Memories and regrets

Paul Tirmenstein and John Marthaler
in 1984, two years to the month
before Pauls' death

A lot of high-rise apartments (if you can call five stories a high-rise) are going up downtown, and as I walked past some of them today, I looked to see if the barber shop that Oscar went to was still there. It was, the whole thing containing no more than 200 square feet and looking out of place among all those apartments, but still standing and still in business. Oscar was in his eighties when we met but was still attractive in a benevolent, dignified, and intelligent-looking sort of way, especially when he wore a three-piece suit, which he usually did (I never saw Oscar but what he was dressed-up).

The day I took him to the barbershop, he said that his doctor had told him that he had a heart problem which would kill him without surgery, but that he was too old to survive the surgery. Oscar said this with a look of horror that made it clear that he wasn’t taking the news at all well. I had seen a lot of death by then—I was nearly 50 and had often worked around the dying as well as the dead—but I didn’t get it like I do now that the actuarial tables are predicting my own demise in a mere 16 years—which is about how long ago Oscar died, yet it seems like Oscar died just a little while ago. At the time I knew Oscar, I realized that anyone except for myself could die at any time, and I rather assumed that if a person was old when the time came, he wouldn’t mind it so much. Oscar clearly minded it, and I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. He died about a month later, and I still feel badly that I didn’t at least have enough brains to encourage him to talk about his feelings. I also wonder how a Christian could have been so afraid of death unless he didn’t really believe.

Thinking of Oscar made me think of Paul, maybe because he was Oscar’s age when he died, and because I had also talked with him about his death without being as supportive as I would have liked. Paul wasn’t much like Oscar except that he often wore a suit, although the only suit he owned had been crap when he bought it and hadn’t improved over the decades, plus Paul was the kind of old man who, every time he eats, ends up with crumbs on his face. It didn’t help his appearance any that he also had piercings in more places than I cared to look, this in rural Mississippi during the early ’80s when the only piercings were in women’s ears, and then no more than one per ear. On the plus side, Paul was smart, thoughtful, and well-spoken. He collected Japanese fans, painted beautifully, made jewelry, had been a refrigeration engineer, and singlehandedly built the house in which he, his wife, and his daughter had lived (his wife being dead and his daughter living in another town when I knew him).

Other than myself, I only knew two atheists in the entire state of Mississippi, and they were a long way from my house, but I still saw them a few times a year. Paul was one, and John was the other, and since part of my name is Thomas, I called us the three apostles, much to their delight. Each of the other two was as eccentric as a village atheist is supposed to be and then some. For instance, they both had ten or more (far more in John’s case) atheistic bumper stickers on their cars. Also, John must have weighed 400 pounds (I know he doesn't look it in the picture), and this made his old Corolla lean heavily toward the driver’s side. He wrote one or more letters to newspapers everyday, and carried them around to show people. Along with his piercings, Paul had a poster on an inside wall that was four feet from, and facing, his front door. It depicted Michelangelo’s god raping Uncle Sam under the caption, “One Nation Under God.”  Since no one could meet Paul (or John either for that matter) without being struck by how polite and soft-spoken he was, I finally asked him why he had that obnoxious poster and all those bumper stickers, and he just told me that some things needed to be said.

Because he knew I smoked pot, Paul phoned one day and said that he wanted to commit suicide because he couldn’t take care of himself much longer, and could I get him some drugs to do it with. Getting busted for drugs in Mississippi back then was no joke because even a couple of joints could land a person in Parchman Penitentiary for years. Still, I would have tried to have gotten them if he hadn’t called me on the phone, but I was just paranoid enough to think that the DEA might be listening in, so I said no. What I did do was to invite him to come live with Peggy and me. I meant it, and I had no doubt but what Peggy would have welcomed him, because that’s just how Peggy is. He turned me down because he didn’t consider a dependent life to be a life worth living, and because he wanted his money to go to American Atheists rather than to “be wasted keeping an old man alive.” A few months later, Paul was busy running a hose from his car exhaust into his car when a neighbor saw him, and called the cops. The cops took him to jail and called his daughter. His daughter, who was a born-again Christian, got him released and stayed with him for awhile. The day she left, he got in his car and killed himself. I admired him for that and for donating his body to the Ole Miss Medical School. If nothing else kills me first, I too will die a suicide. I’m afraid of death, and I hope to live for years yet, but, like Paul, I’m not willing to live at any cost and in any amount of misery.

I guess it must have been 20 or 30 years ago that I read in the newspaper about an elderly couple who lived in Florida. The wife being hopelessly sick, they got their affairs in order—including making their bed and washing their dishes—after which they wrote suicide notes, and then drove to a rural area where the man shot her and then himself. I think it’s a poor excuse for a country in which people who are old and sick and ready to die have to do that kind of thing, and I admire the hell out that couple, the man especially, for having the guts to do it. I’ve pondered that news article scores of times over the years, always with sadness that they had to die without support, and with regret that I refused to support Paul in his wish to die. Every time I remember that Florida couple, I ask myself all over again if I could do as the man did if I had no better option, and the answer is always yes. I might try to make things a little easier by taking a few pills or having a few drinks first, but if Peggy and I were to ever agree that it was our time to die, I could make it happen. I’ve always been that way, and I live with unending grief over something I once did because of it, yet I acted out of the best that was within me. I can look back on many failures in my life, but when it comes to matters of life and death, I’ve always been able to do what needed to be done with the exception of helping Paul, and his death has only increased my resolve to never fail again.

“If thee does not turn to the Inner Light, then where will thee go?”

The Bulwark by Theodore Dreiser is the story of a good man’s lifelong struggles against insincerity and materialism. Dreiser himself wasn’t such a man, for he was bitter, manipulative, physically threatening, and a user of women around whom it was said that no female was safe. Yet, his writings portray a deep and sympathetic understanding of people, women no less than men, and the realism with which he wrote represented a new direction in American literature. As with many writers of depth, I was curious about Dreiser’s religious beliefs, and I found that they were similar to my own:

“Dreiser said he was nearly destroyed by reading Spencer, who, as he emphasized, ‘took every shred of belief away from me; showed me that I was a chemical atom in a swirl of unknown forces…’ Although Dreiser used Spencer’s idea to justify his late and often cruel and selfish actions, Spencer, as well as Huxley, embittered him. It was as if he resented forevermore having to give up comforting beliefs, to face the reality of a world that offered no excuse for viciousness.”*

I believe that science offers a better explanation for viciousness than religion, and that the fundamentalist religion in which I grew up was itself vicious in its eagerness to see everyone but its own members rot in hell, but then the fanatical Catholicism of Dreiser’s childhood was no better. Even so, there lay in it the assurance that there existed a deity who gave to life an ordained meaning and the promise of a better life after death. Along with our shared disillusionment with religion, I also share with Dreiser a high regard for the Quaker faith, a Quaker being the main character of The Bulwark. I haven’t found any indication that Dreiser ever attended a Quaker meeting (as their churches are called), but I did, and his book made me nostalgic.

I first went in 1990 with my friend Walt who was the kind of atheist who likes to tell of realizing that religion was bullshit by the time he was seven, and of losing respect for his parents and other elders for being so stupid as to fall for it. He never wavered in his unbelief or in his contempt for religion, and he ridiculed me when I did. He first attended the Eugene meeting with a girlfriend and, unlike her, became a Quaker. Joining most churches is easy. You can sometimes do it on the spot as in my first church, the Church of Christ, which makes haste to baptize people because it believes they will go to hell if they die unbaptized. It’s even easier and faster to become a Unitarian because all you have to do is to sign your name. At the other end are Catholics and Episcopalians with their requirement that an applicant attend classes for months. Quakers are even more restrictive in that they require a candidate to attend meeting for an indeterminate period, and then ask to be considered for membership.

Walt, to my knowledge, was only the second atheist to join the Quaker meeting. Helen Park, one of the members, wrote the following about the lack of importance that she placed upon whether one believed in God: “There is indeed One that speaks to my condition, but that One may not announce a name or even speak a word; it may reveal itself as Light, or inner peace, or compassion for humanity.” So it was that the Quakers—the local ones anyway—admitted people according to their values rather than their vocabulary. Many atheists would refuse to join a values-centered organization in which anyone used the word God, and only the Unitarian Church universally welcomes atheists, so I thought well of Walt for joining the Quakers and well of them for letting him.

I attended for about a year, although I never considered joining, there being too much that I didn’t like. Sitting in silence in pews that were arranged in an inward facing square bored me; I found decision-making by consensus excruciating because trivial decisions sometimes went unresolved for months; and too many Quakers struck me as stubborn and distant. Some of them seemed to weigh every word they spoke, and it made them appear stilted if not secretive. I also found that not every Quaker was as tolerant as Helen Park. One said to me six months into our friendship, “You’re too sensitive and intelligent to be a real atheist.” She meant it as a compliment, as when a racist tells a black person, “You’re too smart not to have some white blood in you,” and I never forgave her.

What I did like about the meeting was being there with Walt and attending an occasional class. I ended up on the “religious education committee” that sponsored these classes, and we decided to hold a nine-month Bible study. The decision wasn’t easy because few people had an interest in the Bible, and the feminists on the committee strongly opposed studying a book that had inspired so much oppression. By way of compromise, we decided that, rather than study the Bible itself, we would study a book about it. We chose A Guide to Understanding the Bible by religious liberal Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), the first minister at Manhattan’s infamous—to most Christians—Riverside Church. The book being out of print, we had to await the publisher’s permission to Xerox copies. There being few people involved and no money exchanged, I would guess that most churches would have Xeroxed the book without asking, but Quakers are unerring—some might say rigid—in doing what they think is right.

I quit attending the Quaker meeting partly because Walt and I had a falling-out (one of several over our 27-year friendship), but mostly because I was bored by the main service. For those who don’t know, in a traditional Quaker meeting, everyone sits silently until someone feels “led” to speak. There are no songs, no prayers, no sermons, nothing but a silence that is rarely interrupted, and in which one’s own meditations are interrupted when someone does speak. Sometimes, those who talked made interesting points, but I don’t remember them. What I do remember are the queries by which the meeting and its members were to periodically examine themselves in regard to particular values. I give but a small example:

On simplicity

Do I keep my life uncluttered with things and activities, avoiding commitments beyond my strength and light?

Do I recognize when I have enough?

On social responsibility

Am I mindful of how my lifestyle and my investments can contribute to the improvement of the human condition, or to the exploitation of others?

How do I respond and support one who acts out of one clear leading when I am under the weight of another?

On peace

Do I treat conflict as an opportunity for growth, and address it with careful attention?

Do I look for ways to reaffirm in action and attitude my love for the one with whom I am in conflict?

On stewardship of the environment

Do I act as a faithful steward of the environment in the use and disposal of hazardous substances?

Do I choose with care the use of technology and devices that truly simplify and add quality to my life without adding an undue burden to essential resources?

On integrity and simplicity

Do I manage my commitments so that over commitment, worry, and stress do not diminish my integrity?

Am I careful to speak truth as I know it and am I open to truth spoken to me?

Such queries absolutely wrecked me, because I interpreted the absence of anything remotely similar in other churches to say volumes about how little those churches cared about being good people as opposed to being people who could parrot what they believed to be good dogma. I understood that all they really cared about was my salvation, my relationship with Christ, seeing my loved ones in heaven, having my God help me find a job or even a parking place. Here, for the first time, I had discovered a group of people who took ethical behavior seriously enough to examine its implications; people who had the courage to stand against the dominant social mores as well as against a government that could take their property and throw them into prison; people who believed that religion should mean something more than a cheap ticket to heaven and a place to socialize.

I attended during the U.S. backed war in Nicaragua, and found that the Quakers were supportive of the illegal harboring of refugees, which I think some of the local ones probably did. Others were tax resisters who were unwilling to finance militarism by paying their federal income tax. While most churches are busy upholding the status quo (whatever that means in a given area, e.g. slavery in some, emancipation in others), Quakers have served on the front lines of every movement that opposes war or supports human rights and welfare, yet there are only 87,000 of them in America compared to 40-million Catholics and 16-million Baptists. Even the tiny Episcopal Church is enormous by comparison with its two-million members, and just one mega church in Houston holds half as many people as there are  Quakers in America. I would be astounded if the members of any of these other churches are ever encouraged to ponder the morality of paying taxes, using insecticides, or buying a new car versus a used one.

As I wrote three posts ago, I don’t care if people believe in God. For one thing, the term is so imprecise as to be meaningless of itself, but my main reason is that it’s not what people say but what they do that matters. Unfortunately, I’ve rarely seen organized churches do good. The American Friends Service Committee is the only church-related organization to have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Many secular groups have won, and many religious individuals have won, so one would assume that a mega church with a budget of $80-million could easily win, but if not, then surely a denomination with 40-million members in America alone, so why haven’t they?

The Bulwark is exceptional among Dreiser’s books, the moreso because he was a cynic, a determinist, a practical atheist (sometimes he sounded atheistic, other times deistic), and a Communist. Why, then, in his last months, did he end the life of his last great character, Solon Barnes, with the words, “If thee does not turn to the Inner Light, then where will thee go?” I’m sure I don’t know, but I suspect. Having read nothing in three biographies that made me think he was softening toward traditional theism or even liberal theism, I can only guess that he had reference to some other Inner Light, love, perhaps, because what is love but light, and of what does light consist but of a love that brightens a person’s face during the hours that he or she is possessed by it? If I had ever known anyone who was able to hold to love consistently, I would have remembered that person, but its rarity notwithstanding, love remains chief among virtues, and where it is found, many of the rest follow.

At least this is how I see things, but as to whether love was what Dreiser meant, I can only speculate based upon what I know of him and upon what I know of how the Quakers of my acquaintance defined Inner Light, e.g. “...that One may...reveal itself as Light, or inner peace, or compassion for humanity.” As for what I know about Dreiser, I’ll limit myself to my best evidence. The Bulwark took twenty years to finish, and the changes it underwent during those years seemed to reflect the growth of its often autobiographical author, a man famous for the compassion he expressed in his writing. Just as Solon Barnes was rigid, so was Dreiser in real life, but age can soften a person, so it is my guess that as the old and dying author wrote about his old and dying character, he was writing about himself. At least, I like to think so.

* from Theodore Dreiser by James Lundquist. 

Part 2: liberal religion

I usually criticize conservative religion because it represents the greatest threat, and not because, as some believe, I’m ignorant of liberal religion. As one who would like to have some form of religion in my life, but who long ago rejected the conservative faith of his childhood, I have been a Unitarian; read quite a few books by religious liberals; and was the target of my liberal sister’s proselytization efforts for decades. My most recent book by a liberal was A Religion of One’s Own by Thomas Moore (pictured), which came out this year. The first thing I did upon finding it at the library was to turn to the index and count the references to God. I was surprised to find that God only appeared on pages 14-16 of the 272-page work, but this was the part of the book that I spent the most time pondering because it represents the views of millions of religious liberals, served as a source for this post, and because I considered his other thoughts obvious.

The virtue of conservative religion is that its meaning is clear even when its illogical or has no basis in fact; its downside is that it leads to oppression. The virtue of liberal religion is that its potential for oppression is low, but on its downside, its theology is devoid of meaningful content. For example,

“Jesus walked on water,” says something, whereas,

“The best way…keeps the reality of God, but emptied of our ideas of who or what God is…” is so devoid of value that I suspect Moore of writing it without reflecting upon its implications. For to believe in a God about whom one can have no conception means to believe—without the least evidence—in a God that might be good, but then again, might be evil; a God that might be compassionate, but could just as easily be bloodthirsty; a God that might be sentient, but could be an unconscious force, and so on down the line through every conceivable characteristic, including existence, because to affirm that God exists is to hold at least one idea about “who or what God is.”

“God is in the space between sentences. God is the unspoken and the unwritten…God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere…You look until you see nothing tangible, and that is God.” (Moore)

What is the difference between a God about whom nothing can be said—and therefore might not exist—versus atheism, and why pray to such a God (“I’ll speak to God out of extreme need”), prayer being an act that surely implies belief in a deity that is conscious, loving, powerful, omnipresent, compassionate, and fluent in human language? Just as Descartes claimed to throw out all knowledge except for a belief in his own existence, and from that one belief to completely rebuild his identity as a white European Catholic male of a certain age, height, weight, number of teeth, and so forth; I doubt Moore’s honesty when he prays to that about which he insists nothing can be known. Such contradictions are common among liberals.

Various liberal churches teach a course entitled “Living the Mystery,” in seeming unawareness that its synonym would be “Living the Ignorance,” mystery being but a euphemism for not knowing. Those who use the capitalized word believe they have a greater spiritual awareness than the rest of us, but of what does their awareness consist? I don’t know despite having tried awfully hard to find out, and my considered opinion is that it’s simply a case of the emperor having no clothes. Liberals themselves would see it as akin to Gnosticism—not that they use the word—in that, if you’re on the inside of the movement, you get it, but if you’re on the outside, it just looks like silliness.

Not every liberally religious person would agree with Moore on every point (he doesn’t identify himself as a Christian for one thing), but all share his vagueness. My sister often said to me, Your problem is that you’re stuck in the teachings of your fundamentalist childhood, and this causes you to think that either a great many things can be said about God, or else God doesn’t exist. My response was that if some universally benevolent being or force that is deserving of the title God really does exist, then surely its existence would be so obvious that none could doubt it. To simply say, as she did, that I define God as the universal impetus toward good, and my goal is to align myself with that good, strikes me as no different from secular humanism except in its unfathomable insistence on retaining the word God.

Like conservative Christianity, liberal Christianity holds to the parts of scripture it likes and disregards the rest. For example, it’s big on the story of the Good Samaritan but silent on “Put every man, woman, child, and animal, to the sword, but keep the young virgins for yourselves.” How do liberals justify this? About some things, they deny that God (however defined) really said them; others, they identify as metaphors. Fine, but how do they know what “God” really said, or what God’s numerous genocides, wanton murders, and other atrocities, are metaphors of. Metaphors are only useful inasmuch as they relate to things that exist in reality, but liberal Christians mostly use them to clarify other metaphors, and this makes them substitutes for reality rather than definers of reality:

“What is God?”

“God is the ground of being.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that God is the soil, and we are the seed.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“God is the substance in which we live and move and have our being.”

I see no reason to think that vagueness, ignorance (aka Divine Mystery), and endless metaphors, constitute heightened spiritual awareness, and in every field but religion, even religious people regard them as muddled thinking and therefore as impediments to truth. I think of liberal religion as what’s left when everything has been taken from religion except the need to believe. By claiming that vagueness, ignorance, and metaphor, represent spirituality, liberals leave themselves less open to attack simply because there’s so little to attack. Talking with them is like biting the air in that you’re free to do it all day, but why would you? Maybe they can’t help it. Maybe there really is a gene that tends toward religious belief and is weak or absent in those who lack such beliefs. If so, it’s not to the blame of the one or the credit of the other, but is merely a fact, although I would consider it a regrettable fact in the case of believers and among those who, like myself, can neither believe nor escape the impulse to believe if only to cope with a life of endless pain.

I find that the only direction one like myself can go is toward liberal religion, yet I am no more welcome there than I am among conservatives because most liberals regard my unwillingness to use their terminology to prove that I’m unworthy. As Moore put it:

“Atheism tends to be nothing more than yet another too-earnest religion with the added problem of being excessively rationalistic.”

This by the same man who believes in a God about which nothing can be said. In my wide experience, most liberals regard atheists as excessively rationalistic based solely upon the fact that they are atheists (agnosticism being an acceptable alternative), it never occurring to them that the terminology might simply be different. I say this because when I get beyond the God-talk, I find little in liberal writings with which I disagree. For example, Moore’s admonitions to appreciate beauty, cherish the moment, help other people, and find depth in the commonplace, are characteristics of sensitivity and maturity rather than theism, yet he relates them to theism and believes that atheists are less than because they don’t use the word God, a word about which he himself has such reservations that, “I sometimes just use the letter G.” Why, having abandoned two of the three letters is he hell-bent on keeping the third? I know it matters to him because if it didn’t, he wouldn’t insult those who have abandoned the third, not that he thinks any more highly of people who believe in a God whose attributes are knowable:

“We need to grow out of that kind of religion….I don’t want to make little of God by pretending God is a ‘he’ pulling strings in the sky. I’d rather not use the word if it’s going to be so small and inadequate.”

Terminology is to liberals what dogma is to conservatives in that conservatives imbue words with meaning and require that the meaning be accepted, while liberals take meaning from words, and require that the words alone be embraced. Frankly, I don’t much care if liberals believe in a God whom they define as the impetus toward good, or the spirit of love, or that about which nothing can be known. So that I won’t portray myself as more tolerant than I am, I should add that I can’t begin to fathom the adoration that many of them feel toward Christ, and I find their devotion to the word God so lifeless that it troubles me in the same way that I would find it troubling if someone freeze-dried their dead cat, set it on a pillow, and insisted that everyone go along with them in pretending that it was alive. Yet, we all have our little oddities, and I wouldn’t reject them because of theirs, but they do reject me because of mine (it’s easier to be rejecting when you’re not in a tiny minority). I prefer liberal theism to conservative theism only because liberals are unlikely to openly oppress me, but their contempt for atheists is no less complete. It’s just less understandable.