I’m glad you got the hug. And, “holy smokes” (pun intended)–your child ate a tamale!

Davida

Though I do not have a personal Lord and Savior, I am an extremely happy individual who has a positive outlook on life and tries to do the right thing.

Every day I see a ton of miserable people out there who are complaining and doing nothing to better their own situations besides pray about it. I can’t say that I have much sympathy for them.

My son has to put up with a lot of BS from his dad. His dad is a Baptist minister and though our son is extremely intelligent, stays out of trouble, is an excellent musician and artist and has an amazing report card each and every time, my son has to hear how bad he is and how he’s going to hell because he doesn’t go to church, has his ears pierced and has orange hair.

One of my greatest joys in life is that my son is not a sheep and takes responsibility for his own happiness.

Certainly the “self help” phenomenon that grew up in certain communities in the New Age movement fostered such an attitude. Navel gazing and focusing inward on the “inner god” usually doesn’t tell you much about what’s going on in the rest of the world, good and bad. I remember having dealings with people who were into Werner Erhard’s EST (Erhard Seminars Training), which was essentially a self-help program for young corporate types - expensive and personally abusive enough (you had to spend a whole weekend in one room with a bunch of other people, got yelled at and jeered and sneered at by the “trainer”, and spent upwards of $200 - in 1970s dollars - for the experience). The intent of EST was to tell yuppies that they were okay because they were being true to themselves; that their cutthroat path to the top of the pyramid was perfectly moral, because the only true morals are what advances the self. It was a yuppie’s spiritual ideal - they could have “spirituality” and still be as materialistic and me-centered as they wanted. It put the stamp of “spirituality” on the very behavior that made everybody else despise them.

The other phenomenon in the religion world that promotes self-centered attitudes and behavior is evangelical Christianity. For that group, the be all end all of “spirituality” is personal salvation. And how do you attain salvation? Not by helping the poor or anything so altruistic. No, you’re saved merely by “believing on the name of Jesus.” That’s it. And your goal in life becomes converting others to your belief. Have you ever noticed that evangelical churches have very few services like soup kitchens, or health clinics, or therapy programs? Their more liberal Christian counterparts have lots of that, but for the evangelical Christian the central purpose of Christianity is personal salvation; everything else pales in comparison.

Now granted, I have a certain bias against organized spirituality (my definition of “religion”). I spent 50 years of my life attached to organized religions of one sort or another (the Lutheran church in my childhood and youth and the Baha’i Faith for the rest of the time) before I finally figured out it was a shell game meant to keep me under somebody’s control. One day I finally understood the first two sentences of the Tao te Ching:

The way that can be spoken is not the Eternal Way.
The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name

and bingo! I finally figured it out. If you put a label on it, it loses its sacredness. And from then on i went my own way. Sure, I celebrate the turning of the Wheel of the Year in the old ways same as the neo-Pagans. And I read the Tao Te Ching and the poetry of the Sufi poet Rumí. And I’m a fan of the Creation spirituality of Matthew Fox. But I don’t join an organization to do it, and I don’t give it a name. And in that I’m a free man, much more free than anybody sitting in a pew of a Sunday morning (while I’m out wandering in the woods and the salt marshes saying good morning to the birds).

Heh, heh! and I do believe I got carried away there. And i also believe you just witnessed the beginnings of my next (or at least coming soon) blog post.