A certain amount of denial seems healthy at this point because we've got about as much to deal with as our feeble minds can handle. I mean, imagine if all the shrouds, facades, and comforting abstractions were suddenly lifted and we had to face what we really are all at once, all in the same day. We'd all have mental meltdowns and wind up in the nuthouse. I used to get worked up when I perceived some hypocrisy or a belief system that contained obvious contradictions. These days, I'm much more content to live and let live and look for the things we can agree on rather than picking at the differences. I used to think I was being clever with my cynicism, but then I realized that all I really had was a bad attitude. It takes a lot more intelligence and creativity to be positive. I've been learning to appreciate people of all different sorts and conversations become an exercise of exploring common ground rather than generating disagreement. Some circumstances placed me in a vehicle for a couple of hours with a devout Christian man, and what resulted was a challenging and elucidating discussion. We found that we had a lot more in common than I might have thought. I was surprised, too to get a glimpse into his world, to see how concerned he was with the splintering of his own faith. He even voiced his feelings that the right wing was making Christianity look bad with its extreme and hateful statements.
	Now, I am not a Christian, so naturally there were places we could not go. I wasn't in the mood for pushing it over the edge, and when he paused and said, "but the only way to heaven is through Jesus Christ the savior," I let it go, and we headed back for safer ground. I am sensitive to the fact that he is operating from a closed-reality system which cannot, by its nature, allow alternative viewpoints in (without completely unraveling).
However, since I believe in multiple, parallel truths, his system can coexist with mine and make for good conversation. So when we stood at the edge of a pond, appreciating the glory of nature, discussing the difference between the body and the spirit and he picked up some clay and marveled at how God had formed us with his hands from the same stuff, I ran his words through the appropriate translators :-> God = sunlight + time (billions of years) + cosmic interactive forces inherent in matter yet to be fully understood (morphogenetic fields?) -> clay = the earth, source of all raw materials from which we are made -> spirit = the ghost in the machine, a piece of the universal energy manifesting itself temporarily in the form of a human being. It's all true, if you desire truth. I saw a headline on the front page of the last Dance of the Soul that posed the question that seems to be on a lot of people's minds, "Apocalypse or epiphany?" My thought was that they need not be mutually exclusive, and that we'll probably be having both.

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