guess it's after 1 for you

Sun moon and the stars. WOW-Oh yeh thats right I remember in one of your older posts you said don't get me started.

I tried to log in that night and for some reason I couldn't log on.

Its about 12:20 here and this old man is getting tired. Theres no dispute from the rowdy crowd here that I nESRE need all the beauty sleep I can get!

In fact there shouting get lots more! Tons of it!

Do you usually fly the same routes or does your schedule/destinations vary all the time?

Talk to you again SC

Hang on tight with both hands.........

Nesre,

I, flying one trip a month right now and lately it's been to Japan then points beyond, I get to go to Hong Kong on the next trip and I haven't been there in a few years. Not bad duty.....

I've got my questionnaire from WW's lawyer, my goal is to have that thing finished by Wednesday so I'm going to have to focus for awhile. I am motivated to keep that stuff moving forward.

Keep focused man. You've been on a long journey here.

Best of luck-Make sure to land- wheels side down. OK. Ya you probably knew that.......................

nESRE

Yeah, it's been a great carrier , mostly

Had a great life going til the WW made that hard 90 degree turn in the middle of our lives, such a waste of what was a great marriage..... at least in my view,

Of course, the WW says I was a perfect H so, I'm not alone in my assessment of a marriage that should have made it.

But that's in the Past and it's not my future

WW update for tonight, she has moved to the guest room, respecting my need for space I guess, our golden retriever is a TRADER and went in there with the WW, so far our English bulldog is hanging with me, but she snores and farts

For all who care, had both dogs in bed with me the last few nights, nice to know their siding with me at least when I'm home.

Still trying to get the WW's lawyers questions answered. just about got my lawyer happy with it and should have it ready to send to them 1st of next month, I should put a ruler to the pile but it's over 6 inches thick and growing, of course that's x2 because my lawyer has to have the same stuff. I guess the longer your married the bigger the stack is going to be.

I gave the WW's (now mine) old computer to my PI who's firm also does computer forensic work. I know what's on the computer it's just how much money it will cost to retrieve the goods that are on it. I'll have the report when I get back home.

One thing I can count on is that it will be interesting.

I continue to enjoy space how ever I can get it, every time I'm around the WW is triggers an emotional response, I forget what the WW has done and is doing when I'm not is her presences,

A positive that I have is that I don't miss being around her, I gain comfort in that, I am beginning to see her in a different light, guess I'm looking for flaws, no doubt she in an attractive woman but as I looked at her yesterday I was noticing how she has aged,especially in her face, of course I have as well but we're not talking about me....... I sure I'm just as hansom as ever!!!!

I guess my point is I think I can move on and look forward to it.

At least the dogs are loyal, eh?




*shrug* I am not looking forward to all of that. I wonder if anything could make that experience more fun........



About to find out some more truths about your life. I don't envy you. I hated finding stuff. It hurt.



Amen. It only took me a few times of seeing my husband after he left to realize that I had to not see him. I seriously would be physically off kilter for about 3 days before I evened out again. It was just the thought of what he's doing that felt so wrong, abusive, and surreal to me that I couldn't be around him.



It would be so easy for me to find flaws about my husband, focus on those, and feel better about us splitting. But that dang forgiveness thing I have going on, makes that hard for me to do.

I will say though that I DO NOT miss the drama of the wind shifting almost daily.



Leading a double life and destroying a family can do that to a person.



LOL.....nice. Love the confidence.



I have no doubt, and I'm happy you're healing.

Have you talked to her about who gets custody of the dogs? It sounds like they prefer you, but your schedule must make it difficult.



I'm glad you are starting to look toward moving on. I'm there, too. But, if your divorce is anything like mine, it's going to take FOREVER.

There's nothing more unbecoming on a woman than dishonesty. And the converse is true.
My ex was cute for sure. Now I get a gross feeling in my stomach when I have to look at her knowing how she snuck around and kept secrets from me.

[New GF on the other hand: pretty AND honest. THAT's attractive.]

Keep pluggin' SC

Opt

Thanks for your input guys, it always helps me.


The old STBXWW will ask me if I have read her blog she keeps, often I have not and she is disappointed to her me say that. I was checking up on her and saw she had an up date on her blog she had posted..... Thought you guys would appreciate her prospective on life right now.

These are her words.............

There are not many downsides to finding joy in writing. Most of the time (fully 99.9%) writing, for me, is a delight. It is a refuge and a tool and a gift. However, when you do find this pleasure in the written expression of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences, you accept with that the 2:30 am visits from your mythical muse. She calls, with a whisper, and like another myth, the siren, she pulls you toward her, irresistibly beckoning you to the screen, the page, the keyboard. You attempt to placate her with mental bargaining, promising her you will respond with the light of day, assuring her of the solidity of your memory. But in the end, her beauty always wins.

This post is long overdue. Personal reasons, none of which include a fear of its writing or reading, have dictated its timing. A series of events over the recent past have convinced me that now is the time to publish this.

If you stick with me through the end of what is sure to be a lengthy, intimate narrative, I thank you in advance. What started out as a simple training blog has turned into a vehicle of self-expression whose importance I could not have begun to realize. So to those who read this through to the end, I extend my appreciation for completing the circle of the dual purpose of the blog.

Many of the blogs I choose to follow have a posting of this topic. The cleverness of the title is my own, but it is only a variation on a theme. This is the story of my journey out of faith and into reason. It is highly personal, at times painful, and ultimately joyful. I commit to be as honest as I can in reconstructing the sequence, and in recapturing the emotion of the moment. Along with the gratitude I�ve already expressed, I ask for your forbearance; by its very nature this post may be offensive.

I was born a Southern Baptist. That�s a bit of a play on words � Baptists do not believe you are born into the faith. That is an event of your own choosing, and in this case, I use the phrase to mean I was born into a family of Southern Baptists by several generations. I was fully integrated into the faith from birth, experienced personal salvation at age 6, and participated in every aspect of Baptist education, from Sunday School (now Bible Study Fellowship) on Sunday mornings, Training Union (now Discipleship Training) on Sunday nights, first Sunbeams (now Mission Friends), then GA�s then Acteens on Wednesdays, and Worship every Sunday morning and Sunday evening. Then came the Baptist Student Union (now Baptist Campus Ministries) in college, then on to teaching all of those on my own as a young adult, wife, and mother. I served on every committee my churches have had, even the Committee on Committees, a concept that still makes me chuckle. I have served as Sunday School Director, Mission Education Director, Youth Leader, Vacation Bible School Teacher, and Sunday School Teacher. Lest you think my church experience was all busywork and no personal calling, allow me now to assure you that I took every one of those responsibilities very seriously. I do not believe anyone with whom I served, or anyone I taught would dispute that. My faith was the driving force behind my work at church; my highest street cred of a genuine faith was that I committed to rearing my beloved children in that same faith. That is my Baptist pedigree.

When those same precious children entered their teenage years, they began asking me the questions that relentlessly smart, thinking, driven children ask when they are asserting their independence. Those questions were about the contradiction of the faith with science:

�6 million species, mom? On one boat?�

�6000-year-old earth?�

�Creationism?�

There were also the questions of the scholarship:

�Where are the original manuscripts?�

�3 sets of Ten Commandments? And they�re not the same?�

�Divinely inspired writers didn�t know the earth moved around the sun?�

Then the questions of morality:

�God did THAT with children who teased Elijah?�

�Lot gave his daughters up for rape?�

�God had them kill the women, children, livestock, and keep the young women as bounty?�

I set about finding answers for my children, and for myself. A point of irony here is that even as a believer I was considered a liberal, a radical, because I was reluctant to accept the Baptist party line for all the above questions. I had had to repress my own critical thinking skills to accept those party line answers my whole life, and I was not about to allow my children to go without information they asked me for.

I sought information from every avenue. This was the early era of the internet, and I capitalized on the new gift of the information age with vigor. I sought answers from old reliable sources � the institution of religion in general, and my church and its convention in particular. My prayers to my god were fervent, focused, and constant, and were breathed with confidence and patience. I also looked outside the faith, to be absolutely certain I had covered every possible angle, and to strengthen what I already knew with conviction: that despite those difficult questions, my faith would emerge right, and victorious, and applicable.

I can�t tell the story without including this personal branch of the journey. Simultaneous to my spiritual journey, I had embarked on a physical journey. Upon the celebration of my 40th birthday, I experienced an epiphany about the state of my health: that the first 40 years of one�s life, one�s body would respond pretty effectively to the demands placed on it � the second 40 required giving a lot back. I was overweight, out of shape, and clueless about how to alter that. I began researching nutrition and anatomy and physiology and our biological heritage, and our political heritage and how they both affected our collective national health.

I found that both quests took me in a direction heavily weighted toward science. I became a critic of experiment and application and hypothesis, and refused to accept dogma, conventional wisdom, and common practice, without evidence. I was comfortable in this territory � I had trod a similar road in exploring conventionally accepted practices in the 1980′s of living a credit lifestyle, and refused to go along with that too, to my family�s better financial health. I refined my ability to spot an untested theory or unquestioned principle or faulty premise.

I found my church and its larger organization to be of little help in theory or application. I found earnestness and routine explanations, but no answers. I did, however, find tremendous amounts of information outside the walls of the church and greater institution. I found sound science. I found ration and reason. I had moments of utter astonishment, seething anger, and sublime joy. I have this passage written by Robert G. Ingersoll committed to memory:

�When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free�free to think, to express my thoughts�free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination�s wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself . . . I was free! I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all worlds.�

My children, whose stories are their own, served as both pupil and teacher in my own process. They leave me speechless with their courage and conviction, they challenge me with their intellect, and they amaze me with their insight and generosity. They are bright and driven and happy and kind and compassionate and moral, and I learn from them almost daily, now, in their young adulthood.

I know this post has been interminably long, and I am aiming toward a conclusion, but I have to make a few more points before my story is complete. In my relationships with believers, as I share my position, there arises without fail a certain sequence of statements that I feel compelled to address preemptively, as it were. I know a number of my readers are of the faith, and it accelerates the process for me to answer them. I will do so as briefly as possible; each topic deserves a post of its own, but for the sake of brevity, I will summarize:

What about an afterlife?

There is no evidence that any part of us survives our death. No amount of wishful thinking or hoping can change that. I will be as I was before I was born; I will not exist. With the loss of the joy of heaven comes the relief of the loss of hell. Because of the reality of this premise, each morning when I open my eyes, I think: �I get to be here for one more day. I get to hear my children�s voices for one more day. I get to see the sky and hear the birds and smell the air and taste the life of one more day.� Only artists can convey the bliss that thought brings to me EVERY DAY.

How can you believe everything just banged into life?

I don�t. I believe that cosmology will give us the answers to the beginning of life, abiogenesis, in time. I accept the theory of natural selection as the simple, easily explained, completely verified, blind, organic process that it is. Evolution is not random chance, it is not apes evolving into people; we can follow the fossil record that undisputedly reveals to us the shared ancestors we have. This information is easily accessed, and quite easily understood by 4th graders across the world.

How can you be moral without the bible?

Easily. Being the master of my own morality is at once a profound responsibility, a humbling privilege, and an exquisite joy. It is messy and complicated and troubling, and in research requires thought and patience, and in application requires time and effort and money and energy. I have no directive to judge others, and I am free to apply my ethics as I am convicted. I can very generally say that my philosophy is this:

Decrease suffering. Increase joy.

Why not just believe? If you have so much to lose, and everything to gain, why not just believe?

This is called Pascal�s wager, and although I have explained it numerous times to well-meaning believers, I choose to add this link to another blogger�s post about it, because she is a great deal more gifted than I, and her view is identical to mine.

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2011/02/why-pascals-wager-sucks.html

My muse is smiling. I can now sleep. I cannot close without this, however.

I am as happy a person as I have ever been. I am comfortable in my skin, I take great pride in my belief system, and I look forward to every moment of every day. I love moments with my family and friends and I am exceedingly grateful for the life I have had. I have faults and failings and frailties, and I make mistakes and act rashly. I forgive and am forgiven, I give and I receive, I learn and I grow. I am imperfect, but I am not evil or sinful. I embrace the journey that this life is, I seek adventure and new experiences with robust passion, and I am endlessly delighted at discovering science�s secrets.

This post, more than any other, thank you for reading.





WHAT my WW did not say was that her 1st A involved one of the men in her married with young kids Sunday School class.

And that her journey into atheism started after the A.

So that's part of what I'm facing, what is most painful is that all my kids have been influenced by her, they are proud of her and think she's great. All profess to be atheist now.

I stand alone in my beliefs, praying for them all. I know this is not the end of it, that my kids will feel that hole that is left in their soul when God is not part of there lives.

Just venting in my way, I finish my trip on the 4th and go back home, should be ready to see my lawyer as some as I get back to keep things moving forward.

SC

SC,

I'll admit I haven't read your entire stich. But, as a once proclaimed atheist (raised Episcopalian), who has since abandoned that copout (but still subscribes to the sciences); it sounds to me like a midlife identity crisis. The way she speaks of being raised (read 'forced') in her faith, and how feverishly involved she was UNTIL she reached a certain age. Only to slide to the extreme opposite of the spectrum just as feverishly. It amazes me how some people can't find balance in their heads. I know I'm tired of dealling with it with STBXW...

I feel for you brother. And I know that your children think they are helping her. But, being young, we look only to the short term. In time, I'm sure they will understand differently.

I am not the most devoted, but I will say this to you. Go with God my friend. Go with God.

SC, I feel your pain. Unfortunately, I can relate.

My stbxh delved into the New Age philosophy during our (un)recovery. He now makes his own rules to suit his lifestyle, and thinks he's the best thing going since skippy peanut butter. The man has no integrity and is emotionally void of remorse for his selfishness and whims.

To be honest, I wished I would have NEVER met my husband. My life is NOT better having known him. I am healing in spite of him though.

My stbx "shared" all of his new age philosophy with my son, and now my son doesn't believe in God at all. My son has a hole in his soul that even he can't explain.

The worst part, I can't prove them wrong. All I know is that it feels like evil has fallen upon this family, and I do my very best to show light and love without pushing beliefs on my children. I do tell them about my feelings and experiences with it. That's all I can do.

And you know what? It doesn't matter a hill of beans to me if they believe in God or not, athiest or not. What does matter to me is that people are decent human beings who are not selfish, liars, with no conscience to speak of when it comes to another human being.

If our exes are what "New Age" is all about, I don't want what they are selling. They jump from one relationship to the next thinking they are "developing" when the exact opposite is true. They're not developing anything except for more instant gratification because they haven't developed enough to deal with real life and relationships.

/vent over.

MJ, I think I'll just follow you around tonight and say: Amen!

ROFLMAO!

Man alive, I haven't felt this riled up in awhile. SC's last post could have been written by my stbx. He reads, and has posted a few times, on this "personal development" forum and I just want to slam him over there. Heck, even the people on the forum that do share his views are at least decent enough to not sneak around and cheat.

Honestly, I do not see the personal development my H thinks he has. I wonder what I'm not missing.

SC, it sounds like what my WSTBXH thinks. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry that she has influenced your kids to follow her.

My favorite quote of her's was this

"I have no directive to judge others, and I am free to apply my ethics as I am convicted. I can very generally say that my philosophy is this:

Decrease suffering. Increase joy."

I think the quote would be more accurate to say

"Decrease MY suffering. Increase MY joy, because it is all about me after all.

Nice to be able to make up your own rules to suit what ever situation you find yourself in

Exactly, and they do not care that they are increasing other's suffering. They'd say that's our problem. Yeah, my problem is that I picked a guy with no integrity and it became my problem.

Before my husband left, I asked him if he thought what he was doing was wrong and he said "by whose rules?" So yeah, they make up their own rules as they go. I'm cool with that as long as you don't destroy a family in the process. Personal development my azz.

I got one too!

Last week STBXW was posting about how you shouldn't lie to her, because she has a 7th sense to that, and she'll find out.

Sucks when you get what you give...

She speaks from experience.

Hey Itsa...my H once told me that "he hated it when I didn't believe him when he WAS telling the truth".

I mean, I get it. I'm sure he did hate that. I actually hurt for him for that. But what could I do? I gave him chances to build the trust back, but he was resentful over it.