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Sherry,
I will address your response to my response (about smoking, and about "microbiotics") in that forum.
You are a Christian and I am not, and like an automobile, one does have to believe in God to drive it, one needn't believe in God to practice macrobiotics but if it works for you, more power to you.
I am a non-religious Taoist (meaning that I believe in the yin and yang as a whole system of parts, but I don't believe in priests, temples, or deities that the religious Taoist believe in).
I see the universe as an evolving system, and the planet that we live on as both a living organism, and a subset of the greater universe, just as you and I are orgagasms that are both subsets of the universe and the planet that we live on.
I've lived more than fifty years, thinking and wondering about things and just recently after more than 30 years thinking that I was an agnostic or possibly an atheist, come to the conclusion that though I don't believe in a diety, I do see an order or a way of things in the universe, and therefore I do have something that I believe in and it works for me.
I see energy both visible and often invisible, and though one could possibly call some of that invisible energy spirit , I usually don't (though I don't believe in God and Spiriit (in the deified sense) I might sometimes use the language to make it easier to connect with people who do (like when saying gooodbye to a stranger who says "God bless you", as a courtesy I may say "God bless you" back to be courteous and diplomatic.
This is a forum where we discuss our knowledge and our beliefs and therefore it is an environment where it is acceptable (even encouraged) to be forthright about our knoledge and beliefs.
So I don't believe in a deity and have no belief in an eternal life, though I do believe that if something that I say or do, inspires others and might be found to be useful by someone and that is passed along from one person to the next even after I die and am no more, that something of me is alive, so the people who have lived before us and have contributed many good and great things to our present and possibly our future, are in part alive through our rememberence, and so, in that way they live and continue to do so.
Imagine walking through a field and stumbling or something and then bending over, and finding this edge of a ceramic pottery sticking out of the ground, and so digging it out you find a pot that you then take home and clean off and then sometime later you take it to an expert that tells you where it originally came from and maybe even who mmade it and if you find out about this person, then they come back to life somewhat through you and if you pass the pot on to someone else, then that extends the life of that potter even some more.
That to me is an example to life afer death.
Another example, is that a child comes into the world, grows up to become an adult, has a child who grows up to become an adult who has a child and so on and so forth and the experience that each person has that the share with another that then is passed along, that is also the continuence of that life, that energy, that spirit, if you would.
You can believe that when you die that you go to either go to heaven or hell, and I can believe in the continuation of energy from one person to the next, and in some way they are similar, and in other ways they are not
Try considering a life where you don't pass anything good along and you just keep it all to yourself.
No?
So my point is that, the continuance of those good things that have come to us from the past and that we pass to the future might have as much meaning to someone like myself than your believing in God, the Bible, and the everlasting life that you believe that you will receive for your faith.
Thank you, very much.
Bruce Paine
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