Goodbye Christopher Hitchens...and thank you

Christopher Hitchens died this week. Note that I don't use the euphemisms "passed away", "passed on" or "fell asleep", because out of respect for Hitchens' outlook on life I make no assumptions of him living on in an afterlife or any kind. Mr. Hitchens was an atheist. In fact he was more than an atheist, he was an anti-theist. Not a soft atheist who simply thought that there just wasn't enough evidence for a god, but a diamond-hard atheist, who was convinced to the core of his being that there was no God, gods, spirits...anything supernatural.

I disagree with Mr. Hitchens.

He was also as aggravating in his certainty as a fundamentalist; the caricature of the "angry atheist".

I also admire and respect him and thank him for making it okay to reject and repudiate the mainstream beliefs that dominate this country.

Several years ago a poll asked respondents to rate whether they would vote (in a Presidential race) for people of certain religions, philosophies, ethnic groups or sexual orientations based solely on their inclusion in that group. By far the group that received the highest negative numbers, that is the lowest number of people who would vote for a member of that group, was atheists.

As Americans we have gradually become comfortable with all manner of religious belief, but even as more Americans than ever refuse to identify with any particular sect or denomination, out and out rejection of all religions and gods is considered somehow anti-American.

But my greatest respect for Hitchens comes from this quote: "And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)” Yes, there are atheists in foxholes.

So Who Are These Evil People Trying to Steal Your Christmas Tree?

Every December it seems, there are impassioned defenses of Christmas by folks who are convinced that "they" are waging a war against Christmas and by extension, Christianity. Somehow there is a perception that there is a conspiracy to force people to say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas", to have a Holiday Tree instead of a Christmas Tree. In recent years there have even been boycotts of businesses that have "Holiday" sales, rather than Christmas ads. The American Family Association (AFA), a Christian group, even rates various national businesses as "for Christmas" or "against Christmas" based on their use or non-use of the word "Christmas" and Christian imagery in their ads and seasonal promotions.

I think all sides and points of view in this "debate" can agree that there is not a movement afoot to prevent anyone from saying "Merry Christmas", putting up Nativity scenes in their homes or on their lawns or believing what the Bible says about Jesus. There is no law against any observance or any seasonal custom. It doesn't appear that anyone seriously thinks that Christians should (or could) be banned from using terminology associated with their religion. So when someone posts on Facebook, or writes an angry letter to the editor, or calls Rush Limbaugh that they will proudly say "Merry Christmas", I can't muster much more of a response than "ummm...okay". Good for you, you are defiantly daring to make a statement that absolutely no one has a problem with.

A problem that shouldn't be a subject for debate, but unfortunately is, regards government sponsorship or promotion of a particular religion. What we're talking about is when a government body puts up some symbol, like a Nativity scene, or The Ten Commandments, that represents the beliefs of a particular religion. The Constitution, in the First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". While some proponents of public endorsements of Christianity maintain that the First Amendment applies only to the federal government and not to state and local governments, Supreme Court precedents are such that, in light of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the First does apply to all units of government. So, in that regard, it is not appropriate for a Nativity scene to be placed on government property or for there to be recognition of the birth of Jesus in our schools.

Some cities have tried to sneak the Nativity scenes in by also including menorahs and other religious symbols. In this case I believe that there is room for debate among reasonable people. One way to look at it is that inclusion of a variety of religious symbols includes everybody...except that it doesn't; it doesn't include the non-religious or the atheists, and it rarely includes smaller faiths such as the pagan Asatru with their swastika symbol or the Wiccans with the five pointed star or (gasp) the Satanists.

A third category is the use of overt Christian symbolism in Christmas advertising. In this I believe that a private company should do what works best to maximize profit for their shareholders. As a non-government entity, they should (and are) free to mention or not mention Christmas to their hearts content. For the most part what influences retailers is their perception of what the majority of the public wants; and that perception swings back and forth. For a while many retailers began to advertise for "the holidays", and not specifically mention Christmas because the perception was that the public wanted inclusion of all faith and non-faith groups and didn't want to offend the non-Christians among their customer base. For several years now, however, a backlash against inclusive holiday language has caused many businesses to revert to the use of the term "Christmas" if not specific Christian, Jesus-based symbolism. It's all a matter of where the dollars fall.

Now if you don't know it already, I'm not a Christian, but I have absolutely no problem working somewhere that has Christmas ads, I really like Christmas music and am having a family get-together on Christmas Eve. I even say "Merry Christmas" to people. I'm not trying to take Christmas away from the Christians nor do I support those who do.  On the other hand I do not celebrate or observe Christmas as the birth of Jesus and get a bit miffed at those who assume that everyone should be celebrating what they celebrate, or look at me funny when I refer to Yule or the Solstice or the Goddess.

It's a big world out there my Christian friends, and we're not all like you...Merry Christmas

Principles of Paganism Part I: Evolution of Religion and Choosing a Path

           Let’s start with a question: Why is there such a thing as religion? Let’s imagine the hypothetical twenty-first century person who somehow made it to adulthood without being exposed to religion, gods, magic, mythology, Harry Potter or any mention or allusion to the supernatural. Let us further suppose that this person was not raised by wolves, but had access to modern education, technology and science. Would this hypothetical person have any inclination toward ascribing unexplained events to the spirit world? Would this person even have any conception of the spirit world at all? Does the supernatural objectively exist or is a cultural artifact resulting from millennia of speculation and confirmation bias?

            Most religions that we are aware of today credit their origins to some supernatural event, whether the receiving of the stone tablets by Moses on the mountain or White Buffalo Woman giving the Plains people their sacred objects or even Prometheus bringing fire to man, there is some intervention for “on high” that introduces the gods or the supernatural to humans. Evolutionary biologists however, look for evidence in the fossil record and archeology to determine how and why religion developed. Two main prerequisites are put forth for the development of religion: speech and tool use. The manufacture of complex tools requires creating a mental image of an object that does not yet exist before actually making it. Furthermore, one must understand how the tool would be used once made, which requires an understanding of causality. Accordingly, the level of sophistication of stone tools is a useful indicator of causal beliefs. Religion also requires a system of symbolic communication, such as language, to be transmitted from one individual to another. Tool use and language alone would not necessarily lead to religion, although they seem to form a required base for its growth. What really must have spurred the genesis of religious belief was curiosity about the world, a desire to know how and why things happened beyond the purely practical.

            While most animals display only a casual interest in the dead of their species, at some point humans began to treat their dead with a kind of reverence, evidenced by careful burial practices as well as an apparent belief or hope that the dead would either continue to live in some other place, or that they would at some point be brought back to life. It isn’t coincidence then that early attested forms of religious observance were ancestor worship. Initially this was not an issue of praying to deceased family, but merely continuing the familial duties that took place during life. Naturally customs would build around this reverence for the departed that would develop into family or clan rituals, the forerunners of religious observances. Once the idea of some kind of continuing life after physical death was recognized and institutionalized it would not be that great of a leap to imagine other entities inhabiting this other world, this land of the dead.

            Another direction that early religion took was animism. Early humans were dependent upon various animals, crops or forces of nature and at some point saw success in hunting as dependent upon a good relationship with the spirit of the hunted animal. In some cultures in fact one can see a progression from a deity being represented first as a particular animal, later as a human-animal hybrid and finally anthropomorphically with an animal “familiar”. Reverence passed eventually from spirits of the individual animals, to an overarching animal spirit to a god or goddess of that specific animal. As gods and goddesses of various animals became established, the next logical step was to deify other parts of nature – the wind, rain, the sun or the rivers, and of course the Earth itself as Mother. Cultures which had moved past the hunter-gatherer stage of civilization and had become more pastoral and later agricultural saw more specialization in individual tasks and also a differentiation in the roles of various spirits and deities; each deity had its own “job”.             People began to tell stories about their gods, to ascribe to them genealogies and relationships, as well as hierarchies and legends about their deeds. In some cultures it seems like the exploits of real flesh and blood people became legendary and passed into myth, becoming indistinguishable from the gods of the sky and goddesses of the land.

            In our culture, religion tends to be “organized” in some fashion, although there is each year more and more who identify as “spiritual”, but “not religious”. The origins of the organization of religious beliefs can be attributed to the need for the “leaders” to exert a measure of control over the rest of the group. While individuals who claimed to have a superior connection to the spirit world can be traced back to the tribal shaman, medicine man or priest, generally these practitioners where honored for only as long as they produced some kind of tangible results. As tribal societies evolved into kingdoms and empires and later into nation-states, ethical and moral standards became conflated with religious ritual and spirit/otherworld contact and the shamans were replaced by a professional caste of priests, arranged in a hierarchy with the king (or a high priest chosen by the king) at the pinnacle of the pyramid. What better way for a ruler to control his people than divine ordination? If the king has been chosen directly by the gods, then who were the people of the kingdom to argue? Pantheons began to reflect the hierarchal view of the world, certain gods within each culture were “promoted” to chief, king or father of the gods. An example of this is the Norse Odin, who was not always the Allfather and ruler of the Aesir, but was a wandering, messenger god, a psychopomp (one who conducted the dead to the otherworld) and only later, as the culture evolved, did he become the head god of the Norse gods. It was in this milieu that the religion that we later identify as Judaism came into the world.

                        The religions based on the Bible, like many religions, claim that their beliefs sprung fully grown from the words of their god. Their rituals and customs existed from the beginnings of the human race according to their mythology. However, it is apparent from archeology that Israelite religion was similar in most respects to the religions of the surrounding Canaanites, i.e. a varied pantheon of nature, war and fertility deities. Over the course of centuries the various gods in the Israelite pantheon became absorbed into one. There is abundant evidence that Yahweh and El were originally two separate deities; even in the Bible itself there is recognition of other gods, even though they are painted as inferior to the god of Israel and in the gospels as demons. This is called henotheism or monolotry, the recognition of multiple gods while worshipping or ascribing headship to only one. Eventually this belief moved toward a view that there was only one god and that Israel was this one god’s special people. However, even based on a literal reading of the Bible, this was something that took centuries as the monotheistic factions eventually became ascendant. Nonetheless, this was still just a national religion.

            During the years in which Christianity had its start there was a shift in what constituted a religion. Various mystery cults and ecstatic groups sprung up outside of the framework of ethnic and national religions. The sprawling nature of the Roman Empire brought many religions and their adherents into regular day-to-day contact with each other outside of the context of war. So now we had a growing religion that was not connected with any of the tribal religions and despite its roots in the religion of the Jews, was a universal faith that spread by proselytizing. Christianity’s Jewish origins gave it the conviction that its god was the one true god, the creator and father of all, its place in the greater Roman culture gave it access to spread the word in an unprecedented way.

            As the new belief grew in secular power, it’s paradigm became the rule, rather than the exception, and with the advent of Islam some centuries later, the monotheistic religions each strove for world domination, with the old religions seen as bumps in the road to be smoothed over and eliminated. While polytheistic and indigenous religions managed to survive, most, with the notable exception of Hinduism, have been sidelined and marginalized by the Abrahamic religions. For centuries, most, if not all, innovations in religion took place within the context of Christianity or Islam. Each had its own sphere of influence and each became the default spirituality on its own turf.

            During the 1960’s the United States and Great Britain, due to some high profile entertainers, became more aware of Eastern religions; a decade earlier the repeal of the Witchcraft laws in the United Kingdom spurred the founding of (or the publicizing of them, depending on who you believe) numerous Wiccan and neo-pagan groups; in the United States a renewed interest in Native American spirituality became popular. Despite initial popularity and steady growth of these minority or non-mainstream religions, the culture in the United States is still overwhelmingly Christian, “good person” or “religious” is still equated automatically with “Christian” and our politicians get points by emphasizing “family values” that is equivalent to “Christianity” and a definition of “American” that excludes religious minorities.

            Time and time again I have seen people speak proudly of being irreligious, eschewing all trappings of religion and not acknowledging the majority religion in any way only to turn to Christianity later in life. Sometimes this change of heart happens when the person is near death, sometimes when children have been brought into the world, sometimes when a decision to make some change in lifestyle has been made. But more often than not the decision is based on the assumption in the United States that being moral, being a “good person” equals being a Christian. Even among those not steeped in dogma, who don’t know a thing about Jesus or the Bible accept as a given the biblical premise that “God” is somehow running things and that “good” people “believe in God”. A common defensive response by the non-religious is “But I believe in God”. So why do most people who are seeking to change for the better in some fashion, or even who are frightened by impending death, turn, not to the wide diversity of paths available but to Christianity?

            Well a Christian will naturally tell you “Because it’s true!” but I suspect that the reason is really because it’s commonplace, it’s the cultural norm, because it’s easy. I doubt you’ll find a Christian who would agree with that last statement, bringing up so-called secular assaults on their faith that they believe are taking place. Many Christians paint this religion that is being practiced, or at least claimed, by the vast majority of our country, as a persecuted minority. They will put forth that the majority who say that they are Christians are not real Christians. But if you want to become religious, there is no easier way to do it than become a Christian. Our culture is already geared to assume that there is one god, that there is a heaven and a hell, basic premises of Christianity. There is an abundance of Christian churches and inter-denominational organizations ready to take you in. If you think one flavor of Christianity is too ritualistic, too liberal, too dogmatic, too milquetoast, too whatever, there’s always another one across the street waiting to take you in. On the other hand joining another religion generally takes a little work, starting with finding them for some groups. Then you have to actually do a little work to find out what they believe and how they practice their faith. It sounds exhausting. Way too much work for most people.

            The Abrahamic religions, sometimes referred to as “people of the book”, point to their particular book as evidence that their religion is the true one, claiming that it was given or inspired by their god and offering as proof the fact that it says in the book that the book was given by their god.  Sometimes the mention of historical places or events is given as proof that the book is true (although when known history disagrees with the book, the book is wrong) – which would only make sense if I concluded that Shogun isn’t fictional because Japan is a real country and samurai really existed. There is no other reason to conclude that any holy book is inerrant truth other than the claim in the book itself that it’s inerrant. Can you say “circular reasoning” boys and girls? It was that exact thought, concluded upon ten years ago that led me to put aside Christianity in favor of exploring other options. Since I have no reason to suppose that the Bible is the repository of truth, I am free to believe or disbelieve anything in it. I am free to fashion my philosophical, ethical, moral and yes, religious beliefs in light of my experience and rational thought rather than being limited to the cultural norms. My own experiences are in no way inferior to the experiences of the fallible humans who wrote the Bible, the Koran or any other “holy” books.

            So, in a perfect world, which would include everyone thinking in a perfectly rational manner, how would people go about choosing the philosophy by which they would live their lives? And how should we judge among the different religions and philosophies? Should we choose based on which among them is “true”? If so, what aspect of “truth” shall we evaluate? The creation myths? The exploits of the legendary heroes? The rituals? The taboos? How about choosing based on what works for the individual, choosing what resonates and makes sense within, rather than succumbing to cultural pressure. In this perfect world there would be no looking askance at those who dance to their own drummer, there would be no whisperings about whether a Mormon or an atheist could be president, or public musings about how good, ethical person equated with church-going, orthodox Christian.

            So, what about that hypothetical person in the introduction? We’ll never meet that person, will we?

           

            

September 17, 2011

Normally I do a pretty good job of shielding myself from the ambient emotional emanations. You grow up in one of the world's biggest cities and you instinctively keep other people's thoughts and moods out of your head. But when millions of people are all focusing on one single sad and tragic event, the blue vibes become hard to resist.

Last week marked the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the air was full of ghosts.

On September 12th I was asked where I was and what I was doing on 9/11 and despite having related it here in this blog, I was vaguely offended at having been asked. The person who asked was not someone who I have a close relationship with, or even like. After swishing it around in my mind for a while I think the best way that I can articulate it is that in talking about horrific events, we get to decide how and when we talk about them and should not be quizzed in order to satisfy an idle curiosity.

In this era of online disclosure of our every passing thought, there still needs to be some decorum, some respect, some boundaries.

September 11, 2001

I woke up on September 11, 2001 with a severe hangover. In less than two months I would find myself thrown out of my home and things weren't going well at all. Rather than interact with a woman who would do nothing but criticize and find fault, my routine on the evening before my day off was to rent several videos, buy a six pack or two of Leinenkugel and stay up all night drinking and watching mindless entertainment. When I stumbled into the living room that awful Tuesday morning I found my children watching CNN - one of them quickly told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. My first thought was that a small private plane had clipped one of the towers. The news reports were confused and the images unclear. But it quickly became evident that a full-sized jet airliner had plowed into one of the Twin Towers. While I sat trying to make sense of it all, while we watched the coverage, the second plane hit and the chaos multiplied. The day only got worse.

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were an image that I grew up with. From the third floor of St. Pius X, my elementary school in Rosedale, Queens, we could see the towers being erected 20 miles away. Visits to Manhattan frequently included a jaunt to the top and the view of an endless horizon. For several years I worked summer jobs and later a full time gig in New York's financial district literally in the shadow of the towers. On one occasion, while employed as a mail room boy, I ran out with my co-workers to see a man walking a tightrope between the two. They were a duo of hulking, yet elegant, giants, always looking over my shoulder, always a part of the skyline; we grew up together, the towers and me.

On September 11, 2001 I quickly was assured that none of my family or friends were killed or injured. My brother, New York City Police officer and my cousin, a New York firefighter were nowhere near the devastation, none of the family lived or worked in Manhattan. Despite this, I felt a certain helplessness, a sense of being set adrift as the city that I always have considered my home was so mercilessly attacked. Nine months later during a visit to family I had to pull my car onto the shoulder to weep as I saw the gaping hole in the skyline.

Ten years later...the world, our world will never be the same

Ethics

Although most people don't want to admit it, ethics are a personal thing, a line which has on one side that which is acceptable and on the other that which is unacceptable. Perhaps you read the first sentence and wonder why I believe that "most people don't want to admit it". Mainly because for most people ethics is not strictly personal, but is taken wholesale from a book. At least that's what they say, while at the same time abiding by their own personal code. In my view, those who say plainly that their ethics are personal are more truthful, or at least aren't deceiving themselves. Now those who claim to follow holy book ethics and actually do it are equally truthful, but my observation has been that most people claim one set of ethics and even judge society by that set, while in reality holding to a completely different ethical set.

A good (if exaggerated) example of this is the movie gangster. Oftentimes the mafioso claim to be Catholics, attend mass, and have religious icons around their homes, yet their lives revolve around crime. Even beyond the egregious example of crime, loyalty and respect are the rules by which they live, not the holy book on the coffee table. Even beyond the fringe and the fictional, how many Christians live by the pacifistic turn the other cheek, love your neighbor ethos of Jesus? Instead, how many of them are actually living by their own framework of right and wrong while paying lip service to Christian ethics.

So what happens when one set of ethics are espoused and another set are acted upon? One result might be guilt. An individual takes action that is in the best interests of their family, nation, business etc but that action is proscribed by their chosen holy book, so they feel bad about it.

Another direction might be the path of absolution. If your deity is one of the more forgiving ones, any action contravening said deity's commandments will be forgiven, so act out with impunity and you'll be welcomed back into the fold. Or you can take solace in your belief that all men are frail and fall short of divine expectations and resign yourself to failure...once again hiding behind absolution.

Why not take an honest, analytic look at the circumstances of life and craft your own ethics? If you going to live by a set of rules, why not a set of rules of your own devising that fit into your own culture, your own uniqueness? Some might say that this would be playing God? That we have no right to set up our own set of rules in competition with those set up by an all-knowing creator. I would answer that if you're not following these rules but looking for loopholes and detours around them, you are doing the same thing. But the greater issue is to question whether these rules have indeed been handed down by a deity at all.

The Hovel (Nobody Would Want to Live in That Dump)

Here I am; it’s Friday night, sitting in my new apartment, one which I will later dub “The Hovel”. I’ve got my clothes hung in the closet, my mattress on the floor (I couldn’t squeeze the box spring up the stairs so it didn’t make the cut) and my one plate, one spoon, one knife, one fork, a pot & a pan and a handful of ceramic mugs (and tea, I’ve always got to make sure that I have a supply of tea) stored in the kitchen cupboards where I’m pretty sure that I saw mouse droppings. The guy who lives in the Porsche repair shop next door yelled at me earlier for blocking his driveway with my late 80’s Cavalier station wagon that has rusted spots in a far greater proportion of total surface area than the white paint that hangs on precariously, while I unloaded my meager furnishings without any help from anyone other than the meth-head single mom who lived one flight of rickety stairs festooned with bare wires below me on the ground floor. Darren, my new landlord, gave me a discount on the rent so that I could buy cleaning supplies, but I hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the greasy dust that looks like one of the aliens from the first season of Star Trek: Voyager off the overhead fans, the unidentified motile brown stuff from the top of the stove, or the sentient mold from the bathroom. I open the door to the oven and quickly shut it, horrified by the scene within, vowing to never open it ever again.

“The Hovel” is located on the corner of 17^th & N Streets in downtown Lincoln: twelve one-bedroom apartments on three floors; once a hotel for railroaders, possibly built when the golden spike was being driven and great herds of buffalo still darkened the plains. Lincoln Nebraska, home of the then-powerhouse Cornhuskers football team, Tree City USA, highest per capita gay population and highest percentage of police compared to total population. More homosexuals per square foot than San Francisco and more cops per wise guy than in New York. Or so they tell me. Or maybe it was on the “Welcome to Lincoln” sign. Next to the Porsche garage is BB&R pawn shop and behind my building is a parking lot that is used by the HMO across the street during the day and us hovel dwellers after sundown. Despite the dismal immediate surroundings, it’s a pretty good location…if your standards are somewhat negotiable. Russ’s Market grocery store is less than a mile away, and Klein’s Grocery is even closer if you don’t mind the smallness, lack of selection, and panhandlers, but they do sell the New York Times. A block and a half away the bars start sprouting. I’ve never counted, but there’re probably several dozen drinking establishments within walking distance; with the University of Nebraska about five blocks northwest, it probably isn’t enough. There’s also the public library, The Gourmet Grill - a gyro joint where the Iranian workers claim me as one of them, and a variety of other small restaurants all within a stone’s throw. Of course the State Capitol and the Governor’s Mansion are nearby if you want to hobnob with politicians. Or protest something. Or bribe somebody.

I’ve lived in Lincoln at this point for just over twenty years. I spent six months in Kearney, and before that, six months in Sidney after moving to Nebraska from Queens New York, where I was born and had spent the first twenty two years and six weeks of my life, other than brief excursions to Ohio, New Jersey and a couple of trips to Washington D.C. I had a reason for coming to Nebraska, got talked into coming to Lincoln and I’m still here due to inertia, or perhaps momentum; I’m not sure which is metaphorically correct in this case. Entropy definitely figures in.

It’s pretty quiet here in The Hovel, since I have no radio, no television, no CD or tape player and no one to talk to. I’ve got a bunch of my books, but they don’t make much noise. There’s some activity outside, from the gay bar across N Street and the constant drone of traffic on the main drag, O Street, a block to the north. So, I muse, what should I do? How about blowing my brains out? The problem with that idea is that I have no gun and have no idea where to get one at this hour. The idea itself, from my squalid corner, looks like it has some merit though. How about jumping off a highway overpass? They’ve got those things all over town. Surely I can jump off a high one, hedge my bets by doing it into oncoming traffic, but I still have enough of a vestige of good citizenship that I don’t want to land on some poor bastard who hasn’t had his life slide into a pool of crap in the last couple of months. How about sticking my head in the oven and turning on the gas? Hell no! I just made a vow not to open that thing ever again! As I thought up and rejected idea after idea, I fell asleep. One of these days I’ll get better at making a timely decision.

So I wake up the next morning. Apparently I didn’t kill myself. If I was dead surely I wouldn’t be able to smell the, shall we say, unique aroma of The Hovel. Okay, change of plans: I’ll not kill myself and do something about that smell. That’s enough of a plan for now.

Before getting moved in the previous night I had stopped by my part-time job and found out that they were closing down. I still had my full-time job, assistant store director in a local grocery store chain, but I needed the income from the second job too. It would have been convenient to keep that second job. Two years pastward from the events of this paragraph I had sold my soul to the Devil for a dime and become a telemarketer. That’s right, I was the guy who, no matter what time you had dinner, called right as you sat down, the guy who was seemingly oblivious to your repeated ungrammatical assertion that you “didn’t want none”, the guy who apparently didn’t understand the meaning of the word “no”. I sold something called ASDC, which stood for Auto Savings Discount Club, but since it had nothing to do with autos, savings or discounts, and wasn’t at all a club, changed its name to American Savings Discount Club, (yeah, I know); but we just called it ASDC. We called people who for one reason or another couldn’t get a credit card, who had effectively killed their credit, and who had credit scores that were expressed in fractions. We called them and sold them “The Plan”. “The Plan” consisted of a “line of credit”. For a nominal fee of $180 ASDC members could draw on a line of credit, instant cash that they could “access at any time by calling the toll-free number”. All that they had to do was give us their social security number, their bank account number, and be recorded giving us permission to draw out the $180 from their checking or savings account. No way! No one would be stupid enough to do that! One would think not, but there were enough idiots out there that a couple of dozen of us made pretty good money selling this questionable scheme. We used to talk about the “ASDC Continuum”. On one end were the people who were too smart to ever buy anything over the phone in the first place, and certainly not this plan. You could hear it in their voices even before you identified yourself, they were skeptical, they were suspicious, and they were smart. On the other end of the continuum were the dolts who were incapable of understanding what you were talking about. They couldn’t have told you what was wrong with ASDC, but they just couldn’t follow what you were saying. You might have been offering to send them a shoebox full of $100 bills and they’d say ‘no’. They were future Sarah Palin supporters. The people who we sold to were right in the middle. Stupid enough to have ruined their credit, stupid enough to talk seriously to telemarketers, but smart enough to know what their checking account number was and to have a job of some sort. Okay, maybe not in the middle; closer to the stupid side would be more accurate.

For two years and then some I labored on the phones peddling ASDC, sometimes also doing political polling or surveys, but ASDC was our bread and butter, at which I was extremely good at selling to the cerebrally deficient and congenitally desperate. During training they taught us that we were to stick strictly to the script. If someone offered an objection we were to reply using a list of predetermined answers. We were to talk to whoever answered the phone, whether it was our target or not, and try to sell them ASDC. There were several problems with that last part. No matter how carefully you explained that you understood that Mr. John Smith, the person that you asked for, was not home, and that you were now making this incredible offer to Mrs. Smith, or John’s brother Ray, or whoever, and that you were pitching directly to them and not merely leaving a message for Mr. John Smith, they would inevitably say, at the end of a long and complicated spiel, “John’s not home”, so I stopped trying to sell to secondary residents. I stopped pushing for the sale to belligerent people and those who were plainly stringing me along. This meant that I was breaking the rules; it also meant that since I was eliminating a large percentage of almost-guaranteed rejections without taking time to talk to them, my sales per hour went up and I was making a large amount of bonus money, despite only working part time. Every time they hired a new quality assurance monitor, I’d get written up for breaking the rules, until they figured out that I was making everyone a lot of money. Eventually they left me alone completely, and even stopped scheduling me, just letting me show up whenever I pleased.

It was a pretty good until some regulatory agency whose initials I forget shut down ASDC, and since ASDC was our biggest client, we were shut down too, just when I could really use the money. Crap.

So it’s back to The Hovel, since it’s a Saturday and I’m unlikely to find a job on the weekend. I still have to clean this place and it still smells pretty bad. Even though The Hovel was, well, a hovel, there were always an interesting cast of characters. Right across the hall was Dennis the meat cutter, seemingly the only other person in the building who had a job. Dennis always had some down-on-his-luck guy sleeping on his floor, but he often was one of the few people who seemed reasonably sane. Although I suppose that there are different ways that you can define “sane”. After all, he was living in The Hovel too. In the first floor front apartment was Ba Nguyen Bao, a guy who had spent a lot of time in Vietnamese prisons and was somewhat nuts. Ba could often be found walking up and down 27^th Street shouting at passers-by in a mixture of Vietnamese and English, or buying drinks for people with a large wad of bills (I never inquired about their source). One time he fell asleep and left some food cooking on the stove; it caught fire, coming close to burning the building down. Several of us were finally able to wake him up after banging on his door and windows for fifteen minutes. There was Dana, the gay born-again Christian, who moved in after the meth-head woman downstairs moved out, and owned two big pit bulls. His church’s position on homosexuality was that it was a sin, but he still felt gay, so his was a very confusing life. He lived there until one of his dogs ate a small dog in the neighborhood and they went on the lam from the Humane Society. On the third floor were a father & son who didn’t seem to have any visible means of support. The son would come down to my apartment to borrow my phone, then leave messages that he could be reached at my number. When they moved out two guys who owned guitars & drums moved in; they played loud music and jumped out of the windows into the alley. One day I came home to find them handcuffed and being led away by the Lincoln Police Department, the pieces of their meth lab laid out on a table in the parking lot. And who can forget the Native American woman who stopped by to “borrow a cup of Jack Daniels”.

I lived in The Hovel for about two years. Most people were horrified by my living conditions. But it was cheap, it was close to the bars, and I was too lazy to move. Until one day the water was cut off. I came back late on Friday night, in dire need of a shower, and found that I had no water. The next morning there was still no water, so I bathed and shaved using some bottled water that I had in the fridge. After returning home from work the next day, and finding that the water was working, I went about my business, doing laundry, showering, using the toilet, and making tea. After about 45 minutes I heard a horrific screaming from one of the downstairs apartments, followed by its inhabitant, Leroy, running into the hall with murder in his eyes. Apparently a water main had cracked and every time someone flushed the toilet or the washing machine drained, it flowed into Leroy’s apartment, geysering soap and human waste up through his toilet. I can see why he’d be upset. Everyone in the building had been cautioned to not flush the toilets, not use the washing machine, and use water sparingly, everyone that is except for me. I persuaded Leroy to refrain from killing me and got the classifieds and started looking for an apartment. My landlord couldn’t believe that I’d want to move. 

Family

"But you're too cool to have been in a cult" my good friend Pam said to me one afternoon in the cool darkness of O'Rourke's Tavern. Nice thought, but no, I'm not too cool to have been in a cult. (Some of you who know me really well might say that I'm not cool either, but that's another essay now isn't it?) - I'll spare you the details, at least for today, but about ten years ago I was was kicked out of a small insignificant group that had ruled many aspects of my life since 1978. The doctrinal and many of the practical minutia are for the most part not germane, but the founder of this group had a saying, referring to the Bible: "I have no friends when it comes to God's Word" - which, if you are a believer in a literal interpretation of the Bible doesn't sound too bad, but in this particular group, "God's Word" came to be understood as one man's spin on the Bible and by extension, an unquestioning obedience to the man himself.

One of the side effects of this teaching was that "the household", i.e. the core group of people committed to this leader and his group, was more important than anything or anyone, including friends and family. During my time in this group I saw many, many friendships and even marriages broken up due to this thinking. I saw families shattered and fragmented as a result of this insidiousness. Including my own.

Now for all of you bible fans out there, all of you who have a "personal relationship" with Jesus, I have absolutely no problem with people who take their religion seriously, and by "seriously" I mean those who make an effort to line up the talk and the walk, not those who attempt to make over every other human being in their own image. If you're going to claim that a leather bound book of sayings, letters, treatises, mythology, folk history and legends is the infallible, without error word of your god, at least put in the time to live it.

Over the years I have had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of many people who strove to live their faith, men and women who took all the good things from their "holy book" and put them into living breathing action. I'm related to many of those people. But when a fanatical ideology, even if it is a religious fanatical ideology, becomes your basis for interacting with the general public, that's bad enough; when extreme judgementalism over ones adherence to dogma is applied to family, then it just becomes hurtful.

Every family has the proverbial black sheep. If you don't know who it is in your family, then in all likelihood it's you. But we all, every single one of us do stupid things, do things that we regret, even do things that might have serious consequences. Who among us wants to be judged for all time for a period of life or even a single day, an isolated incident that we regret, that we would take back, change if we could? Then why are we so quick to do it to others? How eager are we to apply our own personal dogma to the lives of those around us, our friends, our family?

For many years I applied a dogmatic intolerance to my views and relationships with others. About ten years ago it came back to bite me in the ass as I found myself alone and living in "The Hovel" after being judged unworthy. But my family, whom I had been judgmental and intolerant to welcomed me with open arms, putting the past behind them, as if nothing untoward had happened... because that's what family does.

Balance

Balance does not mean always walking at the perfect midpoint between two extremes, or always settling for mediocrity; balance is an average. Is the weather here in Nebraska always 100° plus? Or it it sometimes very cold? Or in-between? Doesn't the day vary from very bright at noon to pitch-black at midnight? Our lives are like that. Walking the balance could mean that some weeks you are putting your whole heart and soul into your 9-5, other times work just isn't the priority. Our health, our hobbies, our politics, our religion, our jobs, our families are all a continuum of light and dark, fast and slow, important-at-the-moment and it-can-wait. 


The challenge in living a balanced life is that sometimes there are just so many things that you want to do that there just isn't enough time for it all. Don't get so swept away and caught up in by those things that insist on our attention that the quiet whispering voices of what could be go unheard. 

Making a Snowball

           Howling like an unseen wolf, the wind makes its presence known, pawing at the suddenly insufficient layers of clothing, while the snowflakes paradoxically caress like the lover who is no longer there. A single tear bravely tracks its way down the stubble covered cheek and onto the brown leather jacket, congealing into just another snowflake. “Can the heart freeze like my stupid toes are starting to?” the lone figure asks himself, adding “And can my inner dialogue get any more dramatic?” Still, drama aside, it’s been a rough, raw kind of day. Rough enough that the frozen feet that the aforementioned frozen toes are attached to have walked themselves to the span of Adams Street that becomes a bridge across Interstate 180. The whir of the cars passing underneath is like steel hummingbirds while the occasional truck rumbles and shakes the asphalt and chain link as the tread of giants might. “This” he sighs, “Is a freakin’ stupid idea” and climbs down from the fence that some engineer thought was proof against drunks and jumpers. The last swig of Jack Daniels (Old #7 Tennessee Whiskey, Lem Motlow proprietor) disappears as does the bottle (into some bushes). Then, as the traffic thins and the silence grows, he bends over, squatting in the snow and begins to make a snowball. At least he knows how to do that.

            He remembers a day, decades past. running around with his brothers and sisters, ecstatic that school was cancelled, the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception having deemed the day too raw even for those hardened by rulers across knuckles; he’s bent over, squatting in the snow, muttering under his breath. “Why don’t I know how to make a stupid snowball?” he whines, the double layers of wool that wrap his feet like Brill-O pads disguised cleverly as socks keeping his feet as warm as Mom intended. He remembers getting dressed, each layer of clothes like the armor of some medieval knight, specially fitted for Arctic adventures. The green knit cap that Aunt Sissy made him for Christmas beginning to absorb some of the sweat earned by chasing his brother Mike around the yard. And suddenly there’s Dad, just home from work, tucking his service revolver into the garage, ready to join in. “So son, let’s make some snowballs” Dad growls, not letting on that he knows that his boy doesn’t have the slightest idea how to construct this simplest of snow creations.

            His dad was a city cop. Rosedale was a cop neighborhood. The city had a rule then that a cop had to live within city limits, so the neighborhoods on the border of the city, as far from the dirty, nasty center as possible and still with the city, were cop neighborhoods. Every booth at the church bazaar was manned by a guy with a gun, school kids shared the bus ride to school with men who read newspapers and carried brown bag lunches but had guns strapped to their ankles. That was his dad. He was also the guy who umpired Little League and coached his kids’ hockey team and went to church every day. His dad spent three hours a day, an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the evening commuting by bus and train. That was his dad. He was also the guy who made a point of putting his gun and badge away when he got home to spend time with his five kids.

            Even though there’s a pack of kids running around, siblings and cousins and neighbors and school pals, it’s as if there’s no one else there but father and son. Crunching snow echoes as Dad walks across the yard and picks up a handful of snow and motions for his son to do the same. Having recently graduated from colorful, hard to lose in the snow mittens, to gloves, fleece on the inside, suede on the outside, and leather on the palms, the boy holds the loosely cohering snow in his cupped hands and following along with Dad, slowly and methodically applies pressure to the not wet enough snow, pushing and pressing, smoothing and molding until Dad has a perfect ivory sphere and the boy has a lumpy mass that resembles a rogue asteroid. “Take your gloves off son” he is instructed. And miming the apparent expert motions, he uses the heat from his bare hands to slightly melt the crust of his little globe, working magic that he never thought he could until he too had a perfect ivory sphere. “Dad, I did it!” he yelled, a little embarrassed at what he thought was a girlish squeak to his voice. “It’s perfect”. Dad chuckled, “So now we need to make a hundred more so we can ambush your Uncle Richie and your cousins!”    

            Memory skipped forwards a generation to a day when he was the Dad and it was his kids running around the yard, off from school. Except that he didn’t feel like a dad, not like ‘Dad” was a dad. In a thousand ways he felt that he didn’t measure up, he didn’t have a job that defined him like his father’s did; he didn’t have the seemingly effortless ability to do the right thing, but today he was going to try.

            “The perfect ivory sphere, that’s what grandpa’s snowballs looked like” he found himself reminiscing to his son. “So, what do your snowballs look like Dad?” smirked the son. “Look, wise guy, you take those foo-foo mittens off and get some gloves on if you’re going to make snowballs”.

            Not surprisingly, his son doesn’t need as much instruction as he did at that age, and it certainly helps that the snow is wetter and easier to pack than that day when the nuns cancelled classes so that it requires very little pressure to shape the crystalline whiteness into those ivory spheres. An hour later, before each of them, a pyramid of ivory spheres, or maybe rogue asteroids, but each one hand crafted and ready to leave off being admired and put into action. The basketball hoop stood at the end of the driveway, a likely target, the garage door was also very inviting, but in the end, snowballs are meant to be thrown by their makers at other makers of snowballs. The first snowball hit him square in the face, the icy sting as stunning as the blow itself, exacerbated by the sudden fogginess that accompanies loss of glasses by the nearsighted. But revenge is cold, cold as a snowball. After an hour all the son can say to him is “Perfect ivory spheres Dad; perfect ivory spheres”, laughing as he says it.

            “Memory seems to be dragging me to snowy days it seems” he thinks, as the sights and sounds of those two days, one as the son, the student of snowball-ology, and another as the father, the teacher, faded away. “Today, now today was not so fun filled”, floated to the top of his consciousness. He could see his children’s faces as they looked out the living room window, some angry, some sad, some defiant, all confused about what was happening. She stood in front of him, a cigarette between her fingers, darting like a wasp to her lips and back to her side, punctuating her sentences with it, doing everything but extinguishing it in his eye. While she stood almost a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, she seemed to tower over him, dominating, crushing with words and more. She invoked her God; she quoted from her Holy Book, her voice sing-songed like a televangelist and she intoned the list of his sins. He was cast out, cast out from their marriage and from his children. The fog from the cold and the cigarette smoke mingled together, like a veil separating him from all that he loved. He slunk away, got in his car and drove away, watching his life dwindle away in the rear view mirror.

            “Geez, how maudlin do I have to be before somebody just stamps ‘cliché’ on my forehead” he says, fully back in the present, unfolding his six foot, 240 pound frame as he stood up, holding in his hand a perfect, ivory sphere. He leans through a ragged hole in the chain link fence where he had climbed earlier and, in lieu of his previous plan, he let the snowball make the leap, watching it fall, glinting in the streetlights, turning, turning, turning, that one spot that he hadn’t quite smoothed out indicating each revolution. Time seemed to slow as his creation grew closer to the surface, but finally it hit, flattening and expanding, shattering and dissolving and it was no more. “Better you than me, snowball” he croaked and began the long walk home.

            Despite the rubber soled, fleece lined boots and two pairs of socks; there is a fuzzy numbness where his feet ought to be. Aunt Sissy’s green knit cap has survived the decades and still keeps the heat in better than any other hat he’s ever owned. Giving the frost giants a heartfelt middle finger he walks across the street to the playground, to the snow drifted basketball court where he begins to make snowballs. The snow is drier than he’d like it, but the man whom he is now finds himself more apt than the boy he once was to apply sufficient pressure, smoothing out the grooves as he readies himself to hurl his creation at the backboard; and stops. Gingerly, handling the snowball like a Fabergé egg, he sets it down and begins another, and another, depleting the snow down to the dead brown grass as his arsenal grows larger and larger. He moves over to the children’s slide and swings, scooping up handfuls of snow as if mutually assured snowball destruction awaits any who defies him. “I can do this, I can do it; this is something that I can do” he chants. Sweat begins to pour down his neck from under the knit cap and begins to soak his shirt. Even his feet begin to feel warm. The furnace of his tenacity burns fierce.

He is about spent when with a “thump!” something hits him in the face, knocking off his glasses and causing a painful iciness to take up residence where his face should be. Before he can retrieve his glasses he hears the words “Perfect ivory sphere Dad, perfect ivory sphere” and knows that he still is “Dad”. His fingers clumsy due to the thick gloves he replaces his eyewear, the world shifting from smeared watercolor to digital photograph as he does so and sees the smirking face of his son. “You didn’t think I believed all that crap, did you Dad?” he said as he hefted another snowball. “You’re the best Dad in the world…even if you’re wearing that foo-foo hat”

             

           

Some of my best friends are theists...

Just a smidgen of clarification: I have nothing against anyone's religion or god; and just to be even more clear: I'm not an atheist. The point that I am making is  manifold.

• I question whether people would interpret unexplained, mysterious events and coincidences as evidence of the action of the god of the bible if they hadn't first been inculcated with information in the general culture about this specific subset of theism first.
• The dominant cultural representation of religion in a nation tends to be the default position for spirituality for most people. I suspect that identical experiences in diverse cultures would yield diverse, not identical interpretations. 
• Even within the dominant culture, independent thought still tends to conform to some extent to the cultural framework. 

What I'm against is the belief that one interpretation of experience is necessarily the correct one, much less the only one. 

What If Nobody Told You?

What if nobody told you that the "feeling" you got was supposed to be God? Would you decide on your own that you were "supposed to" beseech a deity to save you from the tornado, the flood, cancer, or the mass layoffs? Would you make the intuitive leap that the heart-stopping, white knuckle, razor's edge escape from a fatal car wreck was the result of an omnipotent being having "a plan" for you? And if you somehow came to the conclusion that there was a spirit or god looking out for your clumsy ass, would there be any reason to suppose that it was the tribal god of a group of bronze age sheep herders who were convinced that they needed to cut off part of their penises in order to prove they were godly? Or would you just come to your own conclusions about life and living, making judgments that might be scientific, might be theistic, might be both?