Four Short Life Lessons
1. Hopefully, if there is a god, it is far removed from our human lives, for if a god exists in the way many sincere people believe - a transcendent being who watches over us and takes a first hand role in our lives - it is a most cruel and bizarre One to allow the genocides of Dafur and Rawanda or the slaughter of the Beslan children while supposedly answering the mundane prayers of life. But if there is not a god, this does not mean that belief in a Higher Power is rendered empty. There are always powers greater than and beyond the control of the individual to which surrender can grant inner serenity, wisdom and peace; and recognizing the difference between the spheres of personal influence and the spheres of a Higher Power can be liberating. Ultimately, belief in a Higher Power, divested of the word 'god', may be a more effective and powerful world view.
2. In my experience, the degree to which a family embraces or rejects the homosexuality of one of its children is dependent upon that family's powers of imagination. The less imaginative family cannot and will not adjust their world view to include the gay son or daughter fully. The more imaginative family cannot help but adjust their world view to fully incorporate their child. The unimaginitive family's world view is informed by authority, tradition and social mores while the imaginative family's world view is informed by experience, introspection and curiosity.
3. Many people, if not most, want their life to have meaning and their world to have purpose. This is a statement of universal human nature. Not universal, however, are the means by which people find their life's meaning and their world's purpose, for human experience is overwhelmingly diverse. In my experience, people either accept the reality of experiential diversity easily and naturally, or they find it disturbing and frightening. These latter folk tend to mitigate their discomfort with life's diversity by adopting world views which not only discount its worth but characterize it as evil. Specifically, I hear this when gay people are told they are unworthy of the right to marriage and unfit to be parents.
4. Some people believe they were chosen to enjoy an exceptionally successful life as a reward for their insight into the correct religion while believing others were chosen to suffer an exceptionally painful life as a punishment for their unorthodoxy. Yet the reality shows this 'Chosen Ones' mentality to be more the trappings of the exceptionally arrogant and comfortable than that of the ordained.
