This blog is no longer being updated
I have begun posting all of my journal entries on my main blog here. This page will no longer be updated, but I will leave it up in order to maintain the few posts I have made here.
Passed Away
When a person dies my family says they have “passed away.” Of course, that’s wrought with meaning in a religious context. They believe the person has gone on to the next plane — usually heaven or hell in the thinking of Southern Baptists. For me now, “passed away” is an odd thing to say, seeing as how I’m an atheist who believes when we die we just cease to exist (except in the minds of those who love us). That might seem a bit abrupt, but I’m left with no other conclusion. Certainly I think physical parts of us remain, from the “matter can neither be created nor destroyed” point of view. But ultimately I think my consciousness is wholly contained within the tissue of my brain. And when my brain is gone, so passeth I, if you will.
All of these thoughts arise now because one of my uncles, my mother’s brother, died just before Christmas. He was buried on the day after Christmas. I didn’t know the man very well, as I saw him only a handful of times in my life at large family get togethers. But he was familiar to me, nonetheless. I feel more grief for my mother’s loss and for that of my uncle’s children than I do for myself.
Like my family, I find myself referring to the event of my uncle’s death as his “passing.” And that’s a quandary for me. I don’t want to maintain the illusion that I believe in an afterlife, but I want to be respectful of my family’s personal feelings and their grief. Mostly I end up not talking about it too much.
Coincidentally, PBS rebroadcast an old episode of Frontline this week, entitled “The Undertaking.” It followed a funeral director and his family in central Michigan, as well as some of their clients who were dealing with the death of loved ones. Throughout the program the funeral director read excerpts from a book he had written about his thoughts on dying and the burial of the dead. In one passage, he said [I’m paraphrasing here] that funerals aren’t for the dead, they’re for the living.
That really changed my perspective on the whole matter, and gave me more respect for the funerary process. Because, ultimately, when I’m dead, I’m not gonna care about the funeral. For the longest time I’ve been thinking that I didn’t want some big event made out of my death, nor really even any kind of service at all. But a funeral might provide immense comfort to those I leave behind. And that’s important.
How would you deal with this situation? How do you want to be remembered? I’d love to hear from you.
"Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells, and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower, both strange and familiar."
— Cornelia Funke (via skeletales)
(via throughaglassonion)
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”— Bertrand Russell (via magic8potion)
Bertrand Russell is one of my heroes. He so clearly expresses what my mind often perceives but I cannot verbalize. His words always encourage me to look beyond my mere trivialities to the broader social issues all thinking people should be concerned about.
Don’t Ask Questions
“Don’t ask questions – that was the first rule for a quiet life with the Dursleys.” (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling)
Don’t ask questions: unquestioning loyalty to “the cause,” whatever it might be. In the case of Harry Potter, it is fealty to the concept of the Dursley life, for the Dursley’s are nothing if not normal – or so they think. The Dursley’s are only concerned with being like their peers. They and their friends are arbiters of the status quo. (I call that mob rule.) And the freakish little Harry Potter is the greatest, most present challenge to their authority because he represents something different, strange, outside the Dursley’s realm of acceptable experience and, certainly, outside the realm of what they would consider acceptable in polite society. (It is ironic, then, that the Dursleys spoil their own son, Dudley, developing in him a character that leads ultimately to impolite behavior. Yet, it is the sense of privilege and entitlement Dudley feels that will allow him a place of prominence among his peers when he grows older.)
To not ask questions was also the first rule in my parent’s house when I was young. Growing up in a Southern Baptist home, fealty to the Christian God was demanded. This called for nothing less than abject faith, the kind of faith that (contrary to what most Christians feel) withers the spirit and stifles all creative response – for, how can one’s spirit soar when it is being constrained by the limits of an unquestioning faith in God under which one is not allowed to ask questions about whether God even exists or why God has any authority at all? And I was a very curious child. But my parents were either too ignorant (that’s not a slam, just a statement of fact) or too busy keeping food on the table to answer my questions about life, the universe, and everything. Though I don’t remember those specific questions, I suspect my inquiries must have been troubling for my parents, especially my mother, who, so far as I can tell, has always had a steadfast faith in God.
I don’t, however, blame my parents. They were wholly unprepared for a precocious child such as me. My mother — though reasonably educated, having actually graduated from high school (which was much less likely for her generation than for mine) and gone on to a secretarial school, and later held various office jobs where literacy was demanded — is not stupid; she is, in fact, very intelligent. But her faith doesn’t allow her to ask questions. Among her peers, my mother is the “go to gal,” because she has often served as a compassionate but rock-solid arbiter of Christian faith. She, I suspect, is most revered among her friends for her kindness and her certainty in her belief in God. She also, unwittingly, serves as a psychological counselor to her female friends and acquaintances. They all call her when they lack faith in themselves and/or God, or when they have a problem they don’t know how to solve. Of course, my mother’s response to such problems must always be renewed faith in God and lots and lots of prayer for the answer(s) that will surely come. Don’t get me wrong. I admire my mother greatly. I just don’t like the way she thinks sometimes.
My father, on the other hand, grew up in a farming family. During the growing season, it wasn’t unusual for him and his siblings to be kept home from school for weeks at a time to help with harvesting the cotton crop. My father’s father was a harsh, unforgiving man (he, too, demanded unwavering loyalty), and so my father quit school in 10th grade and joined the U.S. Army (having reached sufficient age because he’d been held back in more than one grade, due to absence from school) to get away from my grandfather, who died before I was born. Today, as in my formative years, my father suffers from lack of confidence in himself, though he doesn’t always show that face to the world – he can, at times, appear to be quite arrogant and self-congratulatory, but those are the external trappings of trying to fit into a society in whose ways he is not well versed. His fealty to the Christian God is motivated by ignorance. He feels he’s not intelligent enough to question his belief – though nothing could be further from the truth; my father is an extraordinarily intelligent man, but he doesn’t recognize it (and I’ve tried to tell him many times).
To me, it is apparent that a proscription against intellectual curiosity is a feature of Christian life. The Christian is admonished in the Bible to simply accept the commands of God and the scripture on absolute faith, without question. This, of course, is the reason why so many Christians find it difficult, if not impossible, to ever look at their faith objectively and see the many irreconcilable contradictions in the Bible, and the utter terribleness of their God. They fear him, as they are told to do. God is jealous and demands unwavering loyalty. Christians have no choice but to believe. Otherwise, Satan becomes involved.
When I was in my early teens I asked my pastor about “the occult,” because he had preached a sermon about it. For many people of the Southern Baptist faith, “occult” is a term into which is lumped all kinds of beliefs, from witchcraft to anything pagan, to paranormal activity, all of which, to my pastor’s and most other Christians’ minds, were spawned by Satan. I, being a devout Christian then and desiring to walk the right path, wanted to know what the dangers of the Occult were so that I could look out for them. My pastor told me not to be interested in such things. Those ideas were dangerous. The devil would seduce me with them. (Interestingly, when I was older and was thoroughly questioning my faith, it was exactly to witchcraft and other pagan beliefs that I turned for an alternative to Christianity.)
And Satan is the ultimate excuse for anything foreign in the world of Christianity. If something arises that is not acceptable, Satan must have done it. The most troubling example of this is when the devil is used in an effort to discredit science. If some scientific discovery challenges a “fact” of the Bible, then the devil must have made some man think that way, must have made that man lose his faith, as well as anyone else who believes him. However, in my experience, most Christians would never talk about Satan and his charms in an argument about science, because they know that a belief in Satan as the source of information which competes with their worldview will cause them scorn from people who don’t believe in Christianity, and that scorn would impede their quest to make all of us like them, which is their duty, they believe.
You see, some Christians — and I’m not saying all Christians, just most of the ones I know, who are all fundamentalists — believe they are fighting a holy war of ideas. They see the devil’s influence everywhere, in everyday life. He is the ultimate scapegoat for anything they can’t reconcile with their beliefs. So, it only makes sense that Satan is also the ruler of Hell. Hell is the place of utter separation from God; questioning belief in God or the authority of the Bible as God’s word leads to separation from God; therefore, questioning belief in God or the Bible leads to Hell. Hell is also a place of great, eternal torment for the unbeliever. That’s a pretty effective deterrent to non-belief, if you think going to Hell is a real possibility for you. Nobody wants to suffer for eternity.
It all leaves me feeling like it takes a map to follow the various, convoluted and often circular reasonings of the fundamentalist Christian mind. Fortunately, Christians have the Bible to always steer them in the right direction. And, as the Bible is the perfect word of God and is never wrong, it is worthy of unwavering faith in its veracity, despite its glaring inconsistencies, which will no doubt be explained through much study and earnest prayer. {Sarcasm alert}
After a long and fitful journey, I now consider myself an atheist. I’ll make another post expounding on that at a future date.
But back to Harry Potter for a minute. I feel a certain affinity with that character, and there’s little wonder. He feels totally out of place in the only environment he’s ever known — the world of the Muggles. That resonates with me both as an atheist, and as a gay man. (Not to mention the fact that Harry lived in a closet for a long portion of his life with the Dursleys. That’s so ripe with symbolism.)
Beginnings
I have at various points in my life kept some form of journal. However, it always seems that I don’t stay with it. So, I make no promises about how frequently or consistently I might post here, but I’ll give it my best effort.
I suppose some history is in order. I grew up in a rural area near a small town Southeast of Dallas, Texas. I have two sisters, both older than me. My parents are both poor working folks who each have only a high school education (though my father dropped out in ninth grade), and so my formative years were difficult. Not only financially, but also emotionally.
See, I’m gay. And I’ve had an immensely difficult time coming to terms with that. Mostly because I grew up in a family of devout evangelical Christians. As you might imagine, they don’t take kindly to the idea of homosexuality. Worse yet, I wasn’t given the luxury of coming out on my own terms; I was forced out of the closet by one of my sisters who told my entire family behind my back. That left an indelible scar that I continue to deal with.
But the most enduring pain of this situation is that we don’t talk about it. Me, because I’m not prepared for the condemnation that is sure to come; them, because none in my family likes confrontation. Unfortunately, I still get chiding innuendo from some of them, which I mostly ignore.
I struggle daily … with myself … with my family’s expectations … with the world. This journal is a record of my trials, and my triumphs.
