To Be or Not To Be

Last week the Supreme Court blocked the attempts by the Bush administration to prosecute doctors in Oregon that prescribe lethal doses of prescription medication to terminally ill patients. This has brought the assisted suicide or apparently suicide of any kind back around for debate and I thought I would weigh in on the issue.

First, the Bush administration has got to stop sending me mixed signals. During his tenure President Bush did not resign the assault weapon bill keeping dangerous human killing weapons off the street. In fact, Bush has been opposed to all forms of gun legislation, but the assualt weapon ban was the strangest. The only purpose of an assualt weapon is to kill people. No one hunts deer with an AK-47. So I thought Bush was in favor of the death of American citizens. But it appears that with his attempts to block suicide, that he is only in favor of killing healthy citizens, the others just aren't sport enough.

The fact that we are even having this debate, to me, is insane. The right to die is the most basic right a human being has. How dare anyone tell me I have to go on living after I decided I don't want to. I understand the religous concerns that many people might have with this, but that plays no role here. If you have a religous belief that suicide is wrong than the simple solution is don't kill yourself. If you still feel inclined to do something more, you can let the anguishing in pain, terminally ill patient know that God still loves him and doesn't want him to end his life. But you as a theist have no right to stop this poor soul from taking his own life. Even if you believe this will ultimately earn him or her a one way ticket to hell, that is their cross to bear and not yours.

Secondly, why are the doctors being targeted here, is it just becuase it seems cruel to target the suicidal individuals. The doctors are not murdering them, they are merely letting the paitent know the most effective and painless method of terminating their lives. They are providing the means, but if that is justification for lawsuit then why did Bush block legislation a couple of years ago stating that shooting victims could not sue the gunshop or gun manufacture. Doctors have as much blame in their patients suicide as a gun shop. The main thing here being they are not putting the pills in their mouth and then holding the patients mouth and nose shut until they swallow.

Like I said, this shouldn't even be an issue, it is just people sticking their noses where they don't belong. It is just more of trying to force others to be and believe like you. If that day ever comes and I am dying of some rare and painful form of cancer I want you to know that old Brandon, doesn't like pain. So you can either give me a handful of pills or I will go buy a gun, doesn't matter much to me, but if there is no hope of recovery and I am miserable in pain, I think it would be time to bid the world adieu. Here's to hoping that day never comes though, and if it does that liberals have won this war, because personally I think taking pills would be easier than pulling the trigger.

It's A Long Hard Road Out of Heavan
(continued)

Finding Peace

When we last left our hero, his faith was strong, but he was starting to question things. I had found that I couldn’t go to church, because it seemed that everytime I set foot in church I found myself in disagreement with those around me and that left me confused, at that point I didn’t understand my need for church because rather than clearing my head it just seemed to muddy the waters. So I gave up on church, I stayed home, read the Bible and prayed. I thought maybe I could have my own personal relationship with God. I thought I could stay in my little bubble and be untouched by the rest of the world, but alas that was not possible, after all I am a member of the human race, and we are social creatures.

I am a logical person, some would say a slave to logic, things have to make sense to me. I need to understand. It was apparent to me that there was something wrong with my interpretation of God and other peoples. I just couldn’t understand how God could hate gays, I couldn’t understand why God wanted us to execute people, I couldn’t understand why God would send a Buddhist to hell just for believing what he had been taught as truth his whole life. But that is what I was told by other Christians. That was apparently the God I had been praying to. Well, I realized I couldn’t pray to that God anymore, I didn’t like that God, but then again I wasn’t praying to that God anyway. When I prayed and asked God the things that were in my heart, I got the answers that I truly believed to be true.

I have always been a logical person, I have always thought about things deeply, but it has only been over the last few years that I have really started to evaluated things. To do that I had to be willing to look at everything in my life and take nothing for granted. I had spent most of my life believing there was God, even during my late teen years when I didn’t precisely believe in a Christian God, I still believe the heavens was occupied by some being. Now this is the most important part of this right here, this is the logic that kept my faith for years. Now matter where the human race and Earth came from it had to begin somewhere. Somewhere at sometime there was nothing, then there was something. So logically to me Somebody, namely a god, put something there, set something in motion. Because if there is not an eternal being to start this chain of events that begats our creation then we have a paradox friends, the “Who created the Creator” paradox, and that just isn’t logical. This one thing held my faith for years.

Over the next few years of my life I slipped into a kind of deitist view of a god. The more I evaluated and tried to make sense of the world around me the more I felt comfortable with this view. I just can not reconcile what I see in the world with a loving and caring god. A month ago I saw a nine year old boy with Proteus Syndrome on television, this poor child will not live past his twenty-fifth birthday, and the worst part is he will probably wish for death long before it finds him. This is not the act of a loving god. I also came to the realization that other than the creation hang up I have, I can’t find any other evidence of a god. Like I said I am a slave to logic. I just can’t understand the logic of asking for unquestioning faith without undeniable proof. That just doesn’t make sense to me because if God showed me his existence I would bow before him, all I ask for is a little proof. Now let us briefly revisit that night in the Pelican Inn when I was twenty. Did I mention how alone I felt? Or how it scared me? I need someone, and I can’t help, but notice that is when most people find God, when they need him. I needed to feel comforted so on a subconscious level my mind accepted God, as comfort. This is what I believe now, because it makes more sense to me.

Now if anyone would have asked me for years I would have told you I was a deitist, or maybe deitist Christian. Based on the fact that I believe there was a god of some kind just not a god involved with our daily lives. And since I didn’t know the identity of that god, that I would be just as willing to call him God as anything else. But I am beyond that now too.

The hang up for me always was that creation moment. I can’t explain it and logically a creator makes sense there, but I can’t take anything for granted so I have to accept that maybe another logical answer will come that removes a creator from that equation, I just don’t know. I also hung onto some belief because that allowed me to continue to have a belief in the afterlife. Which in the end I believe is the single biggest reason why people every join a religion. On a very deep level people don’t want to believe when they die that is it. My dad once told me an anecdote of a dialogue between a priest and an atheist. The priest says to the atheist, “Let’s say we live out our whole lives and die and your right, What have I lost? But let’s say we die and I am right, What have you lost?” Now this anecdote fed me for some time, because it just didn’t make sense to believe in nothing. But a year or so ago, I realized the answer to this question that the atheist should have said. “You sir would have lost you one chance at life.” Because if I spend my life worshipping and living by a god that doesn’t even feel the need to introduce himself to me and then I die and that’s it, I have wasted my one chance to live. Now if I was happy living under a biblical law then that would be no big deal, but I am not.

So we come to the Brandon Collinsworth of today, the atheist. I just don’t believe there is anything out there. I don’t need a god to give me strength and morals. I have morals and found that if I live by two simple rules everything works out fine. One, treat others as you would want to be treated. Two, always do what is in your best interest and the interest of those you care about as long as it doesn’t interfere with rule one. These two rules give me all I need to lead a happy life. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to piss on anyone’s religion. I think faith can be a good thing. Faith in a god helps people who are having trouble helping themselves, it helps them get off addictions, raise families, do a good job, and all those are good things. The only issues I have with religion are when it makes people feel ashamed as in the case with some homosexual who can’t help who they are attracted to, but are made to feel bad about it anyway. Or in the case where people try to interject their religion into my life or the lives of my children. As in people trying to get prayer into public schools or trying to pass amendments against gay marriage. Each person should decide on there standards themselves and let me make that decision for myself.

One last thing, this is not a cry for help. I don’t want anyone to try and save my soul. I am really not interested in that. I have found peace in my unbelief that I could never find in trying to reconcile what I knew and saw with what I was told. There is no more confusion in me, I am happy to my core. Now like I said I do get frustrated with you Christians, right now there is someone telling my daughter about God, and our oldest girl brought home a bible that was passed out to all the children at school when as she puts it, “Someone came to talk to us about God.” But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you too. We just have to learn to agree to disagree.