Suicide is prehaps the biggest thorn in the side of the pro-life bias in our culture. The idea that suicide can be (and most often is IMO) a rational act and not a symptom of madness does alot to expose what this existance is really about. The assumption that life is always a universal good in itself is exposed as baseless by the existance of those for whom the future realisitcally holds no prospect of positive utility that can outweigh their suffering, and who would choose to end their lives rather than suffer on in hope that 'it might get better'. At the moment we as a culture are stuggling to accept the idea that suicide might a valid choice for someone who is already in terminal physical decline and living in a great deal of physical pain, or without the ability to function in a way that physically healthy people take for granted. A great deal of resistance can be expected to the idea that suicide might also be a valid and rational choice for a person who is physically healthy, especially if they are young.
The pro-life bias in a modern secular society, a society that is supposedly built upon the foundations of objective reason rather than superstition, is quite different to the taboos placed on suicide in traditional religious cultures. Before the 'enlightenment' in Western culture, suicide was considered a sin because it was a subversion of the will of god, who created man to live on Earth according to his design. No matter how bad one's suffering is on Earth, there could be no excuse for taking one's life, it would be considered a spiritual failure. The pro-life bias in secular humanism is not based on aquiescence to the will of a diety, but has inherited some of the residual trappings of that judeo-christian world view. Rather than prescribing that we stoicly suffer in this world to earn our reward in the eternal everafter, secular humanism is built on the idea of optimising happiness in this world here and now. What both have in common is the underlying assumption that everyone can be happy, whether it's in heaven or whether it's on Earth. A christian would want to 'save' someone from suicide because they are concerned for the fate of that person's soul, for a secular person there is no soul to be saved only the validity of the pro-life bias itself, which has it's roots in a sort of wilful ignorance:
'Perhaps we do not want to acknowledge that we live in a world where some
people are currently so bad off that any of the following would improve
their lives: (a) selling an organ; (b) selling themselves for sex; (c)
‘escaping’ their lives by getting high; (d) working at a factory at 8
years old. Paternalism can serve to protect the paternalist from seeing
the world as it is.'
The above quote is from Jason Roy discussing the function of paternalism in the denial of realties that are unpleasant to the majority of people. He goes on to say that by censuring certain behaviors that result from people having to endure intollerable circumstances:
'...we, to a large extent, avoid the sympathy
response. People who break the law to use drugs or sell themselves for
sex are not viewed as worthy of sympathy, because they are criminals.'
Suicide is generally not considered criminal, but the same kind of paternalism is at play in suicide prevention as it is in drug prohibition or prostitution abolition. The suicidal are generally seen as 'mad' rather than 'bad', mentally ill rather than criminal, but with the same predictable results, ie; the negation of personal autonomy and the increase of suffering while ostentasiously trying to prevent it. On top of the natural berievement anyone will experience when losing a loved one, the friends and relatives of a suicide often face the guilt that they could have done more to prevent it. The idea that suicide can and ought to be prevented, like with drug
use and prostitution, can only be practically realised by locking people
away or otherwise keeping them under constant scrutiny and by trying to convince them that their own experience and motivations are invalid.
Once we liberate ourselves from blind optimism we can more easily accept that for some people suicide is a very reasonable solution to impossible problems. There is a generalised fear about breaking the taboo on suicide, yet if the breaking of many previous taboos are anything to go by we are rather more likely to develop understanding and compassion than be destroyed by it.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
ebay brings the hammer down on mystic mercentilism
So ebay is going to ban the trading of spells, hexes, blessings, tarot readings, horoscopes, and other forms of commodified woo:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19323622
From my experience of ebay dispute resolution, it is bad enough when you have a disagreement over a real, tangible product that can be photographed, inspected, shown to be unfit for the advertised purpose, etc; so Dog help those who are unhappy with a defective love spell that they handed over good money for. I know some might be unsympathetic towards people who would buy occult services on ebay, 'a fool and his money are easily parted' and so on, but I think it will be an improvement for ebay to close the door on what is tantamount to fraud, even if it's just so that they can wash their hands of having to spend man-hours on dispute resolution for intangeble products and pushing up the cost of running the site. It is almost certainly the cost cutting factor that will be ebay's prime motive for the ban rather than a true desire to protect mugs from charlatans.
Your intrepid hero never ceases to be amazed at the diversity of snake oil preperations bought by people as a 'spirituality' or 'philosophy'. So-called spirituality has always been in bed with worldly commerce, whether it was a state sanctioned clergy being given the right to tax the population with tithes in exchange for promoting the divine legitimacy of the ruling classes, to the 'spiritual' capitalism expoused by new age gurus who are in the business of selling the individual their own personal enlightenment or 'healing'.
At the best of times the commodification of the creative efforts of humans has it's own self-perpetuating logic beyond the mere generation of exchange value. It leaves somewhat of a taint on whatever it touches, and nowhere does it stink more than to sell out the intangible stuff of human experience. This kind of exchange can only work by some degree of fraud, of convincing people that there is a lack where there is none, or otherwise profiting from another's ennui or unhappiness without offering anything of real use beyond some convoluted mysticism or re-enforcement of wishful thinking.
I buy a bag of rice because I cannot grow the stuff myself. To see people buying 'spirituality' from self-professed gurus and other assorted cranks to me is just sad.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19323622
From my experience of ebay dispute resolution, it is bad enough when you have a disagreement over a real, tangible product that can be photographed, inspected, shown to be unfit for the advertised purpose, etc; so Dog help those who are unhappy with a defective love spell that they handed over good money for. I know some might be unsympathetic towards people who would buy occult services on ebay, 'a fool and his money are easily parted' and so on, but I think it will be an improvement for ebay to close the door on what is tantamount to fraud, even if it's just so that they can wash their hands of having to spend man-hours on dispute resolution for intangeble products and pushing up the cost of running the site. It is almost certainly the cost cutting factor that will be ebay's prime motive for the ban rather than a true desire to protect mugs from charlatans.
Your intrepid hero never ceases to be amazed at the diversity of snake oil preperations bought by people as a 'spirituality' or 'philosophy'. So-called spirituality has always been in bed with worldly commerce, whether it was a state sanctioned clergy being given the right to tax the population with tithes in exchange for promoting the divine legitimacy of the ruling classes, to the 'spiritual' capitalism expoused by new age gurus who are in the business of selling the individual their own personal enlightenment or 'healing'.
At the best of times the commodification of the creative efforts of humans has it's own self-perpetuating logic beyond the mere generation of exchange value. It leaves somewhat of a taint on whatever it touches, and nowhere does it stink more than to sell out the intangible stuff of human experience. This kind of exchange can only work by some degree of fraud, of convincing people that there is a lack where there is none, or otherwise profiting from another's ennui or unhappiness without offering anything of real use beyond some convoluted mysticism or re-enforcement of wishful thinking.
I buy a bag of rice because I cannot grow the stuff myself. To see people buying 'spirituality' from self-professed gurus and other assorted cranks to me is just sad.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Xenophobia, puritanism and the moron logic of prohibition
I have been reading through the Alternative World Drug Report put out by Transform, an NGO dedicated to ending the 'war on drugs':
http://www.countthecosts.org/sites/default/files/AWDR.pdf
It is quite astounding to realise that there has been no real concerted effort by governments or the UN to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of their prohibitionist policies. The money spent every year in the UK on police and military enforcement against the black market in illegal substances, the incarceration of thousands of drug users and low level distributers in Britain's prisons, and the insurance costs of aqusitive crime related to illegal drugs must run into the billions, yet the stated aim of the UN conventions on narcotic drugs, of creating a 'drugs free world' though punative measures, is further away than it has ever been. During 50 years of the 'War of Drugs' (or more correctly called 'selective war on certain drug users') the demand for illicit recreational drugs has only increased, and the markets that supply that demand have both grown and diversified.
Compared to 1961 there are so many different variations of recreational drugs on the market now that it is hard to keep up, especially with 'research chemicals' which are a direct result of drug producers working around the efforts of prohibitionists to outlaw new substances and to clamp down on precursors for more established party drugs. The Big Two so called 'hard' drugs - heroin and cocaine - have not fallen in popularity since 1961 despite the sabre rattling of the drugs warriors, quite the opposite in fact - they are more readily available and cheaper now than they were in the 60s. You would think that is would not be so hard for government appointed experts to go some way to quantifying all of this, but the problem is less so of the practicalities, and more of the political will. This is a political climate where in 2009 the chief drugs advisor to the government David Nutt was sacked for publishing an evidenced based report on the 'drugs problem' rather than pandering to the opportunistic 'law and order' rhetoric of the politicians.
The 'Alternative World Drug Report' is an excellent publication. If I was to make one critisism of it it would be that Transform gives the prohibitionists too much credit. They call the prohibition of drugs 'well intentioned' but ultimately misguided. This is not really the case if you dig deeper into the history of drug prohibition, where you find that just like the suppresion of other aspects of human culture such as language, the suppresion of certain forms of drug use in the West, and the USA in particular, were historically motivated by a distrust by the majority towards immigrants and ethnic minorities who were associated with those drugs (ie; chinese immigrants and opium smoking, mexicans and marijuana), and by the mid 20th century that current of hostility extended into a xenophobia towards the majority's own youth, alienating the generations from each other.
This is the reason why there has been little attempt for an outright ban of alcohol in the West as it is the most culturally ingrained drug here. The attempt at alcohol prohibition in the USA in the 1920s became rapidly disasterous because of alcohol's prominent place in mainstream American culture. If the drugs warriors of the 1960's and 70s had learned from the history of prohibition they would have recognised the futility in attempting to curtail a natural human behavior with a big stick.
If one accepts that drug use, whether it's purpose is for ritual, excitement, relaxation or for medicine, is an intrinsic part of human culture, then the 'drug free world' of the prohibitionist stinks rather more of a fascistic and hypocritical intolerance than a well intentioned concern for human health. The very term 'drug abuse' is a product of that way of thinking - the arbitrary assignment of legitimacy based on what is politically expedient. For instance a doctor getting a patient physically addicted to benzodiazpenes is not considered 'drug abuse', but the use of LSD to explore one's psyche is. Once upon a time LSD was legally used in psychiatry until the prohibitionists turned their attention to it on account of it's popularity with the hippy movement, which was at the time reviled and feared by the mainstream. With a stroke of the law maker's pen LSD became a 'drug of abuse'. Cue myth making tabloid hysteria about kids on acid jumping off tall buildings and going blind from staring at the sun!
Before we can even start to openly consider that any one motivation for drug use by an individual as being as 'legitimate' as any other, there is this circular moron logic of the drugs war to contend with. This is the self-renforcing set of beliefs about drugs and their harms that feed the drugs war from the rhetorical point of view. It's what gets politicians jumping on the authoritarian 'law and order' bandwagon and prevents them from questioning the status quo. We see it every time there is a Leah Betts type tragedy spashed across the tabloids, and along with it all the typical right wing hacks baying for the blood of drug dealers as if they aren't to some extent complicit in these tragedies themselves by their speading of stigma, misinformation and fear for a paycheck.
The harms caused by the drugs war, by the social stigma, the black market racketeering, the perverse incentives, are attributed solely to the drug itself and used as a justfication for more of the same. It is an absurd situation we are caught in, and it is probably the single most damaging and socially corrosive set of circumstances we have created. The only real beneficiaries of the drugs war have been criminal gangs, populist politicians playing on public gullibility, the police budget, and the prison industry. It is hard to see how the drugs war can continue or why it has lasted as long as it has without enough people calling bullshit on it for it to end.
http://www.countthecosts.org/sites/default/files/AWDR.pdf
It is quite astounding to realise that there has been no real concerted effort by governments or the UN to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of their prohibitionist policies. The money spent every year in the UK on police and military enforcement against the black market in illegal substances, the incarceration of thousands of drug users and low level distributers in Britain's prisons, and the insurance costs of aqusitive crime related to illegal drugs must run into the billions, yet the stated aim of the UN conventions on narcotic drugs, of creating a 'drugs free world' though punative measures, is further away than it has ever been. During 50 years of the 'War of Drugs' (or more correctly called 'selective war on certain drug users') the demand for illicit recreational drugs has only increased, and the markets that supply that demand have both grown and diversified.
Compared to 1961 there are so many different variations of recreational drugs on the market now that it is hard to keep up, especially with 'research chemicals' which are a direct result of drug producers working around the efforts of prohibitionists to outlaw new substances and to clamp down on precursors for more established party drugs. The Big Two so called 'hard' drugs - heroin and cocaine - have not fallen in popularity since 1961 despite the sabre rattling of the drugs warriors, quite the opposite in fact - they are more readily available and cheaper now than they were in the 60s. You would think that is would not be so hard for government appointed experts to go some way to quantifying all of this, but the problem is less so of the practicalities, and more of the political will. This is a political climate where in 2009 the chief drugs advisor to the government David Nutt was sacked for publishing an evidenced based report on the 'drugs problem' rather than pandering to the opportunistic 'law and order' rhetoric of the politicians.
The 'Alternative World Drug Report' is an excellent publication. If I was to make one critisism of it it would be that Transform gives the prohibitionists too much credit. They call the prohibition of drugs 'well intentioned' but ultimately misguided. This is not really the case if you dig deeper into the history of drug prohibition, where you find that just like the suppresion of other aspects of human culture such as language, the suppresion of certain forms of drug use in the West, and the USA in particular, were historically motivated by a distrust by the majority towards immigrants and ethnic minorities who were associated with those drugs (ie; chinese immigrants and opium smoking, mexicans and marijuana), and by the mid 20th century that current of hostility extended into a xenophobia towards the majority's own youth, alienating the generations from each other.
This is the reason why there has been little attempt for an outright ban of alcohol in the West as it is the most culturally ingrained drug here. The attempt at alcohol prohibition in the USA in the 1920s became rapidly disasterous because of alcohol's prominent place in mainstream American culture. If the drugs warriors of the 1960's and 70s had learned from the history of prohibition they would have recognised the futility in attempting to curtail a natural human behavior with a big stick.
If one accepts that drug use, whether it's purpose is for ritual, excitement, relaxation or for medicine, is an intrinsic part of human culture, then the 'drug free world' of the prohibitionist stinks rather more of a fascistic and hypocritical intolerance than a well intentioned concern for human health. The very term 'drug abuse' is a product of that way of thinking - the arbitrary assignment of legitimacy based on what is politically expedient. For instance a doctor getting a patient physically addicted to benzodiazpenes is not considered 'drug abuse', but the use of LSD to explore one's psyche is. Once upon a time LSD was legally used in psychiatry until the prohibitionists turned their attention to it on account of it's popularity with the hippy movement, which was at the time reviled and feared by the mainstream. With a stroke of the law maker's pen LSD became a 'drug of abuse'. Cue myth making tabloid hysteria about kids on acid jumping off tall buildings and going blind from staring at the sun!
Before we can even start to openly consider that any one motivation for drug use by an individual as being as 'legitimate' as any other, there is this circular moron logic of the drugs war to contend with. This is the self-renforcing set of beliefs about drugs and their harms that feed the drugs war from the rhetorical point of view. It's what gets politicians jumping on the authoritarian 'law and order' bandwagon and prevents them from questioning the status quo. We see it every time there is a Leah Betts type tragedy spashed across the tabloids, and along with it all the typical right wing hacks baying for the blood of drug dealers as if they aren't to some extent complicit in these tragedies themselves by their speading of stigma, misinformation and fear for a paycheck.
The harms caused by the drugs war, by the social stigma, the black market racketeering, the perverse incentives, are attributed solely to the drug itself and used as a justfication for more of the same. It is an absurd situation we are caught in, and it is probably the single most damaging and socially corrosive set of circumstances we have created. The only real beneficiaries of the drugs war have been criminal gangs, populist politicians playing on public gullibility, the police budget, and the prison industry. It is hard to see how the drugs war can continue or why it has lasted as long as it has without enough people calling bullshit on it for it to end.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Smack my bitch up
What with it being poppy season in England, plus the resent media attention on the high society train wreck surrounding Eva Rausing's death apparently from a heroin overdose, it seems a good excuse as any to broach this subject. Then I came across this Dispatches documentary on YouTube, first aired on Channel 4 over ten years ago. I recommend everyone and their dog watch it.
I have casually used heroin in the past, many years ago, but heroin 'chippers' are not great headline-grabbing fodder for moral panic so I'll spare you the boring details other than to say that I have never resorted to mugging, burgling, defrauding or stealing from anyone as a consequence. I had a decent job in IT at that time, and I would spend far more money on my car, buying records and going out to overpriced clubs and bars than I ever did on heroin. In hindsight I should have spent all that money on lead, timber and bronze for boat building and I would have a small galleon to live aboard by now but c'est la vie...
It is an ingrained meme in our society that drug addiction is a Very Bad Thing, which is only somewhat justified. The main problems of addiction to heroin primarily relate to those of illicit supply, and of social stigma and exclusion. It is by those means that we create the 'drugs menace'.
Heroin itself is easily produced. Papaver somniferum will grow pretty much anywhere, although the highest yeilds are in climates where there is a cool spring followed by a warm, dry summer. Opium is extracted from the poppies, and from there the opium yields morphine base with use of simple and readily available chemicals, and this morphine then processed into heroin using acetic anhydride. It is not a complicated or particularly skilled process; it is done sucessfully everyday by some of the world's poorest people in rundimentary conditions the mountains of SE Asia and Afghanistan. There is no real practical problem with offering the heroin addicts a cheap and clean supply of heroin if there was the political will to do so.
It seems obvious that the reason why opium is rarely available for consumption outside the poppy growing regions is that the perverse incentives created by prohibition drive the growers to process a relatively mild, non-injectable opium stereotypically beloved of 19th century poets and chinese immigrants into heroin. It is no co-incidence that when opium prohibition was taking hold in the first half of the 20th century, heroin use grew and opium use declined. In the black market traffickers tend towards a small bulk and high value product; from the weaker 'natural' substance to stronger 'chemical' substance and finally to dangerously unreliable and adulterated substance once the resulting street heroin is 'stepped on' at the other end of the chain - bulked up with glucose, synthetic opoids, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, quinine, anything to line the pockets of the dealers.
I don't think it's desirable for anyone to have an all consuming dependence whether it's on a drug or whether it's gambling, sex, emotional validation, etc. What I am left wondering though is how certain forms of dependence became transformed from a personal or medical problem into a criminal issue detached from proportionality and cascading into all kinds of new social ills created by that very process of criminalisation. Is there some hypocritical puritanism in our culture that leads to the kneejerk repression of the very human desire to chemically alter one's state of being? The sort of mentality that used to tell schoolboys that wanking upsets Jesus and will make them go blind? I would prefer to believe that it's down to a pathological cultural idiocy than believe it's a multi-faceted conspiracy by criminal cartels to maximise profits, by governments to exercise arbirary control over their citizens (in particular ethnic minorities and youth who often get harrasment from the police under the guise of fighting the 'drugs war'), and by chest thumping politicians wanting to look 'tough on crime'. Stupidity is usually the more viable explaination for a set of circumstances than conspiracy, but in the case of the demonisation of heroin it is probably a little bit of both.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Does self-immolation look good on your CV?
With the current 'clampdown' on the benefits system it was only a matter of time before this sort of thing happens:
Man sets himself on fire outside Birmingham jobcentre
The company that would have been contracted by the DWP to assess this man's fitness for employment is called ATOS Healthcare. I have had dealings with them myself, and the bloke I saw even told me off the record that they routinely disenfranchise almost everyone they (non-medically) assess from receiving incapacity benefit/ESA, and that the sucess rate of appeals against ATOS's assesments are in the region of 80%. Of course the appeals process is long and drawn out, with the sort of routine communications that someone on Jobseeker's Allowance enjoys being pretty much non-existant when dealing with an ESA claim. Being forced by unfortunate circumstance to have to deal with the perverse motivations and spin of parasitic companies like ATOS or Action4Employment is enough to make someone sick if they weren't sick enough already.
Having said that, the government are in an unenviable position. They have to maintain the status quo by selling the delusions of a mid 20th-century style economic growth paradigm in spite of an economic, social and ecological reality that increasingly can't sustain it. So when the chips are down what should we do? Why, put the boot in on society's most vunerable whilst make a few quid in the process of course, and who better to do that than a bunch of old Etonian millionaires?
Man sets himself on fire outside Birmingham jobcentre
The company that would have been contracted by the DWP to assess this man's fitness for employment is called ATOS Healthcare. I have had dealings with them myself, and the bloke I saw even told me off the record that they routinely disenfranchise almost everyone they (non-medically) assess from receiving incapacity benefit/ESA, and that the sucess rate of appeals against ATOS's assesments are in the region of 80%. Of course the appeals process is long and drawn out, with the sort of routine communications that someone on Jobseeker's Allowance enjoys being pretty much non-existant when dealing with an ESA claim. Being forced by unfortunate circumstance to have to deal with the perverse motivations and spin of parasitic companies like ATOS or Action4Employment is enough to make someone sick if they weren't sick enough already.
Having said that, the government are in an unenviable position. They have to maintain the status quo by selling the delusions of a mid 20th-century style economic growth paradigm in spite of an economic, social and ecological reality that increasingly can't sustain it. So when the chips are down what should we do? Why, put the boot in on society's most vunerable whilst make a few quid in the process of course, and who better to do that than a bunch of old Etonian millionaires?
Sunday, July 1, 2012
autistic atheists are naughty!
Bieng a contrarian bastard I love to pick holes in things. Recently this youtube video has got my goat:
Aside from the author's strange idea that the label 'autism' is stick to hit people he dislikes over the head with (a bit like how 'spastic' was a common playground insult back in my day), he seems to have some contradictory ideas about god and karma. Not suprising really, it often happens when people believe they are being singled out for preferential treatment by an omnipotent being, they must be doing something right!
The actual meaning of the word 'karma' is action. That's it. Even what we might think of a non-action (ie; sitting around watching innane youtube videos) is a form of action. This is the sort of mess we are stuck in. Thanks god.
If I was to do a global study in the attractiveness of the belief in 'karmic law', I bet the believers would disporportionately made up of economically privaledged hippies. After all, if your situation happens to be that you have been born in Uganda to a HIV positive mother who was raped by militiamen, it would be a bitter pill to swallow knowing that it's all your own fault, that you must have been very naughty in a past life and that god clearly hates you.
The same selective view of reality applies when you beleive that not only did you in some way karmically earn your good fortune, but that god is personally making sure you don't get bitten by poisonous snakes. Warbles makes a good point regarding the Pope's assortment of armed guards and bombproof vehicles as an example of failure to live up to the christian god belief. However, this does not make the pope a 'behavioral athiest', it makes him a hypocrite. If the pope was a true 'behavioral atheist' there would be no problem as he wouldn't be going around actively obstructing public health initiatives and birth control as a direct result of his theistic ideological beliefs. In other words he would keep it to himself.
Presumably in the woods where Warbles walks around barefoot, the snakes god is protecting him from are brownsnakes (Pseudonaja textilis), very poisonous but luckily they are also shit scared of human beings, and like all snakes they can sense a large animal's approach from a long way off through the vibrations that footsteps make in the ground. You are unlikely to see them in the wild apart from the unfortunate ones that get squashed flat while trying to cross the road. Non-human animals have every reason to be terrified of us, not least because we have god on our side.
Well he does have a roundabout point if god made them to have a timid nature, but the behavior of poisonous snakes has little to do with the balance of Warble's karmic current account. I doubt Warbles relies on god to pay his rent or wash his dishes, but then dealing with a pile of mouldy plates is not as exciting as protecting aging hippies from dangerous animals so prehaps that is why god can't be arsed to put on his marigolds.
In my humble yet infallible opinion this sort of god belief is a projection of one's ego onto the chaos of reality, it's the same old story since we realised we are not alone in our heads and freaked out about it. Prehaps god made autistic atheists for a purpose, maybe god is an autistic atheist himself.
Aside from the author's strange idea that the label 'autism' is stick to hit people he dislikes over the head with (a bit like how 'spastic' was a common playground insult back in my day), he seems to have some contradictory ideas about god and karma. Not suprising really, it often happens when people believe they are being singled out for preferential treatment by an omnipotent being, they must be doing something right!
The actual meaning of the word 'karma' is action. That's it. Even what we might think of a non-action (ie; sitting around watching innane youtube videos) is a form of action. This is the sort of mess we are stuck in. Thanks god.
If I was to do a global study in the attractiveness of the belief in 'karmic law', I bet the believers would disporportionately made up of economically privaledged hippies. After all, if your situation happens to be that you have been born in Uganda to a HIV positive mother who was raped by militiamen, it would be a bitter pill to swallow knowing that it's all your own fault, that you must have been very naughty in a past life and that god clearly hates you.
The same selective view of reality applies when you beleive that not only did you in some way karmically earn your good fortune, but that god is personally making sure you don't get bitten by poisonous snakes. Warbles makes a good point regarding the Pope's assortment of armed guards and bombproof vehicles as an example of failure to live up to the christian god belief. However, this does not make the pope a 'behavioral athiest', it makes him a hypocrite. If the pope was a true 'behavioral atheist' there would be no problem as he wouldn't be going around actively obstructing public health initiatives and birth control as a direct result of his theistic ideological beliefs. In other words he would keep it to himself.
Presumably in the woods where Warbles walks around barefoot, the snakes god is protecting him from are brownsnakes (Pseudonaja textilis), very poisonous but luckily they are also shit scared of human beings, and like all snakes they can sense a large animal's approach from a long way off through the vibrations that footsteps make in the ground. You are unlikely to see them in the wild apart from the unfortunate ones that get squashed flat while trying to cross the road. Non-human animals have every reason to be terrified of us, not least because we have god on our side.
Well he does have a roundabout point if god made them to have a timid nature, but the behavior of poisonous snakes has little to do with the balance of Warble's karmic current account. I doubt Warbles relies on god to pay his rent or wash his dishes, but then dealing with a pile of mouldy plates is not as exciting as protecting aging hippies from dangerous animals so prehaps that is why god can't be arsed to put on his marigolds.
In my humble yet infallible opinion this sort of god belief is a projection of one's ego onto the chaos of reality, it's the same old story since we realised we are not alone in our heads and freaked out about it. Prehaps god made autistic atheists for a purpose, maybe god is an autistic atheist himself.
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