Why Literally should not ve used figuratively (religiously)

Every word in the bible is literal and true.  Samuel made the sun sit still, the world was made in a 24 hour period regardless of the presence of a sun before day 4, and placing a penis into a man's anus is an abomination.   Every word is god breathed and is useful for rebuking... well that is the important one.  Of course, this only happens until we have to describe our pains, our struggles, and our perceived agonies.  When jesus said "I have been sent to those in prisons"  it can mean a spiritual prison, a prison of finances, a personal prison of poverty, a prison of bad habbits and addiction.  However, on the topic of Noah, there were dinosaurs on the ark.  We can make things like work a graven image in our lives, like football, like women, pornography, drinking addiction, poverty can be our idol if we worship SNAP and medicaid.  Also, if you believe in anything other than Jesus is going to come back and burn the edifices of those people we judge and dislike, you are a decieved ignoramus who refuses to accept the literal word of God.  Swearing, not in it's literal sense of swearing oaths, but in being profane, using God's name in vain, and using the replacements for those words like heck and gosh.  You may as well say those profanities and cursings.  A fetus is murder because the bible literally says "I knew you when in your mother's womb" no interpretation issues or anything,  and if we let gays get together, we will be showered with fire and brimstone.  There is no other interpretation.  However sometimes we are being opressed by philistenes like the government, philistines like not wanting read your bible and giving your offerings and tithes, philistines like poverty, and addiction, and abortionists.  It's not literal philistines and I should know, my pastor told me and I dechiphered the poetic language of my bible.  The poetic words of the Psalms is the literal wod of God.  You have to be familiar with it to understand it.  There is a literal valley of the shadow of death that I walk in, and I think it is in Huston.   Now, someone's figurative valley could be taxes, abortion, addiction, sadness, gossip, depression, abortion, poverty.  That is not literal, and you have to be able to be discerning in these matters.   Take it fom me; I know the pastor.  My uncle is the pastor, my cousin married the pastor and I went to youth group and had a bible study during lunch. 

Tell me, why can we fudge literal interpretations just because it justifies our grace and defiles those we are to love?  When we have that selective play with definititions, we run the risk of defining what we wish and not what is.  If the bible is literal, let it be literal, but do not turn and say that literal, clear things , mean something they do not because we ironically think that by inventing a definition, we support the undefined and literal interpretation of a book with no modern context. 
Morally, it is all allegory.  It is mythology.  It is Entymology.  It is a window into the insights of prior generations of humans with a view into where our ideas comefrom and where our values originate.

The goal is simple

I recently attempted to write a novel instead of growing a beard.  I failed in both despite the amount of shaving I did not do.  Camp Nanowrimo has begun and now I am 3 days behind.  I have decided simply to finish the novel I started.  Is that a cop out or a cheat?  Perhaps, but perhaps it is an oppertunity to finish the last leg of the marathon.  I used to write everyday in my younger days, and now I find that I write less for me and more for arguments on social media and other such nonsense.  Why should I waste my genius on those people?  A few things toconsider though:
1, I can only write when I am not at work.   I ran into this issue when I was doing nanowrimo.  I was letting my work slip so I could write.
2.  I need to avoid drama.  My last nanowrimo was enveloped in bullshit by the 3rd chapter, when thkngs became difficult in my real life.  Since then I have got my house in order and hopefully I can make some progress outside of having the bottom of maslow's pyramid cave in.
3.  Weekends are ideal.  This means that I have 34000 words to mash out in between laundry, sleeping, and watching my 5 year old son at home.  34000w/30 gw/m= 11333 words which comes to 11333. (((11333/60 min/h) /24 h/d) /2 d/weekend) /4 weekends a month) comes to about 2 days a week of solid writing to finish Dissolution.  If I write from midnights to midnights.  So, as ideal as weekends might be, I have to put in some sweat during the week, leaving very little time for anything else.  I'll at least finish it sometime.

Optimism in seeing a half empty glass

If I convey one thing to my children before I die, it is this:  optimism is not the opposite of pessimism.  When you are young, you are a slave to circumstance.  You must comply.  If you do not comply with the world that is created to keep you safe, you comply to chaos and entropy, which insures your decay and cooling.  Either way, the lack of freedom creates a notion that insists that all courses of action are worthless, all hope is dispair, and you must succumb to a world that is cold and cooling...  this is the essence of pessimism and you wallow in it or are oblivious to it, creating a sense of wonder, curiosity, or simple smiles and glitter of having everything taken care of.  Oblivion and pessimism are then the dichotomy, not optimism.  What people must forget is that optimism and pessimism are diametrically opposed.  Pessimism, by virtue of this quick blurb, is entropy, natural decay and a belief in the inevitability of disaster.  Optimism is something else entirely.   Where pessimism or oblivion is an attitude, optimism is a discipline.  Optimism is not just thinking good things in bad situations, which is of course oblivious behavior, but a cultivation of finding solutions to problems that seem impossible.  Optimism has nothing to do with your attitude in fact.  The most basic form of optimism is the will to live, and the will to live at all costs.  As one cultivates an optimistic skill set, people become creative, analytical, passionate, not always happy or even successful.  The reality of optimism is that you can still be classically pessimistic and still retain your optimism, as well as be happy with everything and lose your optimism by stagnation.   It matters not the water level on the glass, half empty or half full, an observant optimist will look at a half full glass of water and fill it with a pitcher if she wants more water, drink the water and leave an all empty glass, pour out the water for a glass of scotch, or pour the half glass into a thirsty plant to keep it from dying.  Optimism is a dicipline of resourcefulness, not the liquid level in a cup.

Why do I believe?

I am finding, the more I locate the people who shared the same world as I did when I was young, that many of them have discovered religion to be a caustic form of collective ignorance, destructive attitudes, and a smug sense of superiority that supersedes rational thought.  As a fairly "religious person" I painfully have to agree with them on all of these markers.  Then I have to answer them at every turn "Why I still believe?"  The answer is simple, yet gets me flak from my religiously inclined acquaintances, elders, and fellow believers:  solipsism, and probability.  Notice the order I have indicated these, and do not think that is unintentional that solipsism begins this list.  No one can sympathize with my situation, my life, my world, my existence, so no one can truly understand the world that I perceive.  In my world, because of what I have seen, experienced, been blessed with, and struggled through, the probability of God existing is higher than his chances of not being there.  My world just has the edges filled in with a creator who guides my path, and expects me to make choices based on what I understand about being faithful in everything and being kind to others, and what I can empirically understand about my world.  It has nothing to do with science, nature, evolution, politics, economics, or society.  It has everything to do with the observation that either entropy or Love has gotten me to this point in my life, and for those things that are not certain, I have a vocabulary and a system to categorize that which is unknown or imperceptible.  Christianity, or being Christ-like, for me then is not about having the truth and being right, but about being a good father, a forgetter of debts, a person willing to do labor and sleep on the ground, though I have been blessed with divinity, to be alone in hard times, to as Paul put it, work out my faith with fear and trembling, as beads of blood run down my brow in the garden ready to die for the very person killing me, to prevent the stones be thrown on the marginalized, to prepare my intellect for conflict instead of shying away with smug superiority, to recognize sacrifice before generosity, to be a peace maker, a gracious guest, to be one who re-purposes tradition to no longer be a form of discrimination, but a method of inclusion, to subvert power from those who oppress, to pay taxes to Caesar because his face is on the coin, but remember that I am made in the image of God himself, and to contemplate what I must give of myself with that face on me.  To rationally dissect the world and appreciate it's elegance, whether or not a creator made it at all, and to challenge my brothers and sisters in faith when their actions do not align with the doctrine they prescribe to others, to point out the white washed tombs and the dens of vipers.  My job is not to make followers of our tract of beliefs, but to teach the disciplines of what I know to people willing to hear, not to "prove" empirical evidence wrong with fallacious reasoning, but to acknowledge that God is a crafty fellow who designed a complex world that runs on its own.  Perhaps in another mind, not like my own, what I have attributed to God is actually nothing but cosmic coincidence, a happenstance of a spontaneous generation from a single point in space, expanding without uniformed dispersion until we gained the ability to think up God, and Heaven, and Hell, and all of these things to explain the unknown.  That's perfectly fine with me, to the utter frustration of many of my less tolerant brothers.  I don't expect everyone's brains to create the thoughts I do.  I expect that they understand what they believe, not because church screwed them up when they were younger, or they still want that smug sense of superiority without the moral contract of being sent to Hell.  I simply expect people to exist, persist, and end, where that takes us, I am not so concerned.  I live for those now, who need me, as Christ did, and that is simply how I live.  The short answer is simply "because I do."

Merely a speed, not a vector

"We are all going to die screaming, so why would you not fill it with wonderful experiences?'  -Kevin Smith...  abridged.

I am trying to figure out something that has struck me as odd.  I didn't think of it as odd at first but now, as I spend all of this time watching TEDTalks and Kevin Smith Q&As and other miscellanea  that is geared to my intellectual self, I see the oddity.  They talk about passion; they talk about a drive; they talk about a force that pushes those smart folks, and they talk about goals.  I have had goals; oh I have had goals.  I have wanted to be a teacher, a musician, a game designer, a good father, a writer, a transient bum living out of my car.  I lack direction, something that intelligent people seem to have.  I have no direction.

I have had this consistent concept of moving for a long tome.  Since I was a washout C student high school student, up until I am a washout C college student, I have had this concept of moving on, marching though the mire and muck until one day I would be somewhere.  It kept me patient, easy going, and really, it kept my life in perspective that anything I felt was struggle was actually just resistance, a thing to push through until I got what I wanted...  This brings us back to the previous paragraph,  What good is all of this shit wading if I'm not going somewhere?  So here I sit, at my computer at 5 am, trying to figure out my life.  I am tired now, but I cannot sleep.  I need to get these thoughts down to someplace, to someone.  It is unfair to my wife, to my family, to my friends and to my parents that I embark on this quest to make me an adult, only to find I have been walking in a pit of muck and walking in a snazzy pentagram pattern.  Perhaps the problem has always been direction, and I can only think of one time I really had any direction at all.

I can remember being driven by only one thing.  I was a 6th grader and hanging out with a guy with a crush on a girl.  I followed him and his girlfriend, and I met someone else,  a redhead, to be exact, her name was S.  Now S. was an odd duck, an awkward seeming young lady who had a pension for X-files trivia.  She became a friend of mine, nothing too serious, since a friend of mine consisted of someone I talked to about every 3 weeks or so (Really introverted I was in those days.)  The less I saw her, the more I thought about her.  Now compile this against what I can only can describe as teenage angst and depression.  This turned into a full on fixation that I was consumed by.  S. was a stain on my brain, a scorch mark on my psyche, a nagging noise that could not be auto-tuned out of my soundtrack.  I never acted.  I never told her that I liked her.  Not until I was a freshman in highschool, and I left her a note before Spring break.  She shot me down promptly.  This killed me.

Now, when I say killed me, I mean killed me.  I realize that I experienced grief in all 5 cliche steps.    I bartered, got angry, etc. for about 3 years.  I actually had girlfriends during that time, which amounted to just mind games and guilt for a few months.  I could not break this idea, this pattern, but I was passionate about this loss.  I filled notebook upon notebook of poetry; I wrote songs and stories about S. and my pain and anguish.  This is laughable to me now just because I realize most of this navel gazing was my own damn fault, and I should've let it go, but I couldn't. I had to resist the release.  After that, I was careful about anything that required any sort of infatuation.  This lead to the concept of muck walking.  If I pushed on, no passion, only the monotony of every day, I had no space to be lost in something, no space to be passionate, no space to follow things, only the space to plan the next stride and fuck the direction.

So I walk around, but not in a direction.  I push on, but not toward any means.  I will be thirty in less than a year, and I am set up for nothing.  Jesus started his life at thirty, and as we all know, that ended well for everybody but him.  I need to find my passion again, and place it in unattainable things.  I need to find how to give myself over to what I love.  Loving my family is not enough.  Loving my wife is not enough.  I do love those things, but my pushing into nothing is so destructive to myself, that I cannot take care of them, those people to which I have legal, financial and spiritual responsibilities.  Loving them is not enough; I have to find a goal.  I have to find something that I can pursue.  I need something that I can push on with so that I can support my family.  That conclusion I guess can wait, It's 6 am and I have yawned for the first time in 6 hours.  I figure that when I get all of this out, I will sleep like a fuckin' baby.  Until then I intend to contemplate this shit on this blog.

Equals Force Times Distance

Of course I can't sleep.  Apparently I forgot to pay the mental peace bill.  Perhaps they went paperless, but I don't remember it coming in the mail, and not one phone call, not one.  Did I overdraft my account?  Did I not keep it current?  I've lived in the same house for over 6 months now, I should have a constant billing address.  But I'm still awake..  cringing.

I have been unemployed for over a month and a half now.  I have lost 15 or so pounds and I am going to the gym with my wife, something that I am not philosophically aligned with, but participating for the novelty of a 50 dollar a month bill.  It's not that I feel that it is silly, or I am too healthy for the gym, or that I would rather be fat, or that "Da Geem's too hawd... I huwt aw ovew."  It's more on the physics definition of work.   W=F*D that indicates that when I move equipment up and down, back and forth, around and around, and it returns to the same place, D=0 Therefore 0*F=W=0, nullifying any force that I expend at this supposed bastion of health.  In the end, working out in a gym according to physics is an oxymoron.  I am in fact convinced that for every hour spent in a gym, a person gains an hour at the tail end of their life, so spending the cartilage in your joints will ultimately yield a net gain of 0 years.  But I go despite this.  It's something I can do with my wife.   I still have a wife!  Lucky me.

Of course, I am using this formula of work to illustrate other things in my life as well.  I got fired from Wal-Mart over a stupid mistake that I made a few months ago.  It started much like this evening of latenight blogging.  I couldn't sleep.  I was finishing homework for class, reading texts, sorting MTG cards and found myself showing up late for work by a matter of minutes.  I clocked in late a few times, which I was reprimanded for and sent on my merry way.  Now fast forward to a month and a half ago.  I was scared to lose my job.  If I was running late, If my schedule was not perfect, if I wanted a few more minutes of study or a few seconds more with my family, or if someone needed something before I went to work, I was guaranteed to be stopped at every red light to work, and come in late.  If this sounds like an excuse you miss the point completely, in fact this is my mistake.  I seem to have been a push-over in my social life enough to take it upon myself to be a good person and care for my kids, make sure I had things covered, as well as slightly absent minded to not realize what time it ACTUALLY was.  I never wanted to be this guy who was always late, but here it goes, constantly over estimating myself and always finding myself lacking.  It is not the reason I got fired, it is the mistake that lead up to it however.

I started adjusting my hours, by a minute or two.  I did this a couple times, not to get paid for work I didn't do, but to try to keep a job I really needed to provide for my family.  My second sin was fear.  I felt that I could get away with it for a while, and when summer rolled around, I could get my shit together, show up early, work hard, go home and feel good about providing for my wife and children.

They fired me for misconduct.

Completely ineligible for unemployment, completely out of a means to pay for anything, completely back where I started, all of the force I was exerting  was canceled out by the amount of distance I had covered.  W=F*D, D=0 therefore F*0=W=0.

School as well has demonstrated that I am back where I started.  I am out of student loan money.  I had been using that stuff to live off of for the past 7 years, supplementing my shitty job with money that seemed to always disappear into last semesters expenses.  I remember a time in my life where I had 2000 dollars in my savings account, 1000 in my checking, a combined total of 3000 dollars of credit, a good attitude and a credit rating that looked like the record holder's score at a bowling alley after 3 games.  Now, I have nothing.  I have sold everything that I can sell, traded everything I can trade, I literally have no collateral to borrow, no money to use, no income, no force.  I am almost done with my schooling, but I have no foce behind it anymore, F=0, W=F*D Therefore W=0*D=0.

So I can't sleep.  Perhaps it is the lack of work I have done, not for a month and a half, for 7 years, I have expended force until I don't have it, and have gotten nowhere.  The bill collectors for my peace are hassling me now.  If the work was complete, I would have the distance and the momentum to pay them.  The penance of my sin I would figure is the collections department trying to take my stuff and realizing that all I have is shit and stone.  Nothing to pawn, nothing to put up for collateral.  I am out of options.