Perhaps some of us believe that having a companion will make us happy. Having a partner to bring us joy, to share with, to confide in. We are miserable until we find our true love. Then we find someone. We know that person is “the one”. We bond with them, and for a while, we do find happiness. But soon we realize that wanting and having are two different realities. Along with the happiness comes the real work of building a life together. Life is not perfect. We may not be miserable, but we are not really happy. Eventually, if we are unhappy long enough, our unhappiness becomes misery, and it looks like happiness is just not being miserable. So we get ourselves out of a miserable relationship. We are no longer miserable, but neither are we happy.

In my heavy-handed story it is very easy to see that happiness is where you find it. Happiness is relative. Happiness is when we decide to be happy, and happiness is what we make out of what life hands us. Happiness is like a butterfly that flits past us, looking beautiful. If we chase it, it eludes us. If we try to grasp it, we can destroy it. But if we are patient and still and let it come to us, it will draw near and remain in our presence, allowing us to study its beauty close up. It may even alight upon our outstretched had. But sooner or later it will depart, and we are left with a choice. We can tell the world how much we appreciated the beautiful experience we enjoyed during our butterfly encounter, or we can turn inward and mourn the fact that it has moved on. And if we do turn inward and become miserable, we may miss the fact that there are more butterflies hovering nearby, and some will probably fly in our direction sometime soon. We just need to study the nature of butterflies to improve our chances that one will draw near again.

Life will have its aches and disappointments. A little suffering is indeed good for the soul, because it helps us understand that happiness can be as simple as not aching, or it can be as complex as we choose to make it. Complex and difficult are often the same thing, so we should choose wisely. We should not grasp too tightly. And we need to remember that butterflies come and go. We need to enjoy their beauty during the brief time we have to enjoy their presence. And when we find “the one”, we need to keep life in perspective and allow ourselves to understand what happiness is over the long run.

This post was inspired by a tidbit from this month’s Science of Mind magazine in an article entitled, “Mindful Living, the Art of Remembering to Remember.”

I never have felt that anyone personally misled me, certainly not intentionally. I was misled by the misguided and misled, people who did not just believe. They knew. The “blame” lay further down the line. I was deluded by the deluded. I felt that Christianity had violated the trust I had placed in its doctrines. It is easy for a former Christian to feel that way. Who is to “blame”? Why, “they” are. They, the ubquitous, faceless “they misled me”. Could I name names now? No. Could I name the names of Christian leaders who are misleading people now? Well, certainly. Pick a leader, any Christian leader. Are these leaders bad people? Probably not. They were probably misguided themselves, spectacularly misguided. And they are spectacularly misguiding others. Bad people? Probably not. Their intent is pure. Their message is not.

Is Christianity bad? Certainly not, not the way it is preached and practiced by many, probably most, Christians. Christianity has some of the most loving and forgiving characteristics of any revealed religion. Do I believe in or agree with Christian doctrine? Certainly not! To go back to being a Christian I would have to believe in things that don’t make sense. Can Christians be bad? They can be horribly bad, especially when they throw their weight around and try (and often succeed) to impose their worldview on the general population.

In my opinion that’s why we have Christian Deists. I’ve gotten to know John Lindell pretty well over the past couple of years, and he has told me his story several times. He was a Baptist minister when he came to the realization that he could no longer believe the awful things that Christian doctrine said he must believe. He gave up his ministry. John invented his own religion, and then later he found Deism. It was exactly like his own invented religion. John is a Biblical scholar. He sees Deism in the life of Jesus. He believes Jesus was a Deist, a man, not divine. John is a Deist first and a Christian Deist second. I believe that deep down inside John would love to be a Christian, but he cannot accept the horrible things in the Bible. So John takes the good and leaves the rest. John sees Deism in Jesus’ words and actions. I have problems seeing the same thing. I can’t look past the other things.

Does that mean that John filters Jesus’ message from the Bible? Yes, but he is very up-front about it. I think we all filter things that way. We see what we want to see. We hear what we want to hear. We deemphasize some parts and apply emphasis to other parts. We take a subject and make it our own. Humans do that. I do celebrate humanity, even with all our imperfections. These imperfections make us human. Christianity is based on the Bible, which has some of the most inspirational and uplifting messages on Earth, and it has some positively dreadful and ghastly parts. And both the good and the ghastly are attributed to God. So Christians face a dilemma. They want desperately to believe the good parts, so they ignore the bad parts. Not even the fiercest hellfire and damnation preacher encourages his flock to go out and stone someone to death these days. The best Christians suppress the distasteful and stress the glorious. It is the only way they can deal with their dilemma.

The Christian message of love and forgiveness represents two of the best facets in a flawed jewel. When you add salvation to the mix, you get a very powerful message. I cannot, however, make the bad parts go away, so I cannot be a Christian. Like many who have left Christianity, I felt betrayed. People I trusted had told me that the Bible was inerrant, the word of God. I believed, then I found that what they told me was false. So I turned my back on Christianity, a very human reaction. I rejected it all.

There is nothing about getting older that makes you any wiser unless you learn along the way. We learn from the good people, and we learn from the flawed people. We learn from the good experiences, and we learn from the bad. But we only become better ourselves when we apply what we have learned and improve our own behavior. I have taken a page from the Christian Bible and have decided to forgive Christianity. I forgive the well-intentioned Christian ministers and lay leaders who filled my head with nonsense, because they put some good and useful lessons in there too. I forgive the hypocrites who populate so many churches; they have taught me well through their bad examples. I forgive myself for turning a blind eye to the atrocious things in the Bible. I studied more than the parts my mentors wanted me to read. There is much good in there, along with much that is bad or absurd if taken literally. Allegorically, much of the Bible is beautiful.

So I have forgiven Christianity. It is the Christian thing to do. A good friend who went from being an Atheist to being a devout Christian has told me several times, “Don’t judge Christianity by Christians.” I do, of course, but I get the drift of his advice. Just as we should not judge a book by its cover, we should not condemn the good along with the bad. There is much about Christianity to dislike, but to discard the positive aspects along with the negative is very short-sighted. We should eat the fruit and discard the rind. I think Ziggy got it right. “You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses.” Kahlil Gibran perhaps said the same thing a bit more poetically, “The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose.”

To withold forgiveness is to be negative and pessimistic. Try forgiving yourself for having been unforgiving.

Comfort was founded by German Freethinkers (Deutche Freidenker) in the mid-19th century. That entire area of the Texas Hill Country was once over 50% German as the names of the towns attest: Neu Braunfels, Fredricksburg, Boerne, Greune, etc. The Freethinkers had no interest in organized religion. The first church was not built until 1892. Comfort’s inhabitants believed in freedom, and as the Civil War approached, they were abolitionists and were against secession.

Texas joined the Confederacy. Many residents of Comfort sided with the Union, and a group banded together and left for Mexico to avoid being drafted into the Confederate Army. They were ambushed and massacred at Nueces in August, 1862. The wounded were executed, and some drowned in the Rio Grande trying to escape. Their bodies were left to rot. The citizens of Comfort gathered their bones and buried them in a mass grave in Comfort. They erected a monument called Treue der Union (Loyalty to the Union). It is the oldest Civil War monument in Texas and the only monument to Unionists in all the states of the former Conferacy. It is in the national registry of historic places, and it is one of only six sites in the nation that is authorized to fly the flag at half staff every day of the year. The flag flying there has 36 stars, one for every resident killed in the massacre.

Visiting the monument is a profoundly moving experience. Click on the image to enlarge.

Comfort has another memorial to the Deutche Freidenker in the downtown area. It was erected by Central Texas Freethinkers, and it commemorates them and their contributions to freedom and the rich history of the area.

I have intentionally made the picture big so that you can read it.

On the lighter side, we visited an antique mall across the street from this monument. It is huge. It must have tens of thousands of items from small to large. While I was browsing an employee came up and asked if he could help me find anything in particular. I asked if there was anything among all these items that might help commemorate the Founding German Freethinkers. His response was, “I wouldn’t know about anything like that around here.” Right.

But reason does not operate in a vacuum. Reason cannot function without data. Experience is the way we gather data to feed our reasoning minds. Reason needs food for thought.

I was raised like many in America. I went to church. I come from a tiny town of 250 souls in rural Illinois. I lived a block from the church. Of course I went to church. And when we moved to the country, we went to the closest church, which was four miles away. When I got my license I drove all the kids to church. It was a Southern Baptist mission. And we learned about Jesus. I wanted so much to be saved. I went through the motions. I tried to convince myself I was saved. I was baptized, of course.

Then I went away to college. Reason began to matter more than what I had been taught. I began to experience things that a youngster in rural Illinois does not get to experience. I applied reason to those experiences, and reason told me that many of my early experiences did not make sense in the harsh light of mature reason. I began to question why I ever had believed the things I had been taught as a child.

As I grew in experience and honed my reasoning skills I discovered gaps in my experience. Reason directed my search to discover replacement beliefs for the childhood beliefs that had withered and crumbled under the harsh light of reason. Reason had taken away those old, comforting beliefs. It was up to reason to find a replacement. Life has to have meaning, doesn’t it? My search led east to Buddhism, Zen, Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism. The east was not a good fit. I turned west.

More experience. More reason. I became a voracious reader and consumed massive amounts of information. Experience and reason. The search continued. I married, started a family, settled on a career, rose through the ranks. I lost a brother, a sister, my father, my mother and countless older relatives. Life was moving on, whether I was ready or not.

When did I come to Deism? I cannot rightly say. It was many years ago after much reasoning and experience. When did I realize I was a Deist? That is a relatively recent experience.

Here we are again, back at experience and reason. There was a time when I would have said, “Too bad I did not come to this conclusion earlier.” But that was when I believed in regrets. Regret is like worry, a complete waste of time and energy. Regret does not fix anything. Regret does not solve anything. We either learn from our experiences, or we do not. If we reason, we learn. If we fail to apply reason to our experiences, we learn nothing. Regret is unreasonable.

Because of reason and a mature perspective, I now get a lot more out of my experiences. I also get more out of other people’s experiences. I better understand the relationship between reason and experience, and life makes more sense. I have no regrets that I arrived at this understanding relatively late in life. Many people never reach this stage in their spiritual development at all!

To say that it has been challenging collecting the thoughts of over a dozen Deists and transforming them into a meaningful whole  is the biggest understatement I’ve made all year. Deist: So that’s what I am! is far from perfect. It is ambitious, diverse and inclusive. Even the most extreme Deist theories and sub-categories get a hearing. There is something for everyone: something to cheer and something that probably will make you go, “huh.”

For everything that you cheer, I want to give credit to the wonderful contributors who worked so hard to explain what it is to be a Deist, and for everything that makes you scratch your head, I want it to be clear that it’s the editor’s fault.

Now a new journey begins. We enter a strange new land where we spend our energies letting people know that we have produced something of value, and we would like for them to benefit. Deists value reason, nature and experience. We hope you will experience this new book so that you can decide whether or not you can say, “so that’s what I am !”

(this post is also available on our new book blog at http://sothatswhatiam.com/blog/)

On the way back I drove past Brooke Army Medical Center. As I looked at the building I could not help but think about who was lying there in a hospital bed in a heavily-guarded room. I thought about the news reports about the funerals that day for three victims of the Fort Hood slayings. I thought about the words of Kathleen Johnson the previous evening. She told us what she could of the events of the previous week. She works in law enforcement at Fort Hood and knows more than she can tell at this stage of the investigation.

In a couple of years we will give Major Hasan a fair trial. We will convict him and then kill him or lock him up until he dies. We will say that justice has been served, but we know that, whatever the outcome, it will be short of justice. No one will come back to life. Those damaged will not be made whole. Hearts will not be unbroken. Human justice is inadequate, but we do what we can.

And as BAMC faded in my rear view mirror I pondered. What could have been going through the mind of the shooter in the days, weeks and months leading up to this horrific act? Is he insane? By any standard of modern, civilized behavior, he is insane. And what brought on this insanity? We know the answer. There’s no fanatic like a religious fanatic.

The Texas Freethought Convention is represented primarily by Atheists. These are people who have arrived at the logical and reasonable conclusion that there is no God. I have arrived at a different conclusion, but my position is much, much closer to their stance than it is to that of anyone who worships a God who commands His followers to go out and kill in His name. I cannot believe in, let alone worship, a God like that. No religion is far, far better than a religion like that.

I respect people who hold different religious beliefs. I do not respect all that they believe, but if they do not impose their beliefs on others, I think they can believe anything they choose. My own ethical code is simple: be considerate. I take into consideration that other people are usually raised in the religion of their parents. Religion is a social phenomenon, and people derive much spiritual satisfaction from their faith. But organized religion also has a poisonous side. Sacred texts and clergy have urged followers to commit extreme acts against unbelievers and sinners, and followers have followed their leaders’ urgings, no matter how depraved or atrocious. When the promised afterlife is more highly valued than their current life, people can do extraordinary things. Unfortunately, these things are often extraordinarily bad.

Freethinkers use reason and logic to reach their conclusions about life, God and the afterlife. We do not rely on second-hand claims or Bronze Age texts. We can make a leap of faith, but some chasms are too wide and deep, and what is on the other side is not attractive enough. In fact, we just don’t see the allure of what is on the other side. And the more closely we examine it, the more we become convinced that it is an illusion. So as I passed the hospital along I-35 in San Antonio, I tried to imagine what illusion could turn a person into a mass murderer, and my imagination fell short. And I think the shooter also fell short as he leaped the chasm towards his vision of paradise. I believe he plummeted into the depths of that abyss. It’s just too bad that he dragged so many people down with him.

Yes, I know we are supposed to be politically correct, and we should wait until all the facts are in, and if things turn out differently than I think they will, I will apologize and retract my statements in this post, but it is already quite clear that the reason this Army major went berserk and killed 13 people is because he was deluded by a religious call to do harm to others based on religious and political grounds: our country does not agree with the extremists’ point of view.

I watched the Fort Hood memorial service, and I saw and heard our president call these acts incomprehensible. That is an absurd statement. These acts are not at all difficult to comprehend. The sacred text that the major looks to for guidance calls for what we consider in modern times to be barbaric behavior toward unbelievers. To be fair, the Christian sacred texts also call for similar barbaric behavior towards unbelievers, and Christians have happily slaughtered hundreds of thousands. But Christians mostly ignore their sacred text’s requirements to commit murder in the modern era. And they have been ignoring these requirements to slaughter unbelievers for several hundred years, so Christians tend to not be as forgiving of such ritual murder in modern times as their Islamic counterparts.

Most modern-day Muslims have abandoned the barbaric requirements of the Koran as modern Christians have ignored the barbaric requirements of the Bible. Unfortunately, we all know that some clerics urge their followers to commit jihad and kill infidels. And many of their followers follow their leaders’ urgings and reach martyrdom, leaving behind them a trail of death, destruction and heartbreak. Normal people cannot understand the special breed of murderous insanity necessary to produce a suicide bomber or any jihadist, for that matter. Most of us cannot fathom how someone can hate that much, how they can throw their life away in order to kill and maim their perceived enemies. What kind of God would reward such barbaric behavior with eternity in paradise?

Is Islam to blame? Islam is certainly partly to blame. There can be no doubt. If a member of the Westboro Baptist Church was to start shooting up a funeral, Christians from coast to coast and around the world would condemn the act, and there would be no politically correct group protesting that their religion was not to blame. Certainly, their religion would be to blame. This sect’s members believe that “God hates fags”. People do not confuse members of the Westboro Baptist Church with other Baptists. I don’t believe that most people confuse mainstream Islam with radical Islam, but mainstream Islam does not do nearly enough to distance itself from radical Islam. Islam must defeat radical Islam with religious arguments that the deluded will accept. We cannot convince these extremists with any arguments. We have to kill them or capture them to stop them.

Moderate and mainstream Muslims have condemned the terrorist act at Fort Hood, and that is proper, but they have gone on the defensive, because they fear a backlash. I think they have a valid fear. They should continue to vigorously distance themselves from all radical Islam and spend some time actively campaigning and educating their own. They have an enormous problem on their hands. Muslims, more than anyone, need to figure out how to deal with radical Islam. No one else can do that for them.

And we need to be honest with ourselves. Political correctness is at least partly to blame for the slaughter in Texas. We need to identify and fix this problem. Otherwise, even more will die.

Let us not blind ourselves to what is going on here. If racists lynch someone because of his race, we recognize the bigotry and condemn racism. If an ideologue blows up a building or assassinates an opponent, we condemn him and his ideology. If people murder others because of their ethnicity or nationality, we condemn extreme nationalism and ethnic cleansing. The same is true for other violent extremist activity. We recognize that the perpetrator is insane by the definitions of civilized behavior, and we recognize that extreme  anti-social behavior based on ethnicity, nationality, religion, race or other such group identities, is uncivilized. As a species we are growing out of such barbaric behavior, but sadly, our evolution is still incomplete.

For the government to say that we must not blame Islam is absurd. This attitude is insulting, arrogant and condescending. Federal authorities are telling us we are not capable of figuring out on our own what is mainstream Islam and what is radical Islam. All we need do is follow the trail of bodies. Yes, there are bigoted and close-minded Americans who will blame all Muslims. We can deal with them. Dealing with blind, politically correct government bureaucrats is a much larger problem.

Freethought is a step in the right direction. Freethought celebrates individuality, which is the opposite of groupthink. We need free and critical reasoning to prevail to defeat groupthink.

I am not surprised that a terrorist killed Americans, but I am surprised that it was a soldier killing soldiers. I am saddened by the loss and the weak leadership that we are exhibiting in response. I do sense a resolve, however, that people are not going to accept this weak response. Perhaps that will clear the minds of our leaders. If it does not, we need new leaders.

How to tell the good from the bad? We start by listening to our parents and teachers. We trust that they will nurture us and guide us in ways that will lead to good outcomes. As we grow older, we try things out for ourselves. We build experience, and if we learn how to choose more good than bad, we can say we have gained in wisdom. If we look at the long-term outcome of our choices, take others into consideration, and choose what will produce the best for ourselves and those around us, we can say we have chosen wisely. If we fail to consider the future, do not evaluate the impact of our actions on others and generally act selfishly, we can expect less than a good outcome, at least over the long run.

After we reach adulthood we no longer have the excuse of youth to blame for our mistakes. We can blame others for our bad choices, or we can rage against the fates. But if we are choosing unwisely, we should blame only ourselves. Failing to examine the facts, failing to consider the long-term effects of our actions on others and ourselves and failing to use our God-given reason are all human failings that we can avoid if we will only look at nature and our own nature and make the right choice over the easy choice.

What about choices that require knowledge beyond our experience or education? To decide we must rely on the recommendations of others with more experience and education, just as we did in our childhood, except that, as adults, we get to choose who will guide us. Neither our choices nor those whom we choose will always be correct. Life is not fair, and we are not perfect. Science helps us understand nature better and better every year, so we can make ever better choices. What science said was good for us in 1970 is completely different from what science says today. And except in cases where scientists pre-judge and pre-determine outcomes, I trust today’s science more than yesterday’s. We have much better research tools and methods now than we had decades earlier. Not everything “scientific” can be trusted. Some theories conflict, and we have to be careful sorting out which assertions are backed by the evidence, and which are backed by an agenda. Whom do we trust? Look to the evidence, look to the explanations that make sense in light of the evidence, look to the track record of those making claims, and listen to opposing arguments to see which side’s case is stronger. Go with the evidence, not with your emotions. If one side is making an emotional appeal that tugs at your heart, but the other side is presenting solid and logical arguments, you must choose wisely. You know where wisdom lies.

A really good friend of mind is facing a dilemma right now. His heart pulls him in one direction, while his head pulls him in another. That is a tough situation. How do you make the right choice? I cannot tell you. I can only tell you what I think, and that may not work for you. As we mature we develop internal mechanisms that cause us to respond viscerally to various situations. How do we know which choice is right most of the time? We just know**. Usually this response is the same conclusion we would reach and consider correct if we were to take our time and think about it. But this is not always true. Sometimes these internal responses are based on the decision processes of the person we used to be. Our heart tugs us towards old goals that we have made a conscious decision to no longer pursue. These internal mechanisms are like old habits. They are patterns we tend to follow unless we make a conscious effort to break the pattern. All of us know hard it is to break a habit, even if it is a behavior that is bad for us. We have to weigh the evidence. If we are to stand on our own two feet, we cannot let anyone else make our decisions for us. It is good to ask advice, but treat that advice as just more evidence. Keep in mind that if the people arguing on the side that is tugging at your heart have logical arguments, they will use them. If they do not, they may still tug at your heart, because they know that argument often still works. Just be aware of what is going on when people use emotional arguments.

So we should learn from nature. We should observe natural processes, both within us and around us. We should study human nature, and we should make natural, human choices based on reasonable expectations of favorable outcomes. But we should always keep in mind that there are natural courses of action that are not favorable, either to us or to others. Just because they are natural does not always make them good. And just because our heart tugs us in a given direction, that does not mean that we should always follow.

*“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.” –Louis-Hector Berlioz

**I suggest reading the column “The End of Philosophy” by David Brooks (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07Brooks.html). It has excellent information on this subject.

In cold climes we humans will also bundle up and spend more time in our nests. Some will come south for the winter like the birds. We will soon see robins here in the south, along with the snowbirds and their camper trailers.

Autumn is a time to pause and reflect over our spring and summer. Did we sow wisely? Spring is a time of vigor and rapid growth. We find fertile ground, plant our seeds and nuture what issues forth. We pull weeds and cultivate. We feed and make sure there is plenty of sunlight and air and water. Then the summer brings strength. No longer seedlings, those things we have been raising mature and prepare to create offspring of their own. They mature and produce fruit. And life is good. We are happy when we have tended our gardens well.

In Autumn we begin to enjoy the fruits of our labor. We reap what we have sown. We prepare for winter, putting things away like the squirrels and the bears, getting ready for winter. In winter we will enjoy a world of gray and white. Weary from our long labors, we will rest more. And eventually we will begin that long, long sleep.

But enough talk of winter. It will come soon enough whether we are ready or not. For now, we will enjoy. The air is clean and clear, scrubbed by the rains that have blessed us after a difficult stretch. The foliage is recovering, gaining needed strength and energy reserves before going dormant.

I am enjoying my autumn reflections just as some of you are enjoying spring. Life is all circles and cycles. We may find ourselves located at different points on the great wheel of life, but we all must traverse the same general path and pass through the same phases. Choose your garden carefully, sow wisely, tend to the business of life, raise your crops to maturity, and then enjoy the harvest.

For many of us Deism is where we want to be, now and for the foreseeable future. For many others Deism is a stop along the way. They come to us and announce that they had recently discovered that what they had been believing for a long time actually has a name, and they had discovered that the name for their beliefs is “Deism”. They participate for a while, and then they seem to drift away. Sometimes they are enthusiastic Deists for years, but they reach a point when some particular(s) in their lives begin to conflict with being a Deist. They become Christians, Atheists, Buddhists, Taoists, Unitarian Universalist, you name it. They answer a different calling or respond to family pressures or simply decide that something else is what they need to be, and somewhere else is where they belong.

I never regret the pleasure of their company while they are with us. I wish them well and hope that they find truth and happiness. Only they know how to define those things in their lives.

I insist on being true to myself. I would never deny that to anyone else. If you ask me, I will give you my opinion. If you make a choice, I will respect your decision, irrespective of whether it agrees with my recommendation or opinion. In matters of faith, only you can decide. My moral compass points to two words, “be considerate”. They are my True North, my Golden Rule.

I know for a fact that my life is a continuous journey. I like where I am right now. I am enjoying spiritual satisfaction that I had been missing for over 40 years. But have I reached my destination? While I still draw breath, I would have to say “no”.