"Leaving" implies both something being left and something else being reached.

Death.  The soul leaves the body.  The body is a shell, nothing more than a vessel for the soul, the fifth, transient element.  For example, we call your body "yours."  Like a possession.  Not yourself.  Do you see what I mean?  "Self" is personality and thought and memories (not memory).  And what is personality and thought and memory?  Chemicals in your brain.  But not even that.  The way those chemicals come together, with the physical tissue of your brain and its orientation in space and time.  But these things, personality and thought and memory, self, are not physical, nor would we ever presume to describe them as such.  Really, how would we describe them?  Abstractions.  Not matter, but abstractions.  It's a small step from abstractions to energy.  After all, how would you describe energy?  Try; it's really damn hard.  Okay, you can say "I don't know" now.  Self is so amorphous, indescribable, intangible, abstract… you get the picture.

Death.  I keep wandering away from it (intentionally, perhaps..?).  Body is a possession, a vessel, a shell.  Even when you're alive.  But it's a possession like a home.  A house or an apartment.  It's very personal, very you. Still, when the soul leaves, it's just a fallen log, a discarded muffin in a muddy parking lot (don't ask), a footprint in wet sand.  It's the physical manifestation of memory, a dead body is.  I want to be cremated.  I want my body to go to the fire.  Well, actually it's between cremation or just being left out for the animals and the plants and the elements.  Air (the great oxidizer) and water (the great eroder) and earth (the great consumer) and fire (the great equalizer) and life.  Other life: dogs and raccoons and birds and worms and beetles and trees and fungi and soil bacteria.  Either way I am returned; even if I was embalmed and locked in a metal box and buried (*shudder shudder*) I would eventually return to the universe as organic molecules and even atoms.  It would just take longer.  Much longer.

One thing about my faith is that it's not particularly comforting.  But that's the thing: that's because it's realistic.  The world is not "made" for us.  We are not "supposed" to be able to survive, thrive in it.

The "meaning" of life is that it works.  There is no great reason.

The soul is recyclable, but not always recycled.  Yes, reincarnation is in here somewhere, but I've got my own bent on it.

But I do know what happens when you die by a hand or a force other than your own.  Sort of.  Obviously I don't know, really.  I mean, no one does.  If only we could remember…  Think of the first law of thermodynamics; conservation of energy and matter.   Add up all the energy and mass on both sides of the chemical equation and they'll match.  Mostly.  I'm not going there, at least in this paragraph.  Besides, I forget what the principle or whatever is called.  Well, what is a soul but… something.  I mean, there aren't specifics, but souls are like the gods; they have to be made of something.  And there's only two things in the universe (don't you even think about it): matter and energy.  Personally I'm leaning toward energy, and it makes sense/sounds good: heat energy, light energy, life energy.  You know?  But the point of this whole idea is that souls can neither be created nor destroyed (perhaps they can be converted, but not going there right now).  Anyway, this means they have to be re-used, and I think they come out the other side looking pretty much the way they did.  It's, like, hard to change energy, man…

Whoa, I just started making sense!  Like, trippy, right?  Betcha didn't see that one coming, huh?

So, souls survive the journey from one body (the deceased) to another (the newly born) pretty much unchanged.  I have no thoughts on the actual method of the journey at this moment; I will just say that Death is neutral among divines (I'm not even sure he qualifies as a divine) and men, and there are Angels [of Death] and Reapers involved.  What; you thought I didn't have a theory?  Silly, silly; you don't know me yet, do ye?  Actually, have you been, like, paying attention?

BTW: I've been writing this to myself.  Because I talk to myself.  I know, circular, but I get hold of an idea and I'm like a terrier with a bone.  Never let it go.  Just sayin'.

So, I don't really know the mechanism, and the importance of that statement is that I don't know why we don't know who/what we were.  I think that now would be the time to point out that souls are present in all living things, so species, even kingdom, is sort of a nonissue.

Ah, The Bitter Disappointment (How Atheism Has Let Me Down)

I used to call myself an atheist.  I thought I didn't believe in any god or magic.  Actually, I've always believed in magic, but I don't begrudge atheists their beliefs.  I respect their rights.

But that's the thing, isn't it?  Atheism is based around belief.  Because not believing in something is believing in its absence, in some capacity.  Not to belittle atheism at all; a lot of them make a lot of sense.  Richard Dawkins, eg.

Some atheists consistently bother me, though.  I like to read RSS feeds, and I have a collection on Google Reader consisting of some pagan websites I like to read (like Wild Hunt and the Juggler [through PNC], etc) and some funny stuff.  Well, I also subscribe to an atheist blog called LOLgod.  I don't mean to trash it because they say some nasty things about witches.  I believe that nothing is sacred, in the sense that anything can be the subject of satire and sarcasm (including anything I believe in, BTW).  But I do have a problem with hypocrites.  I absolutely loathe hypocrisy.  I loathe it so much that in order to avoid hypocrisy myself, I will (a) point out that loathing something doesn't mean you never perpetrate it, and (b) admit that I may occasionally succumb to it.  I really try not to, but this is beside the point; hypocrisy drives me up the wall and I see a lot of it in the atheist community (because they are a community, no matter how much they may protest).

The reason I had to write about this today is because of something I saw on LOLgod.

Wednesday Nov 3

I like this cartoon.  The biggest problem I have with Christianity is the holier-than-thou attitude many Christians have.  So yeah, good post LOLgod.

Only on Oct 24, LOLgod posted a flowchart of alternative medicine with pretentiously labeled paths to many spiritual healing practices (yes, I mean Reiki and Faith Healing) as well as some non-spiritual healing (like homeopathy and herbal medicine).  I'm not going to put it here, because I don't like it and I don't want it associated with this blog, but go see it here and form your own opinions.  Similarly on Oct 21 they posted a spoof of Christine O'Donnell.  Which I am all for.  But in making fun of O'Donnell, they associate witchcraft with Christianity, which with my feelings about Christianity is enough to make me fume.  The spoof completely misrepresents witchcraft, equating the belief of magic (which of course, out of context, couldn't mean they're speaking of the respect for nature and nature's power over us) with a belief in God (don't get me started).  BTW, can I be totally incensed about the whole "raising the undead" comment?  I mean, WTF?  Again, go see it here.

When I think of atheism, I think of a culture of reason above all.  But these latest posts really show a side of atheism (or at least some atheist) that doesn't fit with this interpretation.

It's disappointing, but I see some atheist writers and bloggers that restore my hope.  ContraRarian is a good example.  The humor is much more cerebral, and I never see the blatantly elitist jokes that I see on other blogs.

Still, atheism troubles me.  Yes, reason plays a pivotal role in the formation of the atheistic concept, but I also see a lot of hatred.  There's a lot of hatred everywhere (evangelism, for example, is hatred in pseudo-solid form), but I thought atheism would be--I don't know--better somehow.  That's one of the reasons I came to druidry; our culture is based on the positives of life and love and happiness.  Again, I mention Dawkins when I speak about atheists who create positive space out of belief in the inexistence of divinity, but I think that's not the norm.  From all the atheist blogs I've read, I think atheism is usually just a form of rebellion, and therefore hatred.  I don't want to be a part of that.

What more can I write about this?  That I'm disillusioned about the grand idea of reason and atheism, and I'll never read LOLgod again?  I think that was pretty much taken for granted.  But I do want to thank ContraRarian, Richard Dawkins, and others like them for keeping the dream alive, in a sense.  I want to believe that a culture based on reason is reasonable.