I Dream Awake

Vacaciones en el mar!, originally uploaded by Rötör.

Whew…

If by god we speak the impetus and function of life, then — nothing more. Why do you say “Do you believe…”? You are alive. How can it be so, to believe or not in what you are? Do you do yourself well by your doubt? If you hate it so, then why is it chosen? And why the shock when self-contempt breeds contempt, more, again?

I do not believe because I see no question. I am alive. It is plain and self-evidently so. Let me not hesitate to live, or through worship of some other power, concept, or persuasive show, be less so. Blessed if I can be, dedicated to this life itself, in all of its forms, and nothing more.

And there it is: Life, self, existence, and that drive which makes us as we make ourselves.

What is this god you insist upon? And what need of this word for your thoughts?

So you feel life within your living, so you examine and are mindful, so you rise with vigor and inspiration, so you call them divine, so you recognize such a thing as value, so you see as nothing stops the living from claiming significance for it, so you have known abundance and scarcity and the seasons of the world, and know yet still that there is forever more beyond your own experience thus far…. so why do you beseech: “Oh, God!”?

What, you ask, do I have against this expression of yours? Sloppy vocabulary.

In self, as in life,

	...and that is enough. 

And sometimes this little string in my back gets tugged on and I go on… as I tend to go on:

What we know about choice and determinism in human development is very hard to differentiate from what we only think we know. The players are pretty clear: Genetic inheritance, response to environmental factors, group trends in response to sexual selection pressures, and individual choice all compete within us and around us to shape who we are and our small portion of the world. To say those among us that identify as gay are “born that way” or “it’s all a choice” is an oversimplification to the point of being totally uninformative and essentially useless.

Human beings are neuro-plastic — neither fluid or rigid in brain function and repair. We are incredibly adaptive to our environments biologically and cognitively. We are subject to a compounding effect on our choices, the choices of those around us, our genetic pre-dispositions, and every other agent within the markets that make us. We are each an economy unto ourselves, with more than one single driving force dominant, and a multitude recessive factors to go with them. What’s most interesting is that while we are very much the sum of what has come before us there is forever something new that enters into our incomplete systems. No matter how much we think we perfect ourselves, the process is never over, the players are never settled, and the deck reshuffles both in seeming order and at random.

I think the only good answer to what makes a person gay is “What does it matter?”. Even if there were a much simpler answer than our experiences and our science hint at, why would we decide how to treat each other based on whether one was born gay or chooses to be? I’d much rather ask if someone is a good person, and why they are so. Are they a good parent, a good teacher, a good business person, or politician (ok that one is a stretch)… and what is it about what they do and who they are that inspires respect or appreciation for their values in the rest of us.

Just one of my pet issues….