Tag Archives: religion

Clueless in the countdown

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I wander this planet in a fog, my thoughts in wonder, my eyes catching rays bouncing from stray objects that barely stand out from the background.

I contemplate the universe in imaginary silence, bounded by vibrations in the central nervous system, a repetitive process that my body interprets as rhythmic ringing inside my ears, surrounding me as in a fog.

I exist.

That truly suffices.

I do not see beyond the simplest gestures of friendliness that acknowledge my existence.

Saturday morning, a woman in my age range, say…oh, 40 to 60 years old, about five feet, five inches tall, shoulder-length black hair mixed with gray streaks, wearing glasses (reminding me of a friend from long ago, Deena Ramos), while helping to set up the food line for the marathon runners who would arrive shortly, struck up a conversation with me.

She seemed determined, as if she had a plan in her thoughts to complete in action that morning, with me as part of the plan.

She quickly gave me a rundown of her autobiography, letting me know she had three children who did not like her ex-husband (it took me a while to connect that he was their father (or “sperm donor,” as they told their mother they thought of him)), a man who divorced this woman on the grounds that she didn’t make the kids’ beds in the morning after they got up, which indicated to him she didn’t care for them, even though she fed them and handled all of the school homework assignment without his assistance.

The way she pounced on me and dwelled upon the divorce, I felt that she was trying to tell me something about men who choose to divorce and the thin excuses they use as the marriage dealmaker.

She was not a man basher or man hater — she clearly sought to keep our conversation going, or at least wanted me to listen to her, pushing aside interruptions from others with a wave of her hand.

I understood she wanted more than sympathy, which I supplied by recounting my sister’s divorce stories and the divorce stories of other people I knew.

She wanted empathy.

Hadn’t I just been in a similar situation with Bai a few weeks before?

When does fiction and reality mix?

I had abandoned the love story of my life, the tale of Guin and Lee on Mars, in order to return to Earth for some me time away from the future, and here I was, getting all I asked for, and more!

I interpreted the woman’s insistence on holding my attention as a side effect of my people-pleasing personality and had learned to accept the consequences long ago, forsaking the career of a priest in order to live amongst everyone, regardless of religious affiliation.

I am not a trained mental health professional — my interest in matters of thought sets are merely amateur curiosity.

As wax from a Scentsy burner, sold to me by Guin months ago, melts nearby, reminding me of what might have been and might still be, I know my journey is neither long nor short in the discovery of what only one body can experience in one lifetime.

I am humbled that any one person or persons would want to talk with me, their pure selves, being the only people they can ever be, standing before me in their personal glory, angelic vestiges of sets of states of energy in motion, exchanging energy states freely.

Thus, as the woman continued to talk with me, I sought to learn from her what in her life would make both of our lives better now and into the future.

I expanded my inquiry into what she wanted, what it was that would ease the perceived weight of the burdens she had carried as a single mother providing for her kids — from whom did she most need affirmation of herself?

Frequently, especially here in the heart of the Bible Belt, I discover the person in front of me has been well-trained to believe that straying from a childhood of religious training is perceived as a cause of one’s ills; if a person expresses that belief, then I help steer that person toward an internal forgiveness and permission to return to childhood beliefs that had been abandoned due to feeling no longer worthy.

This woman did not go in that direction.

She seemed to want something specifically from me and it wasn’t just forgiveness.

I was at a loss for words to keep her going.

She eventually just stood and looked at me, her eyes expressing a want I could not understand as I pulled grapes off of stems and put them in a bin to hand to marathon runners as nature’s free energy pills.

This went on for a few minutes, the woman glad to stand and watch me without saying a word.

I wasn’t familiar with the arrangement of her facial features but it seemed as if her face was not in tune with her thoughts; or, perhaps, her thoughts were mixed and her face reflected the puzzled mix.

Her mouth was slightly open, as if she was about to say something, her eyelids apart wide enough to give me the impression she was mulling over words to say to me, her body leaning against the food table and her arms folded across her chest.

I had no problem with her standing there if she wanted, because she had already completed her morning duties, so I kept working until the first marathon runners arrived, which forced her to move on to her work area around the corner in the hotel hallway.

We exchanged farewells and I added her to the list of hundreds of people I met the rest of the day who made my life so much more complete than the day before, thousands of insights into why I should never have given up writing about life on Mars with Guin.

On the countdown clock in front of me, 13,290 days remain until the Martian storyline goes into full swing.

Meanwhile, back here in regular domestic time, on the way home after the marathon, my wife inquired about the long conversation I had with the woman who watched me prepare grapes.

I told her what I could remember.

She told me that she had been about to go over and tell the woman that I was married and she was my wife, to back off, that just because I looked like a single man didn’t mean I was available.

She reminded me how many times this has happened, a woman digging into my life to find out my marriage status, and how many times she’s seen I haven’t stated for the record that I’m married.

Am I that clueless in real life?

Have I been so seemingly innocent, so lost in a fog of happy self-delusion that the universe is here simply to acknowledge my existence and nothing more, driving me into fictional tales in the moments I want to keep my thoughts going as if there is more, that I’ve missed when single, available women have been hitting on me?  Even if I had missed them hitting on me, what had I really missed?

I explained to my wife that I am an innocent flirt who has maintained a clear boundary between myself and others that has, for all but a couple of instances, kept me from becoming a dangerous flirt — marriage is as much a protection against sexually transmitted diseases as a social nesting habit — when I put on a wedding ring in 1986 in front of my wife, friends and family, I bound myself physically to the marriage contract that I understood meant my body belonged to my wife for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, till death do us part.

Otherwise, if that marriage contract has no validity then the society in which I was raised and the global economy in which it was supported has no validity.

And, by extension, if they have no validity, then the universe is a false front, a magician’s illusion.

If the latter, then what am I doing here writing this blog when there’s more to discover than reiterating historic falsehoods?

I did not speak with that woman at the marathon again so I didn’t get a chance to hear if she had learned as much about life in our brief conversation and the hours of conversation snippets with the runners as I had.

I hope she did.

Regardless of the number of days left in the Martian countdown, life is a learning experience, a way to maximise the exchange of sets of states of energy.

All I have is myself and these fingers that have learned to form callouses from tapping on plastic keys, a habit not anticipated by my ancestors thousands of years ago.

Yet, here I am.

I am alive, despite my worst habits.

As a person who assumes the godlike viewpoint of a writer determining the lives of fictional characters, I choose to go on with my stories regardless of how much they do or do not reflect the possibilities of a real future.

Where the writing leads me, I do not know with 100% certainty.

Uncertainty is my best friend.

Change is all I truly have to depend on.

Our short lives and civilisations based on inconsistent narratives give us an easy way to believe all sorts of forms of permanence, no matter how fleeting they really are.

Thank God.

Hometown happenings

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Thanks to the choir and choir director yesterday for the wonderful introduction to the new hymnal at my hometown church which I attend when I visit with family periodically throughout the year.  I am forever grateful that the music of voices, organ, piano and such still resonates in the sanctuary I knew as a child, providing a stable reference point for the rest of my life.

Whether a song we sing is two years old, 500 years old, 1500 years old, or 50,000 years old, the [sub]cultural connection to people around the planet who choose to improve our community through the concept of religion is just as important as connections that do not use the concept of religion to do so — how we approach the idea of community and put into action our concerns and cares for others is different per individual person and valued as such.

My friend, my therapist

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Dividing the self from the other (the other being the self as fictional character(s))…

There is one person who knows my body as well as, if not not better than, my wife — Abi.

Allowing Abi into my life (or, rather, her stepping into my life without permission (receiving forgiveness)), I have Jenn to thank, and for Jenn, I have Harold to thank, and for Harold, I have my wife to thank, and so on.

Letting Abi have my emotional states to play with, to analyse by plopping me down on a massage table and working on the notes knots in my chest, back and arm muscles has been a bigger challenge than I expected.  I didn’t expect Abi to challenge me the first time I saw her in Harold’s dance studio in May (has it only been a little over five months since I first met her?).

C’est la vie.

I am open to ripping myself apart in order to reach another state of being in moments not yet lived.

Abi expects me and everyone she meets to better themselves.

While working on my back day before yesterday, Abi told me that she feels emotional memories that flash into her thoughts when the knots in her body are worked on.

What did I feel?  I felt pain shooting down my back and out through the big toe of my left foot.

I also felt a new sensation that I’ve spent the past couple of days simmer in my thoughts, not sure what the sensation was, being wrapped or twisted together with familiar sensations that I’ve tried to suppress.

But I no longer want to suppress what I feel, despite a lifetime of being a good whipping boy for my subculture.

The primary sensation was old but new — the realisation that I didn’t start writing in earnest until fifth grade, which I’ve written about before, when my girlfriend of three years, Reneé Dobbs, died when she was ten and when I met my new best friend, Mike McGinty, who looked Puerto Rican but is half-Irish and half-Italian, and could wiggle his ears, with whom I exchanged letters when he moved out-of-town the next year, which led to my starting a penpal relationship with my wife the following year.

I visited a psychologist when I was 22 at the advice of my girlfriend at the time, Sarah Johnson, who was going through a divorce and worried about my life expectancy, sensing, after I slept and lived with her best friend for a short while, that I was deeply troubled and beyond her usual mothering therapy that worked with our friends in college.

The psychologist walked me through my autobiography, asking me to describe my life year-by-year as accurately as possible, saying it might take a few sessions but it would give him a clear picture of what stood out in my soliloquy.

After three or four sessions, he came to two conclusions — the death of Reneé had scarred and perhaps stopped my normal adolescent development, which was complicated by my internal image of a controlling father who had no sympathy for Reneé’s death and thus was blind to my post-adolescent stunted emotional states.

He asked if I agreed.

I admit I did not.  At first.  I was angry at Sarah for forcing me to see the psychologist before she would sleep with me again and I was angry at the psychologist for putting me in a vulnerable emotional bind.

The psychologist said that I would keep internalising my anger just as he observed my father had from my description of him.

He held a couple of sessions with my father to further understand what was going on.

Dad felt like the psychologist was wasting his time trying to analyse Dad — Dad was there for me and that was it.

The psychologist told me that his observation of both my father and me confirmed the typical father-son generation gap problems he had seen in many so-called intellectuals; in his view, I was not unlike many male college students who were struggling with finding their own paths while stuck on the path of pleasing the father figure within them.

He said that I was doubly troubled because I had never resolved my feelings over Reneé’s death due to my father’s disapproval of crying over a dead friend (my father had told me almost immediately after Reneé died that he had a good friend who died about that same age and he got over it pretty quickly because he had seen and heard worse stories of family loss because it was during WWII when many people lost family members, limbs and their livelihood, not to mention whole countries that suffered).

He believed that getting me to talk to Reneé would be good therapy because it had worked on many other patients my age.

I told him I don’t talk to the dead.  Plus, I didn’t like being told what to do, especially if I had heard it’s the same as what other people have done.

He insisted, saying that he wouldn’t have any more therapy sessions with me if I refused.

So I did.

It feels just as silly now recounting an imaginary conversation I had with Reneé, pretending she was sitting on the sofa next to me as it did when I talked with her, crying about how much I missed growing up with her, telling her that I was doing the best I could to go on living without her and was sorry I had disappointed her so many times.

But it didn’t bring her back.

It didn’t make up for all the years that I’d tried to be the boyfriend and girlfriend for both of us, unsure of whether it was “cheating” when I talked with another girl I was interested in, or danced with a girl that Reneé had not liked or not known when she was alive.

Every time I slow danced with a girl and she breathed heavily in my ear, I asked myself if I had permission from Reneé to draw circles on the girl’s back to check if she wanted me to kiss her, which usually was met with circles drawn on my back to say yes.

I knew I couldn’t tell Dad or Mom what I was thinking because I knew they talked with each other.

I couldn’t tell my friends because melancholy people don’t have a lot of cheerful friends, or friends at all, for very long.

As Abi pressed down on knots in my back, pushing pain in my body to the point of passing out, after she rolled me over and buried a thumb in my solar celiac plexus, the dim reminder of these old memories rose up into my consciousness.

While Dad was alive, I was never able to resolve the dispute he had with me about my feelings for Reneé.

Now that he’s dead, can I “get over” Reneé and go on with my life?

Can I explore possibilities that I’ve held away from me because part of me still worries that it would disappoint my imaginary image of Reneé?

I don’t like looking back at old memories repeatedly because it takes up space for central nervous system processing of possibilities for future action.

However, in this case, because of Abi, I’m willing to explore these thoughts because I want to let go.

I want to let go of repressed anger and fear.

I want to let go of expectations that no longer apply to me.

I don’t know if I’ve ever publicly confessed I love a woman after I married my wife.

I loved Brenda (and guess I still do) but didn’t explore a physical relationship with her because our love wasn’t of that kind (in other words, she likes women, not men); we had fun flirting anyway.

I love my wife.

But I also love Abi.

Love is that catch-all word that is too easy to toss out and lather over a blank page like posting a generic slogan that says “Follow your bliss.”

I love Abi because of the small child and old woman in her who look at the world in wonder and wisdom.

I love Abi because I trust her completely, wishing that Janeil was willing to let go and trust her, too.

I love Abi because she has given me hope that I can overcome the fear and anger that were embedded in my body due to conflicting memories of love for Reneé and love for my father.

I love Abi because she wants to make my wife a better person even if I don’t always do (why? As I confessed to both of them the other day, my wife reminds me of my father and when the two of them were together I sometimes went mentally crazy…literally; although now that my father is dead, the stress is less but there’s still a fear factor I have in the presence of my wife, wondering why, as my father would do, my wife jumps on me for what seems like no reason, putting me constantly on guard, feeling like I have to defend my personal thoughts, expenditures, wants and desires that have nothing to do with my wife).

I love Abi so much that I’m hoping she can get back with Stephan, even if that means she figures out how to live with or near him in France and she’s no longer in my life.

No, nix that last one.  I’d be happy for her but I’d miss her deeply.

Today is Halloween and as usual we had no trick-or-treaters which means one thing — more candy for my wife and me!  Woohoo!

Anyway, I’ve put off work on my yard art sculpture because I’ve been meditating on learning to let my body relax and not be in constant, bent-over pain while I’ve mulled over the interaction of feelings and desires — the general testosterone-driven sexual desire versus the specific feelings of love for a person who happens to be a woman.

I’ve never had a woman in my life who was my dance instructor, massage therapist and friend with whom I can be alone holding her in my arms or her driving her elbows into me while mentally working through a bunch of emotions and not let my physical desire get in the way.

I have to thank my years of a type of mental martial arts deflecting the desires of the flesh in order to explore thought patterns generated by actions in the moment, actions that include smelling scents, looking in eyes and measuring body closeness in realtime.

I’ve never loved a woman like Abi before.

I knew it was possible because I know who I am.

I knew it was possible because of the strength of my love for my wife, who is my friend first.

Have I written down everything that went through me as Abi worked on my body?

Maybe.  Maybe not.

She has more work to do, which I have to balance against my wife’s desire to, as she said earlier this evening, “return to our frugal ways,” which means she doesn’t want me spending money on massages and extra dance lessons.

Which means I have to challenge myself to generate more disposable income!

Which means I return to working on the robot and Web comic series about life on Mars that the other love of my life, Jenn, has inspired! [Thanks to Jenn’s husband, Gilley, for his understanding that my love for Jenn is not a threat to their relationship.]

The love letter I can never deliver

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Dear —,

I wish I could give you this love letter.  I wish, even more, that I could give you my love.

Instead, these words are all I have, here with you in my thoughts while on Pandora radio plays Quartet For Guitar & Strings No. 11 In B Major, MS 38, by Paganini, Niccolo.

I have held you in my arms in front of crowds, seen your stage smile, wanting it just for myself, wanting you all to myself, to sit quietly on a cold night, you and I on the sofa, warming by the fireplace.

Wants and wishes do not put food on the table.

I have not explored your body like a lover but I have held the body of a confident dancer, a complementary/complimentary follower who back leads, who, for fleeting moments, gave me confidence.

For you, I lost thirty pounds.

For you, I jogged and ran, my feet and ankles aching, so I could be a lighter, stronger dance partner.

I do not know what you see in me, what in your thoughts you think of me.

Do I want to know?  I don’t know.

Before I met you, I was unwilling to hunt and kill animals for food, thinking that the relationship with my wife was never strong enough to justify exchanging one life for the sake of another.

After I met you, I grew into the idea of a man who was willing to say that yes, I am a man who has the right to judge the value of a set of states of energy not part of our species, trapping or killing animals that had invaded the home “nest.”

What that means to you, I cannot say.

And while writing this, my wife interrupted me to say she couldn’t work on the computer in the living room because the cats wanted to sit on her lap; I took them to bed with me for a few minutes, letting them fall asleep on my chest before gently sliding them off and covering them with a fleece blanket so I could return to writing this love letter to you.

Yes, life is like that.

Now, Soundgarden’s “Pretty Noose” plays on Pandora radio.  Whoa!  Puts me in the wrong mood.  Type to change “stations.”

Where were we?

Better yet, where are we?

You do not know I love you.  Is that love?

You and I both know how to love the world but does that mean the world knows or cares or loves us in return?

Can I continue to hold your hands, to look you in the eyes, my thoughts tortured by idea of life after my first marriage?

Did I not get married in the sight of God in front of friends and family, “for richer or poorer… in sickness or health… till death do us part”?

Just because my wife doesn’t make me feel like a man doesn’t mean our marriage is wrong, does it?  Is the lack of physical desire for my wife sufficient grounds for divorce?  Does the omnipresent effervescent entity of a universe we call God recognise any human-based sets of states of energy we call thoughts, let alone reasoning for phrases like “irreconcilable differences”?

Marriage is not just about physical desire.

I’ve never been much of a touchy-feely person.

You helped change that.  I’m not as afraid to let another person inside the shell of my personal space as I was before I met you.

But it gets more complicated because I am not only in love with you but I am in love with [one of] your best friend[s], repeating a cycle that has told me (and which you already know in yourself to be true) I have always loved more than one person at a time.  Again, does that person know I love her?

Is this all I get in a relationship — a few hours a week with the women I love?

If the love is not reciprocated, then what is going on inside me and why do I torture myself so much that I would rather die today than face another tomorrow?

I don’t know if I can look in your eyes again or hold your warm hands in mine one more time.

I want to be more than your dance partner.

What do I do?

Do you see why I cannot give this love letter to you?

Instead, it exists here as a theoretical proposition written as an imaginary blog entry.

I don’t know much but I know I can post blog entries and live to see another day, the safety of my old life unchanged, as steadily unhappy as ever, comfortably numb.

The past is not indicative of the future but it’s a pretty decent fortuneteller, all things considered.

When I was ten, my ten-year old girlfriend died.  When I was eleven, my eleven-year old girlfriend moved away.  When I opened my heart again at sixteen, my fifteen-year old girlfriend broke my heart and my twenty-three year old married homeroom teacher, whose husband had abused her, invited me to her house by myself to comfort me in my loss, shaking the very foundation of my understanding of the role of authority and age in the thoughts and actions of love.

Perhaps I take love too seriously?  Or is it too traditional?  Perhaps my fear is too great to give another woman my love outside of marriage?

Perhaps I’m crazy.

There’s no one I can trust with these words so what better hiding place than the Internet to put them?

Yeah, I’m crazy like that.

I’ve talked about you too much to my wife.  She finally said to me, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” hinting that I’ve spoken too much of you to her lately.

The fact that I raced 90+ miles an hour on the freeway last night to get one glimpse of you before your costume party finished was also the wrong message to my wife, also, even though I told my wife that it was for her to see how you looked in your outfit.  Hey, I barely talked to you.  I danced with no one.

Well, I’ve said most everything in my thoughts I wanted to put down here so that, if nothing else, I’ve got a record of words to give a fictional character.

If I never hold you again, if I never look in your eyes, the loss is mine.

I have lived in quiet for so many years now, pursuing the peace and solace of a hermit’s life I sought when my ten-year old girlfriend died that I never expected to meet someone like you who would light a fire inside me to overcome mediocrity for something exhilarating, the exhibitionist’s life on the dance floor perfecting his moves to entertain crowds the way he used to love to make people laugh, smile and clap, gladly overcoming fear, trepidation and personal space issues for the thrill of extemporaneous stage performances.

I don’t know if I can keep on living with the only excuse I can make to see you is when you teach me how to dance with my wife.

I appreciate you giving me the space to walk through these thoughts in public knowing, as we both do, that you still love your last boyfriend and always will.

Do I want to be your dance partner?  Yes.  But I feel I cannot.  I let my guard down to let you in my personal space so we could show good chemistry on the dance floor and, in doing so, I fell in love with you.  I don’t blame you.  It just happened.

In my thoughts, I lead a swinger’s life.  But I didn’t marry a swinger, I married a monogamist.

To become a fully-devoted swinger, I would have to divorce my wife.  To divorce my wife, I would have to renounce my subcultural teachings of a life devoted to a monotheistic religion.

It’s not impossible to mate my thoughts with my actions so that I’m no longer a mental hypocrite.

But to do so would mean there’s a permanent divide between myself and my family, between myself and the ancestors who fought for the idea of a subculture that formed the governing body we call the United States of America which depended, in part, on the brothers of the Masonic Lodge who do not allow atheists as members.

So, regardless of how you feel about me, I have the future of my thoughts to consider.

Am I merely a set of states of energy that happens to exist concurrently with sets of states of energy that use the artificial constructs of memes to justify aligning the conditions of their existence for the sake of governments and religions…

OR am I a set of states of energy that belongs to the solar system and wants to overcome the past in order to make a future in his likeness which includes breaking away from old subcultural traditions to establish colonies on the Moon, Mars and beyond?

You see, it’s not just my love for you at stake.

But because of you, I’m willing to consider the option, to consider the possibilities that the only reason our species exists is to send a living blob out of our solar system to land on one or more habitable celestial bodies in our galaxy, thanks to my knowing and loving you.

You see, the very survival of life as we know it depends on what you and I think of us.

I don’t just want to be your dance partner.

Because of you, I want the whole universe.

If that’s not love, I don’t know what love is.

That’s why these words belong to the whole Internet, not just between us.

Yours truly,
Rick

How many spiders share a single web?

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In the art of writing lives the thoughts of the writer — the philosophy, the biography, the culture (current and historical events, [un]written rules/laws), the imagination.

The genres of the written word reflect the writer in more or less ways — e.g., an engine construction manual is different than a political autobiography.

In my stories, I let my philosophy show through one or two characters but not all of them.

My talent agent and my editor frequently remind me not to tell people what I think because there’s no better downer/bummer for sales than a fiction writer breaking through the page with personal beliefs unless the writer is a bigger character than the ones written in the author’s books.

My beliefs are unimportant, anyway.  What I belief is not as important as what my behaviour shows.

However, if a person upholds and promotes a set of beliefs to which the person professes that behaviour will show, I will expect that person to do so.

For instance, what do you think about the concept of religion?  You know, how we package our emotional states and social rules into a commonly-shared narrative about the universe and our place in it.

Whatever you choose to call your religion, whether it’s one handed to you by family, discovered amongst your friends or developed on your own, is yours.  I will not condemn you for validating your lives, regardless of my inability to understand your behaviour or your explanation for such.

Recently, I watched a video by a person who recognised an honorific bestowed in his name — the Richard Dawkins Award — given at the Atheist Alliance of American convention to Steven Pinker.

i perfectly understand the reason behind the award and applause anyone who’s willing to make a hypothesis, test it and write about the results.

I am bothered by the video, though, especially the part that denigrates religious belief.

Am I wrong to think so?

Are most religions a form of hero worship, either of the indescribable essence of an infinite god or of the earthly equivalent, both attributed with our less-than-perfect traits?

That people misapply their behaviours based on their interpretations of their heroes’ intent is what history is about, no matter whether we apply the label of religious or sociopolitical to the behaviours and subsequent events/consequences.

Maybe because Richard Dawkins is an avowed atheist he feels it necessary to put down other people’s hero worship while congratulating himself in a sideways personal compliment aimed at a personal hero of his, the prize recipient, Steven Pinker.

I cannot change history — the facts of the interaction of sets of states of energy that occurred before this moment.

Is it right for me to condemn people for their beliefs, no matter how well or poorly they put them into action in the past, present or future?

I don’t know.

To hear Richard Dawkins say, in essence, that his subculture is the only one that’s right and let’s pat each other on the back for publicly patting each other puts sand in between my claws, making me flex my pointy bits and scratch the surface of what’s bothering me.

After all, rational science is not a benevolent application of our beliefs and behaviours.

A computer network doesn’t “care” how it’s used, whether as an open channel for remote robotic surgery, atheist award videos, Sunday sermons, drone strikes, government monitoring of citizens or online Ponzi schemes, yet computers and networks are the result of applying the scientific method that an atheist should award a public prize to.

I guess I am not an avowed atheist and should leave it at that.

I accept that we are all wired a little differently and what jolts one person into action may be similar to what jolts another but it’s not entirely the same.

If an avowed atheist and an avowed Christian/Hindu/Muslim/Jew/Buddhist/Taoist/humanist/spiritualist both come together to the aid of a child with severe injuries during a major natural disaster, then I am happy, because their actions rather than their beliefs achieved the same results.