The end of an era.

Many Christians, today, do not want to admit that what we are seeing in this world, is the end of a very long era.
I was reading a wonderful Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece by famed member of the Four Horsemen, Daniel Dennett. You can read the article here.
Dennett's main point was, I think, that as we get more and more intelligent and have more access to information and news and ideas, we are less likely to believe in the supernatural. People will not turn to God if they believe he is irrelevant.
But, likewise, if something horrible happens, he says, like a real world wide catastrophe, you will see a drastic rise in religion and religious participation.

For me, I rejoice in the knowledge that people are falling away. If you have time someday, go to r/exChristian on Reddit. Read a few of the posts on the first few pages. There are tons of young people saying on this subreddit that they are no longer able to delude themselves into buying their parent's beliefs, and they are falling away. And, even in the face of harming family relationships, these young people are deciding that being honest and truthful is better than lying to themselves and others.

The reality is, for Christians, that, as long as they try to continue to sway people back, but don't really live according to their own avowed beliefs, things will continue to go sour. I know many people who only attend church because they believe that it's the right thing to do, or because that's all they've ever done.

But, there are also those who are Christians, but who do not go about bashing folks on the head with it. They may or may not attend church. They may or may not even acknowledge their own faith to others. These people, whether they know it or not, are the next stage of Christianity. And hopefully, they will find it in their own hearts to continue on this road of silent observation.

Sadly, though, as with anything, as something dies, it becomes more violent, more radical. The death throes of organized religion are upon us. But, as we get closer, the people who are irrationally dependent on their 'faith' will be more vocal; will go to new and horrid lengths to bring out the worst in their religion.

We, the rest of us, must watch for these people. We must handle ourselves carefully. But we must not live in fear. We must be willing to help those who are leaving get where they need to go and we must be patient with those whose lives are being ruled by fear. As we watch the end of the era of Religion, I hope that what we see are people getting the help they need from the more viable belief systems.

Lost and found

As a parent, the worst possible pain you could suffer, short of losing your child is to not know where they are for a prolonged period of time.
A family member's daughter disappeared for just over a day and the entire family was horrified.
The feeling of helplessness was awful, even for those of us far away.
At one point I messaged my two oldest Christian friends and asked them to please keep their thoughts on the situation.
I did this for two reasons: first, they both have daughters. Second, I no longer believe praying helps me.
But each of them still do. So I knew I would feel better telling them.

There is nothing wrong, on my book, if people pray. It is a form of communication and meditation. I do meditate, but I can no longer pray in the main Christian sense.

Almost immediately after I told them, they found her. I do not make claims here. I only know it helped me to share it with them.  Whether is is a ghost of the amputation of religion from my life; an old habit hard to break or just silliness on my part I cannot say.

All I know, is that I am so relieved for her family, that she's been found.

Feeling and no longer feeling.

As a Christian, I used to feel pretty sure that unless I was "on fire" I was falling short of God's glory.
"On fire" was a mentality that filled me with exuberance; high, happy emotions relating to God's literal presence in my life. These periods were short and irregular, but we were taught that this was the desired mentality to have.
When I wasn't on fire, in some cases, I was just regular me, with my guard down. Cussing, smoking, the occasional beers with my pals. And I would always, after times like this, feel that I had been sinning, because the reality was that while  I was being just a regular guy, I was being deceitful to my real source of joy, my faith.
There were times when, feeling down about myself for falling short, I was painfully aware of how far God seemed from me.
I struggled deeply with this. And it was in these times of pain that the doubts would begin to creep into my consciousness.
Was I really feeling God in my life? Was he really communicating with me? Did we really know for certain that we were doing this right?
These doubts plunged me even farther from my jovial self, because there was no relief from them and certainly, there was no way to discuss them with anyone. Doubts are not a viable thing in Christianity.
Over the years, though, I avoided trying to feel the On Fire joy. I tried to cleave a path of reality in the turbulent waters of life. I strove to be more honest with myself. I allowed the doubts to take root and grow.
But doubts are like tulips: they spend a long time growing, burst open in a vivid color and then fall away.
The more doubts I allowed into my life, the more I had to face the fact that, once the doubt came to fruition, what was left was an irrationality that I clinged to blindly.
The first to go was the belief that I had to maintain some florid exuberance and stay on fire.
I began to realize that suddenly, the way I was everyday, with all of my struggles and flaws and emotions was an okay way for me to be. I didn't feel any longer that I had to somehow keep up a fake and false feeling of spiritual excitement.
Also, I began to realize that, instead of sinning, and falling short of the glory, I was simply dealing with the things that humans deal with in their lives. Disappointments and dreary days and bad choices were all mine; they were all my own and no other had a say in them.
One by one my doubts flourished and left me with the realization that I had been scammed into trying to be someone else's version of who they thought I should be instead of being who I really was.
When I cottoned to that, I felt very resentful -- I was totally dismayed -- that there are others who, even in the face of evident truth, continued to persist in blind attempts to reach that emotional high, like junkies, rather than face facts.
For years, I grieved. I tried different versions of the faith, adjusting here and there, trying to maintain a personal tradition of being a Christian.
Eventually, though, it all fell away. No ritual, no precedent, not even tradition could hold me to what was basically a self perpetuated lie. I knew that, no matter what, the reality was, it was all a lie I allowed myself to believe.
When I came free of it, I was no longer seeking the painful impetus of religiosity, but was calmly and quietly mesmerized with life.
Do I still call myself a Christian? No. I do not and refuse to label where I am. There is no mysticism in it, except a willingness to find and revere the majesty of nature, of love and of truth. There's no need to wave your arms in the air to feel the spirit. You can actually feel genuine awe without convincing yourself you are.

Permanency

I am often caught off guard by how I take for granted things around me. I assume that, because they've always been a certain way, they always will be that way.
I do this, even in the face of the growth of something I've planted or the death of a tree.
I sometimes think that our sense of permanency comes from how short and narrow our perspectives are.
However, if we take the longer view, that we are only here for a short time, in the scheme of things, maybe it would help us to take more advantage of the time we have right now.
I often lament the ideologies that make us focus on the afterlife. But I also lament the ideology that makes us forget or helps us ignore the fact that we are someday not going to be here.
Every day is a gift. But nothing is permanent.

Contamination

I was watching a video, a few days ago that showed babies exploring and being curious, while Neil DeGrasse Tyson was speaking about how that natural instinct of ours to learn and explore; to be curious is quite often squelched by parents and adults at large.
It is called "The Most Human Activity". Watch it here.
This got me thinking.
Parents aren't purposely squelching this natural desire to explore. They are, at least in some cases, I believe, trying to keep the children safe.
However,there is a level of parental participation that falls down a terrible rabbit hole. Indoctrination.
It seems to me that basically forcing the children in our lives to believe things that we believe is falling short of what it means to be a parent. Still millions of parents across the world are purposely forcing their own beliefs on their kids.
Now, some of you will say that I'm overreacting. You will say that it is the prerogative for a parent to decide what to teach their kids. I agree. What I'm saying is it's fine to introduce your beliefs to your kids. What I'm not saying is it's not fine to make your kids feel as though they have no choice to decide for themselves if what you believe is right for them.
The downfall of the Christian Dogma is its mandatory participation. Of course, initially, it's singing Christian songs about Jesus and so on. But very slowly, as the child grows, it becomes inevitable that they make the connection that if they don't believe, or can't, they are sinners and won't go to heaven.
Imagine that!
For years, I strongly doubted and disbelieved. I was terrified to tell my mother, or my church family. I would have alienated myself and caused huge amounts of pain for everyone. All of this, because of indoctrination.
Now, many Christians will say that a child cannot get a good dose of morality without the Christian upbringing. Christians routinely exclude other moralities. None of them are good enough. They adhere to the "train up your child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it" mentality.
And this is not a bad mentality -- it's logical, albeit, not very religious. It can be applied to any child, anywhere.
But this is meant as an internal and not external statement. It refers to spiritual growth, not mental or behavioral growth.
Oddly enough, however, it really makes no difference, either way.
For example, my brother's son was baptised and we were made his godparents. Meaning, that if anything ever happens to my brother, we take over the role of parent. All of this happened in the church that they do not regularly (or ever) attend, and while we were getting ready, my other nephew had to wear this fancy outfit that had a sort of bib on it with the cross in white satin.
He asked his mother why there was a "plus sign" on the bib.
We laughed but this has always served as an example to me. Here was a kid, who, unlike his father or myself, had not been indoctrinated with all of the nonsense they pour into kids. No guilt, no sin, nothing.
He just is a kid. It's wonderful.
On the other hand, children who cannot escape the gravity of the beliefs of their parents, often wind up being so forcefully indoctrinated, that they cannot even begin to think outside of the faith.
The point here is, that it's fine to discuss your faith with your kids and even to extol its virtues. But it isn't something that should be thrust upon them at any cost. Let them decide.
I promise that it will be better for them in the long run, when they call up something they struggle with, and you don't force them at the gunpoint of hell to follow it.
We need to stop contaminating our kids.

Complicity

I remember a morality experiment from an ethics class that went something like this: you witness two muggers attacking a man in an alley. You are physically fit, know several martial arts and can handle yourself. What do you do?
Some of the class waded right in to the rescue of man.
Some were inclined to wait until the muggers departed.
Some just kept on and did nothing.
I always found the last two to be amazing. Given some time to think about this (which one wouldn't have, presumably, in real time) some people would just keep going.
When the professor asked these classmates for their reasoning, their answers varied slightly but all basically claimed they did not have enough information.
They felt as though the man maybe deserved it; it wasn't a mugging but two fathers beating up a perv, and so on.
The other group, those who waited for the attackers to depart had interesting reasons too.
What if they were hurt, how much help would they be? Is it just to use force against men who are doing the same, and so on.
This group believed they would make the situation worse by wading right in, so they opted to wait until the man was alone, before getting help.
Finally, there were those who waded right in; those who believed that no matter the reason for the attack, or the consequences of helping, it was better to do something decisive than to wait.
The professor then added a new aspect to the thought experiment. What if by not acting to save the man being attacked made you morally complicit in his attack? What if, by not helping him, for whatever reason, you became as bad as his attackers? He redid the votes, and far more came out for wading in to help immediately.
This always fascinated me, because by adding this one caveat -- complicity -- people saw themselves as being in the wrong even for inaction. Where once it seemed morally justifiable to wait and do nothing, faced with their own guilt, they would wade into fight for the man.
We spent the whole class changing up various aspects of the scenario and recording responses. Only two people maintained that they would wade right in to the victim's defense, no questions asked.
The point here is not to illustrate that people are motivated differently by different situations. The point is to call to mind the question of complicity.
There are many people who do not condone violence in the name of religion, even if they are adherents to said religion. They believe to their core that the violences, verbal or physical, perpetuated against others by members of their own faiths are the worst possible thing.
But what do they do to stop it?
I posted a video yesterday that showed a pastor advocating for a literal reading of the Levitical laws regarding homosexuals. (Scroll down to find it.)
I asked, what if there were people in that congregation who had a secret that they were terrified to share, because they felt trapped into being in that man's congregation?
What I failed to ask was how everyday common run-of-the-mill believers would feel if I told them that by not standing against this evil dogma within their own faith, that they were just as bad as this pastor.
What I failed to make absolutely clear was to point out that, even if you disagree with his doctrine or ideology, if you don't stand against him and his type, you become just as morally complicit as if you were up there yourself touting his sermon.
Christians and Muslims today are not all of this caliber of evil. But, again, by failing to root extremism of any sort out of their faiths, they are not only allowing monstrous evils to continue against innocent people, they are also morally complicit in those evils.
It's not enough to claim you don't follow that dogma. You have to actually do something about it.

True Commitments.

Over the last few years, close friends of mine have been working to open a brewery in our town. The idea is several years, or perhaps a decade old. But, from the Kickstarter campaign until today,  I have seen them go through the spectrum of human emotion.
They have been varying degrees of ecstatic, exhausted, frazzled, fried, frustrated, pissed off, elated, grouchy, on the brink of despair; they have experienced and lived through the depths of commitment.
Like having a child, or starting a new relationship, when the going gets tough, we cannot just walk away, or give up in disgust.
But in a very similar theme, we cannot just go blindly forth and start something without the willingness to commit to it.
It's difficult for people, I believe, to understand the kind of commitment it takes to start a new business. Imagine leaving your job, where you have a regular paycheck and some job security on a huge gamble. Imagine how you wake up at night and wonder exactly what the hell you're doing? What if you or a loved one get's sick? What if you're house is washed away in a flood? The doubts and fears that vanish in the face of all you accomplish can really gnaw at your soul in the bleak moments.
If you're weak, or if you have an unclear purpose, or if you're just impulsive, imagine how crippling that fear could be.
My friends have not, and will not give up on their way to opening their brewery, regardless of the hours of struggle and frustration that they have had to work through, they are both committed.
The lesson that we can take from this is to be thoughtful about the things we decide to do in our lives.
Measure twice, cut once, as my grandfather would say.
Weigh the options. Have plan B and C and D in the margins in case. But in more than this, we have to be cautious that we are not talked into something that could be detrimental to us in the long run.

But at the same time, while I speak words of caution, we have to admit that there was a certain amount of bravery in the face of the unknown and courage in the face of despair that carried these two and their families to this point.
We cannot forever hide ourselves from possibilities that may make us better or help us grow, or to finally be happy.
But we cannot do it rashly.
One of the biggest scams in this world is that you can say a few words, with good intentions and some magical power will cover you with goodness and riches and no want. These philosophies claim that if you simply name what you want, it is as good as having it.
The reality is quite otherwise.
If you want something in this world, you have to be willing to grab hold of it and wrestle it to the ground with all of the bruises to ego and scratches to hope and dreams.
Do not be cowed into believing you can't do what you want if you're motivated and willing to take the knocks. But also, don't be scammed into thinking you're going to be given an easy time of it.