My cousin called me the other night and we talked for an hour and a half. We hadn't connected since she last called sometime earlier in the year, maybe March when she was living in Arizona.

My landlord is her uncle, and a few weeks ago he needed to come into my room for some work to be done and I asked him about Audrey. He surprised me with news that she had moved to Switzerland.

I was duly surprised. Maybe part of me was a little disappointed that she made such a major life decision to move from Sedona to Switzerland and never once was I on her mind to tell me about it. But to be truly disappointed, I would have to presume that I had some importance to her, and being important to anyone is antithetical to my being, so it was easy to just let it go.

Apparently I would have known about the move if we were connected on Facebook, but in the interim of our connections, I had unfriended both her and my old friend Madoka. I unfriended them as a reaction to people with whom I wanted more substantial communications. If they wanted to communicate with me, then communicate with me.

As far as I'm concerned, Facebook is for superficial contact with people with whom I would otherwise not be in contact. It's not for people from whom I expect more personal, direct communications. I realize no one thinks like this.

Facebook is a primary contact for many people. It doesn't matter if posts, likes and replies become a matter of committee between total strangers. It doesn't matter that a post wasn't meant personally for you and any number of replies are also not meant for you or by people who know absolutely nothing about you, and any reply you make goes to everyone who weren't intended as recipients.

It took about six months for Madoka to realize we were no longer friends and she sent me a message and I duly re-friended her. She didn't get it, but I felt re-friending was the only course of action to make my initial unfriending her not be passive-aggressive. It wasn't. It was hoping for something, and it didn't happen.

I still don't read her FB posts and our communications continue to be superficial and not at all a dialogue. Positive, but not dialogue. Theoretically, we continue to profess being important to each other; practically it's lip service. Well, no, we mean it, but the manifestation in our interaction doesn't live up to it. It's like going to church on Sundays and that being all for spiritual commitment.

Audrey never realized we were no longer friends on Facebook. After her uncle told me she moved to Switzerland, I sent a one-sentence e-mail to her telling her that I learned from her uncle about the move and wished her the best.

She sent a short (but longer than mine) email back saying it's all on Facebook. She still didn't realize we were no longer friends on FB, and I didn't know how to respond, so I didn't and decided to just let it go. Whatever.

Then she called the other night, a couple weeks after I didn't respond, and we talked for an hour and a half.

What's the take away? Well, we don't matter to each other in an attached sense. We're not keeping tabs on each other, concerned for what's happening in each other's daily lives. It's Buddhistic non-attachment perhaps. It doesn't mean we don't care. We care, we just don't matter.

For her, things matter. Her kids, her father, whoever or whatever else matter. I don't, which is great. I don't want to matter.

And nothing matters much to me. That's also great, I don't want things to matter. I don't have kids, I don't have family who matter. I don't keep tabs on them, they don't keep tabs on me. Whatever happens to them and whatever happens to me is just news to each other. There's no involvement. There's nothing we could do if either side knew any more than we do about each other.

I don't know what issues they're dealing with and there's no indication they want my input on anything. That would be mattering.

And they don't know I'm an alcoholic and ignore how big of a problem insomnia is, but regardless, I don't want their input on those things. That would be mattering.

If you want to matter, you have to stick your nose in someone else's business. If you want other people to matter, you have let them stick their nose into your business. Caring is fine, but caring without action isn't mattering.

Me, my cousin, my family, we all care for each other. We just don't matter. There's no judgment in this, it's just fact.

I finished reading two books by Bart Ehrman that I bought in New Jersey last time I was there, Lost Christianities and How Jesus Became God.

He's not the only author I've read regarding the history of early Christianity, but I seem to have an affinity for his scholarship. To me, his appeal on the topic is similar to that of Carl Sagan to astronomy; an effective communicator of the basics.

I don't get the sense that he's necessarily trying to be controversial. Certainly he has an agenda but a lot of it is trying to push the boundaries of how people think about Christianity. And scholarship is just scholarship. Sure, there's good scholarship and bad scholarship, and with a controversial topic as Christianity in fact is, a lot comes down to opinion.

There may be a progression to Bart Ehrman's books. These two books I bought may be more his branching out beyond the basics. The basics are in his earlier books like "Misquoting Jesus" and "Jesus Interrupted" among others.

I might even suggest that his books seem to reflect the progression of his own personal discovery that his initial beliefs as a young, totally converted, Bible-thumping evangelical Christian were wrought with contradictions and inconsistencies. For God's telling of the ultimate truths of the universe, that shouldn't be so. It should be a neat little package that was incontrovertible, and the only people who could possibly disagree were certainly accursed heathen. 

As his studies into Christianity continued with an intent to enter the ministry, he was introduced to the scholarly historical reality of Christianity beyond dogma and blind faith. He did what most Christians don't do. He thought for himself and found the package wasn't so neat.

His early books are straight-forward. You can follow what he's saying because you can verify with your own Bibles (yes, even without a Christian bone in my body, I have two of my own copies of the Bible in New Jersey) what he considers problems. From there you can accept or reject his thesis, but it's pretty solid scholarship and logic as far as I'm concerned.

"Lost Christianities" and "How Jesus Became God" are more his branching out beyond the basics. They probe into areas that are necessarily more speculative. The former investigates the extant evidence of what "other" Christians believed before the Roman takeover of the religion. The power of the Roman Empire makes it easily credible that other understandings of Christianity would be effectively and efficiently suppressed and disposed of.

The latter looks at the development of early Christology and how it may have been influenced by existing or contemporary myths of the interplay between humans and gods. The idea of Jesus becoming God or being God wasn't wholly unique based on the wholly unique circumstances of the stories being told about him. They were formed within a context to explain what they didn't understand.

One point that Ehrman likes to pick at is how ultimately the Romans, in creating an orthodoxy, synthesized various contradictory ideas without explaining them. A big one is the assertion that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine; separate views originally held by different groups of Christians.

My personal snark on that contradiction boils down to whether Jesus shat and peed like the rest of us. Since he was fully human, of course he shat and peed. That's what humans do. And would Jesus's pee qualify as holy water? But the Romans also insisted Jesus was fully divine. So that must mean God shits and pees, too. Wonder what it smells like. I imagine floral bouquets, but that doesn't make sense. It must just smell like shit.

I don't know why I'm at all fascinated by the truth of Christianity; that it is largely based on myth and has only a little to do with the actual teachings of Jesus. Maybe I've always felt threatened by U.S. Christian hegemony which I didn't buy into, and it feels good to debunk it and knock it off its ideological throne.

Part of me wonders whether it's a past-life resonance where maybe I was Christian. Maybe it harkens all the way back to the few centuries after Jesus when the debates about his message were passionate and diverse.

So by my estimation I've been more or less useless and/or worthless to anyone in any meaningful manner for at least a good five years. Anyone who theoretically may make a claim against that, my response is that I haven't tried to be of use or worth to anyone. It wasn't my effort that made that so. I haven't made any effort for anyone else.

But even with suicide as my intended end, I'm still here now wasting space, creating waste, still contributing nominally to the economy by consuming. So selfish as I've established I am, what's in it for me?

The one unadulterated enjoyment I maintain is listening to music. With everything else falling away, I still listen to music almost obsessively. And it's so appropriate that my one last admitted attachment is to something so necessarily ephemeral. Whether it's a 3-minute pop song, a 10-minute prog rock or jazz song, a 30-minute album side, or 15-minute classical movement, the song ends, the enjoyment passes.

As such, it's easy. If you take it away, I have no problem giving it up. But if it isn't taken away, I indulge in it in all its harmless glory. Listening to and enjoying music never hurt anyone. It's still karma, I'm aware, and if I don't cut off the attachment aspect of it, it's something I'll still have to deal with in future lives in any one or many of innumerable possible ways.

Aside from that, I suppose I've just been reading to add to my selected understanding of the human experience on this planet through its history.

I may have reached the limits of Buddhist readings available in English through libraries and bookstores. I've bought available books that I've deemed important and I constantly re-read those. I maintain my personal mindfulness/dharma practice. Despite being of no worth to anyone else, that has been of worth to myself.

Early Christianity has been of interest, how it was formed and how it came to be what it is today. Looking at the history of early Christianity, it's surprising how it became what it is today, and not. Reading academic and scholarly studies of early Christianity, it's clear that modern Christianity is based on artificial mythologies; nothing or little based on teachings of an itinerant, apocalyptic Jewish preacher and probable miracle worker named Jesus.

But if it's all myth, how could it have become hardwired, literal fact of the truths of the universe for so many people? No one takes Greek or Roman or other cultural myths as literal. Of course it's far more complicated than anyone can sum up, but the brilliant stroke of having the Roman Fucking Empire take up the cause is probably of no little consequence.

I'm under the impression that Europe as a whole doesn't take Christianity as fanatically literal as the U.S. does. Many are very sincere about their faith, but there are also many who assume the supposed truths of Christianity because it's woven into the fabric of their culture. They don't question it because it's not important to do so. If they delved into the scholarship, they would probably be able to look at it critically, admit ignorance and agree with much of it.

I don't suppose scholarship will affect faith for at least another 500 years. It may be more than a 1,000 years before the scholarship is common knowledge and human beings can process it for what it is. I don't think the scholarship showing that Christianity has little to do with Jesus is any threat to Christianity.

Just because it's based on myth doesn't mean it's worthless. It has become its own institution and as much harm as it has caused, it has done a lot of good on the profoundest levels. It's just admitting that it's based on myth will be a hard pill to swallow for many, many generations.

Other histories I've read up on include Auschwitz, the arrival of the so-called Pilgrims, religious extremists possibly, on the Mayflower, the U.S. treatment of Lakota Native Americans and how their land was stolen, and the assassination of Julius Caesar.

The Auschwitz book focused specifically on that camp in the context of the Holocaust and embodies all the horrors one might expect. Poorly edited, though. The Mayflower book seemed pretty comprehensive and balanced. It doesn't seem to play politics and realizes that self-interest is the driving force in dire circumstances.

As for the Lakota and the Black Hills, it's impossible to stay away from the impassioned politics of the issues. As an American I sympathize with Native Americans, but certain white people will defend their actions to the end. My main beef about the book is that although it seems to sympathize with the Native American cause, it constantly refers to white people as "Americans" as opposed to the Indians, who aren't American?

I don't know why I got interested in the Julius Caesar book as soon as I saw it. Probably because it is such a famous historical event, and as much as the Roman Empire played in the development of Christianity, I was looking for insight into it.