The one in which I get philosophical and overshare

It's been so long since I've been on here. Honestly for someone who pegs herself as a bibliophile, books have pretty much been off my radar as of late. I am having trouble getting into the one I'm supposed to be reading and that's holding everything up. I also started writing for a website called Pop Culture Pipe Bomb mostly about movies and TV, so that's taken up a lot of time too. But right now I have so much in my head that I just need to get out, and since I don't have anyone to talk to about it, this will have to be the forum.

It all started with some tweets from two people I follow. I'm not lucky enough to call them friends, I'm just lurking on their timelines. As near as I can tell there was a debate between them a while back, and while I don't know the particulars, what I have gleaned from it has made me think all these thoughts. Before I can get to that though, I guess I need to lay down a little groundwork.

I went to Baptist schools until I went to college. I got a first-rate education that I wish could be enjoyed by everyone, religious studies aside, since I understand not everyone goes for that. One aspect of that education was that the existence of God was a given and that our way was "the" way. I remember one class I was in, maybe an American history class, we were talking about Mormons or Latter Day Saints, I can't remember which, but at the end of the discussion the teacher made some kind of remark like, "But we know they're wrong." A thin, small part of me wondered about how dismissive a statement like that was, but mostly I was relieved. Relieved I think to have the teacher close the case on it for me. It saddens me to say, self-reflection was not part of the curriculum. Maybe it was and I was just too self-involved to go deeper into myself at that time. 

Fast foward to college. One required class was philosophy. The intro class covered the major fields of study, and the first one we tackled was the existence of God. We began by reading maybe Augustine or Aquinas, either way it was pro-God. I was so cocky. I thought, I got this. Then we read Shaw or Russell or something counter to those philosophers. This was the first time I'd encountered anything like this. It was logical. It made perfect sense. For the first time in my life, I doubted. And it scared the shit out of me. I kept waiting for the professor to say, like my high school teacher, "But we know they're wrong." He never did. So it fell to me to decide what I believed. 

I can't look at this world in all of its complexity without seeing design in it. The intricacy of the human body, how every cell has its own mission, from the point of conception to the end of it all. Even the vastness of the universe. There's such beauty in both the micro and the macro of the world, I can't see that it could come from chaos without guidance. If matter goes from order to disorder, how can the universe be formed from chaos into the order we see around us without a Creator? I know these are not the most original thoughts in the world. They've been expressed in much better ways, and debated ad infinitum. But they are mine and they are my truth. They may not be yours and I respect that. I am not here to change your mind about your beliefs, only to enunciate what speaks to my soul.

So back to these people I mentioned forever ago. It seems the debate was something to do with free will. It's probably nothing to do with what they were talking about, but it made me think. I know the concept of free will is one of the sticking points in philosophical debates. How can there be free will if God knows the outcome of our fates? If He knows all are we really choosing? Like I said they may have been debating something different, but again, I felt the need to find my own truth in this arena.

I've come to believe that life is a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I see God as the Author. He's laid out the story line and knows all the paths and choices we will face in the reading of it. We, as the readers, can only see the page in front of us. We live out our story until we come to a choice. Do we turn to page 32, 34, or 39? God may want us to turn to page 39, but the choice is entirely up to us. Even if we pray about the choice, we as humans, are still liable to misinterpret the answer we receive because we filter them through our desires. We can only hope that, if we make a wrong choice, we have a chance to get back to our best destiny further into the tale.

I also had a great conversation about the impersonal nature of social media and how that lends itself to people saying things online that, one would hope, they would never say in a million years in real life. When you're face to face with someone, you take in a million little clues about them. Unless provoked, and even then it doesn't necessarily make it ok, I don't think anyone would purposely say something cruel to another person just out of the blue. Yet the internet give us the anonymity to make unprovoked attacks on others, even when we are unaware of the circumstances that person is experiencing. I brought up that old saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." Maybe we've had this drilled into us for so long that we no longer see words as the weapons for which they are so often used now. Part of this is an unawareness of the inner workings of others, I understand that. No matter how much I think I know someone, even my family, I can never truly know anyone other than me. Even face to face we don't know how our words will be interpreted. I'm a classic over-thinker. I can come up with a million different meanings to any simple phrase. One of the best was from my dad. One day he told me, "If I could choose between you being smart and you being beautiful, I'm glad you're smart." Deep down I know he meant this as a compliment, but in my teenage head there were only two thoughts: one, are the two mutually exclusive, and two, so what you're saying is, I'm really smart, too bad I'm so ugly. Whether he meant it or not, that phrase has haunted me my whole life. It seems so silly to think about it now. Some people have it so much worse. I was bullied in high school, and I remember wondering if there was anything in our medicine cabinet that would make it all stop. But my experience pales in comparison to what others are living through, or trying to anyway. This worries me far more than it should. I will tweet something to the people I've mentioned here, only to delete it seconds later because, firstly, they don't care what I think and it's arrogance on my part to intrude on them. Secondly, I'm constantly worried that my words will be misinterpreted. 

One hundred forty characters. I love that it makes me boil down my thoughts to their essentials (something I perhaps should have practiced here). But it's far to few to to express the range of human emotion a glance can make. An arch of the eyebrow can speak volumes, and no emoji can ever replace that.