thread: 2006-09-08 : Picky-choosy religion, 3 views
On 2006-09-11, sammy wrote:
Uh oh. Now I have to jump back in.
Background - I am Jewish in upbringing, flirted for a while with neo-pagan/wicca/what have you, but have always been mostly agnostic. So color me secular humanist.
Do you love your daughter?
I'm going to resume the answer is "yes." If so, guess what: That is a spiritual sensation. And don't say, "Oh, that's just instinct": The spiritual is rooted in the physical, at least for humans; your soul and your body are simply two organs of the same being.
I realize you were talking to someone else, but: I have a daughter too, whom I love very much. She was born very prematurely, and spent the first 82 days of her life in neo-natal intensive care. There were a couple of occasions upon which I was sure that she wasn't going to make it, to the point where I was starting to mentally rehearse how I would break it to family and friends that she'd died.
Of course, she didn't die: she'll be 2 soon, and is smart and funny and beautiul. But during that dark time, I spent some time praying, telling God that I'd do anything he wanted of me - sell my possesions and give the money to charity, stop touching myself, whatever - if he'd just let my daughter live.
After I'd had some time to think about it, I couldn't help coming to one conclusion: that if this had been "God's way" of bringing me closer to my daughter, or my wife, or him, fuck him: I wanted no part.
You can call the love between a father and daughter spiritual if you like. But to try and connect that with anything else, most especially like a God in the terms which you seem to believe in him, is foolishness.
