it’s always something, right? #
For the last few months I’ve been spending my free time getting our house ready to sell. It’s been hard but rewarding watching it transform. Mostly little things we’ve been meaning to do, plus a few bigger items needed before listing—cleaning baseboards, recaulking, new flooring, fresh paint. The house is shimmering now, even more than when we bought it.
Our house has been mostly trouble-free since we bought it in 2017. Regular maintenance with the occasional leak or fix—nothing we couldn’t handle. We’ve stayed on top of everything.
Despite our good track record, several things have broken over the last few months as I’ve been trying to close the loop. Nothing major, but enough that when yet another thing fails—like yesterday, when the HVAC motor started going out—I find myself looking for a “reason.” Why is this happening?
this can’t be a coincidence, can it? #
Why is everything seemingly breaking now? Nothing for years, and now several things in a row. I find myself starting to despair. Can I handle one more thing failing? More contractors coming in and out of our home. Another invoice. What did I do to deserve this?
and there it is #
“What did I do to deserve this?” That insidious root of high-control religion, showing up again. When everything is tied to your behavior, you decide whether you get rewarded or punished. Your behavior decides the bad things in your life, regardless of whether your actions or choices actually caused the outcome. When your worldview is built on a cosmic being weighing your choices to decide your fate, you end up taking responsibility for things that have nothing to do with you—like the HVAC motor breaking.
when you sign over the deed to your own life #
I was raised with years of indoctrination telling me that my thoughts weren’t even my own. Lust and worldly desire were from the devil; evil thoughts were of the flesh, and the flesh must die. The only thing good in me was from Jesus. Joy and goodness come from the Lord.
Bullshit.
When you sign over the deed to your own life—to your own thoughts, to the things that ultimately make us human—everything is indirectly your fault at the hands of an angry God trying to teach you a lesson. In any other situation, that’s abuse.
take a moment to stop and let that go #
Once I realized where that thought was leading me, I felt the anxiety melt away. I felt my heart warm and swell with love and acceptance for myself. I let go of worrying what life would bring, because I know I have what it takes to overcome and persevere. It’s not coming from anything outside myself.
life is meaningless, there is no reason #
There is no cosmic being weighing your life, thoughts, or choices, then dictating your outcomes to help you grow or teach you lessons. There is no universe trying to tell you something. It’s only you. There is no deeper meaning to life. We’re alone and responsible, no one is coming to save us.
Life is meaningless [1].
[1] There’s considerable evidence among modern scholars that Ecclesiastes was 1. not written by Solomon, and that 2. the original ending was modified to reframe the absurdist view of “everything is meaningless” as “everything is meaningless apart from the Lord”, which is itself pretty fucking absurd.
Which brings me to an important subpoint that probably deserves its own post. The more I focused on digging into accurate exegesis, while intentionally removing dogmatic intepretation, the less mystical all of it started to become. Learn the history, try to understand the intention of the authors, and your systematic framework will start to crash. Do it for your own sake, rather than choosing to stay naive. After all, what good and loving god wants their people to not understand? What good and loving god wants their people to wander around in the desert aimlessly [2]? But sure, keep using the desert myth to make sense of struggle and growth in life, that there’s a god that’s letting you wander around to teach you a lesson. How fucking shallow is life for you that you can distill it down to something so bland?
[2] okay, subpoint in the subpoint, this is getting ridiculous. The concensus among modern scholars is that Exodus is completely fabricated without any historical evidence. Stop basing your systematic theology on myth. And even more, stop fucking justifying and empowering the war crimes of religious zealots who hallucinated and believe god told them to steal land from people already living there.