Reason’s Greetings!

If you know the origins of the holidays at this part of the year, then this is all old news to you. If you know that I am an atheist who was once a seeker of truth before the truth found me, you know what follows too. But do you know that I love you, even if you believe in fairy tales?

Celebrating the Winter Solstice goes back thousands of years. It pre-dates Christianity and Judaism. The current Christian overlays were grafted on by the Roman church to make Christianity palatable to the various northern European tribes which existed at the time, and the holiday itself was raised into its current prominence not by Christians but by Capitalists–19th century industry and the rise of corporate culture. This was *never* a Christian holiday. It’s old news. There is nothing in the NT or any of the Christian apocrypha which puts Jesus’ birth at the end of December. If Jesus existed at all, he would probably despise the celebratory aspects of it, depending on how much of an Essene he was. In any case, the gospel attributed to Mark makes no mention of Jesus’ birth because it was unimportant. It really was.

It would be okay if Christians realized how much of their belief was co-opted or outright stolen from Mithraism, how the birth of the god-man matching the Winter Solstice is about Sun worship (not Son–though the English word has a delightful connotation), and was clearly an agrarian celebration. But you all do not.

The only reason most of you believe this tall tale of someone called Jesus is because it was what you were born into. That sort of blind acceptance is toxic. The same sort of blind acceptance that hates atheists automatically, and without reason or cause. Or feels pity toward us. Though that is rather humorous to us. Almost as humorous as you thinking that this is a Christian holiday.

Tuesday Morning

I was sitting in my new apartment on a Tuesday morning, waiting for my couch to be delivered. I had no phone or cable connection (yet). After all, I’d just finished moving everything in on Saturday. My dad and I sat that afternoon resting on boxes drinking water and Coke before dropping the dying moving van off at U-Haul. We weren’t sure the fool thing would make the trip from Haverhill to Fall River, but it did.

So back to Tuesday. I stayed at my girlfriend’s place the night before. We talked about furniture shopping that day (hence the couch) and fooled around a bit. We worked in the same office so I asked her to tell our boss I would be late when she left that morning.

All I thought of that morning was how the movers and I were going to get that fucking couch through the narrow maze-like twists of the apartment building, which like many buildings in Fall River was a converted mill.

I was committed. I was fixated. I’d never bought an actual couch before.

Maybe if the feet were removable we could slide the couch down the carpeted main corridor, stand it on end and wiggle it past the worst of the twists. Then squeeze through the apartment door, sli-i-i-de it down the equally weird and narrow main hallway in the apartment, then we were home free.

While this was happening, while I obsessed over how that damned couch was getting into my apartment, American Airlines Flight 11 flew out of an impossibly clear morning sky and slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. The defining moment of the new century was exploding horrifically into being, and I had a couch coming.

Lacking a working TV and phone, I had no idea what was happening. I turned on Howard Stern while making the 40 minute commute into work and heard him talk about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. No one mentioned it was a jet–let alone a 767 fresh out of Logan with a belly-full of jet fuel. So I thought it was a small plane that punched into the tower and left a hole.

That sky was so clear! Ten years later, I can still picture driving up 495 and noting the clear clear blue. I had a new-ish car, a new apartment, and another day of work ahead. The roads were empty, but that wasn’t remarkable. I was within the window of time when traffic hit a lull all the way up route 44 to 495 to 95 to route 1.

I got to work and everyone was piled in the conference room around the TV. Nothing but smoke all over the Manhattan skyline. By the time I’d gotten there it was all over. Well thank goodness for instant replay huh?

A Boeing 767 is a rather large plane. Each of the twin towers dwarfed the planes which destroyed them. The damage was sufficient to eventually bring both towers down. Now I know over the years there’s been a lot made of possible conspiracies regarding the events of September 11, 2001. The Twin Towers were a unique design, and a perfect storm of circumstances owing to the amount of fuel on-board, the height at which they hit and that unique design caused them to drop as they did when they did. The Pentagon is all reinforced concrete. Like Pearl Harbor, like JFK, there are enough holes both real and perceived to hang a conspiracy tale however tenuous.

I do not believe any of it. Nevertheless, the real impact of September 11th is that America is not the safe hermetically sealed place we thought it was the day before. My dad hit the nail on the head that day when he said that this was payback for all the bullshit we’ve been involved with since the end of World War II. Including our support of Israel. I have never been a supporter of Israel myself, mainly because of the terrorist tactics of Menachem Begin and Moshe Dayan and the others who fought to create that state. I still feel that way, but I understand why they did what they did. Our support of that state, right or wrong, was one of the stated reasons for Al Qaeda’s war against us. And it was proven true by the last ten years of unremitting and unfocused aggression by our military and the CIA. That asshole man-child George W. Bush went from clown-in-chief to cowboy-in-chief and wrapped us all in god and glory at the expense of so many American kids and Iraqi innocents.

Which of course leads me, finally, to the real thing we saw that day. A bunch of religious zealots supported by a regime we prop up with our oil addiction killed themselves and three thousand innocent people for their fucking religion. That’s what motivated those fruitcakes that morning. It served as a wakeup call about what religion does, and our reaction to it also shows what religion does. Poison. All of it.

I miss that blue sky. I miss that innocent morning and that lovely little apartment I could not afford and the world I lived in the day before. This is a colder, darker place. Our innocence is gone, America is not the good country we were all taught it was, the religions we cling to are killing us as quickly as our rampant use of oil is killing our environment. We can never go back, and we may not survive. Nor may we want to survive in the world those Saudi assholes and that Texas buffoon gave us that day.

An Easter Tale

(I have posted this before, and I will again no doubt. This is how I imagine the whole thing in the cave went down, after Jesus hung out for a bit… It’s in my Adventures in Ordinary Time. In any case, a heartwarming tale for the coming holiday, I thank you…)

The first thing was the pain.

Well, before that was nothing, but like one follows zero, here, there, everywhere, was the pain.

Oh, and so very much of it. Everywhere! Hands and wrists and arms and head. And legs and feet too!

He wasn’t sure if it was dark or that he could not see through swollen eyelids, but it was still. He wasn’t sure if the pain was mocking him in his nakedness or if it was cold too.

He tried to speak but all that came was a creak.

Why did you leave me there, he thought to himself. Such humiliation, such PAIN! My god, my god, why did you abandon me?

I did everything you asked of me. Every single thing. You told me to lead and to spread the word, and I did those things. You told me to challenge the people and to fight the powers that push our faces into the dirt. I did those things. And more.

I brought your message of subversion through love and they tore my hide from me like the lamb being prepared for the ritual meal.

Oh, and they laughed! The guards and the priests and the governor too. He could still recall that man’s smirk as he washed his hands and listlessly flung the drying towel into his slave’s face, clearly enjoying himself.

And my followers, such men as these! They scattered like scalded dogs. Only the women remained to weep at the front of the crowd. The vision of it was like a fevered dream for him, thick with humiliation.

No man should die so bloodied and spat upon and naked before his mother and his wife! Oh! Better to die only among the soldiers, giving one bloodied cheek yet again to the one beating you so he will remember that he had to work to kill a man that day.

But they failed.

Oh, it almost worked, oh yes the Romans are thorough. But the nails and the hanging too? To set an example, apparently. Don’t mess with the temple. Don’t get between the priests and their money. Don’t mess with business!

Kill the lamb, skewer the corpse and roast it up for dinner after the audience leaves. But serve with bitter herbs of course! They are Pharisees and must show their leadership and piety with proper food choice, yes?

Ohhh, the pain. And what it does to one’s mind. And the pictures it paints! Those filthy Romans with their costumes and legions. Oh, to see them all weeping like women and kneeling before the beaten man on the cross. To lie prostrate before me and beg forgiveness for the greatest sin of all!

Oh! And the priests in the temple and all the “chosen people” who heard the message again and again. How many times must I tell you? How much more clearly can I convey the message?

A pox on you all! To the hundredth generation nothing but scorn and shame and terror. Wander the earth like the lord never gave you your promised land. I told you, the lord gives and the lord takes away! Oh you Judea, you will finally listen and know!

Yes, obsess over what you’ve all done for generations to come!

Ohhh, such righteous anger makes the pain a little blunt, yes? Makes the heart beat again strongly!

Rest first. Find out where you are, Yeshua. Then find that rock-headed Simon and the rest of those fools! Put a scare into their idiot souls and send them into the world with the fear of GOD!

Just seeing me walk in the room will do that, I think. Yes, you asses, “he is risen.” What did I tell you would happen?

Now I have a real plan. A real vision! A story that will chill the soul and shake the foundations. And executed right it will most certainly topple the powers of the world!

Yes, rest first. Lie still. We have nothing but time….

Artificial God, the Red Thread and the Unwoven Rainbow

For the past few days, I’ve been pondering this idea of an Artificial God. To give a bit of background, this idea comes from a speech by Douglas Adams in 1998. Here is the link to a transcript.

The basic idea is that some concepts, though clear products of the imagination, and as not-real as, well, money, have a definite impact and a definite meaning to us. Money, and the entire system of transacting these pieces of paper–or better, sliding a plastic card through a little device–forms the very real underpinnings of our civilization. So much so that we’d doubtless drop back 100,000 years if the whole system collapsed. Having it in place though has allowed unprecedented advances in art, technology and science to happen. Shakespeare, Heinlein, Apollo 11, the Empire State Building, John Ford, Richard Dawkins, the Beatles, all these people and their works, and so many tangible things exist because at its heart, our civilization depends on a largely imaginary concept, and evolved from that and around that. It allowed the species to delve into philosophy, science, music, learning, in a way impossible otherwise.

The same can be said for God. God as a concept. God as principal creator as envisioned by a species of tool-makers and creators. Such a concept is strictly a product of the human imagination–make no mistake, Douglas Adams was very much an atheist and found the other way of thinking a bit silly. But he saw the need some may have for such crutches, hence his extemporaneous speech.

This comes to mind as I read a book by Becky Garrison called Jesus Died For This? To be certain, I am not her target audience–her disparaging references to the New Atheists are eye-rollingly typical of Christians. Also, her interludes of trying to commune with the spirits of St. Brigid and St. Kevin while travelling in Ireland do read like flights of fancy. However, she is trying to find something authentic and, well, “real” to her–the “risen Christ.”

I can identify with this. I did the same thing for a short time some years back. I was never a born-again Christian. That would be impossible because I don’t believe in the resurrection as an actual historic event. I believe my description of such a thing would be “highly fucking unlikely.” I cannot be a Christian for that reason right there. Also I cannot countenance–let alone actually believe–in the notion of Biblical literalness or (chuckle) infallibility. That I would describe as “bullshit.”

I do love the English language.

So how could I possibly identify with an avowed Christian like that?

Why, the search for authenticity of course. The search for capital-tee Truth. For Garrison it is the search for the “risen Christ.” For me it was just trying to find a way to reconcile my Catholic upbringing with my travels through Zen and the findings of science. The Truth was there somewhere.

Perhaps it was in a more metaphoric reading of the Bible. A reading filtered through human nature and Buddhist thought. The connections between Jesus and Buddha were explored by Thich Nhat Hanh, and I commend you to his teachings.

Trouble with that was, of course, the schitzophrenic nature of God in the old versus new testaments. Not to mention the contradictory views of Jesus in the four gospels. I am not talking Rashomon-style point-of-view errors, I am talking about the sort of depictions that can only come from four separate traditions based on one story, what we call the Gospel of Mark.

So suffice to say there was some serious cherry-picking done by yours truly. In fact, except for Ecclesiastes and Mark (and maybe Romans), the rest of the Bible is completely useless, even as a metaphoric guide to human behavior. Complete and utter shit.

But of course, what all that inspired over the last two millennia! Ah yes, the art and music! Yeah, not all bad, and should each and all be considered on their own merits, and owing to that other imaginary concept, money. Excess time and excess money and someone’s devotion can produce amazing art.

And that is the Truth right there, isn’t it? Devotion. Inspiration. Even the word speaks of the “cool breeze” of the Jesus Sutras. Spiritus Sanctus. Sacred breath, sacred wind. (watch which hole it’s coming out!) Inspiration is the heart of creativity, whatever that inspiration might be. Some of my material in Turboblues comes from the time when I took inspiration from my cherry-picked vision of God. Even at my most starry-eyed though, I knew it was the product of a powerful (albeit sleep-deprived) imagination. God as love, love as the product of devotion, or through the power of sex, sex as the timeless yet long-lost union with the divine. Ikkyu called his brand of lust-infused Zen “red-thread.” It’s the less imaginative, the less daring, the simple-minded, who conflate lust with something bad. Lust is what it is. Used well, it can bring you to quite tangible, almost divine bliss. Used poorly, well, you might understand Hell as it truly is. Hell’s not a place, though I have been there through misused lust.

In any case, that way of thinking, that circular and circuitous route to and through an imaginary god, had to stop. It was the product of a powerful imagination and a lot of thinking. And lack of sleep.

So bring this back to Artificial God, why doncha!

I’m getting there.

Man has a peculiar ability to create, beyond mere problem solving. He creates tools and thinks of processes to solve problems, like how to kill food more efficiently, or to stay warm, or to eat better. He sees the lightning, hears the thunder, feels the wind and the sun, and comprehends this according to terms he understands: Hierarchy. Pecking order. Leadership. Something that makes such mighty forces must be an entity greater than himself. And these things must be “made” by someone, else how did they come to be?

So he combines all this into something he calls, well, one of the billion names of God. Every tribe had its personal name for this being, and make no mistake, it was a human being, only amplified a thousandfold. Fallible, emotional, petty, just like humans. They create totems, symbols, icons, to signify their god, and invent amazing stories to entertain themselves, because this creation of theirs inspired them. In time, as generations picked up, made sense and made use of the concept, it became an institution which was itself picked up and used and understood in differing ways.

Fast-forward through the ages, and God becomes less real, more idealized. More abstract. Terms like infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent become used to describe the god we call God. The world of phenomenon known to the ancients gives way to a world described by something called the Scientific Method. The world this method describes is one of simple processes which, when writ large and repeatedly, shows enormous complexity. Even to the point where a simpler mind would intuit a designer. The ancient concepts die hard, and the world as it truly exists (like, say, at the quantum level) is one that is foreign to our thinking.

Douglas Adams posited an Artificial God as a way of inspiring creative thought while something enormously better becomes more well known. Richard Dawkins wrote a wonderful book on that something better called Unweaving The Rainbow, and I fully commend that book to you as well.

Unconsciously, those who search for a Theory of Everything follow the same path to the divine. Their search may one day bear fruit, and it may not. The Artificial God of their understanding inspires them to push back the darkness, but it is definitely an artifice, and they do not pretend otherwise.

The god of my understanding was always an artificial one and try as I might, I could not pretend otherwise either. But I do love the work I got out of it.

An Insurrection – An Easter Tale

…and off again. Love to all.

Holy war. War holy?

I know this is from a few weeks ago (I’ve been busy. Get stuffed), but it’s been revealed that Rumsfeld or his team included bible verses as quotes in Defense Department briefings. Looking them over, they’re presented mainly as a design element alongside lots of pretty pictures, since our former President was a boob and a functioning illiterate. But it is indeed significant that Rummy included such quotes. He knew his audience, and he knew that that audience would respond favorably to seeing such quotes among his briefings on what our military is doing in the Middle East.

Together, they present an image of American soldiers praying to god, our awesome weaponry in action, and women and children thankful for their liberators. Good works. Holy works, even.

…and exactly what the Arab world thinks we are doing there: Bringing Christian values to the heathen. At gunpoint if necessary. Looking at these images from previously classified memos, I’d say that’s exactly how the Bush administration thought to prosecute this war. Calling this windfall for Defense Contractors and Haliburton and Bechtel shareholders a “War On Terror” also serves to keep the various riff-raff (Muslims, non-(white) Americans, liberals) at bay. “You want another 9/11? Take off your clothes and step through the scanner.”

The near-religion that’s built up around the military in this country since World War II is also put to use here. “It’s un-American to complain about the military, our boys fighting and dying for your freedoms.” Is it? Re-read the First Amendment and get back to me on that.

As an aside, I am not sure which blind subservience to an obsolete ideal galls me more.

So to recap, Rumsfeld cynically fed into the delusions of an overly religious buffoon and is responsible for the deaths of over 4,000 young American men and women and an untold number of Iraqi civilians.

By feeding into this apocalyptic end-times Christian batshit delusion that’s kept us hanging around in the Middle East for so long, not to mention our crack-head obsession with oil and the need to funnel dollars into Israel because of some passage in a book long since discredited as revelation of future times by every educated Biblical scholar of the last century (quite a run-on, big finish coming up), and by producing hard evidence that our President and his administration believed this to be a Christian crusade as the entire Arab world rightly suspected, thus endangering the lives of every American soldier and civilian over there, Donald Rumsfeld is guilty of treason.

Phew! Quite an eyeful, no? I mean every word of it though.

Okay, reading over Article 3 of the Constitution it might be a stretch to fit these actions into something we’re Constitutionally obligated to kill over, but it’s easy to argue that by presenting the Iraq war as being religious in nature (easily implied by the pictures and quotes, the link is a few paragraphs up if you need to see them again), we give every Islamic fundamentalist nutjob a reason to strap on a bomb and kill our kids over there. Before these documents came out they had a kooky supposition. Now they have a strong argument. And my argument (sorta) has the aid and comfort to an enemy needed by Article 3.

By extension, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are also guilty of treason. The bitch of it is, none of these assholes will meet their just punishment for what they have done to undermine the freedom and security this country once enjoyed, and for the lives they’ve so callously and cynically fed to our military blood cult for their own financial gain and religious satisfaction.

I am going to finish this with another thought. We are some 65 years out from D-Day, the largest invasion of Europe ever launched. The boys who fought and died at Normandy that morning had some arguably tangible reasons to fight, whether it was a belief in Democracy, hatred of the Nazis or just that they would be shot or imprisoned if they didn’t go.

World War II forms the nexus of the religious fervor we still have for our military. Before that war, being in the military was something you did, and was not looked upon well by all strata of society in America. For some people in society it was conidered a definite step down. After World War II, being in the military was a singular honor (rightly so by the way, given the Marines’ history), but it was an honor in the way that I’d guess the priesthood would have been five or six centuries ago. Not only was it good for the family name, it was potentially lucrative depending on your social standing.

The filial love the Baby-boomers have for the actions of their fathers has allowed World War II to hold its singular place in the American psyche longer than the First World War did. WWII was also much larger in scope and much more dramatic, but that war changed America more than any other event. We’d aligned ourselves with the concept that capitalism and democracy went hand-in-hand (they most certainly do not, by the way), and used that attractive idea to wend our way into the hearts and minds of the world. Hollywood helped that a lot too. We promoted something called the “American way of life” to the rest of the world, but made sure their attempts at that way of life matched our interests.

What that entailed, and how destructive that was to the ways of life for other smaller countries was never told to us when it happened. If it was, it was relegated to fringe elements, to people who’d come to this country with tales from abroad told on college campuses. I recommend a book by John Perkins called Confessions of an Economic Hitman. That book opened my eyes about what we did abroad throughout the post-war era, and still do to this day. It also brings a lot of light to the real reason we’re in Iraq. The religion angle was just something to keep President Dummy interested in staying. Perkins has another book called The Secret History of the American Empire that is a lot more personal and shameful if you are an American–a person–with conscience.

I am proud to be an American, proud of our secular heritage (yes it is, read your history) and grateful to those who volunteered to serve, or who were volunteered to serve. I despise the waste of that service by those who would use it for personal profit or religious satisfaction. That waste is an insult to those men and women and their memories, as well as a continuing insult to the kids who put on the uniform for whatever reasons they do.

Speaking of religion…

The word “religion” comes from the Latin word which also gives us “ligature.” It is something that binds people together. Christianity–at least the mysticism that Paul wrote about–was about the perfection of man from creature to christ. It was about the Christ in all of us and how to pull that out from the selfish animals we all are. Meister Eckhart saw that, so did Thomas Merton much later on.

Speaking of Paul, a lot of the writings credited to him were not his. The same man who wrote so kindly to the women of the church at the end of his letters would not also denigrate and devalue them. Should be pretty obvious from reading through them that they could not emanate from the same man, even without the extensive scholarship done over the years that proves the point.

The heaven and the hell of Paul’s writings are not physical locations. They are states of mind, states of being. Not some place you go to when you die. We’ve all been in Hell at some point or another, and in Heaven too. Scan your lives, I know you will find those instances in your memories.

There was no historic figure named Jesus, no miracles, no literal crucifixion or literal resurrection of the body. No original sin either. No good, no evil, no god, no devil. None of that makes any sense. As a series of metaphors however it all begins to fall into place and actually have value.

Christianity as practiced today is a perversion.

Religion at its best can be something to uplift the spirit and to make the world better NOW. Because that’s all we have. As I mentioned in this space before, we are all alone. All of us. And the only certain thing we have is that we will all die and return to dust. Religion can be one way of finding solace in this life if solace is what you need. That’s why it’s the opiate of the masses.

Knowing what I know of opiates, Marx was particularly on the mark when he said that.

Finger Pointing at the Moon

I remember the moment quite clearly, though I was sauced at the time.

It was 1989, the birthday party for my friend Marcy. I was in a new relationship with Rhonda, whom I loved very much–at least as much as I thought I could being so young. I knew I loved Rhonda and I knew she’d said she loved me, but I cried because I couldn’t feel it. I had her words and actions to go by and nothing else. I told her this but I don’t think she understood. I was a drunken mess. What can I tell you. I didn’t understand my own thought enough to explain it to her even if I was sober.

The reason I think of this melodramatic tirade from 20 years ago has to do with Colin McGinn. He is an atheist philosopher, one of the six interviewed on the Atheism Tapes (well worth watching. It’s on Netflix). In his interview he talked about the “god” concept being around–being so prevalent in society–because it answers the loneliness we all feel because of being locked in our own skulls. We make up this concept because we are all truly very much alone inside ourselves.

I call it the Tragedy of the Human Condition. We are unable to truly convey the thoughts we have. I don’t care how much of a command you have over your given language you cannot explain some thoughts so well they will be perfectly understood. That’s where art comes in, I suppose.

We are all alone. All of us.

Do you think perhaps that’s really why people can’t let go of religion? Why they can’t let go of god?

Our soon-to-be-former President and our destructive stay in Iraq spawned, among other things, a wave of atheist sentiment which included three great books: The God Delusion, God is not Great and The End of Faith. All three of these approach the subject of atheism in different ways, each according to the backgrounds of their authors, and with different amounts of vitriol at our species’ destructive dance with god.

I spent a lot of time myself going over spirituality, metaphysics and religion over the last 20 years. I came to Zen Buddhism and Taoism early on in that search and liked them both. The fact that neither one requires a supernatural deity or a godman is even more appealing. I’ll come back to this later.

I went back and forth with Christian mysticism as well trying to strike a balance between the Catholicism of my youth and the things I knew made more sense. Some of that was also mixed in with Gnosticism, both in its historical sense and in its metaphysical sense. At this point I will direct you to Timothy Freke and his books. He pushes his sources to the limit to make a point but his argument about the “Abrahamic religions” being false and destructive is a valid one.

Freke points out that the story of Jesus is a copy of the mystery cults that were found all over the Mediterranean at the time and posits the theory that the Jesus Movement was one started by Saul of Tarsus (Paul) among others as a Jewish version of the mystery cults. This makes sense given the fact that the story later recounted in the Gospel of Mark (upon which the other three Gospels were based) is essentially a godman story originally written in Greek for a Jewish audience (John Shelby Spong also speaks of this last bit in his Jesus for the Non-Religious). It also makes sense when you consider that Paul himself never mentions Jesus as an historic figure. He actually doesn’t even care really whether Jesus existed. It was never important to Paul or to the movement he advocated. This last because Jesus never existed in the first place. Spong has a different conclusion about Jesus’ existence in his book, and his reasons are interesting.

I center myself around Christianity here mainly because it is that movement which is responsible for eradicating the other mystery cults that competed with it and directly or indirectly has caused most of the pain and suffering our race has endured for 2000 years. All this for a man who died so long ago if he even existed in the first place.

Personally I say sod the whole thing. All of it.

Zen Buddhism states that once you reach the other shore of enlightenment you leave the boat behind. Drop the crutch you needed to get across the room. Look at the moon, not the finger pointing to it. I can go on with the metaphor if necessary. I love the honesty in Zen. If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. same goes for any godman.

My finger points to this: There comes a time, as Paul said, when you drop childish things. Religion is one of those things. If you want to know the nature of good and evil, look no further than the second chapter of the Tao Te Ching.

Jesus is dead, Lao Tzu is dead, Baba is dead, Buddha is dead, God is dead. So’s Neitzsche but he actually existed. So did Baba for that matter….

I will leave you with three concepts: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, “all you need is love,” and the words of Zen Master Seung Sahn: Cultivate ‘don’t-know’ mind.

A turn in the road, and I must follow.

So for the past couple weeks, I’ve been trying out Grace St. Pauls here in Tucson. They are very progressive as far as Episcopal churches go, and the Episcopals are generally more progressive than other sects.

But they are still too conservative for me. Too Catholic, actually. Too in love with their Episcopalness. They are also a wonderful congregation and let me join them readily. But our paths diverge.

I came back to Christianity via the Tao, quantum mechanics and Zen, but I am not a Christian. I am a lover of Jesus but have no Christian (or Catholic) baggage to shed. Not anymore. I look to Christianity for its mystics. Catholicism for all its ills housed some amazing mystics among its monastics. There is love for that mysticism among this congregation, but they are too tied to the ceremonies of their youth.

To me, all the mainline Christian sects are the same: All Catholic in the original sense of the word. Then there are the Bible-toting yahoos, but there is no mysticism there. Not a whole lot of Jesus or Christ or God there. Just fear.

The people at Grace St. Pauls are wonderful and spiritual people. They are happy in their journey. I wish I could continue to be a part of that journey, but my path goes that other way.

I must follow it.