty about doing that.