My Power Animal Is...

I've been writing in my lj a lot lately, I think it's cause I have a lot of work to do and I'm trying to avoid it. Had a really good meeting today for my Flannery O'Connor project and I feel like I actually know what I'm doing now which is always a good thing before you go up and give a presentation. I also finished the book "Godless" that I'm doing my book talk on on Tuesday (two ons is freaking me out but it works in my head). That book was really great and pretty funny. There's this part where the protaginist is having a conversation with a girl on the phone (he's 16) that is fucking hilarious. He gets so flustered and nervous that he starts to correct her grammer which of course pisses her off so she starts to correct his grammer and it starts this whole argument. I can remember akward phone conversations like this with boys (remember? they still happen) and I completely sympathized. Religion is such a tricky topic that it might be risky to teach this particular book, but aren't those the types of books that we should be encouraging kids to read, the risky ones? No one ever learned anything from playing it safe. The overall message is: how can you understand something if you don't believe it? It doesn't advocate religion nor does it bash it, it justs encourages kids to not believe blindly. Tina and I were talking about a similar topic on Friday and she was saying that her definition of faith (maybe definition is the wrong word and if I screw this up Tina please correct me) is constantly studying and analyzing what you believe. That is, to ask questions and then try to find the answers within your faith. I think some religions try to discourage questioning, they want to tell you what you should believe and for you to accept it at face value. This is why I disagree with a literal reading of the Bible. I think that you get so much more out of the Bible if you read it critically because it's such a rich text. I don't really know what I believe if I believe anything, but I do know that I do not believe in an all powerful God who controls everything. I like the Buddhist idea that God lies within us all and I'm also interested in the Jewish idea of God (according to my own understanding from what I've learned in my Judaism class) that God and mankind have a covenant and that when God gave people free will he had to release a certain amount of power that he had over mankind. That is, God isn't all powerful, he doesn't control destiny and there is no master plan. That is only one kind of Jewish teaching and it's certaintly not Orthodox, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. I just don't like the idea that my fate is in someone else's hands I guess. I think I've written about this before actually. There's this religion called the Baha'i World Faith, a type of breakaway Islamic faith. I've been studying it for awhile but have yet to make any firm decisions.