Beliefs @ MindSay 
god
A supernatural selected me
I see your plan so grandiose
My very own Galapagos
God laid down and he began to trace
An image that he could embrace
Then he smiled down on his plan
And from the dust he made a man
I'm an original species
More enlightened than Nietzche
I'm sure you'd like to meet me
'Cause I am loved
By the Maker oh so clever
I was made to live forever
Though my body turns to sand
My soul is in his hands
A breakthrough theory of origin
A simple truth that always been
Fingerprints have been left behind
To point us to a Master mind
I'm an original species
More enlightened than Nietzche
I'm sure you'd like to meet me
I am loved
By the Maker oh so clever
I was made to live forever
Though my body turns to sand
My soul is in his hands
Stars in the sky
There to please my eye
The cosmos in his command
But he has time to hold my hand
I'm an original species
More enlightened than Nietzche
I'm sure you'd like to meet me
'Cause I am loved
By the Maker oh so clever
I was made to live forever
Though my body turns to sand
My soul is in his hands
I'm an original species
More enlightened than Nietzche
I'm sure you'd like to meet me
'Cause I am loved
I am loved
-Audio Adrenaline
-=-=-=-
I'm caught as though stretched between two poles.
On the one hand, for the first time in a very long time, I've been able to talk to someone about what I think about God. I'm very accustomed to being censored for this - it wasn't any kind of evangelism, it was me making a point about why something matters to me. But I have very few friendships where I can speak openly about God.
It's an interesting thing. One of my best friends is Mormon, and when we were just entering high school, we made some sort of agreement that neither of us would blast our faith at the other. At the time, we needed each other too much as friends to risk the friction. That agreement's stood. I've been generally labeled as either a prude, a religious nut, or something in between by two circles of friends - oddly, that's their variety of respecting what I believe. Even with my few Christian friends, it's as though we're in territory where we feel like we should be comfortable, but we don't know how far the other person believes, and we're terribly afraid of offending. And with my friends from bible study and church, oddly, we know each other as Christians first, and friends second. Which you'd think would be good, but the problem is that there's little foundation of our own making. It's hard to talk about how God's helping you with a particular issue when the person listening doesn't know you well enough to know why this is an issue.
The other pole is a strong fear of what happened last time. My censorship is often self-laid - I found that a particular friend wanted nothing to do with me if I was at all excited about God. As long as I was excited about things he could either enjoy or dismiss, he had no problem with me. He couldn't dismiss God, and believe me, he tried - and he couldn't enjoy a relationship with him, either. I was so eager to be around him and receive attention from him that I accepted the restrictions. They were reinforced by my brother-friend, who loves me dearly but still thinks I'm a religious nut. As he saw it, God was real, but you don't actually have a relationship with him, he's just a force.
So, I'm torn between being completely ecstatic to be close to God again, and afraid that someone's going to be irritated and want me to shut up again. And there's always the force of gravity pulling me down - which is the fear that I'm going to lose this fire again, and be okay with blending back in, keeping my mouth shut and my head down, living as I was before.
Torn between two, and the constant pull of the third. All I can do is count on God to hold me up - clinging neither to my own excitement to last, or caving to my fear, but holding me to him. Pray for us - I don't think God needs any help, but I certainly do.
-A
The following paragraphs are form (www.secularhumanism.org) if you would like to know more.
What is Secular Humanism?
Secular Humanism is a term which has come into use in the last thirty years to describe a world view with the following elements and principles:
- A conviction that dogmas, ideologies and traditions, whether religious, political or social, must be weighed and tested by each individual and not simply accepted on faith.
- Commitment to the use of critical reason, factual evidence, and scientific methods of inquiry, rather than faith and mysticism, in seeking solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions.
- A primary concern with fulfillment, growth, and creativity for both the individual and humankind in general.
- A constant search for objective truth, with the understanding that new knowledge and experience constantly alter our imperfect perception of it.
- A concern for this life and a commitment to making it meaningful through better understanding of ourselves, our history, our intellectual and artistic achievements, and the outlooks of those who differ from us.
- A search for viable individual, social and political principles of ethical conduct, judging them on their ability to enhance human well-being and individual responsibility.
- A conviction that with reason, an open marketplace of ideas, good will, and tolerance, progress can be made in building a better world for ourselves and our children.
How Do Secular Humanists View Religious and Supernatural Claims?
Secular humanists accept a world view or philosophy called naturalism, in which the physical laws of the universe are not superseded by non-material or supernatural entities such as demons, gods, or other "spiritual" beings outside the realm of the natural universe. Supernatural events such as miracles (in which physical laws are defied) and psi phenomena, such as ESP, telekinesis, etc., are not dismissed out of hand, but are viewed with a high degree of skepticism.
Are Secular Humanists Atheists?
Secular humanists are generally nontheists. They typically describe themselves as nonreligious. They hail from widely divergent philosophical and religious backgrounds.
Thus, secular humanists do not rely upon gods or other supernatural forces to solve their problems or provide guidance for their conduct. They rely instead upon the application of reason, the lessons of history, and personal experience to form an ethical/moral foundation and to create meaning in life. Secular humanists look to the methodology of science as the most reliable source of information about what is factual or true about the universe we all share, acknowledging that new discoveries will always alter and expand our understanding of it and perhaps change our approach to ethical issues as well. In any case their cosmic outlook draws primarily from human experiences and scientific knowledge.
What Is The Origin of Secular Humanism?
Secular humanism as an organized philosophical system is relatively new, but its foundations can be found in the ideas of classical Greek philosophers such as the Stoics and Epicureans as well as in Chinese Confucianism. These philosophical views looked to human beings rather than gods to solve human problems.
During the Dark Ages of Western Europe, humanist philosophies were suppressed by the political power of the church. Those who dared to express views in opposition to the prevailing religious dogmas were banished, tortured or executed. Not until the Renaissance of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, with the flourishing of art, music, literature, philosophy and exploration, would consideration of the humanist alternative to a god-centered existence be permitted. During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, with the development of science, philosophers finally began to openly criticize the authority of the church and engage in what became known as "free thought."
Beliefs, ideologies and organized religions are setting us against our neighbors; there is conflict, not only among different societies, but among groups within the same society. We must realize that as long as we identify ourselves with a country, as long as we cling to security, as long as we are conditioned by dogmas, there will be strife and misery both within ourselves and in the world.
I'm not sure why this is, but I don't do very many Caucasian mermaids. It's not that I mind doing them at all, but rather, most of the time I'll just go for some other color when it comes time to do any skin. The exception would be Ice Mermaids. They live under the ice, have ridiculously insane nightvision and powers of echolocation, and are superb war-mongering hunters who believe in 'kill first, then figure out if you can eat it'. Don't mess with Ice Mermaids, yo.
I would enjoy a chance to draw Inuit merpeople. Obviously, they would wear sealskin, not fur. Adaptations abound here, and I'm intrigued. I'm often fascinated by the variations in human faces, and I want to play with how they'd work in an aquatic setting.
After coloring-time, we go to play in the gym or Playland. Today, I had a kid throw up on a new section of the Playland. Certain regulations say that we can't use bleach on any part of the Playland. In the daycare, we use a 5% bleach solution (maybe 10%, if someone's not paying attention) for everything except dishes. It's great. Cleans and disinfects just about anything, yet isn't at the toxic levels that a lot of counter-cleaners are (there's a big wide space between killing most germs and slowly poisoning your kids - guess which brand names are on the wrong side of it?). But, we can't use it on the Playland. Hmmm. Well...turns out that we can use dish soap. Huh. Cool.
It was kinda cool. I mean, not the part where the little boy threw up. But the way we all went into action - Grandma cleared the kids out of the area, I went for getting the kid to the bathroom (with a bucket on the way), one of the other girls hopped over from the other side of the playland so that our staff numbers stayed where they were supposed to be - it was great. I love seamless teamwork.
Kid's fine now, but daycare policy on a number of symptoms is, if they hit this symptom, they go home, even if they're fine again later. So he and I hung out (we didn't think he should head back up in the Playland, just in case) on one of the benches, chatting.
One of my mermaid-girls got a good nosebleed going today, too, just before Playland. She and I elected to chill back in the room waiting for that one to stop, and we talked about hair. She's four, and loves my hair. She tells me this every other day. She particularly likes it when I leave it loose, which looks messier to me (not to mention being slightly more in my way), but she just runs up and wants to play with it all afternoon.
I'm getting it cut over Spring Break. I explained Spring Break to a couple of the kids (tried, anyway - they're 3-5, so how much they grab right away is hard to evaluate), that I would only be gone for a week, and this little four-year-old and I were chatting about how my hair's going to be very short when I come back. She was sad about this, and true to kid-form, asked, "Why?" on every part of my explanation.
So, this is me explaining Locks-of-Love to a four-year-old. "Okay, well...y'know how you can get sick with lots of different things?" She grabs the concept, and volunteers a couple examples that happened to her and to her best friend in the daycare, and one of the other kids. Nod, we're going to be here awhile, and I actually enjoy the explanations where they run away with exploring a concept. "Well, sometimes people get really sick with something called cancer, and sometimes they don't get a fever, but they lose all their hair. So, I go to a special place to get my hair cut, and they take it and give it to people who lost all their hair cause they got sick."
"Why?"
"Well, 'cause I can grow mine long again, and they might not be able to."
"Ohhhh." She plays with my hair again, apparently thinking this over. "But Phirefly, y'know what?"
I smile. "What?"
Looking earnestly into my face, "You shouldn't drink chocolate milk anymore."
I burst out laughing. I don't have the clear skin that the other daycare girls have been blessed with, and in my first week at the daycare, a lot of kids would come up and ask me, bluntly, "Why do you have those spots on your face?" A lot of things that are kind of hard to explain end up getting parallel explanations from me, which might not be the best course of action. I guess I just try to put things in terms that make sense when you're four. So, I explained that, the way one of the kids is allergic to peanut butter and can't have any, it's kind of like I'm allergic to chocolate and sweet things - when I eat some, my face breaks out. And they got that concept. But this little one, and I adore her for her sweet yet blunt approach to life, would check my face every day and announce to me whether I'd had chocolate the day before.
Well, I suppose I sort of asked for that. But, after I came back from semester break, she didn't do it anymore, so I figured that she'd forgotten.
On a deeper level, I've been kind of looking at my life and wondering about what it would look like to live as Christ lived his. I don't feel called to take three years away from work and just do ministry (well, I'm not thirty yet, but I still don't think it's too likely), but, what I do with my time, what I do with my anger and exhaustion, the friends I spend the most time with, how I handle my money...it's making me think, and I have some things I kind of want to change. I realized recently that part of the reason I'm so frustrated with a friend is that he keeps saying that he admires a particular choice I've made, and how important that is to him, and how much it matters to him that he try to take the same road...but the last six times that the two roads have presented themselves, he takes the opposite one. And, over semester break, my sister called me out on something I was just reading for entertainment, and then said something to the effect of, "You love God so much, how can you do the things you do?" It wasn't from the position of a high horse at all - Santas knows where she stands with God, and it's not the same kind of perspective that I have. It's just the same rule with the girls in our family.
Two rules. Never lie to one of us. Understand that you can't love the girl and not love her family. That's it. And the kind of duplicity that's been going on with me is exactly the sort of thing that Santas has no patience for - saying you believe something, but whenever the road comes to choosing what aligns with what you believe, taking the other path.
Santas is my best friend (I use the term for several people, but Santas rides closest to my heart) not just because she knows me better than anyone (save possibly K), but she's not afraid to make me mad by telling me where she sees something like this. My first response at the time was a rather self-righteous one; "Who are you to call me out on what I want to read?" but she's right - it's not just my entertainment, it's a lot of my life. I try to be 'good', but being 'good' is falling short. It's not the core of what I believe, it's a byproduct. It needs to go beyond just trying to be good.
Hello, and good afternoon! I just spent way too much time reading the Newsweek article regarding gay marriage. WOW to say the least. I know this is a very hot button issue and more than likely I will face some harsh reactions to my post.
Disclaimer: These are my own thoughts and feelings regarding the matter, no one else's(unless they agree with me). I do not wish any one any personal hard feelings or wish to discriminate anyone baised on your own personal beliefs, because after all, the issue of the matter is being discriminated against because of personal beliefs and actions... So, please do not discriminate me because of my own beliefs and actions.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/172653?gt1=43002
That is the link to the article.
I have something pretty simple to say about it honestly. I mean, I, in no way, endorse gay marriage. I do believe that it is discriminating against them by not allowing them to legally have the benefits of traditional marriage (such as insurance, estates etc...) But, from a Christian stand point I do with all of my heart believe that it is a sin. I believe that God thinks it is wrong, just as wrong as having sex before marriage, murder and thousands of other sins...(although He specifically speaks out against sexual sins).
I want to say that although I do not wish to put my own judgement on someone and tell them they will be going to Hell because of their life style choice. That is not my place, and I am not about to cast the first stone.
I do believe, however, that the choices of biblical times are not popular today. God is the Aplpha and the Omega, and what He commands should not have ever gone out of style. Granted, the world has changed and our perception of right and wrong have changed...But, God's commands have not. Albeit, as unpopular as it is to think about obeying your husband, and loving your wife as Jesus loves the church...It is a command, not a request. It is like when your Father told yout to clean your room. You saw that, as a child, as stupid and point less because you were going to mess it up again anyway...But if you did not do it you will be grounded. Well, think of eternal damnation as being grounded.
Unpopular, but not requested...COMMANDED!
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