Savannah: A Weekend Getaway

If you are trying to plan a weekend to get out of town, Savannah would be one of my top recommendations. It is full of culture, tasty food, and vibrant nightlife. I've mapped a few of my favorite places and put reviews in the descriptions, enjoy!

https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zIGYkI9rmbhc.kXEsHeEiJT30

Traveling Women

She’s the one with the messy unkempt hair colored by the sun. Her skin is now far from fair like it once was. Not even sun kissed. It’s burnt with multiple tan lines, wounds and bites here and there. But for every flaw on her skin, she has an interesting story to tell.

Don’t date a girl who travels. She is hard to please. The usual dinner-movie date at the mall will suck the life out of her. Her soul craves for new experiences and adventures. She will be unimpressed with your new car and your expensive watch. She would rather climb a rock or jump out of an airplane than hear you brag about it.

Don’t date a girl who travels because she will bug you to book a flight every time there’s an airline seat sale. She wont party at Republiq. And she will never pay over $100 for Avicii because she knows that one weekend of clubbing is equivalent to one week somewhere far more exciting.

Chances are, she can’t hold a steady job. Or she’s probably daydreaming about quitting. She doesn’t want to keep working her ass off for someone else’s dream. She has her own and is working towards it. She is a freelancer. She makes money from designing, writing, photography or something that requires creativity and imagination. Don’t waste her time complaining about your boring job.

Don’t date a girl who travels. She might have wasted her college degree and switched careers entirely. She is now a dive instructor or a yoga teacher. She’s not sure when the next paycheck is coming. But she doesn’t work like a robot all day, she goes out and takes what life has to offer and challenges you to do the same.

Don’t date a girl who travels for she has chosen a life of uncertainty. She doesn’t have a plan or a permanent address. She goes with the flow and follows her heart. She dances to the beat of her own drum. She doesn’t wear a watch. Her days are ruled by the sun and the moon. When the waves are calling, life stops and she will be oblivious to everything else for a moment. But she has learned that the most important thing in life isn’t surfing.

Don’t date a girl who travels as she tends to speak her mind. She will never try to impress your parents or friends. She knows respect, but isn’t afraid to hold a debate about global issues or social responsibility.

She will never need you. She knows how to pitch a tent and screw her own fins without your help. She cooks well and doesn’t need you to pay for her meals. She is too independent and wont care whether you travel with her or not. She will forget to check in with you when she arrives at her destination. She’s busy living in the present. She talks to strangers. She will meet many interesting, like-minded people from around the world who share her passion and dreams. She will be bored with you.

So never date a girl who travels unless you can keep up with her. And if you unintentionally fall in love with one, don’t you dare keep her. Let her go.

This article has resonated with so many women around the world and has been translated into over 20 different languages including Spanish (EU & SA), Portuguese (EU & Brazil), German, Italian, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, French-Canadian, Dutch, Greek, Danish, Swedish, Croatian, Estonian, Russian, Czech, European Spanish and Thai.

Check out my blog www.lovethesearch.com for the translated versions.

Religion: Testing the Waters

I am not one to discuss religion openly since my views don't seem to be very popular in Tallahassee. Most of my friends here are very conservative and several attend church, although a few very close friends share the same beliefs as I do and understand my perspective. I haven't really invested much time in the spiritual path of religion, but I just recently became more interested when a relationship was stifled because we lacked the same religious beliefs. So, if my thoughts are going to hinder those around me to get close to me I might as well explore those them.

I had heard of churches around town that were more liberal with their rock band sermons and jeans, but that wasn't what I was really looking for. I had driven by the Unitarian Universalist Church off Meridian several times, and was intrigued. So I went. They seemed to be theoretically loosely connected yet understanding and encouraging of each individual's thoughts. They are united by the same intention of being generous in a humanitarian and naturalist manner and make a positive impact whenever you can. These basic and broad principles I can identify with easily as can most Christians, Jews, etc. I always thought that if I were to have a child I would like to expose them to religion to give them a basis for interpreting their own beliefs, not realizing that was what I was looking for for myself.

I got an early start to the day and made the brisk walk over to the church arriving ten minutes early since I wanted to be sure to give myself enough time for the walk. I was greeted at the door by a very friendly face with wiry grey hair, her nametag read "Marilyn", who offered me a hot cup of coffee from the kitchen. She inquired if I usually come to the 9am services since it seems to be the less popular time. I told her it was my first time at the church and her response was supportive. She offered the guest book if I wished to sign up for future communication and equipped me with a hymn book. I chose a seat off to the side right behind the piano and waited for the service to begin. There were maybe twenty people in attendance as they chimed in the day and began the talk. The minister was on sabbatical so there was a church member filling in and a guest speaker set to address us at the end of the service. A young man played the piano beautifully as the sun rose through the trees peering through the massive windows. The few guests that attended the service seemed to range from intellectuals, professors perhaps, to young couples and families. We stood up to sing traditional hymns with very unique lyrics with phrases that emphasized the breadth of their beliefs “Some people call it nature, others call it God.” The talk that was presented by Ronald Crowe, our guest speaker of the day, was thought provoking and made me feel welcome. The experience was just what I had been looking for, a platform which I could explore my thoughts and be urged to do so.

This church may not be for everyone and probably not conducive to those who feel their beliefs need to be validated every Sunday. It gives you a chance to challenge what you've been told and either come out the other end with a stronger faith or a new perspective. 

I've included his remarks if you're interested in disputing the logic of your beliefs.

ONE GOD, TWO GODS, THREE GODS, FOUR....

Written by Ronald Crowe

        I remember hearing when I was young that the Christian religion was superior because it had just one God. "Hurray for one god!" people seemed to say. This seemed to be celebrated on the same level as the discovery that the earth was round or that the earth revolved around the sun. Like most young people, I unthinkingly accepted this "one god" idea as a wonderful truth, a triumphal accomplishment. Why did I accept it?  I didn't know. I simply accepted the authority of those who told me it was a great thing, just as the tellers before me had accepted someone else's authority, in a chain of telling and accepting that obviously went back across countless ages.

        But you learn as you grow older that many of the things people told you were good or true did not necessarily prove so under hard scrutiny. They simply turned out to be evolved cultural beliefs with no rational or evidential support. 

        It was only as an older skeptic that I questioned the assumption that having just one god was a virtue. I could think of no reason why a one-god system would be superior to a multigod one, except in one practical sense. Having one god in charge of things would seem easier to deal with than having two or more gods--less red tape, etc.  But beyond preferences of practicality, there appears to be simply no evidence one way or the other that we were created or ruled over by one god, a family of gods, or a host of ten thousand.Where there is zero specific evidence, the answer could be anything. Beyond citing ourselves and the universe as proof of a creative force, no one as far as I have ever heard, can produce one quark of evidence that either one god or a family of gods created us and our universe. If you argue that proof for god is found in the Bible, I would reply: there is every reason to believe that all the inherited "knowledge" we have of god or gods comes not from anyone's seeing or experiencing god or gods--but from man's uninformed religious imagining. As British Bible scholar J.M. Robinson said over a century ago, "The history of religion is a history of the manufacture of gods by men." Today, like thousands of years ago, we are indeed looking for god (or gods) through a window that is pretty well as dark as the one our ancestors peered through thousands of years ago.

        Of course, thanks to Darwin and other scientific thinkers, we know amazingly more about the processes involved in our getting here. But science can not yet (if ever) tell us anything about the nature of God or how this god, if it exists, views us or why it created us and the universe in the first place.

        Of course this absolute void of knowledge about God does not prevent many people from using our or other cultures' ancient religious myths as their authority to speak familiarly of that deity or deities. They use, sometimes cynically, the myths as tools to push this or that policy or point of view. They don't hesitate, like one-time Senate leader Trent Lott, to speak of God's hatred of homosexuality, based on a 3000-year old myth. We've all heard radio preachers speak of God with that smiling, confident, Jerry Falwellian familiarity, as if God were some superdaddy pal they'd just had coffee with that morning. To me, such fantasizing of God as advisor, companion, or bosom buddy is akin to a child inventing an imaginary playmate based on a character in a storybook.

        Regardless, God remains but a hypothesis based on nothing more than the existence of ourselves and our universe. And, yes, Virginia, people still maim and kill each other over god hypotheses. Despite all the conflict over these hypotheses, the word God, standing for the unknown creative force of our universe, remains but a metaphor, a evanescent, symbolic answer to the question of how we got here and why.

        This raises another question: if we know nothing about God or gods now, what is the possibility man will ever make contact with or prove the existence of a god or gods in the future? Who knows? If after all this time and effort and striving to connect with a god or gods intuitively, mystically, or rationally, we cannot prove it or their existence, it seems likely the final truth will remain hidden from mankind. However, if I am wrong and man should ever discover the existence of whatever original force caused us to be, I'm confident its form or nature would surely in no way resemble any god ever conceived, designed, or imagined by man in his various holy books. Why? First we have too little specific and too much indirect general evidence (the universe and ourselves) from which to infer a specific profile or personality of God. Second, past conceptions have obviously been corrupted by man's tendency to put too much of himself and his societal ideas and values and conceptions into the gods he creates.

THE ONE CHRISTIAN GOD

        How ironic that the main religion of our culture, whose keepers have so proclaimed the virtue of one god, has in fact, for most of its history, celebrated multiple gods. Whether Jews or Christians ever did actually have just one god is not clear.

Of course, if you don't accept the Trinity, as the Unitarian part of our name would indicate, then we see the traditional Christians as worshipping at least three gods: The father or major god, (2) the son or teaching god; and (3) the Holy Spirit or ghost (used for special godly missions, like impregnating Mary).  You can add to these, for the Catholics, Mary, Mother of Jesus. Finally, if we really think about it, we have to add a fourth or fifth powerful God , albeit I hope not worshipped by most people. Satan according to the Christian myth, was so powerful he could summon Jesus, the "son of god" and tempt him. Although Jesus did figuratively tell Satan to go to hell. After these five gods, we have adorning the Christian pantheon those mythic creatures so plentiful and popular in culture today--various Angels, not to mention their counterparts, the evil spirits of the Bible–demons, such as the ones Jesus cast out of a man and into 2000 pigs. And we mustn't forget the Army of Saints that the church fathers have added over 2000 years. The Christian heaven and its hell, are indeed  well-populated places.

        So while Christians may not be able to match the old Greeks and Romans for colorful and exciting gods, such as Jupiter, Juno, Mercury, Diana, Venus, etc. Christians certainly have created their share of super beings to populate the more somber pantheon of their mythology. The Protestants in their reformation stripped down to what they saw as the essential gods: the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost, and, let's not forget the very useful Satan. And the Unitarians, following their own strand of the reformation, extended the rational process that Martin Luther had started: from Michael Servetus of Spain to King John Sigismund of Transylvania to Socinus of Italy and Poland, down to Joseph Priestley of England, to William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, and Ralph Waldo Emerson of the United States, etc. The Unitarians, increasingly using their reason and biblical evidence, demoted Jesus from god to a special human status and fired Satan, making Unitarians just about the only Christians to really have just one God!  And of course, later in the 20th century, Unitarians being Unitarians, some of them even stripped God from the equation which would seem to make them no longer Unitarians but Non-itarians. They decided that since we could know nothing about God, could do nothing for God, even if It existed, we therefore might as well turn our attention to human needs and concerns. This was evidenced in the Unitarian humanist movement that had formed by the early part of the twentieth century and which today constitutes perhaps the largest single-strand of Unitarian Universalism.

        However, I don't want to leave you--especially visitors among us--with the notion that we U-Us have evolved from believing in multiple gods, to one God, to zero Gods and are now 100% secular humanists. While that trend did evolve in the U-U church and is definitely true of many of us, others of us are still U-U Christians, more or less. Others yet are seeking their spiritual truths from other traditions and many of us, to confuse this thing further, may have some interest in all these things. I mean, you may be sitting next to someone of Jewish background who can honor Jesus and Buddha and Confucius for their moral teachings and wisdom.  These different forms of belief occur in our church because here we encourage you, as an individual, to open your mind, educate yourself about religion, and look at the evidence – – think your own thoughts, find your own zone of religious comfort, and build your own religious philosophy.  Notice I did not say build your own religious theology, as in my opinion, theology would seem to require a god or gods and thus would not be relevant for all of us.

        All this multiplicity and overlapping of beliefs is what makes it so difficult for us to answer the question: "What in the world do you Unitarians believe in anyway?" For me, the best answer to this question can only be "helping each other and our fellow man," along with quoting our seven general principles. I would say that our development from Orthodox Christian Protestantism to what we are today has ever been strongly guided by rationality, evidence, and science, and many of us feel that this tradition should remain a bulwark of our church. There are others of us who would argue against relying mostly on reason, evidence, and the scientific approach. They may look more to the mystical side or the intuitive, for which there is also some tradition in the church. In other words, there is something here for all kinds of religious liberals. So how do we cope with the differences of belief among us?  We do that by recognizing that despite our differences and various beliefs, we are still united by our strong humanistic values, by a broad striving for the day-to-day practice of tolerance, empathy, and by respect for other U-Us' points of view. This is perhaps our most important religious ideal. And in a practical and moral sense, I believe it is ultimately far more valuable than any superficial unity that we might achieve by requiring a common belief in a hypothetical god or gods. What matters most is that we strive to keep our minds and our doors open to all who need this liberal religious forum; who value the intellectual and religious freedom of thought, liberty and liberality that we strive for here; and who feel they can be most comfortable in this atmosphere of freedom and tolerance to seek God, gods, or no god, each in his and her own way, knowing that we will not all arrive at the same place, godwise, but we will arrive at the same place tolerance-and-humanistic-wise.

        Which brings us back to God. I remember as a young person reading classical mythology--stories about Jupiter, Juno, Neptune etc.--I wondered how in the world those old Greeks and Romans could have believed in their human-like gods? How could anyone really believe that their chief God Jupiter occasionally came down and impregnated human maidens like Io or Leta? I mean, did those old Greeks and Romans who gave us our classical heritage in law, philosophy, mythology, architecture, sculpture, and literature, really think that prayers, homage, or sacrifices to Jupiter or the other gods would prove effective?

        Perhaps in the future, similar questions will be more commonly asked by young people about our culture's one-time literal belief in Christian gods. For example, "how could those people have been so smart in their science and technology, and still literally believed in Adam and Eve in the Garden, Noah and the Ark, the Tower of Babel, or that our chief god, much like his Greek cousin Zeus, came down in body or spirit and impregnated a Jewish maiden named Mary. Because from their distance, these young questioners will be able to more clearly see in our religious myths the comic book fantasies, the magic, the ritual, from the disinterested view of outsiders. Literally speaking, the Christian gods honored by many today will some day seem just as fantastic to young questioners as the Greek Gods on Mt. Olympus seem to all of us now.     I'm aware that many of you already see things that way and have already asked these questions, but then, we U-U's are not typical of our country's religious culture.

        I'll conclude with three questions: (1.) Outside the unprovable, competing claims of man's holy books, what makes us think there is only one god, multiple gods, or any gods at all? (2.) When a one-man, dictatorial type of government is considered potentially dangerous to the rights of its citizens, what is so great about having just one god? 3. How can we meaningfully define the character and values of god or gods when there is no direct evidence and such a confusion of indirect evidence? 

Netflix Queen

Here are my suggestions, I like twisted stuff so... here goes nothing

Character Studies
The Queen
*A Single Man
My Week with Marilyn
Flight
Pollock
Sylvia
Lincoln

Light Hearted Juvenile Mix Ups 
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Dirty Girl
Daydream Nation
The Oranges
Black Snake Moan
Silver Linings Playbook

Love Triangles
Drinking Buddies
The Romantics

More Screwy
The Vicious Kind
Take this Waltz
Last Night
*The Painted Veil
Atonement

Messed Up
Sleeping Beauty
Dreamers

International
War Witch
*Catch a Fire
The Last King of Scotland

TV
United States of Tara
Dexter - you have to watch a few 
*House of Cards
The League
The Inbetweeners
Lie to Me
Numbers
Damages
White Collar