Ban religion?

The so-called New Atheists* vilify all forms of theism, insisting that, while liberal theists might not be as overtly dangerous as other theists, they support them by virtue of their belief that something called divine revelation is superior to reason and evidence. I don’t know what’s new about this as I’ve been hearing it for the entire forty years that I’ve been a card-carrying atheist. I even agree with it, although I consider it better to err on the side of moderation in expressing ones beliefs due to the fact that hardliners alienate everyone but other hardliners. Then again…

Madalyn Murry O’Hair was much more abrasive than the New Atheists, and I used to wonder if, given that atheism got even less notice back then than it does today, the negative attention she brought to it might not have been preferable to silence. If so, the same is probably true of the New Atheists. Moderates don’t make the news, and if you are to succeed in your fight against something as rich and powerful as religion, you have to make the news.

One of my readers suggested that the New Atheists want to see religion outlawed. While I don’t follow their latest pronouncements, I at least scan every book on atheism that comes through the library, and I haven’t run into such a proposal. I wrote to a friend who stays more attune to such things than I, and asked if he knew anything about it. He responded:

“…I’ve never heard anyone honestly suggest that religion should be banned. Hitchens was one of the most strident and he often described religion as evil and poisonous, but I don’t believe he advocated for a ban. Today, P.Z. Myers is one of the most ardent anti-religious voices and he certainly doesn’t suggest banning religion…When a Christian leaps to claiming that atheists would ban religion, they are usually attempting to derail a conversation which has become uncomfortable for them in some way.  I believe it’s a form of the ‘Going Nuclear’ strategy when you are losing an argument. One person points out how the Catholic Church systematically raped children and hid the crimes and the other responds with ‘You atheists want to herd us all into rail cars like the Nazis.’ I’ve seen one of your commenters do this on several occasions.”

All this got me to thinking about my own feelings in regard to outlawing religion. I didn’t have to think long because I consider the following self-evident: 

1) Religious teachings that inflict emotional harm upon children constitute child abuse; 

2)  Such teachings should be illegal in the presence of children. 

You can beat a kid with a stick, or you can beat him with the fear of God (“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”—Proverbs 9:10), and when you have a kid hiding under the bed as I did because he’s afraid of God, you’ve beaten him pretty badly. While the New Atheists might not openly support a legal ban on the ability of religion to emotionally brutalize children, I would, if only such a thing were possible. Unfortunately, the only way to bring it about would be to take children from the homes of those millions of parents who are so benighted as to imagine that they are saving their children from hell after death by making their lives a hell on earth. In the words of Jonathan Edwards, who long ago wrote a sermon that’s still found in college-level literature books:

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you...he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire...you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”

If you imagine that this kind of villainous talk was long ago abandoned by the church, I would point out that I grew up with it (though not always in such flowery language), and that it characterizes the teachings of Catholic, evangelical, and fundamentalist churches to this day. Churches like my childhood church might put more emphasis on their belief that only the blood of God the Son protects us from the “righteous wrath” of God the Father, but it remains church doctrine in nearly all of the churches I’ve studied, and I’ve studied the basic beliefs of dozens.

*The best known being Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.

For those who live with pain

I take the following for pain: Neurontin, Ambien, oxycodone, marijuana, and Cymbalta (an SNRI—selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor). These drugs are what’s left of the 25 or 30 I’ve used, a list that includes every legal narcotic I know of, a half dozen sleeping pills, various anti-inflammatories, and, for good measure, Elavil. Cymbalta (see photo) has helped most, but, due to insurance changes, my cost for my next prescription will be $607 for a 90-day supply. While looking online for substitutes, I learned that Effexor (another SNRI) is equally good for pain and, because it has been around since 1994, comes in a generic form for $12.32. 

The high cost of Cymbalta is why, if you live in America, you are barraged with Cymbalta commercials, whereas you never see Effexor advertised. Along with price, other disadvantages to the latest “miracle drugs” is that their long-term downsides are unknown and they are rarely more efficacious than older drugs. So, why did my doctor prescribe an expensive medication before trying me on a dirt-cheap drug that is likely to be just as effective? Hell if I know, although I’ve noticed that doctors don’t usually know how much drugs cost. They also used to get kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies, although my understanding is that the government put an end to this.

It’s good to remember that you’re probably in a better position than your doctor to know which drugs might help you. For instance, if you suffer from ongoing pain, your medication options are limited, and with a little effort, you can learn what they are and stay abreast of the latest research. Of the drugs I’ve tried for chronic pain, I would say that narcotics are both the most heralded and one of the least effective. I mention this because some of you have trouble getting narcotics, and, as a consequence, appear to hold them in higher regard than they deserve. The reason for their relative ineffectiveness is that you quickly build up a tolerance, so if your starting dose is 5-10 mgs, you might be taking six times that amount (and incurring six times the risks) after a few weeks and still not get as good a result as you had with your initial dose. It is for this reason that I try to limit my narcotic intake to twice a week, but even then the tolerance problem remains. 

No doctor ever told me to take more than 20 mgs of oxycodone or Dilaudid at a time. This used to leave me in the troubling situation of thinking that, my god, I’m taking this strong narcotic that people rob pharmacies at gunpoint for, and I’m still in terrible pain—my condition must be hopeless. When I increasingly turned to the Internet for drug information, I learned about narcotic tolerance, and realized that my doctors simply weren’t taking tolerance into account, so I started increasing my own dosage, but no matter how much I took, I soon needed more. (If you should ever consider increasing drug dosage without your doctor’s consent, bear in mind the following statement from the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “In 2008, more than 36,000 people died from drug overdoses, and most of these deaths were caused by prescription drugs.”)

Rather than the prescribed strength being too weak, I’ve also seen it go the other way. For instance, if I had used that 100-microgram Fentanyl patch that one doctor gave me, I’m pretty sure I would be dead. After another doctor started me on a triple dose of Demerol, I could hardly get out my chair for three days. Such overkill (ha) is another reason that you should do you own research.

Because of my positive experience with Cymbalta, I’ve become very interested in anti-depressants for pain relief. Some of you might know that the old tricyclic antidepressants (Norpramin, Tofranil, and Elavil, to name a few) have long been given for pain. Then came the SSRIs (Prozac, Lexapro, and Zoloft are three that I’ve taken), which weren’t good for pain by themselves but were good in combination with a tricyclic. The next advance was the SNRIs (Cymbalta, Effexor, Pristiq), which are effective for the pain of arthritis, fibromyalgia, and neuropathy, along with depression, panic disorder, social phobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

As you can imagine, any drug that can do all that can also kick your ass, as I discovered when I stopped taking Cymbalta cold turkey last November and felt utterly exhausted, experienced excessive scalp sweating, had symptoms approximating the early stages of a horrendous cold, and wanted to rage one minute and cry the next, symptoms that continued for nearly two months. Since I had stopped taking narcotics at the same time, I assumed I was suffering from narcotic withdrawal and so did my doctor. When I finally went online, it didn’t take me any time to become convinced that it wasn’t the narcotics, it was the Cymbalta. Why didn’t my doctor know this? Maybe he didn’t sleep well the night before, or maybe he was thinking about his last patient or the fight he had with his wife that morning. I have no idea, but I do know that one should never go to any doctor with the assumption that everything that can be done will be done, and that it will be done right. I’ve experienced situations in which so many mistakes were made by so many people in so short a time that I imagined myself trapped in a Monty Python skit.

I’ve gone into some detail about anti-depressants for pain control because Cymbalta has worked fairly well for me without severe side-effects or a tolerance problem. It’s important to remember that chronic pain causes anxiety and depression, problems that worsen the pain, and that anti-depressants have the advantage of treating these along with pain. The worse downside to Cymbalta—so far, anyway—is that, having been through drug withdrawal a few times by now, I worry more about drugs that cause withdrawal than I do about drugs that I can easily stop. Whenever I start to focus on such concerns, I remind myself that living with pain and depression pose their own serious health risks. For example, chronic pain makes a person more prone to accidents; depression impedes his immune system; and the two of them together make it impossible to get adequate sleep. I, like so many of you, can no longer imagine a drug-free life despite the fact that I anticipate dying earlier because of it.

I have found living with pain—and the resultant disability—to be a major challenge to my desire to live at all. Many people experience this, and because of it, I have a great deal of sympathy for other sufferers. We share a problem that can be very hard to treat and that many people don’t understand (especially if you “look normal”) and often seem bored by. I do understand what pain sufferers are going through, at least somewhat, and I am far from bored by it. Just as some of you worry about me, so do I worry about you. I am hardly the worst-off of those in my blogging community, and I can thank many of you for helping me keep my head above water.

Snowbrush's happy outing that ended disappointedly

I saw Satan today while eating a granola bar in front of Jerry’s Lumber Company (and, no, I’m not trying to fool you into thinking that pink taffy is a granola bar). He was a distinguished looking man of 70 in black pants, black shoes, a black coat, a black fedora, and carrying a black mug. I wanted to yell out the window, “Hey, Satan, is hell still under a heat advisory?” but was afraid it would embarrass him, what with it being commonly known that Satan is a shy demon. What did he look like? He looked like an open and cuddly version of Dick Cheney. (During the reign of GW Bush, I sometimes wondered if Satan was dyadic, with Bush being Dumb Transparent Satan, and Cheney being Sadistic Conniving Satan, and them both being bloodthirsty because they hate one another and take it out on us.)

Finished with my granola bar, I went into the store and specifically into the store’s male restroom where I sat down to rest with the hope (but not the prayer) that no one would come in and stink the place up. While I rested, I got to thinking as follows: Peggy has never let me teach her the first thing about managing her own finances…. Peggy’s refusal to learn about finances means that I control every penny Peggy has including her workplace retirement. Peggy can’t even get into her own accounts without my help…. My next blogpost will definitely say: “Hello from sunny Acapulco. I took Peggy’s money and ran away with a twenty-year-old blond called Taffy because her limbs are so charmingly flexible. ‘You couldn’t get a twenty year old,’ you say? Ha! With Peggy’s money and my drugs, I would say that I made-out okay. Hee, hee, hee.”

Done resting, I left the restroom and proceeded, first west, then north, and then west again into the main part of the store where I headed (as I always do, no matter what I’m really there for) down the indoor and the outdoor plant aisles, talking friendly-like to the plants while people stared admiringly. I don’t buy indoor plants anymore, because I don’t have room for the ones I already own, but I saw a Rex Begonia, and I just knew I was going to make an exception, and I was right (it’s a lucky plant that comes home with me, unless it dies).

When Rex and I got to the checkout, the 20-year-old blonde checker said that Rex Begonias are her favorite plant, and that’s when I heard the theme music from The Twilight Zone because I knew that her and me coming together like that had to be more than a coincidence, and I became a theist on the spot. Right away, I knew I should leave Peggy and marry that woman, but then I remembered Peggy’s money which I hadn’t stolen yet. Then, I got to wondering if maybe the woman’s name was Taffy. “Are you Taffy?” I asked. “No, but my boss calls me Daffy because customers often complain that I charged them twice for the same item.” Upon hearing this, I went back to being an atheist and drove home embittered.

I could rattle off stuff like the above constantly because it portrays how my brain actually operates as I overlay reality with imagination, something which I do all day long. 

Losing church, losing readers

I lost at least two long-term Christian readers following the post about my decision to stop attending church (three posts back). I was sad about that, especially coming as it did right on top of my disappointment regarding the church. Then, the following sentence came into my head as I lay awake one night, “I am cast back upon myself,” and I found cheer in that, upon myself being the one place I can absolutely depend upon. Even if other people remain loyal, they can still die, and there’s only so much they can do anyway. Eventually, it all comes back to me.

While thinking about my absentee readers, I remembered that I had more to say about my decision to stop going to church. I didn’t say it sooner because I didn’t know how to express it sooner (if I had, I might not have lost my readers because what I have already said, if taken alone, seems harsh). Now that the words come to me, they flow effortlessly. It is often true that something I can’t say becomes easy to say once I get a little distance between myself and the situation that inspired it. The fact is that I went from feeling very welcome at church to doubting that I was welcome at all. 

For much of the time I attended, I was in email communication with two of the women who go there, and it was with them that I shared my objection to the requirement that I say the word Christ as a prerequisite for taking communion. Neither wrote back, at all, ever, and I took that as a very bad sign. Had I continued to feel welcome, I might have continued to go to Bible study even if they hadn’t relaxed their rule about communion. As things stood, I enjoyed Bible study fairly well (shallow though it was), and I also enjoyed the people, but I needed dialogue about the communion issue, and when I immediately ran into a wall of silence, I assumed that the only way for me, as an atheist, to be accepted was to keep my mouth shut about things that bothered me, and to express a reverence for Christ that I didn’t feel. When, after I quit going, no one contacted me to say I had been missed (everyone in class had my email address), I took it to imply that I probably wasn’t missed.

During my first weeks at St. Mary’s, I felt increasingly idealistic and even optimistic due to the initial warmth and liberalism of the people, but left feeling more jaundiced than ever in regard to the merits of any kind of organized Christianity. I don’t know of anything about the Christian religion that outrages non-Christians so much as hypocrisy. I assume that Christians feel pressure to pretend to be more loving than they are, but the result is that they look worse when they fail than they would have looked had they not pretended. And, no, I am not speaking about every Christian. The only reason that I don’t hate the Christian religion more than I do is that I believe in the goodness of some of my Christian readers. That made it all the harder to lose at least two of them. I suppose they thought I was being an ass over the communion issue, but I only brought it up because I wanted to feel that I belonged and because I believed it an occasion when I had something to teach. Perhaps, the reader was right who wrote, “the Church…is not interested in learning from you. From its viewpoint, you should be learning from it.”

In any event, I deserved to have my feelings discussed even if I was in the wrong, because I shared them with people who claim that love is the virtue that they hold in highest esteem, and love does not shut people out by ignoring problems. I could, of course, have talked to more people, but having been so treated by the two who had shown the most interest in me, I saw no reason to think that any good would come from contacting those who seemed less interested, and I assumed that, even if I had, the most likely outcome would have been animosity. Silence is a very effective wall. When people are yelling, there remains the desire to be understood if not to understand, but silence just says, “Go away.”