Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

Martin Luther King Jr’s claim to have “seen the Promised Land” was an ironic reference for a black pacifist given that the original Promised Land was inhabited by presumably lesser peoples that the Israelites set about enslaving or exterminating—by God’s command no less. Nearly three millennia later, we newly arrived Americans used the Biblical account to justify our own partial extermination of Native Americans and our enslavement of Africans. We called our belief that we, as white American Protestants, had replaced the Jews as God’s chosen, Manifest Destiny, and it allowed us to see others as either obstacles to our progress or tools for our use.

I once took a Sunday School class in which we studied these accounts in which God ordered the Jews to attack cities and kill every person and every animal (except for the young female virgins whom they sometimes got to keep for the victory party). It was a liberal church, and the liberal response to anything vicious, contradictory, or simply stupid about the Bible is: Oh, THAT part isn’t God’s word because it makes God look bad, but THIS part, the warm and fuzzy part about how Jesus loves us, and we’re all going to heaven (all we Christians that is), THAT’S most definitely God’s word. Not so for one old man, who sat there looking for all the world like Santa Claus in a three-piece suit, for he said, “I can only conclude that all those people and animals that God ordered to be killed must have somehow deserved it.”

The stores are already selling Christmas decorations in preparation for the one season of the year during which America talks about “Peace on Earth,” and I will admit that it’s good to have a respite from what the baby Jesus grew up to represent (“I came not to bring peace but a sword”). Jesus’ position on violence certainly reflects America’s approach to problem solving, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re the most Christian nation on earth, which I’m sure we are inasmuch as we are willing to forego necessities in order to buy Hellfire Missiles (“…he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one”). Our love for Jesus is so great that we even paid him homage when we named our favorite weapon, which we quite naturally use to kill those who don’t love him the way we do. Of course, some of them deserve it, I’m sure, but I can’t help but think that we deserve it too. After all, the biggest difference between us is that they kill for one god and we kill for another. Maybe whoever is left alive might finally have Peace on Earth. 

The lesser of two evils is still an evil

I shall vote…whimsically. I shall look at my ballot, and I shall see who is running because the only two I’ve heard about are the only two that the super rich want me to hear about (we’re talking a $2.5 billion campaign here). But shall I vote for Obama or Romney? Naaay, I shall not vote for the Lying Christian Nobel Peace Prize Winning Hit-Man in Chief or for the Lying Christian Foot-in-His-Mouth Buffoon Who Would be Chief. Perhaps, I shall vote for a Green, or a Libertarian, or a Communist (voting for a Communist sounds like great fun in this The Land of the Free and the Home of Brave where Communists used to be deported even if they were citizens). If an anarchist were running for president, I might even vote for an anarchist. I am really excited for me myself to find out who I shall vote for because I haven’t seen my ballot yet, so I only know who Mr. and Mrs. Worth A. Billion want me to vote for. 

You might say that I will be wasting my ballot if I don’t vote for Obama or Romney, but I will say that it is better to waste my ballot than to use it in support of endless war abroad and increasing poverty at home, and do I think either Obama or Romney has the vision, the integrity, or even the popular support to take this country in a new direction? Naaay! If Obama and Romney represent the crème de la escargot of The Land of the Free and the Home of Brave (sorry, foreigners, but we’re freer and braver than you, and we don’t mind saying so either), then we are truly, irretrievably, irredeemably, unremittingly, and forever more screwed, so let the few of us who aren’t too fat to do so bend over now and kiss our asses goodbye.

 

Cat wars

The worst one was over food, and it lasted for seventeen months. Brewsky would start crying two hours before each of his three daily meals and keep it up almost nonstop (Peggy thinks he's starving despite his 14-pound (6.4 kg) weight and insists on feeding him three times a day). Naturally, I enjoyed chasing him through the house with a towel in one hand and a squirt bottle in the other while yelling profanities, but it was clearly too much of a good thing. Near the end of this period, Brewsky ended one such chase by rolling onto his back and squirming slowly from side-to-side the way he does when he wants to be petted. I was confounded and disarmed by this behavior, so I got down on the floor and petted him with the thought that he had just better not mistake my softness for defeat. As it turned out, the defeat was his. He might still cry a few times for his food, but when I look him in the eye and say, "No, it's too early," he takes my word for it. So ended the food war. The laundry room war had a different outcome.

We lock him in the laundry room each night so he won't wake us up by yowling like a demon, running through the house like a rhinoceros, and scavenging in the kitchen like a hyena. I prefer to keep the laundry room door shut the rest of the time too, and this means that I don't want him going in there until bedtime because I don't want to be forever having to let him back out. He resists my determination with conviction, at least partly because the laundry room contains doors to the garage and the patio, and he has an interest in each, but especially the garage where the bulk of the cat food and the dog food is stored. Another thing he likes about the garage is that it gives him access to the attic (just try getting him out of there when he's not hungry). He's so successful at getting into the laundry room, concealing himself, and then getting into the garage or onto the patio when the door is momentarily open, that mine and Peggy's combined efforts to keep him out amount to very little. I have concluded that he is capable of psychokinesis, and having gone that far into woo-woo land, I'm practically to the supernatural, and might be leaving any day now to become a prophet in the Judean desert after having found salvation through my cat. Surely, this doesn't happen very often and could put a lot of preachers out of business if it did. 

Peggy had her own food war with Brewsky. It wasn't as bad as mine because I feed him most of the time. However, she generally puts him to bed at night, and she got into the habit of giving him a midnight snack to assuage her guilt for locking him up. He so looked forward to his snack that he took to biting her calves to hurry it along. Peggy has a hard time discipling pets because she thinks it's "mean." This results in them treating her like an equal, and in her and me getting into an occasional fight over her perception that I'm sometimes too mean. Anyway, her propensity toward "kindness" resulted in Brewsky's nightly bites getting progressively harder until one night he nailed her good. I lay in bed laughing as I listened to her chasing him through the house with threats and profanity. When she afterwards came to me for comfort, I accused her of being mean to her "dear, sweet, starving kitty who loves you dearly and never meant you any harm." This made her mad at me too, but he hasn't bitten her since, at least not until today. She came home this morning with the smell of a strange dog on her legs, and Brewsky sunk his teeth into one of her calves. I must confess that he once bit me too, but it was only once. He will sometimes grab my finger gently with his teeth when he's getting tired of being petted but doesn't want to get up, and I'll stop immediately, but it's even rare when this happens. He and I have come to a position of respect for one another's limits, so we don't run into problems much anymore. As much as it makes sense, I show him the same courtesies that I would show another person, although I think he probably deserves them more. 

When I finally put away the towel and the squirt bottle, I had the thought that if had I ever been as stern with a dog as I have been with that little cat, then I would have to agree with Peggy that it was overkill because it would have ruined a dog. I have often come down hard on Brewsky only to see him do the very same thing right before my eyes three minutes later, and every three minutes thereafter until we were both worn out. If there's a dog with that degree of stubbornness, I'm glad I haven't run into him, but if a person can't feel some respect for such determination in cat, he probably shouldn't have one. The problem with a dog being that way, though, would be that you couldn't take him anywhere, and he would probably be destructive at home. 

Yet, for all my sternness, Brewsky was never afraid of me except when I was actually chasing him. This was the opposite of how I thought a cat would behave, having imagined that they were skittish creatures that you had to tiptoe around and handle delicately. He is skittish in that he startles easily, but he's hardly delicate. I can pet him firmly, flip him onto his back and rub his belly, hold him under his front legs like a sack of potatoes, lift him above my head so that he's brushing the ceiling, and even roughhouse to a small extent. I don't know how people tolerate all these neurotic cats that have a flair for the dramatic if not the downright vicious, including the ones that are so timid that they hide everytime there's a knock on the door. If Brewsky is awake, he'll go to see who's at the door (he would open it if he could). Otherwise, he'll continue sleeping even if they sit down beside him. Now, that's a good cat. You've got to admit it. 

I don't know how much credit I deserve for the way he turned out, but I think it was a case of him liking what I will call manly roughness and of me wanting just such a cat. I've had a lifetime of dogs, and it would be hard to give up some doggy characteristics, and with Brewsky I don't have to. I handle him no less delicately than I would a dog his size. I do hope he will become lap friendly over time, and I would guess that he will because he seems to be leaning a little in that direction. For example, Peggy can hold him in her lap each night and brush his fur, and he has gotten to where he likes to lie in bed with us, as long as it's her bed. She thinks it's cute for him to like in my twin bed with me while I'm reading, so she'll often put him there, but he won't stay (maybe he's homophobic), and she seems exasperated by this. I don't really care if he stays or not, which is just as well because he would have to be shackled, and I can't imagine anything more pathetic than shackling my cat to pet him. I haven't mentioned this possibility to Brewsky, but I have laughed about it to myself.  

Sometimes, he seems more like a considerate roommate than a cat due to his seeming intuition about how to get along with people. What he does is basically this: he gives them almost nothing, and they go bonkers over him anyway (unless they don't like cats). I wish I could pull that off because I often think that being liked is just too much work due to the faults of the people I want to be liked by (meaning all of them). I often suspect that most people are on the fringe of insanity. Then I look at Brewsky and he looks at me, and we both realize that we're pretty sane, at least.

Photo courtesy of Jeff De Boer.

Theology 101: Pascal's Wager

Blaise Pascal (pictured) was a 17th century French philosopher who is best remembered for what came to be called "Pascal's Wager." In the condensed version that is usually presented to nonbelievers (often by people who never heard of Pascal), it goes like this: Even if you don't believe in God, you would do well to worship him, because if he does exist, you will go to heaven, but if he doesn't exist, you will have still lived the most satisfying lifestyle of all, that of a Christian. 

I'm writing about Pascal's Wager because someone offered it in response to my last post, and I wanted to take time for an extended answer. The following are my objections to it, but I'm not consulting any sources, so I make no claim to completeness.

1) Pascal assumed (for no apparent reason except that he was a Christian) that there is an afterlife in which we will remember who we were in this life and be judged for what we did.

2) Pascal assumed (for no apparent reason except that he was a Christian) that his wager would result in one becoming a Christian (a Catholic Christian at that) as opposed to joining some other religion. 

3) Pascal assumed (for no apparent reason except that he was a Christian) that there is only one god.

4) Pascal assumed (for no apparent reason except that he was a Christian) that God demands our worship. What if God really wants something entirely different? What if God's real interest is that we all have twelve children, or else that we have no children? Or what if for some reason known only to divine omniscience, God prefers the company of atheists?

5) Pascal assumed (for no reason that I can think of) that God would reward people for simply going through the motions of worship.

6) Pascal assumed (for no reason that I can think of) that the same religion-oriented lifestyle that he, as a believer, found rewarding would also be rewarding to someone who wasn't a believer. 

7) Pascal's advice is meaningless to atheists because they see no reason to hedge their bets.


Maybe you're wondering why I've thought so much about Pascal's Wager. Well, way back in the antediluvian days of my youth, I took a few courses in theology in order to regain my faith, but the reverse occurred. Although my professor was a conservative Methodist minister and my classmates were ministerial students, I lost what little faith I had left when I started thinking even more critically about what the Bible meant and about the arguments in support of, first Christianity and then theism. I also observed that my classmates never seemed to come up with profound questions, and this too led me to doubt the intellectual respectability of religion. I thought that, yep, these people are dumb enough to be sheep alright, and they're the ones who are going to go out and run churches. Of course, in all fairness, most of them were Mississippi country boys whose families were poorly educated and who had just gone through twelve years of the worst public school system in the nation, and that's assuming that they didn't go to one of the white-only Christian "academies" that appeared in response to integration and were even worse than the public schools. It's also true that my professor didn't encourage probing questions, and as far as I could tell from the answers he gave me, he had never asked them.

However, my educational background had been similar to that of the other students, and not only that, I flunked three grades in public school, making me look even dumber. Why then, was I the only one who doubted, and did I really start doubting all at once at age twelve, or was I already headed in that direction a year earlier when I built a pulpit in my back yard and started preaching to my friends? All I can tell you is that I couldn't believe, and I did try. Now, I respect myself for being a skeptic by nature, and I forgive myself for having so devalued truth that I spent years trying to deny what I considered to be the reality about theism and religion. 

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced." Keats

I was in the kitchen last night when I was suddenly so overcome by the fear of death that I couldn't have felt much worse had I been on the threshold of being violently murdered. I forgot that I ever felt any differently, and I wondered why I hadn't long since killed myself simply to escape my terror of dying. I recalled that before Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun, he had tried to throw himself into an airplane propeller, and I imagined that I was experiencing a taste of that same desperation. 

A few minutes later, I put on a Czechoslovakian film called The Cremator, which turned out to be the darkest, scariest movie I had ever seen, and the fact that it was also brilliantly funny only made the horror worse. Indeed, I had to steel myself to remain in my chair. Then, I remembered that I had eaten some marijuana an hour before the fear started, and I realized that my emotion had been drug-inspired and wasn't really the totality of my life. Marijuana exacts a price for its insights, and if I use it when I'm already upset, as I did last night, the result can be such that I wouldn't hesitate to call it insanity. I survive such times simply by riding them out. I was afterwards exhausted but couldn't sleep so I took an Ambien. It is now the next afternoon, and I've been weak, dizzy, and anxious, all day. I just took a large dose of marijuana because I want to see where it will take me when I am already in such a state. 

You probably read that last sentence in horror and with the question Why?! in your mind. My answer is that I am on a quest in the realm of ultimate reality, and marijuana untethers my consciousness so that I can free associate a hundred times more effectively than usual, and the result of this free association is oftentimes new insights. As you might imagine, given that I'm an atheist, I hesitate to use the word quest because many are sure to assume that such adventured are spiritually inspired and, if successful, will lead to God. My conclusion has been just the opposite. 

Why is this, do you think?

People usually undertake spiritual quests with a pretty good idea of what they're going to experience, and this determines what they do experience. I came at my quest from the opposite direction, that is I started with faith and lost it. That's the thing about spiritual quests, once you give up your preconceptions regarding the nature of ultimate reality, you don't know where you're going to exit the rabbit hole. I know where I exited, and it is here that I will make my stand unless something unexpected happens. What I mean by this is that I try to be open to what many of you call spiritual realities, but the only reason I see to think they exist is that so many people believe in them. 

Why doesn't the firm belief of millions of people over thousands of years lead you too to believe? 

I suspect that people believe for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with external reality. The first is that they are raised to believe as they do, and the second is that they are probably, to some extent, evolutionarily programmed to believe in a spiritual realm.

But, if your conclusion is that the spiritual realm is imaginary, why are you still on a quest? 

The fact that spirits don't exist doesn't make reality less profound or the search for the best ways to live and think less meaningful. In fact, I think the opposite could be true, and here is why. For those who believe in a wise, powerful, and benevolent spiritual realm, the goal is to live in consistency with the desires of that realm just as a child lives in consistency with the desires of its parents. This usually results in a high degree of conformity among those who put their trust in a particular book or teacher. By contrast, I am alone in the darkness with no one to guide me. I say that I am alone because it truly is my road to travel, and the fact that others have traveled it hasn't proven to be of much benefit to me. I can only have confidence in that which I experience because it is only experience that seems real, although I can never be sure that it is real. I just know that it's the only light that I have to go by. As I live it, atheism is stark and bleak, but it is hardly shallow. However dismal the lessons, the quest itself is its own reward.