My Phoenix Saga

September 1st 2009:

I recently returned to MI after living a year in the South. I just got a gig teaching social studies, returning me to the classroom after a long hiatus. I was still dealing with the pain of my marriage ending in divorce a year earlier.  I believed that my life, quite ragged and messy, needed to undergo a radical change. I looked in the mirror and did not like the reflection. I knew what had to be done.

I put my entire life under the proverbial microscope and realized that I carried around lots of things, ideas, that did not belong to me. I had various levels of programming that I finally began to see within myself. I did not want to keep that programming intact, ergo I decided to destroy myself and start over again. In other words, I started the process of recreating myself.

Like the story of the phoenix bird that crashed into its nest, completely engulfed in flames, only to be reborn anew, that became my ultimate goal: A total rebirth.

In order to do this I had to bring all of my beliefs into question. I began to reanalyze the hidden motivation behind ideas and thoughts that I held dear. I questioned my ideas about politics, religion, family, career, relationships, finances, fitness, and many other things.

This process, albeit quite difficult and draining, allowed me to see the truth about myself. I severely underachieved in my life because I wanted to conform to what others perceived about me. I was a yes man, doing things to make others happy, but sacrificing my internal voice in the process. The "me" that I dreamed about possessed great strength of character, integrity, and charisma. At times, I would show flashes of that in my life, but I would not have the psychological strength to maintain it. I would go back to my status quo.

In order to live as the man who had great strength of character, integrity, and charisma, I had to clean out my psyche of old ideas and motivations. By doing this, I made room for new goals and dreams to pursue.

A few major things happened, my political philosophies changed because I found ideas that truly fit me. Also my ideas about family, career, relationships, finances and fitness changed. The biggest change came with regards to my faith.

As I have stated before, my whole identity was tied into my Christian faith. People knew me as the scholarly and passionate believer in Jesus. I recognized that I did not get much return on investment for all those years I gave to Christianity. As a result of this process, I abandoned my Christian identity, leaving it on the bookshelf of my past. I discovered that the path of non belief worked better for me.

Five years and a whole lot of growth later, I find myself finally speaking out for reason and skepticism. I also find myself using the time I have on earth to make a positive difference in society.

Pt.3 Karma and god concepts

As I began to distance myself from Christianity, I continued to study ideas and concepts from the major world religions. I didn't desire to replace one religion with another, but I was interested in different concepts of the divine that other cultures possessed. I will be giving very basic concepts about different faiths, please forgive me in advance for any errors, as my specialty is protestant Christianity.

In general, I noticed that Hinduism and Buddhism search internally for god, the ultimate reality. The Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam search externally for god, the ultimate reality. However certain sects of the Abrahamic faiths, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, and Sufi search for god  internally as well.

These faiths all agree that sin comes from inside of a person. They agree that sin can take you off of the path of god. They also agree that desire is the root of sin. On the other hand, they have wildly different remedies for sin, and what sin will ultimately cost. For Hinduism and Buddhism, sin ties into the ideas of karma and reincarnation. For Islam and Christianity, sin will send a person to a fiery hellish damnation for eternity. However for Judaism, sin will simply cause you to die.

The connected ideas of karma and reincarnation piqued my interest and made more sense to me than the idea of a devil, hell, and original sin.

Karma, the concept that positive and negative actions have consequences with regards to how close you are to reaching enlightenment, made me feel more accountable for my deeds. Accumulating good karma gets a person closer to enlightenment, eliminating the need for further reincarnation. A person will continue to reincarnate until they reach enlightenment. They can reach enlightenment by destroying all desire. I pondered the idea of an ultimate reality, but I like having desire.

As I read and thought more about karma, I realized that the idea of karma was a way for the ancients to make people behave properly because it spoke of existential consequences for temporal actions. In other words, what you do now will affect your internal spirit. Karma, which initially seemed quite different, upon further review sounded very familiar to ideas that I already knew. The consequences, although not the same, dealt with how your actions today can affect your eternity.

Karma, and other concepts like it speak to notions of justice and how "good" things happen to "bad" people, and how "bad" things happen to "good" people. Humanity has a hard time accepting inequity and inequality, ergo they created "spiritual" ways to deal with the harsh reality of living. Ultimately these thought lead to theodicy, or the problem of evil in the world.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus deals with the difficultly of evil with this saying:

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?"

Note: When Epicurus spoke about God, he was referring to Zeus, the God of Greeks in the ancient Greek religion.

This quote, along with a better understanding of nature, took me further away from the beliefs of my youth into previously forbidden, new exciting intellectual territory.