John C. Maxwell

…and I continue to try.

And remember, you don’t have to be a Conservative Christian to be a fanatic. My Bolshie atheist cousin, Robert the Red, has turned out to be a real asshole, too; and for the exact same reasons. I tried to meet him half-way but it was always his way or the highway. I told him to take a hike on it, but he could walk alone and he could walk in his own shoes.

I have no trouble with people who disagree with me. I do have a problem with those who are offended by my having the audacity to disagree.

For what it is worth, I would not barb at you should someone back troll.

Never.

I remember when my not yet diagnosed bi polar daughter left in the middle of the night to be with a man she met online. In England. I remember a particular Zoner doing everything he could to help me locate her, on very little information. He sensed my despair.

Fanatic? One must dig deeper than what we think we see. Nothing is ever what it seems.

I have three brothers. My youngest is a Christian Conservative *fanatic*. He is my loyal, sensitive, loud, obnoxious at times man who would take a bullet for me. I have never seen anyone try harder than Kevin to be a better person. He loves unconditionally.

Brother number 2 is my Hippie Liberal. I have tried for several years to get him to feel safe enough to trust and open up with me. He chases his own demons. He just spent 6 months helping Brother 1 deal with his wife’s brain cancer. She was cremated on Friday.
Hippie Liberal took her death very very hard. He told my husband she the most *Christ-Like* person he has ever known. That speaks volumes to her beauty. She was a Conservative Christian, who felt we all need to be accountable. So, I find that until we walk in someone else’s shoes, we really don’t know squat about anything but our own myopic world of self centeredness.

Because of that, he is convinced that anyone who doesn’t agree with him precisely, to the last minute detail, is either stupid or a villain; a coward afraid to face “the facts” or a dupe brainwashed by the forces of evil. He sees himself as the only one with principles, the sole possessor of decency and virtue, the only one who has correctly read the lessons of history and the only one who can correctly interpret contemporary events.

But like all fanatics, he is inflexible and hidebound, which invariably leads him to error, contradiction and inconsistency. When faced with criticism or disagreement he can only interpret it as evidence of some vast conspiracy masterminded by a sinister cabal determined to undermine his self-evident and obvious Truth. It never occurs to him that the Truth may not be obvious or self evident, that it may be open to interpretation or opinion, or that honest and wise men may arrive at different conclusions, even when faced with the same evidence.

I’m tired of trying to talk civilly to these assholes.
They can go fuck themselves.

A certain amount of loyalty to the tribe?…Humanity?

I know I don’t get to pick and choose. I get to choose how I deal though.

But you have got one thing right, after all. We DO get to choose. We decide what is right, what is worthwhile, what the meaning of life is. This is what I’ve always been preaching here! There is no right way, no principle, no real purpose. We decide, we define, we choose what matters. This is why there is no “correct” religion, or politics, or morality, or economics. There is no philosophy that trumps all the others.

We get to pick and choose what is right, what is truth, what is meaningful. The universe is totally subjective. There is no truth, except in nitpicky things, the kind that physicists study, the things that only matter to physicists.

Oh sure, if somebody’s idea of what is right hurts us, or intrudes on our freedom, we are justified in stopping them, or even fighting back. But we recognize, by some form of simian common sense, that it is best to live and let live, to do whatever we please as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. But we also owe, like all good monkeys, a certain amount of loyalty to the tribe, and we have a duty to help keep the forest clean and peaceful–as best we can.

Beware the zealot, the fanatic, the one who knows what’s best for the rest of us, and is determined to make sure we do it, no matter what.

We think, therefore we are. We think therefore we choose purpose….or not.

This is what separates us from the pounding on typewriter monkeys.

Nothing happens for a reason. Or to put it another way, there may be a reason for everything but there is a purpose to nothing. Nobody’s in charge, there is no meaning to anything. Everything is just random chance, a million monkeys pounding on typewriters. Oh sure, there are the laws of physics, they are accurate and precise, eternal and invariable, but they only take care of things like electricity and gravity; you know, bookkeeping. In the real world, the world we really live in, the world of family and emotion and love and death and career, beauty and pain and love, electricity and gravity don’t really matter. There is pattern, but no order. We make up the world as we go along, and we all do it differently. I know what I’m talking about, I studied science. Its pretty and interesting and probably very important, but I doubt it really matters much because its constantly being revised and updated.

God? I doubt it. If there ever was one, he did a good job, then packed up his tools and went home. A good architect doesn’t need to stick around after he’s designed the building. Or maybe he’s dead, or maybe he’s still on duty, but he hasn’t got a clue who we are, or what we want or need. I know there are bacteria living in my gut that help me digest my food, and there’s others that live in my yard and help the grass grow, but I really don’t care all that much about them. And I probably never will, as long as they do their job. If there’s a god out there, he probably feels pretty the same about me.

At any rate, if the Creator and Ruler of the Universe really needs me to do anything, then its up to him to get in touch with me, because I haven’t any idea how to get his attention. My number’s in the book, if he wants to talk let him call.

Oh, and one more thing. The good are just as likely to suffer as the wicked are to prosper. We all can see that. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all you need to know about the Creator and Ruler of the Universe.

Just what do I know? Not much, really. I know there’s a real world out there, and I collect imperfect information on it through my senses which I then analyze with my flawed reason and try to store in my bad memory. I also know I can affect this world a little bit with my hands and actions. I suspect (but I can’t tell for sure) there are others out there like me, and I can communicate with them, somehow–even the dead ones, I can read their books! The fact that they don’t seem to perceive the same universe I do, and that they appear to deal with it differently I find totally baffling. I think that’s a very important clue, but not all of them seem to agree.

The universe is a beautiful place, and it seems very complicated. But for us, life is mostly about pain and pleasure, curiosity and boredom, sleep and hunger, love and death. The book of life is very long and printed in very tiny letters, but its written in a language we can’t read. And there are no illustrations.