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While as a child I was raised with moderate Southern Baptist beliefs and attended at least a smattering of Sunday School classes, the faith never really took hold. It is a truism to me that from the outside all religions look preposterous, but it is a very human thing to believe in them.

In my opinion, there is no soul, no spirit, nothing that existed that is ‘me’ prior to my birth, nor will there be anything lingering after the biochemical reactions that power my flesh cease. When I die, that is it; that is the end of all thought and all sensation. No lake of fire or endless clouds await me. This one brief passing moment in the nearly limitless expanse of time is all that will comprise my existence. For all of us, this is it; this brief, fleeting, flickering moment of consciousness is all we get.

Does that mean life is meaningless, without purpose or value? Fuck no! It means that the value life has, the purpose life has, is determined solely by each and every one of us for ourselves. We create meaning, and that is the center of a life that is our own.

It is because I hold these beliefs that I deeply despise the ‘social conservatives’ and their spiteful domineering of other people’s lives. You want to believe that sexual relations with people of the same gender is wrong? Fine, go ahead and refrain from it all you wish, but don’t tell others how to behave. Believe that life divides neatly into binary states of existence? Foolish, but that’s okay for you, but don’t tell others how to live.

We get this one tiny moment to live, and as long as it is not harming another, you should get to live your life in the manner that brings you joy in this painful, passing existence.

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This picture, while commonly called black and white, is actually greyscale. The picture elements, pixels, as I do not shoot on physical film but with a digital camera, recreate the image with tones that go from black, an absence of signal, to white, a saturation of signal, but with the vast vast majority somewhere in the middle creating some level of grey. We call it a black & white picture for simplicity and ease of language, but the actual image presented is not binary, it is more complex than that. Our troubles begin when we take what is used for simplicity and speed of communication, black & white, and mistake that for actual reality. The same applies to so much of life.

To many, the founding of the United States is a binary event, either good or bad depending on the person’s perspective. Terrible things were brought into this world with the European settlement of these continents, diseases that killed millions and destroyed civilizations, kidnapping and enslavement of millions more. It is foolish to dismiss these events and actions as mere history, products of their time, and insignificant to today’s events. Today’s home is built on the foundation of what has been. It is also true that the founding of this nation brought forth fantastic new ideas. The very concept of true human liberty and equality expressed in those events reverberated around the globe, inspired countless struggles for freedom and set the conditions for those who followed to even conceive of righting the wrongs of history. The founding of the United States, like the photograph, is not a black & white thing, it is both good and bad, existing far beyond the straightjacket of binary thought.

Nature doesn’t exist in any binary. Everything out there is part of a spectrum of existence, gender, intelligence, consciousness, everything.

Reject the binary and see what is real.