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 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.