The Escape

Happy Easter. I really wish I could believe all the Easter stuff, but I simply cannot. Instead, my departure from religion feels like an exhilarating escape.

I can now look back on my life, freed from the shackles of religion. Of course, I still have religious feelings and am open to a God of Love, but am not bound by such feelings. I choose a life of love not because I feel there is a God threatening me with hell but because I see love as the ultimate good in the physical universe as well as the spiritual one, if such exists.

I do not know if perhaps I inherited a certain brain structure that made me susceptible to parasitic religion. My paternal grandfather Jake was extremely religious, an unofficial holy roller preacher. He was, at heart, a nice man; he loved to plant gardens, and to sing. He even made a homemade record in which he sang The Old Gray Mare. I do not know who played the guitar in that recording, of which I no longer have a copy, but it might have been him. But he was psychologically cruel to his family. Why? Because he thought it his religious obligation to be. When he read that “in the latter days” parents would hate their children and children their parents, he took this as prescriptive rather than descriptive. He thought he had to hate his children. At least this is what my Dad said. But the Bible did not require him to hate his grandchildren, so he was always nice to me and, as seen in old home movies, the other grandkids too. My Dad was an agnostic, without actually ever using that term. He simply hated the way he had seen religion practiced in his family, and had no interest in having me learn any religion. My Mom had no such antipathy to religion, but did not feel any obligation to encourage me into religion either.

But somehow I had a hunger for religion. I did not get it from my parents. And when I saw Garner Ted Armstrong on TV, I became a convert to his religion, which was a hybrid of Christianity and a strange form of Old Testament Identity religion. (He said that the United States was the actual descendants of the tribe of Manasseh.) What attracted me was his appeal to evidence, as strange as this may sound. He encouraged people to read the Bible for themselves, and to consider historical and scientific evidence with their own eyes. Of course, none of us actually did so; when we read the Bible, we saw only what he told us we would see there. I never went to one of the Armstrong churches or colleges. I was simply confused when Garner Ted vanished off on a journey of sex and other vices. As described in the report In Bed with Garner Ted, he was nearly a predator on young female students in his college. I was rescued out of this cult by falling into another: a “Church of Christ” cult that pretended by be strictly literalistic in following the Bible but which had its own set of unique, arbitrary, and unquestionable assumptions about what to believe and how to worship God. It was not until I was in grad school that I escaped from this cult by falling into various other conservative churches. Oh, yeah, I was a creationist too for about a decade of my formative years.

I wonder how my brain is still functional after going through such perversions of reality. At least I wasn’t a Moonie. But I can empathize with people who are drawn into cults. I am trying to be objective, and to not react against all religion as I would against its parasitic forms. My desire is not to attack religion, though I sometimes do so; instead, I am just excited to discover the world outside the boundaries of the religious cults, especially the world of science.

And maybe there is a little bit of good residue of my bad religious experiences. I am more excited about science in general, and evolution in particular, as a result of having been deprived of them for so many years. That is why I am so enthusiastic when I teach or write (see my books listed at my website).

Harmony and Countermelody

In addition to the experiences described in a previous essay, there are two other influences that have shaped my attitude of the world. When I recently recognized them, I was quite surprised, for they seem at first to be minor and irrelevant. They are: harmony and countermelody.

When I was in high school, I was a member of and sang in a fundamentalist church. This church refused to use instrumental music, or special performers, including choirs, because the Bible had not authorized them. This meant that the congregation had to do all the music itself. There were song-leaders (although this is not authorized by a literal interpretation of scripture either), one of whom was I. But it was up to the congregation to provide the harmonies and the countermelodies. The members who were not musically skilled droned along or, at most, parroted the melody. But even in our small congregation there was enough musical talent that there was usually someone to sing alto and bass (I was the only tenor). I learned that filling in the harmony was enjoyable, and was almost as important as carrying the main melody. Furthermore, many of the songs had countermelodies, even solos, for the altos or the basses. The “womenfolk” were particularly enthusiastic about singing the alto solos, since they were forbidden to lend their voices to any other function within the church. Countermelodies were also as enjoyable and almost as important as the main melody. I learned that the main melody sometimes had to just step aside and let the other voices carry the banner.

I also played in the school band. I played baritone horn, which often provided the fundamental notes and sometimes countermelodies. The baritone horn is not one of the heroic instruments of the band. What I learned and loved was the support roles, though I must admit I loved the occasional solos as well.

These seemingly insignificant activities prepared my mind to understand altruism. In order for altruism to function, the leaders have to sometimes step aside and let the other voices carry the banner. This is not merely a way for the leaders to let the followers vent their steam. It actually enriches the experience. Anyone who has sung in a choir knows that the best music has harmony and countermelodies that are obvious to the listener. And in our church, we were the choir. As a result, it is now second nature to me to think in terms of other people offering harmony and countermelody even in situations in which I am in charge. Perhaps as a result of these experiences, altruism resonates with my soul.

Despite the extreme fundamentalism of the church from which I emerged, I believe it was far superior to the megachurches led by televangelists. In these large made-for-TV churches, the evangelist is the center of attention—no matter how much he or she may claim that God is the focus. The attendees may clap their hands but the show is on the stage. The cameras focus on the stage, with an occasional shot out into the audience to show a woman crying passively in response to the power of the message delivered by the God-anointed evangelist. (In addition, since these TV-churches are non-denominational, they pretty much do and believe whatever the evangelist says.) Dare I say that the little church of which I was a member was more democratic than any of the big churches today?

An Inquiring Mind

I have always had an inquiring mind. My Mom told me that, when I was a little kid, I would watch our mechanical clock for many minutes at a time, watching to see if the minute hand moved, and looking at the gears and cogs inside. I did not understand how it worked, but I understood that there was a mechanism that made the clock run. I do not actually remember this myself.

When I was in junior high school, I wanted to understand photosynthesis. I read what I could about it, from the imperfect references that our small school had. I really wanted to understand how it worked, not just have a black-box understanding that sunlight and carbon dioxide went in and sugar and oxygen came out of the process. Little did I suspect that the process was too complex for anyone to understand, even to this day.

I wanted to understand how the entire ecosystem worked. I watched birds and thought about the role of each species in the food webs of nature. I knew that some lived and some died, but I did not fully understand it until I watched a blue jay destroy a robin’s nest right outside my bedroom window. It was a very inefficient destruction, to boot: most of the egg fell on the ground, the jay getting only a beakful or so of nutriment. I watched some pond water with mud in a jar, and saw the tubifex worms wiggling their red selves from out of the mud, absorbing what little oxygen they could get. I was learning that, in the words of the writer Michael Crichton, whom I do not admire very much, life will find a way.

I wanted to understand music. I was not contented just to let music give me pleasure, whether it was classical music or the country music (especially Jimmie Rodgers) that my Dad listened to. I wanted to understand key signatures and time signatures, and how composers created the experience that most people encounter as simply a mystery. I bought or copied orchestral scores. I learned to compose. Had I stayed with it, I could have been the twenty first century equivalent of Johann Ditters von Dittersdorf, no great genius but passably competent. Only later did I realize how Jimmie Rodgers was one of the creators of an unlikely, but splendidly workable, form of music: the blue yodel, which combined country yodeling with black blues. Hybrids don’t always work; they usually end up looking like ugly medieval drawings of chimeras. But the blue yodel worked. That’s what I liked about it.

And I wanted to understand languages. I wanted to understand how Spanish worked, not just how to speak a little of it. Later, in high school and college, I studied Japanese, which is very difficult. But I was drawn by the way the language worked: how it was a hybrid of aboriginal Japanese polysyllabic words and grammar with imported monosyllabic Chinese words and symbols, just as Jimmie Rodgers had blended yodeling and blues.

Finally, at long last, I came to understand religion. No longer do I see it as a revelation out of heaven, communicated to my spirit. I see it as a set of ideas that sometimes facilitates and sometimes parasitizes instincts that we all have. I can look back and see how religion took hold of my mind and made me do “its” bidding. And that is why, in this blog, I do not see religion as a good or bad thing, but as a process that operates within a fascinating world of processes, as much a part of the cosmos as clocks, organisms, music, or languages. I am only happy that (as I will tell you later) I was able to escape from the parasitic form of religion.