REVELATION (bookin’ through the bible 13)
Thomas Jefferson considered it “merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.” Robert Ingersoll called it “the insanest of all books.” Even Martin Luther, who knows a thing or two about being offensive, found it “offensive.” And though some modern theologians call it the “least important” book in the Bible, the Googlemind has a rather higher opinion of its significance:
Google hits for various canonical books:
— “Book of Luke” or “Gospel of Luke”: 414,000 hits
— “Book of Matthew” or “Gospel of Matthew”: 517,000
— “Book of Genesis”: 685,000
— “Book of Love”: 827,000
— “Book of Records”: 893,000
— “Book of Revelation”: 1.14 million
So whether or not it’s theologically “important,” the Book of Revelation clearly has our attention.
I Googled the phrase “The Book of Revelation is the most” to see what word comes next. Some favorites:
controversial–mysterious–troubling–important–detailed–thoroughly literary–dynamic, powerful, awesome, devastating–dispensational–thoroughly Jewish–puzzling, cryptic, frightening–misinterpreted–unusual–beautifully orchestrated symphony–extreme–hard to understand–fascinating–beautiful, majestic–bewildering–hopeful–comforting…
…book in the Bible. And now that Barack Obama has been proven to be the Antichrist — the Beast having chosen to reveal himself through the Illinois Lottery — we’d better take a look at the book that has warned us about him lo these many years.
A brief synopsis, for those of you who haven’t (yet) had the pleasure of devouring Left Behind:
John of Patmos had himself a “vision.” It starts with Christ appearing with eyes of flame, feet of bronze and a sword coming out of his mouth. He explains to John (in an understandably sword-muffled fashion) that he, John, should watch carefully so he can describe the vision to the churches.
John is taken before the throne of God where he sees twenty-four chosen ones and four Creatures covered with eyes, giving glory to God. Seven seals on seven scrolls are opened by a lamb. As each is opened, various things are loosed on the world—war, plague, death, earthquakes, and (my personal favorite) really outrageous food prices.
Sun black, moon red, stars fall, sky disappears, mountains flung, 144,000 people are marked with the seal of God.
As the lamb opens the seventh seal, everyone takes a thirty-minute break. Thank you, unions.
Seven trumpets sound, bloody hail and fire, sea turns to blood. Locusts that look like horses with lion’s teeth and sting like scorpions fly out of the abyss and for five months sting anyone who do not have the seal of God on his or her forehead. One third of humankind is killed.
John eats a scroll, and a war breaks out in heaven. A dragon is defeated. Seven vials of wrath opened. An angel tells birds to feast upon dead human bodies. The beast and the false prophet are cast alive into a lake of fire. The rest are killed with the sword of Jesus. A thousand years pass, God sends Satan to deceive us all, and whoever isn’t found in the Book of Life is cast into the Lake of Fire as the rest ascend to glory.
The End.
Imagine if you will my shock and surprise upon learning that John’s home island of Patmos has been the Mediterranean’s premiere source of hallucinogenic mushrooms for thousands of years.1
For many years I wondered not so much at how anyone could believe such unhinged ravings, but why they would even want to—why such a blood-soaked festival of flying monsters and burning flesh appeals to anyone. And it does, you know. The End of It All is not simply accepted by fundamentalists—it is yearned for.
William Miller, founder of the Adventist movement, predicted that the end of the world would come on October 22, 1844. When it didn’t, his followers referred to it not as “The Day of Phew!”, but as “The Great Disappointment.”2
When yet another, later prediction maddeningly passed, the first one had to be renamed The First Great Disappointment. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.
Many denominations, including Sarah Palin’s Assemblies of God, capture the yearning for the end perfectly by calling the coming end of the world “the blessed hope.” And she almost got the nuclear codes.
But I’ve come to empathize with the yearning to some degree, even if I don’t share it. It isn’t just about the triumph over death—it’s the triumph over injustice and evil. No matter how bad and unfair things seem, says John of Patmos through his shroomy haze, the wicked will one day pay in the most horrible way possible, and you’ll get to watch.
Compared to most of humanity, I’m a shar-pei sitting in the warm, fat lap of obscene privilege. I have never been the impotent victim of genuine injustice. I have recourse when I’m wronged, and I’m rarely seriously wronged. But to be a slave in the 17th century, or an impoverished Irish peasant in the 19th, or a Sudanese villager in the midst of civil war, to be shit upon relentlessly, to live in fear of an oppressor and to know you will die unvindicated for whatever happens to you—to live like that, imbued with our innate sense of fairness and to see none of it—I can see how Ultimate Fiery Justice would exert an irresistible pull. I’ve even seen the need for ultimate justice ( “Without it, Hitler would never pay!”) offered as the reason to believe.
I have considerably less empathy for those who define evil so misguidedly that the burning flesh they dream of smelling is not that of a slaveowner or warlord, but of the gay, the Jew, and the atheist. Not that I don’t know where they got such a grotesque and immoral definition of evil (HINT: See 1000-page preamble to Revelation).
Perhaps the most revealing moral question we could ever ask is whose shoes you’d like to see disappearing under the surface of that eternal lake of fire, with the prize going to those who say “none of the above.”
Okay, there it is. I had predicted the Bookin’ Through the Bible series would end last February (a date now known as The First Great Disappointment), but I proved infinitely distractable. Maybe that’s God’s problem as well—Armageddon’s on the calendar, but it just keeps getting pushed back.
_________________________
1“Magic mushrooms hit the God spot” (Australian Broadcasting Corp)
22000 years of end-of-the-world predictions
UK Channel 4 documentary on the continuing worldwide spread of end-times beliefs
(Click on the bible study series link in the sidebar to thumb through the rest of the series.)
The first really, really hard goodbye
- November 15, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids
17
“Daddy!! Something’s wrong with Max!!” Erin’s face was a mask of anguish. “He’s making sounds I’ve never heard before…and he’s laying wrong!”
Erin’s guinea pig Max, the first pet that was all her own, was clearly not OK. The vet confirmed an upper respiratory infection the next morning, dispensing a little medicine and not much hope.
“Guinea pigs are prey items,” he said, introducing me to a colorful new term I was glad Erin didn’t hear. “They don’t handle stress well. But sometimes the medicine works. He’ll either get better quickly…or he won’t.”
Erin held him all evening, cooing and stroking and sobbing. In the morning, he was gone.
When Erin’s heart breaks, it takes every other heart in the room with it — and her heart is as broken now as I’ve ever seen it. I know when her sadness crosses into heartbrokenness because the inside ends of her eyebrows turn upward like little tildes. It kills me. I can weather her sadness, but when the eyebrow tips head north — well, I hereby warn her future significant others to keep those eyebrows smooth and flat.
Still, I know the loss of Max, as eyebrow-creasingly painful as it is for her, is an important experience for her. Pets can contribute, however unwillingly, to our lifelong education in mortality. Though we don’t buy pets in order for kids to experience death (with the possible exception of aquariums, aack!), most every pet short of a giant land tortoise will predecease its owner.
The deaths of my own various guinea pigs, dogs, fish and rabbits were my first introductions to irretrievable loss. At their passings, I learned two things Erin is learning now: how to grieve, and just how deeply we can love. They certainly helped prepare me for the sudden loss of my father. It didn’t make the loss itself any easier, nor did it shorten my grief, which continues to this day. But the grief didn’t blindside me in quite the way it would have if my father’s death had been my first experience of profound loss.
When we looked into the cage Thursday morning and saw that Max was still, Erin screamed, then did the precise opposite of what I would have done: she flung open the cage, grabbed him, hugged him to her and wailed.
I’ve never had this kind of equanimity with dead bodies. I recoil from lifelessness. When Opie, my own dog of 13 years, died ten years back, I nearly paid someone $300 to remove his body from the yard. When (for lack of $300, and no other reason) I did it myself, it took all of my personal steel. Ever since I stared at my dead father, I just can’t bear the recognition of what’s no longer there.
Erin hugged Max’s little body to her for an hour and keened. She stroked his fur and touched his teeth and gently rolled his tiny paws between her fingers, all the time whispering Maxie, Maxie. Please wake up.
Then came a monologue both stunning and familiar — that ancient litany of regret, guilt, and helplessness:
I wish I had given him a funner life. He didn’t have enough fun.
Do you think he knew I loved him?
I should have played with him more.
I wanted to watch him grow up!
Do you think I did something wrong? I must have done something wrong!
I want to hear his little noises again.
It isn’t fair at all. it isn’t fair. Things should be fair.
She sang in a concert at the end of the day and was all smiles for two full hours — then lost it again when we returned home. So it’s been for two days.
Even our dog Gowser, who always had a special fascination with Max, has spent hours staring into the cage, then pacing, then staring again, whimpering quietly with confusion.
We buried Max in the backyard this morning under a metaphor of falling yellow leaves. Erin placed him in the shoebox on a layer of soft bedding. She put his water bottle to his lips once, twice, three times, convulsing with tears. She added food pellets near his head, like an ancient Egyptian preparing Pharoah for the journey to the next life. Flower petals, then Max’s favorite toy, and at last — this nearly did me in — she carefully dried her tears and placed the tissue in with him.
We talked over the grave about what a lucky guy he’d been to be born at all, that a trillion other guinea pigs never got the chance to exist, to be loved and cuddled like he was. She liked that.
Experiencing loss and regret has one undeniable payoff — it can make us appreciate what we still have. It’s no coincidence that Gowser has received more love and attention in the last three days than ever before.
Meaning and nonforeverness
Young Pastor: You speak blasphemy, sir!
Man in the Yellow Suit: Fluently.
————-
What we Tucks have, you can’t call it living. We just… are. We’re like rocks, stuck at the side of a stream.
————-
Immortality isn’t everything the preachers crack it up to be.Quotes from the film version of TUCK EVERLASTING
Back from the Hawkeye State, where I had the temerity to hold a seminar two blocks from the University of Iowa homecoming game. Went well, as did the next day in Des Moines. Met more fabulous folks including Jaime and Brian Sabel and Becky Mason of Iowa Secularists and our very own blogreader Ei! Plus some nice Amish ladies at the airport.
Driving through corn and a lovely plague of black butterflies on the way to Iowa City, I found myself thinking about a question from an earlier seminar — Cincinnati, maybe. A young man introduced himself as a quite recent deconvert from fundamentalism and told me he’d been struggling with the problem of meaning in the absence of eternal life. If we live for a while and then cease to be, what exactly is the point?
The meaning thing is a legitimate problem. I’ve written before about the ways in which we discover meaning, but that’s down here on the local level of our experience. He was asking the larger philosophical question about the Point of It All. And that’s a much more interesting problem.
Thing is, I don’t remotely see how immortality solves it.
If I live to be eighty instead of forty, is my life more intrinsically meaningful? I think most would agree it is not. How about 200 years, or 500? Ten thousand? These are changes in quantity that don’t seem to affect the M&P question at all. No matter how long you live, right up to eternity, the basic M&P question remains in place. In fact, the excellent novel and movie Tuck Everlasting convincingly makes the opposite claim — that immortality actually robs life of its meaning.
Some suggest that religion solves the problem by means other than everlasting life. Our purpose is to do God’s will, and so on. Aside from how deeply dissatisfying this ant-farm model of meaning should be to any thinking person, it only transfers the question up one level: What is the purpose of God, and why, in the grandest scheme, is this hobby of his worth the time spent cleaning our cage?
Meaning is a legitimate human puzzle. The question is whether this abstracted, higher-level meaninglessness troubles you or not. Unlike death, I don’t find ultimate meaninglessness too arresting a thought, though I have seriously struggled at times with local, personal, self-discovered meaning. As I wrote last year (You put your whole self in, 6/5/07):
I don’t imagine other animals have “meaning crises,” but our cortical freakishness makes us feel that we need more than just the lucky fact of being — makes us imagine these enormous, fatal holes and cracks in our meaning and purpose.
Hence the use of God as meaning-spackle.
When I was a kid, my purposometer (purr-puh-SAH-mit-ter), was always in the 90s on a scale of 100. Didn’t even have to try. I knew what I was here for: getting good grades, playing the clarinet, getting Muriel Ruffino to kiss me (Editor’s note: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, booyah!), getting into college, getting various other girls to kiss and etc. me (mission roughly 17% accomplished). And so on.
Much like your need for a pancreas, you never even know you have the need for meaning and purpose until it begins to fail — which mine did, in no uncertain terms, as I sat black-robed and square-hatted in a folding chair on a Berkeley lawn, not hearing the words of some famous anthropologist standing before me and 150 other black-robed, square-hatted, non-hearing 22-year-olds.
For the first time in my life, I had no earthly idea what was next. It was my first genuine core-shaking crisis of meaning and purpose.
But for reasons I’m not sure about, that larger question — call it cosmic M&P — has never pecked too hard at my consciousness. The best I can do is acknowledge that it is legit and note that religion doesn’t cure it.
Those who aren’t as incurious as I can always imagine themselves in Yahweh’s ant farm — or engage, along with Viktor Frankl and others, in a truly difficult and probably worthwhile bit of philosophical work.
Lemme know how it goes.
Drugs are bad…m’kay?
I had an unusual interview two weeks ago.
I sleep through most media interviews now, since the questions tend to be the same, and in about the same order: Tell me a little about your book, Why do nonreligious parents need their own separate resource, How do you deal with moral development, How can you help kids deal with death without an afterlife, Isn’t it important to believe in something greater than ourselves. Before I know it, I’m being thanked for a fascinating hour I can’t quite remember.
It’s a bit like teaching. In my last few years as a college professor, I’d hear my brain stem doing the teaching while my neocortex was planning dinner. I’d come back just in time to dismiss. That’s when I knew it was time to do something else.
But the interview two weeks back snapped me out of my usual snooze. I was a little wary anyway, as the station runs syndicated neocon culture-warrior nonsense of the Medved/Prager variety most of the day. Even so, I was not prepared for the very first question to come out of the host’s mouth:
“Without a higher power,” he asked, “how are you going to keep your kids off crystal meth?”
Wha?
Now I can see this kind of thing coming up at some point…but right out of the starting gate? This, of all questions, was knocking on the back of his teeth? When he heard he would be interviewing a nonreligious parent, the first thing that bubbled up was, “B-b-but how’s he gonna keep them off meth?”
I answered that instead of a higher power, I encourage my kids to engage these questions with the power of their own reason, the power of their own minds. There are many compelling reasons to stay away from self-destructive things, after all — including the fact that they are, uh…self-destructive.
He threw it to the other guest, a minister at a private junior high school, who answered confidently that the higher power was the one and only option. Without Jesus, he’d have no way whatsoever to keep his kids from whirling out of control and into the black abyss. Only by staying tightly focused on biblical principles, he said, can kids avoid utter annihilation.
Mmkay.
Ready for the follow-up? Trust me, you’re not:
“Now Dr. McGowan,” said the host with a chuckle, “I gotta tell you, when you talk about the Power of the Mind, it sounds an awful lot like Scientology to me. Can you tell me what if anything distinguishes your worldview from Scientology?”
What, if anything.
This is what we’ve come to as a culture. When you advocate teaching kids to reason things out, it sounds to some like the process of auditing past lives to become an Operating Thetan, casting off the evil influence of Xenu (dictator of the Galactic Confederacy) and battling the alien implants from Helatrobus that seek to control our thoughts and actions.
I apologized for being so very unclear, assured him I had intended to evoke nothing alien, supernatural, or magical by encouraging my children to think. I’ve also never “informed” them, a la Mr. Mackey in South Park, that “drugs are bad, so you shouldn’t do drugs, m’kay?” That’s commandment-style morality, and it’s weak as hell. Instead, we’ve talked about what they stand to lose, what others have lost, how addiction works, and what a fragile and fantastic thing the mind is.
I remember drawing that last connection vividly as a teenager. I knew that my mind was the key to any eventual success I might have, an asset to protect. I didn’t want to risk screwing it up for any kind of pleasure or thrill, and drugs were just too unpredictable in their effects. It was a simple risk analysis, clinched by the death of my dad as an indirect consequence of smoking. I got the message: When you put poisonous stuff in your body, you risk too much for too little. And I never touched so much as a cigarette. My kids have received that same message: Grandpa David never got to meet them because he became addicted to poisonous stuff, couldn’t stop, and paid with his life.
I came out of my study after the interview and Connor (13) asked how it had gone. “A little weird,” I said, “but fine.”
“What was weird?”
I looked him in the eye. “Well, his first question was how I’m going to keep you guys off crystal meth without religion.”
“Pfft,” Connor said. “As if it’s an issue.”
It was nice to hear his quick, dismissive snort. I know my kids really well, and though anything’s possible, I don’t see drugs as a serious threat. In addition to reasoning through it, we’ve talked about craving and addiction — that your body can be chemically tricked into thinking it needs the drugs, and that this can be hard to reason your way out of once you’re in the middle of it. That, plus a number of personal, family, and community assets, kept me from using. And all without a Savior in sight. I figure it has a good chance of working with my kids as well.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that both the host and the minister had gone through the requisite “lost years” of sex and drugs, only to be gloriously saved by coming to Christ. It can and surely does work for some. I’d just love to hear someone on that side acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, there are other ways as well — ways that involve no magic, no demigods, no thetans, no fervent, focused distractions — just the ability to draw on our own natural resources.
David Foster Wallace
- September 16, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, reviews
- 20
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.
–from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Just twice in my life have I not wanted a book to end. Twice. No matter how much I love the book I’m reading, I reach a point where I get it, I’ve had my fun, and I start looking forward to looking back at the experience of reading it.
The two exceptions: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
In both cases, the author had put me into a space so compelling and original that I hated to leave. In both cases I riffled the remaining few pages with such regret as the end approached that I actually backed up, rereading previous pages, slip-stepping on a wet hillside to avoid the inevitable.
That was all the more surprising in the case of Infinite Jest, which runs to 1,079 pages (including nearly 100 pages of footnotes, some two words long, some four pages) with a vocabulary like the OED and famously dense sentence structures. But I knew, as I read the maddening last sentence, that every other book in my life would be in its shadow. I wasn’t at all surprised when TIME Magazine named Infinite Jest one of the top 100 English language novels.
I dedicated Calling Bernadette’s Bluff, my own first novel, to Wallace. It was only fair, since his influence is on every page, from namefreaks like Genevieve Martin (the Dean of Faculty, therefore Dean Martin) to sentence-pairs like my description of Martin’s voice:
Half a dozen words in that stainless steel Voice and ambiguity evaporates, padlocks fly open, and underlings collide headlong, Stoogelike, in a frenzy of wish-fulfillment tinged with an inexplicable but highly motivating terror of consequences.
Lovely thing, really.
A shameless theft of technique. Same with Chapter 10, a play rehearsal within a play. Then there’s one of my favorite devices of his, the ellipsis as passive placeholder in unmarked dialogues. Here’s a conversation in Bernadette’s Bluff between two college roommates (an aggressive atheist and a gentle Christian) that is pure homage to Wallace, right down to the speakers’ identities being revealed only in context:
“I know you’re awake.”
“…”
“You forgot to switch your halo off.”
“…”
“Never did answer the Question of the Day, you know.”
“…”
“Ooo looky, there’s an angel hovering over the TV!”
“Ha ha.”
“I knew it. Now answer the Question.”
Even the unresolved ending of CBB was shoplifted in spirit from Wallace. And my travel writing is full of self-referential footnotes, something I learned at his literary teat.
I’m offering my own derived material rather than quotes from Wallace’s work because, as one blogger recently put it, his work “resists encapsulation.” And how. It is the most context-dependent stuff I’ve ever read.
It’s not too much to say that I’m a writer because of the way David’s writing blew my mind in every possible meaning of that phrase. My fiction, my nonfiction, my satire, my talks, and this blog are soaked in his influence. (Example: “I start looking forward to looking back at the experience of reading it” is me channeling Wallace. I don’t even know I’m doing it anymore.)
His nonfiction is frankly incredible in its ability to strip a subject to its essence. He has written about cruises, state fairs, television, tennis, depression, infinity, oblivion, and American material culture, and I’m jolted over and again with the shock of recognizing something I had never seen before. A brilliant piece of reportage about the McCain campaign of 2000 ( “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope”) has been called one of the most incisive looks at modern politics ever written — and also underlines the tragic difference between the John McCains of then and now.
In the span of a few seconds yesterday, I learned that David Foster Wallace had taken his own life at 46 and that he had suffered from crushing clinical depression for over 20 years. His wife came home and found him hanging.
I don’t give much of a damn that “the world has been deprived of his immense talents and his future literary masterpieces,” as someone somewhere is surely saying. Like Harper Lee’s Mockingbird, Infinite Jest was more than enough. I never needed another thing from him.
But I wish like hell — for him, not for me — that he hadn’t been consumed.
Best of David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Oblivion
the iWord revisited
One last ripple to address from last week’s posts…
In emails and comments, a few readers brought up another issue that cuts close to the bone for secular parents. In the conversation with my daughters, I described our condition after death as identical to our condition before birth. Some readers threw the flag at this point — Indoctrination, 10 yards against the parent, second down and 20! — because I did not say “I think our condition after death, etc.” or “other people think that when we die, etc.”
Wanna see a nonreligious parent turn cartwheels of panic? Accuse him or her of indoctrination. It’s the cardinal sin of freethought parenting. To avoid the appearance of it, we often bend over backwards to be evenhanded and neutral. Evenhanded is splendid. But in expressing ourselves to our children on these deeply-felt issues, we are not neutral, cannot be, and shouldn’t pretend to be.
Non-neutrality, however, is worlds away from indoctrination, and a source needs not be neutral to have value as a source. (My critical thinking students had trouble with this all the time, discarding one good source after another “because the author is biased” — meaning s/he had an opinion on the topic s/he was addressing.) Indoctrination is “Teaching someone to accept doctrines uncritically” (WordNet) — insisting they do so, in fact, often by invoking dire consequences should one stray from the party line. A parent can express his or her perspective without doing this. It’s all a matter of the larger context in which the expression takes place.
If this conversation with my daughters stood alone, the charge of indoctrination might stick. But parent-child conversations never stand alone — they build on everything that comes before. As regular MoL readers will know, freethought, not disbelief, is at the heart of my parenting, which makes the avoidance of indoctrination my Prime Directive. So my kids have heard from me, repeatedly, that different people believe different things, that they are free to form their own opinions, that my own statements are merely expressions of my opinion, that I would rather have them disagree with me than adopt my point of view only because it is mine, and so on. These are the foundational concepts in our family’s approach to knowledge. They’ve heard these things so often now that they roll their eyes and say “duh, I know, Dad” whenever I start in on one of those.
Once children hear that message loud and clear, a parent is freed up to express his/her perspective and welcome theirs without the burden of an added paragraph of caveat and disclaimer on every conversation.
Yes, a parent’s opinions will have a disproportionate influence on the child. As I said in a post last year,
there’s no use denying that, nor would I want to…Influence is sometimes passive and sometimes a matter of intentional teaching…My kids know — and are surely influenced by — my religious views. But I go to great lengths to counter that undue influence, keeping them off-balance while they’re young so they won’t be ossified before they can make up their adult minds:
“Dad? Did Jesus really come alive after he was dead?”
“I don’t think so. I think that’s just a made-up story so we feel better about death. But talk to Grandma Barbara. I know she thinks it really happened. And then you can make up your own mind and even change your mind back and forth about a hundred times if you want.”
That’s the idea. When influence exists in the context of direct encouragements to decide for one’s self and to seek out other points of view, it stops well short of that other iWord. That’s all I would ask of religious parents as well — not that they present themselves as neutral, but that they invite their kids to differ and ensure them that they will be no less loved if they do.
That’s influence without indoctrination.
Finks ahoy!
There’s plenty of nonsensical meme creation on the Internet (just so you know). One of my least favorites is what I’ll call the Fictional Narrative Cartoon (FNC, or ‘Fink’). Follow these steps to write a Fink of your own:
1. Select a life stance you have never held or attempted to understand.
2. Achieve a Vulcan mind-meld with people of that perspective. When that fails, simply pick a set of unflattering assumptions off the top of your head about what the world “must” look like from that perspective.
3. Weave a fictional monologue or dialogue to describe the world through the eyes of this worldview. Include acts of puppy smooshing for maximum effect.
4. Post!
I’ve seen atheists do this to religious folks and vice versa. It tends not to be a true Fink if the person once shared the worldview — the atheist who was once a genuine theist, or the theist who was once a genuine atheist. In those cases, the risk of nonfiction sneaking in is too great. The true Fictional Narrative Cartoon must spring entirely from willful ignorance.
My Google alert for “atheist parents” brings Christian FNCs about nonreligious parenting into my inbox once in a while. The gods of cyber-serendipity smiled on me yesterday, delivering a Fink about an atheist dad talking to his child about death just days after I had posted a nonfiction narrative of the same thing.
The blogger, a Christian father of seven, begins by describing his approach as a Christian parent talking to his children about death:
Have you ever had a surprise party thrown in your honor? You walk through the door and the lights come on and the horns blow, close friends cheer as ribbons and balloons are thrown into the air? Have you ever watched as an athlete’s name is announced and he runs from the dressing room tunnel and onto the field as 60 or 70 thousand people cheer his arrival?…When my kids ask about death, these are some of the analogies that I use…
What a difference it must be for atheist parents, especially for those who want to be honest with their child.
He’s right — it is certainly different. And yes, it’s a much greater challenge than contemplating death as a stadium full of angels doing the Wave. Unfortunately he doesn’t stop with what he knows, but begins to construct a Fink:
“Dad [says the child of the atheist], what happens when we die?”
“Well, nothing really. We come from nothing and we go to nothing. Either your mom and I or someone else will put you into the ground and cover you with dirt and the person that we knew as YOU will just totally and completely cease to exist.”
“But how can I just come to an end? What if I only live until I’m five years old? I won’t get to do anything important.”
“My dear boy. Five years or five hundred years, it doesn’t really matter because none of it counts, not ultimately anyhow. Humans are part of a dying species in a dying universe. You’re an accident little buddy. An absolute accident to which we gave a name. Don’t get me wrong. We love you, and perhaps some day you can even manipulate some other people to love you too. But apart from that you’re pretty much on your own.”
“But what are we here for? Is there any meaning or purpose to all this?”
“Use your brain son. How can there be meaning and purpose to something that’s an accident?…Reality is, you come from nothing and you’re headed to nothing, just emptiness, a void. That’s all there is son. That’s not a bad thing son. It just is. The fact is, our life has no meaning, no context and absolutely no purpose save the purpose that you pretend to give it. Pretty cool huh?”
“But daddy, shouldn’t I at least try to be a good person?”
“Oh my precious little munchkin. Good and bad are just subjective words that some people use to describe things that they like or don’t like…All I know is, live good, live bad, live for yourself, live for others, none of it matters because the end of the good and the end of the bad, the end of people, pigs and insects is exactly the same, we rot away and become a different form of matter. Now, why don’t you run along. I’ve got some useless and pointless things to do.”
“But dad, that’s absurd! How do you expect me to be happy if life has no meaning, context or purpose” If that’s the way things are, why did you make me in the fist place?”
“Well, sweetpea, now you’re starting to ask what’s beginning to feel like a lot of questions. First of all, I couldn’t not make you. My genes compel me to reproduce. I squirt my semen here and there and everywhere…”
You get the idea.
I was once at a family gathering where the subject turned to gays and lesbians. I chimed in that homosexual sex is disgusting. They all nodded, mildly surprised.
“You know something else that’s disgusting?” I added. “Heterosexual sex.” Reduce the sexual act to the physical slapping of flesh and it doesn’t matter who is involved — it’s disgusting. Gay rights opponents recoil at the idea of gay sex because they strip it of the emotional component that transforms their own rutting into something entirely else.
Reducing a nonreligious parent’s description of death to the slapping of dirt on a coffin achieves the same brand of reductionist nonsense. The Fink starts and stays with sterile facts, never granting the atheist parent the human faculties of compassion or love except as a laugh line. I do think we die, for real, and that love and understanding can help us live with this difficult fact quite beautifully and well — even without invoking balloons and confetti.
The best thing about the growing nonreligious parenting movement is that we no longer need be content with Finks about nonreligious parenting. We’re living the nonfiction versions. Which points to the most important difference between this blogger’s take on the atheist parent-child conversation and mine.
Mine actually happened.
[Link to the fictional conversation]
[Link to the nonfictional conversation]
Where all roads lead (2)
[Back to Part 1]
We’d had the conversation before, but this time a new dawning crossed Laney’s face.
“Sweetie, what is it?” I asked.
She began the deep, aching cry that accompanies her saddest realizations, and sobbed:
“I don’t want to die.”
Now let’s freeze this tableau for a moment and make a few things clear. The first is that I love this child so much I would throw myself under Pat Robertson for her. She’s one of just four people whose health and happiness are vital to my own. When she is sad, I want to make her happy. It’s one of the simplest equations in my life.
I say such obvious things because it is often assumed that nonreligious parents respond to their children’s fears of death by saying, in essence, Suck it up, worm food. When one early reviewer of Parenting Beyond Belief implied that that was the book’s approach, I tore him a new one. I am convinced that there are real comforts to be found in a naturalistic view of death, that our mortality lends a new preciousness to life, and that it is not just more truthful but more humane and more loving to introduce the concept of a life that truly ends than it is to proffer an immortality their inquiring minds will have to painfully discard later.
But all my smiling confidence threatens to dissolve under the tears of my children.
“I know, punkin,” I said, cradling her head as she convulsed with sobs. “Nobody wants to die. I sure don’t. But you know what? First you get to live for a hundred years. Think about that. You’ll be older than Great-Grandma Huey!”
It’s a cheap opening gambit. It worked the last time we had this conversation, when Laney was four.
Not this time.
“But it will come,” she said, hiffing. “Even if it’s a long way away, it will come, and I don’t want it to! I want to stay alive!”
I took a deep breath. “I know,” I said. “It’s such a strange thing to think about. Sometimes it scares me. But you know what? Whenever I’m scared of dying, I remember that being scared means I’m not understanding it right.”
She stopped hiffing and looked at me. “I don’t get it.”
“Well what do you think being dead is like?”
She thought for a minute. “It’s like you’re all still and it’s dark forever.”
A chill went down my spine. She had described my childhood image of death precisely. When I pictured myself dead, it was me-floating-in-darkness-forever. It’s the most awful thing I can imagine. Hell would be better than an eternal, mute, insensate limbo.
“That’s how I think of it sometimes too. And that frrrrreaks me out! But that’s not how it is.”
“But how do you know?” she asked pleadingly. “How do you know what it’s like?”
“Because I’ve already been there.”
“What! Haha! No you haven’t!”
“Yes I have, and so have you.”
“What? No I haven’t.”
“After I die, I will be nowhere. I won’t be floating in darkness. There will be no Dale McGowan, right?”
“And millions of worms will eat your body!!” chirped Erin, unhelpfully.
“…”
“Well they will.”
“Uh…yeah. But I won’t care because I won’t be there.”
“Still.”
I turned back to her sister. “So a hundred years from now, I won’t be anywhere, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Okay. Now where was I a hundred years ago? Before I was born?”
“Where were you? You weren’t anywhere.”
“And was I afraid?”
“No, becau…OMIGOSH, IT’S THE SAME!!”
It hit both girls at the same instant. They bolted upright with looks of astonishment.
“Yep, it’s exactly the same. There’s no difference at all between not existing before you were born and not existing after you die. None. So if you weren’t scared then, you shouldn’t be scared about going back to it. I still get scared sometimes because I forget that. But then I try to really understand it again and I feel much better.”
The crisis was over, but they clearly wanted to keep going.
“You know something else I like to think about?” I asked. “I think about the egg that came down into my mommy’s tummy right before me. And the one before that, and before that. All of those people never even got a chance to exist, and they never will. There are billions and trillions of people who never even got a chance to be here. But I made it! I get a chance to be alive and playing and laughing and dancing and burping and farting…”
(Brief intermission for laughter and sound effects.)
“I could have just not existed forever — but instead, I get to be alive for a hundred years! And you too! Woohoo! We made it!”
“Omigosh,” Laney said, staring into space. “I’m like…the luckiest thing ever.”
“Exactly. So sometimes when I start to complain because it doesn’t last forever, I picture all those people who never existed telling me, ‘Hey, wait a minute. At least you got a chance. Don’t be piggy.'”
More sound effects, more laughter.
Coming to grips with mortality is a lifelong process, one that ebbs and flows for me, as I know it will for them. Delaney was perfectly fine going to sleep that night, and fine the next morning, and the morning after that. It will catch up to her again, but every time it comes it will be more familiar and potentially less frightening. We’ll talk about the other consolations — that every bit of you came from the stars and will return to the stars, the peaceful symphony of endorphins that usually accompanies dying, and so on. If all goes well, her head start may help her come up with new consolations to share with the rest of us.
In his brilliant classic The Tangled Wing, Emory psychologist Melvin Konner notes that “from age three to five [children] consider [death] reversible, resembling a journey or sleep. After six they view it as a fact of life but a very remote one” (p. 369). Though rates of development vary, Konner places the first true grasp of the finality and universality of death around age ten—a realization that includes the first dawning deep awareness that it applies to them as well. So grappling with the concept early, before we are paralyzed by the fear of it, can go a long way toward fending off that fear in the long run.
Laney, for better and worse, is ahead of the curve. All I can do is keep reminding her, and myself, that knowing and understanding something helps tame our fears. It may not completely feed the bulldog — the fear is too deeply ingrained to ever go completely — but it’s a bigger, better Milk-Bone than anything else we have.
Where all roads lead (1)
I have 22 posts jostling for attention at the moment, but a Saturday night conversation with my girls has sent all other topics back to the green room for a smoke.
The three of us were lying on my bed, looking at the ceiling and talking about the day. “Dad, I have to tell you a thing. Promise you won’t get mad,” said Delaney (6), giving me the blinky doe eyes. “Promise?”
“Oh jeez, Laney, so dramatic,” said Erin, pot-to-kettlishly.
“I plan to be furious,” I said. “Out with it.”
“Okay, fine. I…I kind of got into a God fight in the cafeteria yesterday.”
I pictured children barricaded behind overturned cafeteria tables, lobbing Buddha-shaped meatballs, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and Jesus tortillas at each other. A high-pitched voice off-camera shouts Allahu akbar!
“What’s a ‘God fight’?”
“Well I asked Courtney if she could come over on Sunday, and she said, ‘No, my family will be in church of course.’ And I said oh, what church do you go to? And she said she didn’t know, and she asked what church we go to. And I said we don’t go to church, and she said ‘Don’t you believe in God?’, and I said no, but I’m still thinking about it, and she said ‘But you HAVE to go to church and you HAVE to believe in God,” and I said no you don’t, different people can believe different things.”
Regular readers will recognize this as an almost letter-perfect transcript of a conversation Laney had with another friend last October.
I asked if the two of them were yelling or getting upset with each other. “No,” she said, “we were just talking.”
“Then I wouldn’t call it a fight. You were having a conversation about cool and interesting things.”
Delaney: Then Courtney said, ‘But if there isn’t a God, then how did the whole world and trees and people get made so perfect?’
Dad: Ooo, good question. What’d you say?
Delaney: I said, ‘But why did he make the murderers? And the bees with stingers? And the scorpions?’
Now I don’t know about you, but I doubt my first grade table banter rose to quite this level. Courtney had opened with the argument from design. Delaney countered with the argument from evil.
Delaney: But then I started wondering about how the world did get made. Do the scientists know?
I described Big Bang theory to her, something we had somehow never covered. Erin filled in the gaps with what she remembered from our own talk, that “gravity made the stars start burning,” and “the earth used to be all lava, and it cooled down.”
Laney was nodding, but her eyes were distant. “That’s cool,” she said at last. “But what made the bang happen in the first place?”
Connor had asked that exact question when he was five. I was so thrilled at the time that I wrote it into his fictional counterpart in my novel Calling Bernadette’s Bluff:
“Dad, how did the whole universe get made?”
Okay now. Teachable moment, Jack, don’t screw it up. “Well it’s like this. A long time ago – so long ago you wouldn’t even believe it – there was nothing anywhere but black space. And in the middle of all that nothing, there was all the world and the planets and stars and sun and everything all mashed into a tiny, tiny little ball, smaller than you could even see. And all of a sudden BOOOOOOOM!! The little ball exploded out and made the whole universe and the world and everything. Isn’t that amazing!”
Beat, beat, and…action. “Why did it do that? What made it explode?”
“Well, that’s a good question. Maybe it was just packed in so tight that it had to explode.”
“Maybe?” His forehead wrinkles. “So you mean nobody knows?”
“That’s right. Nobody knows for sure. “
“I don’t like that.”
“Well, you can become a scientist and help figure it out.”
“…”
“…”
“Dad, is God pretend?”
“Well, some people think he’s pretend and other people think he’s real.”
“How ’bout Jesus?”
“Well, he was probably a real guy for sure, one way or the other.”
Pause. “Well, we might never know if God is real, ’cause he’s up in the sky. But we can figure out if Jesus is real, ’cause he lived on the ground.”
“You’re way ahead of most people.”
“Uh huh. Dad?”
“Yeah, Con.”
“Would you still love me if all my boogers were squirtin’ out at you?” Pushes up the tip of his nose for maximum verité.
“No, Con, that’d pretty much tear it. Out you’d go.”
“I bet not.”
“Just try me.”
I told Laney the same thing—that we don’t know what caused the whole thing to start. “But some people think God did it,” I added.
She nodded.
“The only problem with that,” I said, “is that if God made everything, then who…”
“Oh my gosh!” Erin interrupted. “WHO MADE GOD?! I never thought of that!”
“Maybe another God made that God,” Laney offered.
“Maybe so, b…”
“OH WAIT!” she said. “Wait! But then who made THAT God? OMIGOSH!”
They giggled with excitement at their abilities. I can’t begin to describe how these moments move me. At ages six and ten, my girls had heard and rejected the cosmological (“First Cause”) argument within 30 seconds, using the same reasoning Bertrand Russell described in Why I Am Not a Christian:
I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made god?’” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.
…and Russell in turn was describing Mill, as a child, discovering the same thing. I doubt that Mill’s father was less moved than I am by the realization that confident claims of “obviousness,” even when swathed in polysyllables and Latin, often have foundations so rotten that they can be neutered by thoughtful children.
There was more to come. Both girls sat up and barked excited questions and answers. We somehow ended up on Buddha, then reincarnation, then evolution, and the fact that we are literally related to trees, grass, squirrels, mosses, butterflies and blue whales.
It was an incredible freewheeling conversation I will never, ever forget. It led, as all honest roads eventually do, to the fact that everything that lives also dies. We’d had the conversation before, but this time a new dawning crossed Laney’s face.
“Sweetie, what is it?” I asked.
She began the deep, aching cry that accompanies her saddest realizations, and sobbed:
“I don’t want to die.”
integrity
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It’s confirmed: the statistic over which I was so amazed — that 39.6 percent of prominent scientists lost a parent when they were kids — is twaddle. Thanks to blogreader Ryan (who sent the full text of the article I had quoted), I am spared the fate of including a bogus stat in a sidebar in my forthcoming book.
I want to write further about my error (which was silly and avoidable, not a minor slip), but I want to quote a letter from TH Huxley in doing so. Whenever I turn to that letter, though, I am so deeply moved that I have to quote half the letter, just in case someone hasn’t read this remarkable thing. Sometime next week I’ll write about the stat error.
Huxley and his wife had experienced the most unimaginable loss — the death of their four-year-old son Noel. First, a diary entry from the day after Noel’s death, followed by Huxley’s letter a few days later:
September 20, 1860
Diary of Thomas Huxley
And the same child, our Noel, our first-born, after being for nearly four years our delight and our joy, was carried off by scarlet fever in forty-eight hours. This day week he and I had a great romp together. On Friday his restless head, with its bright blue eyes and tangled golden hair, tossed all day upon his pillow. On Saturday night the fifteenth, I carried him here into my study, and laid his cold still body here where I write. Here too on Sunday night came his mother and I to that holy leave-taking.
My boy is gone, but in a higher and better sense than was in my mind when I wrote four years ago what stands above – I feel that my fancy has been fulfilled. I say heartily and without bitterness–Amen, so let it be.
The Queen’s Canon Rev. Charles Kingsley wrote a letter of condolence to Huxley, gently suggesting that he reconsider his agnosticism and accept the consolations of faith in his time of loss. Huxley’s equally gentle response to Kingsley is the most moving testament to intellectual integrity I have ever read. An excerpt:
September 23, 1860
My dear Kingsley –I cannot sufficiently thank you, both on my wife’s account and my own, for your long and frank letter, and for all the hearty sympathy which it exhibits–and Mrs. Kingsley will, I hope, believe that we are no less sensible of her kind thought of us. To myself your letter was especially valuable, as it touched upon what I thought even more than upon what I said in my letter to you.
My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them–and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is—Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie….
I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.
Pray understand that I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of matter. Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvellousness. But the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man’s life is to say and to feel, “I believe such and such to be true.”
All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act. The universe is one and the same throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms. It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions. I dare not if I would.
Measured by this standard, what becomes of the doctrine of immortality?
You rest in your strong conviction of your personal existence, and in the instinct of the persistence of that existence which is so strong in you as in most men.
To me this is as nothing. That my personality is the surest thing I know–may be true. But the attempt to conceive what it is leads me into mere verbal subtleties.
I cannot conceive of my personality as a thing apart from the phenomena of my life. When I try to form such a conception I discover that, as Coleridge would have said, I only hypostatise a word, and it alters nothing if, with Fichte, I suppose the universe to be nothing but a manifestation of my personality. I am neither more nor less eternal than I was before.
Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could speculate without end on both sides, and find analogies for all his dreams. Nor does it help me to tell me that the aspirations of mankind–that my own highest aspirations even–lead me towards the doctrine of immortality. I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.
Science has taught to me the opposite lesson. She warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile.
My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as a part of his duty, the words, “If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all that was best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to the source from whence it came, the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why, the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in a gorge.
_________________________________ Sit down before fact as a little child,
be prepared to give up every preconceived notion,
follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads,
or you shall learn nothing.
I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind
since I have resolved at all risks to do this._________________________________
If at this moment I am not a worn-out, debauched, useless carcass of a man, if it has been or will be my fate to advance the cause of science, if I feel that I have a shadow of a claim on the love of those about me, if in the supreme moment when I looked down into my boy’s grave my sorrow was full of submission and without bitterness, it is because these agencies have worked upon me, and not because I have ever cared whether my poor personality shall remain distinct for ever from the All from whence it came and whither it goes.
And thus, my dear Kingsley, you will understand what my position is. I may be quite wrong, and in that case I know I shall have to pay the penalty for being wrong. But I can only say with Luther, “Gott helfe mir, Ich kann nichts anders.” [“God help me, I cannot do otherwise.”]
I know right well that 99 out of 100 of my fellows would call me atheist, infidel, and all the other usual hard names. As our laws stand, if the lowest thief steals my coat, my evidence (my opinions being known) would not be received against him.
But I cannot help it. One thing people shall not call me with justice and that is—a liar. As you say of yourself, I too feel that I lack courage; but if ever the occasion arises when I am bound to speak, I will not shame my boy.
I have spoken more openly and distinctly to you than I ever have to any human being except my wife.
If you can show me that I err in premises or conclusion, I am ready to give up these as I would any other theories. But at any rate you will do me the justice to believe that I have not reached my conclusions without the care befitting the momentous nature of the problems involved.
I don’t profess to understand the logic of yourself, Maurice, and the rest of your school, but I have always said I would swear by your truthfulness and sincerity, and that good must come of your efforts. The more plain this was to me, however, the more obvious the necessity to let you see where the men of science are driving, and it has often been in my mind to write to you before.
If I have spoken too plainly anywhere, or too abruptly, pardon me, and do the like to me.
My wife thanks you very much for your volume of sermons. Ever yours very faithfully,TH Huxley
[The complete text is available here.]
