Kicking the prayer request habit.

Old habits die hard.

So, I just got back the place I normally live. (I will not call the Gulf Coast home.  This miserable little skid mark of settlement holds no claim on me.  Home begins at the threshold of my apartment.) Drove for one day, hung out for one day, and drove for one day back.

My Christian friends have sent me many encouraging little notes that they are “praying for me”. I tell myself this is their way of saying they care and are concerned about my plight.  But inside, it annoys me a little.

“Oh really?  You can do that?  You can plead on my behalf before God?  You can appeal the laws of cause and effect just for little ol’ me?  Why the hell did you wait for a hurricane to start doing that?”

OK, maybe it annoys me a lot.

My wife and I are safe for a variety of reasons.  (1.) I have a fantastic employer.  I get very frustrated with the bureaucracy sometimes, but the my company just paid me about 30% more than I normally make for three days so that I would have the money for gas, lodging, and food for the time I was gone.  (2.) My supervisor choose to call me 8 hours before the evac order came and tell me that it was coming at 6AM.  (3.) My wife is the best woman on earth, bar none.  She has had a suitcase packed by the door since Gustav went to hurricane status.  When the evac order came at 6, we ate breakfast, grabed the irreplaceable files, the hard drive, suitcase, and sleeping child.  We were on the road and rolling by 0615. (4.) We were obscenely well prepared.  We mapped four separate routes to Little Rock.  One all interstate, one all highway, one all country road, and one shortest time, this was tucked into the atlas.  In the car was 3 gallons of water and four nonperishable meals for my daughter.  In the bottom of the suitcase was two backpacks: one to be cut into a child carrier, one to carry gear.  This was in case we had to walk out of a situation we could not drive out of.    We had our standard survival kit which includes among other things, plenty of toilet paper, and ways to make potable water.  We stopped for gas every time we had to stop for any other reason, so that we always had a full tank.  None of this was survival stuff was necessary of course, because Gustav was not a Katrina, but if the crap hit the fan we had multiple plans.

But to my Christian friends, it its not my fantastic employer which saved me (many companies down here told people if they missed work because they left town it would be counted as unexcused absence.)  It is not my supervisor, who with no requirement to do so, gave me an eight hour heads up.  It is not 2 weeks of skillful planing, or a lifetime of learning the skills necessary to skillfully plan.  It is not God, because he apparently planned on killing me with a hurricane. (If he meant me no harm, then why pray for me?)  Nope.  It was their amazing prayers.

But then, tonight, before I wrote this blog, I wanted to write a blog about going to Germany.  We have had our out-processing time cut short by the evacuation.  We now have two and half weeks to shut down the hundreds of little details that make up day to day life and make them all start up magically again in Germany.

And my first thought was to write a blog a lot like this:

“Hey all, we’ve really had our time cut short with this Gustav thing, please pray we can get all this crap done…”

I may resist the urge to think that way, but the fact is, I still do think that way.  I really resent people attributing my hard work to God, but when the chips are down, my first reaction is the ol’ cosmic vending machine ploy.

I’m disgusted with myself, on one hand, but other hand, I have more compassion for my friends who are telling me they will pray for me.  It’s so natural. “I have this thing that I am completely powerless to change and that makes me very uncomfortable.  I will pretend that I am so special to God that my hopes are important to him, then I can call whatever happens his perfect plan for me, instead of just accepting the fact that some things occur completely at random.”

It’s so very easy.  Of course, it’s crap.  If God really did anything besides give people warm fuzzies there’d so much evidence you couldn’t walk to the grocery store without tripping over some. (Note: I’m not saying God doesn’t deliver warm fuzzies. I am saying that objective, peer reviewed, academic journal style proof is pretty obviously not his cup of tea.)  So, I sigh.

Often, like in my last post, I talk about how great it is to approach life as if there were no god, and often it is.   But, I confess, I miss believing that the universe could be bent to my whim, even if just a little.  I miss having the ultimate “friend-who-works-there” benefit.  I really do miss that paradigm sometimes.

However, I don’t miss the constant disappointment of God occasionally doing exactly as I prayed, occasionally doing the exactly the opposite as I prayed, and most often of all, doing something between.  Almost as if… Horrors! The actions of God were a totally normal scattering of points on bell curve!

Reality is, it turns out, not entirely unlike my home: a sort of crappy place where nothing works as well I want it to, but special because it is truly mine.  Sometimes I look wistfully around it, and wish I was comfortable carrying more debt, but I would rather own something real than pretend to own something false, but much more pleasant.  I would rather believe in the obvious fact of a God who (if there at all) is largely indifferent, than the comforting idea of a God who really cares.

A bittersweet goodnight, from the huricane swept coast.

My Atheist claim collapses and is replaced with weak deism.

October 1949 is the official birthday of the People’s Republic of China.  Any student of history can tell how poorly planned economies work.  One needs only to look at the Great Leap Forward to see how badly planned economies can fail.  And yet, for the first few years after the Communists won, things went better. Why?

Well, it’s not that Communism is that great.  It’s not.  It’s simply that the system of overlapping warlords it replaced was so truly awful that anything, even Maoism, was a distinct improvement.  Within about 5 to 10 years, Chinese Communism had reached its systemic limits and began to deeply hurt rather than to help China.

The point here: it’s not that Communism was so good, it was that the existing system was so bad that even Communism was an improvement.

Atheism is not a perfect fit for me.  I can’t honestly say I am an atheist.  But I can honestly say that not expecting God to help me with day to day struggles and challenges has been one of most rewarding experiences I have ever had.  I am thus, presented with a conundrum: I believe that God is very likely but find the less I have to do with Him the more joy and happiness I experience.

So why believe in God at all? Why do I wish to believe in God?  Well, to be honest, though intellectually weak, one reason is because my parents do.  I’m not pleased with that as an answer, but honestly, if my parents were conservative Muslims instead of conservative Christians, my philosophical struggles would be of a different nature.   Had my dad been an astrophysicist and golfer with a penchant for tintinnabulation instead of charge nurse and Sunday school teacher with itch for IV Demerol, I would be a very different person.  So if I am going to be honest with myself, at least one of the reasons I believe in God is because I always heard it at home.  I can’t reorder my intellectual DNA anymore than could my physical DNA.

I shave the stubble of my brain with Occam’s razor.  To quote Wikipedia… “This is often paraphrased as ‘All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.’ In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam’s razor is usually understood.”

Occam’s razor applies to two instances for me.

The first (the objective one) is the huge amount of evidence for the big bang theory.  The big band theory is not a perfect explanation for the the origin of the universe.  It is certainly not nearly so complimentary as the idea that the whole universe is a vast and complicated diorama created with humanity in mind to help them mark the changes of seasons and draw their attention to God.  Regardless, it is the best available theory.

Its weakness is that parts of the theory seem to operate in a manner inconsistent with the laws of thermodynamics.  Matter cannot be created or destroyed, yet the matter had to come from somewhere. Until further evidence is available, I say God seems a likely candidate.   Yes, I know this is the “God of the Gaps” theory; that we invoke Gods to explain things we don’t understand and if we do, those Gods’ jobs gets smaller every year. So what?  To me Occam’s razor says, considering the evidence, there was most likely some force which existed before force existed.  That sounds like the realm of the Divine to me.

The second and final one, is an answer to a prayer I received.  I know this is subjective, but subjective doesn’t mean false, it just means subjective.  You see, after many days of some really horrible experiences that I am not going to detail here, I pulled into a grocery store parking lot.  I needed to get another week’s worth of groceries, but I couldn’t make myself get out of the car.  To me, at that moment, buying another 7 days of groceries would be saying that I could carry on for another seven days, but I couldn’t, not alone.  So I prayed for a friend.  I needed a friend whom I could trust enough to be myself around.  Someone who would love me and let me love them.   Someone I could be vulnerable with.  Someone I could hold and touch and be held and touched in return.  So I prayed for it.  I prayed for the love of a kindhearted woman.

And having prayed that, I walked into the grocery store.  And I met this beautiful checkout girl.  We’ve been together for almost 8 years now.

Now, I could believe that my subconsciousness did this and that, and that in an infinite number of universes representing an infinite set of possibilities that this is mere chance.  I asked an invisible being for something and got it 30 seconds later.  I take 3 possible routes with this.

(1.)  Pure coincidence. (2.) Invisible workings within me. (3.) Invisible workings outside of me.

I find the first to be unlikely.  So, it’s a battle between the second and third.  To me, the second seems unlikely because I have the happiest marriage of anyone I know.  I work hard at my relationship with my wife with enormous rewards, but I had worked hard on my relationships with the girls I knew before her, too, and without the rewards. My (now) wife had prayed earlier that week for a man to really love her.  It seems like this relationship was very special, from day one.  To me, Occam’s razor here again says God.

So now I must admit, I believe in God. But despite me belief in God, I believe that my life goes best when I live like there is no God.  I believe in God, yet persist that the atheist perspective brings freedom.

Well, I wrote the blog before to complain about a world of miracles.  This was the world I tried to inhabit before, a world which was influenced by my beliefs themselves rather than how my beliefs affected my actions.  It was a horrible place to live.  Everything bad was my fault, for not believing right.  Everything good was a miracle I could not claim credit for.

Every single negative thing in my life became my fault for not believing right.  Every good thing was God working.  I could not like myself for what I did right, only hate my self for my constant failure.  I wasn’t poor because I couldn’t get a good job.  I was poor because God had something to teach me.  I needed to suffer more to get enough of God to be happy.  I wasn’t unhappy because my life sucked, no, no.  My life sucked because I was unhappy.  If I had only had the discipline to make myself be happy when my world was spinning apart then my life would be great.  I would be OK that I didn’t make enough to feed my wife and daughter, because God would provide.  It would be OK that we couldn’t afford health insurance because God would either heal us or miraculously provide for us.

When I was eight I prayed that God would make mommy and daddy stop screaming, would make mommy stop breaking things, would make daddy stop hitting sister, would make mommy stop hitting daddy, would make brother stop cutting himself.   Home schooled and living in the country, I would pray for a girlfriend, so lonely for human touch that I would have panic attacks when I saw two girls hugging.  Later on, a charismatic acolyte, I prayed for a paralyzed woman. Marked her forehead with olive oil, laid hands on her and prayed she would walk.  I am to this day haunted by the vacant, pained look in her eyes as she sat and tried to get up (”Raise up and walk, in Jesus name!”) and found herself no more healed than when her husband laid her in the chair.

Researching afterward I found that God’s likelihood of “healing” someone is directly proportional to the likelihood of spontaneous remission for their particular disease.  Spontaneous remission is not the same as placebo, and is most common among “debilitating and progressive diseases such as cancer and tuberculosis.”  But totally unheard of for people with amputated limbs.  Not surprisingly there is no verifiable case of limb regeneration, leading some to ask what God has against amputees.

If there is a God out there, as I believe there probably is, he has enormous respect for entropy, physics and freewill.  Such that 99.9% of the time it’s just like he’s not there at all. I leave 0.1% for highly subjective experiences like mine, and other experiences that I have heard of from people.

But one does not dare trust 0.1% to save their life.  I don’t think God’s 0.1% miracles are enough to protect us from our own stupidity.  I don’t earn a lousy paycheck and expect God to foot the rest of my bills.  I used to.  Thats how I ended up $12 G’s in debt.  (Which I worked my ass off and repaid, btw.)

Further, if we, as a species, are looking for improvement, it will not come from any number of prayer meetings or prophecies.  They will come by working really hard for change. The early church (which changed the world) was different from today’s church, not primarily because of belief, but because of behavior.  They didn’t have canon to argue about.  They didn’t have a professional clergy sponging off the laity.  They didn’t have buildings to pay for.  In short, they focused on being loving and easy to get along with and taking care of their poor.  They were the change they wanted to see.  The early church only trusted God to take care of the poor after the the church’s money had been spent.

Now, if the world around us will not be changed despite sincerity of belief, can we ever change it?  What comfort can there be in an indifferent universe?  How ever much we choose. True, physics will not be bent for you, though you may pray frequently.  True, God either does not act or will not act (if you are are a Deist) or does not exist (if you are an agnostic or atheist).  But we choose whether we will care about our fellow man.  If the world is indifferent to our suffering it is because, by and large, people have chosen to be indifferent.

Does this mean I am saying I put my trust in man, rather than God?  A qualified yes. History shows God cannot be trusted to stop wars, famines, and plagues. Though man can be trusted to start them, he can also chose to fight them.

So, I am a weak Deist.  I believe the only sane world view to have is that God pretty much leaves this earth alone and I reserve the right to say he may influence people’s hearts once in a while.  But when someone tells me they have message from God, I will respond with Luke’s famous line to Vader in Robot Chicken, “That’s very… unlikely.”  I will not trust God to do anything for me.  I will not give him credit for the good that happens to me, nor blame him for the evil.

Word of Miracles

So, this is tomorrow blog today. I’ll be on the road tomorrow going from KCMO to Mississippi.  I want to write about miracles tonight.  Some of the people who read this blog are Christians, and for them I say, I mean no disrespect.  I am not saying that I am right or that others are wrong, I merely state my confusion.

The laws which physics describes are the engine of the universe.  It is these laws from which develop our concept of faith.  Faith in physics in the metric for faith in God.  It is because the universe functions consistently rationally that we even have a concept of faith.  The fact that one second at my apartment is equal to one second at work is both why I am able to get work on time, and why my employer is able to to have the expectation that I do so.   I never look at my clock and think, “Perhaps time is faster at work today than it is at home. I should call them and see if 0630 has come quicker there and I need to go earlier.”  All of us human beings have such faith in the non-subjective nature of time, that we can all use schedules, send messages, use phones, etc.

Miracles are a suspension of physics.  Be it the physics of water, physics of entropy, physics of time.  Miracles are the laws of physics being stretched and bent.

And for whom?  For God.  For his designs.  Through out the Old and New Testament, miracles happen to those who please God and those who don’t. Physics are bent to make a away.

I’ll be honest, I don’t want to live in world prayer changes things.  Oh, sure it sounds great at first.  My dad, like a lot peoples dads, is dying.  I love for him to be cured. But if the laws the physics are suppended, if entropy is stopped for me, is that the sort of world that I, or anyone else, wants to live in?

I imagine 2 applicants for a job, one the best candidate, the other not.  And the inept one gets the job, becase he prayed about it.

Two people work hard to provide for their families.  One gets food miraculously multiplied, the other starves, because the first believed in God and the second didn’t.

This is a world hard work means nothing, and were the faith we have in physics suddenly ceases to exist.  How would we work?  How would we survive?  How would we make it?

More God Babble

So, I grew up a conservative Christian.  Recently I made the decision to live like an atheist even though I don’t necessarily believe there is no God.  I decided to not trust God to make me happy, but to make myself happy, and not trust God to take care of my needs, but to take care of them myself.

I thought at the time that this would truly show me how much I relied on God, and restore my breaking faith.  Instead, I found that I was  peaceful and joyful.  The two things I had always wanted but never gotten from Christianity.  I also found I was better father and husband, I guess since happy people are less likely to be assholes than people who are depressive and angry all the time.

Most of my good friends are Christians.  Because I love them and am honest with them, I’ve told most of the ones I really care about that I am (1.) A very poor atheist [I prayed about the decision to become one!] and (2.) That I have no explanation for why trying to live like I didn’t believe in God would bring me more inner peace, and make me a better person than than when I tried to live like I believed in him.

There answers are various.  At least 3 people have told me that this is the process by which I drop the “false religion”  that I learned at home.  I grew up in a family that was both abusive (in multiple ways) and Christian, so there is probably some truth to that.

I’ve also been told that this peace is the peace of the damned, like the criminal who stands at ease on the gallows because he has accepted his fate.

I’ve been told that before I was struggling, so now, of course, not  struggling, I feel better.  I was on the fence before, so I am more comfortable not fighting to be with God.  Of all of them, that is the most offensive to me.

I do not consider the 25 years I spent racked with guilt, tithing 10 to 30 % of income, terminating relationships with good people “lest they lead me to sin” and spending hundreds of hours in prayer and Bible study to be “on the fence”  I consider it to be the best I could possibly do to walk out my faith. I didn’t think these things earned me a place in heaven, I thought that these works were the mark of faith, the same way my helping my wife with household chores is a mark of my love for her.

Finally, last nigh, I was told that all of that was a waste, because I had been trying to get to know God by what he had done for others.  I have to meet God not considering what he has done for others, but investigate on His own, without carrying in any emotional baggage of any existing relationship.

This personal God business is a weird one.  In a bit I write more that confuses me about it, the above is just me catching up anyone who wants to know with where I am at.

Explaining my atheist claim II

Published without any editing!

Dear Lottie,
  Well thank you, first of all.  As to me not being an atheist, a good friend pointed out to me that I am an even worse atheist than I was a Christian! Its true.

But I feel like atheist is more accurate than any other term because “There is no difference between a God who will not act because of his nature and one who cannot act because He doesn’t exist.”

If I call myself a theist, then the next logical question is what does this person of God want from me?  The answer I get is sacrifice. I spent the first 25 years of my life sacrificing, throwing away things and people that were valauble to me.  It was misery in the name of Joy, pain in the name of Healing, and despair in the name of Hope.

Maybe I can put it best in an analogy.  Pretend that tommorow a new best seller tops the charts, its called, I am your God by Kevin Bacon.  This book claims that I can have a personal relationship with Kevin Bacon if I just say I believe in him.  That his spirit will comfort me when I am broken and he guide my life. He is everywhere, all knowing, and all seeing.

Now, until the publishing of this book, I beleived in Kevin Bacon.  I saw him in movies and heard about him on TV.  I always trusted that even thought I have never met him in person, only seen his image in movies, that he was real.  But now everytime I meet a group of Baconites, they claim that Kevin Bacon is at there Church.  When I get there, there is no Kevin Bacon.  “He’s in all of us” they say.

Soon, people are being healed in Kevin Bacon’s name.  Other people are so upset that that start murdering Baconites in the street.  The movement grows.

Now, the most resonable belief at first was that Kevin Bacon was just an actor.  Then when absurd claims were made, the most resonable belief becomes that Kevin Bacon is a real person, who wrote a crazy book.  But there comes a point…  Extrodinary claims demand extrodinary evidence.  There comes a point when the claims of the Baconites are so aburd that the evidence of Kevin Bacon’s existence is no longer the most reasonable view.  Maybe there never was a Kevin Bacon, it must have all been movie magic.

Hmm, this has weirded me out about the legitmacy of the existence of God or Kevin Bacon so much that I think I will stop here.  This makes me see further flaws in my argument, and I’m not sure if that means the argument is wrong and thus its statement, or if it is simply a lousy argument for a true statement.

Godless Love

Acts Chapter 2 (44) All the believers were together and had everything in common. (45) Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. (46) Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, (47) praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

It was these verses, and ones like them, which led me to question the ultraconservative version of Christianity I grew up believing.  It was these verses, and ones like them, which led me to question the very core of my faith.  So, some introspection seems appropriate here.

These verses speak of a magical time in the early history of the Church. Everyone was equally generous, and no one abused this generosity.  They met together everyday to pray and probably to sing.  They ate together, sharing good times around their tables.  They constantly told God how great He was, and everyone loved them.  Seeing all this love and affection, approval and care, few could resist and their numbers increased everyday.

I read this passage for the first time when I was around nine or ten years old.  My home life was pretty rough in those days: lots of screaming, lots of crying, and some rare violence, so I suppose it’s no surprise that my heart locked onto this concept of the divine super-family of the early church.

“Why then, but not now?” I remember asking someone.

“Well,” began the voice of reason, “that was a special time, and God was pouring out special gifts as a sign, to mark the beginning of this glorious age of Christ in which we dwell.  But once the time of marking the beginning was over, God began to step back those special signs.”

And for a long time that was enough of an answer.  But the question still burned in me. “Why not now?”  Sometime later I would see the movie “The Mission“.  In part of the plot development, the Jesuits explain that the Indians live as the early Church, sharing all things in common.  After viewing the movie, my father remarked, “Well, the Indians were doomed.  Communism never works.”

But it did work in the early history of the Church; the Bible says so.  What made that time so different?  And the reasonable answer was repeated.  The question remained in the back of my mind, rolling around for years.  I suppose it was this question, in fact, which made me take the interest in cults I mentioned here.

Away at college, a new friend encouraged me to really study through the New Testament and see if I could find any evidence of this theory that those “special times” of the 2nd Chapter of Acts had ended.  I found evidence aplenty, but none of it was any good.  To prove this theory with one verse, you had to forget the one in the next sentence.  To use another, you had to ignore the verse previous.  From the evidence, no person trying to base their worldview purely from scripture, rather than from the traditions about scripture, could conclude that these fascinating things had ended.

And after much consideration, I became a “Charismatic“.  I did not make this decision lightly.  I detested the touchy, “don’t-think-just-feel” vibe that I felt the Charismatic movement represented, but I felt that if I were to call myself a Christian, then I must follow the Word of God, and the Word of God did not teach (in any textually valid way) that the Signs and Wonders of the early church should have stopped.

Yet, the evidence of the Church and the world around me showed clearly: The Signs and Wonders were gone.  There was an explanation, however.  The lack of the signs of God was caused by the lack of obedience to God.  And so I joined the church which I thought did the best at obeying God.  They believed God would use them as vessels to bring His Glory, and thus His Signs and Wonders, to Kansas City.

I still love those people. They were earnest people, desperately hoping for a better world.  But when I was truly presented with the chance to live the way I thought I had always wanted, I was repulsed.  I prayed about it.  I confessed it.  I said I wanted help.  But the idea of working my butt off, to give my tiny, hard earned wages away so that others could fritter away their time in 24 hour prayer grated on me.  Worse still, then I felt terrible for feeling that way.  Obviously, the Lord had so much more work to do in me for I was still so full of self.

It’s been three years since we left that church, broken hearted.  Sadly, hoping for a better world does not alone a better world make.  More questions, and my abiding love for reality, has lead me to atheism as a world view.  And now, surprising even to me, I want that communal life that seemed so repugnant only three years ago.  How did this change in world view make me desire this deep community?

Becky and I went to another Society for Creative Anachronisms class.  The class is held in the living room of huge, rambling country house.  It is owned by one couple, whose adult sister and her husband also live there.  They share many things in common, and “break bread” together from time to time, often with the strangers that wander through their door for the S.C.A. classes.

It’s lovely.  And it sets me to thinking how lovely it would be if Becky and I could do that.  I think of all my friends under one huge roof, laughing together, joking together, and working together.  I makes me feel warm inside just to think of it, like the memory of a hug. Why this 180 degree change?

And then I knew.  Compulsion.  I don’t have to love my friends now; I choose to.  I don’t have to force myself to love any yahoo I meet; I am allowed to be honest with myself and admit that I really love some people, and really dislike some other ones.  I don’t believe anymore that there is anything particularly moral about “loving” all 6.6 billion members of the human race (as if such a thing were even possible).  So, while the quantity of my love has gone down, the quality has gone up.

I don’t love people because I am supposed to anymore.  I love them because I chose to love them.  I can choose to share my home with the people I truly love, people with whom I share reciprocal giving of happiness.  Since there is no Holy Book which can tell me the “right way to love someone” (again, as if such a way existed), there is no expectation.  I do not perform for the people I love and they do not perform for me.  We love one another because, intrinsic to our very identities, our way of showing love is the way that makes the most sense to each other.

Imagining this house full of friends now is a house full of people who love each other by choice instead of compulsion.  What could be more wonderful than living with people who could have chosen to love anyone, but chose me and mine?

Situational Morality for Everybody.

Just a quickie today, I need to vacuum my apartment.

All morality is the result of a personal judgment.  As an atheist, I know that, but its harder for people raised in religious tradition to accept.

“No, no, no!” they cry, “The source of morality is God!”

And how do you know which God?

“By his Holy book!”

And how do you know which Holy book?

“Because he lead me to it!”

And how do you know he lead you to it?

“Because He told me!”

And how did you decide this still small voice in your head was his voice and not yours?

“I made a personal judgment.  Oh.”

See, ALL morality comes from a personal judgment.  Either you personally judge each situation, or you make an appeal to some authority.  If you make an appeal to authority, you must first execute your personal judgment on whether that authority, be it God, some Holy book, a tradition, represents a good authority.

So, all morality is ultimately situational and dependent upon the person deciding it. Doesn’t bother me, but man does that bum out the religious folk.

Love the sinner; hate the sin

I wanted to talk about the phrase “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”  For a long time, that phrase was the foundation of my social life. I tried to love people in that way, loving the person, but hating the evil they did. What, to me, was evil? The absence of righteousness.  What then was righteousness? Webster’s Online Dictionary says righteousness is doing that which is in accordance with divine law.  I hated that which the Bible told me to hate.

As you know, I have a lot friends these days which you might call “free thinkers”. In that community of people,which includes atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and other questioners, alternative lifestyles are much more common than in the Church.  So, I run into people living these lifestyles more often than I used too.

Until recently, I never cared about anyone who lead an alternative lifestyle, because I didn’t know any.  Now, a few of my many oddball friends fit into that category.  When you get familiar with someone, you can empathize with them, you can accurately imagine what it would be like to live life in their shoes.  You can imagine what they might feel.  I’d never before empathized for someone who was leading any other kind of life than mine and upon doing it, I find the views I held as Christian are vicious.  You can’t really love the sinner and really hate the sin.

A person is the sum of their actions and desires.  You are, simply, what you do.  Most of my readers are heterosexual Christians.  Pretend for a moment, that the tables are turned.  You are still your straight self, but you are suddenly part of a 4% minority. 96% of the population is gay, and most call themselves Christian.  Now hear the things that most Christians believe, from that perspective.

“I think your relationship with that woman, who I refuse to call your wife, is disgusting. I think the sex you have with her is repugnant. To have heterosexual urges that you chose not to act on is sin enough, but there is something especially sinful about having that kind of sex.  But I love you!”

“I think that you are a dangerous predator, and that you cannot be a Scout Leader, and that you shouldn’t be allowed to teach in a public school even if the law says you can.  I wonder what would even make a heterosexual chose a job where they work with children in the first place.  But I love you!”

“I think it is wrong for young children to be taught that people like you even exist.  I supported the removal of the book Heather has a Mommy and Daddy from my children’s school library. I oppose any kind of sex education course that teaches kids it is OK to be like you.  But I love you.”

“I believe that you are part of a vast Heterosexual Agenda that includes heterosexuals in places of cultural authority, like media providers and colleges campuses.  I believe this group is subversively trying to hijack our society by projecting a positive image of your empty and promiscuous life. But I love you!”

How loved do you feel when someone says that it is disgusting that you make love to your wife in both theory and practice, that because of who you want to love and be loved by you are intrinsically a sexual predator, that you cannot be trusted with children in a professional setting, that children should not even know that people of your persuasion exist, and that by association you are part of conspiracy to destroy this nation’s children, this nations way of life, and ultimately, this nation?  Does being accused of horrible crimes make you feel loved?  Is this how you treat the people you love?  Do you postscript love messages to your spouse with the statement “And your lifestyle is evil and worthy of eternal suffering?”

Of course not. Your lifestyle is everything that makes you who you are. It is your identity.  You cannot love a person and hate their identity. Its not possible to love a person and hate everything that makes them that person.  Either the love of the person, or the hate of the things they do; one must be starved.

I choose the love. Within the spectrum of Christianity, I could be seen as liberal or conservative. I didn’t want to starve the hate. Righteousness you remember, is being in accordance with divine law.  God hates homosexuality, it both the Old and New Testaments.  I wanted to be righteous so I loved from half a heart.  I could never let my heart free to love.  I might give my heart to someone who wasn’t saved.  They might die, and then this person whom I loved, would be suffering in eternal agony forever.  Think of the brokenness of spouse who’s beloved is POW.  Think of the terror.  Then think forever.  Your beloved suffering… forever.

So I only let myself love a little bit.  People I defined as Christians got the most love, but even then, I love too deeply to carry the burden of forever.  I couldn’t let myself love someone who might suffer forever, because when we truly love we share suffering.  We are hurt when our children hurt, and sad when our family members are sad.

I loved from who I wanted people to be, instead of who they were.  I missed out on love.  On relationships full of meaning and purpose, because I stopped my heart from going there.  I’m done with that.  As an atheist, I don’t believe in hell or heaven.  I am not afraid to love because of the hurt of the knowledge of eternal pain, nor do feel I can live without friends, safe in the knowledge I will see them in heaven.  I must love my friends right here, right now, because any of us could gone tomorrow, and that would be the end.

Never in my life have I felt so loved as I do now, giving my heart away as I am doing.  This is the face of Joy.  This is the life of purpose and meaning I have longed my entire life.  This is the way I was meant to live.

Doing instead of praying

Tonight is the last day of a what has been a very long week for me.  I am tired and a little cranky. I feel misunderstood and brittle.  I HATE feeling misunderstood and brittle.  I know its bogus, but I associate certain emotions with certain people and certain parts of life.  To me it is below the dignity of a grown man to feel misunderstood and brittle.  These are feelings more appropriate in the mind of 13 year old girl, than in the afore claimed “peerless” mind that drives my cognitive and not so cognitive processes.

Sometimes, I think my mind is a parliament, with each portion of the brain represented by a desire in the mind.  A vote is taken, and the decision is, despite rigorous protest by the intellect, the mind is going to tell the ego that it feels bruised.

Why? My sister pointed out my glowing report of the “God Optional” groups I am enjoying leaves out the fact that most of these relationships are taking place online.  She makes a very valid point that I can’t really judge the situation with people that I do not have to deal with face to face.

As any married person can tell you, its far easier to feel like you love someone you don’t live with.  Living day in day out with someone lets you see them at their most real.  Talking to people online lets you see them at their LEAST real.

So, I have to ask myself:If atheism were a heart throb,  am I infatuated with atheism and its adherents, or is this true love?

My answer: I don’t care.  I am happy.  I am not lying to myself to convince myself I am happy.  In my previous life in the Christian community, those things happened much less often then they do now.  Maybe this is infatuation.  Perhaps, I will find out that atheists/agnostic/skeptics are in fact the people the church taught me to fear.  But I doubt it.

I doubt it, because this isn’t about standing on a soap box and yelling “There is no God!”  That would be dumb.  This is about a view point, a vision, quest for a mind that loves real. Through out my Biblical training my favorite stories were the stories of the areligious, anti-magical-thinking, skeptics.  In the Bible, these are the men and women who got things done.

Like Job, who in the midst of suffering did not say “Oh, I count it gain to suffer loss for God!” But demanded an answer from Him.

Women like Jael, who while her king was going from seer to seer looking for something that made him feel better about the attacking enemy, chose instead to seduce the king leading the attackers and kill him with her own hands.

Jehu, (who’s moral philosophy was obviously LeVeyan Satanism) who lied to his enemies, telling them he planed on making a great sacrifice to Baal, then killed his enemies in their own temple, and then made public toilet over their decomposing bodies.

Ester, who seduced a king into letting her people defend themselves.

Ruth, who seduced a wealthy older man into marrying her so she could take care of her loved ones.

Zachias, who was seen by Jesus not because of the fervency of his faith, but because he saw a problem, recognized a solution, and put it in motion.

Paul, (whose shadow made hankies so holy when it fell on them, the hankies could be mailed to friends who would be healed) mysteriously, does not tell Timothy to get a holy hankie, but suggested some red wine now and again.

These people were not atheists.  They were not agnostics, or even skeptics.  They were Jews and Christians, many listed for their piety.

They had the mindset.  They asked why.  They DID rather than PRAYED.  It is this mindset, and not the concept of godlessness that I am in true love with.

Orgy of loneliness

Beautiful, isn't it.

I am often accused of being controversial for the fun of it.  Sometimes, I am.  However, often as not, I am just writing from the heart and my heart is, I guess, full of controversy.  If you are so offended by controversy that you cannot read something controversial to the end, please don’t read this, because I don’t want to deal with the questions and responses of people who only read half.  Also, if you don’t want to know about what I was thinking and doing in regards to sex when I was a teen, again, stop reading, because I am going to be totally honest.

I began looking at online pornography around the age of 12 or so.  Pornography is a available with many themes, and one that intrigued me was orgy themed pornography.  Orgy is a French loan word, which came to France via the Latin orgia, meaning secret rites or secret revels.  (For the not so literate, a revel is big party.) The idea here is a big party where secret rites are practiced.  I’m not clear on the etymology (story of the meaning of a word) but orgy came in English to almost exclusively mean “a bunch of people having sex with each other all at once”.

I wasn’t only attracted to the representation of orgy in pornography, I was attracted to the very idea of it, the concept of it.  This concerned me. As a young teen growing up in a very stereotypically Christian environment I had (obviously) the attendent sexual obsession, but also the attendent homophobia.  Half the people at an orgy were male. Though the men at an orgy were having sex with women, to be in a room where other men were having sex, even with women, seemed gay.  Homosexuality held absolutely no appeal whatsoever, but orgies seemed appealing.  I struggled to answer why.

Around the same time, I took an interest in cults.  I read everything I could get my hands on about cults, particularly ones that included sexual deviancy.  I think I did this because I considered the my desire for pornography, masturbation, sex, and particularly orgy to be a sin in and off it self. (A position, I might add, that the church agrees with.)  To look at porn and to masturbate were, in my mind, bad enough.  That I desired to do these things and to have sex with my female friends, and particularly desired to be having sex in a room full of other people having sex, was appalling to me.  I felt incredibly ashamed.  So, I guess it was natural that I looked for a group of people where everyone was like me, where my desires were not a deviancy to be ashamed off, but a communal value, perhaps, even a virtue.

When I discovered the record of the Oneida Community, it seemed that I had discovered paradise.  The Oneida Community was group of “Bible Communists” who lived in upstate New York.  They believed a lot fascinating things, but the ones of note here are their sexual practices.  Unlike many cults which have achieved infamy for their sexual oddity, the Oneida’s were not primary a “sex cult”, they were a real religious group which positively effected the world around them.  It just so happened they had some unique sexual practices.

The foundation of these practices, was called Complex Marriage.  Complex marriage was a theory.  In theory, every one in the commune was married to everyone else in the commune.  Everyone shared in parenting.  Sex was seen as both physical and spiritual.  They saw nothing sinful in sex as long it was practiced in their unique way.  They were not unaware of the procreative aspects of sex, and this figured into their social norms. They considered the ability to prevent ejaculation as spiritual discipline.  For this reason, young men were paired with post-menopausal women until they had mastered this control.  Men and women who were capable of prolonged and mutually enjoyable sexual encounters were considered spiritually mature.  Immature believers were paired with them until they learned the lessons, at which point they would also begin to rotate through the commune to spread “love”.  Each member had about 3 pairings a week.  All children were planned, wanted, and raised by all.

To me this sounded like the most wonderful state of human affairs on earth.  Of course, it didn’t last.  The values got corrupted and church leaders got the most nubile and young with whom they were not “spiritually disciplined” and had many babies, not all of which were wanted by the whole community.  Aside becoming selfish lovers, they also became selfish about those lovers.  Demanding that the laity share, the clergy refused to share their treasured few.

When I was 18, and looking to move out, I looked at several “swingers’ clubs”.  For the naive among you, a swingers club is often much more than a place where people interested in anonymous sex can meet (that’s what singles bars are for).  Swinger’s clubs have rules.  Often everyone gets together once a week.  In some clubs you can’t refuse anyone who asks, in others, there are certain formalities of asking.  Some clubs require that sex take place in front of all other guests.  Some require that it does not.   The point is, all of them have certain rules and methods of operation to prevent a sex cult from forming.  By “cult” I mean they struggle to make sure that everyone relates as equals, and no one had undo force on any other person, to ensure total consent.

None of them were attractive, and coming to undertand why helped me put two and two together.  The reason that orgy themed pornagraphy had interested me in spite of myself, the reason that the Oneida Community had seemed to call to me so much, the reason that the swingers clubs had so little appeal, was all the same:  What I wanted was the intimacy.  The reason that orgy as a lifestyle intrigued me was the idea of being so loved. To love a community of people, so much, and have that love be returned, to love the women so much that I could make love to any of them, and to love the men so much that I would share the women I loved with them was what I wanted… In short, I wanted to be loved. Not just by an individual, but loved by a whole group.

I wanted it, but I was a conservative Christian.  To me to turn my back on the values of Christianity was a death sentenence.  Once I even took one step on that road, the full consequences would be taken.  I didn’t really want to get into some freaky sex, I wanted to be loved.  I wanted, however, a love the church could not give me.  The church cannot love you for who you are, since you are at worst a sinner and at best a “saint who sins”. If who you are isn’t spiritual, then loving that part of you is sin.  They can love the part of you that prays, but not the part that works on trucks.  However if you pray and evanglize, then they can love the part of you that prays as well as the part of you that works for a living. They must love you because Jesus does.  I didn’t want to be loved out of duty or obligation, I wanted to be loved because I was unique and special.  My love of science is as much a part of who I am as my love of my wife and daughter.  I wanted to belong to a community that loved ALL of me, not just the spiritual parts.

As many of you know, when I was 18 I very seriously considered going to Philadelphia and starting a sex cult.  I never thought that this would be right or healthy.  In fact, even as I considered it, I thought that it would be corrosive to my very soul.  Ethylene glycol was an early antifreeze.  It is so like sugar that it even tastes sweet.  It brakes down into the blood just like sugar, cell by cell.  Then it goes to fuel the muscles just like sugar.  Then it metabolizes into poison, this poison is filtered out by the kidneys. They stop working, and you die.  Sex is so like real intimacy that its easy to confuse the two.  Then at some critical point in your life where you need intimacy to make it, all you have is sex, and a part of you dies.  I knew thats what would happen to me.  But I was so desperately lonely and hungry to be loved by a community of people, that I almost accepted the second best to nothing at all.  I didn’t care about the personal cost, I just wanted to be wanted, not because Jesus said so, but purely because of what I have to offer.

I didn’t go start a sex cult, I tried, instead, another avenue.  I thought maybe I should go into “ministry”.  I went to bible college, I tried campus groups, eventually, I even joined a wild eyed charismatic church who talked big about the coming revolution and change at any cost.  Let me make clear here.  My point is NOT is not about sex.  My point is that I was so desperate to be loved by a group of people that I would have used sex.  I would have done anything, I would have even given my life.  And so desperate was this desire, that knowing full well I counldn’t get it with sex, I was almost willing to to use sex just to feel like I had it when I did not.

None of it worked.  No mater what I did, I couldn’t be loved for what I have to offer, I had to be loved for who I knew, Jesus.  I couldn’t be loved for what I could do right now, I had to be loved for what I could do in some distant future.  And finally, and most painfully of all, I could not be loved for what I loved (science, skeptisicm, and rationality).  The community that I wanted so much was not available in the chuch.

Of late, I have been spending a lot of time in the company of athiests, agnostics, and skeptics.  For the first time in my life, I am loved by a group not because I am pimping Christ, not out of duty, and not because I have potential.  I am loved for what I am, and greatest of all, the things that are most important to me: critcal thought, freedom, and truth, are something that people admire about me instead of tolerate.  That which I am, is loved and respected instead of channeled into things which “support the cause”.

The desire that I have had since adolesnce to be loved by a group for who I am is finally fufilled.  The Oneida Ideal suddenly has no appeal for me as I get what I need from people who respect me.  I don’t to compromise who I am to be loved, I can simply be myself and people seek me out. That which the church denied to me for 25 years I have found in the rebels of the church.  I have that “one thing” and I won’t ever go back.