Water...

  Empty is a full space. The void contains timelessness. I have been anxious to meet empty     very, very anxious. I have avoided empty feelings     only to notice empty more prominently. Sometimes I have saught for empty spaces     nature dressing up the unfathomable     sheltered, I have for brief moments,     relished a deep inhalation of empty air     pregnant with morning dew, ladened with pollens     empty air rushing into gasping, expanded     lung-sacks, permeable organic things     squeezed into companionship among billions     of cells made up of stardust.   The spaces between stars, empty? Between breaths, universes? Empty is not so empty: impish a-void-er!     Nothingness vastly embraces and fills you. Full of space, I step through the portal of this Thursday morning: 6/22/23

I close my eyes . . . what do I see?  At first it's blackness.  Then a moment of thoughtfulness.  Images emerge.  Some vivid images of peaceful spaces.  Imagination plays with settings that seem to be the perfect essence of joy and fulfillment. There is the edge of consciousness that seems hazy...peer there and something seems to emerge hazily.  A flitting image.  Observe.  Stand still.  I hear a robin to the left.  I smell the scent of some wild mountain flower.  A bee buzzes behind me.  Warm light over-head shines down on my perception of this personage I call: me.  The illusion is real, with breeze, gurgling brook faintly titillating in the background.  The words rise and fall in my mind. Grass sways, there are a million stimuli, and I sit . . . eyes closed, imagination creating, painting, creating. I think in the saner moments of life, there is a  whole lot of creativity emerging.  I'm curious...

" Honest Atheism " First appeared in Free Inquiry, vol 35 issue 1 By permission of author: D. Cameron Webb this is the unedited version of the FI article: As atheists, we hear it all the time: how miserable our lives must be, how utterly devoid of meaning and purpose. Without the promise of eternal life, without knowing that our lives are intrinsically important to the machinations of a creator god, we must agonize daily, endlessly, under the weight of crushing despair and pointless suffering. This widespread notion was recently brought into sharp focus in a piece written for  The Week  magazine by Damon Linker. Asking “Where are the Honest Atheists?” under the guise of reviewing A. C. Grayling's book  The God Argument , Mr. Linker articulated what millions of Americans simply take as brute fact: The style of atheism rehearsed in these books has reached a dead end. It’s one thing to catalogue the manifest faults within this or that religious tradition, which...