Short Post in Celebration of Life

I'm pretty much hating on life these days -- all of it is entirely my own fault, and knowing that does wonders for my mood -- so I'm following the advice Roy gave awhile ago to just blog a little every day. Makes me feel better, somehow. Even just a little bit. Not that this will improve my writing. But surely it can't make it worse.

I want to know what the expected outcome is of being married a long time. Through both the internet and actual real conversations with actual real people, I've seen that there is a lot of ambivalence out there. People, both sexes, not really excited about who they're devoted to, but it's too god damn much trouble to make a change. Now, the dumb ones, who think they're clever, go and explore and have affairs and get caught and wind up in the shit, and if they're well-known and powerful they make the news and we all get a laugh. But the rest of us don't act up like that, we just sort of live the habits and accommodations and look up once in awhile to notice, wow, another year has gone by, fancy that.

I'm struggling because on the one hand, I'm sick of living a half-ass life, and though I married someone who never lives her life half-ass -- in fact, she pretty much kicks ass, every day -- I can't just flip a switch and start wanting to be full-ass specifically with her. No: Ambivalence; and a long history; and way too much shit boiling up from the state of our lives when we got together as well as from all the years before, dating right back to when I was a one year old. Seriously. All those long arcs of personal history are converging to this point, focused like sunlight through a lens, and that intense light beam is slowly but surely lighting the fuse.

Sort of a crisis that strikes at mid life. That's why they call it a, erm, you know. But what I'm wanting to know is, what do all the other poor saps (and sapettes) do? Right, some go off. Maybe I will too, at least something happens. Some (men particularly) push it deep inside where it twists around and they wind up being seriously outlived by their wives. Some manage to look (at least outwardly) quite happy. Typically those are men of faith. That fact bugs the shit out of me.

I understand faith. I understand it as a form of mental organization that human beings evolved as a means to survive. More accurately put (because too often, evolution is described backwards, as if changes are adaptations when in fact they are accidents that happened to turn out as advantages), the mutation that allows for faith and god and all that provided a psychological advantage that, in the unforgiving primal forest, led to more successful reproduction. So we all have it. I just don't choose to use it. Faith is like fire with all its risks and benefits, but now that we have central heating, why set part of your house on fire just to keep warm?

Yet there they are: Men of faith who have defined and narrowed (or maybe broadened, wtf do I know) their lives and found their bliss is in what they've spent the past couple three decades building. Well. BULLY FOR THEM.

I have to get back to work but my whole hating on life point is that this conundrum and a number of related side issues that I'm not going into here have me so distracted that my job performance sucks which only makes things worse and I'm supposed to feel better now that I've written it out and done so publicly. Yeah.

Confusion of Faith

Slow week: No one in the office, no one asking questions, no one expecting results. So I'm multislacking.

Wrote the following to Taranto wrt his quibbling over points made in debate by fellow non-believers but presumably politically non-aligned Christopher Hitchens and Heather Mac Donald (why else would he distance himself from them?). He writes about it at the bottom of today's BotW.

Summary quote from Mac Donald:

Do modern Christians still believe with the same fervor as in the past all those unyielding doctrines of eternal damnation for the unbaptised and unconverted? They sure don't act as if they do. If they really were convinced that their friends, co-workers, neighbors, and in-laws were going to hell because they possessed the wrong or no religious belief, I would think that the knowledge would be unbearable. Christians surely see that most of their wrong-believing personal acquaintances are just as moral and deserving as themselves. How, then, do they live with the knowledge that their friends and loved ones face an eternity of torment?

She goes on to suggest this conundrum as evidence of a widespread cognitive dissonance. Taranto thinks she's a little bonkers for regarding eternal damnation following the Last Judgment as an empirical matter. I don't.

Mr Taranto,

You are gently pulling Heather MacDonald's leg (and those of your readers) when criticizing her points. Your subtle sense of humor is at work here. I have to conclude this because even what little of her positions you have provided make good sense.

Obviously there will never be experimental evidence of a Last Judgment, so referring to its results as empirical could be described as inaccurate. But it is potentially so to those who truly believe in it. She is therefore asking of believers to own up to their beliefs: Either all your cherished friends and family who do not believe will be forever punished at the end-time, or you don't really believe what you say you do. If the former, you either don't care about their inevitable torment, or are pretending you don't. If the latter, you are being dishonest. Since very few people who are not sociopaths really don't care about the pain and suffering of loved ones, it's sensible for her to conclude that many, perhaps most, people of professed faith are to a degree lying to themselves.

Since you don't highlight this as the fundamental point of disagreement, it seems you are quibbling over whether or not after-life results could ever be verified experimentally. Obviously they could not if there is no afterlife, but it is a valid point for discussing the perspective of those who believe there is. That's why I think you're quibbling, with a bit of tongue in cheek.

By the way, she's right. My grandmother died without ever professing faith, yet those of her family who believed in faith as the escape route from everlasting torment mourned only her passing, and not at all her presumed fate. It would be ridiculously cruel for me to conclude they were indifferent to her suffering. Like most people who profess belief outwardly, in their hearts they just didn't believe in it.

I stretched a little here. My grandmother didn't really have family members who were believers, unless you include a temporary step-grandchild or two, but the point was more important than strict accuracy. Oh, I could have picked another example, but that would take more time. Hey, I'm busy here!