A place to start...

Let's clear "this" up.....

I grew up in a fundamentalist religious environment in the South.  Lucky, I guess.  For the greater part of my life, I took my ability to think for granted.  Was it the adherence to the rigid principles of fundamentalist Christianity in which I was taught to fear god that abused my natural childlike curiosity to think openly and without shame?  I feared thinking the wrong thing(s) so much that I policed my thoughts laboriously and incessantly used prayer to wipe out any impurities in thought or otherwise.  Original sin? My ass.

As a child and adolescent, I wasn't taught the benefits of thinking clearly, let alone how to think critically.  I was, however, taught the virtues and "blessings" of blind faith and belief.  I was taught that it was a sin to think impure thoughts.  "You shouldn't think like that" was a repetitive thought in my head as I tried to maintain a pure conscience.  I spent many hours on end worrying and fearful that I'd somehow screwed-up and not had "enough of" or the "right" belief in god and I'd spend eternity in hell.  It wasn't until college and I was in my early twenties that I began to shake loose from this twisted web of illogic and fallacy.

As a rule, logic was not in my lexicon of belief as I grew up.  As could be expected, my belief engine was so strong that I would accept without question, most, if not all of the claims made by the preachers and teachers in my life.  I didn't know there was such a thing as skepticism, nor did I realize how valuable reason and logic could be.  The absence of skepticism was in no doubt (pun intended) a result of a guarded and warped belief system.  Skepticism or having doubt in god or in things of god, pastor, church, bible, etc. was, in my mind, a sin.

Okay, that was fun!  At a later time, I'll come back to some of the topics raised above.  Let's skip to today, now that I'm in my mid-40s.  I am different now.  I think, I question, I doubt, I feel, I laugh, I love, I live.  I continue to have a natural curiosity about the world that instills excitement and wonder.  I have a healthy and skeptical perspective.  As a father to a, now, 22 month old daughter, I owe it not only to myself but to her to embrace curiosity and the ability to question and reason.  To the best of my ability, I will teach her the value of inquiry, doubt, and logical reasoning.

For the record, I am not religious nor Christian nor new-age nor, would I say, spiritual.  I am a human with a genuine desire to connect deeply with others in this life.   Hence, the reasons for me to blog:  to connect as well as to share with others, to challenge and liberate myself emotionally and intellectually, and to solidify my humanness.

Most of the time my thoughts whirr about in my noggin' and they don't have a chance to settle and crystalize.  My hope is to use this blog to dive into the depths of my understanding of the world, current events, and life and formulate into words those ideas, hopes, rants, and raves that make living a once in a lifetime event.  Read on...