Atheist Turned Believer

 Something interesting occurred to me this morning during meditation, and it has a lot to do with my last post entitled "On Addiction."  In light of this morning's epiphany, I believe that, in that post, I may well have overlooked my own point.  In fact, looking back, I may have missed my own point over the course of the last 76 posts. Last evening I stumbled onto a blog post on a site addressed 1517.org.  Until stumbling upon it, I was unaware of this site's existence and am still illiterate regarding it's purpose, etc. beyond the blog post I happened to hit upon.  That post, entitled "The Failure of the Modern Apologist," proposes what is, to me at least, a radical idea: that all cut-and-dried ideas of Truth as defined by empirical evidence and jurisdictional authority have become passe in the wake of technological advancement.  Author Cindy Koch believes, much like Howard Snyder before her, that the technological revolution of the last 30 years has st...

There is a young man living in my house to whom I am not related.  He gave me permission to post his story here so long as I did not reveal his name or any identifying information.  I have known this young man most of his life.  At the age of 17, he lost both parents in reasonably short order and had no other living relatives in the area.  He asked me at the time if he could move in with me and I refused.  It wasn't that I couldn't have made room for him; I probably could have.  The problem was that he had a drug problem, and I felt like I could do nothing for him. As time went on, the drug problem grew worse.  He lost what nominal housing he had and wound up on the street.  He worked occasionally in temp labor, but any money he received was spent on his drug of choice.  He finally ended up, in a drug-induced stupor, committing a felony and spent a couple of years in state prison.  When he came up for parole, he asked again if he could m...

 I have been asked about my Scriptural quotations in this blog, or more specifically, the lack thereof.  It seems that my use of quotations from Lewis, Bach, Buddha, et al far exceed my quotations from the Bible, and some of my dear brothers and sisters find this to be disconcerting.  Allow me to explain. The first thing to bear in mind, as I have pointed out in the past, is that I write this blog largely for myself.  Many of the ideas expressed here are thoughts that I'm attempting to work out in my own mind by putting them on paper (or a computer screen, in this case), and many more are ideas I've thought through over the course of many years, have found to be beneficial, and am attempting to pass along for the possible benefit of others, should they be so inclined.  The long and short of it is this - my musings on these pages are highly personal, and my various quotations - both Scriptural and extra-Scriptural - are those that I have at various points found t...