Things to Do Before Killing Yourself

The bulk of this post has been relocated to my religion blog and revised there.

The part about the book by Professor Xavier Cortez, 100 Things To Do Before Killing Yourself In The Midst Of A Murderous Rampage, has been revised and converted into a review of that book on its Amazon site.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

-- RW, Dec. 12, 2012

Religion and Me

I liked some things about being a fundamentalist Christian.  I liked, probably most of all, the camaraderie that you get when you are a member of a close-knit group of fellow travelers, like how you might feel toward other Americans when you're in some remote location abroad.  "You're from the States?  Where?"  "Texas."  "Texas!  I'm from Wyoming!"  "Wyoming!  Alright!"  Like that makes you practically cousins.  That's how it is, sometimes, when you are among fellow believers, in a world hostile to the Gospel.  And then, being a Bible-believing Christian as the end of the world nears, and thinking about what's going to happen when all the believers are raptured.  That was pretty exciting stuff.  And the hymns at Christmas, and the feeling that I had a Friend, and the special meanings in everything.  There were a lot of things to like.

On the other hand, I disliked some things about being a fundamentalist Christian.  I disliked the feeling of obligation to save souls - to harass people about Jesus, in effect, when I knew they had absolutely no interest in hearing it.  I disliked the confusion that I experienced, and that I certainly saw in the lives of others around me, as we tried to reconcile our hope that God was on our side with the reality that, too often, things were just not working out as advertised.  After all the allowances for God's superior wisdom and so forth, the uncomfortable fact remained that we were forever inventing ad hoc justifications on his behalf, as if he were an abusive father for whom we needed to make excuses, lest the outside world find out what a cluster our family life actually was.

I especially disliked the dishonesty of trying to portray the Bible as being consistent when it was weaving around like a drunk sailor, and as being a source of guidance when it was obviously wrong and even dangerous.  I disliked that my religion seemed, historically, to have been on the negative side of everything, as if God wanted us to be dragging our feet and giving people a hard time whenever they wanted to dance, drink, and play bingo.  It was as if God did not want us to acknowledge equal rights for women, or to reject slavery even if St. Paul did condone it, or to understand dinosaur bones, or to inform kids about sex - and so on, ad nauseum.  I disliked the fact that Christians of the sixth century cut off the ears of Christians who disagreed with them, and that Christians of the twelfth century found it important to take Jerusalem from the people who lived there, and that Christian faith seemed to provide an important fault line underlying innumerable other wars and atrocities - dividing Byzantine from Roman Christendom, and Roman Catholics from Protestants, and Presbyterian Protestants from Lutheran Protestants, and Missouri Synod Lutheran Protestants from Wisconsin Synod Lutheran Protestants, and so forth.  I definitely disliked seeing how Christians avoided taking responsibility for the assumption of superiority that keeps being used to justify such behavior, century after century.

Lots of Christians would tell me, right off, that their religious practices and beliefs are not like that.  And that's the nature of religion:  keep moving.  Keep 'em guessing.  If something has been publicly rejected as one of the worst aspects of your faith, make sure that you join everyone else in condemning it, and redefine your religion as something that would never behave in such a way.  It's just commonsense marketing.

Liberal Christianity was my case in point:  it freed me from much of the heavy baggage of my fundamentalism.  As a liberal Christian, I could have a much more educated sense of superiority, there in my nice clean clothes on Sunday morning, surrounded by all those other nice-smelling middle-class suburban white people.  It wasn't about the Bible anymore, per se; it was about the undeniable importance of compassion and giving.  These, I think, were the kinds of Christians to whom Bertrand Russell would have been referring, in Britain in 1927, when he wrote these words:

There is another point which I consider excellent.  You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged."  That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did.

Liberal Christian belief and Unitarianism, with which I flirted after some years away from religion altogether, gave me company in my mild, patronizing scorn for the fundamentalists among whom I had counted myself previously.  Actually, it gave me company, period, as I socialized with other religiously indifferent but socially concerned individuals.  But then, alas, the socializing gave way to subgrouping, gossip, and misunderstanding, and I understood that his would probably always be one of the defining features of the Body of Christ.

I couldn't have said for sure what I was supposed to be believing during this phase.  I do remember that, during a visit to a Unity church, I was struck by the many references to "the Christ in you."  Those references reminded me of the advertisement I was hearing on the radio at about the same time:  "I like the Sprite in you."  Neither, I surmise, was intended on a literal level; but in what figurative sense I should construe such sentiments, I cannot say.  In any event, I sensed that my days as a liberal Christian were numbered when I found myself thinking, during a visit to a new church, that it was a pretty cool place, except for all the talk about Jesus and such.

I never got around to becoming Jewish, except to the extent of being married to a Jewish person whose religion consisted of lighting the candles and singing the prayer, and then dissolving into laughter halfway through because that was all she remembered.  But I picked up a fair amount during my dozen years in New York, half of which I spent at a school where, it was said, the three major religions were equally represented:  Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed.

As far as I can tell, Judaism is more or less like Christianity, on a smaller scale.  You have your extreme fundamentalist conservatives, who make things miserable for themselves and everyone else.  You have your totally assimilated liberals, who don't much know or care what their putative religion is about.  In the middle, you have people who occasionally become overbearingly self-righteous about some particular issue, or who otherwise have a somewhat identifiable culture of their own, but who generally seem like they get along better and are happier to the extent that they can control their religion, rather than having it control them.

Other religions seem, to me, to follow relatively similar lines of thinking.  There are the Brahmins at the top in India, and the upper-class Muslims in various nations, and I imagine I would find, if I looked into it, that there were social classes among the Incas as well; and in all cases, no doubt, the lower-income people are expected to fight and die to defend the upper-income people of their religion - even if they actually have more in common with the lower-income infidels they're shooting at.

Nowadays, I've begun to think that may be the nature of the difference between religion and spirituality.  If you're religious, you'll pick up that gun and shoot that person - your former neighbor, perhaps - because of the religion s/he belongs to.  Or, to put it differently, you probably wouldn't be shooting him/her if s/he were of your own religion.  You may think you would never do that, but then the social pressure and the law and the fear kick in, and after a couple of months of military training, you become like all the others, before you, who said and then did exactly the same things.

It's somewhat different with atheists, who never seem to have armies of their own.  For them, the righteous zeal tends to come out in other ways - in, for instance, the racist e-mails I get from some atheist intellectuals, educating me about the stupidity of Bible-belt rednecks.  This literature is ironically reminiscent of the sacred spam I get from my few remaining Bible-thumper friends.

Spirituality, I think, is not a matter of imagining that your elevated feelings of a "higher" reality are anything more than funky chemicals in your skull.  It's also not a question of whether God exists.  His existence or nonexistence does not make anyone spiritual.  I think, much to the contrary, that it may be more spiritual to simply admit that you don't have privileged knowledge about Truth.  Spirituality, in my working hypothesis, begins with daily renunciation of transcendentalist hubris - with, if you will, the recognition that, if the gods had wanted us to know more, they would not have played games with us; they would have told us plainly.

Hillary and Mitt: Studies in Political Sincerity

I met Mitt Romney in 1983 or 1984. I was working at a law firm on Wall Street, and he was looking to set up a venture capital limited partnership. I was a junior attorney, specializing in writing the agreements that the members of such partnerships would sign. Our firm helped him set up Bain & Co., which has helped him to become a richer man; I contributed to writing the agreement that created that firm. He didn't make much of an impression, one way or the other. He was your usual Wall Street Gentile -- tall, handsome, rich. I guess he made an impression, in that I do have a vague recollection of him, which is more than I can say for most of the people I met in 1984. I guess at this point he falls into the same category, in my mind, as Gary Hart, the ultimately scandal-plagued Democrat who was running for president around the same time, whose hand I shook at the Hoboken train station one day. Is Mitt Romney an honest man? A rationally (not necessarily politically) conservative judgment would be that we cannot know for sure, for lack of solid evidence; a rationally liberal judgment would be that he is not. On the rationally liberal side, we have some evidence. During the current presidential primary contest, Mitt has made a series of statements that make him sound like a liar, and a poor one at that. There is also the evidence from wealth -- the sentiment that, behind every great fortune there is a great crime. Also, whatever the media say about Mormons, in my own experience Mormons (including particularly those who live on the East Coast) are not more honest (in the simplistic sense of the term) than other people of conservative lifestyle, though they may be somewhat more inclined to pat themselves on the back for it. If anything, the implausibility of the Mormon scriptures would incline me to think that Mormons may be somewhat *less* preoccupied with truth than the average person. But I recognize that there are different kinds of Mormons, and that not all of them have a fundamentalist's orientation toward, or familiarity with, those Scriptures. What I would conclude, about Mitt, is that a rationally liberal argument for his insincerity might draw support, but not convincing support, from the fact of his Mormon roots. The rationally conservative argument would be that it may be possible to prove that he is dishonest, but doing so would require more than the occasional screwup in the heat of a political campaign. I noticed an article, in the New York Times the other day, by a guy who used to drive Mitt around. This guy was convinced of Mitt's honesty. His article called to mind that cynical saying, "Sincerity is the main thing: if you can fake that, you've got it made." A great many people are honest when they think God or someone else is watching them. The question is whether they would behave the same way, over a period of time sufficiently long to forget about God et al., if they came to believe that nobody at all was watching them, and that their handling of a certain opportunity was not even a moral test. That may never happen, if they are religious or if they spend their lives under a political spotlight. Indeed, they, themselves may not even know whether they are honest, though surely they will have an opinion on the question. So what should we conclude? In this primary election contest, this week, in Michigan, John McCain stood up and, in a painful exercise by his so-called "Straight Talk Express," told the voters of Michigan that their jobs were gone and would not be returning. This was not consistent with the dream, and McCain surely knew it. Regardless of whether he "is" an honest or straightforward person, he seems to have decided -- in this campaign, and evidently long before it -- that what works for him, personally and/or professionally, is to work toward providing people with a relatively close approximation to his actual understanding of things, in that small minority of human experiences when it behooves him to express his thoughts. John McCain probably will not, and possibly should not, be sharing his innermost "truths" with us. But on the relative and limited scale just described -- up here on the tip of the iceberg, as it were -- he seems to have understood that his Straight Talk Express would be derailed if he fibbed to the people of Michigan, and so he did not. Therefore, he lost Michigan. We have yet to see whether his gamble pays off in a backlash, in other states, against the politics-as-usual that prompted Romney to declare, in Michigan, that he would not accept the defeat of any American industry. Romney, not being a stupid man, surely realized that it's not his call -- that the defeat of American industries will be determined by factors beyond his control. But that is not what he said. And it is this instance that raises, in my mind, a question of sincerity sufficient to prompt the writing of this posting about him and Hillary. The Hillary connection has to do with the Show of Emotion. In New Hampshire, just before the primary election, Hillary -- for the first time of which I am aware -- showed, in public, a sign of what is stereotypically treated as a trait of women: she got emotional. Not very emotional. There did not appear to be any actual tears. But her face and voice were those of a woman who is getting a bit choked up. It seems that female voters loved this, and in my opinion they should; I've seen Bill get misty-eyed often enough, by now, to have a legitimate curiosity as to what Hillary would look like in that condition. It doesn't seem fair that political contests and power are such that she dare not -- not, anyway, until she or someone manages to make it seem normal for female politicians to express emotions that their male counterparts can safely express. I'm not sure how far we want to go down that road -- do we want male politicians, breaking current taboos, to feel comparably free to express violent rage? But we aren't there yet; and for present purposes, Hillary did tread onto some new ground there, and good for her. The question remains, however, whether that was a cynical move. Did Hillary, becoming desperate about pundits' predictions that she would lose New Hampshire by double digits, decide to undertake a bold experiment? She has shown such steely self-discipline, for so long, under such pressures and national spotlights, as to suggest that she probably did not show that bit of emotional upset by accident. A possible difference between her case and Romney's is that, if he is speaking cynically, he is doing so to convey a belief about something that ain't so, whereas Hillary's emotional moment, if somehow artificially contrived, seems likely to have taken us a bit closer to something that *is* so. Hillary Clinton has had grounds to cry, and to receive the nation's sympathy in the process. And not just in the receding past, when Bill was being himself. Crying about losing in New Hampshire, had she done so, would have been reasonable, and would have brought out sympathy in some who might not previously have considered themselves capable of being sympathetic to Hillary Clinton. Of course, it would have prompted disgust in others, and rightly so. Hillary Clinton is a woman who could lead the nation in a nuclear war. Let's keep it that way, at least until she ceases to be responsible for the fates of constituents. I don't know that a question about her hairdresser was the best moment to let her hair down, if you will. But it may have been sufficient for the purpose. My guess is that Hillary, alone or in consultation with Bill or other political advisors, have surely recognized that this Iron Lady routine is not always playing well. Certainly there has been a great deal of discussion, among the leading strategists within her campaign, on the question of whether and how she might reveal that she is actually a human being, to the extent that she is. (Disclosure: I will probably vote Democrat, but am presently undecided as to the specific candidate.) My speculation is that the discussion, in Hillary's head and/or among her advisors, came to the conclusion that all she really needed to do was, at some point, to take a deep breath and confront the unknown. She just had to let herself think of a certain thing -- possibly, but not necessarily, the question that was put to her -- and doing so would choke her up. It would be a gamble, and she would have to take it, and see what happened. It seems fair for Hillary to have decided to let us know that she is (probably) a human being, and that she gets upset too. It seems fair even if she decided to do it when the cameras were rolling, under conditions that she considered favorable for purposes of helping her to win the New Hampshire primary. I do not know of any candidate in this election who has forsworn the use of emotion, if emotion will help him/her win. It is also OK with me if she uses her gender -- the power of a lady's tears, as someone put it -- to counteract the gender disadvantage of being a woman in what has been a man's world (speaking, specifically, of the presidency). It does not seem likely, at present, that she will overdo it. Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton are politicians. As such, they will lie, they will fake sincerity, and they will otherwise mislead people. It is a requirement of their job. They must be able to please everyone, which is the ridiculous expectation we place upon our political leaders. They must also be able to play poker with the bad guys. We may not think it would be appropriate for your minister to tell you that you're a pig-headed idiot, even if that is what s/he is thinking, and in this sense we permit your minister to mislead you. When your wife asks if a certain dress makes her look fat, we know the proper answer. It's a question of honesty, of course, but it's also a question of priorities, and of being able to lie well when circumstances require. Sometimes the truth hurts, and sometimes hurting someone is just not within the realm of reasonable reactions. That said, John McCain's approach is more palatable to me, partly because I want to believe that some members of the political class are actually reliable, and partly because his approach seems more workable as a practical matter. If Mitt Romney cannot lovably deceive the people of America, I honestly don't know if he will have what it takes to bargain with the Chinese. Michigan bought his line; but despite his expenditures, Iowa and New Hampshire didn't, and I think a lot of others won't. By similar values, at present, Hillary is the Democratic candidate I would consider most likely to perform well in an extremely difficult role. Her claim of experience resonates with me. I won't vote against her just because she probably manipulated people with a show of emotion. It didn't look fake -- which is to say, she was doing a good job of being a politician and, at the same time, was bringing us closer to the truth (i.e., that she has feelings), rather than further away from it. McCain, in his own very different way, seems to be making the same calculation: that he has to be the straight-shooter, even if it hurts him in some states, because that's what will help him win; and in making that judgment, he, too, may help voters to become more acquainted with the realities.