Believe in miracles

I have a friend who writes a blog called Martin & Sons and I find it really interesting.  The blog entries are short but poignant and the blog itself is beautiful.  The reason I bring it up is because the blog has a clear theme about raising boys.  My blog just seems like a self-indulgent whine about myself and I have no idea how that could be interesting.   I looked at my blog feed and found they all have a topic of some sort - exercise, food, technology and they pepper in bits about themselves around the larger topic.  My topic is just me and I do not think that I can sustain without injecting something else but I cannot figure out what else is of interest in my life.  Given that, this morning I am going to take a dive into my own spirituality since yesterday left me thinking about that journey.

As a child, I was raised a Methodist which is a moderate Christian - well at least the way I was raised.  There was a joke that Methodist had 7 commandments and 3 suggestions to overtly hint about their laxness of the doctrine.  As a family, we went to church, but it was more of a social event for my parents than a religious commitment.  I went to a Christian camp every summer and while there I must have accepted Jesus in my heart over 30 times - every session - it was sort of a requirement.  As an avid reader as a child, I actually read the bible all the way through - although I started skimming through the apostles as it was really repetitive.  My review of it - meh.  I was sent to a baptist boarding school and actually attended "holy-roller" church in the town just because it was incredibly interesting to see people so enveloped in their faith.  I even participated in the schools church group but that was because I was totally crushing on a guy in the group.

I do not know how old I was when I realized that I was not a Christian. It was more of an acknowledgement that I did not believe in the ideology than a shift in my beliefs.  For me, this is where the rub is - if not a Christian as a white american - what do you believe?  I played around with Taoism and Buddhism but I struggled with some of their ideology.  Mystical beliefs were something that I could not lend myself to believe in.  I realized quickly that organized religion had many similar themes and none of which I accepted.  I wanted to embrace spirituality and played with yoga and Universal Unitarian churches - however the generic nature - believe in anything but believe together - left it as an empty wanting experience.   My oldest son at an early age announced himself as an atheist and although I was surprised at the finality of his decision about god, I was not surprised given my lack of religious affinity.  As he got older, we had an interesting discussion about agnostics (which he deemed me and probably accurately) versus atheist as he believed that agnostics were just atheist hedging their bets.  This is a common reaction from atheist that agnostics cannot just cannot get off the fence to say there is no real god.  Is that who I am, just someone who cannot commit to my beliefs?

The thing about atheism is that makes sense to me is that there is no power over us control and monitoring our lives, rewarding or denying us based on some arbitrary value system.  It is clear to me that religion is a construct created to manage society and impart a moral system.  It also works for those people that need meaning and solace in their lives that they can not find otherwise.  Without religion, the world is a bit stark and your success or failure is dependent on your own actions and ability to handle what randomly occurs. Life is random - it can be joyous, hellish and mundane all in one day.

I wish I could believe in a few things because I would really like them to be true. I love the concept of Karma as I would like there to be balance in the universe. However, in the end of it all, I think we are in control of our own destiny and I do not think there is some grand plan or some universal equalizer.  I do not think that things happen for any particular reason or there is any super being or spirit that really cares.   I also would like to believe that we have a soul that is energy that joins some collective mind (totally Jungian and eastern religion) or is reused by the universe in some way.  As much as I think the concept is great, I cannot get my head around the fact that it is unlikely and that like a dead tree or dead animal -- we are absorbed back into the earth as a nutrient.  Well at least before we started embalming and putting ourselves in boxes that were encased so we just disintegrate alone and bringing no value back to the world.

The only thing slightly interesting about this is it really means to me that every day every minute as your life is your own.  You have to live for these moments and not for the promise of a better afterlife.  It means that shit happens, great stuff happens and you do what you can to manage your life but all you have as control is to make the best choices you can.  I guess in the end it means I am an atheist with dreams of a few choice bits from other ideologies.  A real dream would be universal tolerance of the different strategies (religion or whatever) to deal with this life.  I really wish religion was not something compelled and drove people to push their beliefs on the non-believers.   Why can't we all just believe whatever and be excellent to one another and move on?.