The Mel Word

My English teacher recomended that I read the book Ishmael. It is incredible. I don't want to tell to much about it because I don't want to spoil it for anyone but I highly recomend it to anyone that is interested in ethics, philosophy, sociology, religion, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)

It's Christmas Eve! YAY! I'm excited to open presents tonight. My family has a tradition that we open half our our presents Christmas Eve and half Christmas morning. See, my dad's family celebrates Christmas Eve (I guess it's a Polish thing?) and my mom's family celebrates Christmas morning. So I get to celebrate both. :D

Honestly though, I feel a little bad about celebrating Christmas. Christmas for me, used to be celebrating Jesus's birth. Now I'm not sure that I believe that Jesus is God. So now I guess I'm just celebrating a historical figure's birthday? And we aren't sure that he was actually born on December 25th anyways. So now Christmas just seems to be a time of food, presents, and family tradition. Which I suppose isn't bad but I feel sort of guilty for celebrating a holiday that I don't really believe in.

My apologies for not updating. I almost always post updates from school and my school decided to block blogger.com. Now it is unblocked though. *shrugs*

Today is my last day of school before winter break. Tomorrow is Eid-ul-Adha so we get off. If you aren't familiar with Eid-ul-Adha, it is an Islamic holiday celebrating Ibrahim's (Abraham) willingness to sacrifice his son Ismael (Ishmael) to Allah.

There is a similar story in Christianity and Judaism, but they believe that it was Isaac who was almost sacrificed, not Ishmael.

The Bahá'í Faith says that the name of the son is unimportant. The important thing is that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son to God.

I'm questioning my belief that Jesus is God. I'm thinking maybe he was just a extraordinary man and prophet. I still believe in God. I just don't am not sure of what specifically I believe. I'm currently looking into Judaism, Buddhism, and the Baha'i Faith.

I'm afraid. I keep remembering how people have told me that if I don't believe in Jesus Christ I will go to hell. It was easy to shrug off as BS when they were talking about other people. I said it wasn't my place to say if people were going to hell or not and it wasn't my place to tell people to what to believe in. When it's my eternal fate it scares me more.

I'm in Cisco class. We've been talking about religion and politics for the past hour though. I'm all for talking about religion and politics but these guys won't let me get a word in. We're talking about terrorism, and Israel and all of that good stuff. I want to bang my head against the desk right now. Apparently, I have had it very easy because I was born in America and my parents were born in America. Okay, true, I do not have to worry about my family over seas. Okay, sure, fine. Do I have it easy? That's debatable.

I'm told that I do not care about people dying over seas. Maybe I am not closely related to the Arabic and Israeli people that are over there dying. I still care though. When I hear about the fighting I feel horrible. I have cried myself to sleep about all of those people dying. All of that hate. No, I do not have to worry about people invading my house or bombing my house or anything. My heart goes out to the people that do though. Am I a bad person because I am not related to those people? I empathize with them greatly.