I'm Back . . .

Sorry I’ve been away so long. Things have piled up, and I’ve let my responsibilities to friends and even myself slide. Loads of illnesses, crises, and just plain laziness have kept me away.

I’ve started attending church, a local Episcopal church, after about twenty-five years away. I grew up in the Methodist Church but left once I got too big for my parents to drag, and haven’t been back except for weddings and funerals – and few of them. Maybe not even a few – I went to my brother’s wedding in 1995 and my maternal grandmother’s funeral in 1998. I refuse to go to any of my parents’ weddings (there have been three, I think) on the excuse that I didn’t go to the one where they married each other. That’s not really the reason. I’m suspicious of anything that requires new clothes, to paraphrase Thoreau. The church I’m going to now has no dress code, so I can get away with jeans and t-shirts. Perfect.

My mother is married to a Lutheran minister, so naturally she wants me to find a Lutheran church. I don’t think they’re quite as gay-friendly as the Episcopalians, and, in any case, they’ve got prayer books, too, so I might just as well learn the ways of the Episcopalians as the Lutherans. At least the church I’m attending is gay-friendly without being a gay church.

I’m still baffled as to when to stand up, sit down, and find my place in either the prayer book or the hymnal, but I’ll learn. I’m starting a new blog devoted strictly to church questions, debates, and what-not, so I’ll leave that for now and give you the link once I have a post on it.

The great news is that Kaye is finished teaching! All she has to do is give two exams, grade them, and post the grades. She should be done for real by Thursday, at the latest, although she doesn’t officially retire until September 1st as there is some rule somewhere that you can only retire on the 1st of a month. (I assume months where the 1st falls on a weekend let you retire on the 2nd or 3rd.) We’re both looking forward to her well-earned freedom after teaching for some forty years. She’s been at NCSU since 1970.

Hope everyone (and everybody’s cat) is well. See you in the funny papers.

Mysterious Itches

The itch from which I have suffered for months (or, but with interruptions, for years) has recently become unbearable and, for the last few nights, has almost completely kept me from sleeping.

Besides, nothing appears on the outside; immediately under the skin, it is like a poison that wants to come out; an injection of extract of bedbugs.  Can it get more intense?  It doesn’t seem so.  But it can enlarge, spread to the whole body . . .

I think of Job looking for a piece of glass with which to scratch himself, and of Flaubert, whose correspondence, in the last part of his life, speaks of similar itchings.  I tell myself that each of us has his sufferings, and that it would be most unwise to long to change them; but I believe that a real pain would take less of my attention and would after all be more bearable.  And, in the scale of sufferings, a real pain is something nobler, more august; the itch is a mean, unconfessable, ridiculous malady; one can pity someone who is suffering; someone who wants to scratch himself makes one laugh.   –   André Gide, March 19, 1931

This is weird.  Yesterday I wrote about Flaubert, and today I find out that he and Gide (to say nothing of Job) had the same inexplicable itching – literally, I take it – that I’ve been having lately.  I told Kaye we must have bedbugs or something, but she’s not itching.  Well, it’s not that bad.  And I’m happy to find myself in such company, I think.  I notice that Flaubert had epilepsy, if Wikipedia is trustworthy.  It may as well be, as it’s what people get their information from these days.  Gide seems to have been a married homosexual.  Job may not have existed.  I’m beginning to see what my problem is . . . I guess I'll take an antihistamine.

Is it too prurient that I looked up these guys to see what I'm going to die of?

Beware the Ides

Beware the Ides of March. Since it’s March 15th, I wanted to remind anyone who could possibly forget to be extra careful today. Whether you’re standing in line at Starbucks, blogging or working on an assembly line, you don’t want to get stabbed in the toga. It’s seriously dangerous. Well, once it was.

I am amused and annoyed that I have been pegged for a Jesus freak just for standing up for theists and agnostics and admitting that my cultural background was Christian, so that’s what I have in my mind. I keep getting all these “Dear friend in Christ” e-mails. Probably shouldn’t have put my e-mail on the page, but I like to live on the edge. Anyway, anybody out there who’s thinking of addressing me in such a manner, please know that you will be promptly marked as junk mail, and I will never hear from you again. I am not passing out Bibles, becoming a brickyard preacher (at NCSU, we had a lot of them, having a brickyard), financially supporting your Jesus project or anything else. It is not my mission in life.

Discussion is fine, though. Just don’t call me your “friend in Christ.” It gives me hives.

Do unto others before they do unto you?

I’ve just finished reading Panzram: A Journal of Murder, by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long. It’s about a serial killer, rapist (mostly of men and boys), arsonist, thief, batterer, and conspirator (albeit largely failed). I’m sure I’ve left something out. I’m interested in what makes people do such evil (and often just plain weird) things. This book bothered me from the start, though, and I almost stopped reading it. The thing was, I felt empathy for the serial killer, and that’s a scary thought. Usually I’m a mix of sadness and perverse amusement at what lengths people will go to to hurt people for no reason. People can be very creative in their meanness. But this guy was abused, neglected, raped, and in reform school (a century ago) by the time he was eleven, where the abuse and neglect were carried to new heights while the rape continued. So he became a rapist, a random serial killer who hated mankind (including himself) and felt no remorse for what he’d done. I guess my empathy would end there. I’d feel remorse. But I can understand his wanting to get revenge, I guess. I made a lot of promises to myself when I was little – not that I would go on a killing spree or anything, but just that I would remember what happened then when I grew up. I have a reputation in my family for one who holds a grudge. It’s true. I promised a little girl I would remember her.

I forced myself to finish the book despite my discomfort. What I am coming out of this book with is the message that “[d]o unto others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31, KJV) is not so much a rule that Christians (and humane people in general) should live by but one that anyone with common sense should live by out of self-preservation if not humanity. I don’t know what a modern psychiatrist or FBI criminologist would make of Carl Panzram, but I suspect that if he’d been treated better earlier in his crime spree (which began with public drunkenness at the age of eight), he wouldn’t have been the monster he became. So whether you want Jesus to love you, to be a humane individual, or just look out for number one, you ought to be kind to people. Not a new idea, but I’m glad I finished the book.

When he finally gets hanged (not a spoiler, as it’s in the introduction), he says something to his hangman that I think is a wonderful, if nasty, expression of the individual: “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around!” You have to admire his spunk, if not his actions.

I’m not so worried about my occasional empathy with the guy anymore. He had a far rougher childhood than mine. He just never forgot what people had done to him. I must stress that I don’t approve of or empathize with his actions, just to get that straight. I simply have a sadness not just for Panzram’s victims but for himself.

The Existence of God

I got a response from the writer of the piece I cited in my last blog entry, which is posted under “The Illusion of Free Will,” and I would urge people to read it in its entirety. But here are some of my responses:

****I hope my blog entry didn't stereotype all Christians as "idiotic, bigoted, closed-minded [people]." ***

You didn’t say that Christians per se were stupid, but it felt a little like I was on the dumb end of the spectrum just because I chose to believe in God, something that’s necessary to Christianity. Incidentally, I’m more interested in Christ as a role model than as the purported “Son of God” – in the broader scheme of the Bible, he’s an essential part of the mythology; setting aside the issue of his divinity (especially as his being more divine than the rest of us), he’s a pretty good role model with a few questionable actions. It’s too bad I can’t ask him, for example, why he mouthed off at his mother when he was just twelve (“How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?” Luke 2:49 KJV). My answer is that he was a twelve-year-old boy in a patriarchal society that thought adulthood came on at age thirteen.

***Your experience with [Kaye] covers many years of daily contact - sight, touch, communication. She [is] a physical reality in your life. God, if such a being exists, is an invisible, supernatural entity. Could you explain what your experience with [Kaye] and your experience with God have in common and how you can reason God into existence?***

What do we know about reality? We are limited by our experiences. I’ve had some experiences that no one else has had – some of these are labeled “hallucinations.” If I had the same kind of contact with God that I have with Kaye, you’d write me off as a lunatic. So it’s a no-win situation for me. Some things can be proven through reason. Faith is what you have when you can’t prove something through reason. You choose to have it or you choose not to. I choose to believe that there are things out there that I don’t know about. Although I don’t think it much matters which philosophy or religion you have, as long as you don’t use it to excuse your bad behavior, I chose Christianity because I understand the mythology, having been brought up with it. Yes, I consider it a mythology – but the ties between mythology and history can be delicate.

The thing that frustrates me is atheists' unwillingness to acknowledge that atheism is itself a belief system. It’s the agnostics who honestly say they don’t know. You can’t prove God does or doesn’t exist, so whether you opt for atheism or some religion, you’re making a leap of faith. Atheists have faith that God doesn’t exist. They don’t know.

Ultimately, though, to answer your question, I don’t think you can reason God into existence. Once, I had to have reasons for everything. I still want them. But I accept the fact that some things just are. So I didn’t and can’t reason God into existence. I just chose to take a leap of faith. I still know I might be wrong.

***Atheism isn't a belief system. It is an absence of belief in any kind of god. And it doesn't take faith, because faith is the choice to actively believe something without any verifiable proof of its reality.***

Sure it is. It’s not a lack of belief. It’s a belief that God doesn’t exist. I suppose what I am is not so much a believer as a hopeful agnostic. Agnostics are the ones who don’t believe in something because they don’t know it exists. Atheists are sure it doesn’t exist. That’s a belief.

***You can't prove that the Flying Spaghetti Monster does or doesn't exist. But do you have to exercise faith not to believe in its existence? No, because there's no reason to believe. So it is with atheism. No faith is needed because atheists don't think there's any good reason for belief in God.***

When there is scientific evidence about something, such as evolution, I believe it’s true. It’s hard for me to know it’s true, because English and Computer Science don’t really give me the tools to understand the raw data. I have to have faith that the experts in the relevant fields know what they’re talking about and are telling us the truth; for example, I don’t think “Creationism” should be taught in schools because I think it’s nuts, whereas evolution makes sense. I don’t think evolution and the existence of God are mutually exclusive. I just don’t think I see the whole picture. I’m pretty smart, but I don’t know as much as I once thought I did. When I was eight, I was an atheist because there were no dinosaurs mentioned in the Bible.

No sensible person can believe in the Bible – the first two chapters of Genesis are mutually exclusive. The Bible is not evidence of God; it’s a story of a culture. It’s a pretty good story, and it’s important because it has, for good or ill, influenced Western culture and continues to do so.

The Illusion of Free Will

I happened across an interesting piece on the illusion of free will the other day. It doesn’t give any arguments I haven’t heard – or made – before, but it does make you stop and think. It makes me think I should read Erasmus and Luther instead of just thinking about it. But I guess that would require, well, maybe not entirely free will – if I had free will, I certainly never would have a migraine – but some will.

This type of argument annoys me with its smug dismissal of people who believe in one thing or another that hasn’t been proven (some things could be proven but just haven’t yet). A good friend of mine thinks I am completely bonkers for believing in God, just because I am reasonably well-educated, in two very different fields (neither of them religion). I even go the Christian route, a choice I made based on the fact that I understand the mythology, having been brought up in Baptist and Methodist churches (mind you, I stopped going as soon as I was too big for them to drag to church, unless I had ulterior social motives, and I don’t go as an adult).

Yes, I consider the whole Bible a myth. That doesn’t make it less powerful or less real in any important sense. And it doesn’t mean that some of it isn’t historically accurate. Neither does the fact that some of it is historically accurate prove that Jesus rose from the dead or that Mary was inseminated via a dove, or any of the other crucial (sometimes literally so) points in the Bible.

Hamlet is very real to me, more so than many people who have lived and breathed, or are even living in very close proximity to me. I know Hamlet a lot better and have seen him at his best and at his worst. Yet, as with my neighbors, I don’t know what goes on offstage. That part’s on me and my struggle between reason and imagination (note that I am not saying that either is more important than the other). But I could carry that much further. Do I really know the person I’ve lived with for nearly twenty-three years? She’s not here now. And she had a good deal of her life before we met. The fact that I know, as well as I know anything, what she’s capable of and what she would never do is based solely on my experience with her. It still boils down to faith. I have faith in Kaye, and I have faith in God’s existence. Both are based on the same kind of experience and reason.

I don’t begrudge atheists their belief system. I do think it takes as much of a leap of faith not to believe in God as it does to believe in God, since neither position can be proven. Given those options, I’ll choose the more hopeful one. I am not afraid of God, because I don’t believe that any omniscient, benevolent entity would be as petty as the Bible often claims. I know lots of people who would; it’s just that none of them have the kind of power that God would have. That’s a combination of reason and faith. That God is omniscient and benevolent is part of my definition of God.

I just get tired of being stereotyped as an idiotic, bigoted, closed-minded person because I have decided that I believe in God. So now I’m going to prove, to myself, anyway, that I have at least limited free will and take control of my life to the degree of clearing up my study, which, as my mother would say, looks like a hurricane swept through it.

I respect other people’s rights to think what they think. I don’t think I’m always right. But I do think.