The coming blue funk

Ok, so I am almost done with my Health Care V post.  It’s a honking 2k words and I need to edit the crap out of it.  I’ve actually found some false conclusions and mis-facts that I hadn’t caught the first time, but I will probably leave those in because the concepts are right, and the type of polishing I need to do will probably be part of larger project where I rewrite the whole US system. It probably doesn’t have a chance of getting published but I would like to do the kind of editing that published work gets, so you all get the 2nd draft instead, in a couple more days.

Being a full time student has changed the way I view the passage of time. My life is broken down into 8 week blocks, and I can keep alot better track of when I feel good and when I feel like crap.  I am nearing the end of pretty pleasant 3 weeks.  This Monday I just couldn’t get excited about going to work.  The day drags on, I seem to get head aches easier, and I am tired all day, but then can’t sleep when I get to bed.  The petty irritations of social interaction with strangers weighs on me.

Times like this…

are when porn seems like a great idea. Porn is a substitute but not a very good one.  The way I feel after hitting up porn because I am sad is the same I way I feel when I haven’t eaten all day and late in the night eat a bag of Dorittos.   Satiated, but still empty.

are when I wish I could go home.  I’m not sure why, but I checked out when I was around 15.  My parents did their best to make a home, but from about 15 all I could think about was leaving.  I’ve been on the run from myself every since.  It’s only been very recently I decided that when my enlistment is up I am going back to Iowa and I am going to build a real life there.

are when I wish I could still pour my soul into a six string the way I used to.

are when I wish I could be as broken on the outside as I feel on the inside and be taken home by a well meaning woman to sleep pathetically beside her. Me feeling blessed by her presence, and her by my tears.  It’s a primal feeling that I can never entirely shake.  It’s not about sex, just acceptance.  (The strength of that feeling is why I don’t get drunk, and why I don’t frequent bars, btw.)

are when I wish I could still go the community art class I took in highschool, and turn out delightful abstract nonsense on the potters wheel.

are when I wish the claims of religion had evidence, so I could believe them.

Some of these things have consequences I will not risk.  Once upon a time, these feelings made it hard for me to hold down a job, but I’ve learned to live with them.  It is rare, this early in my blue swing that I will wake up tomorrow and feel better.  Once this starts it takes about two weeks to work out.  But, it will get better.  There will be moments of dark clarity, moments of where melancholy poetry is possible, moments where, because of frailness a single kind word will carry me up to the sky.

It’s not bad to be me.  Sometimes it’s just harder than others.  I will not say there is something wrong with me because this happens to me.  I’m not damaged, just different.   Sometimes I look at sunrise and I see the glory of a new day.  Sometimes I look at sunrise and I try and find those happy hopeful thoughts, but all I can feel is the pressing blackness of another day of struggle.   Regardless of whether I see darkness or light, I’d rather be the me I am then try to be someone else.

Maybe that someone else, that perfect Christian self who didn’t feel those ways was the person I was running away from for all those years, and “home” was wherever I didn’t think I had to keep up the masquerade.

Triumph of Existentialism and Atheism

Every kid wants to be a hero. We all ran around the house with a bath towel cape at one point, thwarting our imaginary nemesis, enlisting an annoying little sibling or long suffering family dog for our trusty sidekick. At some point, we lose the towel and the spider-man underoos but for at least few the dream never dies. Some us do grow up to be everyday heroes: firemen, cops, EMTs, etc., but most of us don’t.  We go to college or get a good union job in the local factory and with time we stop thinking that we sold out. We change our definition of success until the daily grind meets it.

For me the desire to do something great and noble that I could truly be proud of never left me. I believed in a great story, written by the unerring hand of God and that God had a role for me in his unfolding drama.  God was the decider of human affairs. If I was to amount to anything in this world, it would be by the hand of God. I’ve been a very relational person my entire life, always aware of my emotions and the emotions of others. I could be carried up to the heavens with a single compliment or beaten down with a single harsh word. However, I had deep sensitivity to reality, an almost hyper-awareness of how feeling that something is true does not make it true. I poured myself into Christianity because it was the only context I had for greatness.

Adolescence didn’t cure me of these thoughts, but it did change me in two ways that weren’t compatible with Christianity. First, I became sexually aware. I thought about sex constantly and frequently while masturbating. Also, I began to struggle with occasionally despondency. God’s commands about sex and sexual fantasy are clearly withing marriage, and a Christian should be full of peace and joy, even in the midst of anguish, echoing Job’s “The Lord gives and takes away. Blessed be his name.” Relational as I way, this deeply concerned me. Love is shown in actions, sin “nails Christ to the cross again” so every time I was lusting I was hurting my friend and savior. I wanted a girlfriend and friends, and had none and few respectively. Christianity teaches that ones relationship with God is the fount from which all relationships flow, so when I was hurt, and lonely, and blue my pain was magnified by my additional failure to be totally content with God.

When high school was over, I was a full blown neurotic. The only thing I knew that I wanted to do with my life was to be great.  I had heard college was full of sex, drugs, and rock’n roll. To me, my inability to shut off my sexual desire showed my lack of self control. I knew the guilt that I would feel if I partied and slept with strangers, and out of fear of suicide in response, I went to Bible college instead.

Like so many young men away from home for the first time, the next part of my story begins with “So, I met this girl.” She was a little blond butterfly, social, friendly, and bouncy. I was so proud that she would even talk to me. At the same time, sensitive as I was, I knew she’d be hurt badly, torn apart inside. I could see it on her like a shadow.  Now in part I pursed her because she was cute, in part because she was aching. And I pursued because she was wounded in part because I wanted to help her, but in part because I hated myself. I thought I was trash, and thought when she realized what a filthy, disgusting person I was, only if she was desperate for man, only if she was broken inside, would she not leave me.

However, in the end, I broke up with her, believing her not to be a part of God’s plan for my life. I came home, and got a crappy job, followed by some random college classes. This became a pattern: work pointless jobs and fail out of college classes. I worked talentless, pointless jobs for almost nothing. I did it for two reasons. First, because I believed this was my path to greatness, from the lowly and humble to the top of the company by hard work and godly decisions making.  The other reason I believed this was because I still thought I was trash. I needed approval so badly and handled rejection so poorly that I took jobs any sane person would have turned down, because only when my peers were drug addicts, the developmentally disabled and the mentally ill did I feel I was appreciated enough in comparison.

During this time, I met the woman I am now married to. We did marry for love, but alloying that love was lot of desperation. For sex on my part and to get started having babies-for-Jesus on hers. I failed out college a last time, saying God needed me somewhere else, not that I hadn’t been proactive enough with my advisers about my needs as a student.  We were called to an inner city mission in Kansas City. The pain of previous failure would be worth it when we got to partner with God to save the city from Darkness. My daughter was born.

We went to that inner city saving church for 2 years. In many ways they were good years, but in the end, the church was a lot more interested in feeling like they were changing the world then changing it. Also the work environment I was in was filled with pornography, dirty stories, drugs, and cursing. To obey God and flee temptation, I quit my job, fully expecting God to give me a job that paid better, perhaps one SO nice, we wouldn’t have to take welfare anymore. The whole church prayed for us, but no one would help us.

Needing to hear that I had done the right thing, I called my brother, a pastor. He called me a fool and said that I was a failure as a father and husband.  I hung up the phone and sobbed like a little girl for three hours. When I could breathe again, I walked outside and sat on the porch. I looked at the clean new Cadillacs and broken beer bottles. I watched the drug dealers and the prostitutes mingle. I thought of my little girl upstairs. And the weight of it hit me. I was twenty five years old. My life was a third over and I had shat it all away.

In the words of Social Distortion “Well I’ve searched and I’ve searched/To find the perfect life/A brand new car and a brand new suit/I even got me a little wife/But wherever I have gone/I was sure to find myself there/You can run all your life/But not go anywhere.”  It was all my fault. I had done this all to myself. I was everything that Christianity said I was supposed be, possessing all the values that the Bible said I should have. I had lived in constant, slow, misery trying to find my place in God’s plan. I said out loud “American Christianity is a black hole. It’s never going to change anything. I’m going to find God on my own, and I am never trusting anyone else to take care of me or my family again. I’m never taking anyone’s word on what Truth is again, because the people that told me to obey God are sitting on their asses with good jobs and safe homes and I am sitting in fucking hole with loaded shotgun behind the door.” Three months later, the Air Force paid me for the privilege of moving all of my belongings to a prestigious a training school in Southern California.

I kept a promise to myself to truly understand scripture on my own. I read the Bible cover to cover and investigated the history of the early church.  A child could tell you it’s all just make believe. I didn’t make the cut in the 95% fail rate program, and for the first time in my life, the failure didn’t crush me because I didn’t care. I’d made my decision, I’d done my best. I took another career in the Air Force. I studied more and more about the Bible and began to study the things the Bible had argued with science. Science won.

And then I told my dear sweet wife, the one who had married me to raise sweet little Christian children with that I was atheist. It broke her heart. She would not have married me 5 years previous if I had been an atheist. I told her she could leave me, if she wanted a divorce I would give her one and she could have any portion of my income she wanted as long as I got to keep my daughter with me. She declined, and instead we began to get to know each other. And she fell in love again with the new me.  The me that didn’t think it was sin to sleep with other women, but chose her anyway.

And with time, the questions she had always had about Christianity became insurmountable to her. She progressed from Deist, to agnostic, to atheist.  For the first time in our lives, our future was what we made of it, not what our God ordained leaders said it was, not what the Bible said it should be, not what the Church said it was.  Our future was whatever we made it to be.  We worked our asses off. We got out of debt, became full time students, and began saving money. We started writing our own story.

That’s the key to atheism. I’m not a nihilist; I don’t think life has no meaning. I’m an existentialist. I think my life has the meaning I give it. For the first time in my life I am writing my own story. The things I did, the things I valued never belonged to me. Atheism has not cured me of occasionally struggling with despondency or even the rare depression I fall into. Importantly, neither did Christianity. Atheism gives me the freedom to accept occasional bouts of blue funk without feeling like a moral failure. Nor does atheism require to me to reject my emotional sensitivity and relational orientation as not manly enough. It takes away the right for others to tell me the best way to be…me.

Am I happy? Yes and no.  As I said, atheism and existentialism have not cured me of situational depression or high strungness. What is had cured is my belief that I need to be cured of my own identifying characteristics . I will make no apologies for what I am anymore, and ultimately, being content with who I am is a long way toward happiness. My whole life I wanted to do something great, something noble, something worth remembering. Now, I am. I am making something wonderful: me.

I am worth working on.  And starting from that single point, my dreams matter and are worth making real.

Life, Love, Sex, and Porn

Aching loneliness in my soul
Led me down paths strange
Shoveling cinder and coal
Burying me in burning shame

It seemed a simple thing at first,
Images of women’s kindness
Did amply slake my thirst
And restore in me fineness

But my thirst would not be stayed
By such innocent mintage
Twas like sipping lemonade
But wanting headier vintage

Searching out stranger strangers
Seeing things which ought not.
Watching clips of varied dangers
Finding not that which I sought.

Then, forgetting mad dreams
I flesh and blood pursued
In hope and without schemes
I let myself be used

Steamy pictures o’ erotic tangles
Had awfully prepared me
For a real relationships’ tangles,
Arguments, tears, and pleas

Porn and I then parted ways
Religion was my watchword
I fantasized not of other lays
And followed always cross-ward.

Religion didn’t heal me
From the aching at the start
In fact, it just buried the real me
And broke my aching heart

Investigation of church’s claims
Left me scratching my head
The church had nefarious aims
Obsessed with others’ beds.

So I left the sacred fold
Trading one lonely for another
Finding bits of soul I’d sold
And myself, and my lover

When porn was viewed
By more secular angle
Without religious skew
Or tempting fallen angel

I realized I was never seeking
some erotic chemical high
Twas on beauty I was tweaking
Eros when most shy

To strange pastures I went
Not for tolerance built
To creepy content I was sent
Driven by crushing guilt

Atheism, ironic blessing
Freed me from guilt’s’ bully
To be myself without missing
The parts that are not “holy”

Free from guilt and shame
I view what I find lovely
I’m not driven by pain
And skip what misogyny makes ugly

And I can see clearly
With all the women I view
Real women I loved dearly
And almost always you

My taste has improved
I’m not looking in dark places
With all the shots perused
Trying to find you in their faces

But such an awful thing to say
And even worse to do!
To shape images like clay
To dream of loving you

The dream I often visit
Is us physically together
But, somehow, not illicit
A love that time could weather

I would be scorned
I seek images in replacement
I want to love and be loved in return,
You’d gag at my abasement.

None of them are right
None of them are you
All of them are right
All of them are you

So, to what cannot be
Between us, (though we love you)
Onan and I will  see
What can I substitute

But it would misleading,
To blame only the ‘net
Your image is fleeting
For we’ve nott met yet

Morning dew gleams
Moon beams shine brighter
Life is better it seems
When love’s circle is wider.

I don’t want love to still
At some arbitrarily limit
I do seek a thrill
But only if love gives it.

I want love’s full expression
In context of friendship
Where physical affection
Is compassions apprentice.

So, I am seeking another
to have and to hold
Addition and keeping
Not substitution of old

I want to love with depth
A true equal and partner
But also with breadth
A circle out farther

Inventing Government

I like to invent things (even if only on paper) and I do so in spurts of enthusiam for different things.  For the last year or so, my enthusiam has been about religion and government.

General, cultural Christianity as well as my personal upbringing, instilled in me the paradoxical idea that government is (omnipresent) God in abstentia, along with some other conflicting ideas like freedom being a gift from God, but only for good people not for undesirables like homosexuals or the inner-city poor.   These ideas were among the many that burned off like fog in the sun when I de-converted.

But it left me with a ticklish problem.  If the purpose of government wasn’t the “or else” in the statement “Obey God’s rules, or else!” what was it? I studied different ideologies and rejected them one by one.  Some ideologies contained more truth than others, but ultimately I found a lot of them were based on false premises, and unconfirmable or unconfirmed data.

Since I’ve been fascinated by revolutionary movements since I was child (When I was 9, I planned out an eloborate and violent coup of my school giving it up not out of moral qualms  but because I realized ultimately, any resistance I offered adults would not result in children being granted our constititional rights, but serve as pretext to steal the few we had.) I had decent working knowledge of revolutionary movements, further enhanced by some pretty hard reveiw of revoltionary movements I undertook to offer advice to my so called “revolutionary church”.

This knowledge served me well, as world history is the story of the revolutionary movements that worked.   Even within the scope of revolutions that effectively won, most revolutionary movements struggle enormously with the task of switching from David to Goliath.

War represents a reversal of normal values.  Normally killing people and taking their stuff is socially condemned, in war, it is applauded.  Civil war is worse because it is more specific.  Normally killing your neighbor is socially condemned, in civil war, it is applauded.  The same key that increases a revolutionary movements’ chance to succeed increases the revolutionary movements’ chance to successfully transition for revolutionary movement to rule. That key is how the members respond to the entrenched ideology of the existing government.

People gather together around ideologies, from NASCAR tailgating parties, to the ritual cannibalism of the Eucharist.  If a revolutionary movement gathers under hating the existing system, it is gathering around hate and no change of system will change the organized , systemic, rage.  Most likely the hate will destroy unit discipline within the revolutionary cabal and it will collapse into organized crime and terrorism. (Al-qaeda and the Tamil Tigers). Should the the hate-based group stay organized under a strong and ruthless leader (such as Lenin) as well as defeat the existing government, it will transition to power by entrenching the existing system at the point of a gun.  This is why so many revolutionary movements become everything they abhor.

Contrariwise,  if a revolutionary movement gathers around the postive change that it wants to make, it can often become a competeing voice in the existing system, growing in legitimacy and power.  Should it succesfully overthrow the incumbent government, it has a post-revolution plan.  Since the people revolting were gathered around something besides destruction they tend to have better idea of what to do with power once they have it.  For an object lesson on this,  juxtipose the American to the French revolution.

The government classes I had studied as outstanding young Christian gentleman were centered on what was wrong with the existant American system.  They offered no plan, no system, no roadmap for post-change improvement.  It was believed, I think, that no roadmap was nessisary.  When things were “made right” God would magically make everything work.  Question: Why did terrorists attack? Answer: Because we we’re too soft on queers and babykillers.   When we stopped allowing shows like “Will and Grace” to be broadcast and made abortion illegal, or at worst difficult to get, then the terrorism situation would improve in the total absence of systemic change.

So I addressed my desire to understand government, and the flaws I percieved in various ideolgeous by trying to invent a new government.  I won’t make any argument against the componants of the existant system until I can offer a better peice.  Not a peice I feel better about, mind you, but one that does the componants’ function better.

And finally, it must be remembered we speak of a system here.  By definition, systems are interconnected.  If 3 foot rail gauge is better than Standard for a rail system, you can’t make one line narrow gauge and expect improvement.  Systems must be integrated fully to function at all.  Thus, I can’t offer a single better peice to governmental theory.  In the absence of total systemic improvement, individual peicemeal improvements are actively destructive.

I’m trying to invent a whole new government from the ground up, with consistancy and reason throughout.  It’s the largest, and most encompassing inventing I’ve tried.

Super Atheist III

So what ties the previous two blogs together?  In the first blog, I talked about sometimes missing the comfort the church provided me.  I spoke of speaking in tongues and the joy of sharing spiritual experiences with others.

In the next, I wrote about one of the best nights at house church.  What happened that night felt wonderful, a pleasure not entirely unlike the non-sexual part of one’s wedding night.  When you get married, there is this joy that seems to exist independently of the joy of sex . It’s the joy of belonging to someone totally and them belonging to you.  There is a spiritual sharing, a knowledge that this person is really, finally, yours.

And that was the feeling I felt that night.  My life would forever be tied to those people in that room.  We had all adopted each other, so to speak.  We had committed ourselves to love them, to care for them, to help them be the best they could be, and they committed the same to us.  There were perhaps 30 of us in that room, and we conscientiously decided we were going to be the early church together, God’s little point of light in Westport, Kansas City.

The feelings I felt that night were real.  The elation, the warmth, the affection.  All of those feelings were real feelings.  It’s just the premise which was false.  None of us really loved each other, not like that.   We all thought we did; I don’t doubt anyone’s sincerity that night.  It’s just that our hearts were writing checks our lifestyles couldn’t cash.

I remember once taking an old, rotten wood and canvas canoe down a river.  My father and I began with the feeling that everything would be OK.  The boat fell apart over a little 3 day trip, patched beyond repair. The next year we began another river trip, this time in a heavy aluminum jon boat.  Again we began with the same hope, excitement, expectation and the feeling that everything would be OK.  That trip was OK because our feelings were founded on solid fact, unlike the first, when the feelings were not.

The comfort of the church I miss is the false comfort of kindly lies.   I do miss the comfort of naivety, but not at the price of living a lie.  To be naive because you are ignorant of the truth is a normal part of youth.  To be naive because you choose to believe lies rather than truth is the first step toward mental illness.

Above all, I guess what I missed was the friendship, but upon reflection I realize, I didn’t have real friendship, but rather real feelings about non-friends.   An acquaintance asked me the other day if I still wanted to be friends with her.  I laughed out loud.  Real friendship isn’t something you choose to do, it’s something you cannot chose not to do. And that sort of friendship takes time measured in years and decades, not months.

Let me plug my friends Jason, Paul, and Ben here.  I have known all of them for 16 years.  Any of them would lay their lives down for me, and I for them.  We aren’t friends because we know how to be, we are friends because we don’t know how not to be.  All saw me through an awkward adolescence, the turbulent nine years of teenhood, 3 failed attempts at college, a failed engagement, marriage, fatherhood, ministry, and finally atheism.  And nothing I have done has made it possible for them to stop loving me.  That’s friendship.

I am not super atheist. I do miss the comfort of the church sometimes, but it was real emotions based on false events.  I miss the feeling, not the falsehood.

Communion memmories. (Super Atheist part II of III)

It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t been there.  Fasting is hardship.  It’s not nearly so bad as starving, but it’s an experience that few westerns have had.  Shared hardship builds tight social bonds, and fasting is no exception.  We hadn’t eaten in three days.  The first day is easiest, you don’t even feel it till supper, really.  The second day is harder at breakfast, but easier in the afternoon.  The third day is pretty hard.  I’ve talked to people who’ve fasted for weeks, and they say the third day is the hardest, that your body is learning how to fast, metabolically.

Wednesday night we had all had supper together, and none of us had eaten since.   Eating together also forms bonds between people.  The early church broke bread and praised together in houses Acts 2:46 and so did we.  Everyone had brought something, a casserole, a dessert, finger food, prepared with shaky hands and growling stomachs.  Have you ever prepared food when you haven’t eaten in 70 hours?  The anticipation is almost crushing.

There was so much food it was overflowing the table, crock pots were circled around outlets like campers around a fire, and chairs were loaded down with platters and bowls.  We stood around the table, hand in hand.  It was strange how we looked at each other.  Our eyes were shinning like lovers as we looked into each other’s souls shamelessly.

We prayed in a babble of tongues for a time, each person worshiping God in an inscrutable language he blessed them with, and then stopped, looking at each other breathlessly.  We ate, at last.  We talked, we laughed, we loved.  We all loved each other.

Finally it’s time for communion.  Communion is a joy, but also serious business.  Many modern Christians have forgotten that God punishes those who take communion unworthily with death and damns them to hell (First Corinthians 11:27-37). This same passage also tells us that to take communion is to be in unity.  We knew that.  We had chosen this communion to be special.

This was our standing before the lord as one.  We took communion together that night not only because we loved Jesus, but because we loved one another.  That night, before we took the cup, we each affirmed that we loved each other, and that we bonded ourselves together, to care for one another as Christ cares for us.

The next post I write will tie this and Super Atheist together.  Thanks for reading all, and thanks for the comments, both for and against my position.

Super Athiest

I have an online acquaintance who is disabled.  She speaks often of a struggle she has, which she calls the “Super Cripple” complex.  (Read her blog here).  Are you familiar with positive stereotypes? A positive stereotype is a belief which infers imaginary abilities to a group or subgroup, such as black people being better at sports or Asians being better at math, etc.

She deals daily with the struggle to accept herself as she is, rather than a Hallmark Movie caricature of herself crafted of positive stereotypes. She calls this caricature “Super Cripple”.  SC never gets tired of campaigning for human rights. SC can wheel-up gradual stairs.  SC is super, she doesn’t need help from ANYBODY!  The reality, of course, is that disabled means “less able” and she does need help.  The real strength is accepting the reality of needing help, rather than trying to pretend she doesn’t by playing the fictional part of SC.   Accepting this every day remains a challenge for her.

My struggle, or one of them, is to not be Super Atheist.  Super Atheist finds purpose and joy without God or religion.  Super Atheist doesn’t need faith; Super Atheist has reason!  Super Atheist never believes sincerely with one part of his mind something that another part of his mind knows is actually false.  Super Atheist finds happiness in holidays like Easter and Christmas, because even though he knows there is no God to celebrate, he is with his family and that is what really counts.  Super Atheist never wants to go to church, or take communion, or pray for the broken of the world. Super Atheist can do anything!

But the thing is, I’m not Super Atheist.  I miss the comfort of the God hypothesis.  The idea that I am here for a capital “P,” Purpose, a participant in a grand narrative.  I miss the afterlife hypothesis.  The idea that what we do on earth has a greater meaning than the handful of lives we touch, and that evil which is not caught in the here and now, will someday be punished in the after life.

I miss crappy church.  I miss getting dressed up and going and singing once a week.  I miss real church…a lot.  I miss sitting in a room full of adopted family, and singing and praying and feeling loving and loved.

I miss speaking in tongues and the emotional high that it brings.  Actually, come to mention that, I really miss it.  Someone would come forward and we would all put them in a group hug.  We’d all go around the circle and “pray a message of God’s heart for that person” which amounted to telling the person how valuable they were, how loved, how special.  It felt great to do and to have done to you. Then we’d pray in tongues.  The reason part of the brain idles down, and the emotional part revs up.   I’ve never taken 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (Ecstasy) but speaking in tongues seems to have the exact same effects.   From wikipedia:

• Mental and physical euphoria
• A sense of general well-being and contentedness
• Decreased negative emotion and behavior such as stress, anxiety, fear, and paranoia
• Increased sociability and feelings of communication being easy or simple
• Increased urge to communicate with others.
• Increased empathy and feelings of closeness or connection with others
• Reduced insecurity, defensiveness, and fear of emotional injury
• Decreased irritability, aggression, anger, and jealousy
• A sense of increased insightfulness and introspection
• Mild psychedelia (colors and sounds are enhanced, mild closed-eye visuals, improved pattern recognition, etc)
• Enhanced tactile sensations (touching, hugging, and sex for example all feel better) Ask any married Pentecostal if you don’t believe me, by the way, sex after praying in tongues is an amazing spiri-sexual experience.)

And I miss them all.  Above all I miss feeling like I was apart of something really special:  a 2000 year old Royal guard, still fighting the rebels to have the kingship of the true and most high King recognized.  There is a romance to words like “Kingdom”, “Knight of the Cross”, “Sacred purpose”, “Most High”  that words like “country”, “community advocate”, “special reason”, and “President” simply cannot match.  Though administratively identical, they are rhetorically worlds apart.

I am not Super Atheist.  I confess, I have a desire in my heart to gather with believers, to sing songs of worship, reverence, sorrow, penitence, and heroic victory.  I long to kneel, to dip the broken crust in the wine, to speak the words of my heart to a friend and Lord.  My only caveat is that he not be imaginary.  I desperately want to sing, worship, kneel and gather my community around a real God.

I long for a god, a religion, a purpose, and grand narrative.  I long for everything worthy religion gives man.  My disbelief in God is not the result of a lack of longing, but a lack of God.

Atheism and Simplicity

Happiness is a funny thing.

It’s so transient.  Today was my last day on 60+ hour weeks.  My box of bike goods arrived, and my new duty time is 0630.  So I will be riding my bike to work again.  I will be seeing my family again.  I am getting rid of my little Panda. (I liked the Panda, it was a fine little car, but I’ve learned all I can from it.  I’d like to have small car that I can hot rod a bit, and if I fix up the Panda I’ll have the world’s fastests P.O.S.)  I’m getting a used Volvo V90.  I’m putting it on finance to work up my credit score, though I could afford to buy it in cash.

Everything is working out my way for the first time in awhile, and today I am happy.  I thought for a moment that I sort of missed being able to thank God.  But then the one sidedness of that relationship came back to me.

I think I would still be religious if it was OK to get angry at God.  I had a great day today, and I wouldn’t mind thanking God for it if when at some point in the future, when I have lousy, lousy day I could be pissy at God.  I mean if a good day is His fault, then a bad day is too right?  He’s either Lord of all or He’s not.

But no, bad days were always somehow my fault.  Even if I didn’t cause the ‘badness’, I was sinning by not blessing God in a bad situation.  I was sinning by doubting, sinning by having such a poor attitude, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Today I am happy.  Sometime, sooner than later, I won’t be.  Crap happens. While I am happy I will celebrate with my loved ones.  When I am sad, I will be sad with my loved ones.  No fault, no failure, no blame.  Life is so much simpler and more peaceful as a spiritual atheist than as a Christian.

Dearest

I wish the me I am
could be as good as friends
with the you that you are

As the me you thought I was
Was with the you I thought you were.

My id tells me that I need to move on, goodbye dearest.

I know when you say “I am atheist” people think, “Ah, you don’t believe in spirituality at all.”  Actually I do.  I believe, with the existentialist, that things, in general, have whatever meaning you give them.  From time to time, I have these incredible dreams.  One such dream is one of the first things I blogged back on my crappy Yahoo360 account and can be read here.

I was in little cabin, a shed almost.  The wood was weatherd a dull, lifeless gray .  Sunlight was pouring the open door, and I was looking out into these green, rolling hills.  My wife was out there somewhere, waiting for me, but I couldn’t make my self go.  Some darkness, some inner dread, kept me from walking out the door.  I turned back to the cold fireplace, the fire long gone and stared at the ashes.

There was a captain ladder behind me to the attick and I heard the squeek of someone coming down.  I turned, and behind me stood three women.  The first was my highschool sweetheart.  The second the woman I dated in college, and very nearly married.  The last, a stranger to me.  They were all beautiful, but etheral somehow.

They smiled, bitter sweet, slightly hurt smiles as they walked towards me. The two I knew gave me a speech, and it went something like this.

Dearest, we are your ghosts, ghosts of relationships long dead. You have kept your ghosts well and held our memories dear.  But it’s time to grow up.  Please let us go.  Stop keeping the memories alive.  We’re not real.  The women you remember are long gone, and we can’t ever be them again, not in body, not in spirit.  You can’t ever be the man we loved again.

Darling, you don’t need us anymore.  You’ve held our memories because you were sad and broken then.  To a broken you, our love, our compliments, our attention was the greatest thing you ever had.  It’s not anymore.  You are loved now, respected, treasured.  You don’t need us anymore.  Let us go.

The one I didn’t recognize stepped forward.  She touched my face, gently.  As I looked I recognized her.  When I got kicked out of Bible college she was the waitress who offered to take me home at the end of her shift, the girl who folded my laundry when I forgot it at the laundry mat, the CNA who rubbed my shoulders as I charted the worst shift ever, the girl who put my arm around her at a hayrack ride in youth group when I was too chicken to do it.  She was evey female that ever made me like I was someone special instead of trash.

They all held me.

“Goodbye, my dears,” I said.

“No hard feelings, beloved.  Goodbye.” They said

I stepped to the door, and woke up