Tag: FreeThinking

mld, August 11, 2000 at 5:31:00 PM CEST

II - The Shamans

I decided about age ten that the shamans didn't have the answers, no matter which creed they were pushing on the rubes.

I was an altar boy, and went to Mass six days a week. I knew it in Latin, the sounds, not the meaning. The words were mere nonsense syllables. I liked the ritual, the chants. It was like meditation, and it always left me feeling relaxed.

“Om mani padme om”

“Et cum spirit tu tuo”

Then the pope decided that the Vulgar tongues were the new order of the day. Relearn the prayers, in English this time.

Say what?

I read the Bible cover to cover. A couple of times.

It didn't make sense. Read some Catholic history, the stuff the nuns weren't mentioning.

Now I know why the Church had delayed so long in translating the Bible. I think a purblind idiot can see the cause and effect relationship between the printing press and the Great Schism.

But I digress, as I am wont to do.

Back to the books. Looking for somebody with a clue.

Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. Zoroaster and Ra and Moroni and Augustus and Gilgamesh and Odin and Ceres and Athena and Mithras. None of it made any sense! They were all fucking wrong! They had to be.

Deism and Humanism seemed to be the only things that were even close.

Then, as a teenager, I stumbled upon Letters From Earth, and some of the other writings of Twain's latter years. My fate was sealed.

By this time, I was in high school, being taught by the Jesuits, the shock troops of the Inquisition. I was required to take theology classes, and comparative religion.

Boy, did I have some questions for them. I got my ass tossed out of class on a number of occasions, twice so hard they wouldn't let me back in school for three days. My questions about Pope Alexander VI, complete with bastard children, buying the papacy centuries back, and therefore sorta straining the concept of papal infallibility, were not well received.

Did I yet mention that I had long since become a pretty sarcastic smartass punk?

I had to have my ass kicked a few times before I grew out of that habit.

In theology class, as a sophomore at the Jesuit school here, I asked the priest teaching the class how the Church explained the concept of eternal damnation as congruent with God being infinitely merciful.

This has been a topic on which theologians have broken their teeth since the third or fourth century, I forget.

There was in fact a schism in the early church over this very topic, though the priest had no idea I had read anything about it.

I'd be surprised today if he knew much about it, but wait, he's dead now, so I guess not; he knows all about the afterlife, such as it is.

After he proclaimed some mealy-mouthed platitude about some thing not given to man to understand, God's ways are mysterious, yatta-yatta …, the conversation went something like this:

“Uh, Father, aren't we supposed to be God's children, and isn't his love supposed to surpass any love we imperfect humans can feel?”

“Yes.”

“And is his capacity for love also not infinite?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let's say I was the worst human that ever lived, and spent my entire life doing the most evil things possible, murder, rape, whatever.

“I live to the age of eighty, and die unrepentant. So I go to hell.

“I'm there, say, a thousand years.

“Isn't that enough? No?

“How bout a million years? A billion?

“Is that enough yet?

“Don't you think I'd have learned my lesson by then?

“Where is this Infinite Mercy?”

Of course, while that didn't go over very well (remember, the Jesuits were the shock troops of the Inquisition), I didn't get thrown out of the class at that point.

He'd been trying to shout me down during this tirade, with little success.

Only after his answer, something about it was a fair system because Jesus dying on the cross gave us all a chance at redemption, that God was Merciful, but that he was also Just, did I really screw the pooch (sorry, old Marine lingo cropping up).

“Well, Father, I'd like you, the Pope, and everybody in between to try and find a parent that would be hard-heated enough to torture one of their children for one year, much less eternity.

“I don't think you can.

“Even Hitler only wanted to toss the Jews into the ovens long enough to turn them into soap.”

I think God <= Hitler, delivered with a pretty dogdam sarcastic manner, was the kicker.

Ban the heretic from our midst.

They wouldn't even discuss Galileo.

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mld, August 11, 2000 at 5:24:00 PM CEST

Origins of an Iconoclast, Part 1 - Reader

iconoclast \Icon"oclast, n. 1. A breaker or destroyer of images or idols; a determined enemy of idol worship. 2. One who exposes or destroys shams; one who attacks cherished beliefs; a radical.

Pick one word to describe yourself.

What would it be?

Your role, your job? Mother? Geek?

Happy? Your state of mind?

Quiet? An adjective?

I am a Reader.

That is what I do very nearly every waking hour. I read. I read when I eat, I read myself to sleep, I read when I work. I get paid to read and write. I get paid for things I've read and learned.

Reading fascinates me. Reading has changed the very way human minds operate, but that's fodder for another post.

My mother taught me how to read long before I started school. That has proved to be the single most important factor in making me the man I am today.

I read on a seventh grade level in the first grade. The nuns accused me of cheating, and made me retake the test in the principal's office, while three of them watched.

The results were the same.

They couldn't believe it.

They took out a dictionary, and started asking me words at random. I knew the largest part of them.

In the second grade, I had to get thick glasses.

My mom would spank me when she'd come into the room late at night and find me reading under the covers with a flashlight.

“You're ruining your eyesight!” She was probably right.

In third grade, I maxed the test. I was reading at the college freshman level. Twelfth year, ninth month, on the Iowa Standard Reading Test.

They never tested me again.

I read anything, everything, just hand me words in a row, I didn't care.

I read a set of children's encyclopedias from A-Z, then read the entire World Book Encyclopedia. Webster's.

Again and again.

The Black Stallion, Connecticut Yankee, Grimm's Fairy Tales, the newspaper, Reader's Digest, Buick repair manuals, the Sears Catalog, the Bobbsey Twins, Field & Stream, Robinson Crusoe, everything I could get my hands on, to include the stag magazines my father hid under the mattress.

(Nothing too erotic, just Argosy and True)

I learned most of what I know today before I was fifteen.

Mom wouldn't let me read at the table, sometimes, so I'd read the ingredients on the ketchup bottle, on the sly, and try to figure out how to pronounce all those chemicals.

I spent my summers at the public library, with the family collie shepherding this little, bespectacled runt of a boy through downtown Kansas City. He'd wait on the steps for me to emerge hours later with a load of books to balance on his back, as we walked the half mile back home.

In school, I'd sit bored and read ahead in my history, science, and literature books, and have them all read after the first month or two of the school year. So I'd read them again, or daydream, or read paperbacks I'd smuggled from home.

I didn't like comics; they didn't last long enough. I read too fast.

Oh, I'd do other things, too. I had brothers; we roughhoused and played ball. I was on the swim team.

But by and large, most of my childhood was spent happily lost between the pages of a book.

I read a sci-fi book about a gigantic computer called the Final Encyclopedia. An artificial moonlet the size of Texas, it was constructed with all the wealth of the industrialized world, and was available only to the elite in the fields of science and academia. It contained all of human knowledge. I used to daydream of being able to sit there, to read and learn. I never thought that it would happen in my time.

But, of course, it has. We have the Internet. It didn't happen the way that author had envisioned it, but it is today a reality. The world of knowledge at your desk, for twenty bucks a month. This is the best of times.

But I digress, as I am wont to do.

In the sixth grade, now in Texas, they put us on those speed reading machines. There I discovered that you can only speak about 350 words a minute. The machine went up to around five or six hundred, I don't exactly recall, but I maxed it out, too.

It was about then that the torment began.

I can sum it up in three letters.

WTF?

All of human history, war, religious movements, jihads, revolution, art, life, death … What The Fuck?

What does it all mean?

What is our purpose?

What is a man supposed to do with his life?

Who started all this? WHY?

What is worthy of the doing? We spend only a few short years in this quickened state, before we get recycled back into Terra?

The questions still confound me today.

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