ngdawg

I am reading through this thread for the first time and the labels of who everyone was or is seem to stick out boldly.
Those that know me know I am no fan of religion at all. I am not ignorant of them, having been to Lutheran, Catholic, Methodist and Episcopalian institutions numerous times in my youth, married into a Protestant family and being the child of a Jewish mother and Catholic father.
I might very well be Pagan. I am deeply spiritual in the emotional sense-meaning I have the utmost respect for life, see the good in all and strive for the understanding of everything around me. I believe we have powers and connections to our natural world and other people that too many of us stifle instead learn from. I believe that the universe is too vast to compehend, but our connection to it in terms of our life cycles and paths is real and purposeful.
Giving that, I also believe that we, humans and all nature, are flukes of nature. A meeting of chemistry and evolution, if you will, that culminated in what we now are.
Religions tell us that if we are good, we will go to heaven or paradise and if we are bad, we go to hell. I believe that every day, we are faced with the choice of good or bad, and we make our own heaven and hell as we live. After life is over, we go the way of a flower or roadkill. I hope I can be the flower....

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Don't blame me. I didn't vote for either of'em.