It's been a long while...

Quite frankly, I've been wanting to update this blog for a while.  Revamp it a bit and start blogging again. With Taolung now blogging here it just didn't feel right.  He was always the better writer.

For those who have gone back and read old posts, my sister is in remission from her cancer.  She had a bone marrow transplant up in Salt Lake City.  She is living with her boyfriend (much to my parents' dismay) and is actually really happy.

I have finally officially resigned from the LDS Church.  I am still dealing with the fallout over doing that with my family.  I expect that will be ongoing.  More on that later.

Losing God, Gaining Humanity

As an atheist, I don't get to believe in divine intervention. We have to rely on ourselves and on the people around us.

There are times when this seems crushingly unfair.

Humans like control. It's how we've survived. It's an urge that's been wired deep into our minds through thousands of years of evolution. Rather than getting big claws or strong muscles, we learned how to build tools and plant crops - anything to gain advantage and control over the world around us.

When we lose control... when we stare a cold mortality and an indifferent universe in the face... it's natural for us to look - desperately - for a way to control it. Not having control... well, that's just against our nature.

We want to believe that a prayer or a spell or a chant might actually make a difference. If we can't have control directly, then we want to believe that we can appeal to some power, some intelligence greater than us who does have control, and that by giving that power a sacrifice, a bribe, or make a promise... pay tithing, fast for a day... we in some way regain control.

But although the human instinct to find control is powerful, reason and rationality tells us that sometimes we just can't.

And we have to watch in horror, helpless, when the forces of the universe act without regard to our personal whims and wants. A tornado levels our home, a drought destroys our crops, or a cancer eats at our body.

Science has given us control over much of the natural world, but we're still subject to it in far too many uncomfortable ways... and our reminder for that is usually sudden and unexpected. An invisible punch to the gut.

We can take some minor comfort in the thought that in the generations ahead, we may one day gain control over the things we are currently enslaved to... just as today we've created vaccines and weather satellites to help us against what our ancestors were enslaved to... but that does little to help us here and now.

So we stare into the heavens and wish there really were a power out there that could swoop in and save the day.

But in the end, all we really have is each other.

So we struggle together. We cry together. We mourn together. Then we band together and rebuild together.

I want to say that we grow stronger together, that the pain and hurt can ultimately mean something... but sometimes it just doesn't. Sometimes, we lose.

We live our lives, win or lose, and we love and cherish everyone around us until they're gone.

That's all we really can do.

Giving My Teenage Sister Cancer Has Some Higher Purpose?

by: Kay

My baby sister was just diagnosed with Leukemia. She is 18 years old. None of this makes any sense to me. She was just feeling a little run down and tired, but was still going in to work. I was a little worried about her symptoms so I asked a family friend, who is a physician, to stop by her job site and take a look at her. He thought she probably had Mononucleosis and ordered a bunch of blood work. He said he normally doesn't order so many tests, but was concerned about her bruising. He saved her life by seeing her like this.

She waited over the weekend to get her lab work drawn and was feeling increasingly tired to where she had to call in to work. She was procrastinating because she is afraid of needles. My mom finally put her in the car and drove her over to the lab to get the blood drawn. They called up the ordering doctor within two hours to tell him she has critical values.

She was directly admitted to the Pediatric Special Care unit yesterday. They did a bone marrow biopsy and today she'll start chemo. They are also going to do a spinal tap and inject chemo medication into the cerebral spinal fluid surrounding her brain and spinal chord. This is to prevent the cancer from metastasizing to her brain. The overall treatment is so poisonous and aggressive it may kill her. Without treatment, she's been given only a few weeks to live.

I called up a TBM friend of mine to tell him what was going on. His response was to give me a lecture on how this was a learning experience, we would all grow from this, and even though we didn't understand what the higher purpose is, this is all part of God's plan for us. This line of stupid thinking made me so angry I hung up on him.

Why would God need to give a child cancer and treat that child as a tool, rather than a person with free-agency, just to teach everyone some ambiguous lesson? Why would God choose to punish an innocent child by making them go through the most awful thing possible? If there were no children out there who suffered with cancer we would still have free-agency. A moral God wouldn't inflict his creations with something so horrible by making them suffer like this. If this is supposed to treat us some great lesson why are only 7000 children a year diagnosed with this form of Leukemia? We have a better chance of winning the lottery! Thinking about this when I was on the phone with my TBM friend made me so angry. Normally I would have argued my position, but I have been through so much in the past two days I couldn't deal with someone forcing their ignorance on me.


When I got home I held my 6 year old son and told him how scared I was for his aunt. He held my head, and stroked my face as I cried into his shoulder. He told me in a very concerned way not to worry because she is going to get medicine in the hospital to make her better. Out of all the friends I tried to reach out to today, my son was the only person able to comfort me.