I do not excel at travelogues

There is a giant mountain outside the door, and it is so dry that when it rains the moisture evaporates many feet above your head. Christopher and I walk Koko (a small pomeranian) each morning and use it as an excuse for a ramble to spot wildlife. Notable so far have been a western tanager and a snake I haven't positively identified. (It was tan, of uniform color, not shiny, diurnal, and fast moving. I know my poisonous snakes, but my ability to ID non-poisonous is fairly limited - partly because the best way to make a positive ID is to know what the underbelly looks like, which is usually not possible.) There are dozens of dark-colored hummingbirds and small lizards. The river is brown right now, and the vegetation is silver. The ravens are working hard to imitate other animals, for reasons we can't fathom; it took us several minutes to track an eerie frog call to one of them. We had fresh trout for dinner and blueberry pancakes for breakfast.

I continue to drink a great deal of water and wear a great deal of sunblock, which is not much change for me. Val has observed that by being least adapted to this climate I am most adapted to this climate, since I assume most climates are equally hostile and take strong precautions accordingly.

Visited a wonderful bakery around the corner and had a good cannoli for the first time in . . . ever, probably. The pastry was not hard and the filling was (properly) made of ricotta instead of cheap whipped cream. So I finally understand the point of them.

Atheism and Me

Although I am an atheist, I find it productive to hold opinions on God and to maintain beliefs about salvation. For me, God is not "real" in the sense that I do not believe there is a being of any sort who has any plans or makes any judgements, or who acted as creator, savior, permeates the world, flows from being, etc.. God is, however, a valuable abstract concept, much like art, freedom, friendship, wildness, and so forth. For instance, I will drive down the highway and the thought will occur to me at random: "I am grateful for my life. I am grateful that I got to exist even for a moment." I am definitely grateful to someone, and that someone is God. Also, there is no God and I was not made by him. This is obviously a hard position to get across to both atheists and Christians, although it is often shared by theologically-minded ministers in non-evangelistic Protestant churches - your more socially liberal Methodists, Episcopalians, etc.. The ones whose sermons sort of treat God as a metaphor, but a metaphor for nothing besides itself. They and I get along.

In any case, I was thinking about salvation (salvation from what? I don't believe in Hell. Bear with me.) It seems to me salvation through Grace is a nice idea - the idea that you are saved, period, no matter what you do - that no matter how much evil you do, God loves you and you don't deserve to suffer forever. That would seem to excuse a lot of bad behavior, but not really. It's still bad. It still hurts people and needs to stop - or be stopped. It just says you have value anyway and deserve compassion even while people are stopping you. Salvation through works is good as well - the idea that simply through working at it, you can become a good person and enter a state of grace. (Here I am using "grace" to mean something slightly different, in the same way I might use "oneness with the Tao.") I like the cognitive-behavioral backbone of salvation through works; it says that you can become a good person simply by starting to act the way a good person would act in that situation - that you can still have doubts and weaknesses and flaws, and it doesn't make you less saved as long as you go through the motions you need to go through.

What I find damaging is the idea of salvation through epiphany. Epiphanies happen, obviously, but to matter they have to be either a realization that one was saved before the epiphany (salvation by Grace), thus allowing you to forgive the past which held you back, or by a realization that certain actions must be undertaken (salvation through works) - and those actions must then be undertaken. What I don't like is the idea that epiphany is a central part of salvation - accepting Jesus into your heart, being filled with the spirit, etc.. It's essentially an excuse to procrastinate - an excuse to put off doing something you think is desirable if you don't have one, and a free ride if you do. You don't have to perform good works to be saved - you've accepted Jesus into your heart! And this is not a state of Grace that extends to all God's creatures - it's just special you and your personal revelatory moment.

I mention this because I think people wait for epiphanies all the time - the have a romantic notion that someday something will happen that will make them really realize clearly they need to quit smoking, or leave a bad job, or any of a thousand changes they say all the time they need to make. They wait for "a real wakeup call," after which they will immediately manifest all the correct behaviors. This is the winning the lottery version of a savings account. This is the "pulled off the street by an agent" version of movie stardom. These things are possible, but not likely.

It would be awfully nice if things suddenly got much easier, but they don't. If you want salvation, you're just going to have to put up with the withdrawal and the planning and getting turned down by publishers and being hungry while you diet. There are ways you can make this easier, but not easy. Why would it be? Incidentally, if it is too hard today, God loves you anyway, and it doesn't mean you'll fail again next time.