Kids and Religion

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fwatch%253Fv%253D1Rwioe1SGkQ&h=dba32&ref=nf


I posted this video a couple of days ago much to the chagrin of my fundamentalist sister. She thought it was hateful and offensive. I thought is was blunt. It may push the envelope in a few places but the basic message is accurate.

The reason I felt the video to be so compelling is that all religions have one fundamental moral flaw: they teach their beliefs to children. Children should not be taught to choose religious sides. Period. It's a moral outrage. It's wrong.

Children should be taught morals and ethics and critical thinking skills. Children should be taught the difference between right and wrong. How to treat others like they want to be treated. How to make good choices about what they watch and wear and eat. Children should be taught three basic rules: Don't Hurt Yourself. Don't Hurt Nature or Other People's Property. Don't Hurt Other People. NONE of these basic rules require a religion to back them up. All of these rules reside within basic human nature and all humans share this basic ethic. Religion, should it be taught at all, should come much later.

I was five years old when I "went forward and gave my life to Jesus" in a Baptist church. I took this decision seriously. The destiny of my eternal soul depended on it. It affected all the major decisions in my life. Who I married. Where I went to school. Ultimately I decided to go into the ministry because of what I decided was Truth at the age of five. All of these turned out to be decisions that, as an adult, did not work for me. Because, ultimately, I decided that I didn't want to be religious. I didn't want to be married to the person I believed God wanted me to marry. I didn't want to be a pastor or involved in any way with Christianity. Or any other religion for that matter.

As an adult I firmly believe that five-year-old children have no business making a religious decision like the one I made. And adults who allow children, and who encourage children, to make this kind of sweeping life-altering decision, are completely misguided. I don't have a magic number for when a person should make religious decisions. But it certainly isn't five or ten or fifteen.

Watch the video.

If I Fear Anything

Not knowing what is at its end and what is at its beginning makes me wonder what becomes of a man who has reached fifty and still has so much to do.

I have yet to fulfill my destiny what with so much time dithered away chasing the evangelical God and slipping up the company ladder and wallowing in an unsatisfying marriage - all for far too long.

I have yet to achieve my magnum opus, my landmark achievement, my personal masterpiece, the thing that, when I'm gone, someone will observe and say, "yes, he was really here."

Perhaps my fear - if I fear anything - is that when the fulfillment of it begins, the life left in me to achieve it will be at the beginning of its end.

Time, I now understand, is both the giver and conqueror of dreams.

Depression

I was diagnosed with clinical depression about four years ago. After several months of not eating (my weight dropped to 154) or sleeping (I went about four months on less than 2 hours of sleep a night) I finally found the strength to get some help. That in itself is quite a story. Help came in the form of a little pill. The pill is known as a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It happens that serotonin is needed to keep emotions stable. When the body lacks the capacity to produce or distribute seratonin efficiently it causes an imbalance and emotions go berserk. Emotions, after all, are chemically and neurologically induced. They don't float out there somewhere outside of our bodies. Emotions are not spiritual, they are physical.

I've been on an anti-depressant ever since. To be honest, I'm afraid to go off of it. The one I use now is Celexa. It manages my depression nicely without sexual side effects (when I was on Lexipro, for example, I could maintain an erection but I couldn't achieve an orgasm). Even so, one thing I've noticed over the past four years, as I've learned more about my depression and how to manage it, is that my depression, even with medication, gets much worse this time of year - mid-December/late January. I know it has much to do with sunlight and warmth. As the days grow shorter and colder I can feel it coming on but there's nothing I seem to be able to do to stop it. SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder is something I've heard about but haven't really studied so I don't now how this relates to me.

The funny thing about depression is that no one wants to hear you have it. It's like mental leprosy. No one wants to touch you. So depression is something I bear mostly alone. No one wants to hear that when I get into these states all I want to do is die. Really? Well, no, it's not that I really, really, want to die for real. I actually enjoy most of what life has to offer. It's just that I want the pain to go away. And when my depression grows to a head there are some days when it feels that the only way to end the pain of depression is to end the life that feels the pain. It's that bad, and that painful. I'd rather have a tooth pulled without Novocain.

When I get really depressed this is what I say to myself over and over: "I am nothing. I have done nothing. I have nothing. I have nothing to give. I have nothing to offer. I am a loser. I am a failure. I have failed at everything I have ever tried. I just want to die." Sometimes I speak this audibly. Sometimes I think it in my head. Either way, the prevailing feelings are those of worthlessness, hopelessness, helplessness and unworthyness. It's a dark hole. Black, dark, and bottomless.

I know my depression will subside again into a more managable form. As days get longer and temperatures rise and I can get outside more and ride my bike more the really dark days will become less frequent. One thing I know for sure. For depression there is no cure. I will alway have depression. It doesn't go away and when I look back over my life with an understanding of its symptoms, I realize that I've been depressed since childhood. It's only in the past four years that I've begun to understand how to manage it.

Single

This has been quite a Fall. First I lost my love. Then, about a week later, I lost my job. I think the love thing is harder. I'd rather have someone to sleep with every night than a job. Sex and affection and true companionship are all way better than health benefits. I've tried "dating" on-line but my heart isn't in it. And most women on dating sites are just so pathetic. Everyone is happy and well adjusted and smiles a lot and lives life to the fullest and thinks everyday is a glorious sunrise with limitless possibilities and is independent and successful and loves puppies, hiking, and lattes.

I met one woman. For lattes. She wasn't as thin in real life as she looked in her photos. She wore a bulky sweater in a lame attempt to cover-up this important fact but I'm a good judge of body types. You can't hide bulk. It heaves with every breath. I don't feel the urge to call her again. She's just not that great. Not anything like what I had. Not even close. I haven't been into settling since my marriage so why start now?

Some days I feel like going back (to the girl I met on a flight from Phoenix to Denver and then spent the next year-and-a-half with) and saying, "Look, I'll do anything. What will it take? What do you want me to do? Be? Say?" Maybe that sounds desperate. I'm not desperate. I just want her back. At nearly any price. Maybe that is desperate. Maybe I would rather be alone the rest of my life than be without her. Maybe I spend too much time idealizing our relationship. Why do I do that? Why can't I just be jaded and move on? Problem is, when I fall in love (which has happened exactly twice in my life - and no, the first time wasn't the person I married) I fall hard and it takes me forever to get over it. This one could take a very long time.

Unemployed

This has been a tough one. I've never been "downsized" before and it's been more than three months since I lost my job. I really don't now how to look for work. I've had a few positions over the years but they always had a way of finding me. I didn't go looking for them. I think the last time I really did a job search was when I came out of graduate school. That was nineteen years ago.

Looking for work has changed so much. I was completely unaware that you can't talk to anyone, you do everything through the web. You send your resume which then gets scanned along with the hundreds of other resumes. Then the search system on the other side looks for key words which of course you don't know what they are. If your resume has enough of the key words you get a second look, if not, you don't hear from a soul. I've probably made five to six hundred job inquiries since September. I've had exactly two interviews. One of them over the phone.

Beyond the technical frustration of this job search the psychological toll is getting worse. I've forgotten who I am. I'm not sleeping well. I have to try really, really hard to feel optimistic. I have this little glimmer of hope that things will get better. That I'll find another position that takes care of me and my kids and that maybe someday I can finally get out from under the debt and financial turmoil from my divorce and maybe even be able to buy a place of my own again. Maybe be able to buy a car that has less than 100,000 miles and that doesn't break down all the time. Maybe, just maybe.

It's gotten so bad that I pulled my profile off of Facebook. I decided that Facebook is for people who have lives. When I get one again maybe I'll reactivate.

The bottom line is... this is bad. I feel bad most of the time. I feel like a failure and I feel like a fool for believing that good things would happen to me if I worked hard. Maybe they will sometime in the future. Maybe things will get better. I just don't know. I know I'm not the only one who has lost a job recently. It just feels that way.

George Bush with Lipstick

'nuff said.

The Ghost Within

"We fall in love with ghosts."
- Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient and Divisadero.

Suddenly single. Or, in a relationship with me. Undefined. Alone. Happy. Sad. Hopeful.

Things fade quickly in the world of love. A mist that burns off in the heat of the day. We meet, we dine, we laugh, we make love, we... well, we don't always share in even the most intimate of relationships everything that makes us who we are. Our pain, our wounds, our fears, our struggles.

We are ghosts who fall in love with ghosts. We are, to the world around us, only a partial picture. The unseen picture is a mystery to others and often even ourselves.

Love, for all the songs and books and movies and preachers who try to define it, is still a vast sea of air that is unreachable, unfathomable, uncontainable. We ride its currents. We love its stillness. We are devastated by its power. We view it as both savior and demon. Like air, we are innately drawn to it, feel like we're drowning when we lack it, take it for granted when we inhale and exhale without thinking.

Love, for all the songs and books and movies... is the ghost that no one has ever seen and at the end of the day, leaves everyone wondering if it exists at all.