Margaretta Wade Campbell Deland


Margaret Deland 1857-1945
If life is a series of births and deaths, I was reborn in the old books' section of a St. Vincent dePaul store in Albany, Oregon, in 2015, when I discovered John Ward Preacher by Margaret Deland. I was so entranced that I, a non-collector of almost anything, quickly became a joyous collector of all things Deland. I now have six feet of shelf space devoted to her books (many novels, two autobiographies, a book of poetry, and an account of a summer in Florida) along with two Deland biographies. I also own numerous photos and letters. While mine isn't a notable collection, I'm in the process of willing it to a New England university so that it can supplement an existing Deland collection.

My love for Deland is being born afresh now that I'm rereading her books, of which I own multiple first edition copies, many of them autographed. I haven't seen the three silent films that her works inspired, and her Broadway play ended before World War I. She was awarded four honorary doctorates, and was among the first women to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. As labels go, she was a Pennsylvania regionalist and a member of the American Realist Movement.

John Ward Preacher (1888), is about the marriage of a non-religious Episcopalian named Helen Jeffrey to a very religious Presbyterian preacher named John Ward. Like her heroine, Deland was orphaned and grew up in the home of an uncle. Deland's uncle was a non-observing Presbyterian who came from a family rich in influential ministers; her aunt a former Episcopalian who obeyed society's expectation that she join her husband's church. The Presbyterians in Deland's life, and of whom she wrote, were not the mainstream Presbyterians of today, but hardcore Calvinists who saw no contradiction between a deity who was perfect in love but could predestine infants to eternal hell.

Unlike Deland's uncle, Helen's uncle was an Episcopal priest who lived a comfortable life despite his lack of religious conviction. He was dismayed by Helen's choice of a husband, but, not being a man to make waves, he remained silent. By contrast, John Ward took his Presbyterian religion very seriously indeed and, despite being a gentle, loving man, didn't hesitate to make waves except when it came to Helen, who he was afraid to  lose. To this end, he didn't allow her to hear him preach (they lived miles apart), and he avoided the subject of religion, telling himself that there would be plenty of time for that after they were married. Helen had hints that his views were abhorrent, but she also avoided the subject, telling herself that love alone was enough for a happy relationship, and that he would eventually come to respect her lack of religious conviction. 

William Campbell 1808-1890
After they were married, John tried to avoid alienating Helen by dodging his church's expectation that he preach hellfire sermons vividly and often. When he finally told Helen about his church's belief that God had predestined most people to a fiery hell before the world was created, she begged him to never speak of the matter again. Months passed during which John agonized over her lost state and wondered how to convert her. 

When Helen sought counsel from her priestly uncle regarding her doubts about religion, he was painfully reminded of his own non-belief, and told his daughter Lois, "I shall tell her to mend her husband's stockings, and not bother her little head with theological questions that are too big for her." Because of her outspokenness, the elders of John's church eventually learned that Helen didn't accept their church's belief about hell, and demanded that John turn her over to them "for discipline." John, worried that instead of winning her to God, the elders would push her away, undertook an all out effort to convert Helen to his views. When this failed, a despairing John imagined that God wanted him to expel Helen from their home so she would be forced to look to God for help, whereupon God would show her the reality of hell. 

As did Deland, the more Helen thought about religion, the more she came to doubt that any of it was true, and through the intense loneliness of her struggle, I saw myself. Coming as I did from rural Mississippi, all I knew of religious doubt was what I learned in church where ignorant preachers described it as the product of modern universities, and claimed that it represented a renunciation of morality, tradition, and common sense. I knew that such words didn't apply to me, yet I didn't even meet another non-believer until I was 29, and I had to make a special trip to New Orleans to do so then. So it was that the loneliness and desperation of a fictional character in a 127-year old novel by a forgotten author came to seem more real to me than anything else I had ever read. 

Houghton Mifflin had misgivings about publishing a book that was critical of religion, but since Deland's first book had done well, they finally put her under contract. When she wrote of the news to her family, "The result, in the domestic circle, was like the unexpected explosion of a firecracker." "Maggie...knows no more about hell than a kitten knows about a steam engine," her uncle raged, and it looked as if she might have to choose between telling the truth as she understood it and being disowned. Given that the heroine of John Ward Preacher, like the women in her later books, prized intellectual integrity above patriarchal acceptance, the answer might seem obvious, but it didn't come without a struggle, and it was followed by a heavy cost.
 
Lorin Deland 1855-1917

Deland's uncle finally proposed that she travel from Boston (where she moved when she married the famous Harvard football coach Lorin Deland) to New Jersey, to discuss the appropriateness of the book's publication with the spiritual patriarch of the clan, the Rev. Dr. William Howard Campbell (president of Rutgers) and abide by by his decision. She discussed the proposal, first with Lorin, and later with their friend, the renowned Episcopal clergyman and bishop, Phillips Brooks. She finally told her family that she would talk to her great uncle, but that she wouldn't be bound by his opinion. After a very long conversation, the Reverend Doctor gave Deland's book his approval. Her family's disappointment was such that a cousin suggested that the aged patriarch had become senile.

John Ward Preacher inspired plaudits and outrage. While walking her dog, Deland was accosted by a stranger who said that her book would "destroy Christianity." A friend of Deland's was castigated at a dinner party for keeping such low company. For a time, her family excluded her from gatherings. She was denounced from pulpits, and literary critics attacked her personally. The disapproval extended beyond the book's criticism of religion and into Deland's rejection of patriarchy, a rejection that also occurred in her later books. The following beliefs were commonplace in 19th century America:
Rev. Phillips Brooks 1835-1893

(1) Criticizing religion is wrong. (2) Women are the bulwarks of Godliness, so it is especially wrong for women to criticize religion. (3) Women lack the intelligence to address profound subjects. (4) "Ladies" don't write about hell. (5) Girls should adopt the faith of their fathers; women of their husbands.

I am glad that I possess things that Deland's hands touched, yet I rarely look at her letters, it being enough that I own them, if such things can be owned. While I regret the fact that I will never be able to talk with her, I have no reason to think that we would be friends because, whatever problems I bring to relationships, Deland admitted that she found it difficult to love. When she was still small, she overheard the aunt who adopted her say about another orphan, "No one can love a child as its own mother loves it." Deland was hurt to the core, but when she wrote of the experience decades later, she blamed herself for her loss of faith in her aunt's love: "As I think of that day in the back entry, and the smell of cinnamon and cloves, and the moving leaf shadows on the hall floor, and the tears in the sweet dark eyes, I am ashamed of Maggie. She seems to me a cold little monster..." Still speaking of her childhood self in the third person Deland wrote: "...she is selfish, cold-hearted, joyfully cruel, with no love in her, and not a particle of humor."

Perhaps as a result of losing trust in her adoptive aunt, Deland came to display two dominant characteristics. One was that, from a very young age, she was uncompromisingly independent, both in her intellectual integrity and in her desire for financial self-sufficiency. The other was that she concealed her intense nature behind a reserve that was generally mistaken for tranquility. Only Lorin was allowed to penetrate her core, and when he died in 1917, her very being and all that she had accomplished seemed empty. She dealt with the crisis by immersing herself in the misery of others as a canteen volunteer in war torn France. She also followed the lead of many others of the World War I generation, and turned to spiritualism. Her former belief that death was an eternal sleep became unbearable, and she, like Arthur Conan Doyle, came to believe that our earthly identities and relationships somehow survive the grave. 

Yet, what was to her, as it is to me, the nearly unbearable tragedy of loving and being loved in a world that contains death had tormented Deland long before Lorin died. She had even debated all sides of the issue with herself through the mouths of the characters in her 1890 novel Sidney. As with religion, the inability to reconcile myself to the fact that death and love exist in the same world is another existential theme that Deland and I share, and that enables her words to enter my depths. If I should someday discover a writer with the power to affect me more profoundly than Deland--both for good and for ill--I don't know how I will bear it, because she so often moves me to tears.

17 comments:

kylie said...

I really love that you are going to leave your collection as a bequest.

It is difficult to imagine why people get so upset at those who struggle to believe anything outside of what we know. I would have thought that anyone with a scrap of honesty and self knowledge would have experienced moments of doubt at the very least

Snowbrush said...

Kylie, Dear, I put twenty-plus hours into writing this post, put it online yesterday, and still found it necessary to do major editing this morning. Yet I know that few people will read it, both because of its length and because they will assume that's it's not worth their while to read about some old writer that almost no one today has heard of. For their purposes, they're probably right. Still...

I often listen to America's public broadcast radio, and am almost as often struck by the fact that, out of thousands of years of recorded history and uncountable realms of knowledge concerning science, literature, human experience, and so forth, rarely do any of the programs touch on anything that doesn't relate to violence or politics and that didn't occur within the last 24-hours. This results in the absurdity of Donald Trump's latest asinine tweets being given precedence over the writings of any number of wise and intelligent authors. Once most of us are out of school, our academic education is at an end.

"It is difficult to imagine why people get so upset at those who struggle to believe anything outside of what we know."

I interpret your words to mean that people get upset with people who struggle to believe that for which there is little or no evidence, but is this really what you meant to say? It seems to me that such people are more mystified than upset, and that the upset (including persecution and murder) is mostly in the other direction with a great many people (most notably in India, Malaysia, and the Middle East) who wish to believe things that are without evidence becoming enraged with anyone who doesn't agree with them (and NO, I'm NOT talking about you or any other long-term religious readers of this blog because the mere fact that you're still here suggests that you have a high degree of tolerance). This is what Margaret Deland encountered, and what she wrote about Helen Ward encountering. Deland somehow managed to fool herself into believing that the day would come when Americans could think outside the religious box and not be persecuted for it, but we're now headed back into the Dark Ages. I can't imagine that we're really going to get there because of two things: one is that the direction in which the religious party that now controls the presidency and both houses of Congress is taking us is so demonstrably disastrous--take their their views about guns for example since it's all the news here this week. The second is that, despite the fact that Trump was elected, Americans in general are becoming less religious and more tolerant, and that the ascendancy of Trump and his party is moving them in that direction faster than they were already getting there. I fully believe that there within the next three years, the religious party in this country (meaning the Republican Party) will be out of power. Surely I am right in thinking that Australia is a LOT less religious than America, and so what you wrote might very well apply there, but it most certainly doesn't apply here.

Marion said...
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Snowbrush said...

"She sounds like a truly fascinating person. I feel the same way about reading the Bible & Gone With the Wind at age 12 and the complete works of Mark Twain at age 8."

When a woman exclaimed, "God bless you," to Mark Twain," he said, "I guess she hasn't heard of our strained relations." Have you read his story "The Mysterious Stranger"? Twain didn't allow it, or his other anti-Christian, anti-God sentiments to be published until after his death. Madalyn Murray O'Hair said she read the Bible cover-to-cover one night when she was six or eight (I forget which) and immediately became an atheist. I don't believe that any child that age would read the complete Bible (I think Madalyn was simply putting on airs about her imagined brilliance--her state of being a "stable genius" as it were--but then I seriously doubt that that anyone else would either because too much of the Bible is jump-out-the-window tedious, as in, "Bill begat Frank. Frank begat Jim. Jim began Bob. Bob begat Hank and Wally who were the brothers of Shem and Japeth and the husbands of 666 wives and innumerable concubines, etc., and even if a person read it, he/she would get no more from it than from reading the phone book.

While I never sat down and plowed through the Bible as such, I did go to a church that put an enormous emphasis on Biblical knowledge, and so it was that I soaked up everything I was taught, the result being that I, like O'Hair, found my knowledge of what the Bible actually says (not many people know) to be a complete deal killer. For example, when you got to the part of the Bible where women who are on their periods are declared unclean (and therefore not allowed to worship in the temple), did you have a clue what periods or uncleanliness were or suspect that the Bible was blatant sexist? And how did the God-ordained thefts, genocides, and stonings of homosexuals and wayward children strike you? And then there's the penalty of rape being that the rapist has to marry his victim! Such things made me hate the Biblical version of God in the same way that I hate the Hitlers of the world, although it was years before I had the guts to say so out loud. I ask about how such things struck you because it seems to me that, unless someone is a murderous bigot (which you're not), I can't see how they can get anything from the Bible without glossing over the horrific parts (which constitute much if not most of the book) while focusing on the heart-warming parts--like the story of Ruth or the parable of the Good Samaritan. This isn't to say that a good bit of the Bible isn't interesting (the life of David stands out), but I find NOTHING in the Bible that would suggest to me the stamp of God, and I am forever stumped about how anyone else can. I think that, well, if someone like yourself grew up in some remote land and never knew a Christian and never read the Bible until you were in your forties, would you jump from your seat yelling, "Yes, this is IT; this is the Word of God, at last I've found it!"

cont.

Snowbrush said...

"Gone with the Wind" I've never read. I saw a copy at St. Vinnies recently, and seriously considered it, but demurred because the print was SO small (I like the movie though). Thomas Dixon also wrote about life in the South before and after the Civil War, and I've read a good bit by him. Deland's stories are set in western Pennsylvania, and when she wasn't living there, she was living in New England. I wish she had been from Oregon or the Deep South--places I can relate to--but it is what it is, and I love her no less for it.

Speaking of Southern writers, have you read Richard Wright? He was another writer that I had never heard of but rather stumbled across here in Oregon, and damned if he didn't come from 45 miles from where I'm from. Such was the racist-based educational system of white Mississippi during the '60s and '70s. It really pissed me off that a writer could be THAT good and THAT enlightening, yet be completely ignored simply because he was black. Welty and Faulkner, I haven't read more than a smidgen of--and you? Someone told Faulkner that he had read one of Faulkner's books three times, still didn't understand it, and then asked Faulkner what to do. Faulkner said, "Read it a fourth time." I though, jesus man, are you kidding?! I LOVE re-reading books for further enjoyment and enlightenment, but NEVER would I reread so much as a ten line poem because the writer was such a screw-up that he/she couldn't make it comprehensible.

"Thank God for books."

Yes. I recently related a story of one of the early Christian hermits who said, "I sold the book that told me to sell everything I own and give the money to the poor." This points to another problem I have with the Bible, namely is that I've never known anyone who carried its commands to their logical conclusion, not because, as some would say, they're hypocrites, but because what Jesus commands them to do is too much. He might have said that his yoke is heavy and his burden light, and I suppose if a person is content to live in abject poverty so that every last dime can go to the poor, he was right, but not only does the dominant face of modern American Christianity not regard such a state as a ideal, the dominant form of modern American Christianity holds to the teachings of men like Joel Osteen who say that if they please God, then God will make them rich as he is rich, so they too can live in opulent mansions.

xo to you too,
Snow

All Consuming said...

You've written about her before and mentioned her many times too, and she really was a fascinating woman it seems. I'm so glad you found her writing, for it is through recognising something of ourselves in books that they can be a kind balm, give us a kinship despite the distance in time.

I have a similar thing going on with Emily Dickinson.

I have read 'Gone With the Wind' and recommend it highly, it's a cracker of a tale. I can watch the film again and again, but the book has far more going on course. Xx

Emma Springfield said...

What a fascinating woman. What struck me most was her aunt's careless words. Adults often don't realize the effect their statements have on a child.

kylie said...

You understood me, I don't know why the religious must persecute those who are not. Persecuting those who have a different opinion (on any subject) mostly suggests to me that the persecutor (in this case, the religious) is not at all confident of their belief.
There is good tv here that examines all kinds of interesting subjects although it is limited to the public broadcaster or the multicultural broadcaster which most people don't watch. All other stations focus on the immediate. I call them the fear and greed channels

Snowbrush said...

"I have a similar thing going on with Emily Dickinson."

I've known you for many years during which time we've shared much, yet I never heard you say this, and I very much wish you would write a post about it.

"What struck me most was her aunt's careless words."

She was careless, but it was also true that she had no idea that Deland was nearby because Deland was hiding, not in order to spy on her aunt (she hid before her aunt appeared) but because she was a child, and that's what children (and cats) do. A few days or weeks later, Deland told her aunt what she had heard, but nothing that the aunt could say was sufficient to undo the damage, and it was for what Deland saw as her hardness toward her aunt that Deland felt self-loathing. In her adult view, Deland understood that her aunt did her utmost to be an exemplary parent and to treat her and the aunt's child by birth the same. Deland's adult self believed, accurately I think, that the problem between them had less to do with whom the aunt was as with whom Deland was.

"Persecuting those who have a different opinion (on any subject) mostly suggests to me that the persecutor (in this case, the religious) is not at all confident of their belief."

I thought that I had surely misunderstood what you meant to say, yet I couldn't make your actual words fit what I thought you meant. As for why religious people commonly persecute others, I believe that what you say is right, but I also wonder if there's not more to it. It seems to me that people create God partly so that they might project upon him their own basest instincts and then use that projected image to to justify carrying out those instincts even to the inclusion of rape, murder, imprisonment, and torture. It seems to me that the world would be better off if religion could be wiped from our minds. I know that, for me, it has never represented anything but torture, mostly self-torture, but when I look at the effect it has on our species as a whole, I consider it obvious that people like yourself who use it as a means for good are in the minority, and it's not even a statistically significant minority. I very much feel sorry for good people who are religious because I know that those who are only too aware of the evils of religion tend to paint all religious people with the same brush. Even I do this, although I very much try not to. Anytime my anger and hatred of religion feels like it's about to consume me, I remember you, not because I hold an exaggerated estimate of your virtues but because I have a sense of how very hard, and how very consistently, you try.

Marion said...
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Snowbrush said...

"at age 13...I'd never even heard the word homosexual or know what it meant when I did read it in the OT."

The actual word "homosexual" wasn't in the Bible prior to a 1946 edition, but I'm sure we both had an inkling of what was meant in Leviticus 20:13: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them" (lesbianism was apparently unknown to Biblical authors). The point of my statement was that the Bible is full to overflowing with stuff like that, yet you found in the book a rock and a comfort at the same age that I was so horrified by its bloodthirsty deity that I was struggling to maintain any belief whatever. I couldn't understand why everyone I knew wasn't having the same problem I was. The fact that they gave no appearance of being disturbed led me to imagine that they knew something that I did not, and that if I could only learn what they knew, I could, like you, find happiness rather than torment in religion. When I tried to find out what they knew that I didn't, they had nothing to tell me, but instead of concluding that they had no special knowledge, I just figured they were holding out of me.

While thinking about your comment yesterday, I got to wondering how much of the Bible I would now consider factually accurate. I concluded that if I were to go through it verse by verse, I would find almost nothing that I believed to be true on any level aside from the notable exception of Matthew 10: 34-35: "Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘A man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law." Why doesn't this appalling contradiction between Jesus as "the Prince of Peace" and "the Lord of all," and his own admission that his purpose was to bring division--even bloodshed--not bother Christians? So it is that I am in the same state of mystification today that I was over fifty years ago except that I no longer believe that Christians know something that I do not. However, I am very curious as to how the same book can strike people so differently, but when I try to understand how Christians interpret our differences, they have no answer other than to say that they have faith (which really doesn't tell me anything since they're unable to define the term), and that I don't.

"I'm not into the politics of religion."

The church stayed out of politics when I was a kid, but it is now so closely allied with the Republican Party that the success or failure of the one will be reflected in the success or failure of the other, and that's speaking of the short term. In the longterm, we have a population that is becoming less and less religious, so even where the church succeeds, for example, in wining the right for its members to deny birth control coverage to their employees, their success will hurt them in the long run.

"As for Twain's religion, I could care less."

I didn't mean that you should care. I instead wondered how his strong anti-Christian bias struck you at age eight when presumably you hadn't previously encountered such hostility to Jesus and his religion.

Later gator yourself (I wonder if my readers in England and Australia are aware of what this means).

All Consuming said...

"I have a similar thing going on with Emily Dickinson."

'I've known you for many years during which time we've shared much, yet I never heard you say this, and I very much wish you would write a post about it.'

You've just forgotten sweetie. I've checked and I have 34 posts that contain either her poetry or me talking about her *laughs*. I shall do another soon though as I haven't mentioned her since 2015 which is rather remiss of me, but comes down the the time-frame that includes my cognitive decline so far as memory and concentration goes. I mention her quite often.

Snowbrush said...

"You've just forgotten sweetie. I've checked and I have 34 posts that contain either her poetry or me talking about her *laughs*."

I never forget anything, and it's also true that, like you, I majored in statistics, although (not to brag) while you stopped at a bachelors and graduated with a C+ grade average, I made statistics my third doctorate (my emphasis being on the size and weight of Victorian head lice according to age, gender, beauty and family income--of the people, not the lice, it being impossible to tabulate the family income of lice--on both sides of the Atlantic), and completed my studies with a 5.2 GPA (I was given extra credit due to my outstanding loveability).

According to my comprehensive records, you mentioned Emily Butch Dickinson (no one knows why her parents gave her such an odd middle name since she was decidedly NOT butch) in 35 posts. I read twelve of those posts (I was on a religious retreat when you wrote the other 23). In nine of the twelve, you appeared to have been drinking based upon the fact that you stopped writing in mid-sentence--suggesting that you might have dozed off--leaving readers to wonder if you were pro-Dickinson or anti-Dickinson (I suspect the former because the anti-Dickinson crowd is vehemently pro-gun, which you most certainly are not, that is unless you're operating under cover because you're afraid that if the government learns that you own a private arsenal, they'll try to confiscate it). In the other three, you appeared to confuse Emily Dickinson with Carl Sandburg. For example, "The fucking fog stomped in on gi-normous Hound of the Baskervilles feet," is decidedly NOT Dickinsonian, and although it's not Sandburgian either, it surely contains a Sandburgian element, not to mention a Sandburgian influence (or perhaps a Sandburgian plagiarism, depending upon whether your readers make a kindly or a un-kindly appraisal--as you know, mine is ALWAYS kindly).

cont.

Snowbrush said...


In any event, if I am wrong (fat chance), and you HAVE written a COMPRENSIVE post about your adoration of a thoroughly weird poetess who, despite never leaving Amherst Massachusetts (I think it was Amherst)--and rarely her room--wrote of hope, "I've heard it in the chillest land and on the strangest sea," then for godsake send me a link. Sure Dickinson's fame has survived while Deland is only remembered by me and eight other people, seven of whom are so old that they only remember who she is on their good days, but this isn't to say that she's any better than Deland except when it comes to poetry (Deland's first book, The Old Garden and Other Verses, was nothing but poetry, and it broke the mold, so to speak, in that both the cover and the pages contained floral artwork, this in an era in which previous books of "serious poetry" came with plain pages and black covers). It's neither here nor there certainly (it's actually over yonder), but if I were to name a favorite poet, I suppose it would be Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose poetry is, unfortunately, so sad that I can barely bear to recite it (that's right, I memorized a few of his poems), and the older I get, the harder it becomes because the more his words ring true. Take "Mr. Flood's Party" for example.

But back to you...would you consider it meaningful to visit Emily Dickinson's home (https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/)? I was more interested in Thoreau and Emerson (who were also from eastern Massachusetts) back then, so I visited Walden Pond, the Thoreau Lyceum, and Emerson's home, as well as both men's graves. I'm glad I saw these places, although the best way by far to feel connected to a writer is by loving, studying, and thinking about his or her life and what he or she wrote. I've toyed with the idea of visiting Deland's home in Maine, but it's a long way from Oregon to Maine, and since the home is privately owned, all I could do would be to look at it from the sidewalk. Much to our delight, while walking around Walden Pond, Peggy found a cork-stoppered bottle within 100 feet or so of the site of Thoreau's cabin. The bottle was actually under the mud of a path with nothing but one end showing. It wasn't broken, and it serves as a good souvenir (we broke no laws by digging it out and taking it with us).

All Consuming said...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, *takes the LSD off Snow*

And yes, I would consider it meaningful. I stayed at a hotel the year before last that was William and Dorothy Wordsworth's house and enjoyed looking at the views out from the windows knowing they saw much the same hills out there as they penned. Also there's a lovely wee wood on the grounds that has places he and Dorothy would sit and enjoy the world around them. Dorothy is nothing like as well known as her brother mind you. The inside of the house was a joy too mind. I think people leave echoes in time if they live somewhere long enough and such echoes resonate through other dimensions which would explain ghosts quite neatly. I'm basing this on everything I read from the science mags connected to the multiverse theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

That is a fine souvenir!

rhymeswithplague said...

Despite what you said to kylie, I read your post all the way through. What I really want to hear more about is you and the nonbeliever in New Orleans when you were 29.

Snowbrush said...

"I think people leave echoes in time if they live somewhere long enough and such echoes resonate through other dimensions which would explain ghosts quite neatly."

The problem, of course, is one of verification because while a theory can make all the sense in the world, logic alone does not prove that it's true. I feel about parallel universes a little like I do about a belief in a personal deity, by which I mean that it would be a happy, happy day when I determined that it was true, I don't look for that day to come. I will say that, in the case of parallel universes, the fact that they're taken seriously by many scientists does make a belief in them more acceptable to me.

"What I really want to hear more about is you and the nonbeliever in New Orleans when you were 29."

Well, maybe I was 28 or even 30. It just seems better to me to pick the most reasonably precise number that I can rather than to give a range. In this case, I know what house I lived in at the time, and that I hadn't been in the house very long. Anyway...

In the late 1970s, I got tired of being the first and only atheist that I knew I knew (except for my father who was on-and-off about the existence of God), so I went looking for companionship, and this led me to discover American Atheists. Imagine my joy when I learned that the group had not one but two Mississippi chapters, but imagine my disappointment when I learned that these chapters only contained one person each (Paul Tirmenstein "led" the North Mississippi chapter at Corinth, and John Marthaler the South Mississippi chapter on the coast)! Because New Orleans had a great many atheists, I occasionally drove the hundred miles to that group's monthly meeting, stopping off in Hammond, LA, on the way to carpool with a gentle and loving man from Baton Rouge named Andy Cohen. Just as he was one of the first atheists I met, he was the first Jew whom I knew well enough to call my friend. I don't know that I ever mentioned this, but whereas many people are prejudiced against Jews, I am prejudiced FOR Jews based upon the depth and intelligence of the one's I've known and because Reformed Judaism, at least, welcomes atheists (as do the Unitarians and the area Quakers--unfortunately, both groups bore me, especially the Quakers). I even fantasize from time to time about joining the local synagogue, but the fact is that I can't imagine that I would ever feel good enough about ANY religious group to support it financially, and I figure that if I'm unwilling to support a group financially, it would be wrong of me to join. That aside, and while I can't say that it's an especially good reason, another thing that would appeal to me about joining a synagogue is that I would get such a kick out of aligning myself against the damn "white nationalists." Even here in liberal Eugene, the synagogue had a bullet fired into it (during a service no less) on one occasion, and its member occasional find swastikas painted on its walls, doors, and windows.