149. cathect

I go up and down in an elevator every day, usually multiple times. It’s really a marvel of engineering that we take for granted, all of the complex machinery and programming that goes into making sure that it runs smoothly and efficiently. As I’m being whisked up or down, I can’t help occasionally wondering as the numbers change how safe it is. My rational brain tells me that it’s perfectly fine, that these things run every day without a hitch, that regular maintenance and inspections are performed on these elevators, and that the chances of an accident and the car plunging down the shaft to our collective doom is slimmer than a heroin-riddled New York ballet dancer. However, my lizard brain whispers from its dark corner in my mind that this is exactly what everyone thinks in the horror movie right before the cord breaks and every dies.

That’s the difference between faith and assessment. You could say that there’s a certain amount of faith behind stepping on an elevator or boarding a transatlantic flight. The elevator could malfunction. The plane could still fall from the sky. There’s always risk, but there’s also science and probability that allow us to measure those risks and take educated leaps.

This afternoon on NPR there was a story about ritual and belief, starting with an anecdote from the author about sitting in a yoga class and thinking positive, empathetic thoughts for Michael Joel Hall, the yoga instructor who was violently beaten earlier this week along with his boyfriend.

As we sat there repeating a simple combination of Sanskrit words, I imagined our voices floating out the window, down the street, and into the hospital room of Hall (whom I’ve never met). After six minutes, we stopped. Though reason told us our efforts did nothing to speed Hall’s physical recovery, a resounding feeling of accomplishment nonetheless lingered in the room as we made our way out.

I probably don’t need to editorialize too much about this as it’s probably not too hard to imagine what I think about this. Exercises like this are largely masturbatory and serve only to make the user feel good. Scientific studies have been carried out to examine and measure the effects of prayer and meditation on subjects, such as the Mayo Clinic’s famous 2001 double-blind study that found that “intercessory prayer had no significant effect on medical outcomes after hospitalization in a coronary care unit.”

It’s what Freud called magical thinking, and what we can more broadly refer to as superstition, to believe that anything we do can have a significant effect on an outcome or condition. Furthermore, it’s supreme arrogance to think that a God or god who created the universe and human beings should arrest the laws of nature for your convenience or welfare. If you pray for a parking spot, doesn’t that imply that someone else should be denied that same spot? Or if you think that God helped your team win a football (or any sport) game, don’t you then believe that God was against the other team?

I don’t have a problem with people thinking nice thoughts about others, or believing that there’s a God out there working everything for your benefit. If it makes you feel better, great. What you believe is your business, and it’s none of mine to police or tell you what to think. However, we run into problems in two areas when:

1. you try to force or share unbidden your personal beliefs with or on me;
2. that magical thinking extends into the real world, with real world implications.

Take, for example, the case of Carl and Raylene Worthington, a couple who allowed their 15-month old daughter, Ava, to die. Do I think these people are monsters? No. They are probably very nice, albeit tragically negligent, people. Their church took the following passage from the Book of James literally:

Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.

The Oregonian described the scene this way: “As the 15-month-old girl struggled to breathe, church members anointed her with oil and pleaded with God to provide a cure. But Ava died March 2, 2008, of bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection. Antibiotics could have saved her life, the state medical examiner’s office said.”

Antibiotics could have saved her life. I can imagine that scene in my mind, and it looks pathetic. Those deluded, weak-minded Christians look pathetic. Mourners in Aurora praying before the memorials of loved ones gunned down by James Holmes look pathetic—desperate people looking for a magical solution to their desperate problems.

Believe what you like, but just as believing that the laws of gravity can be suspended just for you won’t keep you from falling off a building if you jump, you cannot abdicate your intellectual responsibility to face facts.

This is the beginning of a much broader conversation, but it concerns me that there are members of our government who use (or at least claim to use) prayer as a form of decision making on very important issues that have consequences for real people. It worries me that we have a man who believes the earth is no more than 6,000 years old and that God lives on a planet called Kolob who wants to be president of the United States. It worries me that presidents have turned first to men like Rick Warren and Billy Graham rather than policy advisers or scientists for council.

And, of course, it worries and infuriates me that we have politicians trying to ram through legislation that would deny me and millions of other GLBT Americans constitutional and civil rights and liberties based on Bronze Age beliefs and teachings. And that millions of people take that shit seriously.

109. how

The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella,
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just’s umbrella.
— Lord Charles Bowen (attrib.)

Someone asked me the other night, “what harm can religion do?”

In the context of last night, it was about a recent episode of A Gifted Man, in which a shaman who volunteers at the clinic that Patrick Wilson’s character works at wants to perform a blessing on a baby that was abandoned. The argument was that the baby is too young to really register what’s going on, or to be negatively affected. Yes, it’s nonsense, but there are people in America even who really believe in that idiotic nonsense—that there are spirits in the world that can be entreated, summoned and appeased.

In keeping with my New Years quasi-resolution, I’m trying to not be a wet blanket when it comes to religion, especially considering some of my previous blogs and letters on the subject, and the fact that I’m striving not to alienate the religious friends that I still have who want me to be a part of their community.

… I’m just not 100% sure how that’s supposed to work.

In another episode of A Gifted Man, this same shaman character tells a hypochondriac boy who is side struck by lightening and suffers traumatic brain injury that lightning strikes are often ways of calling a person to be a shaman, a variation on the “everything happens for a reason” theme. “What harm can that really do?” To a boy morbidly terrified of the world, how can such a notion not do harm? It’s assuring him that there is a spirit force guiding his steps, and introducing the notion to him that he too could share this nonsense with others.

Yesterday I was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from season five, “The Body,” in which Buffy’s mother Joyce suddenly dies and everyone reels from the fallout. Throughout the episode everyone asks why it happened, and at one point the character Anya (a vengeance demon divested of her powers, reduced to a human, and exhibits a Temperance Bones-like understanding of humanity) explodes,

“I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she’s– there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid! And Xander’s crying and not talking, and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why.”

This is why religion is damaging—because the answers it gives to these huge questions beg more questions. We know why people die. We are fragile, organic beings, susceptible to the elements and to physical damage. We don’t know for sure what happens after death, but it’s more than probable that consciousness is tied to the brain, that it too is a biological function which will cease to exist like all other bodily functions. Neuroscience, in its quest to identify the origins of human consciousness, is increasingly finding that we are our brains, and that “I” can be altered by traumatic injury or physical changes to certain areas of the brain. One episode of WNYC’s RadioLab tells the story of a woman who suffered a major aneurysm and basically woke up a completely different person.

There is no evidence in the world that anything happens other than for the reason that it happens. A 30 kiloampere bolt of lightning strikes a gnat flying through the air at the moment of the discharge. A boulder is dislodged from a mountain after the wind and the rain works upon the stone for thousands of years, and it rolls down the steep incline where it crushes a car that is driving through the pass, killing everyone in the car. We are human. We are subject to same conditions as every other life form on the planet.

My friend Emily told me to wait until I’ve experienced death personally a few times before passing judgement on those who choose to find comfort in religion, and perhaps she’s right. My friends and family are still alive (knock on wood), and I’ve never experienced the kind of loss that violently tears away a person’s sense of security in the world and brings you face to face with human mortality as someone you’ve known your entire life ceases to exist.

I have thought about this. Someday I will inevitably be faced with the death of the man I love more than anything else in the world. Someday everyone I have ever known will die, and someday I too will be tapped on the shoulder and told that it’s time to take leave of the party, which invariably will go on without me.

We are born to die, and while this thought may drive many to despair (theists and non-theists alike), for many atheists this makes our present life all the more meaningful. Our mortality drives us to make every moment on earth count, for we will never be presented with another of its like. It makes the wine a deeper red, for it is the only wine of its kind that has ever been set before us. It makes the sunset that much richer, for it is the only sunset of its kind that will ever pass before our eyes. It makes the kiss that much sweeter, for it is the only kiss of its kind that will brush our lips. Religion robs us those moments, for it tells us that there is a greater reality to come that causes all present experiences to pale in comparison.

Bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad.

The rain rains on the just and the unjust.

Religion tells us this isn’t so.

78. nevermore

This weekend I came to the realization that I can probably only date other free thinkers or skeptics—guys who grew up in the Church and, after much thought and weighing of evidence, decided that it was no longer tenable to stay there.

Frankly, it’s not an easy thing to turn away from the place that has been your home for all of your life. From my earliest remembrance, the church was the primary social and sociological organizing feature of my life. I can still vividly remember sitting in the hard pews of the Evangelical Mennonite church that my family attended, feet dangling off the side, not yet long enough to reach the floor.

… I remember singing hymns together, and the older Mennonite woman who taught my 1st grade Sunday school class, and the felt board and pieces she used to tell Bible stories.

… I remember lunches, dinners and missionary gatherings in the community hall, and playing games in there during AWANA and vacation Bible school.

… I remember Christmas, Advent services with the candles (and mine catching fire several years in a row), Easter, and all the services in between.

It’s not that I don’t care about the Church, or about religion, or even God. I take it very seriously, which is why I can’t believe anymore—because I take it too seriously to believe on such a profound lack of evidence as there is. As Richard Dawkins writes in his endnote to Chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene:

“I don’t want to argue that the things in which a particular individual has faith are necessarily daft. They may or may not be. The point is that there is no way of deciding whether they are, and no way or preferring one article of faith over another, because evidence is explicitly eschewed. Indeed the fact that true faith doesn’t need evidence is held up as its greatest virtue; this was the point of my quoting the story of Doubting Thomas, the only really admirable member of the twelve apostles.”

He continues in the same endnote: “Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.”

I’ve dated a number of guys who have held various religious beliefs. My first boyfriend had a horrific experience coming out as a teenager in his Christian community, where he was literally thrown out of his house by his conservative fundamentalist parents, as well as shunned by everyone he knew.

It’s been a mixture, with some guys still believing that Christianity is the way and trying to reconcile homosexuality with the Bible; but mostly the guys I meet are apathetic at best about Christianity. Like most American men, church doesn’t have a strong draw for them. Most grew up around Christianity but once they were old enough drifted away; and for many gay men, we get the message early on that the church has no place for homosexuals. Some might even go so far as to say that gays make Jesus throw up.

I’m at a place right now where there’s a lot of internal anger towards the church and its teachings. Having grown up within the system, while I’ve known many decent and kind religious people, I frankly believe that religion itself is too often used as a tool of psychological abuse and terrorism, subjugating individuals through fear of damnation and glorified ignorance in a sort of holy Stockhausen Syndrome.

It’s ironic. When I first came out, I was committed to only dating Christian gays, even going so far as to joining Christian gay dating sites and online forums (such as the GCN Network, which is where I met my first boyfriend). Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, where I should probably only date date agnostics or atheists, guys who have come out of the church and are committed to free thought and eradicating ignorance and religious abuse and inculcation from the world.

This experience is so defining and pervasive that it honestly makes it difficult to connect to others. That was what made it easy to connect to Seth—our common religious backgrounds and the experience of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian environment. But that chapter of my life is over, and a new and brighter one has begun—and now I want to share it with someone who understands that; who takes faith and religion seriously but also realizes through having lived it how toxic and deadly an ideology it is.

What it comes down to is that I can’t date guys who are willing to suspend their critical thinking skills in light of everything that we now know. Looking at the long term (which is where I’m at in seeking a relationship), our beliefs about the world are fundamentally different. He’ll believe that everything happens for a reason, and that there is a God benevolently looking out for us in Heaven, whereas I do not. My deepest sense is that there is a God (though that being is probably more akin to the God of the Deists than the personal God of the Evangelicals), but see no evidence to believe that life has any intrinsic purpose beyond that which we ascribe to it. The universe doesn’t care about anyone. It is amoral, non-sentient. Therefore, we must care about each other.

Similarly, I couldn’t date a guy who is apathetic about religion, because what we think and believe does deeply define us. It’s somewhat like having lived through combat—difficult for anyone who hasn’t experienced it to relate or fully appreciate the gravity of the emotional, psychological and social ramifications. Turning your back on your religion is a huge decision—one not to be taken lightly.

42. vexed

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him who I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England. I did not then see what is not the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape. The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
– C.S. Lewis, “Surprised By Joy”

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I had a long-ish chat with a guy tonight from Texas from that same site. Another nice guy, this one Catholic, and again, not my type. Nor is he looking for romantic partnership at this point in his life. But it puts in me this fear that there aren’t any non-effeminate Christian guys out there who aren’t already taken; who value intellect as much as I do; who are comfortable with their sexuality and see it as compatible with their faith; and know where they’re going in life (i.e., have it mostly together) and are interested in someone to truly share a life with.

I’m just feeling like I’m never going to find what I’m looking for. I don’t want to be 35, single, dating, knocking on doors and either getting turned down or not finding what it is that I’m looking for, and I’m feeling so down and discouraged right now. I want to either not care and ditch my morals, or somehow develop fortitude and wait. Neither is making me happy at this point.

I want a Joy (C.S. Lewis’ wife), a man who understands me, and who I understand; who gets how I think, and doesn’t just tolerate me; someone who can make me, like he said of Joy, look like a fool, because he’s smart and calls me on the stupid shit that I say and do.

Here it is: I’m afraid there isn’t anyone good enough for me. That’s an incredibly haughty and arrogant thing to say because implicit in that statement is the idea that I’m all that great of a catch. But I’m afraid there isn’t anyone masculine enough, intelligent enough, or interesting enough. My date last night could barely hold a conversation about C.S. Lewis outside of the first three books of the Chronicles of Narnia, let alone his other books (including the non-fiction stuff).

I feel conflicted about that because I fear this image of l’homme idéal will get in the way of any future possible relationships. Is it so much to ask that he’s well-read, well-spoken, attractive, has a wide variety of interests, and most importantly loves God and can articulate his faith? I’m just afraid I’ll never find anyone like that before I’m thirty, and damn it, I can’t take another year of being alone. I just can’t. I’m going to end up an awful, alcoholic mess of a jaded bastard, and it seems unavoidable at this point. My standards are set so insanely high that there seems to be no one else. I’m trying so hard not to extrapolate the whole population of gay men from a single piece of fairy cake, but it just seems hopeless.

So why am I still single? Yes, I haven’t been dating all that long, but I seem to want that which does not exist. I want a Christian gay man who has not been beaten down by Christians or his own doubt and fear and has a faith that is thriving; doesn’t come with baggage that weighs him down or defines him; and basically appears as a normal guy to the outside world, like myself. Perhaps that comes back to the desire for someone to just understand and relate to me; because I feel like no one does.

Herein lies the paradox. John Donne would revel in it. I would revel in it, if he wrote a poem about it; of the seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against me finding anyone who is even remotely compatible for me.

Oh little self that walls itself within
This cage of thine own making and despair,
Resign thyself to vigor or forbear
For thou art not of ilk to bend to sin.
The bars of thy design hath been, yet bear
The imprint of Divine conspiracy
That deigns for good and ever seeks to spare
The heart from useless ill, and courtesy
Of that degree we seldom show or see
From fellow man, for he can only will
Our happiness or pleasure. Oh! to be
A beast that finds contentment in its fill!
By condescending mercy am I mired,
And standards unattainable conspired.

It’s not quite Donne, but it’ll do.

W.C. Fields observed that “comedy is tragedy happening to someone else.”

Happy Monday.