"There's more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
(The less I seek my source)
Closer I am to fine." - Emily Sailers, Indigo Girls
God, dear lord, this song moves me. It took me an instant to give up Christianity, but it's taken me a couple of decades to wrap my arms around that loss.
We are humans. We live, and we die. Our sons and our daughters live on. And they die,, and their sons and daughters live on, and we, as a species, ideally -
have eternal life.
But there's no ME in that scenario. I'm a cog in the wheel. I'm dust and decomposition. I'm the roadkill the crows would be pecking at, were it not for embalming or caskets or cremation.
And I don't want to be nothing. I don't want to have no consciousness. I want to know what happens next. I want more than what I'll likely be given - 100 years or so on a planet, as a fairly evolved mammal - evolved enough to say, think these thoughts and write these posts.
So, there's a Great Depression in knowing that I spent my first 20 years believing in the God of a bible (my chosen source - or, more so, the source chosen for me.) And then I spent another 20 trying to convince myself that it was okay to walk away from said source.
Like the song said, I even spent time trying to take from multiple sources.
I even spent time thinking through the metaphors in the sources - the Son versus the Sun. You know. If you know, you know.
All of it sucks.
All of the hate, done in the name of a god.
All of the longing for something better than this mortal coil.
All of the comfort in believing the Evil ones will "get theirs" in Eternal Torment.
But there's none of that.
There's only pointless hate, carried out for ego and for power.
There's only this mortal coil.
There's no comfort, no Eternal Torment, just a glitch in the brains of these mammals around me that make them hurt and kill their own.
There's only here. There's only now.
And it terrifies me to have conscience, and it horrifies me to lose it.
Like Shakespeare said, "Conscience doth make cowards of us all."
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