The Weapon of the Enemy

The living room
Sleepytime Sinus Soother Tea
Pumpkin pie (expired)

I'm starting this at home.  Will probably finish elsewhere.

This is why I never finish my housework.  Well, this is partly why.  Anyway.

If you think about it, there's only one true sin in the Bible.  Everything else is only a sin under certain circumstances.  Sex is not a sin, just premarital sex.  Killing someone is not a sin, not at all.  There are numerous passages delineating under what circumstances and by what method someone shall be put to death: female sorceresses, back-talking children, women who are raped who don't cry for help, but only if they live in the city because women who are raped in the country might not live close enough to someone who could have heard them so it's okay if they just didn't bother.

You can even steal someone else's land if you say God really wanted you to have it.

No, the only act that appears to be inherently sinful is disobedience.  Everything else seems to have an asterisk.  You can even put your beloved son on the alter if the big G tells you to.  Obeying the command to kill your child is - in a biblical context - the righteous act.  More righteous than obeying the standing order to not kill anybody (except where explicitly commanded to do so) because it was a direct order.

Even our military and police forces are expected to not obey a direct order if it conflicts with the laws established in the Constitution.

Oh, military and police forces... how you have so often failed to disobey...  How often you have protected those among your ranks who have defiled their sacred obligations.  Instead of casting these criminals out of your body, you have so very often closed in around them and formed a protective cyst, a tumor, and doomed your body to sickness.

Again and again and again...

Mix Bakeshop
Americano
Pumkin-something Macaroon
Biscotti

...And that's where I left it when the boys got home.  Let's see if I can finish this before closing time.

Today, we went to the library.  As the boys played with the Thomas the Train set in the kids section, we heard chanting and shouting outside.  From the window we could see another Ferguson rally marching across the street, blocking the crosswalk for a time to address the stopped traffic, then continuing on to the heart of downtown.

"No justice!  No peace!"

"Hands up!  Don't shoot!"

As their voices receded Oliver began crying.  He was upset because he had wanted to throw something into the recycling bin but Daddy had done it first.  I thought how lucky we are that that's all he has to cry about.  When I posted that later - the picture of the marchers and Oliver's incongruent despair - a friend of mine replied with "#FirstWorldProblems".

Amen, sister.

We live in another Gilded Age.  As before the Great Crash, the news buzzes about the extraordinary wealth of our age, the billionaires being churned out by Wall Street.  And the seeming normalcy of Middle America is only achieved through massive debt - student loans that may or may not be paid off before your children are ready for school, and the 30 year mortgage you had to refinance to get the loan to pay for the car repairs on that 2 door subcompact you were supposed to trade-up before you had the 2 car seats in the back, but now you can't afford to replace it so you have to string it along, and you can't put it on the credit card because you maxed it out on 4 crowns and 6 fillings - and that's with insurance! - and the Black Friday specials you sacrificed your Thanksgiving for because they told you it was your only chance to get it cheap enough and you could pay it off when you got your tax refund but then they cut the Earned Income Credit you were banking on so your interest rate just got jacked up to a rate you didn't know was legal.  But you sure look comfortable.  When everyone looks so comfortable, it's easy to think that it's your fault.

God forbid you get sick.

God forbid you're the victim of a hit and run while you're marching down to the Plaza for those among us who are dying in this Age of Gilded Freedom.  That's your ER bill.  Good luck.

This country is most definitely not well, but the worst part is that we cannot have the conversations we need to have to fix it because reality is obscured by the gilding of lies.  Equal opportunity?  Not a bit.  Not economically, not legally...  We don't even have an equal opportunity to stay alive just walking down the street.

Around the country, some of those who see the injustice, especially those who have been the victims of it, have taken to the streets to grieve, to demand change - they march.  And some, they scream their grief, their frustration - their fear - they riot.

Song lyrics come to mind... "I need something to break!"

On the right, they have been stoking fear of the president, of immigrants, and those "thugs" who just happen to, ya know, bounce less light in the sun...  Frankly, calling Obama a "tyrant" is an insult to the people of Syria and Libya and anyone else who has really lived under a tyrant.  But the fearful shall defend themselves.  They have been stockpiling their bunkers and talking openly of insurrection for years.

They want something to break, too.

What we do when we are afraid, when we are threatened... that is when we earn our humanity, or when we fail it.

When Henry David Thoreau saw the injustice of American aggression in his time, he simply stopped paying for his share of it.  And he happily went to jail for it.  He disobeyed, civilly.  That was the righteous thing to do.

But what about today?

We do need change.  A lot of it, on many fronts.  You could use the term revolution.  But I wouldn't go too far with that.  I certainly would not say insurrection.  So long as the basic structure remains in tact, we need to try to work within it.

I've known people who say we need to tear down the whole system and rebuild on whatever survives.  I don't think highly of that kind of nihilism.  I think of it as an immature human mind, the intellectual equivalent of a toddler's tantrum.  So it's hard?  So it's frustrating, and slow?  So what?  It's a lot harder to bury your sons and daughters sacrificed on the alter of revolution.  And the societies built upon the ruins of revolutions most often do not survive, let alone thrive.

There are exceptions.  But there is also a cost.  Always a cost, not the least of which is our humanity.

I have no disrespect for someone who defends themselves or their families, but only when it is necessary.  In the case in Ferguson, the only way Wilson might have needed to shoot Mike Brown dead from 150 feet away is if he mistook Mike Brown for Luke Skywalker and had a reasonable expectation that Mike Brown would imminently use The Force to steal his gun.  Which is silly, of course, because Brown could have just choked him before Wilson could reach.  Or tossed his police cruiser.

Which makes me think of burning witches.  How stupid is that logic?  If she's a witch, don't you think she could get out of it?  In which case, the only people you'd end up burning would be innocent.  Oh, the folly of the righteous...  Committing obvious sins in the name of God.  Murder, torture, destruction, violence... whatever... for the Greater Good.

Didn't we learn anything from the Lord of the Rings?  You never use the weapon of the Enemy.

If killing someone, on purpose, is wrong, then it doesn't stop being wrong if you change the scenery or put the trigger in another person's hand.  Injustice must be answered, and in a meaningful way, but you don't go outside the system you're trying to fix if there is any path at all left open.  There is no social system that will ever be free of corruption.  The strength of the institution comes from the ability to address and amend injustice within itself.

In Ferguson, there was clear abuse of power and corruption - and there are still paths left to address those trespasses of justice.  And more broadly, there is wide-spread racial injustice and abuse of police authority - and that, too, can be addressed.  There are white allies, and those in positions of power - yes, even white police officers, too - who see and will march alongside those seeking justice.

And even those of us who may only march our fingers across keyboards in suburban coffeehouses, we are doing our best to scrape the fool's gold off the bullshit that's being oversold, hand over bloodied fist, to keep us from seeing that one simply truth: There's no such thing as Other People.  We're all in this together, and we can change things for the better and be our higher human selves.

I am such a damn hippy.  Coffee shop is closing.  Time to go.

I love you all.

Cozy in my uncertainty

Rogue Valley Roasting Co.
16oz Coffee
Vegan Pumpkin Walnut Bread

Some people have a very dismissive or negative view of agnosticism.  I've heard people refer to agnostics as if they were just indecisive or afraid to commit.  I say "they" but I mean "we."  I have said numerous times that I am agnostic.  If you want a good understanding of what the term means, I recommend visiting its Wikipedia page.  In a nutshell, the term means "without knowledge," and since it is usually used to describe someone's religious views, that generally means that the person has no knowledge to give them a belief in any kind of deity.

The nuances of that meaning diverge from that point.  Some will say "I don't know - can't know - and neither can anyone else."  I keep it a little more close.  The concept of god, by definition, goes beyond the typical objective reality with which we are familiar.  That is not to say god is not part of our reality, just that god doesn't function in a way that we can define in our usual physical terms.  In other words, old-school miracles - like the creation of all existence - cannot be duplicated in a laboratory.

And yet, that which used to seem miraculous to our ancestors has been revealed to be very normal, predictable phenomena.  It's good to remember, sometimes, that most all religious texts were written before human beings understood the water cycle (evaporation, condensation, precipitation, all that).  If any religion was truly inspired by divine words, remember that they flowed through human messengers.

For myself, I believed in God as a child because everyone around me talked about God as if He was a done deal.  I asked my father why, then, were there other religions if everyone knew about these miracles Jesus had performed.  Surly, with so many witnesses, there would be extensive contemporaneous accounts to validate that these had, in fact, taken place (yes, I was a weird 8 year-old).  So my father explained that these accounts were recorded by just a couple people decades after Jesus' death, and there were not the innumerable written or oral accounts I would expect, so people have to choose to believe or not believe that these things had taken place.

Oh, these are stories?!

And I became an atheist, because it was too much to be asked to believe these stories of spectacular miracles unless there was some really strong evidence that they had actually occurred.

But I got older, and I kept thinking and pondering and listening to the great thinkers and ponderers of human history.  And I softened my views a bit.  Because how do I know there isn't a god, anyway?  Maybe human beings are screwy and can't get the story straight, but maybe there's a god in spite of all that.

The point is what we know and what is knowable.  Right now, I can't see a way for the human mind to be able to know with demonstrable certainty that god exists.  I have heard the smartest people in modern society argue with authority that it's illogical to think there is no god.  And I have heard equally brilliant minds argue that it's illogical to think that there is a god.  The problem is that logic doesn't have an imperative when it comes to how the divine is or isn't.  At least, none that I can see.  Perhaps someday we will find a way to know definitively one way or another.

Most people who believe, it seems to me, believe because they feel a personal connection to the divine.  They have opened themselves to the Holy Spirit(s) and have felt a divine presence.  And it doesn't matter which religion you're talking about, from the outside, every practitioner sounds the same.  They know The Truth.  All the other religions are actually false and their practitioners are deceiving themselves, or are being deceived.  Once they, and I, leave behind these self-deceptions and open our hearts to The True Religion, we'll know the difference; we'll Know. The. Truth.

It all sounds the same from here.  But epiphanies, as I've said before, can be the most true and least reliable form of knowledge.  Maybe one of these groups has it right.  I can't say they are wrong or right from the outside.  But you can't convert me based on your certainty.  And, as I said before, logic breaks down.  So, what's left?  Empiricism?  You want me to believe my lyin' eyes?

Empiricism used to "prove" spontaneous generation, proof of god, because you could see meat miraculously turn into maggots.  When it was shown that it was not an act of the divine, that maggots were actually fly larvae, religious minds resisted the truth because they thought it invalidated the existence of God.  Likewise, many refused to believe in any kind of micro-biology in spite of the fact that... oh, what's his name... proved that women were dying in childbirth needlessly because doctors were not washing their hands in between deliveries.  Or after eating.  Or pooping.  Or ever.  The point is that what you see, what you hear, what you feel in the most intimate crevices of your senses, does not necessarily mean what you think it does.

And yet... we exist.  There is ...stuff.  Why is there something instead of nothing?  Even if we are nothing more than a dream in the mind of some slumbering divine entity and all we see or feel or experience is an illusion - we are still the dream.  The dream is.  I am okay not knowing all the answers.  I don't know if there is a greater purpose to all this.  I'm okay not ascribing grand notions of purpose or grand destinies if I don't feel a compelling certainty in them.

I am open to listen to what you believe is true.  But I am not seeking some answer.  Try not to be too disappointed if you try to say, for example:

1. I have problems.
2. I am not a Christian.
3. Ergo, I should be Christian.

And I will reply with:

1. You're right - I have problems.
2. I am not a Buddhist.
3. Ergo, I should be a Buddhist.

Actually, Buddhism has a lot to offer.  But so do most religions, to an extent.  They tend to break down when you get to dealing with people who don't follow the same religion or who deviate within the religious order.  But the 'be kind and respectful to others' part - that's pretty solid.  I am willing to accept the parts of any religion that I feel hold true outside of the confines of that religion.  If a particular doctrine is consistent with reason and empathy, I have no reason to reject it.  I just don't embrace it solely because it was given by an authority figure.

To those who still think that agnosticism is weak or non-committal or wishy-washy, you still misunderstand.  It is commitment the pursuit of truth that keeps agnostics from going any further.  The scientific mind says only what it can say.  This is what we know, this is what we know is knowable, and this is what can be said given that.  That doesn't preclude there being more than that.  That doesn't mean we won't be able to know more someday.  We just don't try to make things fit to make the world more comfortable for us.  That would be faithless and false.

What about the afterlife?  What if there is a god and its followers have been trying to tell me the grand Truth but I have rejected it this whole time?  It's not so much rejection as much as not accepting it without reason.  But aren't I afraid of going to some hell?  Aren't I afraid of some divine punishment?  Frankly, I don't think much of any deity who would condemn me to eternal suffering for having a reasonable doubt and not bearing false witness.

Damnation for utilizing the spectacular mental faculties we have been gifted with?  What a douche!

Fear of divine wrath is not a reason for believing in the divine.  That falls under "incentive."  Like, in the checkout aisle at the grocery store, if I buy two pieces of candy, I can get two more free!  That's an incentive.  But the reality is: I need no candy.

If there is some kind of afterlife, I will have to accept whatever consequences await me.  Maybe I just think more highly of god, but I don't tremble in fear for not following some other person's dogma, no matter how popular.  Maybe there is an afterlife, maybe there is nothing.  Maybe the remnants of our holographic mind continue.  Maybe they dissipate.  Maybe we are reincarnated.  Maybe we just turn into mulch.

All I know is that who I am now ends at my death.  If a part of me continues, it will be in some other form.  I will not again walk in this body and be just as I am now.  If I exist in spirit, I am still not quite the same as me now - I will know things unknowable now.  If I am reincarnated, then who I am will continue to change and evolve.  I can never live this story of me, exactly, ever again.

So, why wait for the answer of what is beyond this life?  All I can do is make this life the best that I can.  If you've ever met me and wondered why I often wear an ankh (sorry, not a cross, folks) it's because it is the symbol of life.  I wear it to remind myself to live while I'm alive.  Because agnosticism is not living without morality or fear of eternal consequence.  It is living with the accountability of your earthly actions.  It is not disregarding any possibility of the after.  It is about truly living within the now.

I feel like I've said all of this before.  Apologies for my redundancy.  And love to all.