139. obtuse

“Defriending” is a messy business sometimes. What was once just a website started by a couple of college guys is now a major part of our global social fabric. What happens in the online universe now often has real-world consequences, as in the recent case of the Marine discharged for comments made about Obama on his Facebook page. Earlier this year in February there was a double murder sparked by a defriending. Couples’ relationships even begin, evolve and end on Facebook.

Yesterday I happened on an event that a friend of mine commented on that I wasn’t invited to (for reasons that were pretty obvious to me). Late last month I helped some friends move out of a house they were live in and taking care of while a friend of theirs was on deployment. Soon they’ll be moving into a new house and have enlisted more friends to help them. I’ve known them for many years. We went to the same church for years, practically grew up together and were involved together in the young adult ministry, and for a long time I thought that we were fairly close. These are the friends that started the GLBT-friendly church.

Now they’re moving into a house with Seth.

I had a chat with my housemate this morning on the way to work about it because I have conflicting feelings about this. On the one hand I see the positive aspects of it for them. My housemate pointed out that it won’t be as easy for him to be a total slut living under the same roof as my friends, but for them there’s also the part of being a Christian community together. And I get that.

And frankly, just because Seth and I had a major falling out (understatement of the decade right there) doesn’t mean that anyone else should pattern their lives around that. To an extent I’ve been expecting my mutual friends to do that, which isn’t very fair. They have to do what’s right for them, which I can respect. That doesn’t mean, however, that I have to be okay with it—which I’m not.

Ultimately, I have to do what’s right for me. They’ve essentially made a decision about the future of our relationship, and by living with Seth they’re sending the message (and I know them well enough to know that it’s not intentional or personal) that they’ve taken his side against me. I know that they care about me to an extent and they don’t want it to be this way, and I don’t expect them to like it, but at some point you have to draw the line where personal integrity is concerned. They can’t have it both ways, and it’s not fair of them to expect me to go on as if nothing happened.

So I decided to sleep on it, to see if I was still upset enough in the morning about this, and I was. So my two friends have been defriended, both in the digital and in the real-world sense. It’s unfortunate, but I have to respect myself enough to not be a doormat. As much as they say they care and love me, moving into a house with the ex-lover who ultimately treated me like shit is hardly a sign that they want to continue to have me in their lives. So I just have to move on.

In physics there exists a hypothetical particle known as a strangelet that is so unstable that any matter they come into contact with is also destabilized and converted into something called “strange matter.” Without a working knowledge of physics and how quarks work, that’s about the best I can do to explain it; but that’s essentially what Seth has been for me. A strangelet. He wandered into my life like one of those rogue particles and because of his cosmological mass rearranged everything.

Like a passing star, he dislodged me from the solar system I’d been orbiting comfortably in for some time, and now I’m off into interstellar space, with ever-growing distance between the people that I used to know. As a consequence of knowing him (not that it’s his fault—I was headed in that direction before we met) I became an atheist, which affected my relationship with my family, friends and everything.

My housemate and one guy on Facebook made the comment that leaving Minnesota won’t necessarily solve everything. And it’s true. That’s wishful, magical thinking to believe that changing geography will alter the situation. But I do need to physically distance myself from this place and from the people who are involved.

I am developing a new secular community of friends right now, people with whom I share values, so it’s not like I’m just sitting around being lonely and sad. If I have to be single for now, I may as well be as busy as possible, if only as a distraction from the fact that I desperately want to be in a relationship.

But I’m through being there for people who aren’t there for me.

138. aperçu

Last week on the way home from vocal rehearsal I listened to this past weekend’s episode of This American Life (462: Own Worst Enemy), and then again on Monday morning while doing a project at work. The second act, The Conversation, features a fictional radio play about a guy who is basically sabotaging his love life by being a complete jerk, but seems incapable of doing anything about it.

It all starts with a phone call.

This girl he’s meeting at a coffee shop for a date calls him up to tell him that she’s running late, but that she’s close. It goes downhill startlingly fast. At first she’s pleasant, but then she seems to be reacting defensively, as if talking to a completely different person. In a moment, we realize that she is. She finally tells him to forget it and he sees her walking away down the street. The guy is confused, but by chance recently downloaded an app onto his phone that allows him to record phone conversations. (Not creepy at all.) He plays back the call. It’s the same words, but he’s irritable, sarcastic, condescending, even a little cruel. He realizes that she was right to walk away, and he doesn’t blame her.

What follows borders on the obsessive as he tries to fix himself, to force himself to be more aware of how he’s coming across to other people. He calls the girl back and apologizes, but like the first time it quickly goes downhill. He admits to playing back the recording of their phone call, and she’s understandably creeped out. “That’s really creepy,” she says. She then admits to lying about her dog being at the vet, and then lying about her dog actually dying the day of their date, which she used to explain why she was so upset. It turns out that she’d met someone else the day before and had been planning to blow him off but didn’t know how to do it.

It was… uncomfortable.

For several reasons.

In some ways, I rather feel like some of that’s going on in my own life. Sometimes it’s like my mind is home to two distinct people. One is the nice version of me, the one that people are (inexplicably) drawn to. The other me is stormy, dark, changeable, and emotionally unstable. He reacts violently to rejection. To abandonment. To being disrespected. To betrayal. Or perceived versions of any of these. And the change can happen in a matter of seconds, as anyone who has witnessed it can attest to.

A few weeks ago I was in a snit over the state of the kitchen in my home. My roommate’s dad moved in about a month ago and is fond of cooking large meals, but not cleaning up after himself, and I’d had to clean the entire kitchen more than a couple of times. It’s a matter of a difference in living standards (although admissions of simple laziness have been made). I was raised that you don’t go to bed until the kitchen is clean. My roommates are a bit more… lax about it.

I, however, did not handle the situation well. After one night where I was up until nearly 1 A.M., I chewed my roommate’s dad out the following morning, telling him in no uncertain terms how angry I was, how disrespected I’d felt, and that he needed to start cleaning up after himself. This culminated in a huge fight between my roommate’s and I one night, and things haven’t really been the same since. The kitchen has been staying pretty clean, Mark and I have chatted a few times, but I haven’t really talked to Emily in weeks.

The kitchen was really about hearing from Emily that Seth was dating that fuckwad closeted pastor; about feeling as if I have no control in my life; hating the fact that I’m single and that none of my romantic relationships have ever worked out; and basically hating myself.

Regarding my romantic life, I’m unsure whether the guys in the Midwest just aren’t my cup of tea. The majority of them seem religious or spiritual, and they also tend to have a shelf life of about a month or less before they literally disappear on me. There have been a few exceptions, but most recently a guy I’d met on OkCupid and had been talking to on the phone and exchanging texts with for a few weeks suddenly disappeared. This mirrored a similar experience several years ago, where I met this guy about a month before he moved to the Pacific Northwest, we hit it off, decided to keep talking. And then he abruptly disappeared.

Then I’m also wondering if it isn’t just me. If I’m not somehow to blame for the destruction of all of my relationships. When my younger sister was going through therapy for her eating disorder, she came home one day to announce that her therapist had called me toxic. Needless to say I did not take that news well, but I partly knew that it was true. I have an obscene amount of unresolved anger that’s nearer to the surface than I’d like, and depending on my mood it doesn’t take much to set me off.

A lot of the anger has to do with my family, and about basically having over two decades of my life stolen from me by fundamentalism and the lies that it told me. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I am a single gay man nearing age 30 who hasn’t been able to make a relationship last longer than six months, watching everyone else basically just fall into happy relationships while I can barely even get anyone to flirt with me. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I’m not good at anything enough to make a career out of it.

Basically I feel like a raging destructive spewing poison, magma and ash.

Save yourself.

137. fugitive

It’s a cold, wet day in Minneapolis. I was greeted upon leaving the house today by a disgusting, freezing mixture of rain and snow. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to turn around, call in sick and go back to bed.

This morning I was going through my email inbox and decided to clean out some subscriptions that have been cluttering things up. At some point I signed up for the Google and Amazon offers, but for some time I’ve just been deleting them as they tend to be things that most of us never end up using.

The cruelest offers for me are the ones for “couple weekends” or “____ for two.” It’s egocentric, of course, to assume that the universe would conspire against me in this way. It’s my subjective experience superimposing a narrative over arbitrary events and happenstances that causes the bile to rise in my stomach at the thought that Google is mocking my continued and miserable single existence. But I have a hard time not taking it somewhat personally.

A few months ago I cleaned out my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house, shortly after the events of Christmas day when I cut ties with them completely. They were going to be out of town for a few days and asked me to come by and finish moving all of my stuff out while they were gone. The results were about eight full paper shopping bags of recycling, four large trash bags, several bins that I took to the local Goodwill, and a large box of Christian fundamentalist books I’d amassed over the years. It made me realize just how much stuff we hold on to for purely sentimental, irrational reasons. There were magazines I still have memories reading and enjoying; notebooks of math homework and past assignments; papers I wanted to store for future reference that I hadn’t looked at in years. These were things I had no reason to keep and was just taking up unnecessary space, but felt uneasy and even defensive about getting rid of. It’s anal-retentive, yes, but it still felt comforting to know that a record of my past was in a box somewhere. Needless to say, feeling the weight of nearly twenty-five years-worth of paper and finally putting those bags in the recycling bin was surreal. But it felt good to be free of it at the same time.

The same could be said of my religious beliefs. This past weekend we had a bi-monthly former fundamentalists gathering at a coffee shop near Loring Park in downtown Minneapolis, where part of the gathering is going around and telling our stories of how we left religion. Part of the reason for that is because we generally have someone new at the meeting every time, so we want to give them an opportunity to tell their own story and have their own experience affirmed, as well as to hear our stories. It helps to hear these stories as it reminds us that we’re not alone, even though it often feels like that in a culture where one of the most-often-asked questions is, “Where do you go to church?” and where references to god or to prayer are too common.

For years I held on to my religious beliefs for largely the same reason as I held on to all that stuff. It was comforting and familiar, and I had strong emotional attachments to it. It was my past and my present; my family and my community. But they were gathering dust, and I hadn’t really looked at them in years, and if I had to be totally honest with myself it wasn’t likely that I was going to look at them again any time soon. I hadn’t truly believed in years, even when doing all the research to prove that the bible wasn’t really incompatible with homosexuality—that it was the religious leaders and translators who were prejudiced and bigoted. In reality I was just trying to find reasons to continue pretending that I was a Christian after all. In retrospect, I’m not sure if I ever believed at all, even as a child.

After a couple of moves, my attitude towards “stuff” has changed radically. Whereas ten years ago I couldn’t imagine being able to let go of anything, now I look at all of my possessions with the knowledge that someday I’m going to have to pack all of this stuff up into boxes—and do I really want to lug this downstairs to the truck, haul it across country and then lug it all the way up into my new apartment? It’s just not worth it.

As an atheist now, I view my beliefs largely the same. Knowing that we are finite beings, with an afterlife highly unlikely and this life being all there is, I now treat my beliefs with the same economical thriftiness as I do my belongings. Belief in god and all of the suppositions that go along with that when there is little to no evidence for belief in such a being now feels like lugging a heavy box around.

One of the tenets of Buddhism is renunciation of possessions and the hold that they have on the self. While I don’t believe in any sort of universal consciousness or spirituality, there’s a lot of wisdom in that. It takes work and energy to hold on to things, and they inevitably weigh us down through upkeep and the effort it takes to retain them. One website I looked at said this about Buddhist philosophy: “The quest for comfort is also futile as it is the nature of our mind that the feeling of happiness when our desire is satisfied is only temporary… Thus we spend our lives in the vain and futile quest for possessions, experiences, relationships and more and we are never satisfied. We are forever projecting outward.”

If we’re ever going to be free, our perception towards “stuff” needs to change.

136. caparison

Dunno about anyone else, but I’m always relieved whenever a religious holiday finally passes. Christmas and Easter are probably the toughest to get through, mainly because they’re the two holidays that have entered our national consciousness. Even non-Christians observe them, though for them it’s more about the family gatherings, the food and the gift giving at Christmastime than it is about the birth and death of Jesus Christ, who doubles as a swear word for those of us who don’t accept his deityhood.

I’m often asked, “If it isn’t true, if we’re just deluding ourselves why does it bother you so much?” And it’s a fair question. We don’t begrudge the people who think that they’re Napoleon, or that nefarious government agencies are secretly plotting against them. To be safe, of course, we give them a wide berth, but thankfully we’re past the days when we persecuted people for their delusions. Today we acknowledge that these are symptoms of a malfunctioning mind, and hope for recovery and that the affected individual will someday be a fully-functioning and productive member of society again.

That’s mental illness. In most cases it’s a matter of genetics that comes down to a chemical imbalance in the brain, or even some kind of damage to the brain itself (in the case of something like post-traumatic stress disorder), and people can’t be faulted for that. You’re not going to blame someone for hearing voices or experiencing severe depression. There are drugs and treatment programs to help.

In the case of religion, though, we accept behavior that would normally get a person locked up. We think it’s acceptable to mutilate the genitalia of male infants because a 2,000-year-old book commands it. We tolerate street preachers standing on sidewalks and telling people that they’re wicked and awful and going to hell unless they say a magic prayer to an imaginary god and stop drinking, swearing, and having sex. We allow children to be taught that the earth is 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, and that some deity in the sky is watching their every move and can read their thoughts (especially when they reach adolescence). We permit parents to deny their children medical attention because of the belief that to intervene is to interfere in the will of their god, dooming the child to a life of otherwise preventable but excruciating suffering and even death.

Of course, not everyone holds such extreme beliefs. Not every religious person goes around openly judging everyone who doesn’t believe what they do. Not every religious person rejects scientific evidence or proof. Not every religious parent circumcises their male children because of their beliefs (and if they do, it’s often in the interest of hygiene). Nor does every religious parent believe that god would send them and their children to hell for going to the doctor. It’s wrong to generalize, no matter how tempting it is to do so.

My problem with Easter is that it stands for two appalling lies. The first is that Easter itself is really a pagan fertility festival. The name can be traced to several ancient gods and goddesses, including Ēostre, the Saxon-Germanic goddess of the dawn, whose festival fell around the end of March and early April, and her observances involved both hares and eggs. Other possible candidates include the Greek goddess Demeter and the Assyrian fertility goddess Ishtar.

The second lie is that Christ’s death was a noble sacrifice. Noble sacrifice? As if having yourself butchered up for an imaginary sin that you invented in the first place is noble! It’s a bit like creating an imaginary virus, telling everybody that they were in terrible danger and then waving your hands over them in order to cure them of said virus. But this is something that people truly, sincerely, deeply believe! They think that, as John 3:16 states, “god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son; that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (I can still quote it in the King James Version.)

What I object to is the fundamental belief that many Christians have of the certainty of the existence of god. Sure, some atheists may be certain that there is no god—but how can you be sure of something for which there is no evidence? Atheists can’t disprove god any more than theists can prove it, so what does it really matter?

I don’t have much of a problem with religious people who shrug and admit that they don’t know, that they want to believe, and refuse to force that belief on others. That I can at least respect. Sometimes you can’t help who you love, as I should well know, and that probably extends to belief as well.

What I object to the kind of mindless bible thumping that’s been going on lately in conservative circles, especially where women’s and gay rights are concerned. I object to the kind of magical thinking that allows religious people to retreat into their places of worship and leave the fate of the world and their fellow human beings to their imaginary god. I object to the kind of extremist, political, dominionist ideology that leads them to think that this world is theirs to take back; that we all ought to strap ourselves into their subjective straight jackets; and that, by virtue of their birth, all children ought to be likewise fettered as well before they have a chance to learn to think for themselves. I object to the kind of theist who looks at evidence and rejects it based on the fact that it contradicts something in their holy book written thousands of years ago by pre-scientific people.

I object to living an unexamined life, to never questioning what you’re taught or what you believe, and to not being true to the essence of who you are as a person. At best, we live a hundred years, and a life is a terrible thing to waste.

135. agley

Consider again that dot. That’s here.

That’s home.

That’s us.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

— Carl Sagan (1994). Pale blue dot: A vision of the human future in space.

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I don’t know that I really have much to add to Sagan’s words. They were written in response to a photograph taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had just completed its mission to the planet Saturn. Its camera was going to be turned off in order to conserve energy for the remainder of its journey out of our solar system. Its other instruments would still be active as it continued to send back its findings, but Sagan convinced the NASA scientists to turn Voyager around and take one last picture of Earth before it headed out towards what we’d later learn is the heliopause—the beginning of the edge of interstellar space.

With this image, for the first time, we saw ourselves in relation to the whole solar system, and it in relation to the universe as a whole. It’s one thing to know the size of the universe we live in. It’s another thing to actually see it. This world that feels uncomprehendingly huge is indeed a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot. The image was captured at a distance of 3.7 billion miles from earth. The dot is a mere .12 pixels wide, set against the blackness of space. That’s home. That’s here. That’s us.

Given that scale, it’s truly mind-boggling how utterly insignificant we are, and if more people truly understood that and how lucky we are to even be here, things like politics and land wars would end completely. Maybe that’s a bit idealistic, but I’d like to think that hot button topics like gay marriage and women’s reproductive rights wouldn’t even be an issue, because what does it matter? Religion taught us that we’re special snowflakes made in the image of our Creator; and we’re admittedly probably something of a phenomenon in the universe. Sentient life is likely a relatively rare occurrence. Yet here we are.

In this tiny space of time we call a “lifetime,” we are given the improbable opportunity to think, give, feel, love, imagine, enjoy and marvel. It will be another 40,000 years before Voyager 1 comes within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445. By that time you and I will be long gone and forgotten, and the human race may have already made its way out into the heavens. By that point we may have even made the next leap in our evolution as a species. By that point it’ll have been nearly 100,000 years since homo sapiens appeared on the scene. We’re rather overdue for an upgrade as it is. Still… it’s awesome to think about.

Due to the nature of the brains we developed by virtue of the rock and the chemicals we stewed in, we are always learning, always processing new information. Yet some of us insist on living in fear. Life is far too short and too grand to be lived in a tiny box, in a straight jacket, with blinders on and earplugs in. We are explorers, adventurers, and it’s a crime not to take full advantage of every minute we’re lucky enough to enjoy on this pale blue dot.

134. apotropaic

“I had just moved to New York and was wondering if I was going to be alone for the rest of my life. Part of the problem was that, according to several reliable sources, I tend to exhaust people.”
— David Sedaris. “See You Again Yesterday.” Me Talk Pretty One Day

It’s weird thinking that at this time last year I was passed out on my friend Emily’s couch. We were both spending Easter as single adults, me still freshly emotionally raw from the ghastly episode with Seth on my birthday and her having recently separated from her husband. Life was not going particularly well for either of us at that point (one could justifiably say that conditions haven’t changed that much, at least for me, since then), and that ended with us getting fashionably drunk and passing out.

I’m getting sick of referencing my birthday. Doubtless anyone who reads this with any degree of frequency is thinking the same thing.

Tonight I watched What About Bob? with my roommate Mark. It’d been a while since I’d seen it, having grown up with that movie. We were actually introduced to it as a family by an individual who closely resembled Bob in many ways. She claimed to be a survivor of a Satanic cult in Shakopee, and at the time we knew her was going through treatment for dissociative identity disorder, although we later came to find out that this was not true. Most of the things she told us were not true, and yet like Bob she drew us in and convinced us to let her into our family.

As it’s been a while since I’d seen the film, there were several new takeaways in the story, especially relating to Bob.

Bob has, according to Doctor Marvin, a “multi-phobic personality characterized by acute separation anxiety and extreme need for family connections.” He’s like a big neurotic golden retriever, whose need for attention and acceptance is so profound that he pulls everyone around him into his orbit; and because he’s so well-intentioned (like a child, really) nobody can really hate him, even for making demands on his hosts, such as asking about a salt substitute at dinner or rushing in calling for a bowl of water for his fish (who is about to explode from rage over being locked up in a mason jar all day). If anything, they love him for his lovable craziness.

In coming under Dr Marvin’s psychiatric care, Bob begins to radically warp his doctor’s world. Everyone from the ladies at his building’s service to his family comes under Bob’s spell. He’s essentially evicted from his own life by a “textbook narcissist” (though a therapist like Dr Marvin should really know better than to throw around terms like that).

In some ways I can be just as destructive as Bob within my own relationships. Not to pull the victim card, but I did have a pretty toxic childhood and young adulthood in my fundamentalist Christian home. Ask anyone who grew up in a family like that and they’ll tell you that you basically become a master at pretending just to survive. Add the “figuring out that you’re gay mid-way through your teen years” element and on top of trying to be a good Christian kid, attempting to prevent your parents from finding out that you’re gay and possibly going ape-shit, throwing you out of the house and/or shipping you off to an ex-gay camp to “cure” you. Sure, I didn’t have a physically abusive parent. I wasn’t sexually abused. There wasn’t drug use in the house. Lots of people had it worse. But my home life essentially left me unable to truly experience any positive emotions, to form close bonds with other human beings (since my sixteen-year-old self is trying to keep everyone at arm’s length so they don’t find out I’m gay), and to give and receive love.

There’s a whole slough of other issues, but I have been somewhat of an emotional terrorist lately. What most people don’t realize is that bullying isn’t always of the active, playground variety. Sometimes it can run more insidious. I’ve functionally reduced the people closest to me to walking on egg shells lest they set off my trigger-happy anger that lately has been riding close to the surface. Part of it’s revisiting the Seth wounds through new acquaintances, and learning that he started pursuing a new no-strings-attached sexual relationship with another guy not three weeks after my birthday. It was beat-for-beat how our relationship began; and then just a few days ago I found out that he’s now dating someone (some closeted pastor here in the Cities whose music plays on the conservative Christian station KTIS now and again apparently).

And I’m still single. And the most important thing you need to know about me is that I’m highly competitive, so it’d be understatement to say that I’m feeling a tad lapped. Emily tells me that a relationship isn’t a race, but my limbic brain says differently. Part of it is just wanting to replace him with someone who I care about and who cares about me in return, but the louder part wants him to hear about how well I’m doing and that in spite of what he did to me that I succeeded. (In my world, the height of success is finding a boyfriend.)

What infuriates me is that, like Bob, all of this comes so easily to him. He just waltzes in and everything falls neatly in place for him, while I (like Dr Marvin) watch helpless as everyone unwittingly conspires to take it all away from me, evicting me from my world. And the awful thing is that I can’t beat him. He’s too charming, too sexy, and too lucky. Some people just have all those qualities. And some people, like me, are fucked before they even leave the starting gate.

I’m nearly 30. Only in movies does the protagonist find love late in life.

133. catechize

Last week I was listening to an episode of This American Life about two women who were switched at birth, only to find out about it in their mid-40s—after they’d both grown up, gotten married and had families of their own. To summarize, there was a mix-up at the hospital in 1951, which one set of parents quickly deduced (from things as blatant as their baby weighed radically different from her birth weight). But, in typical 1950s manner, rather than bring up the error, the parents actually covered it up in order to not raise a fuss or, in the words of one father, embarrass their doctor. And so the other family went on for four decades thinking that they had the right baby when, in fact, they did not.

What a horrific situation, right?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the father in the story who didn’t want to return the baby is a pastor, and part of his reasoning about not correcting the mistake was that the whole situation was obviously the will of god for the girls and for the families. He psychologically bullied his emotionally vulnerable wife whose instinct was to return the girl to her rightful mother (as well as get her own daughter back) but like a meek, subservient and disenfranchised Christian housewife she went along with her husband’s wishes (Ephesians 5:22).

So one man made a decision for everyone, whether or not they even knew they were involved, based upon the inflated sense of self and moral prerogative bestowed upon him by his religion.

The agonized letter from this mother to her daughter closes: “I feel I must get this out in the open so you two know. How wonderful that you both are Christians and great workers in the church! Do let me hear from you. I love you both. Thanks, and Jesus lead you in this time.”

The father who coerced his wife into silence later contacted the other mother involved, to attempt to assuage his own guilt:

Jake Halpern: Kay McDonald began getting notes and phone calls from Reverend Miller. He told her that he thought it was God’s will this had happened. Even so, he asked her for forgiveness again and again. [To Kay McDonald:] He’s just outright saying, “Can you forgive me,” just like that on the telephone?

Kay McDonald: Yes, and quoting scriptures all the time for me to read to console me because I had said that I had shed a lot of tears. And I had probably all of the emotions that you have with death in a family. I think I went into a kind of a depression about similar to when my mother died. And so of course he was trying to get me to say that I had forgiven them.

This is so typical of religious types that I almost cringe or roll my eyes at how painfully stereotypical it is—the tendency for religious people to screw everything up because of the certainty that their religion gives them, and then after the fact beg for forgiveness for the harm done, all the while undoing the very apology by claiming that regardless of how badly they fucked up, god means it for good—if you’re willing to let him use it for your good. (My parents used that line on my sisters and me after they finally acknowledged the parenting mistakes they made when we were kids.)

So not only do they do irreparable damage, but then they further victimize by attempting to extort forgiveness from the very people they wronged by putting on a penitent face and claiming to have your best interests at heart when that’s the very last interest they have in mind. Which is not to say that they’re never sincere. No doubt the Reverend Miller is deeply sorry for the harm he caused, just as my parents wish they could go back and fix their mistakes.

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” – Genesis 50:20, English Standard Version.

Compare that to what Doctor Pangloss says at the end of Voltaire’s Candide:

“All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; for, after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunégonde, if you hadn’t been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn’t traveled across America on foot, if you hadn’t given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios.”

We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28, King James Version), which illustrates how you can use the supposed omniscience of god to justify or get yourself off the hook for just about anything.

Going a step further, this gives the religious person the divine right to do just about anything if s/he believes that god is on his/her side. Inquisitions have been carried out,  innumerable lives forever lost and ruined, and children tormented and killed in the name of god’s ultimate benevolence (among the many crimes of the Church). “We tortured your body in order to save your soul!” ecclesiasticals cry. “It was all for your good!”

That’s the rationale of Shift, the ape in C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. In it, he makes a deal with the country of Calormen to sell the Talking Beasts into slavery:

“It’s all arranged. And all for your own good. We’ll be able, with the money you earn, to make Narnia a country worth living in. There’ll be oranges and bananas pouring in—and roads and big cities and schools and offices and whips and muzzles and saddles and cages and kennels and prisons—Oh, everything!”

Don’t worry. Sky Father god knows what’s best.