Aside from teaching me to think for myself and the importance of empiricism, the most important values my father taught me were how to argue in order to learn, and to pay attention to the evidence, with the rule of thumb being the rule of law, innocent until proven guilty. This is the principle of “falsifiability,” an application of Occam’s Razor. If a proposition can not be proven to be true, it should be assumed to be false. If you cannot prove guilt, assume innocence.
Consider the statement, “there is extraterrestrial intelligence.” One can imagine the proof of ETs being as obvious as invasion from outer space, but one cannot imagine any condition that could conclusively disprove their existence. In the absence of any irrefutable proof of their existence, I reluctantly conclude that, like the human race, extraterrestrial intelligence has been too stupid to survive. Or take the statements “God exists,” vs. its null. The existence of God is not falsifiable, but many of people find themselves in conditions where the statement “God does not exist” seems to be false. The proper attitude, in the absence of evidence one deems sufficient, is to assume non-existence.
I have experimented with Christianity twice.
The first time was right after John Lennon died. I really wanted to believe he still existed. Being a Christian allowed me to imagine him in Heaven, and I had a lot of evidence pointing to Ronald Wilson Reagan being the Antichrist, so the world made more sense from a Christian viewpoint. I was certainly expecting Nuclear War, but the cadres of the Revolutionary Communist Party (Maoist) called me a bourgeois degenerate, so I was at a loss as to how to fight it, aside from dropping out. Armageddon would at least have a valid point. Besides, being Christian would please my mother, and give me some commonality with the people around me. Little as I like to gamble, I staked my reason on Pascal’s Wager.
My models for Christianity were the fundamentalism I had been exposed to as a child and the modern Gnostic faith of my mother. As a Christian Scientist, she believed the material world is an illusion, but that we have an inborn knowledge of “God”. There is also the family legend of my ancestress Anne Hutchinson, who was expelled from Massachusetts for claiming she could hear God speak. (And let’s have a cheer for the Puritans and their freedom of religion!)
My fundamental act of faith for my experiments with Christianity was to believe that I would hear God. My model for this was the premise of Christian Science: God is Thought.
The question then is, which thoughts are God? I must modify “Cogito, ergo sum” to some degree, but only a Hindu would think all my thoughts are God.
I started with the assumption that part of my brain I had called my super-ego was God. I was a strict follower of Wilhelm Reich, who synthesized Freud and Marx in the 30’s in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. My basic principle of believing that I am my thoughts had led me to a close study of my thought processes as I grew up in a world saturated with Freudianism. For example, I recall that when I was six I heard Art Linkletter on Kids Say the Darndest Things explain the Oedipus Complex, and my being aghast at his having just told all America my secret.
When I learned I had that thought and suffered that complex at precisely the age predicted in the classic Freudian model, my respect for Freud went through the roof, and my respect for my own thoughts took a blow.
The classic Freudian model traces the origin of the super-ego to the internalization of parental commands at the age of three. When I was three, I stood at the edge of my parents’ yard, and thought the grass was greener on the other side of that invisible line.
“Don’t go out of the yard,” I heard my mother say.
I started, and to my amazement, I saw Mother was nowhere around me. I was alone, and standing on the edge of the yard.
“Don’t go out of the yard,” I heard her say again, but in my head, not my ears.
“Who said that?” I thought. It is the first question I remember asking in words in my head.
“Don’t go out of the yard,” I heard the voice say, but much weaker. I was insulted. I had asked a question, and I had been taught questions were answered. I had also been taught not to trust strangers, and that strangers were those whose names I did not know. “Who are you?” I asked again, savoring the new sensation of “hearing” my thoughts in words, as opposed to my awareness being the content of my sensations.
“Don’t go out of the yard,” was repeated, but only as a memory. I clearly remember thinking “If you won’t tell me who you are, then I don’t have to listen to you!” Then I stepped out of the garden and into knowledge of good and evil, and into word-bound consciousness.
My first internal dialogue, and I was already disrespecting half my brain. I later named that ego who told off the still small voice, “Doubter”, but it was the super-ego I appointed God, as I said above. When I became a Christian the first time, Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind had just passed through the Cultural consciousness, and the right brain was in. I made the switch from Freudianism to Jungianism, and from Marxism to Apostolic Communism, and opened myself to experiment.
When I first became a Christian, I noticed almost immediately that every acid trip I took from that point on ended up a theological bummer. I failed to notice anyone getting raptured, but as only 144,000 people are going to go pop, or up, we might not notice, unless they are all Jehovah’s Witnesses. I did come to provisionally accept certain of my thoughts as being from God’s radio in my right brain, until about three years had passed, when in a long dark night of prayer, the Voice told me to “Join the Army and marry a Third Worlder.”
Aside from rationalizations of Christian morality, and fears of disease or paternity, I was also socially maladroit to the point of believing the human race deserved extinction. I did not fuck at the time, although being biologically a young male, I was perpetually horny. Still, in my prayer, I put that aside, and said (in my head) “But ‘thou shalt not kill!’”
“They are a stench in my nostrils,” the Voice quoted from one of the less politically correct passages in its book. (After four years of Bush, how I miss political correctness!)
“I don’t believe I am talking to God,” I said. “I am talking to the Devil or myself.”
“Caught me,” my libido said, “but I still want to fight or fuck.”
The illusion of God’s Voice failed with my faith, or more precisely, with my suspension of disbelief. I had, Doubter concluded, by objectifying a part of my mind, the super-ego, opened an avenue for my libidinal urges to take it over. But then, what has the super-ego evolved for but to domesticate our sexuality and aggression into the patterns of our community?
My second experience with Christianity was longer and deeper, but shorter to tell, I hope. My act of faith was entering into “Christian marriage,” a mutually re-enforcing co-dependency with my wife. Our faith community of two kept me from voting, even for the lesser of the two evils, as I considered it idolatry, and the choice always seemed to come down to “Well, which one would you rather see as Antichrist?”
The lengths God apparently went to in order to make our 43rd President impressed my wife and me deeply. Not having seen Fahrenheit 9/11, I didn’t realize God didn’t need to have anything to do with it. A month before 9/11, I had a fifth of a lung removed, so I wasn’t at my best that morning, 9/11, when I woke up and for some unfathomable reason, turned on the teevee, and saw the plane crash into the Tower.
I had an instant of dreadful clarity, and moral choice. Everything I knew about this nation said it was now, once again, a blind giant with feet of clay that would stumble off to war in shock and rage, but my very first thought was joyful. As I saw what the subject people saw, that symbol that I hated also struck down, with all those living masters and servants of the American Imperium struck down in hellfire and agony, my first thought in words was, “someone got a good lick in!”
With this thought was the holographic image of all I knew of the world and the place of US in it, the starving AIDS stricken millions of the Third World dying for the International Monetary Fund and the selling of the liberated woman as the “ho”, the nuclear arsenals and the Dark Satanic Mills that build them, the repression spawned in the name of anti-communism, and the criminality and genocide into which the former Soviet has fallen, the blindness of a people who have all this done in their name while they consume more than ten times their share of the world’s resources and wonder why the world hates us, and unadulterated joy comes when I realize they hit the Pentagon too.
The clarity passed as in panic I reduced this panorama to a still small voice. Knowing damned well what I was doing, I chose to give #43 a trial run of support, with an option for one war and a large blank check labeled benefit of the doubt. I will run with the herd, and more important, I will lie with my wife, I thought.
