Rant

With the warm weather I shoveled and scraped snow and ice off the back deck steps, the landing at the bottom and on and around the hot tub. Shoveling (or most any type of manual labor) makes me contemplative. Usually those thoughts drift away. Tonight they stuck.


I am not a faithless man but I hesitate to refer to myself a Christian. I have been a Christian but I walked away from those churches because I saw hypocrisy everywhere. Who am I to judge? Nobody, but I chose not to live a disingenuous lie like some many were and still are.

I believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired work of God just as much as I believe that the texts of Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Vonnegut, Andre Dubus II, Tom Robbins and Christopher Moore are. If we're all the creation of the Creator then, gosh darn it, everything we do is ultimately divinely inspired.

I believe it is ok to do whatever you desire as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else or is consensual. I believe that we can learn from everyone we meet; from some we can learn how to live better and from others we can learn how not to live.

I believe it tolerance, yet there I'm a hypocrite; I'm fairly intolerant of the intolerant. I'm also not so keen on the ignorant but ignorance can be cured through education. Narrow-mindedness is another subset I have problems with, yet I digress.

I want to cure the ignorant and blow the minds of the narrow-minded. I want to embrace the differences that we all have because a world where we're all the same would indeed be an Orwellian nightmare. I want the world to be a better place for my children, for everybody's children, because a better world for everybody is a better world.