Green Oasis

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.—Oscar Wilde

I am grateful…

1. … to be alive and healthy.
2. … to have a best friend.
3. … for the generosity of strangers who donate their time for free culture projects. I use so many free tools every day (e.g. I manage this blog with free software), I won’t attempt to list them.
4. … for museums and libraries and other local institutions that bring the best of culture to us.
5. … to have clean food and water.

I am grateful…

1. … for birdsong and mown grass in the morning.
2. … for music.
3. … to be healthy and alive.
4. … for culture, the vehicle of human nature, wisdom, and values.
5. … to have a place in my little family.

I am grateful for…

1. … a half-baked idea for a new blog (shh! don’t tell anyone about it yet) that I’m really excited about. I think I’ll have fun with it even if no one else pays attention (which is a good sign).
2. … the chance to learn stuff, one of my favorite things to do.
3. … the opportunity to watch the crazy, improbable miracle of life as I watch young things sprout and grow.
4. … the perspective that watching things die gives me.
5. … the good fun I have with my wife.

April 12, 2006

Releasing myself from what I thought I knew about God and Satan has empowered me.

I was taught to be in perpetual combat with my adversary, Satan. This colored my life and perceptions with a tone of crisis. Putting down my weapons of war has given me the calm, inner clarity to see that the evil that I do comes from within, not without. I have the power to direct my actions, not an immaterial tempter. I alone bear responsibility.

Releasing my hope for a life beyond what I can see has made this life more precious. I do not know whether I will live beyond my death or whether my consciousness is a function of the biological processes of my body. I can no longer see injustice and pain and excuse it in the hope that it will be rectified in an afterlife. My best hope is to improve the human situation today, now.

Strangely, Alma the Younger’s word have more meaning to me today than I can ever remember:

“Now, we will compare the word unto a seed. Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.”

My heart swelled with peace and confidence when I finally accepted the evidence that has been before my eyes my entire life. Still there lingers some shame for being disloyal to the community that nurtured me. If anything, the Mormon faith has taught me virtuous principles and a loyalty to the truth above all else. For that I am grateful.

[It is true that I learned the importance of truth from Mormonism. However, the LDS church for all its talk about the truth has a stilted, awkward relationship with it. Where I learned to value the truth from Mormonism, I learned how to find it from scientists, skeptics, and freethinkers.]