AN POWERFUL LETTER BY A PERSON OF INTEGRITY
Dear Catholic Church: Excommunicate Me - An Open Letter
by Paul Constant
Apr 6, 2010
Bishop Richard Malone
c/o Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland
510 Ocean Avenue, P.O. 11559
Portland, Maine 04104
I am addressing this letter to you because my entire life as a Catholic took
place in Maine. I was baptized into the Catholic Church at St. Matthew in
Limerick a few weeks after my birth in 1976. And I was confirmed 16 years
later at St. Anne's in Gorham.
Even though I have never believed in God or the afterlife or anything else
that Catholics profess, I did get confirmed in the church of my own free
will, and though every baptized human being is supposedly a "full Catholic"
at the moment of baptism, the consensual sacrament of confirmation*
supposedly, in the words of the church, "renders the bond with the church
more perfect."
My father, Joseph Constant, worked his whole life, adored his wife for 45
years, and loved us no matter what. And I decided when I was 16 that as long
as I was living under his roof, I would continue to be a full member of his
church. He wanted to meet us again one day in heaven, and he believed that
there was only one way to do that: by believing in the One Holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church. My confirmation was a tribute to him, but it only went so
far: After I struck out on my own, I lived as an atheist.
But I suppose that, technically at least, I'm a Catholic, one of the
millions of Catholics whom American bishops profess to lead and, when the
church inserts itself into our political process, claim to speak for.
Today, Bishop Malone, I am demanding that you excommunicate me. I cannot in
good conscience belong to your church anymore; I do not want to be counted
with the 200,000 Catholics in Maine, or the 68,115,001 Catholics in the
United States of America, or the 1.1 billion Catholics in the world.
I have been watching the events of the last few weeks with horror. The pope
(an ex-Hitler Youth whom your fellow bishops used to refer to, lovingly, as
"God's rottweiler") whined during a Palm Sunday homily about what he called
"petty gossip." That "petty gossip" is a tsunami of reports of child rape
perpetrated by Catholic priests across the globe and attempts by bishops,
archbishops, cardinals, and the pope himself to cover up that child rape by
moving ordained rapists to new parishes where they could, and did, rape
again. That "petty gossip" includes one case in which the pope halted an
internal investigation of a Catholic priest in Wisconsin who is alleged to
have raped more than 200 deaf boys.
And then, on March 30, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and
Civil Rights placed an ad in the New York Times dismissively accusing the
Times of "looking for dirt" that "occurred a half-century ago" and saying
that the church's "pedophilia crisis" has "all along" been a "homosexual
crisis." He accused the Times of flogging this story to further a
progressive agenda that includes "abortion, gay marriage, and women's
ordination."
I demand to be excommunicated because I do not believe women are
second-class citizens. I demand to be excommunicated because your
missionaries are informing impoverished citizens of third-world countries
that birth control is a sin when it is in fact the single most important
thing they could do to gain some small amount of control over their economic
situation and health. I demand to be excommunicated because your church has
become a hate group as virulent as any this world has ever seen, one that is
unnaturally obsessed with the sex lives of good men and women across the
planet. I demand to be excommunicated because I do not condone child rape or
the concealment of child rape.
You might ask, Bishop Malone, what my father will think of all this. Joseph
Constant died on August 20, 2009, after a long battle with acute pulmonary
fibrosis. The sacrament for the sick gave him great comfort at the end, and
I thanked the priest for administering it. But then, at a mass that was
dedicated in Joseph's name in September, instead of a homily about how
Joseph lived the kind of life that other Catholics should emulate-generous,
faithful, good, true-the priest showed a video. You came on the screen that
had been set up on the altar (as you did in all the other Catholic churches
across Maine that weekend), and my family was forced to watch as you gave a
hate-filled lecture about why Maine's pending gay marriage law must not be
allowed to come into force, and then you had every church under your control
pass the collection plate a second time solely to collect funds to fight
marriage equality. (Thanks in large part to the Catholic Church's
efforts-efforts that included threats to remove charitable Catholic
organizations from the state if the law was approved-gay marriage remains
illegal in Maine. You must be so proud.) You took an occasion intended to
celebrate my father's life and spoiled it with hate speech.
And so it is with deep personal satisfaction, sir, that I say-and I'll put
it so you can understand it-to hell with you, Bishop Malone. To hell with
your church. To hell with the pope, especially. If you think the Catholic
God actually smiles down on you from heaven for your hatefulness, then to
hell with that God, too. I renounce your church, your God, and your
traditions. I will not be a part of any organization that welcomes and
comforts hatemongers, child rapists, or you.
I demand that you excommunicate me immediately and that you send me
confirmation as soon as possible that you have expunged me from the roster
of the Catholic Church.
Paul Constant
c/o The Stranger
1535 11th Avenue, Third Floor
Seattle, Washington 98122
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
A WHOLE IN ONE
I've been an atheist probably as far back as I can think, with some lapses and backsliding into belief under the duress of painful times. In short, when I am most weak and helpless is when I make decisions about gods and powers of greatness that I normally would not make.
I don't know why I came to be an atheist, but as a teen, I probably said I was an atheist in order to shock people. The other day, though, I understood something about atheism that I'd not noted before. I was thinking about the book I'm writing and was trying to phrase a central theme of it when I chanced upon the following thought: my life seems to be directed toward the purpose of seeing myself as I truly am beyond or outside of the consciousness of a judging god.
To live godless builds a truly human way of evaluating life. I think atheism is allowing me to quit having a split nature, seeing myself at one time as a human animal and at another time as a constructed creature at the mercy of a whimsical god like the gods of the Bible or Koran. The end of dualism is the end of being split, coming to live within existential doctrine. I'm sure that's what the existentialists were hoping for—to quit living as dual people and to be as one.
To think as an atheist one escapes the duality of good and evil. As long as one is encumbered by the good versus evil continuum, he cannot help but be judgmental. His consciousness is bathed in good and evil thinking rather than in evaluating life on less onerous and practical terms.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
ATHEISM AND AGNOSTICISM DELINEATED
Atheists agree that the phenomenal identity named god does exist in the synapses of the brain and can, therefore, be discussed in abstract terms, but they claim no brain has contacted an identity in the material world outside the human synapse that correlates to the synaptic construct named god. Thus atheists conclude that god does not exist in the material world except as a synaptic pattern in the material human brain.
Atheists further maintain that “in synapsizing about the mental construct god”, the synapsizer or brain is, by necessity, restricted wholly to its own synaptic reality without reference to the real and material world by which human sensory organs interact with the phenomenal world outside the brain. Therefore, atheists are necessarily materialists, whereas agnostics, since their synapsized conclusions about the unprovability of a “god phenomenon” in the material world remains wholly a creation of the synapses of the human brain, are idealists.
The agnostic argument is a valid syllogism, but it has no implication for or reality in the material world. This discrepancy results because the agnostic has no evidence of the “phenomenon of god” in the material world which is as cogent as the synaptic phenomenon of “not-god” in the synapses of the brain. The two concepts are not equally evidenced to the synapses of the material brain. An agnostic, therefore, must ignore material reality in order to maintain the equality of the god/not-god evidentiary and syllogistic balance in the agnostic brain.
Agnostics are, I repeat, idealists while atheists are realists.
I have invented three terms in the foregoing discussion. Each term is based on the mental phenomenon of synapse, an evolved technique by which the material brain recognizes itself throughout its carcass and overhears itself communicating within its residence in the skull. Synapsizing is a more concrete and specific way of referring to the “activity of thinking”. Synapsized is the past tense of synapsizing, and, finally, the synapsizer refers to the brain/body which senses (feels) itself doing the synapsizing or thinking.
You may ask why I would invent terms. I do it to try and be more concrete or real about the processes that are happening within the human carcass when the brain idealizes or realizes the world it’s in contact with through evolved sensory equipment. I can see that if it were a philosopher/brain speaking here, “the brain that calls itself I” would need to invent and define a lot more terms in order to make itself understood to other brain/bodies. I have no training as a philosopher, and so this attempt seems silly and unrealistic even to me, though I sense that what I’m doing verges on an attempt to communicate what I think is a reality unique to this particular “brain that calls itself I”. However, this I-brain may not be unique at all.
“Ah, the humility! The humility!”
Atheists agree that the phenomenal identity named god does exist in the synapses of the brain and can, therefore, be discussed in abstract terms, but they claim no brain has contacted an identity in the material world outside the human synapse that correlates to the synaptic construct named god. Thus atheists conclude that god does not exist in the material world except as a synaptic pattern in the material human brain.
Atheists further maintain that “in synapsizing about the mental construct god”, the synapsizer or brain is, by necessity, restricted wholly to its own synaptic reality without reference to the real and material world by which human sensory organs interact with the phenomenal world outside the brain. Therefore, atheists are necessarily materialists, whereas agnostics, since their synapsized conclusions about the unprovability of a “god phenomenon” in the material world remains wholly a creation of the synapses of the human brain, are idealists.
The agnostic argument is a valid syllogism, but it has no implication for or reality in the material world. This discrepancy results because the agnostic has no evidence of the “phenomenon of god” in the material world which is as cogent as the synaptic phenomenon of “not-god” in the synapses of the brain. The two concepts are not equally evidenced to the synapses of the material brain. An agnostic, therefore, must ignore material reality in order to maintain the equality of the god/not-god evidentiary and syllogistic balance in the agnostic brain.
Agnostics are, I repeat, idealists while atheists are realists.
I have invented three terms in the foregoing discussion. Each term is based on the mental phenomenon of synapse, an evolved technique by which the material brain recognizes itself throughout its carcass and overhears itself communicating within its residence in the skull. Synapsizing is a more concrete and specific way of referring to the “activity of thinking”. Synapsized is the past tense of synapsizing, and, finally, the synapsizer refers to the brain/body which senses (feels) itself doing the synapsizing or thinking.
You may ask why I would invent terms. I do it to try and be more concrete or real about the processes that are happening within the human carcass when the brain idealizes or realizes the world it’s in contact with through evolved sensory equipment. I can see that if it were a philosopher/brain speaking here, “the brain that calls itself I” would need to invent and define a lot more terms in order to make itself understood to other brain/bodies. I have no training as a philosopher, and so this attempt seems silly and unrealistic even to me, though I sense that what I’m doing verges on an attempt to communicate what I think is a reality unique to this particular “brain that calls itself I”. However, this I-brain may not be unique at all.
“Ah, the humility! The humility!”
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
WHAT A MORNING—ATHEISM AND A BETTER THAN RELIGIOUS RAPTURE!
Some of my days in Vancouver since moving from Spokane are as enthralling and uplifting as any evangelical church service with its rolling eyes, trembling limbs and non-sense babbling! But an atheist’s uplift is totally sensible and as understandable psychologically as religious ecstasy would be if ecstasidysiasts (sic—I invented the term just now, using ecdysiast or stripper) understood that religious rapture is only a psychological mechanism, not an actual contact with the spiritual world. Atheists don’t need to explain our ecstasies as being a contact with a god. We understand our ecstasies as resulting from our being in a heightened touch with the natural world and with our fellow beings from which the human species as a whole and we as individuals emerged. Please, readers, come along with me, follow my morning for a few minutes. I’ll explain.
This morning, I awoke to a rather chilly and overcast dawn. But, after seeing my wife off to work, I threw on my togs and set off to one of my most favorite espresso joints, the Mon Ami, owned and operated by a couple of young women named Juliana and Claire. There I ordered my 12 ounce non-fat, sugar free hazelnut latte and dropped into my chair to continue reading my Yukio Mishima novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. While reading, I stopped to make some entries in my journal and wrote a couple of senryu:
Mishima —
wild horses can't drag me
from his novels.
That senryu paradoxically refers to Mishima’s novel, Runaway Horses.
Purple hazed mountains —
they linger in the distance
till darkness claims them.
Sun peeping between
tree leaves over well-mown lawn —
Mizoguchi’s nightmare.
Those senryu come directly from a couple of lines in the Mishima novel I’m currently reading. Mizoguchi is its main character.
But I did not read nor dawdle over haiku poetry for long because I was joined by a young man who I had talked to a month or so ago. Nathan came from the back of the coffee shop and sat on a couch, facing the comfortable chair where I was seated, and we nodded to each other, then picked up our conversation from where he remembered we’d ended it.
An ex-Mormon now atheist, and me, an atheist, atheism was central to our discussion—with such questions as what about “free will” and where do “ethics” come from if we can’t shove them off onto a god. It was fun. I asked him if he felt lonely, being an atheist. He said “no” and told me that most of his friends were atheists, all young like himself. He felt that the numbers of young people who are atheists were growing. He quoted the same sorts of numbers that are based on the most recent census surveys that we know of—16% or so who claim no allegiance to gods. I shared how my own long struggle was fraught with emotional turmoil and loneliness until I finally affirmed my suspicions about gods and goddesses and popped out from that tangled hierarchical and authoritarian nightmare that is Christendom and drew my first really free, fully American and human breath. Many of our founding fathers would understand clearly what I’ve just said.
We discussed the human animal’s situation in the ecosphere, housed in his stick and adobe nests alongside the human game trails that lead to work and play niches where male and female human couples earned their meat, nested and nurtured and gamboled with their children. This forced me to mention I’m still a carnivore while he mentioned that he was a vegetarian, not a vegan. I admitted I was "not there yet" and told him how dizzy I get in the mornings if I don’t get my protein. We discussed sources of protein, named toast and peanut butter breakfasts, oatmeal with raisins and nuts, eggs, yogurt—but Nathan said he didn't like the taste of yogurt.
Most interestingly, I asked him how he came to atheism, and he said “by employing a rigorous skepticism”, questioning one thing after another until he arrived at atheism. Of course, there were those moments when he realized how different his thinking was from those of his Mormon family. Yes, I can imagine. Nathan will soon be off to Seattle University to study Math and (?—I forget, Nathan, the second interest).
When Nathan left to take a philosophy exam on Heidegger, we acknowledged that we’d probably meet at the Mon Ami from time to time and talk some more. It was great fun and mentally stimulating to have that discussion. Then I decided to take off for my morning walk along the Columbia. As soon as I arrived at the river, I was amazed how swollen the river was by spring runoff. In fact, I decided to go on to Marine Park and walk there. I wanted to see the wetlands.
The sky was still overcast as I set off along the concrete trail, eating my Luna Bar lunch, through the manicured Marine Park. Finally, I thought, the piss stations are open. How often did I wish during my winter walks that their doors were open. Once or twice in the cold, I had to scramble down off the trail and take a piss. The woods below the path to my right were inundated with water now. Where last year, people could walk down off the trail into those woods, this spring, the woods are filled with water, and the water surface is full of driftwood and dead plant matter, not to mention the occasional pop jug and paper cup. But there weren’t too many of those so the scene was wildly delightful to the eye. No scrambling down there today to mingle my water with the river’s.
Swallows darted and dove, eating their fills of insects. Robins hopped about beside me, and one stood atop a fallen trunk of a small tree close by the trail to watch me. He swiveled his head to track me as I passed. “Hello there,” I was thinking. I know—anthropomorphous—that’s nonsense and I know it, but it was fun. In the middle of one woodland water clearing, a duck paddled along, and, then, at a distance, crossing the clearing, the head of a swimming creature appeared from the tree trunks. I watched the animal swim for some time until it dove under a floating mass of plants and branches on the other side of the watery clearing and entered the shadow of trees. I guessed it must be a beaver, but asked myself, “don’t they need streams to damn up in order to survive”. So I was not sure what I’d seen and thought longingly of my binoculars in the glove compartment. Still, I was enthralled as any Wordsworth on an English field trip. Then I remembered a couple of chewed, fallen trees I'd seen in March down from the trail. Of course!
Next I made the right turn at the million dollar condos which headed me straight toward the Columbia. When I emerged from this pleasant, short stretch, with condos on one side and wetlands on my right, the sight of the swollen river amazed me. Shorelines, where people picnicked last year, were completely submerged. The river rushed by very close to my concrete boardwalk. Right then a wonderful misty drizzle began which shaded into a steady but light rain. I opened my umbrella, breathed deeply the marvelous coolness and continued my stroll. I can’t tell you how delightful these walks can be.
After a half mile or so, I came to my turning around place—a long narrow (10 to 20 yards) strip of land that juts into the Columbia about a football field and a half long. The walk to its end slopes upward and then downward to a concrete pad upon which is marked with an arrow the direction, “N”. A lone fisherman stood there in the rain. He was young and I greeted him, “The water’s really up.” “Yes,” he replied. “Catch anything?” “Not yet.”
And the water is truly up! Normally, the land slopes down from the pad quite a few yards all around and the fishermen climb down those slopes to fish for sturgeon and salmon from the rocks at the water’s edge. Right now, the water is touching the pad itself, lapping and splashing over it from time to time, I imagine, when the wind is up.
I stood there for some time, surrounded on three sides by a mighty river, watching the swirls caused by the jetty where the river beats against it upstream and the whorls of water it forces the river to make on its way around the jetty’s tip. Just a little leap, and I could be swimming, though not safely. Farther out, float logs and islands of matter torn loose and set free from the Columbia’s banks farther upstream. On a man-made pole and platform nearer the bank downstream, an osprey has built its nest and the female crouches in it, her head peeking above the edge of plant matter—brooding the eggs? Or is it the male? They are mates for life.
What a vision this river and its banks are! I love it. I breathe it in and find joy in the moment—my ecstasy, a reunion with my evolutionary roots, not some imaginary god hypothesis. Then with a “good luck fishing,” to the solo fisherman, I departed the pad and him to return to my car.
Heading back, the wind shows up—a new element of nature added to my sojourn! It drives the light, misty rain horizontal, so my pant legs begin to darken with wetness. I tilt my umbrella in the direction of the wind and walk a little faster, though I love the rain, the wind, my walk. Soon, I’m back to the short run of walkway between the condos and the wetlands. Now I’m into a narrow passage between tall cottonwood trees, and, then, another element of nature emerges. The rain stops, a break in the clouds opens above me, and the sun bursts out, dappling the ground! And I rejoice with an ecstasy based on my psychological nearness to the nature that birthed me! I can’t express adequately how fun this is, these feelings, this walk, all so different from the artificial religious and forced cleanliness of a modern church where people gang together and create an artificial high between themselves and an imaginary hypothetical superbeing. Here, on my walk, its me in touch with the natural world, my aboriginal home; in there, its them in touch with their hypotheses.
Soon I’m back to my car and driving home. I’m thinking of sharing my morning with my friends who read this blog and those who are members of the Inland Northwest Freethought Society. I’m thinking over the whole morning, my intellectual discussion, topped off with a wonderful whipped cream of nature! Only an atheist can know this sense of enlightened freedom, out from under the fog of Jesus and his killer father and their constant moral harping and shame-based finger pointing. And, look, free of god, I have not, like HIM, resorted to killing, maiming and raping for my fun and revenge. All I’ve done with my ethical freedom is take a walk and have a friendly discussion with an intelligent fellow human animal. Next, I’m off to the hot tub, a good soak and a shower. What an evil atheist I am!
Some of my days in Vancouver since moving from Spokane are as enthralling and uplifting as any evangelical church service with its rolling eyes, trembling limbs and non-sense babbling! But an atheist’s uplift is totally sensible and as understandable psychologically as religious ecstasy would be if ecstasidysiasts (sic—I invented the term just now, using ecdysiast or stripper) understood that religious rapture is only a psychological mechanism, not an actual contact with the spiritual world. Atheists don’t need to explain our ecstasies as being a contact with a god. We understand our ecstasies as resulting from our being in a heightened touch with the natural world and with our fellow beings from which the human species as a whole and we as individuals emerged. Please, readers, come along with me, follow my morning for a few minutes. I’ll explain.
This morning, I awoke to a rather chilly and overcast dawn. But, after seeing my wife off to work, I threw on my togs and set off to one of my most favorite espresso joints, the Mon Ami, owned and operated by a couple of young women named Juliana and Claire. There I ordered my 12 ounce non-fat, sugar free hazelnut latte and dropped into my chair to continue reading my Yukio Mishima novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. While reading, I stopped to make some entries in my journal and wrote a couple of senryu:
Mishima —
wild horses can't drag me
from his novels.
That senryu paradoxically refers to Mishima’s novel, Runaway Horses.
Purple hazed mountains —
they linger in the distance
till darkness claims them.
Sun peeping between
tree leaves over well-mown lawn —
Mizoguchi’s nightmare.
Those senryu come directly from a couple of lines in the Mishima novel I’m currently reading. Mizoguchi is its main character.
But I did not read nor dawdle over haiku poetry for long because I was joined by a young man who I had talked to a month or so ago. Nathan came from the back of the coffee shop and sat on a couch, facing the comfortable chair where I was seated, and we nodded to each other, then picked up our conversation from where he remembered we’d ended it.
An ex-Mormon now atheist, and me, an atheist, atheism was central to our discussion—with such questions as what about “free will” and where do “ethics” come from if we can’t shove them off onto a god. It was fun. I asked him if he felt lonely, being an atheist. He said “no” and told me that most of his friends were atheists, all young like himself. He felt that the numbers of young people who are atheists were growing. He quoted the same sorts of numbers that are based on the most recent census surveys that we know of—16% or so who claim no allegiance to gods. I shared how my own long struggle was fraught with emotional turmoil and loneliness until I finally affirmed my suspicions about gods and goddesses and popped out from that tangled hierarchical and authoritarian nightmare that is Christendom and drew my first really free, fully American and human breath. Many of our founding fathers would understand clearly what I’ve just said.
We discussed the human animal’s situation in the ecosphere, housed in his stick and adobe nests alongside the human game trails that lead to work and play niches where male and female human couples earned their meat, nested and nurtured and gamboled with their children. This forced me to mention I’m still a carnivore while he mentioned that he was a vegetarian, not a vegan. I admitted I was "not there yet" and told him how dizzy I get in the mornings if I don’t get my protein. We discussed sources of protein, named toast and peanut butter breakfasts, oatmeal with raisins and nuts, eggs, yogurt—but Nathan said he didn't like the taste of yogurt.
Most interestingly, I asked him how he came to atheism, and he said “by employing a rigorous skepticism”, questioning one thing after another until he arrived at atheism. Of course, there were those moments when he realized how different his thinking was from those of his Mormon family. Yes, I can imagine. Nathan will soon be off to Seattle University to study Math and (?—I forget, Nathan, the second interest).
When Nathan left to take a philosophy exam on Heidegger, we acknowledged that we’d probably meet at the Mon Ami from time to time and talk some more. It was great fun and mentally stimulating to have that discussion. Then I decided to take off for my morning walk along the Columbia. As soon as I arrived at the river, I was amazed how swollen the river was by spring runoff. In fact, I decided to go on to Marine Park and walk there. I wanted to see the wetlands.
The sky was still overcast as I set off along the concrete trail, eating my Luna Bar lunch, through the manicured Marine Park. Finally, I thought, the piss stations are open. How often did I wish during my winter walks that their doors were open. Once or twice in the cold, I had to scramble down off the trail and take a piss. The woods below the path to my right were inundated with water now. Where last year, people could walk down off the trail into those woods, this spring, the woods are filled with water, and the water surface is full of driftwood and dead plant matter, not to mention the occasional pop jug and paper cup. But there weren’t too many of those so the scene was wildly delightful to the eye. No scrambling down there today to mingle my water with the river’s.
Swallows darted and dove, eating their fills of insects. Robins hopped about beside me, and one stood atop a fallen trunk of a small tree close by the trail to watch me. He swiveled his head to track me as I passed. “Hello there,” I was thinking. I know—anthropomorphous—that’s nonsense and I know it, but it was fun. In the middle of one woodland water clearing, a duck paddled along, and, then, at a distance, crossing the clearing, the head of a swimming creature appeared from the tree trunks. I watched the animal swim for some time until it dove under a floating mass of plants and branches on the other side of the watery clearing and entered the shadow of trees. I guessed it must be a beaver, but asked myself, “don’t they need streams to damn up in order to survive”. So I was not sure what I’d seen and thought longingly of my binoculars in the glove compartment. Still, I was enthralled as any Wordsworth on an English field trip. Then I remembered a couple of chewed, fallen trees I'd seen in March down from the trail. Of course!
Next I made the right turn at the million dollar condos which headed me straight toward the Columbia. When I emerged from this pleasant, short stretch, with condos on one side and wetlands on my right, the sight of the swollen river amazed me. Shorelines, where people picnicked last year, were completely submerged. The river rushed by very close to my concrete boardwalk. Right then a wonderful misty drizzle began which shaded into a steady but light rain. I opened my umbrella, breathed deeply the marvelous coolness and continued my stroll. I can’t tell you how delightful these walks can be.
After a half mile or so, I came to my turning around place—a long narrow (10 to 20 yards) strip of land that juts into the Columbia about a football field and a half long. The walk to its end slopes upward and then downward to a concrete pad upon which is marked with an arrow the direction, “N”. A lone fisherman stood there in the rain. He was young and I greeted him, “The water’s really up.” “Yes,” he replied. “Catch anything?” “Not yet.”
And the water is truly up! Normally, the land slopes down from the pad quite a few yards all around and the fishermen climb down those slopes to fish for sturgeon and salmon from the rocks at the water’s edge. Right now, the water is touching the pad itself, lapping and splashing over it from time to time, I imagine, when the wind is up.
I stood there for some time, surrounded on three sides by a mighty river, watching the swirls caused by the jetty where the river beats against it upstream and the whorls of water it forces the river to make on its way around the jetty’s tip. Just a little leap, and I could be swimming, though not safely. Farther out, float logs and islands of matter torn loose and set free from the Columbia’s banks farther upstream. On a man-made pole and platform nearer the bank downstream, an osprey has built its nest and the female crouches in it, her head peeking above the edge of plant matter—brooding the eggs? Or is it the male? They are mates for life.
What a vision this river and its banks are! I love it. I breathe it in and find joy in the moment—my ecstasy, a reunion with my evolutionary roots, not some imaginary god hypothesis. Then with a “good luck fishing,” to the solo fisherman, I departed the pad and him to return to my car.
Heading back, the wind shows up—a new element of nature added to my sojourn! It drives the light, misty rain horizontal, so my pant legs begin to darken with wetness. I tilt my umbrella in the direction of the wind and walk a little faster, though I love the rain, the wind, my walk. Soon, I’m back to the short run of walkway between the condos and the wetlands. Now I’m into a narrow passage between tall cottonwood trees, and, then, another element of nature emerges. The rain stops, a break in the clouds opens above me, and the sun bursts out, dappling the ground! And I rejoice with an ecstasy based on my psychological nearness to the nature that birthed me! I can’t express adequately how fun this is, these feelings, this walk, all so different from the artificial religious and forced cleanliness of a modern church where people gang together and create an artificial high between themselves and an imaginary hypothetical superbeing. Here, on my walk, its me in touch with the natural world, my aboriginal home; in there, its them in touch with their hypotheses.
Soon I’m back to my car and driving home. I’m thinking of sharing my morning with my friends who read this blog and those who are members of the Inland Northwest Freethought Society. I’m thinking over the whole morning, my intellectual discussion, topped off with a wonderful whipped cream of nature! Only an atheist can know this sense of enlightened freedom, out from under the fog of Jesus and his killer father and their constant moral harping and shame-based finger pointing. And, look, free of god, I have not, like HIM, resorted to killing, maiming and raping for my fun and revenge. All I’ve done with my ethical freedom is take a walk and have a friendly discussion with an intelligent fellow human animal. Next, I’m off to the hot tub, a good soak and a shower. What an evil atheist I am!
Thursday, July 05, 2007
SICKO
If you notice that my entries are not as current or as frequent as they have been, it's because I've been recovering from shingles. It's a very debilitating sort of disease, you know—a recurrence of chicken pox, and this old body doesn't bounce back like it did when it carried the consciousness of a ten year old around inside of it. This illness is another reason why this entry is so short.
ON BEING AN ATHEIST
Being an atheist is, if you can picture this, like breaking through the thin layer of an egg shell and crawling out to stand on a pristine, white surface. Here and there, one spots a courageous lad or lassie who has crawled out there with him. Beneath one’s feet, so to speak, trapped within the thinnest of shells, remain the poor, sad lot of his fellows, still trapped in and coated with chicken-yellow goo. The atheist looks up into a black, infinite void and, filled with the most tender sensation of awe, he crows like a rooster to have attained such unlimited freedom.
ON BEING BEN FRANKLIN
“The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.”—Ben Franklin
If Ben Franklin can say that, imagine how we ought to feel?
DESPOTIC GOVERNMENT AHEAD?
“I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults—if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”—Ben Franklin
If Ben Franklin can say that, imagine how we ought to feel under the boot heels of GWB?
If you notice that my entries are not as current or as frequent as they have been, it's because I've been recovering from shingles. It's a very debilitating sort of disease, you know—a recurrence of chicken pox, and this old body doesn't bounce back like it did when it carried the consciousness of a ten year old around inside of it. This illness is another reason why this entry is so short.
ON BEING AN ATHEIST
Being an atheist is, if you can picture this, like breaking through the thin layer of an egg shell and crawling out to stand on a pristine, white surface. Here and there, one spots a courageous lad or lassie who has crawled out there with him. Beneath one’s feet, so to speak, trapped within the thinnest of shells, remain the poor, sad lot of his fellows, still trapped in and coated with chicken-yellow goo. The atheist looks up into a black, infinite void and, filled with the most tender sensation of awe, he crows like a rooster to have attained such unlimited freedom.
ON BEING BEN FRANKLIN
“The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.”—Ben Franklin
If Ben Franklin can say that, imagine how we ought to feel?
DESPOTIC GOVERNMENT AHEAD?
“I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults—if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”—Ben Franklin
If Ben Franklin can say that, imagine how we ought to feel under the boot heels of GWB?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)