Conclusions of the Godless

Having finished Dawkins' The God Delusion yesterday, I have some further thoughts on the book and its general premise.

Dawkins proves himself to be a remarkably enlightened individual who has an incredible level of frustration with the current state of international psyches. He just doesn't understand how so many people could be confronted with the same universe as the one in which he finds himself and not come to the same conclusions he does.

I sympathize.

I do understand how someone might wish to believe in god or in the supernatural. I even understand how they can believe in it. I've seen enough strange and unexplainable things in my life to have my own moments of doubt, though I must confess that I consider the supernatural to simply be things-we-can't-explain-yet-but-someday-will. Even if that means finding a scientific explanation for hauntings, etc. that includes the dead. Great. Fine by me.

What I - and Dawkins - do not understand is the type of mentality that allows a person to believe something even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. Creationism, for instance. Like Dawkins, I tend to cringe at the phrase "intelligent design," though I do understand the thought that maybe god got the whole ball rolling. But then, like the proverbial ball, it rolled along its evolutionary way.

I'm sorry, but the earth is NOT 6000 years old. It just isn't. It's millions of years old, and that - as Dawkins points out - is just so much cooler than if it were a mere 6000. But this wasn't meant to be a post on creationism versus evolution.

It's a post on religion itself. I tend to harbor what may be an irrational animosity toward organized religion. It all started - as I said in an earlier post - with a pink button. Funny how so small a thing can be a life-changing, mind-altering thing. The proverbial straw.

But once my eyes were open to the idiocy going on around me - at the tender age of six, mind you, things began to make more sense. Grow more infuriating, too. All of the things a child must do in Catholic school seemed more and more ridiculous the older I got, and the very notion of god slipped away into the shadows as I began to realize that the people around me were more interested in themselves than in the god in which they professed to believe. It wasn't simply that they were children. It was that the god - the "little god" - in which they had faith would damn me for any number of insignificant things.

God, in my rapidly expanding world, was a thing of rules. A thing of limitations and condemnations. A thing that tried to stifle my voice, my creativity, my self. And I decided - very early - that I was having none of it. God was, insofar as I could tell, an excuse for people to tell me what to do. Dawkins agrees:

Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion's arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: 'Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.' Again: 'Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.' And again: 'Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.' (221)

The elimination of reason would be the elimination of one of the fundamental things that makes us human and sentient. I suppose it would disprove evolution - if we abandon reason, then we all devolve into monkeys. We're already slinging metaphorical feces at one another; why not make it real feces? It can't possibly smell any more of bullsh*t than the Creationist Museum.

Did you know, for instance, that dinosaurs didn't come with name tags? And did you know that the T-rex ate fruit because in Eden there was no death and therefore he couldn't have eaten animals? Well, then. I guess T-rex got to the Tree first and the reason dinosaurs got wiped out is because of a stupid animal with too-short front arms that got hungry and made itself as god. *BLAM!* Enter falling sky-bits. Good-bye T-rex. Adam and Eve were really the second expulsion. (Please note that the Creationists' assertions end with the last question mark. If you couldn't tell that, it may be a sign of just how stupid their logic *cough* really is.)

Finally, though, my biggest complaint about religion is another mentioned by Dawkins. The fact that people do things in the name of religion that are otherwise entirely unsanctionable. The Crusades, for instance. Under what other auspices could an entire continent send droves of children off to die? Again, to quote Dawkins:

As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.' Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.' (283)

I'm sure we can all run through a laundry-list of atrocities committed in the name of one god or another. The wars, the deaths, the destruction. Only patriotism can convince people as wholeheartedly to commit themselves to death and slaughter... but at least patriotism has a tangible result. The safety of a nation makes infinitely more sense than... than what?

What do we get from killing for religion? Sent to a magical land which has what? Puffy clouds and wings? What if you're afraid of heights? Virgins? Not for long. A table of mead and women and war? I hope they've got cures for hangovers and syphillis. Any conception of the afterlife that we've managed to concoct (with the exception of the reincarnationists, who actually make some sense) is based on a flawed, human understanding of the universe. The things we get are the very same things we're warned away from during our lives as being sinful (with the exception of the very nice Norse - drunken sex and battle are good things in both worlds).

What is most pathetic - in all senses of the word - about religious devotion is the idea that a person can willfully discard the wonders of the world in favor of imagined wonders of equal or less splendor. I can think of no greater tragedy for the human mind than to be consoled by a weak shadow of this world, to look forward to the promise of something so much the inferior of the universe around them that they cannot see what it is they have.

And if there is a god - particularly a benevolent one - how can it possibly find value in a race of creatures whose motives are all directed at selfish self-promotion? I will be good so that I get to heaven. How is that goodness? It's self-serving and vile. Be good because you wish to be good. Be good because you believe it is good. Don't be good just to get a pat on the head from a great invisible power that could squish you like a bug.

If there is a god, then I hope that it judges us not by our religion or our devotion, but by the quality and content of our characters. It does not need us to believe in it in order to exist. And if it demands worship and devotion, well, then I'm going to blaspheme and say that I agree with Milton's Satan: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven." But I tend to find myself agreeing most with Epicurus:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able, and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

This is not an American Pipe Dream

I'm teaching Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. At first glance, it is a play that seems to have little to do with the rise and fall of kings and kingdoms, with the rampant violence that typically graces the pages I study.

But then I got to thinking.

It's been a long time since I read the play. But I remember, vividly, the experience of reading it, if not the play itself.

I remember the way it looked in my head, dusty and drab and dry. Curtains made of wallpaper fabric with yellow fade-marks from too much sun and grease. A wooden floor that hadn't seen wax for years. Doilies made by someone's grandmother once upon a time. An olive-green stove that had made birthday cakes and Christmas cookies, spaghetti from a jar, Betty Crocker cake mix, Jello, and pot roast with little pearl onions and carrots.

I think of Willy Loman as the king of a failing kingdom, surrounded by successful neighbors, with subjects who recognized in his rule faded glory and wished they could still respect the king in his tattered robes. His sons are filled with regret, but they know their father - like King Lear - is no longer fit to rule his house. They are the Cerrex and Porrex to Loman's Gorboduc, Edgar and a legitimate Edmund whose success should be measured in something other than what it is, following their blinded Gloucester-father as he stumbles his way toward the edge of a cliff.

All this leads me to wonder whether or not the American Dream is all that different from any country's dream, from Shakespeare's "Wherefore base?" and the countless tales of upward social mobility all across early modern Europe. After all, Aristotle defined Comedy as the rise in status or fortunes of one who began low.

Tragedy, however, was the fall of one from a height of status or fortune. The decline of the high school football hero to the fat, middle-aged and miserable man who sits morosely in his foam-and-steel cubicle and stares at the blank grey fabric where a window should be.

All this comes back to a point I have made - one that Shakespeare made many-a-time - that our lives are played out as on a stage. We have our exits and our entrances, and we, in our time, will play many parts.

Learn from Willy Loman. Decide, now, that yours will be a Comedy. Decide that, whatever your fortunes may be, you will make yourself rise, if not in wealth or status, then in contentment. Make content your crown, and crown your life in content before you play your final age in mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Searching for an Author

As an (aspiring) author - though I suppose, technically, I am a published author, just not in the genre in which I would like to be published - I often think of myself in terms of words. Not language, in general, but words. I see myself sometimes as a me-shaped bottle filled with ink, all swirling and dark and filled with the loops and whorls of letters. I can envision my skin covered with words, tiny insect-like creatures that cover me from head to toe in little tattoo-feet.

In re-reading Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author for class on Wednesday, I came across this fascinating and brilliant passage:
Father: But don’t you see that the whole trouble lies here. In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.
It struck me, then, that what the Father describes is, in essence, the Human Condition. We are all, in some ways, searching for an Author.

In the case of Pirandello's play, the Author for which the Characters search is the Logos, the Word, god. And I think Pirandello is right. We are, all of us, searching for that Author, that Logos, that god.

Regular readers will know, of course, that I am not religious. In any way. I am not looking for god in the traditional or non-traditional sense of the word. But I am looking for Words. Always. It is a perpetual search for the right language to express exactly what haunts my inner castle, the spell that will seal or release my sanctum sanctorum.

Pirandello's Father Character offers the suggestion of impossibility. Of the interiority which Edward Said (in Orientalism) we all bring with us to every cultural, social, or literary encounter. We cannot help but bring our ideologies into play whatever we do, see, hear, or read. I acknowledge this. I embrace it.

I am proud of my ideology. I am proud of the things I choose to reject and of the things I have chosen to bear. I know that my upbringing has colored my world with a particular palette of paints, that my view on the universe in which I find myself awash is mine and mine alone, and thereby flawed. But it is mine.

I am a possessive creature. I like the things that are mine. My world. My words. I think we all like the things that are ours. It is why, as children, our papers, our homework, our art, was proudly given to mommy to put on the refrigerator. It is why we claim what is ours and fight for it. It is why we like to put our own spin on things.

I know this. I accept it. I revel in it. I acknowledge that it is mine, and it is flawed. I acknowledge that my world is not that in which others live, even if a part of them is mine, as a part of me is theirs.

And a part of this is searching for that impossible Author. The Logos. The Word.

The difference, I think, between me and most people is that I choose to find that Author in myself. I am a creator of worlds, a manipulator of universes, a source of salvation and damnation.

And Pirandello realizes this. He is his own Author. He creates himself. Writes his way into and out of corners. But his Father (his god-voice, Author-voice) condemns him for it:
Father: Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn't exist. For each one of us has his own reality to be respected before God, even when it is harmful to one's very self.

For Pirandello, then, this world in which the self is the Author, one is condemned. The Author-less Characters in the play are condemned to live and relive the tragedy of their "lives" precisely because there is no pen to script out their existence. No Author. No god. For Pirandello, a godless existence is one in which the self-Author is condemned to make mistakes. To fall into error.

I concur. I make mistakes. I stumble. I fall. I am the ultimate in post-lapserianism. I have long been a proponent of imperfection. It is the bite in the apple that - the myth tells us - gave us the wisdom of gods. And for this, we are damned? Is not this wisdom in and of itself the greatest blessing we ever could have been granted?

I have never understood - and my virulent reaction against Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge is testament to this - why knowledge is so very bad. Why there are things that I should not - or must not - know. There are horrifying things that exist in our universe. Terrible things. But that does not mean they should be forbidden - at least in theory. We should know the theories, the means, the methods. There are things we should probably not do, but knowledge makes us greater, better, no matter the severity of the information it contains.

And words... Words are the vehicles of this knowledge. The means and method of its transmission. They have become the safeguards of history. They are the elements that compose our collective memory, and, as such, our wisdom.

This is why the pen is mightier than the sword. Why language is the sword of my mouth. And with it, I will destroy thee. Create thee. Love thee.

Thou shalt have no gods

In this day and age of televangelists, the rising power of the Religious Right, and the encroaching theocracy of our government, I find the attitudes of people like Richard Dawkins refreshing. Frustrated, angry, and exasperated, but refreshing nevertheless. Dawkins' recent book - The God Delusion - has recently made its way into my pile of things-to-read, and I find most of what he has to say edifying.

Dawkins focuses - at least thus far - primarily on science and its increasingly persistent conflict with religion. He quotes Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way'. (Dawkins 32-33)
I have to say, I love that - "My god is a little god." It so encapsulates everything that is wrong with the Religious Right and everything that is right with faiths like Buddhism.

The right first: the idea of a "little god," a personal god, who exists within and for the person, the idea of the internal "little god" within each of us who possesses the possibilities of divinity and enlightenment - this idea is wonderful. It smacks of joy and self-promotion and gentleness and oneness with the self and the world.

The wrong: this, I find, manifests in the term I have used - the Religious Right. The branch of society that is both politically Right (conservative) and convinced of its Right-ness (righteousness). It is self-congratulatory. It believes that its "little god" is one that it knows, thoroughly and completely, a "little god" that serves those who follow it like a slavish monkey. A "little god" who has nothing better to do than rain fire and brimstone down on the [insert ethnic/social/religious minority/gender here]. A "little god" whose omnipotence and omniscience is entirely wasted on the dregs of humanity who are both self-serving and narrow-minded.

(Let me be clear for one moment in saying that I do not think all conservatives or religious people are a part of the Religious Right. That epithet I reserve for the very worst of the worst.)

What is wrong, I would like to know, with appreciating the beauty and grandeur that is our universe? Why must we compartmentalize it? Force it into our little creationist box and insist that it is only 6,000 years old and that it was made by invisible hands in 6 days? Why can't it be millions of years old? Isn't that much more impressive?

But we must rely upon The Truth.

Fine. I'm all for truth. But my truth and yours, Religious Right, are two very different things.

But, oh, yes, your Truth is sacred and I mustn't touch it. I'll defile it.

Bullsh*t. Dawkins has a quote for this, too:
A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts - the non-religious included - is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other. (Dawkins 42)
Yup. And if I dare to violate that bubble of sanctity, then I am a heretic, a heathen, a monster. I become a violator of the sacred, a profaner of the great All that is religion. I am an ignoramus who needs must be saved.

Let it be. Or, to borrow a familiar term, Amen. I know. Sacrilege.

I do believe that religious belief should be respected. But I also believe that my lack thereof is also deserving of respect. As is my choice to wear cotton or leather or a purple polyester shirt. Or my decision to be vegetarian. Or to study Shakespeare. Yet those things are not nearly so offensive to most people as my atheism. How dare I not believe in god!

The anger that comes through - and which I recognize even as I type it - is also prevalent in Dawkins' book, and I can see how he's ruffled a good many feathers. For instance, an amazon search of "God Delusion" brings up Dawkins' book, one that seems similar, and eight books that attack atheism (7 of those 8 are direct responses to Dawkins - I'm jealous of the fact that the man has managed to make so much of an impact). And that's just the first page. But while perhaps a published author should refrain from too much vitriol, I completely understand. Having been raised Catholic, I understand the frustration of a man struggling to make sense of what seems to him to be entirely delusional.

I remember being sent to the corner for insisting that god was not something I could draw (I was 6, and I still believed in god). I remember being told I was going to hell for any number of things, most of which I can't even recall. I remember the insistence that I was a "bad Catholic" because I didn't give a hoot about the Apostles' Creed, about First Holy Communion, or about First Reconciliation (Confession. I lied to the priest.).

I blame my mother. No. I thank my mother. Not because she raised me to be atheist. My mother is a Catholic. Sort of. At any rate, she's a practicing Christian. But she had a button. It was big and pink and glittery and it read "Trust in God. She will provide." I asked why it said "She" (I think I was four or five). My mother explained to me that because god wasn't human, it was silly of us to think of god as either male or female. I thought that was a pretty good point. My first grade religion teacher did not.

And that was the beginning. I learned to distrust everything I learned in school (Catholic school). I learned to question everything they told me. And I learned that such questioning wasn't fondly looked upon. In high school Morality class, my Catholic hero was Martin Luther.

Dawkins, in his book, uses a scale, 1-7, with 1 standing for absolute belief in a god or gods and 7 an absolute belief that there aren't any. Dawkins says he's a 6. I'd probably fall at a 5.5.

I like the idea of deity. Not of the Judeo-Christian god (whom, as Dawkins points out, is really rather self-contradictory, vindictive, and downright sadistic), but of some kind of otherness, a divinity or quasi-divinity that sets us in motion, gives us some kind of as-yet-indeterminable largeness. Whatever it is that draws us toward one another, cements friends, lovers, families together. Maybe it is chemistry. But it's not yet one that we can even begin to understand.

Do I think there is a god or gods out there, controlling our lives? No. And I don't like the thought at all. I want to be the one in charge of my destiny. No three hags with strings for me, thank you very much. My thread, my scissors. Back off, Fate-ladies. I want to take responsibility for my own successes... but also for my own failures. I made myself. You didn't make me. No god made me.

I am the only god - terribly flawed and awesomely human as I am - I need. I am that I am.



Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008.

Strange fruit

I must say that one of the things that encapsulates the theatrical experience for me is the very simple act of carrying strange objects around with me, knowing what they're for, and knowing - as I do so - that nobody else has a clue why I'm carrying that with me as I walk through the hall, down the street, or on the subway.

In the past, that has been canoe paddles, a medical bag, swords, a staff of office, large yellow pantaloons, a life-sized portrait without a face, and a decapitated head. This year, it's a large box containing a bundt-pan sized ring of green jello and a half-collapsed skull named Gloriana. Most people don't know her name is Gloriana, of course, but it's one of those things that you just feel compelled to refer to by name. What is even more amusing about Gloriana is that her jaw is held on with Gorilla and Krazy glue and she is older than most of the cast (her date of manufacture is 1985). And she's wearing lipstick.

Kudos to anyone who can tell me why she's wearing it.

It may seem strange that carrying odd things about is what encapsulates theater for me. But I'm not an actor, I'm a technician, and the theater is all about strange objects. It's about things that you've cobbled impossibly together to resemble something else entirely. About putting string and wire and paint together and making an obelisk, a monument to human intellect and imagination. About closing your eyes, stepping back, and flipping the switch and finding out whether your little creation glows brightly or sets the theater on fire.

Characters are like that, too. These funny, mish-mashes of the writers who've scripted them, the directors who interpret them, and the actors who breathe life into their hollow forms. They're these funny things that appear one way in your mind, but then take on this uncontrollable energy once you let them loose within a body. Each time, they are different. Each time, the glue and strings that compose their flesh are unique.

There is no absolute Hamlet. Hamlet must change as time passes, as the seasons turn, as kings rise and fall, as new countries are made and new worlds discovered. Yes, there is a timelessness to Hamlet. To any character or play. But it is not that Hamlet, as performed in 1600, has endured. It is that Hamlet has adapted. And I do not mean in the Ethan Hawke sense. I mean in the sense that we find something within the hollow essence that is Hamlet that is relevant, that is real. What is real now in Hamlet may be - but most likely is not - the same thing that was real when his words were first scripted. But he has endured.

This endurance is not unique to drama. Far from it. Novels, poems, songs, paintings. All endure. All adapt. But theater is different. It must be. It is a medium not of words or paint, but of bodies and voices. Yes, there are words. Often, there is paint. There are lights and clothes and makeup and music. But the bodies. The voices. These are the true medium of the theater, and no one person has control over it all. Not even in a one-man or one-woman show. Because the theater requires the audience. It needs - like we need air and food and water - the people who come, who stand or sit and listen and watch. The theater is not simply what is put into it by the designers and directors and actors. It is what the audience takes, and what it gives back.

That is its true beauty. The strangest fruit of all, that ripens as you watch, that blooms and fruits and seeds itself within the minds of those gathered to witness a singular event that can never and will never happen again. The crowd of transient participants who have the privilege, the honor, of witnessing a birth, a life, and a death all in the two-hours traffic of the stage.