A Diversion

I have been having a hard time getting through Deuteronomy. I am trying, but my god. It is beyond terrible.

In other news, I have been re-listening to old podcasts by The Thinking Atheist on my iPod and heard this wonderfulness from 2/29/12 today. I liked it so much I want to put it here:

... it's simply a realization that we live in a real world with real evidence. Cause and effect explains pretty much everything. And the things we don't understand, the things that we're still exploring, well they don't require a fantastic, mythological storybook fantasy. They don't require crazy stories of naked people in a garden or being conjured up from a clot of blood. Or animal spirits. Or looking up at the sky, looking at the stars, reading our horoscopes to see what the stars say about our day.. Should we stay in bed today? Should we go out the front door?! I'm an Aries, I better read up on this. 

We are liberated because we understand we only have each other. We're liberated because we're no longer worried about the eye in the sky threatening hell. And honestly, heaven doesn't sound all that great. An eternity of what? Sitting at the feet of Jesus, telling him how awesome he is? Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty who was and is, and is to come, forever and ever and ever and ever.. zzzzzz... Sign me up!

Don't need it, thank you. We're here for a blip, a blink of an eye. Make the most of every moment. It's all we have. And having that realization, embracing that fact, that truth... it's like having the chains lifted. It's like you can fly. 

Will people understand? Well, most of them, in our religious culture, probably not. Are we going to catch some serious shit for saying it out loud? You bet. Will it be easy? Probably not. But I tell ya, I'll take this life any day over what I had as a Christian. Trying to jam that square peg into a round hole everyday. This is supposed to work. I've got to make this work. It's got to be my fault. It's got to be my fault. I must not have enough faith. I must not have enough knowledge. I must not be using the discernment of the Holy Spirit to understand. I must not be attuned to the voice of God. I need to pray more. I need to go to church more. I need to do this, I need to do that. I've got to be better. It's my fault that this crazy, batshit, Bronze Age document written by anonymous primitives doesn't make sense to me.

The whole thing is gold, but that last bit really resonated with me. It is indeed a crazy, batshit, Bronze Age document written by primitives. And it definitely does not make sense to me.