First in a series of posts to catch up a bit on el-journal-o. Now that our brief flirtation with facebook and twitter are over \u2013 all the cool kids can come back here and write more than a couple of sentences at a time about our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vignette 1<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n After a recent workout at a gym that I visit while on the road, I was stopped after class by one of the guys who has made an effort to remember my name. He caught me between the mats and the locker rooms and asked, somewhat conspiratorially, \u201cso, are you a humanist or something?\u201d I explained that I had helped start the RI Atheist Society \u2013 been on an atheist radio show \u2013 and considered myself a Buddhist. He said something along the lines of: \u201cWell, I\u2019ve been atheist for a while, and there\u2019s just nobody around here that I can talk to without feeling like I\u2019m a bad person for not believing in Jesus.\u201d He continued with a really high complement \u2013 said that I was perhaps the first outspoken atheist he had met who wasn\u2019t \u201ca complete jackass.\u201d He shares my opinion of Dawkins and Hitchens \u2013 that they are just too shrill and abrasive to actually help anyone live a good and productive life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We talked for a bit about resources for the godless \u2013 the Unitarian Universalists in particular \u2013 as well as the fact that if you find strength and comfort in a particular tradition it is 100% okay to hang on to your doubts about what he termed the \u201chokey superstitions,\u201d present in most organized religions. I\u2019m a big fan of bringing analytic thought *into* religion rather than completely tossing thousands of years of moral thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When my martial arts training comes full circle to discussions of spirituality \u2013 that means I\u2019m doing something right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First in a series of posts to catch up a bit on el-journal-o. Now that our brief flirtation with facebook and twitter are over \u2013 all the cool kids can come back here and write more than a couple of sentences at a time about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1646,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions\/1646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}