All Right Brain All the Time

Today. Partly cloudy with occasional showers. Temps almost chilly (low 46F, high 67F). That’s what I like about Western Oregon. NO HOT WEATHER almost hardly ever.

We went to the Old Cascades yesterday and hiked six miles. We used to hike and camp twelve or more miles in the High Cascades every week, but thanks to one knee surgery and two shoulder surgeries, yesterday was only our second trip in two years to any deep woods. I love places where a person could die and rot and no one ever know what happened to him. Every time someone gets lost in the woods near Eugene and is NEVER found, I think, “YAY! I LOVE living here.”

Today, like most days, I am sipping vodka. Two ounces is my limit, so sometimes I will drink on an empty stomach to get a little higher. I’m also—as you probably noticed—writing. I am most purposefully NOT writing a left-brain essay this time because, like a dog, I learn what people like, and that’s what I give them. Ha! Sometimes—for about two seconds—I AM tempted to write to please other people, but I do it so badly anyway that it’s useless. ME always leaks out, and most people aren’t going to like me no matter what, and I’m rather proud of that, actually, although I do make a studied effort to avoid alienating people unnecessarily.

In a few minutes, I’m going to go out and dig a hole. I only have once a month garbage pickup (a single small can), and I have no yard debris pickup, so I bury grass trimmings and compost, and, when they’re done rotting, I dig them up and put them in the garden or scatter them around the yard. Recycling and composting aren’t just about frugality; they’re about respect.

Anyway, digging a hole is something else I haven’t done in two years, and I shouldn’t do it now either because I’m probably not healed enough. Ah, but any day that I work with a shovel is a happy day; I have dug holes for the sheer joy of it.

Climbing way high up in my Ponderosa Pine and pruning limbs that could fall on the house during an ice storm is another bad idea that I’m planning to undertake (a neighbor took photo at top in 2003). Peggy protests it adamantly, but I am SICK of being a pain-wracked invalid. I’ll wait a few months though, until the sap is down, and I’m stronger.

I visited my friend, Doyd, this week. He’s 92, and in a nursing home, and breathes like a fish out of water even on oxygen. He’s also nearly blind, and his TV is broken, and his neighbor NEVER turns his own TV off, and the place is ALWAYS noisy, and the nursing home staff lost his dentures, and the place smells like shit, urine, and Pine Sol. Doyd is screwed. Doyd should die today. If I were Doyd, I would want to die today.

I have a big problem with trimming big trees because I’m afraid of heights. I used to fly an airplane, but even that didn’t make me like high places. The thing is, I always worry that I’ll jump off, which is kind of funny because the VERY LAST THING I want to do is to fall to my death. This incongruity used to make me think I was crazy, but then I learned that it’s a symptom of acrophobia, and I felt better about it. It’s like when I’m tempted to throw hot coffee in someone’s face, not because I want to, but because I so very much don’t want to that I’m afraid I might. I’ll think, “Wow, wouldn’t it be just the most horrible thing in the world to suddenly throw this cup of hot coffee in my friend’s face,” and then I’ll think, “Uh, oh, how do I know I won’t DO IT?” Then, I take my hand off the cup and sit back in my chair.

I’ve trimmed this tree before, and I’m hell-bent on doing it again because I’M the kind of person who does things FOR HIMSELF, and that’s the ONLY kind of person I want to be. When I have to give that up, what’s the use? Watching other people do my work is NOT ME, and sitting around in a nursing home is definitely NOT ME.

Years ago, when I was an undertaker, I went to pick a corpse up at a nursing home late one night. “She’s in room twelve,” the attendant said, but the attendant didn’t say that there were two women in room twelve. I stood looking at them for several minutes in the dim light trying to figure out which one was dead. I guessed wrong. No, no, no, I don’t want to be in one of those beds spending money like there’s no tomorrow for NOTHING that is of the least value to anyone—except to the people who are getting the money.

In closing

The last respondent to my last post wrote: “I don’t know how you could present your theories…in greater detail.”

Believe me, Dana, I could, but I sense a readiness on the part of many readers to move on, so I’m going to content myself with one last post on the subject for the foreseeable future.

My previous efforts occasioned a great many responses but none of them in regard to the points I raised. I’m not sure what to make of this, but I’m not easily discouraged, so I will close with two other objections to theism. First is the logical contradiction. It arises from God’s commonly supposed attributes such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, and examples can be thought of by the dozen. Here are a few.

Can God create a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it?
Can he do evil?
Can he will himself to die?
Can he choose to not know something?
Can he create a being greater than himself?
Can he be somewhere that he isn’t?

A final, somewhat related, objection to the type of God whom most people worship concerns suffering, and has inspired its own branch of theology—theodicy. It was an early concern of mine, and I have never found an explanation that made sense to me. I’ll present it in three parts.

(1) If God is omniscient, he knows exactly where, when, and how much every creature suffers. (2) If God is omnibenevolent, he doesn’t want any creature to suffer. (3) If God is omnipotent, he has the power to eliminate suffering without eliminating any benefit that suffering might bring.

Why, then, doesn’t he? All of the answers I have seen denied one of these three attributes. Of course, some people seek to avoid the problem altogether by throwing up their hands and claiming that God is inscrutable, but this approach has problems too. For one thing, it amounts to an admission that the case against God looks awfully bad. For another, it raises the question of whether moral behavior is whatever God says it is, or whether it exists independently of God. If morality is whatever God says it is, then it would be perfectly moral for him to tell you to lie, cheat, and murder your children (all of which are things he has actually done, according to the Bible at least).

Indeed, it is this second way of thinking about God that enables people to do absolutely horrific things in his name everyday of the week. Suicide bombers think they doing God’s will. Men who murder their daughters for “honor crimes” are likewise trying to please God. All of the people who shunned me when I lost my faith thought that turning their backs on me was what God wanted them to do, as did the people who threw my brother out of the church for playing music in a place that served liquor.

There is nothing that so angers nonreligious people as the observation that those who worship God often stand ready to throw compassion and justice out the window in a heartbeat if they think it will please him. For example, the opposition to abortion regardless of the circumstances; the cover-up of pedophilia by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church; George Bush’s willingness to violate the law in order to route taxpayer money to religious charities that discriminated and proselytized; and families that disown their children for marrying outside “the faith.” Slavery, genocide, religious intolerance, discrimination against women and the disabled, the murder of nonbelievers and homosexuals, and so on and so on, are all solidly rooted in Jewish, Moslem, and Christian scriptures. And, no, nothing that Christ said changed that. So it is that people who seek to excuse God by virtue of his “inscrutability” as also excusing the crimes done in his name.

I have tried to be fair in my criticisms throughout these posts, yet this is a subject that is as emotional to me as it is to many of you who stand, as it were, on the opposite side of the fence. I therefore apologize for whatever ways I might have failed. I have likewise generalized my comments to only apply to the supernatural deity in whom I once believed, and in whom most Americans appear to believe. In closing, I can but thank those of you who have hung in there with me despite the offense I have surely occasioned.