Goals are deceptive. The unaimed arrow never misses.

In the last 2-3 days I've eaten nothing except a tiny mandarine and a couple of crackers. Now, I'm suddenly hungry! I have my appetite back! That's a good sign!

Ah, it's good to hunger.

Still not 100% but I'm definately getting better.

What I'm about to blog about is not what I personally believe, nor do I personally disbelieve it. It is an unexplored idea I just had that I thought was worth sharing.

A conversation I've been having on someone else's blog has gotten me thinking about something...

Christianity has been criticised for creating a culture of guilt, and using guilt as a means of controlling its "believers." In some cases, this might be true, but I don't think that that is what Christianity is supposed to be about. In fact, I believe the opposite, that Christianity is supposed to be about freedom from guilt.

But this got me thinking about what I believe about original sin. The general belief amongst many Christians is that because of the original sin of Adam and Eve, all the descendants of Adam and Eve, that is, the human species, bears original sin from the moment they are conceived that they need to be forgiven for.

Now, I certainly understand why this seems unfair. Should I be punished for something that happened before I even existed? Should I need forgiving becase my parents are humans, which is something I've never had any control over, nor my parents, for that matter? Is there really such thing as original sin? Do I bear personal responsibility?

Then I thought, the answer to that last question, might be no. I don't bear personal responsibility. I don't bear personal responsibility.

I thought about our aborigines. For many years the Australian indigenous population has been asking our government to apologise for the way our ancestors treated them, which today many aborigines are still suffering from. Our previous Prime Minister, John Howard, from the Liberal Party, thought that although the way the were treated was terrible, he should not be the one to apologise, or bear moral responsibility for. After all, everyone who was involved in those acts towards aborigines were dead, and he wasn't even born at the time. Although some Australians agreed with him, he was rather unpopular with a large number of them, aborigines and white people alike. We all felt a national guilt that, even though none of us were personally responsible, we should bear the responsibility of the actions of our forebears. In our last election, John Howard was voted out and Kevin Rudd from the Labour Government was voted in, and one of the first things he did as Prime Minister was make a public announcement on behalf of the Australian people, apologising to the indigenous Australians.

I also thought about the African slave situation in America. Although slavery is now illegal, and Americans of African descent have as much rights as any other American in America, many white Americans still feel white shame, and I have met a few over the internet that have felt ashamed of being born white because of the actions of their ancestors, even though they had nothing personally to do with it. And even though some might not feel it as keenly as others, there is still a "sensitivity" between the races.

Do any Germans feel ashamed that theirs was the nation that produced the Nazis? I don't know a lot about the German mindset, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Anyway, this got me thinking. Maybe original sin is simply species shame. Eating a fruit from a tree versus crimes against humanity? Okay, not quite the same ball park, I'll warrant, but this story is full of symbolism. The seven days of creation? Science tells us how unlikely it is that the universe was created in seven days, but the number seven itself was highly symbolic to the Hebrews, a number representing wholeness. The fruit that they ate wasn't just any fruit, God didn't forbid it for just any reason; it was the fruit from the knowledge of good and evil. There's some symbolism right there.

So people use the story of Adam and Eve to make people feel guilty for something that happened before they were born. But maybe it's not about having personal guilt, because it's not our personal sin. But maybe it's the responsibility we all have as human beings, to be resonsible for each other and not to seperate ourselves from our shared past. Maybe us Australians do bear some responsiblity for the actions of our ancestors. The consequences of their actions are still existing, after all, and they're not around to fix it, so maybe it's not enough for us to say, "tough luck, I feel bad, but it's nothing to do with me." Do I feel personally guilty for the way our aborigines were treated? Of course not. I had nothing to do with it. Do I think I should share at least some moral responsiblity? Maybe so.

There is a resonsiblity we have as humans towards other humans, when we see one part of humanity committing atrocious sins, even though we are not a part of that "part," maybe we, as humans, need to take action, and not just sit back and do nothing; because maybe the acts of one human reflects on all humans. Maybe, I thought, this is what original sin is about. Not personal guilt, but shared responsiblity.

And as for Christianity? I mentioned before, is about freeing us from the shackles of guilt. All types of guilt, whether guilt that we feel we deserve when we don't, guilt that we don't feel when we do deserve to, and guilt that we feel that we rightly deserve. Whether that guilt is our personal guilt, or the shared guilt of humanity. Responsiblity will still be there, though, of course.

Anyway, this is just a thought, nothing more, nothing less. Chances are, I'm way off.

Vomiting and diorreah, all night. Mostly vomiting. Didn't get a wink of sleep, at least not until a couple of hours after daybreak when the vomiting settled down. Absolutely miserable.

Some old family friends are in Melbourne and just dropped by for a few minutes. They're gone now. Their mum is my mum's best friend, the first person who got to know mum when we first moved to Melbourne when I was five years old. They moved to Queensland about ten years ago and I hadn't seem them since, until now. I went to school with the boys, two brothers. We used to spend time at each other's houses.

The older brother (J) is about the same age as my older brother, so he would hang out with my older brother and sister more than me when we went over to their place (or they went over to mine.) He was a year level above me. What I remember about him was this one time when we were at school. When I was in school in prep I used to not speak. I would speak at home and at church, but not at school. There was this time when J was arguing with this other boy from school on whether I could talk. This other boy reckoned I was unable to talk at all, J, who often saw me outside of school, knew I could, and was trying to convince his friend that I could talk. So he goes up to me and said, "Come on Naomi, say something. It's me, J, you can talk to me.'

I still didn't say anything, though.

The other thing I remember about him was when they were sleeping over at our house. We had run out of pillows or something, so I said he could have mine, but then later when I couldn't sleep because I wasn't used to sleeping without a pillow, I regretted my decision, and went to where he was sleeping to get it back. He refused to return it, though, and spat on both sides of it so I wouldn't want it. I didn't care and took it back, anyway.

The younger brother I have more memories of since he's the one I would hang out with when we were at other people's houses. He was younger than me by a couple of years and so I knew him before he started school. Although he was younger, he was the dominant one. I would always have to either be the villain or the sidekick when we played Batman. We also sometimes made our toys have sex with each other by bumping their groins together. The year he was about to start school, I asked his mother that wasn't she worried about how he'd act at school? I don't remember why I said it but his mother didn't understand why I was concerned and reacted by laughing at the idea. I was embarrassed by what I said. Once, years later, I overheard her talking about it to my parents and then she laughed at it, and it made me feel ashamed. I often wonder if she was offended by what I said but since I was just a little kid, decided to laugh it off instead. He once smashed an unripe lemon in my face and it really, really hurt. He was later diagnosed with aspergers and was homeschooled during much of highschool, although this was after they had moved to Queensland.

When people try and convince me that God doesn't exist, it'd be about as effective as trying to convince me that they don't exist when they're just standing there in front of me, arguing about it. They can show me documents and make arguments that can't be argued against that shows beyond any reasonable doubt that they don't exist and I can listen too them and look at their proof and think, "Hey, wow, that's a good point: it totally makes sense that you don't exist." But I'll still have a hard time believing it. Not when you're standing right there, and I can see you and touch you and smell you and hear you, and you're real to me as the sun is real to me and my friends are real to me and trees are real to me and the food I eat and the air I breath is real to me.

You can convince me that what I've always believed to be your nature is wrong, that I've been deceived; I thought you were one thing, you might convince me that you're something else. But you'd have a hard time convincing me that you don't and never have existed. You might say, "It's all self-delusion," but if you can convince me that God is self-delusion, than you can also convince me that the heat of the sun is self-delusion, and the air I breath is self-delusion, the food I eat is self-delusion and my very existence is self-delusion, and that you don't exist even when you're standing in front of me and arguing to me about it. God isn't just an idea to me, a concept that can be argued about, an opinion; He is as real to me as touch and sight and smell and taste and sound. No, I don't see God as a person in human form standing in front of me, arguing with me; but I do see him in everything I see; like the World shimmers like a curtain and behind it all there is God. And no, the World doesn't really shimmer, that's just a metaphor. But it's like that. I don't mean having "a spiritual experience"; I might get those from time to time but I can also get a similar experience by eating an extremely hot curry. It's more substantial than that. Like I can taste God.

The truth is; those things, the sun and the air and food and people and everything I can see, smell and touch? I have less faith in the existence of those things than you might imagine; if there's anything I've learned in my short 23 years of existence, it's that nothing can be taken for granted. I might be insane. I believe I know the difference between reality and fantasy as much as a sane person does, but I cannot rely on my own opinion on this matter; you can always ask my friends, although they might be insane, too. Maybe nothing is real, that it is all an illusion. It'd be hard to live life believing that all experience is nothing but an illusion, although I suppose it's possible; I'm just saying that God is as real to me as those things are. The nature of God, the little details I believe in; about heaven and hell, if God is a woman, if animals have souls, even how I should understand the bible; it is worth arguing with me about. I don't believe the same things about God as I did as a child. But try and tell me that God isn't real at all? Show me all the proof you want, you might think I'm being unreasonable, stubbornly blinding myself to logical arguments that are staring me in the face. Those are all well and good, but all the while you're arguing with me about it, it's like God is standing behind you and winking at me.

I don't know why I bothered writing this, though, as people who don't already understand this will think this is just another practice in self-delusion. Even as I'm writing it, I'm wondering the same, seriously considering whether this is just an attempt to deceive myself. But the conclusion I come up with is that if it is, then the sensation of touch that the nerves on my fingertips are sending to my brain as I tap the keys on my keyboard might also be a self-delusion, and then it doesn't really matter as you will never even have read this since I never wrote it in the first place.

My faith in God isn't perfect, though. I remember one sleep-deprived night, lying in the backseat of the car on the way back from a long trip, when I truly convinced myself that I don't and never have existed. After half an hour of napping and waking up again, I realised that what I had believed only moments ago was absurd, but that's also my faith in God; it's about as strong as my faith in my own existence, and my own sanity, and those are things I've been known to doubt about.