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Context: It’s Christmas, which means I’m listening to a lot of Christmas music, which lends itself nicely to other sacred music. I’m also fighting depression more strenuously than is typically required during the Christmas season, and have slept roughly 11 of the last 120 hours. This sends my head into some…weird territory. This post is an experiment in writing about writing. I both eagerly anticipate and deeply dread the comments, ha ha!
What If I Believed In God?
What If I Wrote an Essay About Wishing I Believed in God?
Yes, this is a meta-post.
I’ve been playing this video over and over for a couple of days, and not just because earnest Mormon boys are adorable. It’s moving and very powerful.
The young man crying in the last few seconds of it dedicated his performance to a deceased sibling, a little brother who died at age three.
The story behind the song is well-known among those who grow up Christian, but here it is in case some of you don’t know it.
This song was written by a man undergoing an unfathomable series of tragedies. He lost a fortune in the Chicago fire of 1871, shortly after his 4 year old son died of scarlet fever. He sent his wife and four daughters on a ship to England for a vacation to grieve together, planning to join them in a few days. The ship got into a wreck and all four of his surviving children died. His wife survived, and arrived in England having lost all five of her children.
He got on a boat at once, to go join his wife. The captain knew what had happened and summoned him to tell him that they were passing over the place where his four daughters were, essentially, buried at sea.
He got out a pen and wrote the lyrics to this song.
There Are No Gods
My atheism has always been of the reluctant variety.
I wanted to write something about this, but the absolute certainty of what my inbox would fill up with stopped me.