writing as a discipline

I've descended back into rough journal mode.  No problem.  Just write and see what happens.

I joined a writing club with an atheist sparring partner from the UK.  Actually it took me a while to convince him that I wasn't ready to persuade him, I just wanted to understand him.  The tricky part was for him to get to where he could answer my questions without trying to guess how my question was some kind of setup.  After conceding a few points regarding religious delusion he finally relaxed a bit. Interestingly we got to the point that is the crux of my own understanding of neutral's position on the whole God vs. Nature debate: determinism.

For personhood to be real in any familiar sense, there seems to be the necessity for the concept of personhood to transcend the material.  In ultimate terms that would the the I AM, pure personhood.  Matter/Energy, then, comes from personhood, not the other way around.

For my atheist friend he was hovering around the question by reasoning that consistency should make him a determinist.  He even had vague convictions from partly remembered articles on current brain science to suggest the same.  But it just didn't seem like how he experiences life.  The apparent illusion of active personhood, real choosing, was just too compelling.  It is a problem for him.

I'm off to write on my combo book: Hope without Hype~ finding the meaning of life without becoming a weirdo.  Journey + Perspective + Perscription