Pat Robertson vs The Sanctity of Marraige

I remember that back when Pat Robertson made his immensely horrible comments on the Haitian earthquake Jon Stewart did this amazing response to it, pointing out all the great (and Biblical) responses Pat could have made instead.   That was one of the clips that got me started watching The Daily Show because I thought it was just such a smart and well thought out response that showed Pat Robertson for the insensitive jerk he was.  Apparently not everyone thought so though.  In the comments on that clip I was stunned to see many comments along the line of "How dare you criticize God's anointed?", "Pat Robertson is a man of God, shut up about him!",  "Pat is a prophet speaking the Words of God, you will be judged for opening your mouth against him!" etc.  And I remember thinking "WTF is wrong with you people??"  Do you really think this failed apocalyptic prophet, this ghoul who has never found a tragedy so heartbreaking that he couldn't turn it into an opportunity to take cheap shots at the groups he dislikes, this horrible, cruel, self righteous old man - you think he is God's anointed prophet?!  How ugly would your God have to be for that to be true?  How damaged would you have to be to actually buy into such a claim?

Long story short, I try to avoid Pat Robertson because he's really bad for my blood pressure.  But now he's gone and said something else that I simply can't ignore:



So if your wife has Alzheimer's disease, consider her dead, consider your commitment to your marriage vows done and go find yourself someone else.  Just be nice about it and at least dump your spouse at a care facility first - just dumping them on the street just wouldn't be Christian after all!

Lest you think I'm upset just for the sake of dogma or ideology, I'm not.  I am all too familiar with the horror that is Alzheimers.  My grandmother, the only one I ever knew and who I loved dearly, had Alzheimers and it was hell.  It's not like most bad diseases where someone gets it, gets worse, dies and then everyone gets to mourn and move on.  No with this hellish disease you get to watch for years how someone you love turns into someone who doesn't even know who you are.  I've never lived through anything worse.  So I get how hard it is, I understand fully just how badly one wants to escape from it.  But I would never agree that it would be OK to forget about them and move on as if they are already dead.

See, her illness was hard for me - it was hard for everyone in the family - but no one suffered due to it like my grandfather.  I just had breakfast with him last week, he turned 93 and the man is still as sharp as a tack.  I can't even begin to imagine how it must have felt for him to watch his wife of about 50 years slowly deteriorate day after day until there was nothing left of the woman he married.  I can't even conceive of that kind of pain.  Here's the thing, he never bailed on her.  He stayed with her, taking care of her all day and every day until the day she died.  Just by doing that, my grandfather taught me more about what it means to be a real man and far more about what the term "sanctity of marriage" means than every lecture, book, sermon and talk I've heard on the subject my whole life. 

A real man, doesn't take the easy way out.  A real man stands by his loved ones until the very end no matter what.  Marriage vows mean something.  Phrases like "in sickness and health" and "for better or for worse" are not just idle words, if you speak them you better mean them.  The vow you make is the vow you live by.

I don't think anyone ever called my grandpa an "anointed man of God" but I have to say, I think he is a million times the man Pat Robertson is.  If I can live to be half the man my grandfather is I would not have wasted my life.

Problematic Theology Made REALLY Simple

Let's say I tell you that I own a Davy Crockett style coonskin cap.  Now let's say that first off you think that "coonskin cap" sounds vaguely racist even when a Wikipedia link is included showing it's not and secondly that you are skeptical and do not think it's possible that I can own one.  How should I respond to you?

The best possible answer I could give would be:

See?  Argument settled, it's right there for all the world to see.  Still skeptical?  Feel free to come over, I'll show it to you in person and maybe even let you touch the soft fluffy hide.  Just wash your hands first.  Still don't believe me?  Really?  How could you not?  You're just being contrarian on purpose now, aren't you?  Psh, I can't talk to you when you get like this!

On the other hand...

The worst possible answer I could give would be:

Really?  How is that even an argument?  Sure if I said "You don't know everything there is to know in the universe so it's totally possible that I'm right and you're wrong" I would probably technically correct in a way but that's a terrible answer to a simple question.  Similarly if I told you to just believe that I have a hat and that if you presuppose that it is true you will feel the proof of my coonskin cap ownership in your heart - that wouldn't be very convincing either now would it?  No, I'm pretty sure that would sound insane.  Even worse, I could say that I don't need to give you proof, the fact that I told you about it is all the proof you need and if you don't believe me then just wait until you're dead because then you will have all the proof you want.  If I said that and you punched me in the face, no one would blame you because that is such a bad argument that it actually goes full circle and becomes the opposite of an argument.

Only thing left to add is that I look uber manly in a coonskin hat.  Don't even bother trying to refute that argument, you're just going to end up looking stupid.

Problematic Theology Made Simple

My entire youth spent in church, a year in Bible School and 3 years in Seminary and I never once heard it explained quite as well as this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic:

Theodicy is a theological problem that predates Christianity (See Epicurus) but sad to say, 2000+ years of theological pondering has left us no closer to an answer.  Well, if you want to be technical it has left us with a great many volumes of answers but none of them are particularly satisfying (hence the many volumes).  The problem is simple, on the one hand you have a perfectly good God who is all-knowing and all-powerful.  On the other hand you have the messed up world we live in.  One of these things make it very hard to believe in the other and the problem with reality is that we are kinda stuck with it.  The problem, like I said, is simple - if God is so great why is the world so evil?  The answer is also fairly simple, all you have to do is change something about God to make Him fit the state of the universe.  Problem is that the moment you start tinkering with God you change Him into something less godly and usually you end up with a God as ugly as your universe - which makes the whole exercise pointless.  Honestly, I don't see what is so bad about the skeptical view here.  Surely an uncaring universe is preferable to one governed by a malevolent or apathetic God?  Also, if you're going to have a God that can be overruled and marginalized by your (and everyone else's) choices at all times then why bother having a God at all?

In all fairness, I think CS Lewis made a pretty good case for free will as a solution in "The Problem of Pain".  I can agree with him that for God to actually stop every evil thing that happens would require near constant miraculous intervention and having the laws of physics and reality altered every couple of seconds does seem like an absurd expectation to have.  The problem is, even the free will argument breaks down after a while.  Let's say I'm walking down the street and I find a teenager who tried a dumb stunt on his skateboard and ended up with two broken legs at the bottom of a sewer drain that is busy filling up with water.  He got into that situation by his own free will, no doubt.  However if I ignore all his pleas for help and just leave him there to suffer I'm not respecting his free will, I'm being a dick!  Where it falls apart for me is not that bad things happen or that evil exists, it's that there seems to be no divine help when you beg for it. 

Ye gods I am sick and tired of the weepy, impotent God of modern Christianity!  I was reading The Shack which explained how God was right there when the protagonist's little girl was abducted, molested and murdered, crying with her and feeling her pain.  I have found that this is a Godview shared by many evangelical Christians and it's meant to be comforting.  Comforting?!  Comforting my ass!  You know who can cry along in empathy when children get molested?  Me!  Also: You and anyone you know with even a shred of humanity left in them.  We don't need God to do our crying for us.  A God who could have saved that little girl, now that would be a praiseworthy God!  I don't need a God who can get weepy about my pain, I need a God who can help.

How I long for the Old God, for the God of Elijah and Moses!  He walked the earth in fire and lightning, He was powerful and He was present!  When Elijah wanted to show who served the true God he didn't have to break out the ontological argument  or anything like it because he had a God who answered with fire!  Moses didn't show up in Pharaoh's court with the Cosmological Argument because he had a God who could turn a staff into a snake, bring down horrific plagues on the land and split the sea in half!  Their God may have been terrifying but you knew without a doubt that He was real and you wanted to be on His side!

Or how about an eating, drinking, miracle working God-with-us like Jesus?  You don't need to discuss "first causes" and "unmoved movers" when you can walk on water and raise the dead!  If you were on the side of power and the status quo He was every bit as terrifying as the God of Elijah but if you were amongst the outcast and the broken you had no better friend.  He didn't go through the land feeling sorry for people, He healed and restored and helped!  He was present and He made things better for those who called on Him in a real and tangible way!  Jesus of Nazareth was nowhere near as emo as the neutered Jesus of modern suburbia.

I guess what I really long for is a God who lives in reality and not in philosophy.  Is that too much to ask?  I don't think I'm alone in this either.  Despite all his apologetics and philosophy, even CS Lewis ended up inventing a God more majestic, compassionate and present than the one he preached about in his theological works.

L.A.E: The wisdom of waiting rooms

It’s not hard to be a cynic. You need only spend some time with the news to realize that in our brief time here on earth, mankind has excelled at making life a living hell for pretty much every creature on the planet but especially for our other human beings. Cynicism and nihilism seems to be the only logical response to life on earth. Why would we possibly hope or be optimistic when we have been killing, robbing and oppressing each other in some way or another for as long as we have been here? Whether its nation against nation, ethnic group against ethnic group of person against person, we seem to be hurting each other from the highest offices of government right down to our livingrooms at home. Living without hope is not only logical, it’s easy. I get that, I really do. So why is it that we can’t stop hoping then?

Here is the thing, people still hope. You can go to the darkest most hellish places in the world and you will still find people hoping and planning for the future. If you ever get the chance, check out the deleted scenes in Love Actually (although the whole thing is pretty uplifting actually!) They have these two scenes where they zoom in on very depressing looking Oxfam posters but then the scene starts playing and the people in the poster aren’t talking about how miserable they are, they are talking about their families and about love and hope for the future. I realize it’s just a movie but they aren’t wrong. I was watching TV a few nights ago and the president was visiting a squatter camp – and these people are so poor they make people on the bread line look like jet setters – and yet in the midst of all that poverty and misery I couldn’t help but notice something peculiar. The people were still getting married, still having kids (not the best family planning under the circumstances but I digress), still hoping for a better future, still smiling! In squatter camps to prisons to war zones you will find the most unexpected thing – people who refuse to give up. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially not according to Fundamentalist Christianity. Spend some time in church and you will hear it preached again and again – those outside the church live hopeless, loveless and violent lives. Only they don’t. People the world over seem to just not care about making sense (or living up to Fundamentalist expectation) and they keep hoping, they love, they keep trying, they act noble and selfless.

I get why dogs (arguably the most optimistic beings on the planet) are always so tail-waggingly optimistic, it’s easy for them! They don’t have our brains, they have only the most basic concept of cause and effect (they never seem to put 2 and 2 together regarding having baths and not itching) and they certainly can’t foresee the future the way we can. Questions like: What if my health fails? What if I grow old alone? Who will take care of me? What if the Large Hadron Collider destroys the planet? never cross their happy doggy brains. It’s easy to be optimistic when you can’t even properly worry about where your next meal will come from! We humans on the other hand can worry. We do realize that we are going to die and suffer and be unhappy one day. For some reason we just don’t accept it!

It is as if hope is just built into us somehow. It’s in the stories we tell (with the exception of the French…), it is in our legends and mythology, it is in our religions, it is in the “happily ever after” of our fairy-tales (well maybe not so much in some of the originals but still…). Wherever you look you find that we have hope, we have this illogical expectation that things are going to be alright in the end, somehow. Even in our most unhappy moments we still hold on to it. Eve eats from the tree and gets cast out and cursed but at the same time receives the promise that the very serpent who tricked her would one day get his head crushed by one of her descendants. Pandora opens the box and unleashes all evil into the world but in the end one last thing comes out of the box – hope. The whole concept of hope seems to be a part of us and it keeps popping up even in the darkest places. A great place to see this is a hospital waiting room.

I've spent a lot of time in those this year and they are horrid places. They are unfriendly, depressing places were a whole lot of people are at the mercy of a few (there is a metaphor for life in there somewhere I'm sure...) No one is there because they want to be there, no one asked to be afflicted and for most of us there at least, we ended up there through no fault of our own. No, the waiting room at the surgery wing of a large African state hospital is not a happy place. You would absolutely expect everyone to be miserable, for there to be constant outburst of anger (time does not exist as far as the admin personnel are concerned) and considering that a lot of people there are actually in pain, you might even expect crying. You'd be wrong. Right there in a miserable place I saw something beautiful. The shared affliction brought out the best in people, not the worst. Across the lines of class, age and race, people were offering each other support, comfort and solidarity. People smile at one another, make silly jokes, discuss everything from knitting patterns to personal history with people they would have been friends with outside the hospital walls. Yes there was misery, but there was also kindness and hope. Waiting rooms showed me that the fundies are wrong about us.

To tell the truth though, I'm not so sure why the fundies are so sure of their version of the truth. I know the world looks bad when you watch the news but aren't these the same people who claim to live not according to perceived reality but according to the Word? When I read the Bible it doesn't so much talk of people as irrevocably evil - though it certainly does point out a lot of our evil - the big picture I get from the Bible is that mankind is lost. Lost is not the same as evil, lost means we've lost our way, that we are not where we are supposed to be. That doesn't sound the same as "evil" to me. Now I seem to say this in every one of the LAE posts, but I don't really think I could prove God. I really don't. But consider for a moment, if what the Bible teaches us has any truth, shouldn't we expect to see what I did in the 6th floor waiting room? If you say you believe that mankind bears the image of God, wouldn't you expect them to behave with kindness and nobility at least to some extent? Shouldn't the nature of man be closer to that of a dethroned monarch than that of a demon? If you think that there is any truth to what Paul wrote (in Romans 8) about all of creation anticipating a time of repair and restoration, shouldn't you expect to find the seeds of hope everywhere? Wasn't the whole idea that everything is going to turn out OK God's idea? If the Bible shows us one thing about God it's that He has not given up on the world. Why then are Christians so quick to?

Do people not realise how dangerous and wrong this "Christian" mindset of "the world and everyone in it is hopeless and evil" is? For one thing it's patently untrue and if it isn't true then it should have no part of the Gospel. For another thing it makes Christianity very unattractive and needlessly so. Peter tells Christians to "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have" - now tell me, how many times do Christians actually get asked about the hope they have? It never seems to happen and I don't think we should be surprised! No one is going to ask you about something you don't seem to have! For a lot of Christians our only "hope" is for Jesus to come snatch us away so God can make everyone pay. The way some Christian communities huddle together and talk about the world makes it seems like the only thing they are hoping for is a chance to say "I told you so!" Is it really surprising that so few care about the hope we have? This dark and negative outlook also doesn't do us a lot of good. I always liked the way Jewel put it:

"If I could tell the world just one thing

It would be that we're all OK

And not to worry 'cause worry is wasteful

And useless in times like these

I won't be made useless

I won't be idle with despair"

I love the way she puts that, despair and hopelessness makes us useless and idle. That's why you have groups of Christians (the fine folks at Rapture Ready are a great example) who do nothing but wait for rescue. Some do this to the point of no longer making repairs to their homes or investing their money wisely. They are just sitting around, waiting to be picked up and enjoying the misery in the world because they think it proves them right. Nevermind the fact that this is pretty much the opposite of how Jesus commanded His followers to live. We are supposed to be making a difference, bringing more hope and making the misery less. THAT is what the Kingdom of Heaven is all about!

Although I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people live like this. After all how you see the world has everything to do with you you live. If you truly believe the world to be hopeless and evil that is all you will expect and that is all you will see and that is why it will be the only way you live. If you don't think there is hope and goodness in this world, your life will show it and it will not be pretty.

I have decided to be different. I may be a cynic at times but my heart isn't really in it. I have seen the beauty and the hope in this world and it makes me want to be involved with it despite the ugliness. There is a lot we can learn from waiting rooms I think. It's true, this world can be a pretty miserable place and none of us asked to be here. For the most part the misery that befalls us happens to us rather than because of us, we certainly didn't ask for our unhappiness either. Yet here we are. If we can see that we are all in this together, all hoping to do better one day it can make things better. If we allow misery to isolate us in despair then that is all we will have. On the other hand if we start seeing the goodness and the nobility amongst the misery then everything changes. Once you let let hope in you start seeing that things can be better and before long you start being a part of making things better. Goodness is everywhere, the human race can be amazing. I can see why God would think we are worth saving. I believe that there will be a "one day" when God will give us the happily ever after we so long for. I also believe that God tasked us to bring goodness and hope to this world in the HERE and NOW. What our world looks like is to a large extent in our own hands despite the severity of our afflictions. This is what I learned from a waiting room. I choose hope.

L.A.E: The Cruelty of the gods

I never indented for the Life After Eden idea to be more than one post. As I said before, I realize that all “proofs” of God and the spiritual are subjective and there is no absolute objective proof to be had. Yet in recent weeks I realized something else that might (again, subjectively speaking) show that there is more to this world than what we can weigh and measure. Whether or not this is proof of the existence of God I am not wise enough to say however. Theologians often make an argument from the existence of beauty, but personally I think a better argument can be made from the existence of cruelty.

After spending a reasonable amount of time in this world, one soon realizes that it is not all sunsets and rainbows. At some point we all learn that this world has teeth and it is looking for ways to devour us. It’s not just that things go wrong either, it’s the way in which they go wrong. Sometimes things go wrong in such a specific way that it almost seems planned that way, especially when things don’t simply go wrong but they go wrong in the worse possible manner. In times like these it’s tempting to think that there might be someone or something out there who takes sadistic joy out of watching us squirm. Sometimes it seems this someone or something takes great pains and goes to unimaginable lengths to be cruel to us.

Then again, maybe you have never felt this way. Yet I am clearly not the only one or the first one to feel this way. From my admittedly sketchy knowledge of anthropology it would seem that from the moment mankind became aware of the numinous they were convinced that it was out to get them. It would seem that throughout human history people have been convinced that there was something out there that was making their lives hard and so they had to do things and kill things in order to keep it happy in order to keep it from ruining their lives. This also seems to be a running theme in all ancient myths, in fact at times it is almost as if the various pantheons of gods and goddesses were invented for the sole reason of explaining the seeming intelligent behind the cruelty of life. The gods may have been beautiful, powerful and wise but you did not want them noticing you for they were equally capricious and cruel. From the myths it seems that every time they became involved things tended to go horribly wrong for all concerned. Being a judge in a music contest between gods could land you donkey ears and judging a beauty contest between goddesses could lead to the destruction of your city – it was just a no win for you if the gods happened to be aware of your existence.

The idea of someone out there being responsible for your misery was not just found amongst the pagans either, you can find plenty of that in the Judeo-Christian faith as well. Take the book of psalms for instance, you can paraphrase a substantial amount of them as:

“Why God why?? I’ve done all I can to please you and yet I am miserable – while those who are wicked live utterly charmed lives. Why do I have to suffer like this? Why God why?”

Then of course, there was Job… Lets face it, there is a reason why we even have sayings like: “If you want God to laugh, tell Him your plans.”

I have to admit, I know what these people – both pagans and psalmists – feel like. I’m not one to wonder why things go wrong, I accept that this is an imperfect world and that things don’t always work the way we want them to. I don’t waste time with stupid questions like “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The answer to that should be obvious – bad things happen to all people its just that we only call them “bad things” when they happen to “good people”. When they happen to “bad people” we call them “justice”. However recent events in my own life have made me wonder why things go wrong in the horrible way that they do. As I explained in previous post, I had some health problems and had to go for surgery. Now this was surgery to my thyroid and I dreaded it because the removal of my thyroid would mean I would have to go on medication for the rest of my life and suffer all the unhappy consequences of not having a thyroid gland anymore. However my life was in danger and I accepted that whatever needed to be done had to be done. Then, things took a turn for the better – they only removed half of my thyroid, I needed no medication and the surgery went perfectly and I didn’t suffer any damage to my vocal cords (or any of the other inherent risks to thyroid surgery). I have to say I felt pretty good, I had an incredible sense of forward momentum – something important that needed to be done had been done now (very successfully) and now it was time to take care of the rest of my life. Two weeks later I returned to the hospital for a follow-up and since no one had called me (as they told me they would if they found any cancer) I happily assumed that this was the end of it, I would have my stitches out and be on my way. That’s when I found out it was in fact cancerous, I did need more surgery, I was going to lose my entire thyroid and I may still have a long road ahead of me. Suffice it to say I don’t feel like I have that much forward momentum anymore. It’s not because things went wrong. It’s because things went right before they went wrong again that makes this seem, well, cruel.

So then, what are we to do with this notion that things do not simply go wrong but they seem do so in a way that suggest a malicious intelligence behind it? Well there could be more than one explanation for it.

• It could be mere coincidence, just statistical probability and the law of large numbers working together with natural laws (like entropy) to create what seems to be malicious intent in situations that in reality have none. Maybe this whole “something is out to get me” mindset is an outdated part of the human condition that we need to move beyond. Maybe we just need to accept that it’s nothing personal, its just life in an imperfect world.

• Maybe these things just seem like cruelty. Maybe we are looking at these things the way a toddler looks at the rules and discipline of a good parent. Maybe we just think they are cruel because we are unable to see the big picture. Although I have to admit this makes me think of a scene in Evan Almighty where Evan (after losing his job and family and with the whole world ridiculing him) looks up at the heavens and says to God: “I know, whatever you do, you do because you love me. Do me a favor, love me less.”

• Maybe the world really does have teeth. Maybe our primitive forebears were right, maybe there really is something out there that is horrible and cruel and seeks nothing but our harm and our ruin. Maybe Peter really meant it when he talked about the Devil walking around “like a roaring lion, seeking someone he may devour”

Now, which of these is right I cannot say and I do not fancy myself wise enough to hazard a guess. I may never be. They may all be right in some way, they may even all be wrong. There might yet be another, truer, reason that I cannot grasp yet. All I know is that from time to time, there truly seems to be more to the cruelty of life than mere coincidence. The teeth of the world may not exactly be a proof for the existence of God, but I can’t help but feel it does somehow point to the existence of something beyond the world of our senses.

L.A.E (Life After Eden): Secrets and longing

Once upon a time, a long time ago when I was much younger and far more foolish I dreamed of being able to prove my faith. I dreamed of finding that one overwhelming argument, that bit of undeniable logic, that mathematical equation even that showed that could vindicate all I believed to an unbelieving world. It is now many years later and I have found nothing of the sort. I have looked at every argument from the ethical to the mathematical and there was a plausible counter argument to every one. Even the work of CS Lewis - which to me is nothing less than sheer genius - can be pulled apart at the seams and discarded by those of sufficient intelligence. Now I have realized that this quest was folly to begin with. You simply cannot argue anyone into the Kingdom. You shouldn't want to. See the problem with getting someone to believe in Jesus with a good argument is that someone else may get that person to stop believing due to a better argument.

Yet today, my quest long since declared folly, I came across what is possibly the closest thing to proof of my faith than I could ever hope to find. I stumbled upon a blog called Post Secret - a simple concept really, people from all over write their secrets anonymously on a postcard and send it in and it gets posted. Now I will resist the temptation to use words like "compelling evidence" but I have yet to find anything that so truly seems to point to the truth of the Fall (Genesis 3).

Usually when we try to show how fallen humanity is we point to the news and the pain in this world, how humanity seems to be able to sink lower just when you think we have hit rock bottom. Certainly there were plenty of postcards to showcase this. The blog itself only shows one week at a time but I found a Facebook group dedicated to it and looked through 1049 of these postcards. From the person who admitted to finding a reasons for people to desert him because his father never gave one to the girl who told of how she has promiscuous sex in order to devalue sex so that she may be able devalue the fact that she was raped and the man who seems proud of the fact that he has a sexual relationship with his niece. These go on and on, in fact it would be fair to say that the bulk of these postcards demonstrate just how broken and lost humanity really is. But this is not what tells me the Fall must have been a reality.

See every once in a while, buried between all the darkness would be something beautiful, an expression of love. On the Facebook group, each one of these would have a mass outpouring "I wish this one was meant for me". To me, this offers incredible proof of the reality of the fall of mankind. See the thing is when I read those I wished exactly the same thing. And here is the kicker - I have actually received similar expressions of love from others. It just wasn't enough or rather it was enough, just not enough to last me for very long. You see it's not that I am unloved or unappreciated, it's mostly that no matter how loved and appreciated I am, I never feel loved and appreciated enough. That is partially why I blog in the first place, that is why I fake things and try to come across more interesting, why I fish for compliments and why I always need more. I look into my heart and see a bottomless chasm aching for more - more love, more appreciation, more acceptance, more compliments more everything. And in the rare moments I manage to get outside of my own head I find this same inexplicable chasm in the hearts of others. We need to be special, we need to be needed, we need to be wanted, we need to be thought of as precious and worthy by others - not just the ones we are close to but even complete strangers. Scratch that, especially by strangers. Why else would we disregard the complements of those who love us and know us best but embrace the offhand comments of those who never met us? We struggle to belong and at the same time we struggle to stand out. Who does not dream/hope/believe that if someone just really got to know us they would realize just how special and worthy we really are? Who among us doesn't yet at the same time hold back due to the fear that if our wish was somehow granted and people got to see us as we really are we would be revealed as the frauds we secretly fear we are?

My point here is simple: It seems that there is a bottomless pit in the human heart (maybe not in yours but certainly in mine) that simply cannot seem to be filled. No matter how loved and wanted I am, I always feel a yearning for more. There is a loneliness and a longing in me that I cannot seem to silence. Since it seems that I am not the only one I have to conclude one of two things (this is why I won't propose this as undeniable truth): Either there is a terrible programming error in the human genome OR once upon a time, long ago when humanity was new, this chasm used to be occupied by a Being large enough to fill it to the brim. A case could be made for both options I guess so I do not present this as any sort of absolute, incontrovertible truth. I for one believe that I have a need this great inside me because I was supposed to live in constant communion and fellowship with Someone great enough to satisfy it. I believe that this fellowship has been broken and this former blessing has become a curse. God once walked with us in a garden and we lost that and no matter what we do or drink or eat or learn or even pray we can never climb back up to the place we were before we fell.

We can be content, we can be happy, we can live, love, be loved and we can worship, all to the point of being so filled that we can forget the dark chasm of the soul even exist. Just never for long though. Every now and again, alone in the dark, we realize that it is still there, has been all along and that everything we thought filled it was but a drop in the ocean. Its what drives us. After all, why else would be even have a word like fulfillment?

[Now I use words like "we" and "us" but I realize I can only speak for "me". You are other and different and I am of course limited by that. I think thats the best part of the internet really, it shows us that others are not as "other" as we may think. I certainly saw a lot of comments to day which may as well have been spoken by me. Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe I just happened to run into the one group who is similar to me and maybe I am blind to those who are nothing like me. Maybe none of this resonates with you at all. In that case, consider yourself wildly blessed! Please tell me your secret, I would love to know how you do it.]