I foolishly created this blog, super naptastic, using my Comcast email address, not realizing (a) how blogger is now a Google thing, and (b) I already created a blog under blogger / blogspot / google using my Gmail email address. (“Dire Bends, or the definition of impossible,” a great concept I never did anything with.)

Here’s what I’m wondering: Can I somehow transfer “ownership” of Super Naptastic to my Gmail and Blogger account without losing all my great content? Or do I need to keep logging out and logging back in with a different account every time I want to post?

I met Todd at a party on Stansbury Island in the fall of 2008, if memory serves. We talked some, exchanged phone numbers. Some months later, we got together and walked to Liberty Park and he took some pictures of me to post on my various online profiles. Sunday, while I was stuck in a hotel room in Denver, I posted one of those pictures as my main profile picture on Facebook. And then today, he killed himself.

Angry? You bet I am. This does not need to happen. This is stupid. Pointless. A complete fucking waste. A WASTE!

This is a consequence of people taking their fucking stories and making them the fucking truth. Fuck your truth, and fuck you. And fuck the god who spoke to Spencer Kimball and Boyd Packer, and fuck both of them too.

And this is gossip because it’s only going to be read by people who can’t do anything about it.

And even if they did, they’d just find a way to justify their position, make me wrong, make themselves right, blame Todd for the things that they did to him.

This could just as easily have been me. I have every reason in the world to join Todd in discarding the physical. You know why I don’t? Me either. That’s choice for you. Being alive is a really unreasonable thing to do. I am an unreasonable person.

And I will be re-arranging my life in the immediate future so as to ensure that I don’t have undue amounts of time to myself. So don’t worry. Or do worry, but do something constructive with it.

The possibility that I am inventing for myself and my life is the possibility of being generous–someone who has made a difference, is making a difference, and whose future is filled with contribution to everyone around me and to the future of humanity itself.

There is no scarcity; in fact, there is an abundance of the difference I make.

Let’s get something straight here.

Your church does not make you happy. Your church makes you unhappy. It makes you unhappy so often that you’re used to it. Like a bad haircut, after a while you forget that it’s not normal. But this starts from age zero. It’s a precept of your church that you do something wrong every day–you break the law–and if you somehow manage to go a whole day without doing something wrong, there are an infinite number of things you could, and therefore should, be doing right–“sins of omission”–and you aren’t doing them. You can never win. You are a SLAVE to The Law. Your church is built around the idea that YOU ARE A LOSER. Your church is making you a loser all the time. You are so used to your church making you feel bad that you think feeling bad is your normal state. You feel bad by default and you have become OK with that.

And then, once in a while, your church has a moment where it stops making you feel bad–through the invocation of grace, or the Atonement, or of repentance–and it lets up, and all the crap about you being wrong, doing the wrong things, or failing to do the right things subsides for a minute, and it leaves you alone. And not feeling bad for that moment is so disorienting, since you’re so used to feeling bad, that you think you actually feel good. You don’t really feel good, you just don’t feel bad. And it’s been so long since you didn’t feel bad that you think not feeling bad is the same as feeling good.

Your church does not care about you. It REALLY DOESN’T. It never did before, and it’s never going to. PEOPLE in your church MIGHT care about you, but I doubt it. More likely, they’re just doing what they think they’re supposed to do in order to avoid feeling worse than they already feel. They’re just as scared of not being good enough as you–maybe even more. Your church only cares that you continue to support it, and it does not, in reality, support you at all. It never has. It never will. It’s a one-way relationship. It is not in the design of churches to support the people in them. The rare moments in which a church supports an individual exist solely to justify and to excuse the inherent nature of the church, which it displays plainly the rest of the time.

Judaism managed to exist without the concept of grace for thousands of years.

I postulate that the appearance of Jesus Christ was a social and mathematical inevitability given the way things were going: Grace and mercy became necessary as justifications for the continued oppression of the people by The Law. Since we, as a species, started to believe that we are all sovereign, Christian churches have become more “liberal”. People won’t put up with a church that disrespects their sovereignty. It’s taking more and more grace, mercy, and love and the like, for a church to successfully justify its mistreatment of its people. For example, we see a racist church, and we decide we’re not okay with that. Alright then, *POOF* a new church is formed which isn’t racist–this is only done to shut the people up, to get them back into the pews and paying their tithing so the church can get back to the business of making you feel bad.

I propose that rather than having another More, Better or Different church, that it’s time to undo the entire underlying context of church–to undo what it means for a church to be a church–and create something that actually serves us. I think that’s worth doing. Do you?

Really folks, just one simple question: is everything that you believe actually true?