Six Feet

Sitting in a supermarket of sickness,
A waystation of fading men benched with honor.
Alone with asymmetrical despair,
As a spider darkening a white wall.
What to read about?
Kierkegaard or Earthworm Jim on the Sega Genesis?
Gazing at Google…
A meaningless search field punctuated by forgotten frivolities.
Flesh, wretched even to my own vision, is clinically massaged by a gloved hand.
“Well, you’re probably fine.”
“Get out.”

A Walk in the Park

Out of the car and its dirt-peppered cover of reality.

A collage of dying reds and yellows,
Designed to stoke sight in my darkened third eye.
Perhaps a feeling?
But a man's on the path.
He has invented traffic and is as unwanted as an accident.
Before him there was no other, now he'll need an ambulance.
A reminder that I suffer from another's very visage,
A melancholy I cannot mend.
The Narrow Way gives way,
And Pandemonium's port opens.

The Depraved Nature of a Church at Peace

"For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." This verse spoken by Jesus Christ, from the Book of Matthew, is a fine working definition of the church. You'll notice earlier in the same chapter, Jesus also tells his audience to point out the sins of a believer to the church if he should fail to listen. In our glossy modernity of iphone and ipad plastic, what is called the church is far too invested in gluttony to care about the sins of a parishioner, let alone their own.

If you ask a gay man in America what he thinks of the church, then you should already know the answer. If you don't, then you're a liar. It has been a bludgeon wielded against them. Effeminate attempts to claim that church has simply "been done wrong" misses the obvious conclusion. A brick and mortar church, that is as an institution, cannot exist in a land of peace and prosperity. It decays quickly into a spiritual cirrhosis.

The church as a city on a hill has only worked in times of persecution. This claim is easily demonstrable. The Black Church encumbered by chains gave strength to the voice that God was with them in the world of their present agony. The Confessing Church in Germany screamed out the Gospel as their lungs were choked from the smoke of human furnaces. It ought to go without saying that the Orthodox Church of both of these eras were firmly entrenched against the dignity of souls. The Southern Baptist Convention and Nazi "Positive Christianity" subsisted on political power and mere economic opportunism.

Once a church stops feeling the ache of every sinner's labored breath on this wretched planet is the moment I can and will tell it to go straight to Hell. Every church now, from the Catholics to the Anglicans, to the Russian Orthodox, to the smattering of tax-exempt American parasites, all of them are a monument to at least ineptitude... if not idolatry. Taking mission trips to vacation spots like Turkey, while the religion of their hometown smolders. Perhaps meeting as Christians in groups of two or three is preferable to tithing just so Liberty University can stump for the president. To many, it might be that the church is reduced to a piece of gothic architecture and a few funny hats.

The modern ecstasy-like concoction of church group-think has deluded us into thinking that faith is something other than a personal struggle. Faith never leaves the subjective. Attempts have been made otherwise, and from them have all come shameful notions. The yawn inducing yes-men of apologetics have failed and will surely continue to fail with their overt intent of making belief more palatable to the businessman born without want. One can get no further than finding God in oppressive silence.

I am no more or less than myself

The title I’ve chosen to use for this article is from an anime. That’s probably not too surprising for those that know me. However, the anime in question, Neon Genesis Evangelion, is one of the most existential pieces of art I’ve witnessed. It starts out following the well-trodden cliché of a teenage boy piloting a mech (here called an EVA Unit) to save the world. For a title from 1995 the general premise is not much different from 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam. In that show, the boy, Amuro Ray, became very capable with few moral qualms about being a child soldier. On the other hand, Shinji Ikari, from Evangelion, was not so eager. In fact, he’s a coward.

Shinji reminds me of myself… in that he’s uncertain about his identity. He’s afraid of everything, from human contact to even knowing what he wants in life. However, his one fleeting pleasure is from the praise of his superiors for doing a good job at piloting a weapon. Shinji falsely believes that even though he hates himself, that if he pleases others he’ll find meaning. Evangelion’s last two episodes have received much criticism from a change in tone to their slow pace. In fact, the creator, Hideaki Anno, received death threats for his ending. Anno also suffered from clinical depression.

I imagine people hated it because it was too real. The finale didn’t have giant robots blowing up other giant robots, instead, Shinji comes to an internal revelation: That though he still hates himself, maybe his life is worth living. In other words, he comes to believe his own personal truth. Shinji, though an animated character, is us when we ask ourselves, “Who are we really?”

I suppose it might be a lack of imagination that I relate my deepest thoughts to an anime. Yet I find that Shinji’s desperation to find meaning through simply being complimented is uncannily similar to my attempts to please others by mimicking their beliefs. Due to my Borderline Personality Disorder, one of my coping mechanisms in the past has been to just give assent to whoever I look up to. I’m afraid of abandonment and betrayal, so I would lie to myself about what I truly thought regarding God. If you always agree with someone, the less chance there is that they can hurt you.

However, there’s a limit to self-deception. I would push all my doubts away, but eventually the dam burst. The last seven months I’ve tried to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and just be a fancy kind of Albert Camus absurdist in order to somehow float above left-wing Atheists and right-wing Christians.

To be an Atheist and not despair, you have to have faith you’re going to live in a Star Trek fantasy land where we all sing and hold hands in space despite our inherent selfishness. In order to be a Christian, you have to have faith that 2000 years ago a Palestinian rabbi was the Son of God, was executed, and subsequently broke every natural law by coming back to life three days later. Both of these are insane. Rather, they both violate what we know of reality. Humans are greedy and dead people stay dead.

However, I believe that if one is looking for some finished crossword puzzle of truth that is 100% provable (or even quantifiable in any way) then they are wasting their time. There will always be some argument, some piece of data, that will seem like it absolutely does not fit into your worldview. For the Atheist, they cannot explain what sparked the Big Bang without going into different hypothetical dimensions and a different hypothetical “bubble” multiverse. It’s an excuse to get around the uncomfortable fact that the universe is not eternal as Atheists had hoped before evidence of galaxy redshift was found by Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest and astronomer in the 1930’s. So, Atheists must look toward a secular miracle to explain away the basic logic of causality.

Yet the Christian is no better off. He cannot explain why there are billions of empty galaxies with hundreds of billions of empty planets if it’s indeed accurate that the salvation and sanctification of mankind on Earth is God’s only true concern. Why would God wait 13.8 billion years (minus two millennia) until he got started with his one and only plan? Why are we not even in the center of our own galaxy? Why allow dinosaurs to evolve and thrive for millions of years only to inevitably smash them with an asteroid in the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago? Why not just skip the reptiles and go straight to it with mammals? Why keep human beings naked and cold in the dark for tens of thousands of years before fire and the wheel? Why wait for Mary in Bethlehem to reveal yourself?

If Christians want to ignore all these questions or pretend that the Earth is 6000 years old, then they are welcome to it. Just know that whatever apologetic you come up with, be it the Shroud of Turin or trying to prove the eyewitness accounts of the Gospel, you will get no closer to producing God. Neither will wallowing in the depths of arcane doctrines like Calvinism or Arminianism produce him.

Fundamentally, after all this time I am still choosing to believe in Jesus Christ. It has nothing to do with Christianity magically filling in every intellectual gap. It doesn’t. It doesn’t even answer moral questions I have. Why did God allow the Holocaust? Why does he still allow innocent children to be sexually abused in the world even at this very moment? No amount of Bible study will give you the right formula.

No, there is only one reason to become a Christian… and that is Christ himself. As an individual operating under Descartes’ philosophy, “I think, therefore I am.” Or, to quote Evangelion again, “I am no more or less than myself.” To put it another way, I can only relate to another how I personally see things. I can only speak for myself. I know many people have sacred beliefs that are dear to them. I know that in my attempt to fight hypocrisy and double standards that I can often come off as an elitist myself. I’m not blind to that fact. However, I do try to be honest.

So, why am I still a Christian? It’s the same inspiration that forever boomerangs back into the forefront of my mind: that Jesus loved me so much, that despite my utter sinfulness, He volunteered to die in my place so that I may eternally live through Him. Not only that, but God promises me that my mental illness which has caused me to scar my body and almost take my own life three times is merely part of, “light momentary troubles and are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” What’s even greater is that if Jesus has mercy on me, then there is hope for everyone that suffers and believes in His name.

But make no mistake. We are called to be “fools for Christ’s sake.” In the same passage, we are also told that, “the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.” So, you can work a white-collar job, put on a suit and tie and then go debate a skeptic; just remember that we are not meant to look respectable or intelligent in society. We are supposed to be spat on. As Jesus said, “So the last will be first and the first will be last.”

Finally, I am committed to focusing “not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.” Therefore, I will believe in Jesus alone and not submit to any particular church’s dogma. Though I’m aware many people will reflexively lump me in with Jerry Falwell and Roy Moore, I refuse to just accept what is deemed orthodox in Donald Trump’s America. I will not defend these statements, nor do I feel that I have any obligation to do so as a free man. I hope that all men are saved eventually, as the early church father Origen once did. I believe God smiles upon faithful gay marriages. I believe in the theory of evolution. I believe in Big Bang cosmology. I believe it’s blasphemy that Christians came into political power through emperors Constantine and Theodosius. Furthermore, I also believe that the United States has been an idolatrous and godless nation from its inception.

I care about trying to minister to those without hope, which is why I’m finally getting my associate degree in human services. I care about trying to be a better Christian, so that others with mental illnesses know that suicide isn’t the answer. I care about reaching those the church has left behind. I care about praying for what God wants me to do, even if it’s unpopular. I care about worshipping Jesus, my personal savior, in my own personal way.

Stop ruining peace in Israel and Palestine

Although I'm not considered a Jew by Orthodox standards (I am by Reform Judaism standards) since only my father and his side of the family is Jewish, not my mother's... the bottom line is if I lived in Germany during the 1940’s with my last name as Cohen, my ass would be rounded up and put in a concentration camp before I had time to eat a latke. So, I write this with some semblance of authority.

After last week’s horrific slaughter of 60 Palestinian protesters (including 8 children) by IDF members, I’ve finally decided to speak my mind on the issue of Israel and Palestine. The entire debate has very simple solutions, and indeed, always had. One can certainly say that the way Israel was established in 1948 was the wrong way to go about it: bringing in displaced people to a land already occupied... but here we are exactly 70 years later, and it doesn’t look like either side is going to magically disappear anytime soon.

Quite honestly, this constant conflict is kept in place by the most degenerate representatives of the Abrahamic faiths. Not any one faith or its people in general, mind you, but the Jerry Falwells, the Benjamin Netanyahus, and the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads. One of these groups, the nationalistic Netanyahu faction, refuses to remedy the situation by simply assimilating the displaced Palestinians into Israel as citizens or even producing a two state solution. The idea seems to be that if the Palestinians became Israelis, that they would somehow corrupt the "Jewishness" of Israel, which is a bigoted and baseless thing to say. I mean, Israel is a secular democracy and isn't supposed to operate as a theocracy in the first place.

Then you get the Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian factions which refuse to even admit the fact that Israel exists. I suppose this type of idiocy is best summed up by Iran when they’ve said they will "wipe Israel off the map." This rhetoric is all well and good if you're a radical Islamist that lives in the palace from Aladdin, but it doesn't give any reality based solutions to all the Palestinians that endure unspeakable poverty. The U.N. has said a while back that Gaza's conditions will officially be "unlivable" by 2020... which is, you know, just a year and a half away. The Middle Eastern coalition couldn't beat Israel militarily in the Six Day War in 1967, and they sure as hell won't now with tanks and planes from the Soviet era. Islamic countries need to stop swinging their dicks around and sit down at the negotiating table with Israel.

Finally, the worst bunch: Us. Or rather, far right Christian extremists in the United States. I’ve taken to calling them the American Taliban with business suits and a smile. Pastors like Jerry Falwell (who's now thankfully very dead), Jerry Falwell Jr., Pat Robertson, John Hagee, and Franklin Graham, as well as moronic politicians like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, don't give half a cross about the West Bank... or Israel and the Jews for that matter. They believe in a modern form of the End Times, as popularized by Tim LaHaye and the literary dumpster fire that can only be the Left Behind series. They actually think that if Israel builds the so-called "Third Temple" in Jerusalem this will spark a biblical end of the world which will lead to Jesus Christ's second coming.

Every time Jerusalem is mentioned in the news these gentle Christians are dancing a jig hoping that their rapture to Heaven is close at hand, and that the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, and yes, even the Jews, will apparently wallow behind in blood and shit under the furry hoof of Satan. Their foreign policy is literally chaos. Should we really pay serious attention to what these delusional clowns think is best for the region?

These three elitist groups don't give a damn about anyone other than themselves. They are living definitions to the trait of selfishness. Their philosophy is essentially Ayn Rand with a prayer thrown in. They deserve our laughter and nothing more. Ordinary Jews and Muslims, Palestinians and Israelis, humans and other humans, are going to have to fix this humanitarian crisis themselves. When a man is starving, does it truly matter what label he has before you feed him? If there is a God, surely compassion and reason are gifts to be used.

Labels

It’s odd. I know that I’m quite prone to black and white thinking (called splitting) when it comes to most things in my life. It’s a result of my mental illness. Yet when I look around at the overwhelming majority of mankind, I cannot believe that their petty squabbling about political philosophies, theological differences, or even opinions on something as pedantic as the corporate tax rate, is something that ought to be considered normal. Here’s a fun game: just mention the topic of abortion in any group conversation and watch everyone cluck and sputter in their best attempt to mimic a chicken with its head cut off.

Clearly, people have strong opinions. I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising. Yet what amazes me about “normal people” that don’t have BPD or Asperger-like symptoms is this: they may be more comfortable with their own thoughts on how the world should be… or to put it another way, they quite enjoy agreeing with themselves on every issue, and they’re also inclined to find solidarity with social groups that espouse those exact same things. Conservatives seem to get along with the Republican Party just fine, while liberals seem to get along with the Democratic Party just fine. However, what they can’t tolerate is another idea that has any sort of baggage that strays from their own ideological lens.

I’m not smarter than the average guy on the street, but I am more intellectual about the world than most. However, because of my BPD tendencies, I’m unable to craft a coherent sense of self like most of humanity. I’ve constantly gone back and forth as to what philosophical label applies to me. Before understanding that I had Borderline Personality Disorder, I simply thought that there was something wrong with me on why I couldn’t form a systematic theory of ethics unto myself.

It turns out that I just had the reverse problem of mankind. The average person may be “proud to be Irish” or “proud to be Italian.” They might also shout “Black power.” Of course, some of them (as just demonstrated in Charlottesville last year) may also chant “blood and soil” and everyone’s favorite, “Jews will not replace us.” For example, as an objective observer of reality, I can look back into the 1960’s and plainly see that when Malcom X was part of the Nation of Islam, an organization that literally believes white people were created by a mad scientist named Yakub 6600 years ago (look it up), he was being just as bugfuck bonkers as a KKK member who believed in “racial hierarchies” with the white man on top.

I remember the day after Barack Obama was elected again in 2012. I was talking with a friend of mine and his wife, who were both very active in their conservative church. I tried to treat the discussion with kid gloves, so as not to trigger them. Even in doing so, the wife abruptly started sobbing about “unborn children” and how President Obama was apparently going to kill them all one by one. At moments like these I simply marvel at our species for its incredible inclination for irrational thinking.

Everyone wants a label. It seems they need it to be able to rationalize their existence on a pale blue dot spinning in the dark depths of space. Over 1300 planet Earths could fit inside Jupiter alone, and we’re here debating tribalistic nonsense like whether a football player taking a knee during the American national anthem is somehow disrespecting the troops or that it’s not the right time and place to protest. Want the answer? Well, here it is: Who gives a shit either way? Who in their right mind concerned about globally critical issues like terrorism, poverty, and climate change can possibly think anything involving the respect or disrespect of an inanimate object like a flag could possibly chart even a two on the 1-100 “Does it matter at all-o-meter?”

I think if we’re ever going to move past the “indelible stamp of our lowly origin,” as Darwin once said, then we’re all going to have to remove as much vestigial black and white thinking as we can from our collective consciousness and attempt to have discussions with people we strongly disagree with. Maybe you believe that transgender couples should have all the rights afforded to them as straight couples. That’s completely legitimate and constitutional. However, the majority of religious people on the planet do not believe that transgenderism is a legitimate phenomenon. Even if you feel emotionally triggered, you cannot coerce people into believing something they don’t. That being said, if there’s hate or discrimination based on your gender identity, then everyone regardless of labels should come to your defense as fellow human beings.

I’ve become an Agnostic, and I often get lunch with Christian friends of mine that are absolutely certain that if I don’t believe the Nicene Creed as written in 325 AD before I die then I’m going to burn in a lake of fire with demons for all eternity. This is actually what they believe. Of course, I think that’s laughable. However, I'm still convinced that we can all work together despite seemingly insurmountable division.

I think at the root bottom of morality is something innate. It’s certainly metaphysical, and you might even call it supernatural to a degree. What I mean is that while we obviously have great debates on how things ought to be, we really do have a core of hard ethics that seem to crop up on its own. When I say supernatural, I merely mean to suggest that since we cannot look at “good and evil” under a microscope, or any other scientific method, that it doesn’t seem to simply occur naturally as a survival mechanism.

I had an epiphany just last week when I read the nightmarish story in California about 13 children being physically and mentally tortured by their parents for untold years. There seems to be a metaphorical switch in our brain that trips when we hear about something monstrous like child abuse. This might be an extreme example, but I think it shows that deep down we all truly do care about each other. Children aren’t pigeonholed by partisanship, so we’re able to love them unconditionally. Imagine if we got rid of labels like children do. I don’t know if what I’m positing is that there’s some kind of cosmic force that planted these objective ethics into our DNA, but it seems to exist regardless of the origin. Maybe if we work together we’ll be able to get a beer together.

A Convinced Agnostic

I’ve decided to write this for my own catharsis and nothing more. I don’t expect it to change anyone’s mind. To quote Jethro Tull, “I may make you feel, but I can’t make you think.” I can only say that I’m being true to myself.

To clarify some unfortunate cultural ignorance, Agnosticism actually has two definitions. One is what most people say, which is that they’re undecided on Theism or Atheism and they’re still looking for evidence. The other definition, of which I fall under, is that any talk of God or any ultimate explanation as to why we’re here is fundamentally unanswerable. I’m not waiting for new evidence to come in, because any possible data we receive would be inherently unacceptable under the lens of scientific rigor.

I want to make another distinction here, in that I’m only talking about being Agnostic in the sense of a prime mover or a Deistic creator that metaphorically “wound the clock” of the cosmos. Or perhaps even that life was seeded by an alien species so advanced that they would functionally appear as gods to our primitive ape-like minds. All of these are interesting and plausible ideas. Hell, if you really want to go crazy, you can even say that since philosophically we can’t prove our five senses past brain chemicals, we could all be in the Matrix. Of course, the probability for the last one is pretty low I’d wager… Not that I wouldn’t want to be Neo. Despite the lack of evidence, I even admit in wanting to believe that there's an afterlife.

What makes me an Agnostic as opposed to an Atheist would be my attempt to be humble about not knowing everything. Science is the best tool humanity ever invented. In just a few hundred years from Galileo, we understand so much about our universe. We know the Earth rotates around the sun and not vice-versa. We know that all species evolved from a common ancestor through natural selection. We know that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. We even know what the surfaces of all the planets and moons in our solar system are like through photographs sent back from probes like Voyager 1 and 2.

As grand as all that is, science is only capable of answering “how” questions. In which I simply mean that science explains natural phenomena in the material world. It cannot, and is not even supposed to, try to answer a question like, “Why are we here?” That’s not to say we can’t fight back against pseudoscience like young earth creationism, but it does mean that there are boundaries. For example, what caused the Big Bang is a realm that we cannot enter. Theists say God created everything, however, this only begs the question as to who created God. Atheists say that there might be billions of universes, a sort of “multiverse.” Of course, that also just begs the question as to where the multiverse came from. So, at the end of the day, we merely have to be skeptical of any “grand theory” be it theistic or atheistic.

Concerning the religions on this small planet, specifically the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I am as close to being an Atheist as I possibly can be as an Agnostic. I view their likelihood as I would with Greek or Roman myths. However, I also recognize that the Golden Rule found in all major faiths has tremendously helped progress our collective ethics. Stories like Jesus' Sermon on the Mount still have moral power and relevance.  

I was a Christian for a long time. In fact, I only left it very recently, so I don’t view religious people in contempt or anything of the sort. As I said, I simply must be true to myself. I could easily spend pages upon pages dismantling Christianity and all its intellectual pretenses as a justification for my apostasy, but the truth is there are better things to do. I was born Jewish by heritage, an Atheist for most of my life, then a Christian, and now an Agnostic. However, these things don’t define me, nor should it anyone. The only thing that ought to matter is how we treat one another. If humanity fails to love everyone, even those they disagree with, then it won’t much matter who was right when we all kill each other.

"I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came from and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty." -Charles Darwin, 1873