reason vs faith vs reality

[wandering soul]

What sort of dogs do you have and what do you do with your yard? My signature line shows a bit of my garden and gardens are big part of what interests me these days.

100 lb Golden, 60 lb Walker Coon Hound, 40 lb Chowchow mix, 16 lb furry little dominatrix who has the face of a Shitzu and body of a Yorkie! bosses the others around.

You, my friend, have a garden. I have a yard. As I am still working 40-50 hours a week, and in a city 3 hours from where we live (stay in small apartment during the week there), the best I can do on the yard is try to remove stuff: the ivy from the trees (I insist it stay only in the border area and the fence), pull up the briar vines endemic to our area, cut back the bushes and hedges (not doing so well on that lately). Husband takes care of the mowing. Dogs have reduced our back yard to Crater Central. So filling in holes every week also part of my yard work.

You don't seem to have a lot of anger any more. How big a family? What did your parents do? What if any religious affiliation and how central was that for them? Did you end up doing any therapy in finding your way out of your family of origin?

My family was different from yours - but similar effects - maybe that is the case with all families? Family-extended family for three generations (now going on 4 & 5) deeply religious conservative Christians. Also nearly all with college degrees. My parents (and I think the extended family for the most part also) were not only comfortable in their sexuality, but celebrated it.

My father, though loving in his own way, was totally intellectual, logical, and always had to be right. For him, only intellectual, educated, white, Christian men were right. Only they knew the truth and everyone else was simply wrong - about everything. My mother was an exhubrent energetic outgoing celebrator of life, children, people, the world and everything. She was an artist.

As a child in the 1950s I was already questioning some of the assertions of the reality structures I was being told were truth. Internal inconsistencies that they couldn't give me satisfactory answers for. In particular - if God is really universal, the creator of everything, and loving the world, why would he only accept people who believed a particular set of ideas? Why isn't everyone's idea of God just because we are in different cultures with different languages and different perspectives on God? I couldn't bring myself to believe that only these types of Christians were right and I couldn't bring myself to believe the particular set of beliefs they said were mandatory or you'd lose God.

In my teen years I began to find the liberal/progressive writers and thinkers in Christianity (my father told me they were from the devil). They completely accepted the entire scientific explanations of the universe, the psychological explanations of our humanity, the historical critical analysis of the bible, and they were engaged in and responsive to the way I experienced and saw life in the 1960s - an exciting time to be a teenager. I also found the rising feminist writers and began to feel much more empowered in my own thinking.

During those years (because as an artist I am very visual in my thinking) I began to see the reality structure of the conservative Christians as a large jigsaw puzzle where they have all the pieces fitting together to create a very complete picture of the universe, god, humanity, and everything. I saw the liberal/progressive perspective as an alternative way to incorporate the same pieces plus some other important pieces (like the scientific, historical, and psychological information) while leaving out the most troubling pieces from my family jigsaw puzzle.

I saw I could take them both apart and put them back together quite easily. I became "bi-lingual." And I gained a model for any new set of ideas I came across. I didn't need to lose anything. I knew how each puzzle went together and how it came apart. I began to collect versions of the universe, god, humanity, and everything. And I became multi-lingual.

Through my 20s (1970s) I was engaged in working, playing, making money, enjoying a life built by me, on my terms, for my reasons - without having to answer to my family. But was still very angry.

In my 30s I began to pursue my life as an artist. My primary self-identity is as an artist. Trying to exhibit, get into galleries, sell at art fairs, joined associations and guilds. Thinking mostly about art. I found that living geographically distant from my family (so I didn't have to deal with them unless I chose to) helped reduce the anger a lot.

Ahh, so when did the wheels come off for you? Did anything specific lead to your dissatisfaction with the friends and cloths? What did you find exciting and what adventures did you have?

So I didn't get back into seriously thinking about life, the universe, god, humanity and everything until in my 40s. Divorce disrupted my life as I knew it and forced me to re-think the entire conceptual structures I had constructed for my life.

Instead of merely thinking abstractly as I had been doing, that everyone has a valid, sustainable, internally coherent and consistent reality structure and respecting them, I began to actively study what everyone actually believed, the details. I began to deliberately fill out my mental shelves of jigsaw puzzles so that each one was a complete picture (inclusive of the various forms of atheism). And I began to spread them out and look through all of them.

The grand inclusive perception I began to have was similar to what a biologist might experience studying a dozen different ecosystems around the world. The diversity is stunningly beautiful; the individual systems uniquely adapted. The differences can be seen in the context of the conditions and resources of each particular geographic region. And the similarities suggest the intriguing possibility more universal underlying principles, properties or systems that beg for more study.

and this has gotten way too long for anyone to get through it! so adventures I may have to just send you in personal communication if you are interested!!