One of the people whom I no longer follow on Facebook (she's an old family friend, and while I keep her in my friends list, I've blocked her feed) posts nothing but memes and shares. "I'll bet only 1% of you have the GUTS to share this." While some of the memes she shares are racist, or worship the police, the majority are about how the world would be a better place if we would all just prayed more. Rather than just ignore her, part of me wants to weigh in and ask why she bothers to pray.

I know that she'll just get defensive and have no good answer if I do, but sometimes I want to jump in and say, "Exactly what are you hoping to achieve by praying?"

I don't mean that in the "there's nobody at the other end to hear you anyway" sense of the question (though that's another issue unto itself).

My thinking is that praying to ask for stuff displays a remarkable degree of hubris. This person has also posted memes about how God has a perfect, immutable, inscrutable plan. Everything that happens does so because it is part of that plan. If something good happens then praise him because his plan is good. If something bad happens, well, obviously some good will come of it because it's just part of his plan and everything happens for a reason.

So... God always follows his plan, good or bad.

This gets back to my question of why one would bother to pray, or at least be arrogant enough to expect any change in results from praying. If God has a perfect plan, then he is going to follow that plan regardless of any petitions you happen to send his way through prayer.

I remember a preacher I heard a few years back talking about how God answers every single prayer he receives, but that sometimes the answer is, "no." He explained that God has a perfect, immutable plan and that sometimes he has to say "no" to a prayer if it doesn't align with his plan.

This makes sense - sort of. If you pray and ask for something, he will grant it only if it aligns with his plan. In other words, he will only accede if it was something that he was already going to do anyway. This means that if you hadn't prayed, the results would have been the same.

If he changes his plan to answer your prayer then his plan wasn't perfect. Expecting God to fulfil requests is founded on the tacit belief that God's plan - and by induction - God himself is imperfect.

I mean, I'm not saying that people shouldn't pray. I'm sure if God exists, he likes to know that his creations are thinking about him. Asking him to change things, though, is the height of arrogance. It's a way of saying, "Hey God, I know you've probably got a reason for killing millions of people with this new virus, but take it from somebody who knows better and maybe consider ... don't?"

A thread I just finished reading on Reddit reminded me of an awkward lunch conversation from many years ago.

The thread involved a religious person taking it as some kind of personal affront that their room-mate did not share their beliefs. While it's not an exact analogy to what I encountered, some of the conversation resonated with me.

Back before my late brother slid into atheism, he was actually quite devout and deeply involved in Christian activities. As such, he surrounded himself with like-minded friends. We were both living in Vancouver at the time when this happened, and we were hanging out together one Saturday. He had warned me in advance that he was free for the day aside from a lunch date with some friends, but he said that I was welcome to join them. Most of them had not seen each other in some time - a few years in a couple of cases - so I figured I could sit by quietly and eat lunch while they caught up on things.

Anyway, we settled in for lunch at a restaurant over in West Vancouver. It took awhile (a few nanoseconds, if memory serves me), but the lunch conversation turned to religion. I sat quietly to one side, trying to look invisible while I picked at my appetizer and listened to them comparing denominations. It seemed that there had been a minor schism in the group of friends, with each settling into subtly different Christian denominations over the years. I am talking very subtly-different ones, with degrees of separation along the lines of "holds the pinkie straight out when holding a brandy snifter versus having a slight crook at the knuckle".

One of the ladies at the table noticed that I had not spoken up during the conversation, and she decided that she wanted to bring me into it. It's been many years, so I'm paraphrasing a bit here.

"You've been very quiet," she said, just loud enough to catch the attention of the rest of the table. "I'm curious - what denomination are you with?"

The whole table turned to listen to my response, so I replied, "I'm really not comfortable discussing my religious views."

She started in about how they were non-judgemental, and they all friends, and none of them would judge me on which Christian denomination I was with, so I reiterated that I did not want to discuss my beliefs with them, but they were free to continue their discussion amongst themselves.

And she kept pressing. She just wanted to know what flavour of Christian I was, then we could drop if after that. I was reluctant to speak because I knew from past experience with his friends that some of them could be pretty pushy proselytizers.

So I said, "I'm agnostic."

The whole table went silent for a few moments before she said, "So ... how long have you been agnostic?"

I think they all heard the chill in my voice when I said, "I've told you repeatedly that I don't want to talk about this.”

Her friends picked up on that and steered the conversation in other directions. Lunch got much more amiable and less awkward once the conversation switched away from religion.

Two subjects that did not come up during the family gathering at Christmas were religion and politics. At one time our family was unified under the twin banners of Christian Fundamentalism and Conservative politics. Over the years, most of us have migrated to the left politically, and most of us have trod the winding path to various flavours of atheism or agnosticism.

All of us, that is, except for my elder brother and my mother (the two who were hosing the Christmas get-together). Mom keeps her politics pretty close to her chest, but in terms of religion she has moved closer to the centre of the spectrum, leaving the Pentecostal church behind. She was Lutheran for awhile, but I honestly don't know what church she calls home now. On the other hand, my brother has made the leap from Pentecostal to Baptist, and he is unapologetically Conservative - more on moral than financial grounds, though. He is quite content mixing church and state as long as it's a church he likes.

Mercifully, none of that came up over Christmas. Other than my brother's obvious ill-ease over a long game of Cards Against Humanity ("Well, I have to say that this is the first and last time I'll ever play this.) it was a pleasant visit all around.

Muffins.

I experience a muffin disappointment this week that was disappointing enough on the scale of disappointingness that I felt compelled to share it here. Part of our morning routine is that if we get away early enough, and the line there is short enough, we will stop at McDonald's on the way past so that I can get a coffee and an orange/cranberry muffin. It's not that McDonald's is my first choice among places to stop for these things, rather it is the only place to stop for these things between our house and my office.

I don't always order a muffin - usually when I do, it is because I have skipped breakfast and I am counting the muffin into my meal plan for the day. Tuesday's muffin was ... different. I knew it was different the moment they handed us the bag through the window because it smelled extra muffiny. The bag was warm, and it was practically pulsing out waves of muffin smell into the car. At any real muffin outlet, one might reasonably assume this meant the muffin was freshly baked.

I was under no illusion that McDonald's bakes their own muffins. I'm sure they arrive dehydrated and they add water, or they are reconstituted by some other process that would put me off muffins if I could witness the process of their transformation from arrival to sale. In any event, this one had obviously been nuked. I appreciated the gesture until I got to work.

Once I got to the office (pictured below), I discovered the extent of the nuking. This had been nuked from orbit. This muffin had been weaponized. They had managed to render this muffin hard enough to bludgeon somebody senseless if I chose to put it to that application. When I finally managed to separate the bottom from the top, it was browned in the middle and smelled slightly burnt. Somebody must have forgotten this thing in an industrial microwave for a few minutes, so it's not like they started preparing it for me the moment I ordered - it was just unlucky happenstance that I got the shitmuffin. Needless to say, I was disappoint.

Tomorrow I may order blueberry instead.



Trust me when I say that not all of my "picture a day" pictures are in black and white, but I have noticed that my new phone gives a blue tinge to the darker areas of photographs - especially at higher ISO settings. I have heard of this happening on other phones as well. I will just have to remember that it is a fair-weather camera when I use it. This one (and the one above) were not part of my "picture a day" project though.


Actually, this is my only one from this batch that is from my "picture a day" stream. The fact that I am taking more pictures than I need to keep up a this point is a promising sign.


I dusted off the Bodum vacuum pot on the weekend. It makes wonderful coffee, but it is fiddly to use because it needs to be monitored.

In many respects, I am glad that I was an adult before I lost my faith. No, let me rephrase part of that - I did not lose my faith, as that implies that it was an inadvertent act, and that the faith is something that I am seeking to find again. I discarded it as I grew to realize that I was putting trust in things that did not stand up to rational examination.

The reason I am glad that I retained it until my early adulthood is because it did bring me much comfort as a child, and by remaining in the beliefs of my family, it gave us a happy and harmonious household when I was growing up.

I cannot claim that I went through the same intellectual journey as the narrator in the video I linked, but there are definitely some overlapping elements in how we arrived at where we are today. And that is not to say that I self-identify as an atheist today either, I prefer to think of myself as an agnostic, because I lack the conviction of faith to discount the possibility that there might be at least one religion out there that I have not met, that has some founding in truth. My eldest brother identifies as an atheist though - which comes simultaneously as a surprise, but not a deep shock to me. He embraced Christianity far more deeply than I ever did, even aspiring to be a youth minister at one point in his life. He has never spoken to me a lot about how he parted ways with his faith, but he has tossed about terms like "internal inconsistencies" and "fails to stand up to critical examination".



My initial stirrings of doubt came after I had moved out of home, and into an apartment with my elder (not eldest) brother. I became close friends with a guy who had been working his way through our family, befriending my eldest brother first, then moving on to my elder brother when the eldest moved away, and then on to me when that brother drifted off to become closer with some of his more fundamentalist friends. After I moved to another city, he and my younger brother became very close for years before they had a falling out.

This friend and his wife belonged to one of the stranger offshoots of Christianity that had its roots in the 70s (though the church has since moved to being mainstream evangelical after the death of its founder in the 80s, even going so far as to denounce him as a heretic and false prophet).

Many of the his church's tenets were outright loony in my view, and though I avoided teasing him about them too viciously, I was always struck by the mental gymnastics he would have to jump through in order to defend them without making them sound really stupid. I had always found his religion a bit daft because it did not match mine, but it made me a bit uncomfortable with the knowledge that I had to jump through similar hoops to defend mine when some of its sillier elements were brought to my attention.

While that made me question my beliefs at times, it was not the wedge that split me from my faith; it was the people in my faith who drove the first wedge.

I was raised in one of the very fundamentalist religions, where disdain and hatred for those outside of the faith were masked by the ostensible, positive-sounding maxim of "Love the sinner, hate the sin." There was a disturbing level of underlying hypocrisy in the words, because there was no love at all for the sinners. Many members of our faith, and of kindred faiths could barely suppress their glee in the idea that sinners were looking forward to an eternity of damnation and torment after they died. They loved capital punishment (even though we'd not had it in Canada in some years) because it just sped along the process a bit for these awful people to meet their awful afterlife.

And that leads to another wedge; Hell.

I could not resolve myself of the idea of Hell, at least not in the context of a loving god. Our lives are short. The length of an individual life against the entirety of human existence is almost ludicrously short. But when you look at the entirety of human existence against the the time that Earth has existed, it is almost forgettably short as well. When the sun swells to its red giant form and burns our world to a cinder, the length of time between our planet's formation and destruction is immeasurably short compared to the expected lifespan of the universe before its heat death.

Yet when the last sub particle evaporates from existence an inconceivably distant time in the future, and time itself ceases to even be a concept, one's time in Hell would barely even be getting started. Yet the vast majority of people who have ever lived, or ever will live will be condemned to this place of torment and torture. I questioned the competence, and the love of a god who would design a creation in such a way. What loving god would knowingly create a race of beings in his image with the intention of torturing the vast majority of them for all of eternity?

Either he was not very loving, or he was just incompetent, and the result had never occurred to him.

It occurred to me that the concept of purgatory suggested that others had the same misgivings. The idea of infinite punishment for finite sins just did not seem like a concept that would come from a loving, rational being. The current pope has gone one step further, even publicly embracing the concept of universalism during his tenure. I may not agree with him on some of the more fundamental points of his church's dogma, but he scored many points with me when he started espousing that. Of course, that concept does not sit well with people who are holding out hope that Islamic extremists and their ilk have anything but an eternity of torment to look forward to in the afterlife.

Ultimately though, it was neither the hypocrisy, nor the contradictory nature of Hell that drove me to part ways with my religious beliefs, but the realization that God was not a necessary part of my personal equation. The world still worked, whether I believed in him or not. I found that I could love, hate, wonder, fear, feel compassion and do all the things that let me function as a human without feeling like I needed an invisible entity watching every moving and judging me for it. I could judge myself. When I held up a hand and blocked him from my sight, life went on about the same. Ultimately I realized that this god was neither good, nor bad, loving nor wrathful.

He was irrelevant.

There is an expression that when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade.

Life did not hand me any lemons today, but it did hand me a pie crust. Well, more accurately, I had some crust left over from the pumpkin pies I made the other day. The recipe I used for the crusts actually made enough for two covered pies, but since I don't cover pumpkin pies, I had enough crust left for another two pies (or a covered one). While we were out shopping today, I mentioned to atara that I was thinking of using the rest of the pie crust when we got home, and I asked if she had any requests. She thought about it for a moment and then mentioned that she had some apple pie filling in the freezer that was left over from some pies she made earlier.

So here is my leftovers pie, made from spare crust and filling. The pie is not cooked quite as dark as it looks in the picture.


A few weeks ago, one of the members at our church did a guest stint at the pulpit. He is a retired history professor, and a very engaging speaker, so atara and I make a point to attend when we know that he will be speaking. What he tends to deliver at the pulpit more closely resemble dissertations than sermons. His latest thesis was on the topic of atheism, and more specifically, that people tend to be rather targeted in their atheism.

Most people who identify as atheists tend to mean it fairly specifically to the Abrahamic religions, while giving very little thought to their feelings toward Zeus, or Ganesha, Gaia, or any of the pantheon of local, native religions. He confessed that he does not believe in the god of Abraham, but he knows too little about many of the other religions to pass judgement on them. It is always possible that there is an obscure religion out there that presents a compelling case for the existence of its deity with a solid body of proof to back it.

Then he back-pedalled a bit and said something that struck a personal chord with me because it reflects my own feelings.

I am paraphrasing him a bit because he said it more eloquently than I can remember it now. "If I am being completely honest with myself then I must self-identify as an agnostic, rather than as an atheist. It is not that I believe in the Abrahamic gods, but I lack the conviction of faith to be a pure atheist."

I have felt that way for some time now. I do not believe in the god of the major religions. I find them to be logically inconsistent, relying far too strongly on their followers to suspend their critical thinking for unquestioning credulity in order to function. At the same time, while the object of their faith cannot be proven, neither can it be entirely disproved either.

So in the end, I lack the evidence to believe, but I lack the faith to completely disbelieve. I am, therefore, not an atheist, but an agnostic.

My undead warlock, tauren druid and troll mage are all on temporary hiatus while I work on my latest character: an undead priest.

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I admit that I have a soft spot for villains and antiheroes.  That doesn't mean that I don't like heroes, or that I want Superman to fail, but I prefer the insane genius who honestly believes he is doing the right thing when he sets his army of mechanical nightmares marching across the plains to turn hapless townsfolk into quivering blobs of protoplasm.  He just has more character, IMO.

Does anyone else out there like villains?