The Skeptical Seeker

I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. Most of the time they are nebulous and soon forgotten. However, I did actually manage to keep my resolutions for 2009. They were to play my flute more (I did that for the first few months), keep doing yoga (kept though most of the year), and get married (done ). If there where any resolutions that made that I failed to keep, then I can’t remember what they were.

In keeping with the tradition of making resolutions for New Year’s Day, I would like to state my intentions to accomplish a few clear goals in 2010.

I want to:

• Get my passport. Not planning any international travel just yet, but I want to be ready if the opportunity arises.
• Make some progress towards getting my Masters degree. Even if I don’t start a program this coming year, I want to take the GRE and get my letters of recommendation before the end of the year.
• Finish rest of the 10 speeches in the Toastmaster’s Competent Communicator manual. I have done 2 of them, 8 to go!

Happy New Years!

I have changed the name of the blog from “The Atheist Yogi” to “The Skeptical Seeker.” I’ve moved away from my interest in yoga, and I think that the idea of seeking for truth and reality with a skeptical mind would be a better fit for this blog.

My Grampa, my last remaining grandparent, died last Friday. He had been sick over the past week, and on Friday morning I got a call from Mom saying that they had taken him to the emergency room and found out that he had leukaemia. At about 2:30pm she called me at work to inform me that “Grampa has gone to heaven.” He was 90.

There is going to be a memorial service on Tuesday, at the church that Grampa attended–the one that I attended as a small child. This can be a tricky issue for an atheist in a mostly Christian family, but thankfully there is some degree of religious diversity in the family as well. That translates in most cases into a atmosphere of tolerance for different views, and a low likelihood that this memorial will turn into an appeal for the ‘unsaved’ to turn to God to avoid going to hell when they face death themselves. I’ve heard of such things from other people, but that is not my situation.

I cringe a bit inside when I hear someone say things like ‘Grandpa is with Grandma in heaven now’ or some such thing. Fine if that makes them feel better, and I’m definitely not going to pick fights with anyone over that sort of thing.

This will be a bit different from a usual funeral service. Grandma and Grampa both agreed — back in the 60’s I think I heard someone say — to donate their bodies to ‘medical science’ when they died. I personally think this is a great idea, since I think having one’s body pumped full of chemicals and buried in the ground in an expensive box is a bit wasteful. Please don’t take offence if you disagree.

So, there will be no body at the service and no burial. If it’s anything like Grandma’s memorial service, it will mainly be family members sharing memories about Grampa.