Dear Friends,

I have always been a person who welcomes the ideas of anyone and everyone to the table of discussion and argument. No matter whether I agree with their ideas or not.

I have been blocked on social media by others, (my ex-wife, some family members, and some former “friends”) for various reasons. Mostly due to my personal mission to combat the bullshit inherent in religious dogma and propaganda, but also for pointing out the hypocrisy contained in many political stances.

In the vein of that open and welcoming discussion platform, I have never deleted, unfriended, or blocked ANYONE, from my friends list on Facebook due solely to their personal beliefs or ideas, no matter how much I disagree with their ideas.

Yesterday, for the very first time, I am saddened to report, I did.

The person I blocked is a close relative of mine, a cousin, who is inveterately racist. A person who continually advocates for arresting, prosecuting, and even killing of people who simply protest inhumane treatment at the hands of their fellow humans, both police and civilian.

This cousin of mine continually agitated against accommodating the basic human rights of these people, the very same rights that he himself believed he should enjoy, unfettered, and unencumbered. There is nothing I personally find more distasteful than hypocrisy. Followed closely by racism. There is NO room in our society for either of these human failings. Tolerance of either of these things is a vice and immediate shutdown and complete and total intolerance of them is the ONLY acceptable and virtuous treatment of this kind of behavior.

It’s true that everyone has the right to express their opinions on anything regardless of how wrong or distasteful or illegal those opinions are. But tolerating such behavior in others, is NOT acceptable in our society…a hundred years ago, sure it was. Now? absolutely not. Just because your bullshit religion advocates for the same things and you can point to your bullshit religioius book to justify your hatred does not make your behavior and ideas ok or acceptable. The same right you have to express your bullshit racist ideas is the exact same right I will exercise to point out the FACT that your ideas make you a racist piece of shit and to further point out that your ideas are out of date and unacceptable in a modern (more than in the past) enlightened society. The path forward is to discard such out of date and false ideas and all the trappings and bullshit and propaganda that go with them.

Change is inevitable. It is the ONLY truth of human existence besides the guarantee of death. If you cannot handle the change or move with the change, you will be left behind where you BELONG…dead and buried in the past just like all the other morons that couldn’t bring themselves to overcome their personal intellectual, emotional, ethical, and moral failures. Buried like the bullshit ideas of Phrenology, Geocentricity, Alchemy, Human Bodily Humors, Pholgiston, Young-Earth Creationism, Anti-Evolutionism, Climate Change Denialism, and all the other bullshit ideas that have been thoroughly debunked by facts and science.

I had undertaken to reasonably, logically, and historically (and often heatedly) using the Constitution and Bill of Rights, to demonstrate the self-contradictory, anti-scientific, pro-bullshit religion positions and ideas he held. It was to no avail.

Yesterday, after reading yet another inflammatory post, where he compared protesters advocating for their rights to be recognized (and which same protestors haven’t killed a single person), to hate groups who have killed thousands, even millions of people just for being different or having the “wrong” skin color, I had enough of his specious bullshit. I’m tired of continually having to correct the staggeringly enormous amount of bullshit and propaganda that continually makes the rounds on the internet which same specious bullshit he reposted ad nauseum.

I unfollowed, unfriended, and blocked him.

The worst part of the whole thing is that he is family. I went to high school with him. We have been friends since that time. We share the same last name and are both named after our common Great-Grandfather. We share a love for old lifted 4×4 trucks. Trucks that we both built ourselves and enjoyed immensely on the desert west of our common hometown. We share a love of guns and nature. And yet we diverge greatly on our ideas about ehtical and moral treatment of our fellow humans.

It saddens me and angers me that members of my own family (almost all of them in fact), have bought into the lies of religion, or racism, or both. Lies that often are so intertwined that it is extremely difficult if not impossible for most people to unravel them in order to see the reality that surrounds them. Lies that blind them to the facts. Bullshit that doesn’t hold water, and is disproven by statistics, numbers, studies, science, and numerous other things.

Today is a sad day for me. It has been made obvious to me yet again, that some people are so far gone in their hatred and intolerance of their fellow humans that they are irredeemable, beyond being helped by those who care, and those who care about them.