For those who don't already think I'm crazy...


I realize that there’s nothing straight people like better than to listen to a druggie talk about how high he got, complete with details about all the stupid things he did, so I’m here to oblige.

I grew up in rural Mississippi during the ‘50s and ‘60s. This was before marijuana arrived and before teenagers realized that every cow pasture contained mushrooms that would make a person have visions. I occasionally heard tales about the ass-kicking power of Valium, Methadrine, Percodan, or Queludes, but I never knew anybody who had any, and there weren’t any drug dealers in my area, only bootleggers. All that my generation had to get wasted on was liquor, and, since Mississippi was still under Prohibition, liquor was abundant and any kid could buy it. I don’t know why the frequent teenage driving fatalities (I started driving while drunk as soon as I got my license at age 15) didn’t cause public alarm, but people seemed to assume that there was just something about teenagers that made them get drunk, flip cars, hit bridge abutments, and get runover by trains, and there was really nothing anyone could do to stop it. This was before MADD convinced the nation that drunk driving should be taken seriously, and during which drunkenness was portrayed as funny on prime time family television. 

In 1970, I was a senior in college, and I still hadn’t seen any marijuana. Then one night, my friend, Ed, and I were hitchhiking, and two girls from a school in Virginia picked us up. They had driven all the way to Mexico to buy pot, and were on their way home with several pounds. After they told us this, Ed whispered to me that we should rob them. I said no, so Ed spent the rest of the ride sulking. When we got out of the car, he was so mad that he threatened to push me off an I-20 overpass, so we continued our journey separately. These girls had given us a couple of joints to smoke later, but I don’t remember smoking them, although I’m sure I did. In any event, I smoked a lot of pot over the next twenty years, the quantity being limited by cost, availability, and the fact that I didn’t enjoy getting high everyday because doing that makes the drug work more like a downer than a hallucinogen. My assumption is that most potheads like the downer effect, but feeling sleepy and looking stupid never appealed to me. 

I knew that some shrinks and college professors from New York and California had become excited about the consciousness expanding effects of hallucinogenics, and claimed that such drugs gave them insights that led them to, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (who became Ram Dass), and Alan Watts (an Episcopal priest) were the three I remember best. Then came Carlos Castaneda, an anthropologist who wrote a series of books about his apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian medicine man who relied heavily upon a large number of hallucinogenics. I found it impossible to believe half of what Casteneda wrote, but I was impressed to think that even the remaining half might be true. In any event, Castaneda was one of the highly educated and respected people who believed in drugs so strongly that they jeopardized their careers by endorsing substances that, they believed, had the power to alter one’s consciousness for the better.

During this period, I was very distressed about the excruciatingly prolonged loss of my religious faith, and my hope was that drugs would give me a way of looking at life that was superior to what I had found thus far. I had heard that other people had seen God while on drugs, and I thought, well, why not me? Of course, I knew that some of these drugs could also induce lasting insanity. At the time, there was a famous daytime TV personality named Art Linkletter, whose twenty year old daughter Diane often appeared on his show. One day in 1969, Diane dropped acid and a few days later jumped from a skyscraper to her death. Art Linkletter, sweet and gentle man that he was, threatened to kill Timothy Leary because he blamed Leary for making drugs seem desirable to the kind of sensitive and searching people—like his daughter—who were the least equipped to handle them.

I personally witnessed two other incidents that made me take drugs seriously. I drove an ambulance at the time, and one night while I was in the ER, two hippies came in with a friend who was having such a bad trip that he didn’t know where he was. While the staff ignored him, two guards roughed him up for no reason that I could see other than that he was on drugs. After that, I realized that no matter how bad a trip might get, I would never go to a hospital for help. In the other incident, my best friend actually did see the Holy Spirit while on marijuana. Afterwards, he would look at me as if from the far side of the ocean and ask, “What’s it all about?” over and over and over. I was the one who finally drove him to a mental institution. He lost his job, his house, and his family, and never did regain his sanity.

In the interest of caution, I started taking half doses of whatever new drugs came my way and working up from there. After I experienced ten continuous hours of full scale visual hallucinations on marijuana while partying with people for whom I felt no rapport, I concluded that I needed to do more than simply start with half doses, so I resolved to go easy on drugs in the following situations: at night, at parties, in cold weather, in strange places, with people I didn’t trust, when I didn’t feel well, or late in the day (how hallucinogenics affect a person is closely tied to his or her surroundings), although I didn’t always stick to my resolve. I eventually experimented with psilocybin, meth, cocaine, LSD, hashish, ecstasy, angel dust, nitrous oxide, and a half dozen narcotics. I also mailed off for exotic drugs like lobelia and kava kava, drugs that the government hadn’t gotten around to outlawing, plus I ate morning glory seeds, smoked cloves, hops, and catnip, and experimented with other drugs that I no longer remember by name. 

I even took one drug that was so good that I wish I could feel that way forever. The drug was called ecstasy for good reason. Think of how you feel when your heart is overcome with sweetness for everything and everyone, and that’s what ecstasy is like several times over, or at least it was for me. The second time I had some, I shared it with a woman friend while visiting her and her husband. A half hour later, she became panicky, and her eyes started darting rapidly from side to side. I assumed she was having a seizure. Naturally, her husband was concerned, maybe the moreso because she was a nurse, and would lose her license if he took her to a hospital. Because I too was on ecstasy, I had every confidence that I could follow my friend into the depths of wherever the drug was taking her, and bring her right back out. And I did. First, I radiated love like the sun radiates light and warmth. Then, I held both of her hands in mine, looked into her darting eyes, and told her with complete certainty that she needn’t worry at all, because everything was going to be just fine. Because I believed this, she believed it too, and everything was just fine.  

Ecstasy is a very long-lasting drug, and the day after this incident, I was sitting on a city bus looking at passing cars when I noticed that their wheels were spinning backwards. In another hallucination (while on meth and marijuana), I heard the best music of my life coming from a toilet that had been flushed. I’ve also seen demons, heard angels, watched my face turn into the face of a turtle without knowing I was hallucinating, spent hours happily watching rapidly changing psychedelic patterns, felt intimately connected to angry red wasps, and watched trees dance. 

Two years ago, I got a marijuana card, and now I have a supply of marijuana that is far stronger than anything that was available in the old days. Twice, I’ve eaten too much (I “capture” the THC in butter and bake it into cookies). On the first of those occasions. I became extremely nauseous, could only move isolated muscles with sustained effort, and found that walking, crawling, or holding anything in my hands was impossible. On the second, I had visual and auditory hallucinations. No one gets that high on purpose—not more than once anyway—but it’s very hard to get a standardized dosage on cookies that are so strong that I limit myself to one-eighth of one small cookie and even that can sometimes be too much.

I’ve come so far in my ability to handle drugs, that hallucinations no longer scare me—not much anyway. What I’ve learned is that if a hallucination is troubling, I can turn my head away in order to either stop it or, if I’m lucky, find one that I enjoy. For example, the last scary one I had was when I looked at a wooden Santa, and saw it looking back at me with fiery eyes filled with hatred. There was a time when my eyes would have become stuck in his, but I immediately turned away, at which point I heard voices in the air above me, but they weren’t scary like Santas eyes, so I was sorry when they roared off into the distance.

Despite the risks, I don’t understand non-psychotic people who don’t experiment with drugs. I’ve known quite a few, but, “I’m not interested in drugs,” or, “I like myself the way I am,” only makes them seem, well, ignorant in that they have no way to know they’re uninterested in a given drug until they try it, drugs being so unlike other experiences and so unlike one another. As for liking oneself without drugs, the most interesting drugs (the hallucinogenics) don’t cause you to like yourself—they show you other ways of looking at reality. As the parlance goes, they take you on a trip, and you come back tired. As I see it, how could anyone NOT want to explore altered states of consciousness. To me, the desirability of it is so obvious that one doesn’t need a reason to justify doing it but rather to justify not doing it. You will grow from certain drugs if only because you experience heightened creativity and come to see “normal” reality as but one possibility and that, as desirable as “normal” is, other realities have a lot to recommend them.

Of course, I would agree that a person should evaluate the risk posed by a particular drug, and that some drugs really are so bad that one might reasonably choose to avoid them altogether. Meth, for instance. Bad stuff, meth (Just do a search for “meth before and after pictures). But why avoid every psychoactive drug in the world because some of them are bad? I would also agree that a lot of drug users behave in ways that give drugs a bad name, yet I would offer in defense that a great many drug users are immature and troubled people who use them inappropriately. The fact that drugs will fuck you up doesn’t mean that this is all they will do (or even what they will do if you don’t overdose), but that’s all a lot of users get from them because that’s all they bring to them. The only drug that I have regrets about is alcohol, and its the only one that’s legal.


The Doors drug-inspired music captured a taste of what hallucinogenics sometimes feel like. Along with people like Leary, they and other bands inspired much of the drug use of the era.

What am I? What are you?


I am a rationalist in that I consider reason and evidence to be the only means by which objective truth can be determined. Even when authority, intuition, tradition, or supposed mystical insight, makes a claim to truth, the soundness of that claim must be rationally validated before it can be accepted by an impartial examiner. If widespread acceptance occurs without such validation, the result is often oppression. While people rarely feel the need to coerce others into believing that which they can prove, they commonly consider it necessary to coerce others into believing that which they can’t prove. 

Some people view rationalists as being devoid of emotion, but I, for one, am intensely emotional. While I dont believe that rationality can supplant emotion, I do believe that a reliance upon rationality can make one’s emotional outlook more positive. Some claim that rationalism doesn’t go deeply enough to enable a person to understand himself or to change things about himself that he doesn’t like, but my experience—and the experience of psychologists—is just the opposite. While I believe it would be harmful to stifle my emotions, I haven’t found that purposefully going “deeper” into them has provided me with insights that enabled me to handle them better. If anything, feeling the same painful emotions over and over causes destructive thoughts and behaviors to become ingrained. 

Years ago, I went to a psychologist because I was crippled by stage fright. I expected her to delve into my past, uncover my early experiences with stage fright, and thereby furnish me with insights that would allow me to overcome it. Instead, she showed no interest in my past, but told me to join Toastmasters and to take every other opportunity to expose myself to my fear. I had thought that, with all her training (and for what she charged), she would know an easy way to overcome my problem, but I did as she suggested and it worked. The same is true with depression. It doesn’t matter where the self-talk that characterizes depression came from, the only way to overcome it (aside from medication) is to replace it with different self-talk. This isn’t a glamorous process characterized by tears, insights, and breakthroughs, but hard work that requires perseverance.

Emotion, art, literature, ritual, and other feelings-oriented pursuits are important, but none are the equal of rationality when it comes to gaining knowledge or deciding issues. I would even argue that nearly all of the world’s problems are caused by too little rationality. Take war, for instance. Everyone says they’re against it, yet millions of people are supporting one or more wars at any given moment. Why? Because our species’ rational side is insufficiently evolved, which means that we are still enamored of the same tribalism and violence that we took with us when we left the trees. Otherwise, we could end war, today.

Some people argue that rationalism is another form of faith, saying that just as some people have faith in God, rationalists have faith in science. This is true to some extent, but it’s also true that not all faith is well-founded. For instance, if I said that my faith was in Zeus, people would challenge me to prove that my faith was sound, yet those who put their faith in modern gods can no more validate their faith than I could validate faith in Zeus. The power of science can be validated. While it’s a leap to say that the same approach that has worked so well for us up until now might someday allow us uncover the secrets of the entire universe, such a belief is based upon the fact that everything we have discovered thus far suggests that the furtherest reaches of the universe operate on the same principals as our little corner. Whether our species can survive long enough, or accumulate enough data, to understand the universe is another matter, yet belief in our theoretical ability to do so hardly seems incredible given that we have come so far in the 350 years since the start of the Enlightenment, with knowledge now doubling every seven years.


The portrait is of Benedict Spinoza (1632-77), a Dutch Jew who was expelled from his synagogue because of his rationalistic beliefs. The following is but a sample of the curses in his order of expulsion: “Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in… We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof…or read anything composed or written by him.” 

Spinoza was known for his centeredness, integrity, courtesy, and scorn for money and fame, but his vague, impersonal, and intellectualized view of God made him an atheist in the eyes of the public, if not in the eyes of atheists. Philosophy was his passion, and he is widely revered today because of the joy and fullness with which he devoted himself to its pursuit.

The end of an experiment




If I knew a Christian who lived alone in a cave for forty years, I wouldn’t imagine him to have discovered verifiable proof of God, but I would consider it possible that his years of solitary reflection had given him insights from which I might profit. It was with a similar hope that I started attending a Bible study at an Episcopal church a few months ago. I didn’t believe the liberal claim that, although the Bible lacks literal truth, it contains unique metaphorical wisdom, but I was open to the possibility that the mature, intelligent, and educated people that make up the bulk of Episcopalianism had transcended the Bible and, working as something akin to a network of rebels within the Christian community, had gained insights that I would find useful. I also hoped that they would likewise be open to learning from me. I let them know that I was an atheist, but I neither talked about my beliefs, nor did I ask probing questions or issue challenges about theirs because I wanted to present myself in as non-threatening a manner as possible.


Three months later, I am as ignorant as when I started, and have all but given up hope that their religion has provided them with the first unique insight. The thing that I find most interesting—and exasperating—about liberal Christianity is that a liberal Christian might define Jesus as God, man, God-man, or even as entirely fictional, but he or she absolutely must hold something about Jesus, or what Jesus represents, in high esteem. Just as the Boy Scouts and Freemasons require reverence for a completely unidentified God, and AA requires reverence for a completely unidentified Higher Power, so do liberal churches require reverence for a completely unidentified Jesus. In every case, it’s not reverence for an agreed upon entity or belief that is demanded but reverence for a particular word(s), as if that alone had the power to set one apart from less enlightened mortals.

Idolatry (n) the giving of undue honor and regard to created forms.

Although I rarely heard any of my classmates say much about what they did believe, I did hear most of them imply that they didn’t believe most of what is in the creeds. I was also excited from time to time to hear a classmate express puzzlement or consternation about a Bible verse or a church teaching, but such things were never addressed by the group. For example, during the last class I attended, someone said she was finding it difficult to combine the concept of God as an entity with the concept of God as love. After a brief and (I thought) awkward silence, someone changed the subject. After observing a few such instances, I concluded that there was tacit agreement to keep the discussion at a shallow level.


In their apparent determination to ignore doubt or anything that might result in doubt, liberals and literalists are alike, but they differ in that literalists consider their faith to be inseparable from specific facts about God, whereas liberals appear to regard vagueness as what they like to call a higher form of spirituality. In practice, this means that literalistic religion is centered on content, and liberal religion on process. As to how process can exist apart from content, I—like the woman in the class—have no idea, and I doubt that liberals do either. They define God as love, virtue, evolution, a feeling of oneness, awakening awareness, the ground of being, etc. although such terms are figures of speech rather than definitions. To illustrate, if I say that dogs are quadrupeds, I have said something identifiable and verifiable about dogs, but if I say that God is the ground of being, I have simply used a metaphor to express my belief—or at least my hope—that God is providing me with the kind of support that solid earth gives a building or the kind of nurturance that garden soil gives a marigold.

In a 12/17/12 Newsweek article entitled “The Myths of Jesus,” Bart D. Ehrman trashed the historical accuracy of the gospels, after which he took Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith across the chasm of logic by ending his article with a non sequitur:

“…for those with a broader vision…the story of the Christ-child and his appearance in the world can be founded not on what really did happen, but on what really does happen in the lives of those who believe that stories such as these can convey a greater truth.”

I wondered what he meant by “stories such as these” (there being other God-men who were born of virgins), and I also wondered what he meant by “a greater truth.” As one who lacks his “broader vision,” I had hoped in vain that, having gone to pains to attack the accuracy of the gospels, he might at least give some clue as to what he found good in them, but like other liberal writers, he proved to be a tease. Islam has its Sharia; Buddhism its eightfold path; charismatic Christianity its plan of salvation; and liberal Christianity its greater truth, but the last group differs from the rest in that they hold their greater truth closer to their chests than a poker player’s cards. What they offer instead are bromidic truths about love and justice, truths that rarely coincide with the behavior of the vengeful, intolerant, impatient, and ego-driven deity of the Bible, a deity who supports slavery, sexism, racism, blood sacrifice, homophobia, nationalism, genocide, rape, and everlasting torture. How do liberals handle such challenges to the deity of their holy book? They either interpret troublesome passages metaphorically or deny that God inspired them. They also deny that Jesus said much of what was attributed to him. They then take whatever is left and interpret it as it pleases each of them, the only requirement being that everyone think of Jesus as somehow special.

On the back of the handout for the communion service I attended were the words “...coming together...to struggle with our faith.” This and other things I read and observed led me to think of liberal Christians, not as the originators of bold new ideas, but as the last gasp of an emasculated Protestantism that has been struggling for relevance since the time of Darwin. Its few remaining adherents are now huddled behind the walls of their churches, doing their best to bolster one another up so that they might retain some semblance of a support structure that the rest of Christianity has long since abandoned. I envision them as children (sophisticated children to be sure) whose growing knowledge of how the world works has caused them to lose faith in Santa Claus. Being grieved by the prospect of Christmas without Santa, they doggedly pretend he’s real, only without the part about the sleigh, elves, reindeer, chimneys, presents, red suit, rosy cheeks, white beard, North Pole workshop, and jolly “Ho! Ho! Ho!” They replace such “obvious myths” with an unsubstantiated “higher awareness” of what the myths point to: miraculous powers, the existence of an omniscient being, the material rewards of being good, etc., yet they are left, as it were, with a superstructure without a substructure. Liberal Christianity doesn’t offer new beliefs, but a sorting through of old beliefs with the result that most have been discarded. 

I wrote a few posts back of an Episcopal priest who showed respect for my atheism by calling it “a valid spiritual path,” and I wondered in that post if I would ever be able to show respect for her path. What I’ve found is that while I very much respect her—and a few other Christians—as people of goodwill, to respect their religious path, I would have to think it was based upon truth, or at least that they were wiser or more insightful because of it, but I see no reason to believe that either is true. 

Then and now

It’s funny how many of my memories are of inconsequential things, things I never expected to remember. For instance, I’m a teenager and have gone with my father to see about a job at a bachelor’s tiny house. It’s early winter, and the man is obviously proud of his big garden of turnips, collards, and mustard greens. I picture him alone each night, eating greens, beans, salt-pork, cornbread, buttermilk, and sorghum molasses, and I think he must be the happiest man alive.

In another memory, I’m eleven, and my mother and I are sitting in her overstuffed chair watching Have Gun Will Travel. We admire Paladin because he’s tough, caring, cultured, and mysterious. I think she admires him even more than I do, but I don’t know why.

I’m eighteen, and my father and I are roofing a big house next to a playground. A girl who looks to be sixteen is overseeing the children. She is pretty and kind. I want to talk to her but am too shy.

I’m seven, and when I get off the school bus one day, I run across a ditch where a guinea hen has her nest. She flies atop my head and scratches my scalp. I scream, and my granny comes running out the screen door with a broom in her hands. I’m so surprised to see my granny run that I almost forget about the guinea hen.

I’m twelve and have traveled 450 miles alone, on a Greyhound Bus, to visit cousins in Trenton, Georgia. As the bus passes through northern Alabama, dawn breaks, and I see Sand Mountain on my left and Lookout Mountain on my right. I think they must be the tallest mountains in the world. An old man lives with my cousins. He and I sit on the porch, and talk happily about life on the road. Lookout Mountain towers before us. Im called home early because my granny is dying. My cousin Carrie calls and says the old man is accusing her of putting broken glass in his eyes. He scratches the sockets raw.
 
I’m a small child and screaming with the pain of an earache. My mother and granny (that’s granny and me in the photo) look afraid, and it scares me. They heat castor oil and pour it into my ear. I feel better.

I’m nine and my mother has just turned the car onto US Hwy 84 on our way to town. I can’t imagine a time when I was not, so I conclude that I have always been and always will be. Then, I can’t imagine anything existing if I’m not there to see it, so I conclude that I create the world as I pass and it disappears when I’m gone. These realizations have come to me within the space of a quarter mile, and I am certain they are true.

I’m five, and my family and I are leaving the cemetery where my uncle has just been buried. I ask my father where Uncle Byrd is, and my father says he’s on his way to heaven. I immediately look out the back window so I can see him rising like a balloon.
I’m 63 and am taking dishes from the drainer and putting them into the cabinet when I have the thought that even this little chore feels like exercise. My body is hurting, my blind dog is slamming into things, and Peggy is wretchedly sick with a new cold. Outside, the air and everything it touches is cold and gray. The passing years have left me weary of counting my blessings.

Except for this morning’s memory, such fragments stand out from everything that went before and everything that came after, for months if not for years. Why? What do they mean? I’ve lived in this house for 23 years. That doesn’t seem like long, but it’s longer than I have left to live. I think that, once our bodies start to fail, most of us are simply biding time until we die. I want more, but I don’t know what more looks like, and most days I’m too tired to wonder.