SSSSSMOKIN'!

I spent three years watching my girlfriend's mom gradually succumb to cancer because she smoked cigarettes for 37 years.

She had two tumors on each lung, and was pronounced "in the clear" after three surgeries and months of radiation and chemo.

A month later she started having headaches, and a tumor was discovered inside her brain, having metastasized from her lungs.
She had seven brain surgeries, another year of chemo and "cyberknife" (aka hyper-intense radiation) treatments, and in the end she died in her living room as her mother (my then-girlfriend's grandmother) tried to help her take pain pills anally because her throat no longer functioned.

She also had lupus and rheumatoid arthritis BEFORE being diagnosed with cancer.

I married her daughter three months after her death.

The thing which blows my mind is that several of this lady's relatives, who ALL saw what she went through and KNEW why she was forced to experience it, have since STARTED SMOKING.

I understand that if you've had the habit for years/decades it can be a struggle to quit.
What I don't understand is the people every year who, with all of the above type information available to them, START smoking.

There's just no excuse for that kind of stupidity nowadays.
We don't have TV/radio/Internet commercials for cigarettes, especially ones like they had in the 50's which encouraged "good" smoking, or the little pamphlets which detailed the health benefits of smoking cigarettes.

I should probably specify that I'm mainly going after CIGARETTE smokers.
Usually, pipe and cigar smokers are at home or outside when they smoke, and because more work went into producing what they are smoking, they tend to consume less (and produce less second-hand smoke).

Cigarette smokers, on the other hand, are MASS consumers, plowing through quickie after quickie, day after day, and polluting the air the rest of us were using before they showed up.

I've never heard of a two-pack-a-day CIGAR smoker.



Now, how should this play out on the legal end?
Keep cigarettes legal, legalize marijuana, and charge users of both out the wazoo in special sales taxes, production taxes, etc.
Do so, knowing that no marijuana user worth his/her/its salt is going to go farther away for it than their own backyard.

Kids Leaving Church

Recently read an article describing several big reasons why my and younger generations are leaving "the church" in droves.

Inflexibility, hypocrisy, irrationally repressed sexuality, refusal to explain the reasoning behind doctrines and church traditions, and lack of authentic experience were among them.


A few years ago I made it a point to become friends with at least four people of different faiths.
Ended up with two Atheists, an agnostic, and a Pagan.

All four were raised in church (this is the Bible Belt after all), and by adulthood had summarily ditched the whole thing.
They grew up being spoon-fed doctrine and dogma, all the while becoming increasingly aware that the "church people" around them weren't demonstrating any behavior different from the people "outside" whom the churchy people would vocally demonize every week.

All "Christianity" had to offer my friends was a bribe ("Heaven") combined with a threat ("Hell"), with no real life-changing effects in the interim.

For all but the Pagan, the rationale became:
"None of these 'religions' have anything but their own bleatings to offer anyone! Why waste my time?"
The Pagan, a girl with great spiritual sensitivity, unable to break away completely from all things spiritual, instead sought a more open group of people with whom to commune with higher existence.


The rise of technology has demonstrated the value of scientific thought and research, so for "Christians" to come down against it is hypocritical.
Nothing like hearing a sermon bashing scientific research on evolution while reading one's Bible on an iPhone or Kindle.

With the advent of the Internet, children, teens, and young adults from ALL backgrounds and ALL walks of life have access to more information than ever before.

As a result, the days of "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it" are now prehistoric in perception.
The idea of taking what ANYONE says as automatically true is farcical at best, dangerously ludicrous at worst.

There is always a WHY behind every statement the church or the mosque or the synagogue or the witch's circle makes.
Young people today have made the WHY their target, and refuse to accept the WHAT or the WHO or the WHEN or the HOW without it.


As for sexuality...
In my lifetime alone, the church has attempted to clamp down on sexual expression time and time again.
The only results have been sexual repression in adults, and sexual proclivity in kids.

Parents and church leaders and "church people" need to get out of their little fortresses of solitude and recognize that kids are asking about sex earlier and earlier than they ever have before.
If you want to influence your child's decisions regarding sex, you have to VOLUNTEER THE INFORMATION.

My high school alma mater in Texas, a school of about 1200 kids, once held the #2 spot in the STATE for highest percentage of drop outs due to pregnancy.
(can't speak for the present, since I haven't checked in awhile)
The sexual atmosphere has been so repressed for so long, by old churchy people who treat the whole thing as "icky", that the MOMENT most of the teens raised in poverty start feeling the urge, they GO FOR IT.

...and having had zero education on the subject, from teachers and church people alike, they crank out another generation statistically doomed to repeat the process.

Personal experience time.
I had sex before I was married. I gave up my virginity at age 17.
I'd been addicted to porn for almost four years prior, and had never had a girlfriend until about a year before I first had sex.

I was given ZERO information by my parents, I was given PLATITUDES by my church family.
The only reason it didn't result in a pregnancy is because HER parents and HER church family had educated her from day one of puberty on how to have an enjoyable, intimate, pregnancy-free sex life.

We broke up after dating for three years.

My wife and I also had sex before we were married.
I'd gone without sex for almost two years (another thing I was never informed of was that sex is like an amazing, natural drug: gotta have more after that first taste), and she, though never having been in even a short-term relationship before, had decided (after a long, calm, informative month of research) she was ready to lose her virginity.

What started as a fling, God turned into a lifetime of intimacy and selfless sacrifice.


My generation, and those which follow after, will continue to be forced to discover sexuality for ourselves, whether online or in the back seat of a car, because the church has spent the last centuries demonizing the naked human form.

Sexual sins have been treated as Satan's "favorites," i.e. those most offensive to God, for generations.
Thus a natural progression to "better avoid sex entirely so you don't do one of Satan's favorite sins!" has occurred.

The church needs to quit talking about sex with kid gloves on, get out of the fortress of chastity it has built for itself, and give younger generations something MORE than just the same old bleating platitudes.


And I'm not even broaching the subject of homosexuality in young (or old) people.