dianarchy.net

email exchange, minus the exchange

It wouldn’t be right to post someone else’s emails, but I’m happy to share my end of them. Any holes in the middle are your problem ;)

I’m definitely not an active mormon anymore. I know it isn’t right to hold an entire religion culpable for the actions of a few in it, but the hurt they caused shattered my faith *shrug*. Right now, if you were to ask me what I believe, I’d say I’m a spiritual atheist. Atheist from its literal meaning “without God”, since I can’t figure out what people find in believing in an omnipotent white guy in a beard. One thing I always admired about the LDS faith is that it’s got answers for everything. A lot of people ask, “Well where did God come from?” I never had to worry about that when I was mormon.

I definitely think there are mysteries to life, however, that can’t be explained (yet) by science. That’s where the spiritual part of my path comes in. I have a strong faith in (and love for) those mysteries and humanity’s ability to solve them. It frightens me to think that we’re just a convenient pile of amino acids waiting for a comet to strike. There has to be something beyond the physical realm that we have yet to identify. I’m not sure what orchestrated Life on this planet, but we’ll figure it out someday.

And in a nutshell, that’s where I stand. I realize that I am only 24 and I’m sure to change my mind a thousand times over between now and when I die, but for now, that’s what makes sense to me.

I do speak a little Mainese, but I’m not fluent yet ;) Some of my patients come down from “The County” and I find myself lagging a couple seconds behind everything they say because it’s so heavily accented. A little English, a little French, R’s where they don’t belong and none where they do. It’s a trip.

-Jan 2, 2008 5:02 PM

Then there was a blog post in reply, and I followed with this a few days later.

I haven’t decided if I want to post this. I’m leaning towards yes, so
don’t be surprised if you see it up :)

…

Sorry this has taken so long to reply to. I really wanted to think about it. Finally last night just before I fell asleep, I thought of what I wanted to say; now let’s see if I remember it as clearly as it made sense to me then.

(You and I both know that never works :] )

I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a Yoga class, but at the end of them, the usual parting phrase is “Namaste”. It’s actually a common greeting/parting phrase in some parts of the world, completely aside from any spiritual meaning. When it’s given religious definition, though, it means approximately, “The divine in me recognizes and greets the divine in you.” I truly believe there is divinity in every
person. For that matter, there’s divinity in every animal, plant, rock, every atom in the universe. The divine, to me, is energy that flows through.

…

Ugh, I had to go back to work and when I got home, the blizzard had knocked out my internet, so it is now 36+ hours since I figured out what I wanted to say. Let’s see if I can’t catch my thoughts.

…

I think my next point was going to be, yes, God (for lack of a better term on my part) is in all those people; God is in all those sounds. But I don’t think those things represent him. If they did, it would imply that he wasn’t in whatever he wasn’t representing at that moment. I think that’s why I prefer using “The Universe”, rather than “God”.

That’s funny. While I’m writing this, I’m distractedly reading wikipedia. I’m rereading a book I read in high school, “Contact”, by Carl Sagan. When I got to an article about him (via an article about his son Nick, via an article about an episode of Star Trek that Nick wrote … ah, caught in the web of the wikiverse … anyway, back to the point. *clears throat*)

Anyway, when I was reading this article about Carl Sagan, I found this quote: “Sagan wrote frequently about religion and the relationship between religion and science, expressing his skepticism about many conventional conceptualizations of God. Sagan once stated, for instance, that “The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by ‘God,’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”"

Finding that quote just now, something that so perfectly describes what I’ve been thinking about these last few days, this is why I believe that there’s some sort of undercurrent in life, keeping everything moving the way it should move. I won’t dismiss free will; people can change their lives if they want to and work hard enough at it. But everything happens for a reason and everything turns out the
way it should. I’m not sure how those two things (fatalism & free will) aren’t mutually exclusive, but in my mind, they aren’t.

I know I’m forgetting one other point I’ve been meaning to make, but it always happens that I save the best for last and then by the time I finish all the rambling and tangents in the middle, I’ve forgotten what I meant to say.

-Jan 15, 2008 10:08 AM

Anyway, I’m not sure why I’m posting this, but I feel like I need to.

Does any of this make sense?