prickly life

Here's life. Enjoy the flowers. Not too far away though are the prickly parts that keep things in perspective.

it's all in the genes

For the past month I've been working on my children's genealogy tree. I started the project over 10 years ago, did quite a bit of work on it back then and then got sidetracked. After seeing a TV program about genealogy two months ago, the bug has become active inside me again. The project consumes long periods of time searching for the next fact to fit my puzzle. Fascinating and addictive is how I would describe the process. Birth, marriage, children, residences, and death are the parts of the puzzle for each individual which I search out.

There are more resources online now than there were 10 years ago. Accumulating facts is one thing, but imagining how the different families survived is another. Life was difficult for these families not so very long ago. Many children did not live past early childhood because of disease. Many didn't survive birth. The sorrow that parents and siblings must have suffered seems overwhelming in some families. I've found a handful of mothers that died during childbirth and within months their husbands remarried a local widow who recently had lost her husband also, both families with lots of little children each. Large families by today's standards are repeated over and over as I fill in the blanks.

On both my mother and father's side of the family are Germans from Russia going back as far as the 16th century Germany for some of the family lines. It wasn't called Germany then but that's the geographical area from which they came. Other familial backgrounds my children can identify with are Finnish, Norwegian, Scottish, British, and German again on their dad's side. There are a whole lot of farmers and laborers in the bunch. The original immigrants to America came between the mid 1600's to the early 1900's.

I've been able to connect with several cousins who represented branches of my tree that were blank. I had the common ancestor, spouse, and children by name only. Four generations later they show up in my inbox asking questions about our common relative and we help each other fill in missing generations on both of our trees. There was an immediate kinship felt. It definitely produced in me a sense of awe and appreciation for mankind in general. We are all in this thing called "life" together.

I figure it will take me about 3 months more to finish the project.

In addition to all that stuff, I haven't stopped reading. I recently finished Dan Barker's godless. He was a music evangelist back in the 60's and 70's in southern California in the charismatic movement. He wrote children's musicals and traveled. He's co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation today.

Currently I'm carrying around the book Why I Became An Atheist by John W. Loftus. He's a former evangelical preacher/apologist who got to thinking too much. His is a similar story to mine... disillusionment, introspection, study, and reinvention.

a matter of interpretation

Does it move?

What else does your brain tell you that may not be true?

living by faith or fact? which is more reliable?

On a more serious note... there was no world-wide flood as the bible reports. This article is representative of the kind of material that I find fascinating. Years of following the evangelical mindset prohibited me from reading this sort of thing. Today I am amazed and disappointed to an extent that for so many years I was brainwashed and didn't have any idea of it. How can I say this? Maybe I'm brainwashed today?

The difference is that today I am making a choice based on knowledge gathered from investigation. Basing one's world view on one book is risky at best. What if the book is not totally reliable? What if it is a collection of myths gathered from earlier cultural myths? Building on what is believed from previous civilizations is all we can do, I suppose. This is how science works. I'd say religion is no different. The difference in religion is that the method of testing for factual reliability is not carried out. It's all a matter of faith.

Living a life based on faith seems scary to me now. It was scary when I was in the evangelical church. The idea of "trusting God" was given lip service for the most part. Exhibiting fear and anxiety about life's events was never acceptable, so you had to say that you were trusting God. In actuality taking things into my own hands is what I usually did and still do today. It was the times when I was trusting God and things turned out totally bad which initiated the gradual breakdown of my belief system. Was it God's problem or was it me not hearing clearly. After all, I'm only human. Years and years of disillusionment can only go so far. Right?

aliens, stay away

I agree with Stephen Hawking in this article. Aliens showing up would not be cool. If they were here we'd know it. I don't give any credibility to the UFO cult phenomenon. If aliens had the ability to find our planet and then show up, they would be more technically savvy than us earthlings. Harvesting is the term that comes to mind. Oh dear...

Probability is interesting to think about though. The numbers say, yes, it's possible that other life forms exist somewhere in the universe. But what the heck do we do with that information? Until we have the ability to go places, we won't know. Unless we see them coming. That's a little scary to think about.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the idea that we can see history through our telescopes. Millions of light years away means an even longer time ago when the event occurred. Change the subject. My brain is beginning to swell.

20 years old

Happy Birthday, Hubble!

"Hubble's unprecedented capabilities made it one of the most powerful science instruments ever conceived by humans, and certainly the one most embraced by the public. Hubble discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of current astronomical research, from planetary science to cosmology. And, its pictures were unmistakably out of this world." (HubbleSite News Release)

Source: Hubblesite.org

brain waves

I've been told more than once in my life,"It's all in your head." A number of years ago I came to the place where I decided that the idea of a devil or a Satan was nothing more than a mental experience. This threw other ideas into play. What about feelings in general? I have experienced "hell on earth" at times in my life. But I also found relieve from these feelings by changing the way I thought about the circumstances.

The brain is an amazing and complex organ. Science has just begun to study it in the past 10-20 years. I think there's a significant chance that whatever seeming realities religious experiences bring to us are simply mental exercises. I found this article this morning that speaks to this idea.