Okay, I admit it. I read The Secret. Loved it. Have the “wish board,” or whatever you call it. At the risk of sounding crazy, I have to agree that there is something to this “power of positive thinking” or “Law of Attraction” deal. For those of you who’ve somehow managed to escape hearing about it, the basic premise is that what you think about is what you bring to your life, good or bad.

Near the end of 2008, I decided that I wanted to write a book. And I did. I just kind of asked for the words to come and they did. 44, 461 words, in fact. I don’t really know how, seeing as I have no previous writing experience or training, but it happened and I’m grateful.

Getting what you ask for works in mysterious ways, too. Everyone has heard the phrase, “Be careful what you wish for, because it may come true.” When I asked for money to come my way, I wasn’t expecting it to come in the form of a severance check after being laid off. But hey, I didn’t ask how to get it, I just asked for it.

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, religion & philosophy by Stephanie West
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One day in November 1973 I was sitting on a Metroliner bound for D.C. I had bought a copy of Newsweek at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, but didn’t even open it because I wanted to finish the book I was reading. This was In My Own Way, the autobiography of Alan Watts, which had come out the previous year

I finished the book, stared out the window for a while, then picked up the magazine — and discovered that Alan Watts had died some days earlier. It was an odd experience, if only because, in the prose I had just been reading, Watts had seemed so very much alive.

I suppose a thrice-married, former Episcopal priest with a drinking problem (“I don’t like myself when I’m sober,” he told a friend) could be regarded as a dubious choice for a guide to religion, but I continue to think that much of what Watts had to say on the subject is worth paying heed to.

In an essay called “The World’s Most Dangerous Book,” for instance, he says something that is very worth pondering. Belief, he says, is “holding to a rock.” Faith, on the other hand, is “learning how to swim.” (By the way, the book referred to in the essay’s title is called the Bible.) [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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It was the common grilled cheese dilemma. As with most fried foods, if the temperature is too high, the bread will burn while the sandwich’s contents remain cold. If the temperature is too low, well, it takes forever to cook. I wasn’t in the mood to wait.

It was New Year’s Eve and I had stayed home to work on this sandwich. I cooked with maximum efficiency. While I sliced the onion, mushroom, and tomato, the first piece of bread and slices of American were already in the pan. [Read more →]

Tags: recipes & food, religion & philosophy by Tyler Samien
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On Christmas Eve it seems appropriate to throw out a link to a column I wrote last year arguing that perhaps my fellow secularists shouldn’t be so eager to throw out the materialist baby with the Jesus bath water when it comes to the latter’s wayward birthday party. In part:

No less a self-described “dedicated secular humanist” than Barbara Ehrenreich has declared the War on Christmas over. “Christmas is not the exclusive property of those who think God came to earth 2000 years ago as a baby in Bethlehem,” she sniffed. It’s true, if hardly for the reasons Ehrenreich thinks, although I nevertheless look forward to reading the biting piece of investigative journalism detailing her time as an undercover mall elf trying to organize the workers against a cigar-chomping, red-suited bossman with a little round belly that shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

One has to wonder what exactly Ehrenreich, who compared “consumer culture” unfavorably to drug addiction in her 1989 book Fear of Falling, expects the end result of a simultaneous embrace of Christmas and scuttling of consumerism will be.

She and other secular humanists might hope Christmas will eventually morph into a paid national holiday for circulating global warming petitions and unionizing Wal-Mart workers with gift buying limited to items praised on NPR programs and wine from fancy vineyards. It is consumerism, however, not class war enthusiasts and pretentious do-gooders, that has made the holiday one that transcends, without overshadowing, our religious differences. Leave behind capitalism with its multitude of niche markets and we will almost certainly be left with a much more Christ-centric holiday. Do secular humanists not remember how much they hated it when all anyone could talk about was The Passion?

Tags: money, religion & philosophy by Shawn Macomber
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I was having sushi with a business associate the other day when the subject of regret came up. 

My colleague, who is much younger than me, said, “I really don’t have any regrets.  It’s not that I haven’t done things I wish I hadn’t done, it’s just that I made the best decisions I could at the time based on what I knew, and what I was capable of, at that moment. 

“And besides, I’m in a good place now, and maybe I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the mistakes I made earlier.”

There was something oddly familiar about her comments, and then I remembered that I used to say almost precisely the same thing when I was in my twenties. 

But I haven’t said it in years. 

Suddenly, a wintry image, or rather a progression of images, appeared before my mind’s eye: I pictured myself speeding down a highway through a very light and whirling and intermittent snow, so light that I couldn’t be bothered to turn on my windshield wipers. 

For the first few miles, the feathery flakes just blew away in front of my advancing windshield.  I felt vindicated, in an odd way, in my decision not to use the wipers.

Clearly, they weren’t needed.

All along, of course, a few random flakes here and there would stick to the glass, and a few droplets of mud as well.  But it didn’t make any discernible difference.

Even after 25 miles or so, though the windshield could have been cleaner, I suppose, the view remained completely unobstructed. 

But somewhere around the 50-mile mark, though the snowfall wasn’t any heavier than before, I realized that some terribly important line had been passed, though I hadn’t at all noticed it, many miles back.  [Read more →]

Tags: getting older, religion & philosophy by Michael Antman
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I was born an atheist. In the  Soviet Union, religion was not outlawed, but it was greatly frowned upon, so most people didn’t bother, unless they had very passionate feelings about it. My family didn’t, beyond my grandmother’s histrionic appeals to God to witness the outrage of me, age six, refusing to finish my soup. When we immigrated to the United States in 1980, I looked into getting some religion but nothing struck my fancy, mainly because I couldn’t grasp the concept of making a leap of faith across the gaping abyss of logic. Still can’t. My atheism is what it is. I don’t feel what Salman Rushdie called “a religion-shaped hole” in my modern life.

That’s why American atheist activists freak me out. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy by Olga Gardner Galvin
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I’ve been thinking a lot about organ donation lately and a story on MSNBC about a mom hoping to have a hand transplant hit home. I am not an organ donor, nor am I prepared to say I want to be one. But I am not sure why. Why do I hesitate at the chance to give someone else the opportunity to, in some cases, live? What the hell is wrong with me?

When I do think about what organs I would be willing to donate, should I change my mind, I immediately think about things that are inside my body — things that no one would be able to tell went missing. That seems to bother me less. Well, except my heart; I am not so sure I would be willing to let that go. But then I think, really, if a doctor took my heart (after I am already, of course, utterly and completely dead) and gave it to someone who needed it, why should that bother me? I am not going to need it anymore… or will I?

Jerry Orbach donated his eyes. His eyes! How will he see? Okay, obviously he is dead, he won’t need them anymore… so why am I having so much trouble with this?

How do I get past this silly feeling I have of violation? If I am dead, I’m dead, right?

Tags: health & medical, religion & philosophy by Amy Boshnack
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My Tim Gunn bobblehead just arrived in the mail. I am counting on it to radically alter my life/destiny. So far he’s only sagely cautioned, “I can’t want you to succeed more than you do,” but on the upside he has yet to call me a “pterodactyl out of a gay Jurassic Park.” I take this as an affirmation of my personal potential. “Fab-u-los!” he now adds. Clearly, great things await us.

Tags: religion & philosophy by Shawn Macomber
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