Shatter Nicely

This is why Ann Althouse is my favorite blogger.  She is incredibly insightful about human nature.  I thought this was really interesting.

For years — decades — I’ve found insight into the way other people think with the simplification that there are 2 kinds of human minds: Those that focus on difference and those that focus on similarity. I think most people, like Jonah, figure things out by observing and heightening the ways in which things are different. We’re taught to pursue that tendency from an early age. Think of the kindergarten/”Sesame Street” quizzes asking which of these things is not like the other. But the skill of likening things to others is also useful. Perhaps it should be encouraged by repurposing those old quizzes and asking kids: If you had to explain why all these things are alike, what would you tell me?

I think I am going to start asking my kids to tell me why things are similar.  What a good skill to nurture.

This is the fifth and final part of my five part series about my journey to Christianity and back. Here are part one, part two, part three, and part four.

Leaving Christianity was a really hard process.  After having what I thought to be many genuine experiences with God, I was left feeling at a loss for how to make sense of the world.  I am still trying to find my balance.  To center myself.  To figure out what it means to be.

It’s not about god.  I don’t really believe in god, though there’s a part of me that easily could.  Because I know that there is something more.  That is why a strict rationalist view of life just doesn’t resonate with me.  It doesn’t resonate with a lot of people, I think, for the same reason.

There exists something that is bigger than ourselves.  But it’s not god.  I’m not 100% sure of that, but I am quite sure.  Sure enough, anyway.

I haven’t quite put my finger on what it is, but I think that it’s us.

All of us together make up this thing that’s greater than the sum of its parts.  That’s why people feel fulfilled when they join a religion.   It’s not god; it’s us.  We need each other.  When we help each other, it creates personal satisfaction, but it also produces good will that carries on and produces more.   It – metaphorically – takes on a life of its own.   But it can feel like there’s some outside force at work, some guiding hand, god.

But if that were so, how can we explain the times when it doesn’t work out?

“God’s ways aren’t our ways.”

“God works in mysterious ways.”

No. That’s not sufficient, in any sense.

I prefer to think, rather, that it is not god.  We have an interdependence that goes far beyond what we can see.  It is so deep, it can feel like there must be more, something that is bigger than ourselves.   But we are it.

The universe is indifferent to our existence.  It doesn’t care what happens to us.  There is no god looking over us, with his divine plan, guiding our lives.  The universe doesn’t care if you get that speeding ticket, if you get that promotion, or even if you get cancer.   It doesn’t care.   There is no other way to explain all of the bad things that happen, without revealing a god so twisted and sadistic as to not deserve our worship.   After all, he’s playing with our lives and we don’t even know his rules.

No.   Events happen and they happen by random chance, more or less.  That person two cars in front of you that died in the head-on collision could have been you.   The fact that it wasn’t doesn’t mean that god spared you and not him.  It means you won the toss of the cosmic dice that day.

But just because the universe is cold and meaningless doesn’t mean that life is.  It matters.  You matter.  We all matter.  We matter to each other.  And I don’t just mean that you matter to the people who love you, or even the people who know you.   You matter to humanity as a whole.   Everything you do affects the rest of us.  And we’re glad you’re here.

The other day, I posted about how I got my start in blogging.  Without the person who introduced me to blogging, I might never have started blogging.  Without the local alternative daily reporter who started a blog about Vermont blogs and linked to me, I might never have gained the audience I did.   Without that exposure, I probably would not have met the person who I turned to for support when I left Christianity.  Without that support, I really don’t know how I would have gotten through that, the most difficult time in my life.

Something as simple as telling someone about your blog can lead to that person making a new friend.  I’ve made a lot of wonderful connections through blogging, all because someone told me about his blog.

In just that one small example, you can begin to see how seemingly meaningless actions can profoundly effect the lives of those around us.  When we get into the ways in which we all love and support each other, our interdependence become mind blowing.

Every little thing we do in our lives affects someone else. When taken together, it creates this web of support that enriches our lives and makes them better.  It also gives our lives significance and meaning.  It creates something that is bigger than us, something that transcends our being.

But it’s not god; it’s us.  And really, isn’t that enough?

Tuesday was Town Meeting Day in Vermont, which is when all of our cities and towns hold their local elections.  Many of the small towns still hold an actual town meeting, where everyone gets together to actually discuss the town business before voting.  Other places, such as Burlington, where I live, hold regular elections.

When I went to vote, I realized that this is the first TMD in 7 years that I have not been involved with a campaign or with political blogging.  Seven years ago, I actually ran for a city council seat myself.

Seeing all of the people standing outside with their signs, being greeted by the familiar faces of other Burlington pols, and, later, watching the election returns on our local government access channel, where I myself have appeared many times over the years to discuss politics, made me realize something.  I still love politics.  And now that I have taken a much – much! – needed break, I am so ready to get back into it.

So, I created a separate page here at Shatter Nicely, aptly called The Politics Page, where all political posts will show up.  They will not be in the regular RSS feed, nor will they appear on the front page of the regular blog, though they will show up in the archives.

I like what I am doing with Shatter Nicely and I still want to keep that going.  I don’t want to take away from that with the political posts.  But, as the saying goes, once a political blogger, always a political blogger.  No, really.  People say that.  Or, maybe not.

Anyway, head on over and check out The Politics Page.  There’s not much there yet for posts, and most of them are old, but I did some cool tweaks to the PHP to make it different than the main page.  It was fun and educational, and I was actually able to get it to look the way I wanted it to.

Today is the third annual National Grammar Day.  You can find out all you every wanted to know about it, and all about the proper use of grammar, over at the Grammar Girl website, linked above.

March forth on March 4 to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!

This is the fourth part in a five part series about my journey to Christianity and back.  Here are part one, part two, and part three.  Part three ends with me realizing that I no longer believed in the Christian god.

So there I was, not believing in Christianity any more, but still not really knowing what I believed in. And not really knowing what to do next.  I was afraid to tell anyone because I didn’t know what would happen.  This was such a big change in me.

I already told the story on my old blog about contacting my blog friend and atheist JD Ryan from the blog Five Before Chaos, so I won’t repeat it here. That was my first step toward coming out as a non-Christian. Now, it was real.

That night, after I talked to JD, I told my husband. That was hard. Among Christians, especially the conservative evangelical variety, everything good comes from God, so a life without God means a life without the things that are of God. If morals come from God, then atheists cannot have morals, at least, not the kind of morals that are grounded in the truth of what is right. So, of course, his first reaction was to think that something else bad was coming. It was a tough time getting through those first few weeks, but eventually we talked through what had happened to lead me away from the faith and he saw where I was coming from. He is still a believer in God and in Christ, but he is no longer being held hostage by the strict beliefs that we had.

Telling my family was not difficult at all, since they are not Christians, though it was interesting to hear what they thought of my little foray into evangelical Christianity.

The hardest part was telling my Christian friends. I actually had it relatively easy because the people in my close circle all recently moved out of state. I broke the news via facebook. A couple of people were deeply hurt and tried to talk me back. I was sent creationism links and told to think about my children and what would happen to them if I were wrong. It was assumed that I was angry at God, of course. The worst response I got was silence. That was hurtful.

I still haven’t told anyone from my church. I just stopped going.

After my big coming out on facebook, the reality set in. I was no longer a Christian. So now what? I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know what kind of music to listen to. I had let my religious beliefs dictate my thoughts and actions for years. It was like I needed to re-learn everything.

I spent the next coupe of months trying to get my bearings. I felt a little crazy at first. I started to believe that there are no morals without God. I went from looking at everything in terms of absolutes, to looking at everything as ambiguous, wondering if anything, short of obvious violations of other human beings physical bodies, is ever really wrong.

It sounds so ridiculous to me now. I mean, I new right from wrong before I was a Christian, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to know right from wrong after. Thankfully, I had a friend to point that out to me. It really saved me a lot of trouble reinventing the wheel.

Still, in those first months, I questioned everything about my life. My mind was overfilled with all of these life questions, big and small. It was miserable, but at the same time it was wonderful to have my mind working again.

After the excitement and relief at being free from my oppressive and thought-controlling religious beliefs started to subside, I went through a month or so of being depressed and kind of lost. Now that I was free from Christianity, I wasn’t really sure where to go.

When I left Christianity, I called myself an agnostic. I really wasn’t sure what I believed and I wasn’t really sure if we could ever really know god, even if there was one. But, it didn’t take long to start thinking of myself as an atheist. The more I thought about things, and the more I read about the experiences of other former Christians, ranging from atheist to agnostic to people who found some other religion, the more I realized that I didn’t really see the existence of any god as a likelihood or even a necessity to living a full life.

But still, something was missing, and I think that is why I became a bit depressed. The problem with atheism is that it lacks any sort of meaningful explanation for the experiences that I had as a Christian that seemed to transcend my being, the things that I had attributed to God.

Sure, I read things about probability and random chance and errors we make in reasoning when we attribute events to a supernatural force. But there still seemed to be something lacking in that explanation. I had felt things that were bigger than myself and I needed an explanation for that.  I needed to figure out the meaning of my life without God.

(Read part five.)

Hey blog friends, I’m back!  I think I am finally through being sick.  First, I had a cold that was the worst thing I have ever experienced, besides the time I had the flu.  My lungs were so congested that I couldn’t take in a full breath.  The things we take for granted.

That reminds me of a facebook status I read today.

Ah! I just realized I can breathe out of my nose again. I so often take my health for granted. What a good reminder to thank God for every breath!

How do you respond to things like that?  Do you ignore them?  Do you challenge the notion that god is responsible for our breath?

I did reply, having just had the same experience.  The first day that I was able to fully fill my lungs with air, I said out loud how awesome it was to be able to breathe again.  Re: the facebook comment, I just said that I could relate because I just had a bad chest cold.  I just ignored the god part.  This friend isn’t someone I want to go that route with.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

So, after my chest congestion broke up, it turned into a painful head cold.  Then, just as that was getting better, wait for it, all five of us (husband and 3 kids, for you noobs) got hit with a stomach flu.  Three kids all throwing up at the same time.  Whoopie!

But now, it looks as if we are all on the mend.  I even took the boys snowboarding today.  They go every Monday with a homeschool group, but we don’t actually meet up as a group; we just get the group rate.  We had to miss it last week because we were too sick.

I brought my laptop with me to the mountain, since I don’t ski or board.  I found out that they charge for day use of the wi-fi, but I was able to get the final two installments of my conversion/de-conversion story done!  I guess that’s what happens when one is not distracted by the internet.  I still need to read them over and make any changes, but I plan on posting part four tomorrow.

I’m happy with the way the whole thing came together.  Part one is my back story and how I became a Christian.  Part two is how I got all fundamentalist-y.  Part three is how it all unraveled and I stopped believing in Christianity.  Part four is about how things were for me after I didn’t believe in god anymore.  Part five is the way my new life philosophy is shaping up.

I feel a sense of closure now that I have worked through writing out all the whole story.  There are so many other posts I want to do that explore religion and belief, but I wanted to work through my own story first.  So, I am very happy about sitting down and getting it all done today.

So, now that you’re all caught up on my life, what’s new with you?

Sorry that I haven’t posted in a while.  This cold is kicking my butt.  I have a few posts that I’ve been working on, but I just haven’t been well enough to finish them.  And if you e-mailed me, I swear, I am not ignoring you.

I’m heading back to bed.

A couple weeks ago, my husband and I were driving up to my mother’s house and we were admiring the mountains.  I see them every day, but I never stop being in awe of how beautiful they are.  I remarked, “I love the mountains.”

Then, I started singing a song we used to sing in chorus to warm up, “I love the mountains.  I love the rolling hills.  I love the flowers.  I love the daffodils.  I love the fireside, when all the lights are low.  Boom-dee-ah-da, boom-dee-ah-da, boom-dee-ah-da, boom-de-ah-da.”  We had a laugh.  (Yes, I am totally cheesy.)

Then a couple of days later, I saw a video called “We love xkcd” (which I do), posted at the blog Pharyngula.  It is sung to that same tune.

I hadn’t heard that song in years upon years and days after I sang it, I heard the same tune.

Coincidences like that happen all of the time.

Last Friday, my mom took my two older boys to see “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” and I stayed home with my 6-year-old.  I watched “Reality Bites” on HBO for the first time since the mid-90s.  I love that scene when they are dancing in the convenience store to “My Sharona.”

Well, a few days later, Althouse had a post saying that Doug Fieger, lead singer for The Knack, died, with a video of, wait for it… “My Sharona.”

Another song-related coincidence.  Creepy!

Actually, coincidences like that happen all of the time.  There is nothing creepy about it.  But when I was a Christian, that sort of thing was always taken as a “sign” from God.

I actually decided on a church because the choir was singing my favorite song from Christian radio on the day we went to visit.  Seriously.  It was “Indescribable,” by Chris Tomlin.  I thought it was a sign from God that we had found the right church.

Now that I no longer view every event from the point of view that God is micromanaging my life, I can see that there are odd coincidences all of the time.  There’s really nothing supernatural involved.  It was perfectly within the realm of probability that the church would be singing a song that was popular on Christian radio at that time.  In fact, that was frequently the case.

It amazes me how much meaning people assign to random events.  Everything happens for a reason, the saying goes.  No, it really doesn’t.  Well, yeah, everything has a cause, but there isn’t some greater cosmic reason that I heard the same tune twice in one week, or my mom called just when I was thinking of her, or even that Bob (my husband) and I just happened to start at the same company on the same day.  Those events are not the result of divine providence; they just happen.

I used to think that attitude removed all of the mystery and wonder from life.  I was wrong.  I was wrong about a lot of things.  Life is still full of wonder.  I still said, “Wow, that was cool; I was just singing that song” when I heard that xkcd song.  I just don’t assign any greater meaning to it.  And I still think it’s amazing that Bob and I just happened to both start at the same company on the same day and totally hit it off, and still be together 11 years later.  I just don’t think that God created us to be together, or had anything to do with us meeting.

All of the chance encounters and interesting coincidences are no less fascinating without the supernatural cause.  They might even be more so because they just happened randomly, yet turned out great.  I don’t need belief in god to appreciate the wonder of mere coincidence.

Today would be the 4th anniversary of my political blog, She’s Right, if I were still blogging there.  I really have no desire to get back into writing, reading, and thinking about politics 24/7, but I do miss the good old days when political blogging was fun.  I really enjoyed the conversations and the friends I made at She’s Right.

Inspired by fellow Burlington blogger Haik Bedrosian, I started She’s Right on Feb. 17, 2006, with a post about the Burlington mayoral race.  A week later, I started a craft blog.  Though it has changed names a couple of times, I am still posting there.

Before Haik told me about his blog, I don’t even think I ever read a blog.  After I started blogging, I started reading other political blogs, then craft blogs, then homeschooling blogs.

Over the past four years, I have made a lot of friends online through the different blogs I have kept and the ones I have read.  It’s funny how one little e-mail that said, “Hey, check out my blog.  It’s for Burlington pols like you,” started my love of blogging.

So, even though She’s Right is no more, I still consider today my blogging anniversary.  It is a hobby that has literally changed my life.  I have learned so much from all of the people I have met in the blogosphere.

Happy Valentine’s Day from Shatter Nicely!