LETTERS TO DAVE: AN ATHEIST’S PROGRESS

What will follow for the next three days is the odyssey of a rake from a time not too long past his third divorce, caused by too much moral thinking, and his arrival upon the shores of atheism some ten years later where he finds himself a changed and more honorable man through adopting selfishness as his code.

My treatise is in the form of three letters to a certain Dave fellow, almost a stranger that our man picks on to reveal himself. Some have called this a sign of boundary problems, to be too open too soon and with too much candor. Others might see this as the sign of a conscience which no longer has need to hide.


Dear Dave,

Here’s a true story about morality, lies, god, me, George Bush, alcoholism and sociobiology.


PART ONE: THE BIG LIE

Back in the late 70’s or early 80’s during Rodeo week in Cheney, for two years in a row someone raped a girl in the Eastern dormitories. I was sober by that time, living on campus in the Vets’ dorm called Sutton Hall. I knew a guy named Pete from my drinking days in Cheney, and he had lived in Sutton Hall for a couple of years too, and that second year, I happened to notice that he flipped out just about the time of the rape.

Pete began walking around town in shorts alone, barefoot, claiming that his house had burned down. He also climbed into his best friend’s house through a window a couple of times to sleep on his couch even though Pete’s house had actually not burned down. I grew suspicious. Gossiping around, I learned that Pete had once slugged a woman in the face with a beer mug down at Goofy’s, the local hippy bar in Cheney. He was a reputed party animal too and well known among the hard-drinking veterans, and I noticed that, for all his partying, he never had a girlfriend.

Putting all my evidence together, I came up with the conclusion that Pete was the rapist. By straightforwardly gossiping my suspicion around town in my usual devious manner, eventually, my suspicion drifted into the campus cops’ ears, and they showed up at Sutton Hall looking for me.

“Why do you think Pete is the rapist?” they asked.

“Unh….” Then, when I realized I had nothing to go on except a few wild hairs up my ass, I turned beet red, lamely mentioned my evidence, and that, as they say, was the end of that.

One of reasons I thought Pete might be a rapist was the fact he couldn’t seem to get a girlfriend and that “… men without girlfriends are likely to be rapists because they are women haters”, I lectured, looking down into the face of a little person, literally, who was a cop on the Cheney campus police department at the time, realizing as I said this that I thought he probably couldn’t get a girlfriend either. Boy, was I eating my words!

An aside—years later when that midget campus cop left Cheney, he happened to pull up in a huge Cadillac to say goodbye to a mutual acquaintance who I was chatting with beside the street. In the passenger seat beside the little guy was his very attractive, nicely built, full size wife.

Well, anyway, back to the rape case. That afternoon, after being completely humiliated, I was driving into Spokane to go to work. I worked evenings. I felt very uncomfortable, guilty about my unfounded suspicions, embarrassed by the whole interrogation process and being forced to face my own stupidity.

Now at this time in my early sobriety AA was trying to teach me that I had to question my motives in all matters to find the truth of my situation or bad feelings like these could lead a man back to drinking. So I was asking myself why I had jumped to my conclusion… “why, out of all the damn people in Cheney and the Rodeo visitors and cowboys, why did I single out this one poor bastard to lay my suspicion on.”

Didn’t take me long to build the case against myself once I got serious about looking into myself. The guy had once sold me a faulty camera, and I was too shamed to ask for my money back. He was a popular party animal, so I imagined, and I was a recovering drunk who felt very unpopular about himself a good deal of the time. He was a wise guy who once questioned me as to why I would do such of stupid thing as to get sober in AA. And finally, my girlfriend, who was breaking up with me, once said a complimentary thing about Pete’s partying ways which made me feel small and once attended a party he was attending so, of course, she must have slept with him at that time or was soon going to sleep with him in the future.

All this driving self-evaluation was very uncomfortable. I was inside the Spokane city limits and didn’t even know how I got there. Then I learned another thing about lying and the frail nature of human reality: I now knew how I had used all these bad motives to make a decision about another human being, but then, I realized, with a powerful jolt, an even deeper truth, that not only did I think he was guilty, I also wanted him to be guilty! Quite a jolt!

Ever since that day, I don’t listen with the same ear to anything that anybody tells me about themselves, about others, about anything! I don’t care if the man’s the president of the United States, he’s as human as I am and as capable of self-delusion as I am, of lying to himself and others without blinking an eye, and basically, we can lie so easily because we are all frequently capable of lying to ourselves first and for devious reasons. It makes the world a very relativistic place to live in—to realize that all people are just like me, with those capacities for self-deception, even the men who write the things which are in a book, no matter how holy they think they are.

More asides—turns out that Pete may have been the rapist because he soon left town and no more rapes occurred. Also he ended up in prison because he later stabbed his father in the back with a broken beer bottle. Final irony—as I was looking the midget detective in the eye with my silly claims, he was looking back at me as one of the men on his list of suspects. What I didn’t know until years later was that all men who lived on campus and who owned a denim jacket were on the list of suspects. I owned such a jacket.

And… Pete did sleep with my ex-girlfriend.

[This very last detail I only guess at because of a few comments Pete made to me when he returned to Cheney years later, ex-con and all, and I put it in because of the wonderful irony and fitting conclusion that it brings to this first part of my essay.]

Even as I argue with you and the editors of the Spokesman, I fall in and out of anger and kindness, of self-justification and lies, false accusations and true, true revelations and deceptions, honest moments and false…. And I know that you all have the same flaws because you are human animals too, just like me, just like George Bush, with similar psychological mechanisms for interpreting the evidence pouring into your senses. You can’t escape your human biology no matter what you do, because we all live in such fictions and each of us makes up the world we live in as the moments flit by and we go on. In fact some evidence suggests that none of us are in the least bit in touch with the reality outside our ears. Which brings me to sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, more about alcoholism, and the world of reality outside the average, value-based reality we are all trapped in. That will be in the next section in my next email to you. Please stay tuned… please… for my animal ego with its need for status among the writer clan (the evidence shows that all animals have that need) craves it.