I mentioned that a couple of months ago, a new group of readers of this blog, about a thousand of them, showed up. I studied what they were reading, and they were—oddly—gravitating to my journey with multiple myeloma, especially the first three years when my life was a living hell. I am hesitant to write more things about my cancer here, frankly, because I am doing so well. No, I am not normal as I have a litany of residual health problems from that atrocious battle, not the least of which is renal failure. But compared to where I’ve been, I’m doing extremely well, with only a little discomfort. I just posted on Facebook the other day (and some consider me an over-sharer) that this epoch of my life, the last three years, has been my most content.

A writer must have an impetus to write from the heart. Since I’m not suffering, it is impossible for me to write fairly about it. But before I move on and return to my usual ponderings, specifically how our culture got to this point of a total loss of factual truths, I do want to reward those new readers with something about my journey with multiple myeloma. Since I am in the middle of writing a book about that journey, titled How Cancer Taught Me to Swear, I want to draw from that manuscript as I have before.

Before I started writing this new book, I had finished writing a book I titled The Agony of a Woman. It is an intimate, while comprehensive, pilgrimage into the topic of abortion. Abortion, by the 1980s, had become the defining issue for conservative Christianity, protestant and Catholic. While that manuscript had been collecting dust, I now have two publishers interested in it. This may go nowhere, as each new book must compete with thousands for a publisher’s attention. But because one publisher wanted to see the entire manuscript, I have been working on edit number 11 of that book this week. When I finish that edit by Monday, I hope to pull my latest manuscript, How Cancer Taught Me to Swear, and present some thoughts from it, as I have before.

After I share a few posts about myeloma, I will start a new series, The Honest Search for a Rational God. I’ve been studying Søren Kierkegaard and am now studying Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. I found Kierkegaard easier to read because he develops a simple concept and goes over it a thousand times. Hegel, on the other hand, is meticulous, trying to apply his worldview to every possible aspect of society, covering miles where Kierkegaard covers an inch. But both men have had a major impact on how Christian men and women think today, more so, believe it or not, than the Bible.

Let me start this series on How Cancer Taught Me to Swear by saying, each time I mention this title around religious people, I sense the same response as if we were sitting at a formal dinner, and I cock up my leg and farted loudly. They stare at me, turn away in disgust. The point is that the concept of a list of forbidden words that can’t be uttered without causing a social blunder within the Christian world is a strange phenomenon. Each of those religious people would swear (pun intended) that it is because the Bible says those words are bad. After an exhaustive study of the Bible and the history of Christian civilization, I can assure you that this concept of “bad words” is not in the Bible.

But like always, I want to take this to the philosophical level. There are philosophical and psychological reasons why Christian society wants a list of forbidden words. Those Biblical passages, each one, that are used to create this list, are not about words, but attitudes. Unloving behavior is the problem, not forbidden words. I am giving away the plot, but I believe we Christians want to focus on certain words, because it is simpler and makes us feel better about ourselves when we remove them from our vocabulary. It also gives us the moral space (we think) to violate the intention of those passages, speaking only loving and encouraging words to others.

I will end that thought here, but only as an appetizer for what I want to write. I’ll be back after I’ve completed my edit of The Agony of a Woman and have submitted that to the publisher.

I hope you are well,

Mike