Today (father's day) I fully dropped the idea I have held on to for so long that it was the religion that was the root cause of what was wrong throughout my childhood/adolescence. I can see how I blamed it on principle, just as part of my nature, on the areas that I did see it affect me, lost in smaller details. Never before have I seen the big picture.
I fully see now that it was the combination of my personality/needs/traits, the overall circumstances of having lost my parent (at age 9), and his overall inability to do social/emotional involvement. I feel "sad" in a calculated way... like he's just lost and I want to figure out how to help him. I told him I accept him and I wanted to be forgiven for rejecting him for the past years.
I ponder how incredibly different life could have been for me and him had she not died... she would have provided an emotional adhesive that we both desperately needed.
When he or I say "I love you" that's calculated. Love is something we *do*, not something we feel. We are loyal and willing to contribute whatever we can.. we just have an emotional "cup" where most people have a bucket or industrial-size mixing vat. We have on/off switches for anger/joy where most people have a dynamically sliding scale of emotion they can sense/repair in others and that they feel in response to events/consequences and can communicate dynamically with non-verbal communication.
The HFA/asperger's explains EVERYTHING. Ethics and ultimately his choice to be religious is simply tied to who he is. Spectrum individuals tend to build a rigid morality and a sense of self based on the abstraction of that morality. This is exactly me, but I simply chose a solitary morality where I couldn't handle the social complexity of religion. I've abstracted myself to the absolute limit of abstraction. I see how I went down this path as a direct result of my relative walking alone. So I chose different ethics. In addition, I was unable to feel any of the "spiritual" impact that most religious people live by. I disengaged naturally from the idea of religion since I never experienced those emotions.
There's no good way to compare what different individuals view as ethical.. at the most abstract level the individual's choice of what to believe in about mortality and other complex issues like chastity is best worked out as what really fits comfortably for themselves.
I can't condemn him any longer for those abstract beliefs that I realize are at the core of who he is. There will always be the "political battle" between those of different ethics because they are fighting for what they feel are the rights of everyone. I think that freethought/freedom in generally has a tenacity to prevail and enhance the overall unity of the human race over time. Even with LDS thought itself, progress has been evident in equality and freedom. I think some aspects of it are still troubled in this category and this is the main reason I felt it was a bit harmful to me growing up.
I believe that my death will result in my no longer being aware I was ever alive, total destruction of the self. I simply feel that's the most feasible outcome... Any other is far too fantastical for me to grasp. The fact of our existence as it is is a cosmic inevitability and is equally fantastic to me. My father believes he will go to an afterlife where he can be with his true love again. I think I hated him for this belief for the past 8 years or so. I feel a calculated shame about this, now... But I'm not sure how I could have avoided this attitude, as I felt so betrayed when I initially began to reject religious thought at about age 18, when my self-lucidity really began to form.
No comments:
Post a Comment