105. chime

This is a response to an opinion piece by Tom Arcano in the Greensboro News & Record that I just fired off to the editor of the paper.

---

To the editor and to Mr. Arcano,

As a fan of all things Hitchens, I recently came across the op-ed tribute piece written about him in the News & Record, and as an atheist myself would like to respond. First, I too was devastated by the unexpected news of his death (though we were bracing ourselves for its inevitability, hopeful though that that day would be a long way off). He was a beacon and a role model for me and others in the rigorous pursuit of truth and the defeat of ignorance, fear and superstition in the world. Few champions of reason have walked the earth, and we were privileged to have had him.

Second, I do feel the need to address the statement posed in the headline of the article: “Hitchens as a role model for atheists today.” I will confess that in the hours after learning of his death, I found myself pondering the legacy that he left behind. Like many others, in the weeks that have followed I’ve watched countless YouTube videos and marveled in his ability to turn a phrase on the spot, or come back with a devastating coup de grâce to an opponent. I am also a huge fan of the works of Richard Dawkins (who helped crack open the door in my own journey of coming out as an atheist) and Sam Harris; but not as familiar with Daniel Dennett or Victor Stenger, the other two prominent “horsemen” of the New Atheism.

However, as I ponder these examples and the attitudes toward people of faith, I’m left wondering if the aggressive anti-religious stance of neo-atheism is a sustainable one. Nor is neo-atheism (or anti-theism) the only variant. There is agnosticism, skepticism, deism, agnostic atheism, agnostic Christianity, secular humanism, and even simply ambivalence to gods and religion. Personally I consider myself a post-theist, not so much rejecting god as considering him obsolete. Like the neo-atheists, I abhor religious fundamentalism and extremism wherever I encounter it. I’m concerned for children raised in such homes, who, like myself, are often inculcated before having a chance to choose what (or if) they believe. We should war against that, and against the exploitation of the poor and the undereducated, who are often unwitting targets of religious proselytization.

But the reality is that religion is not likely to disappear any time soon, and in its proper form I don’t think that it needs to. As Douglas Adams pointed out once in a speech, religion and the belief in god can serve its purpose. And it’s extremism and fundamentalism that has led to the problems in our world. So the question I am pondering is: Are we setting the right tone for discussion? We are just entering a global phase of civilization, with hundreds (even thousands) of beliefs and worldviews literally living next door to each other, sharing a garden wall. Some of these belief systems—such as the one I hail from—claim to be the One True Religion, with the corner market on Absolute Truth and the sole key to Life Everlasting. It was these that Hitchens reveled in going up against, picking holes in logic and pointing out inconsistencies and outright crimes.

However, is this the legacy that we ought to pick up? Yes, relentlessly pursue truth and evidence; and doggedly go after charlatans and oppressors. But just as non-theists tire of evangelicals relentlessly trying to save their souls, theists are just as put off by the caustic and often contemptuous tone of atheists. Take, for what you will, Dane Cook’s story about the man who huffily barks back, “I’m an atheist!” when Cook says, “god bless you” after the man sneezes. Or a more recent anecdote related to me by a friend who took a group caroling at an airport this year and had barely got through the first song when a store employee came over and asked them to “please stop with the religious music.”

Not that we have to hold hands and sing (insert your own feel-good campfire song here), but is it possible to discuss religion without having to poke holes in each other’s beliefs? The conversation seems to have devolved into ideological trench warfare, with an arms race of new and ever devastating ammunition to annihilate the opposition. Certainly there will be those who are converted by such tactics, but the majority will dig themselves deeper into what they already believe and only become more resentful of the other side. A worldview ought to be defined by what you stand for, rather than defining yourself by what you’re not.

I fear that what we are losing sight of is the distinctly human element in faith and belief. Why do people believe what they do? What benefit do they derive from it? Obliterate a person’s faith if you can—but what will you replace it with? Instead of thought warriors like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, what we need are diplomats like Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord or Jimmy Carter to initiate negotiations and address the needs and fears on the part of both theists and non-theists in order to find ways that we can live together while retaining our ideological integrity, and collectively declaring extremism unacceptable.

For non-theists, atheism is about the freedom of a mind unfettered by belief in god or gods. But where Hitchens and the neo-atheists have been (and can be) belligerent, I should like to see us strive for a more generous approach where we are able to get to the root of and address serious questions while always affirming the humanity of those who believe differently than us. After all, we’ve only one planet and we have to live on it together.

104. respect

Tonight on the Tuesday edition of the CBC’s As It Happens, a story was aired about an ultra-conservative sect of Jewish men who are creating a lot of controversy in Israel by demanding a return of sex segregation and enforcing strict standards of modesty for Jewish women. The story has been covered in the Jerusalem Post, amongst other places, but it’s caused something of a cultural clash between traditional conservatives and progressive secularists. (I’m not quite sure if “secularists” is quite how to describe the latter group, but it seems appropriate when contrasted with the more religious conservatives.)

The issue has struck a bit of a cord when, as the story on the CBC related, the men began protesting outside of an all-girl’s school in the city of Beit Shemesh, harassing and even threatening the children on their way to and from, and then even during, school.

This they do in the name of their religion. And their god.

The sect in question is known as Haredi Judaism. As the article on Wikipedia states, “According to Nachman Ben-Yehuda, ‘the Hebrew word Haredi derives from harada – fear and anxiety – meaning, he who is anxious about, and/or fearful of, the word of the Almighty.’ Nurit Stadler writes that the word ‘meaning those who fear or tremble, appears in Isaiah 66:5: ‘Hear the word of the Lord, you who tremble at His word’.”

There is also the unfortunate case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman convicted in 2006 of the murder of her husband (which carries a stiff prison sentence) but is being sentenced to death by stoning (now commuted to hanging apparently) for the separate crime of adultery. Not surprisingly the outcry from the international community and from amnesty groups has been vocal, but (also not surprisingly) Iran is stubbornly moving forward with the (dare I say it) execution of the sentence.

To modern eyes accustomed to a modern judicial system, this sentence makes absolutely no sense. Prison for murder—but execution for adultery? Where no one was physically hurt or killed, and the only crime is against a husband (which itself is a private matter)? This sentence only makes sense in light of the barbaric views on women still harbored within religious fundamentalism, where women are considered inferior to men by decree from Almighty God.

Even the Apostle Paul, whose writings (presumably) make up a large part of the New Testament of the bible, had this to say about women:

“Women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.” – 1 Timothy 2:9–15 (ESV)

The popular post-feminist interpretation of verses 11 and 12 of this passage is that Paul was not talking about all women but rather about one woman; that this woman rather was being disruptive and disrespectful of the entire congregation. Yet why would he bookend those verses with directives about women dressing modestly, and then with the reminder that it was Eve and not Adam who brought about the downfall of Mankind?

Yes, this was a different time and the views of the ancient world towards women were dreadful; yet those views have changed little in the Middle and Near East; in places where women often go uneducated, have few to no individual rights, and are themselves given as and considered the property of men.

This is the problem with religious fundamentalism, the kind that I was talking about in the previous article; the kind that is ultimately anti-human in nature. As Stephen Weinberg, who was often quoted by Christopher Hitchens, said, “If you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.”

(“But wait!” you might be saying (if you read my last blog, or have dialogued with me about ethics). “You don’t believe in good and evil. You’ve said so!” And quite rightly, I don’t. To expound on the quote, “If you want to make people, who under normal circumstances try to behave towards others in a kind and respectful manner, do things that even beasts would call beastly, you’ll need religion.” Things like:

• Gunning down a doctor who performs late-term abortions as he is serving as an usher at his church while his wife looks on in horror from her seat in the church choir;
• Blowing yourself up in a crowded marketplace along with numerous others who have done no wrong to you other than to hold differing beliefs;
• And protesting at the funerals of soldiers—who, ironically, died defending your right to protest—with hateful slogans like “Thank God for IEDs”, “Thank God for 9/11” and “Pray for More Dead Soldiers.”)

Fundamentalism not only loathes change: It rallies and often wars against it. It insists with a sharp finger jab to the chest that “the old ways were good enough for your grandparents, and it’ll sure as hell be good enough for you.” It screams, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” and sneers, “So, you think you’re better than us?”

Behind the black hats and the long beards of the Haredi; beneath the turbans, kufiya and the Pashtun dress of the Taliban; and the well-coiffed hair and tailored suits of men like Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann is fear. Theirs is a stern and unsmiling god, graven in their image, who looks down from Heaven with disapproval at anything that they dislike or feel uncomfortable around (which usually has to do with sex or sexuality, something god—even though he technically gifted us with it—is terrified of and detests). They fear anyone on the outside who thinks, believes or behaves differently, and cloister themselves, their families and their children away in guarded communities and schools (or home schools, in the case of many Christians).

It is this fundamentalism that presents the greatest threat to civilization and to progress. It’s the kind that demands that the whole world stop whatever it’s doing and bow down to its god and to its inexorable ethics. It craves the suspending of all human rights, of all human wants and desires, and of all human emotion and need. It demands worship and unwavering devotion, transforming people into mindless hordes marching unquestioningly into the yawning maw of its ravenous god, much like that iconic scene in the silent film Metropolis, where the main character sees a dynamo transformed into the god Moloch.

That’s a bit of a melodramatic description, yes, but no less true. These are the religions that demand that all females subject themselves to males as their superiors, to do with as they please, and as their god permits them to do. These are the religions that mutilate bodies according to the decrees of an ancient holy book. These are the religions that execute homosexuals for the supreme crime of loving someone of the same sex, but also the religions that brainwash gay teens and adults into believing that they are broken, diseased and in need of curing. These are the religions that promise that no matter how awful and unbearable life is on earth, that no matter how much you suffer, if you can hold out long enough, that Heaven is just around the corner, with a bright, shining afterlife.

In a scene from Tony Kushner’s Perestroika, the Angel delivers this prophesy to Prior:

YOU HAVE DRIVEN HIM AWAY! YOU MUST STOP MOVING!
Foresake the Open Road:
Neither Mix Nor Intermarry: Let Deep Roots Grow:
If you do not MINGLE you will Cease to Progress:
Seek Not to Fathom the World and its Delicate Particle Logic:
You cannot Understand, You can only Destroy,
You do not Advance, You only Trample.
Poor blind Children, abandoned on the Earth,
Groping terrified, misguided, over
Fields of Slaughter, over bodies of the Slain:
HOBBLE YOURSELVES!
There is No Zion Save Where You Are!
If you Cannot find your Heart’s desire
In your own backyard,
You never lost it to begin with.
Turn Back. Undo.
Till HE returns again.

This is what all fundamentalist religion demands of humans.

It’s what evangelical Christian parents demand of their gay sons and daughters, that drives those children to despair and sometimes to suicide.

It’s what Haredi men demand of Israeli schoolgirls in Beit Shemesh.

It’s what Iran demands of its people when it puts women to death for adultery, but not for murder.

Or when an Afghan court tries to force a raped woman to marry her attacker to spare her family the shame.

Evolution by nature moves forward. It progresses. The question is: How long before humanity lets go and progresses with it?

103. sucre

Let dreamers dream what worlds they please;
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good;
We’ll do the best we know;
We’ll build our house, and chop our wood,
And make our garden grow.
— Richard Wilbur, Candide (based on Voltaire’s work of the same title)

The past few months I’ve had chats that begin like this, or include questions like these:

• “Can you be good without God?”
• “Without absolute truth, you can’t really believe in good and evil.”
• “Doesn’t that just mean that you define what’s ‘right’?”

The first thing that pops into my head when dealing with questions like these is—did I sound like that when talking to atheists back when I was a Christian? Not that I really ever recall talking to nontheists that much, but I’m sure that discussions like that were had. There were several times when we went out witnessing or having “spiritual conversations” with non-Christians, and I’m sure that something like that came up.

This brings up the issue of what I actually believe now as a non-theist – as a post-theist. In blog post 99, I expressed my frustration with the current flavor of atheism, which can best be described as neo-atheism: the sort of aggressive, in-your-face, denialist movement that has characterized atheism as more of a negative worldview than a positive one. It’s the kind that loudly denies the existence of any supernatural being under any circumstances, and seeks to destroy all belief in god or gods the whole world over. It’s also the kind the kind that has no qualms insulting the religious faithful by calling them weak, small-minded, superstitious, gullible, and… well, you get the picture. [Insert insult here.]

And, of course, the two high priests of atheism – the Anti-Popes, if you will – are Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Or rather were, since Hitch is no longer with us. But their voices defined the movement in ways that few others have. Their vehement, shrill and oftentimes rude confrontations with monotheists (and fundamentalists specifically) and their call for all people to throw off the shackles of belief in favor of reason, science and intellect has been persuasive for many, and off-putting for others, including many atheists.

So some of us are left wondering: All right, now what? Rather than stand and define ourselves against a whole belief, what do we stand for?

Well, for starters, the first Humanist Manifesto, followed by the second manifesto (more fleshed out and developed than the first), is a good starting point. As the authors of the second manifesto wrote in their preamble, “Traditional moral codes and newer irrational cults both fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow. False ‘theologies of hope’ and messianic ideologies, substituting new dogmas for old, cannot cope with existing world realities. They separate rather than unite peoples.”

Religion, as I have come to realize (and let me be clear—I’m talking about the extremist and fundamentalist varieties that I’ve known, that I grew up with, and that most people associate with “religion”), is a distinctly anti-human enterprise. It puts human beings at the bottom of a hierarchy of importance, existing at and for the pleasure of a supernatural deity. It grants other human beings who supposedly hold the “Truth” permission to use and abuse others for their own benefit—or, for the truly devout, for the sake of “God.”

Why would I want an “absolute morality” like that—of a beneficent, celestial dictatorship? Hitch was fond of calling it a celestial North Korea in his talks, where “the real fun begins after you’re dead.” (“But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea,” he says in that video. “Does the bible or the Koran offer you that ability? No!”) Why would I want to pattern my life around such a system in terms of what I do and don’t do?

But that’s getting sidetracked slightly away from the original question: “Can you be good without God?”

The answer is: Yes. Millions of people do it every day. Is the only reason that you don’t rob, cheat, rape, lie and murder because of your fear of divine punishment? And is that the only reason for a theist to do good—because God’s watching? If so, that’s a pretty bankrupt morality, in the opinion of myself and other nontheists.

Morality seems to be a strictly human invention. While there is a rudimentary morality among some of the higher primates, the rest of nature seems to be a completely amoral place. It’s survival of the fittest. “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote. Our human morality seems derived from our deepest, most tribal, and most primal being that values getting along and cooperating over total anarchy. As tool-wielders, and through trial and error, we’ve worked out a code of immutable “laws” for human survival:

• Don’t kill other humans.
• Don’t steal from other humans.
• Being selfish is bad.

It seems to come from our ability for empathy, which evolved from emotional connections that were necessary to form bonds with other members of our tribe. We learned to see things “from the other chimp’s perspective.” We realized that if we don’t like the other guy beating us up, he probably doesn’t like me beating him up either. And it’s that ability to see through another person’s eyes that gives us our “moral” code.

I see morality as being essentially a complex equation of sorts. Most of the calculating we do automatically, as one segment on “chimp morality” shows on an episode of WNYC’s RadioLab that was about morality. In fact, if you want to really know what I believe about morality, stop reading this and go and listen to that. Then come back and read.

It’s a sort of three-dimensional cost/benefit analysis, where various potential choices are compared side by side, and the possible outcomes are weighed against each other. The solution is usually the one that does the least amount of harm to everyone, and carries the most benefits for everyone involved. It starts with the individual, then moves outward to others in the immediate circle of influence, and then goes further and further out until we can look at the potential benefit/harm done to something as large as the planet.

Doesn’t that sound like a better alternative than blindly following what your 3,000 year-old Bronze Age holy book tells you to do? Such as if it tells you to stone your wife to death for adultery? Or cut the foreskin off a newborn baby boy? Or tells you that homosexuals are disgusting perverts who are going to hell and deserve the abuse they get?

My morality boils down to the line from the closing song of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide (lyrics beautifully penned by Richard Wilbur, which is itself an adaptation of the last chapter of Candide’s novel): We’re neither pure nor wise nor good; we’ll do the best we know. Play nicely with others, treat them how you want to be treated, and leave the planet better than you came into it. What reason do I have for believing this? Absolutely none, aside from my own deeply-held convictions.

Supposing these ancient “moral codes” are merely humanity’s first attempts at describing what it means to be human? Explore and examine how we can live together in community? To try and put these deep and primal desires within us into words? We don’t really need a god to have handed those down to us.

Could I be a selfish bastard and try to get as much as I can from life while I can? Sure. But would it make me happy and contented? Would others benefit from my selfishness? No, they wouldn’t. (“What does that matter,” my theist friends will postulate, “if this is all there is?”) My humanity allows me to look at it through the eyes of my neighbors and decide what the best course of action is.

I don’t know if there is a God or not. I can’t disprove it any more than I can prove it. I take the last verse of “Make Our Garden Grow” to heart: Let dreamers dream what worlds they please; those Edens can’t be found. Ultimately, we don’t know, and speculating only makes things more complicated. It’s fun to think and argue about; but if there is a personal god out there, from the sort of universe it brought into being I think it probably considers belief in it—and all of the myriad of locks and fences we’ve built—pretty pointless.

Even ungrateful.

“Go outside!” it seems to be saying. “Get some sun—but in moderation! Enjoy nature! Enjoy yourself. Enjoy each other. Do good work.”

The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good;
We’ll do the best we know;
We’ll build our house, and chop our wood,
And make our garden grow.

102. wolcum

“It’s Christmas Eve! It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be!”
— Bill Murray as Frank Cross in Scrooged.

I don’t have many holiday traditions.

In my family we didn’t have very many, aside from putting up a fake tree, dragging out decorations (most of which were religious in nature), opening tiny doors on the Advent calendar, going to church on Christmas Eve, and making a birthday cake for Jesus, after which we sang “Happy birthday” to him, candles and all. They are, in fact, probably doing that right now.

Christmas for my family was about remembering the “reason for the season,” which was Jesus, and now that I don’t believe in him anymore I’m at a bit of a loss for what to even do. So today I’m engaged in probably the only holiday tradition I’ll ever follow: Streaming the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings College on the BBC 4 radio online. I encountered it quite by accident one year while driving to the airport to do some holiday caroling and have never missed a broadcast since. I still remember sitting in the car in the car park, mesmerized, listening to the intoning of the Christmas story, and then an audience carol led by organ. It’s more for effect than anything else; and anything read or sung by a Brit just sounds fantastic, but they really know how to do Christmas.

Right now everyone is gathered downstairs for Christmas festivities: Opening presents, having dinner, and generally enjoying themselves—or at least pretending to. I really don’t know what goes on in peoples’ heads this time of year; whether or not they actually buy into the “goodwill” message of the season, or if it’s just another social obligation. I went to bed last night feeling rather depressed, and the feeling only deepened in the hours since. It’s a special feeling, spending Christmas hiding in your room, curled up in bed in the fetal position and wishing that you could just hibernate until spring.

We had Christmas Eve at the house last night. Since I won’t have anything to do with my own family, this group has functionally become my clan, and I’m grateful to have friends who care and who are including me in their own holiday traditions. My roommate’s sister came over, and their dad and his lady friend came up from Rochester for the weekend. (The lady friend was drunk for most of the evening and managed to insult and offend me several times over the course of the night, so I’m really not in the mood to deal with her today—not when I’m feeling like this.) I was pretty drunk too as I’d started doing shots of whisky around noon, and then mixing whisky with just about any drinkable liquid. Everyone seemed to have a good time, wrapping presents, enjoying hors d’oeuvres, and watching Christmas films.

Everyone except me, that is.

As an introvert, it takes a lot of energy to be around people, and usually I have no clue what’s going on but I’m adept at faking emotions when the need arises. Most of the time I feel next to nothing, and it’s only around people whose emotions I can mirror that I can typically feel anything. But once they’re gone, it’s back to feeling “blank.” Or sad.

This is my first year as a nontheist. This is also my first year not celebrating with my own family—my own family who, for nearly two decades, I had to pretend around in order to maintain a modicum of tranquility; for whom I had to pretend I was heterosexual for (like the rest of them) to avoid any unwelcome questions or insinuations. I watched as my sister brought home her boyfriend and then, after they were married, her husband and look on as he more or less effortlessly took the place that I hadn’t been able to fill as the favorite Christian son. Now they’re bringing their son—my nephew—to Christmas, with everyone fawning over him like families do, celebrating the miracle of life and the love of god (or some such rot). Once I was out, there was something of a tacit agreement or an unspoken shift in thinking that we weren’t to bring up my being gay (homosexuality being the one sin their so-called god can’t stand), and my parents explicitly stated that they’d never accept anyone I ever dated. After all, we wouldn’t be dating. We’d be “living in sin.”

I’ve always been depressed around this time of year. That’s probably not really anything remarkable. A lot of people get depressed around the holidays for sundry reasons. For me, it comes down to the fact that I just feel like an outsider. I don’t understand family. I don’t get how it operates, how people relate, how they function, how they do it. If you were to press most people they’d probably admit that they don’t really know what they’re doing either. But even around this new family, I feel like a non-English speaker stuck with Americans, able to communicate in broken phrases and get the gist across but not truly understanding; or like Margaret Mead, studying the cultural practices and traditions of a native population to which I am an outsider.

A large part of it probably is that for so long I was so focused on keeping my family (my parents in particular, who are master interrogators) out that I never really learned how to let anyone in. I was so afraid of my parents finding out that I was gay and trying to ship me off to some ex-gay camp that I never learned how properly to interact with a family. And now here I am, nearly 29 and pathetically single, deeply desiring to share my life with someone but unable to speak the language. I’m like a Helen Keller, possessed of all my senses but emotionally deaf and dumb. I can communicate in a rudimentary manner, but it takes a lot of work. Writing is one medium in which I’ve been able to speak, but it still leaves me removed from normal society.

So what’s the point?

It’s painful seeing everyone else celebrating, going home for the holidays and looking forward to it; taking part in the festivities when I feel none of the joy or sense of merriment that they seem to. It feels as though I missed something; that I’m not trying hard enough, or doing something the wrong way. I’m looking in the window at everyone gathered around the table, sharing in each other’s company, and I can’t find the door to get in, which augments the feeling of emptiness that I have, and the loneliness.

And it didn’t always used to be this way. They say that memories aren’t enduring, but I can look back into my early childhood and recall the sense of magic that I used to feel around Christmas: The lights all around the living room, our tiny tree decked to the nines (which seemed a lot bigger then), the special candles lit, opening presents, and looking forward to receiving a new tree ornament from my parents. I remember going to church on Christmas Eve and feeling the sense of community and love all around, and that sense of being a part of something ancient and real as we lit candles and sang carols together.

But then I grew up.

We never did Santa Claus or anything like that. We knew that presents came from our parents and other family members, so there was never that belief balloon to pop. The excitement of getting presents was fun for a while, but then it gradually wore off, as most pleasures of childhood do. And then I began to notice that I was different from the rest of my family. They smiled a little easier. They joined in the fun more wholeheartedly. They loved Jesus, while I—ever like Margaret Mead—looked on in puzzlement, but all the time feeling left out, like there was something I’d missed that the others had latched onto, but I hadn’t figured out in time.

This is going to be a very different year, full of adjustments and opportunities to learn and figuring things out. I have to figure out how to handle myself around religion without turning into an iconoclastic berserker, as well as be around my religious friends. I have to find community with nontheists, and hopefully a boyfriend to boot. That’s what I really wanted for Christmas and, as usual, I was disappointed.

The ancients believed that during the solstice the sun died and was reborn. In some ways this Christmas was like that. I’m finally, truly on my own and having to find a new way to be.

It sucks being an adult.

101. yule

Do atheists hate Christmas?

With all of the talk about the “war on Christmas,” it would seem that the answer would be “Yes.” Atheists want to rain on everyone’s parade, and spoil the party with derisive and insistent assertions that “God doesn’t exist and neither did your baby Jesus!” We loudly point out that “Christmas” has pagan origins, and it was only later that the Church jumped on the Saturnalia bandwagon when they saw how they could use it to trick more gullible people into believing into the fictional god person and the even more fictional Jesus (who is just another recycled version of Apollo and Dionysus). We scowl and even growl at the happy people obliviously wishing each other a “Merry Christmas” and aggressively reply with “Happy Holidays.” We sue Christians for putting up crèches on public property, and try to force churches to take down their religious displays. We ban the singing of carols mentioning “God,” “Jesus” or any sacred motif.

Basically, we’re carefully and deliberately eviscerating any joy or fun out of the holiday season because, after all, atheists don’t believe in anything, and if we can’t have any fun, the rest of America doesn’t deserve to either.

At least, I think that’s something like what many of you will be hearing in church this weekend…

Today I saw this posted on Twitter and thought it ties pretty well into what I was going to write about today:

This is my first Christmas as a nontheist. This is the first year that I can remember where I haven’t gone to church on Christmas Eve, heard the songs and the traditional reading of the Christmas story, lit candles, sat with my family in a pew and sang “Cantique de Noël.” Of course, I see the origin of the symbols now:

• We light candles against the night in order to remind ourselves that morning is coming.
• We raise our voices together in song to remind ourselves that we are not alone.
• In the story of the birth of Jesus is the story of the death and rebirth of the sun and the triumph of light over darkness.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these. In the midst of all the reasons we have to despair and lose hope, here are tiny beacons to raise our spirits.

Now, certainly there are atheists who want to rain on everyone’s parade, and who think (like the fundamentalists also most likely believe) that they’re really doing everyone a big favor by setting them straight and down the path to true enlightenment. After all, most people don’t really think about what they’re celebrating during Christmas. They’re just employing the symbols and the language of the season as part of the social traditions that are really just about gathering together with family and friends.

I guess what most irks me now about the Christmas season is the mindless dragging-out of all the trappings, the chintzy songs and the spirit of commercial merriment that any of us who venture out at any point between September and December 25 are forced to endure. It’s having to run the gauntlet of holiday parties, avoiding having what’s left of your soul hammered to death by the relentless stream of advertising campaigns, being saddled with the artificial guilt of having to get everyone in your life some sort of meaningful gift, and listening to the million-and-one iterations of “Merry Christmas!” from well-meaning stranger, friends and family.

No wonder there’s so much depression around this time of year. Every year we’re forced as a society into celebrating a holiday without much context to its symbols or its history, that is little more than a thin pretense for stores to quickly rake in billions of dollars in revenue (and have you noticed that they’re starting earlier every year?). And to make it palatable, it’s thickly coated with a sugary glaze of saccharine emotional appeals. I could delve into a diatribe at this point on everything I hate about commercialism and how it and not atheists are responsible for the evisceration of everything that’s truly special about this holiday.

But I’m trying to focus on the positives.

To be honest, I really don’t object much to Christians having their “special time of year.” If it’s going to get you through the rest of the winter—great, I’m glad you found something that works for you. But for the sake of all that’s decent, I wish they’d observe it at home and in their churches, show a little regard for the beliefs (or non-beliefs) of others, and leave those of us who don’t want to go along with the rest of callow America alone. Because unlike most Americans (it would seem), I take God pretty seriously: Seriously enough to not believe in Him.

And I take words, symbolism and their meanings pretty seriously too. I wish that people who didn’t really believe in God or that “Jesus is the reason for the season” felt that they had to pretend like they gave a damn about God, going to church because “that’s what we do on Christmas Eve;” or that corporations felt the need to bombard us with vaguely religious paraphernalia for three months out of the year because it makes people feel a little more mirthful, a little more generous, and a little more willing to part with their hard-earned money once a year.

Just as gay marriage will one day hopefully restore sanctity to marriage (if conservatives get over themselves), I think atheists could actually bring back some of the importance to Christmas by stripping away the artificial trimmings and trappings and getting back to what really matters this time of year: being with the people we love the most. We were doing that before the Church came along and told us we needed Jesus to do it properly.

So let’s welcome return of the triumphant sun, of longer days, the coming summer, and the likelihood that we’ll do all this again next year.

100. singularity

This story begins with a boy, seven or eight years old, crouching outside on a mid-summer day under a clear blue sky. The boy is peering down into a puddle. It had been raining the day before and there were many such muddy puddles all around. He stares down into it, wondering, perhaps, if (like in The Magicians Nephew or Alice Through the Looking Glass) another world lies just beyond the reflection of the sky above; if that reflection is the mirror image of another universe, with another boy, who is also looking down into his puddle beneath his own clear blue sky.

He stares at it a while, and then it hits him like a bolt. He is looking into a puddle, at his own reflection, at a natural mirror. No such worlds lie beyond. This is all there is.

That, I suppose, is one of the formative moments of my cognitive development as a young person. Growing up on the outskirts of a farming town in rural Kansas, there weren’t many opportunities for… entertainment. So my two younger sisters and I had to create our own. We read books. We ran through fields. We acted out our favorite movies. We developed our imaginations.

Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family was perhaps not the ideal upbringing for a boy with an inquiring mind and insatiable curiosity. I was always the child in Sunday school asking questions, trying to figure out the story or the lesson, and aggravating the hell out of the adults with my persistence. In church during the sermon I would draw as the pastor talked, illustrating what he was saying in a way that made sense to me. In fact, one week one of my drawings was even published in the church bulletin as an example of how young people were “taking part in worship.”

I’ve been asked over the past several months why, after nearly twenty-five years (you can’t really count the first five, can you?), I suddenly became an atheist. My answer is always that there was no “suddenly” about it. Like the slow progress of evolution over billions of years, my own “coming out” as an atheist was a slow journey; with countless small changes and adaptations along the way, being gradually divested of what I wished were true, what everyone was constantly telling me was true, and accepting what is true.

At first I considered beginning with September 11th, 2001, driving in to college with my father and listening to the first reports of the attacks on the World Trade Center on National Public Radio; and then watching in chapel as the first and then the second tower fell, knowing that there were doomed people still inside them; or later that day watching the footage of people leaping from the top floors of the buildings rather than burn to death in the jet fuel inferno.

But that would be too easy.

Perhaps we should start in my living room when I was about eight years old, sitting in an orange arm chair and watching a Billy Graham crusade on television, and the reality of hellfire and damnation sinking in for the first time as he described the eternal suffering of those who died without having Jesus as their savior. There were tears that evening, and it frightened me so badly that I begged God to please spare me from that fate. I searched my soul for some sin that I might confess, sure that I’d done something to offend God at some point in my life.

A while later I ended up praying “the prayer” with my father, largely after my younger sister had done the same with my mom. I didn’t want to be left out, after all. And for a while things seemed good. I had Jesus now. I was “in.” But any changes I experienced didn’t last very long, and I found myself praying over and over again for that same feeling of newness that I’d experienced the first time.

It was never to last.

It wasn’t until my family moved to Minnesota and we found the church that I’d be at for the next fourteen years that my training as an evangelical really began. My fifth and sixth grade Sunday school teacher was an ardent Creationist, and at one point she even arranged for Ken Hamm to come and do a seminar. Those days were exciting.

My church also had several pastors who were great teachers and apologists. These men knew the Bible, and were able to communicate biblical truths in a way that was both relevant and instructive. There was no screaming, finger wagging or podium banging from the pulpit, and to this day I honestly believe that these men love God and love people. One of the pastors in particular deeply engaged my mind and my intellect, and challenged me to think.

And overall it was a positive experience. The people at my church formed a family of believers, both inside the church and out. They mirrored a kind of Christian love and acceptance that still produces warm feelings to this day. Some have experienced unspeakable shame, threats and all manner of psychological trauma at their churches growing up. Me, I recall the little old ladies in their red hats, and evenings in choir practice. (For a time we had a top-notch group, and not your regular warbly church choir—we were an auditioned and solid vocal ensemble.)

But on September 11th, 2001, I watched the towers fall and for the first time God seemed powerless and even uncaring. How could such a thing happen? How could God allow it? Didn’t God care about those people? And I had to assume then that there were many who “died without Jesus,” which meant that they were ushered from one hell directly into another. And it was the will of God.

I remember that morning that we had a speaker in chapel who changed his topic from whatever it was he would’ve been speaking about to Habakkuk, a prophet who I still admire and respect today. Habakkuk was writing on the eve of the arrival of the armies of Babylon, and questioning the wisdom of God in allowing injustice. “How long will I cry, and you will not hear? I cry out to you ‘Violence!’ and will you not save?” It was a particularly pertinent passage for that horrific morning. I don’t remember much of what he said, but the response did ring hollow in my mind. How could a good God allow that? Because we were Calvinists and fundamentalists, we had to assume that this was all part of God’s ineffable plan—but why?

That night, as I watched the image of the falling towers for probably the twentieth time, I said out loud, “There is no God.” And part of me waited for a lightning bolt to strike or an earthquake, but it was just me and the television.

It was then that I began to question my faith—not so much in response to the horror that I’d witnessed, not to mention the nightmares at the end of the 20th Century, of the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia and even in the Darfur. Rather, it was the passivity of God, and the seeming resignedness of his followers—almost a shoulder-shrugging at the inhumanity going on around them. As a child there was a song we sang in my family: “Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King. (That’s sung three times.) No more crying there, we are going to see the King…”

I remember watching the film “Quo Vadis,” a 1951 biblical costume epic with Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr and Peter Ustinov. In one scene condemned Christians wait to be sent into the Coliseum to be torn apart by wild animals. As they waited, they sang a hymn. And my mom began to sing that old hymn: “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.” But I remember thinking that it seemed such a waste to be killed over a belief, and pondering whether I could hold out under similar duress.

One night years later in my church’s youth group, shortly after the Columbine shootings our youth pastor proposed a similar scenario: A gunman threatening to kill us unless we renounced Christ. What would we do? My initial reaction was to go with the handful of Jesus deniers (after all, you could always ask forgiveness later), but I’m ashamed to admit that I ultimately caved to the pressure and the guilt towards being a dutiful Christian—but that same thought was nagging away at me. “It’s not worth it!”

For me, church was largely a social activity. It was about being with my family and my friends. God was an important part to be sure, but if I had to be honest he was more window dressing than a personal force for me, and theology was the language we spoke—and going to a Christian college for four years, I got pretty good at speaking it too. But as I felt I was growing more certain in my faith, so did the doubts that had steadily been growing in my mind since September 2001—was God even there? He never seemed to intervene.

In high school the husband of our children’s pastor died of brain cancer, and my family went to the viewing. Several years earlier one of the older boys lost part of his leg in a motorcycle accident. And as we stood there with friends, with the casket not far away, I wondered how she could still believe in God, when God allowed all that to happen, for her husband to suffer unimaginably before finally dying. They all believed he was in Heaven, with Jesus. They even went on how he’d been such a witness to the nurses, and to everyone he’d encountered. “That was Jesus in him,” they’d say.

I remember another incident from much earlier in my childhood, when one of the sons of our pastor in Kansas died in a car accident. I don’t remember the details, but the family’s car had hit a patch of ice or something, and the car had rolled, and only he had been killed. The rest of the family sustained injuries, some severe, but they lived. I was puzzled by everyone’s resignedness to this—how it was all part of God’s plan.

Some people have said, “It sounds like you just don’t like how God chooses to work.” And maybe that’s true. I don’t. But every time I’d watch the news or open a paper, someone was being murdered or robbed, and Heaven just seemed silent. And I started to wonder if it wasn’t that God was choosing to be silent, but that God wasn’t there.

On August 24, 2008, I came out as a gay man after over thirteen years of struggling with same-sex attraction and failing to overcome it. Imagine the pained confusion of a twelve-year-old boy, having read all of the books about adolescence, and knowing that I was supposed to be having thoughts about girls and instead having thoughts about… other guys. My friends were starting to talk about girls, having growth spurts, getting more masculine and… well… sexy. It wasn’t until the age of sixteen one autumn afternoon while raking the leaves outside, under a clear blue sky, that the thought finally occurred to me:

I’m gay.

It explained everything. But I couldn’t be gay—not and be a Christian! So I tried to be attracted to girls. I’d masturbate at night and try to force myself to think about being with a girl, and at first I’d try to trick myself into thinking about a guy and a girl, but the girl would always disappear and I’d get off with the image of being with a man sexually. And that led, of course, to more praying and begging for God to please take away those thoughts and feelings. But Heaven was ever silent, and I was left with the guilt.

So in 2008, when I finally came out, I made a sort of deal with God that I was going to figure this out. As Dan Savage said of the Catholic Church as a teenager, “That can’t be right. They must be wrong.” I started researching scripture in depth, stopping just short of studying biblical Greek and Hebrew myself—I was going to find out what the bible really said about homosexuality. And I found some really interesting information, but the more I looked and the deeper I dug, the less satisfied I was with the answers I was finding. And I started to become aware of this voice that had made itself heard that evening in front of the television that hadn’t gone away: “There is no God.”

Years previous to September 11th, I was sitting in the car listening to This American Life, and it happened to be the episode with Julia Sweeney where she tells an abbreviated version of Letting Go of God. In the dénouement of the show (which I’ve quoted on here more than once), she recounts the moment where she first begins to lose her weakening grip on the faith she’s desperately trying to hold on to:

One day I was Cometing out my bathtub, and I thought, “What if it’s true? What if humans are here because of pure, random chance? What if there is no guiding hand, no one watching?” I realized I had spent so much time thinking about what God meant that I hadn’t really spent any time thinking about what not-God meant.

A few days later, as I was walking across my backyard into my house, I realized that there was this teeny-weeny thought whispering inside my head. I’m not sure how long it had been there, but it suddenly got just one decibel louder. And it whispered, “There is no God.”

And I tried to ignore it. But it got a teeny bit louder. “There is no God. There is no God.”

And then I felt like I’d cheated on God somehow. And I went in the house, and I prayed. And I asked God to please help me have faith. But already it felt slightly silly and vacant, and I felt like I was just talking to myself.

And then, over the course of several weeks, God disappeared.

My teenage self heard this and felt both a mixture of self-satisfied pity, but also of fear. It seemed to me that Julia had just given up; that she hadn’t tried hard enough. Everyone has doubt, but you’re supposed to soldier on. After all, “the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 24:13). But there was also a part of me that was afraid she was right; and, looking back, knew that I was hearing that same voice too.

On the night of my birthday this year, after I’d just been dumped by Seth, the guy I’d been in the quasi, one-sided relationship with, it finally came crashing down. I’d been so excited about the church he was starting with my friends, and the thought of being in that church with them, and having a whole new community of friends—but mostly of being madly in love with him. And as I vented my rage at him, it was as if the glasses were suddenly taken away and for the first time I could plainly see that I hadn’t really believed any of it; that I hadn’t believed in God, in the theology I was so good at talking about, in Heaven or Hell, or any sort of divine purpose for my life or for anyone else’s life. It was a bit jarring to do it all at once, but I was finally being honest.

For years I’d had clashes with my parents over my “ungodly” behavior: The swearing, the drinking, the overtly self-centered behavior I’ve admittedly exhibited over the years. One night as my dad and I were driving up to Forest Lake to look at a car after my SUV had died, I admitted to him that I really wasn’t a Christian. I could “talk the talk,” but I hadn’t “given my heart to Jesus.” Not really. He said he knew.

This past summer I lived with my parents for a bit before finding a new place to live, and in one of the many discussions I had with them, my mom accused me of never really giving God a chance. “A chance for what?” I shot back. “God has never been real to me. Everyone else seemed to have these experiences with God, these personal encounters, but I’ve never once had any of that. Give God a chance at what?”

I’ve had religious experiences, to be sure, which were more emotional than spiritual. They were always connected to highly charged moments in my life, in periods of deep depression or brokenness, or to music. And there were a few times when I could almost sense the presence of God near me, when I was attempting to pray, but it was always fleeting, like seeing something out of the corner of your eye.

In the weeks following the debacle with Seth, I considered my decision to reject God. Was I leaving God, or leaving the Church? Was I just mad at Seth and this was my way of lashing out at him—or was there something more to it? As I thought and read and listened and discussed, the more I, like Julia, had to admit that there wasn’t enough evidence to continue to believe in God. Neuroscience is able to duplicate many of the experiences of transcendence that I had; and if I looked back over my entire life so far, God was always part of the window trappings, part of the paraphernalia of the Christian community I’d grown up in. And that wasn’t reason enough to continue. I could try to fake it, to go to church anyway, sing the songs, sit through the sermons (even though I didn’t believe any of it), and enjoy the company. But that’s not me.

I’ve had overall positive experiences in the church; and despite my family’s dysfunction (and the fact that all three of us kids are incredibly neurotic, can’t really trust anyone, never felt loved, and never feel like we’re good enough), a good home life too—but I never had a choice about what I believed or what I was taught, and we lived in an insular community where exposure to outside ideas was limited. It was God’s way, or Hell, and who wants eternal damnation (especially as an incredibly imaginative nine-year-old)? And I could’ve just as easily grown up in a home with bigoted non-Christian parents who didn’t want a gay son, but I grew up believing I was broken, disgusting and the worst sinner for being a homosexual or not trying hard enough to overcome it, and that God was going to send me to Hell if I didn’t literally straighten up.

Since coming out as an atheist, I’ve had much more peace of mind. I no longer fear Hell, or God. My thoughts are my own, and I’m free to think and believe whatever I want. And life without God isn’t as hopeless as we were always taught it was! It actually means more now than it did as a Christian. We live in an amazing universe, as a race of highly evolved primates who for whatever reason are able to think and reason and know and love and appreciate the beauty and wonder of our world. And the fact that this is the end result of billions of years of evolution makes it seem even more remarkable—and there’s still more evolving to come!

I don’t regret all of my life as a Christian. I made wonderful friends, and did some pretty cool things that were a part of that experience. And it’s made me who I am today. However, I’m left wondering who I’d be had I left religion sooner, or come out as gay sooner. But of course it doesn’t do any good wondering what might’ve been. That only leaves you crazy, bitter and stuck in the past. Things went the way they did, there’s no changing any of it, and here I am.

And all of those things have led me here, to realizing that who I am is who I always have been: the skeptical post-theist. I’ll always be the kid asking questions, aggravating the hell out of everybody else because I can’t just stop at the answer, and looking up from the puddle and at the clear blue sky and realizing that this is all there is and that there are no worlds on the other side—but also realizing that true wonder and magic are all around us.

And that that’s okay.

99. prometheus

I hate getting bad news. I hate it more when it’s about someone I have admired for years.

Yes, Virginia, Christopher Hitchens is dead.

It doesn’t come as a huge shock since we knew it would happen sooner or later, but it did come as an unpleasant surprise this evening to open my Twitter feed to see the bevy of #GodIsNotGreat hashtags and “Christopher Hitchens is dead!” posts. That put a damper on the rest of an otherwise pleasant evening.

Not surprisingly, major news outlets have published obits touting his career and many accomplishments (one of the best, in my opinion, has been The Guardian’s). No doubt they’ve had pieces ready to go since his diagnosis of terminal cancer. Also not surprisingly, many fundamentalist Christians have been expressing their glee at the passing of someone who they considered a mortal enemy. We’ll be hearing sentiments like, “Wherever he’s going, he’s there now!” And, “Boy, doesn’t he feel stupid!”

To be honest, I haven’t read much Hitchens’. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed for his column on Slate.com, and have enjoyed reading his views on everything from religion to politics to the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but have always felt a tad… overwhelmed by his intellect. I’ve fallen victim somewhat to the Systematic American Intellectual Laziness (S.A.I.L., for short) that plagues this land and its people, content with a few clever sound bites or quotes, or a summary in layman’s terms of what he’s saying instead of doing it myself.

Sorry, Hitch.

What is probably most unfortunate is that the thing he will probably be most remembered for is his polemics on religion when he had polemics on just about everything else. Right up until the end of his life (the last article of his published on Slate was dated Nov. 28, 2011), Hitchens was still using the scalpel of a mind that he had to go after Republican presidential candidates. It’s inspiring.

As I was driving home from Starbucks tonight, I was musing over this and some of what I’d read tonight, particularly the negative reactions from the religious community. Hitchens was proud of this, taking every opportunity to attack religion in scathingly brilliant diatribes and essays, gathering scores of enemies along the way.

When I first came out as an atheist, the only role models I had were the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, two of the more prominent and vocal members of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. Their vehemence at organized religion fueled and sharpened my own hatred of the Church and of God, which I’m not sure was the healthiest thing at that point since there were a lot of issues I was dealing with by not dealing with them and taking up arms instead. To be sure, I’m as staunchly opposed to organized religion—and to Christianity in particular—as ever.

But as I thought about the work that Dawkins and Hitchens have done, the books they’ve written and the rancor they’ve stirred up, I found myself wondering if that’s the kind of world I want to live in—a world of ideological trench warfare, where atheists are constantly on the attack and saying nasty things about theists, and vice versa; and where there is no hope for conversation or dialogue in the midst of the flying vitriolic projectiles and snares.

For the first time in history, atheists and non-theists of all varieties are free to come out and be vocal about their views. Not too long ago it was unpopular, even dangerous, to not believe in God and say so in public. In the 1950s you could be labeled a Communist. In earlier periods it could get you jailed, tortured, interrogated, and even murdered. There are still places where that’s the case, in particular countries where radical and extremist Islam are the dominant religions. But in the Western world, people are largely free to be atheists, agnostics and skeptics. We may still face discrimination, prejudice and abuse from religious bigots (and I’m using the dictionary definition of “bigot” here, not just as a slur), but non-theism seems to be rapidly growing in popularity and acceptance.

What comes to mind is the gay rights movement and the attempts for gays and lesbians, and now bisexuals and transgendered persons, to gain acceptance in society. Homosexuals, like atheists, have always been around but have lived underground for fear of persecution for being who they are. (I’m certainly not equating homosexuality and atheism, though in my own experience you can’t force yourself to believe any more than you can change your sexual orientation.) In order to gain visibility and start the proverbial ball rolling, the founding members of the modern gay rights movement had to be loud, controversial, counter-cultural and polemic. As Harvey Milk said, “You must come out.” After all, people can’t understand what they don’t know about or never come into personal contact with.

In a similar way, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have been the pioneers of neo-atheism in a world dominated by religion and religious factions. “We’re mad as hell as we won’t take it anymore!” Sundry flavors of Christianity dot the American landscape like radioactive Skittles; and we can’t stop hearing about ethnic violence in the Middle East between sects of Islam, between Sunnis and Shias, but also with the little-talked-about marginalization of the Zoroastrians (which still sounds to me like the name of some alien race on one of the Star Trek series).

Thanks to them and the flak that they’ve taken, countless atheists have had the courage to come out and identify as atheists and skeptics. Dawkins has stated that this was the purpose of his book The God Delusion; that while his wildest hope was that he might de-convert some of the “faithful,” his true intent was to help those who were privately non-believers find the confidence to no longer hide in the closet. His aim succeeded with me, for after hearing him interviewed on MPR I began my own quest for understanding that ultimately led to my letting go of God. But, looking back on my life, I was already there. All Dawkins did was open the door and show me at least one person who’d gone through it.

That said, just as most gays aren’t lisping drag queens or uber-butch lesbians, most of us aren’t as angry or acerbic as many of the prominent atheists. Or, at least I’m coming to realize that we shouldn’t be.

As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, flamboyant drag queens and butch dykes paved the way for gays like me to live out in the open—often with their own blood. But as important as those early days for the movement were, the gay community is experiencing somewhat of a convergence as we enter the mainstream. We’re doing away with sequins and feather boas (think the denizens of Queer as Folk) and getting down to the business of figuring out how to actually live our lives. (And, so long as a Republican isn’t elected President in 2012, one of these days we’ll be able to legally marry too.)

Neo-atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins paved the way for atheists to be out and proud, but I’m wondering if it’s time we set the vitriol aside and get down to the business of trying to figure out how to live together without killing each other. Sure, theists constitute a majority in the world today, and they tend to flex their ideological (and political) muscles a lot, and we need to fight that; but religion or belief in God isn’t going away for a long time—and neither are atheists. So do I want to alienate all of my friends who still believe in God by constantly attacking and belittling their beliefs (a là Dawkins)? Do I want to be the atheist in the Dane Cook sketch who takes offense when someone says, “God bless you”?

Is that really productive?

This is part one of a two-part entry that conveniently precedes my hundredth entry on this blog, wherein I want to flesh out how exactly I came to atheism and what I believe now. It’s as much an exercise for me as it is for others to read.

Here’s where I’ll leave this today: As much as I admired Christopher Hitchens, his intellect and his uncompromising articulation of his views, I don’t want to pick fights with every ecclesiastical windmill on the road. Nor do I want to waste another year of my life jabbing at the ghosts of my religious past.

It’s time to start moving beyond religion.

It’s time for post-theism.

98. cranberries

The other night I watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation for the first time. This was to correct a serious cultural deficiency in me—although now that I’ve seen it, I’m not sure that I’m actually better off.

While I realize that this is a lighthearted comedy (the purpose being to entertain), and the intent is ultimately to stress the importance of family and how we should stick it out despite how much we screw things up, offend, infuriate and torment each other (which—don’t get me wrong—is a positive message to send), it left me with the desire to never celebrate another holiday ever again, to never see my own family again, and to never attempt to ever deal with anyone else’s family at family gatherings.

This is probably not exactly the reaction the filmmakers were hoping to engender; and, to be fair, it’s not the reaction that most people will have when they see it.

Part of it is that the whole biologicalness of family gatherings makes me… uncomfortable.

All the parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters, all gathered together under one roof. Now, of course, this is my lizard-brain talking: The part of me that doesn’t get humanity or its social rituals. I mean, I understand the functions and roles, and even the origins, but I don’t “get it” like one of them. The thought of everyone, young and old, gathered around a table, just seems to me overly sentimental, like something out of a Norman Rockwell or even a Thomas Kinkade painting.

My immediate family was removed from our extended families by virtue of the fact that my dad’s family is all in Pennsylvania, and my mom’s family is all on the West coast, so we never really took part in large family gatherings at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and only rarely got to attend family reunions. So family is peculiar to me, and therefore makes me uncomfortable.

And yet there’s another part of me that longs to be included in such gatherings: In being part of a lovable, cute, frustrating, “overcoming it” family. I’ve never had that experience, and the thought of being accepted as “one of them” has a certain appeal.

This appeal has even more urgency to it since, for the time being, I’ve excised myself from my immediate family since they’ve made it clear that they’ll accept their son, but not their gay son and certainly not their gay son’s partner—if and when that ever happens.

I have this elaborate fantasy of finding a guy who happens to come from a big, really welcoming family who will just fall in love with me like I did with him.

His parents will be the parents I never had, and when we meet for the first time they’ll make a big deal about it, and I’ll go over to their place for dinner or something, and his dad will give me a huge hug that’ll crush the breath out of me and his mom will cry because they’re both so happy that their son finally met someone.

And they’ll insist that I come to their home for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and they won’t mind one bit if we stay in his old bedroom (because they’re not old fashioned like that). And I’ll help in the kitchen in preparing the big meal for the family; and they’ll be atheists and agnostics and humanists, and dinner conversation will center around philosophy or science or literature or NPR (because they’ll be articulate, educated, thinking people), and he’ll squeeze my hand under the table because he’s so happy that I’m there; and nobody will mention “God” (except in passing), and nobody would talk about going to church for Christmas Eve service, or want to bring out a cake to sing “Happy birthday” to Jesus (even though Yeshua was probably born closer to Easter if we take the account of his birth seriously). And yes, my family did that, cake and all. And we’ll go on vacations together, and they’ll insist on taking us out to dinner when they’re in town, and maybe go see a show, and vice versa.

And it’ll be the family I never had.

Heavy sigh.

But that is not what I wanted to write about.

What I wanted to write about is Chevy Chase—or rather, Clark Griswold. (Although maybe Chevy Chase.)

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, Clark Griswold is this well-meaning, passionate, caring, loving family man. And through the course of each of the National Lampoon movies, he ambles through situations with the well-intentioned grace and poise of a careening wrecking ball. He starts out Christmas Vacation dragging his wife and two very reluctant and freezing children out to a field in the middle of nowhere to pick out the “perfect Christmas tree.” In the process of he and his wife belting out Christmas carols at the top their lungs, he pisses of the locals with his inane driving, and nearly gets them all killed when he inadvertently ends up underneath a semi hauling tree trunks while playing King of the Road with a couple of red necks. He goes on about how picking out a Christmas tree is an American tradition, as if George Washington took time out from hunkering down with the Colonialists at the Battle of Valley Forge to drag a tree home on Christmas Eve to Martha to put up in their living room.

Quick primer on Christmas trees: The modern Christmas tree originated in western Germany as a prop in a mediaeval play about Adam and Eve, with the tree representing the Tree of Life. It first began to appear in British homes after the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert in the 1840s. It came to America in the 1850s via a publication known as Godey’s Lady’s Book, in which a picture of the royal family’s living room was reproduced with the royal crowns and whatnot removed in order to make it an American scene. So by the 1870s, Christmas trees were ubiquitous in the States.

Back to Christmas Vacation. It only continues to get worse from there. In his tireless and monomaniacal obsession with having the “perfect Christmas,” complete with two giant Christmas trees, every surface of his house being decked in lights (which, as one visual gag describes, drains the entire surrounding power grid to sustain it—a metaphor?), and a horde of relatives who descend obliviously on the house to add their own unique stamp to the mayhem (including one scene where a red neck cousin empties his RV’s septic tank into a storm drain). In the process, Clark’s kids and his neighbors are relentlessly and unapologetically terrorized in his single-minded quest for the “perfect Christmas,” which, in Clark’s mind, probably looks like something straight out of that Norman Rockwell painting, with the family happily gathered around the table, each joyfully taking part in the great American tradition of Christmas.

What we’re left with to witness is a nightmare that spirals out of control. And at the center of it all is Clark, with his almost child-like faith in the institution of Christmas and what it represents, no matter how much hell he puts everyone else through.

You know what else is like that? The fundamentalist Christian.

I saw in Clark’s enthusiasm for the Christmas tradition the same single-minded devotion to the teachings of scripture and to the God of the Christian faith: The belief that no matter how dark or confusing things get, what really matters is toughing it out, and that the only thing that truly matters is knowing God and knowing Jesus.

I also saw in his megalomania that same devotion in evangelical fundamentalist Christians that leads them to try to impose their beliefs on others, and cause reckless emotional and psychological havoc in those around them. On a personal level, I look at the issue of homosexuality and the untold lives of misery and agony that have been suffered by gays and lesbians over the centuries at the hands of Christians alone, all because a narrow reading of a number of scripture passages leads them to teach that homosexuality is wrong. And then there’s the doctrine of original sin, and how wickedness is basically imputed to every human being ever born all because “Eve ate the apple.” The church teaches that you’re an evil, worthless, corrupt, wicked, rebellious, repulsive and depraved sinner who deserves to suffer an eternity in Hell because God can’t stand the sight of you… all because of what someone else (who probably didn’t even exist in the first place) did however many millennia ago. So you’re constantly asking God for forgiveness for even the smallest of infractions (e.g., losing your temper, telling a “white lie,” watching a show with sex on it), terrified that he’ll send you to Hell anyway or are content with the story that God tortured his son Jesus to death on a cross, basically as a sacrifice to himself.

I kept thinking in watching Christmas Vacation, “It’s a commercialist holiday, for pete sake! All these ‘traditions’—the house decked out in lights, the huge and exorbitant feast, the presents, the bringing the whole family together—are a cultural construct that you’ve been suckered into! And do you really need a pool, or is that just another status symbol that will boost your self-image and your self-worth as a man, and provider as a husband and a father—or rather, in what America tells you that you should be as those things?”

Religion does the same thing. It holds up an image of what a Christian should be: An idealized, romanticized, impossible-to-live-up-to superman (or superwoman). It’s an image that millions of well-meaning and sincere people think they have to squeeze themselves into every day, and they beat themselves up when they ultimately fail to do so. Because after all, the only thing that matters is getting to Heaven to spend eternity with Jesus, at any cost—even if that cost is a lifetime of misery.

So Clark Griswold… you’re doing it wrong.

97. ambivalence

Only three more blog posts away from #100. It’s hard to believe how long this blog has actually been going, and how long it’s actually taken me to get to a hundred posts. Most of that ground has been covered in the past couple of months as I’ve been using this blog to explore and document my journey from Christianity to apostasy, and the various ways in which my thinking has changed and grown since February.

For my hundredth post, I intend to write out an essay on what exactly I believe now, how I came to atheism (aside from the “born again” moment on my birthday, which I shall try to reference as little as possible), and answer some of the questions that have been posed to me since coming out as an atheist.

Since wrapping up NaNoWriMo on November 28th and feeling utterly drained creatively, I’ve been taking some time off to recharge, feed and nurture my creative self. Most of the time I drive myself like a machine, with the expectation that my mind is this factory of ideas that can churn out and turn over high-quality work in a relatively short span of time. The fact is that this is not the case, and that I’m more like a creative “shoppe” that needs freedom, flexibility and room to work. And I also need to love myself and my muse, and treat it with love and respect instead of with an iron fist.

My brain also undergoes something akin to the reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles every couple of months, switching from musical North to verbal South, or what I call different mental “modes.” Sometimes my brain thinks in words, and I’ll write stories and novels; and sometimes my brain thinks in music, and I’ll do a lot of composing and music. Right now, after a heavy period of verbal writing my brain is switching back over to music; and one project in particular has caught my attention again.

Back in 2007 I started work on a setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo, a one-act play which I’m turning into a one-act opera. My friend Larisa directed it in the spring of that year, and I was immediately taken with it. Aside from how well her words translate into music, what attracted me at once was both the beauty of the language and the chilling message that it offers. The difference between what I do as a composer and what most composers do is that for me, music always takes a backseat to story and to text (and/or to action, whichever is driving the piece). When I’m picking a story or a text to set, my first consideration is whether it will be served at all by being paired with music, and how my music can serve the words and the story. (A lot of the time I feel it’s the other way round.)

My composition professor in college gets a lot of credit for this perspective. He would say that “opera is a mind expressing itself at a critical point.” I take that to apply to music in general: That breaking into song or playing an instrument is the only possible choice that a character could take at that moment in time, so I’m very careful about how and where I put music. For me, singing in an opera isn’t an obligation, and I’ll think nothing of cutting music if it makes more sense to have speech. After all, song is just sustained speech.

I hope that makes sense.

Anyway, I’m getting to the headline at the top of the page.

If you haven’t already, go and read Aria da Capo. It’s well worth it, and a short one at that. The title comes from the baroque song form, which is tertiary, meaning that it’s essentially in three parts: A B A, where you have the first part of the song, followed by a contrasting section and then a return to the first part. The play opens with a harlequinade, with a farce featuring the Commedia dell’arte stock characters of Pierrot and Columbine.

COLUMBINE: Pierrot, a macaroon! I cannot live without a macaroon!
PIERROT: My only love, you are so intense! . . . Is it Tuesday, Columbine?— I’ll kiss you if it’s Tuesday.
COLUMBINE: It is Wednesday, if you must know . . . Is this my artichoke, or yours?

This goes on until Cothurnus, the Greek muse of tragedy, enters and kicks them off. He then brings on two shepherds, Thyrsis and Corydon, who insist that they thought they had more time before they had to go on.

CORYDON: Sir, we are counting on this little hour. We said, “Here is an hour,—in which to think a mighty thought, and sing a trifling song, and look at nothing.”—And, behold! the hour, Even as we spoke, was over, and the act begun, under our feet!

They also complain that the setting is all wrong (“We cannot act a tragedy with comic properties!”), but Cothurnus urges them on:

COTHURNUS: Try it and see. I think you’ll find you can. One wall is like another. And regarding the matter of your insufficient mood, the important thing is that you speak the lines, and make the gestures. 

The shepherds begin their own play, with Cothurnus standing by as prompter, a tragedy about two friends who decided to play a game that goes horribly wrong:

THYRSIS: Let’s gather rocks, and build a wall between us; and say that over there belongs to me, and over here to you!
CORYDON: Why,—very well. And say you may not come upon my side unless I say you may!
THYRSIS: Nor you on mine! And if you should, ‘twould be the worse for you!

Over the course of this play, this game becomes more real as Corydon realizes that Thyrsis has all the water on his side of the wall, and then he discovers jewels on his side. In the end,  the shepherds kill each other, with Corydon strangling Thyrsis with a necklace of jewels and Thyrsis poisoning Corydon with a bowl of water. Pierrot and Columbine return and discover the bodies. Pierrot complains to Cothurnus:

PIERROT: Cothurnus! Come drag these bodies out of here! We can’t sit down and eat with two dead bodies lying under the table! . . . The audience wouldn’t stand for it!
COTHURNUS: (Off stage.) What makes you think so? — Pull down the tablecloth on the other side, and hide them from the house, and play the farce. The audience will forget.

They then start the first play over again, with the first couple of lines (“Pierrot, a macaroon,—I cannot live without a macaroon!”). For almost a year I was working on bits and pieces of music for this, struggling with the meaning of the text, and it wasn’t until I saw the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback, that I finally understood. It’s a film about former U.S. Marine Captain Brian Steidle’s experiences in the Darfur, documenting incidents of cease fire violations, and his eventual uncovering and exposing of the genocide taking place there. The last scene from Aria da Capo instantly came to mind as the story broke in U.S. papers but then quickly faded as a news item.

That film, along with the shockwave of 9/11 still relatively fresh in my mind, as well as the genocides in Bosnia and the myriad of other horrific events — murders, suicides, tsunamis, earthquakes — began to shake my faith in God and his supposed goodness.

So today I open my Google homepage, with a newsfeed from CNN, and there’s the headline from the story I posted at the top of the page (which you can read here). A 7-year-old girl was beaten about the head, stabbed to death, and thrown in the trash. Is that part of God’s ineffable master plan somehow? That somehow this all fits into his grand design?

Or perhaps that, as some of my Christian friends assert, he’s constantly working to restore the creation? In that case, God is looking more and more like a harried, overworked social worker, with an ever-growing stack of files on his desk, and more cases falling through the cracks than he’s able to keep track of, no matter how hard he tries to stay on top. That God deserves our pity and maybe even our assistance, not our worship or undying devotion.

However… this is the all-powerful God who created the universe and all life therein? The God who forgives sins, ushers the faithful into a blessed afterlife, and punishes the wicked with an eternity in hell? This is the deity Christians entrust their security to?

The more I look at that headline, the less plausible God (at least the Christian God) seems, even less plausible than he already seems to me. Again, I will cover more of this in post #100; and I certainly don’t believe in God anymore; but it is an interesting thought.