Would the heathens/pagans/Others care to explicate their stances and/or spirituality?

It'd consider myself a Deist, in that what we know about the creater can only be determined from the details of the universe around us. While I've had a good deal of exposure to christianity, I've found that the more I learned, the more I felt it was mythology rather than reality. Also, I was always uncomfortable in thinking one set of beliefs should be right when so many others have believed other things. So I sort of went to the position that, okay, there are some core values that might be shared among beliefs and that the christian mythos is one story of those beliefs.

I was also bothered by the concept that our existence here on earth somehow determined our eternal fate. To me that just didn't make sense, sort of like making life decisions for an infant based on the infants actions in the first second of its life. But I could abstract this, thinking okay this is just one step in a progression and while it does have consequences in the hereafter, it is only a beginning.

Essentially, the more abstract I could make the beliefs, the more comfortable I became. Eventually, I just abstracted out the Deist view of the universe. I do think there is more to us than just matter, so I place myself in the Deist camp rather than the Atheist camp.

P-C!!!

I think she's still hoping I'll go back and get a Ph.D. eventually.

Why is this so important to her ?

MotherFUCKER!

When I was hired, I was told that my benefits would kick in on the first day of the month following 90 days of employment. Since I was hired Dec 1st, therefore, my benefits should kick in March 1st -- and I was explicitly told so by HR. I just handed in all of my insurance documents, and now I'm being told that, actually, since March 1st is the 90th day of my employment (what with Feb being a short month), my health insurance won't be able to start until April 1st. Meaning the cancellation papers we just sent in to our COBRA plan will have to be recalled. (And, of course, those papers have already been moved over to the new apartment, meaning DH has to go over there and bring them back before he can call them to find out if it's too late to extend our plan another month.) Meaning that we have to come up with the money to pay for another month of COBRA. Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

Have you talked to HR again, Jess? You might be able to get them to change, if you remind them they promised, and you expected, etc....also double check they dont' start taking out money for the health care too early. Cause that would doubly bite.

WARNING: Rambly, unconnected thoughts ahead. My usual kind of post.

In re: spirituality - I have a hard time defining my beliefs enough to clearly communicate them. This may speak to an absence of belief. Hmmmm.

Anyway. I can't speak to the existence of a God or Gods. They certainly may be there, but I am not in their ken nor are they in mine. I do not have the capacity for blind faith, and I've not received an impression that They/He/She/It are there. Mind you, I'm not a person who only believes in what I can see or touch or smell. I know there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. I do believe in ghosts and alternate planes and continuation of self and intellect after these wonderful machines we occupy cease functioning. All of that is a continuation of energy, and not everyone accomplishes it. We as humans have a most amazing capacity for imagination, which (I think) works against us in some way. We need a reassurance that We Are Not Alone (we’re not, of course, look at all the other life-forms sharing this rock with us). So, some people may have the self-energy to continue after their body stops. What if a whole bunch of people were concentrating their energy on solving the Why Are We Here question? Could they then create a god or gods? I think so.

Hunh. This veered off from my personal beliefs into larger sociological issues. If I continue, I’ll start explaining how I think religion is just a way to codify certain social mores, and that’s just boring and possibly offensive. So. To sum up my personal code:

There may be gods, I don’t know and have no truck with them. There is a lot of energy crackling around in the universe, and some of it interacts with us, and some of us interact with it and can harness/use it better than the rest of us. An It Harm None, Do What You Will (and don’t try to impose your worldview on others thankyouverymuch). All You Need Is Love (And Some Booze). It’s A Small World After All (so don’t fuck it up).

If I do have a god, it's the God Of Parenthetical Abuse.

Oh, Jessica, that's horrible! Clearly, someone in HR needs to be severely beaten. it seems to me that once they tell you you'll be covered March 1 they shouldn't be able to take it back, regardless of their apparent error in the original calculation.

Wait a minute. 31+31+28=90. If you started 12/1, 2/28 should be the 90th day.

Oh, shit, Jessica. That's just stupid! I mean, is there a rule somewhere that benefits have to be all sticky and legalese?

I was raised in a Baptist/Non-denominational home and we never gave anything up. The only thing we did was not eat red meat on Good Friday.

It's more of a personal/spiritual challenge thing for me than anything else.

My parents are both on the Tommyrot side of things in terms of what they believe, find religion baffling, and probably are blissfully unaware that it even *is* Lent.

I'm on the liberal side of theology, don't believe that most of the Bible is literally true (though I do believe it to contain a lot of spiritual/emotional truth), and most of my religious library is readings of the text within the historical context/discussion of how various factions and translations have distorted things over 2000 years and why.

I suppose my beliefs could be summed up with "Gut instinct tells me there's something Higher, and Christianity has a lot of good core concepts."

OTOH, if there is a God, then all sorts of issues come up, such as why are there thousands of different and contradictory religions over human history, why is there no direct evidence of God's existence, why there is so much pain, suffering and premature death, and so on....

That only contradicts a benevolent, omnipotent God. Who's to say God isn't just interested in us? That or eternally bored. I was just thinking the other day about how if you wanted to, you could believe God was so lazy he let evolution do all the work. Then he sat around looking at all the dinosaurs and plants and people. And maybe he walked away. Or took a vacation. I think if you want to believe in a God, you can totally come up with a plausible personality. I'm a wishy washy agnostic who reserves the right to complain about God's meddling in my affairs. Though I also think it's fun to believe that life itself has sentience and it likes to fuck with people.

Why is this so important to her ?

Well, you know, a son with a doctorate is something to be proud of and brag about, moreso objectively than a son with a Master's. In my family, I am pretty much the golden child with the smarts and all. The oldest child on my mother's side. The children on my dad's side are mostly in India and not as educated. When I continued to whine about disappointing everyone, I wasn't kidding. I'm supposed to go to the top here.

I'll be back in about five hours.