OK so I'm going to start writing not knowing what the point of all this is going to be. I'm at a weird place, I'm rethinking a lot of things, this blog, my career aspirations, religious issues. The usual, I guess you could say. The blog, well, I haven't had much to say, my life has slowed down and I don't use it to vent the way I used to. Pen and paper is very therapeutic, sometimes more so than a keyboard and a white screen. I've always thought of myself a writer, but putting words out there on the web doesn't make me a writer, or maybe it does but it doesn't make me a good writer. I write more to vent than anything else, not for any other purpose, really. It's been a long time since I've really considered the craft of writing and practiced at it in order to become better at it, and considering that I've always had ambition of being a writer that is pretty pathetic. I'm not the writer I want to be and I could really use some practice at it. That's a hard truth for me to face.

My research project hasn't been going so well. Things haven't worked out the way I thought they would, I didn't get the results I wanted, and now I'm faced with the prospect of scaling things back to the point of lameness. I don't know why that bothers me as much as it does. I am starting not to care, I'm nearly at the point where all I want is to be done with it and not look back. And yet I feel like I am wussing out of this and taking the easy way out. I'm going to have to stand up and defend this project in front of a group of professors, how can I do that if I truly don't believe in what I'm doing, if I know I did a really lame project and I'm trying to pass it off as my crowning achievement as a master's student? This really bothers me, I am so done with doing things that I don't really believe in. But the alternative is to prolong my work on this, to put even more effort into it and still be faced with uncertain results. It's a frustrating situation.

Religious issues. I have stopped believing in the religion that I was brought up with. A few months ago a man stood up in my church and said that moral relativism was poisoning our society. The alternative to moral relativism being moral absolutism based on the Bible. Anything with the word 'absolute' in it tends to bother me. Absolute morality. The idea that one man, one religion, one book, has the answers on morality and no other views are accepted. That's the main thing that bothers me about religion. I know not every religious person believes this way, but a lot of people do.

I'm really questioning the foundations of Christianity. Whether God exists, whether Jesus was really the son of God in the literal sense, whether spirits exist. Why human beings are here. How can we know what is true, how can we know what we are doing is right. I have been reading as much as I can about it. Books on Christianity, Islam, history books about past civilizations, the Bible, origins of life. Autobiographies written by religious people. I'm still really confused. I am approaching this in an intellectual way (of course), not really seeking out spiritual experiences. There aren't a lot of answers for these questions. There's no way to prove that Christianity is true. Still, I continue on with this path hoping to find some enlightenment on the subject.