In 1997, I watched my lover and my mother die. I've talked about it before, and don't want to rehash it in great detail.
The experience was a shattering and remaking one. No, I don't believe they're in some cloud city looking down on me. In the end, what it reminded me of, though, is that there is this life in which you do what you do, and after that, you're done. Where you go after that, if you go anywhere, is irrelevant.
You learn to cope and repair yourself by realizing, you have one shot, to honor your ancestors, as their progeny, to do something, anything, no matter how tiny and small, to make the world a better place. You have one shot in life, and after that, the booster rocket that is you has burned out, and the world has to either coast or change course on its own.
I probably am taking potshots at my pre-loss self, but comparing now, as opposed to then, I can see myself still through that pre-Year-Of-Hell mist. The insensitivity and surface concerns seem alien. Like looking through a mirror of time, and seeing another person wearing "you" as a mask.
Ironically, the common cultural theme that is played out again and again is people finding religion in times of great pain. Somehow, I found the opposite.
For a while, I wallowed in the actual coldness and darkness of loss .. pulling the emptiness of the world as I perceived it at the time around me like a cloak. It can be comforting, to wallow, even in coldness and loss.
And there will be no comfort for you. No comfort to ease the pain of his passing. He will come to death.
An image of the splendor of the kings of men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.
But you, my daughter, you will linger on in darkness and in doubt. As nightfall in winter has come without a star.
Here you will dwell, bound to you grief, under the fading trees, until all the world has changed and the long years of your life are utterly spent.
-Elrond, LOTR
But in the end, even the seeming eternal cold must thaw. In pitch black darkness, the tiniest spark is like a bonfire. Survivor's guilt must be assuaged, coped with. The sword that was broken, must be reforged. From the seed of anguish, I found within me a mighty tree of determination growing. Determination to make a difference. Determination to make shit better. Compared to zero, the tiniest amount, the meanest change, is an infinity.
And, so I learned, people, just like metal, can be annealed and tempered. In some sense, I am harder than I ever was before, and more resilient and resistant, but at the same time, with a far greater sensitivity to other people than I could have imagined I'd ever have.
I don't and never did understand certain aspects of Christian morality. Possibly this idea that the world can be batted about, casually killing, damaging, and hurting in the process, in the name of a rigid inflexible adherance to doctrinal dogma, dismissed, and trifled with, and in the end, forgiveness granted because of an afterlife, and eternal rewards granted therein, more than the idea of an "afterlife" itself, is the reason I finally, with a virtual snapping sound, abandoned religion entirely.
What eludes many Christians I know is that, though there is no rigidity, no structure and no universality, among atheists, many can find morality in taking the world itself seriously, because, for us, there is no other world. And, however much some Christian propaganda states otherwise, we are not unthinking, shallow, fragile, feckless leaves blowing on the wind, easily broken with the first moral crisis.
Unlike formal religions, we atheists pick up pieces around us from all kinds of sources, each judged separately and put in its place. Nothing is ever swallowed whole. We work hard, and think much, to forge our morality, and it is different in each case. I don't like to talk about this in public partly, admittedly for fear of being mocked to the extent of not being able to get my point across, and partly from self amusement, but I like to joke that everything I ever learned from morality, I learned from Star Trek. Well. That might be an overstatement, just a bit. I can hear the Christians right now, laughing at this.
"How callow, how shallow," the mocking Christian reader I imagine, intones. "You find moral validation in the works of amoral Hollywood screenwriters. My morality, on the other hand, is the work of centuries, of generations of the greatest healers of the world!"
Well, basically, yes.
Ironically, I have faith. It's not faith in a God, or an afterlife. We are not diminished by the generations, as is the case of many a Christian subtext. Our ancestors were not heroes without flaw, and to the contrary, I believe that greatness can actually grow rather than shrink. The grand, rolling, greatness of Humanity, across the millenia. Growing in greatness with each generation into an unstoppable force. If we survive, even the Cosmos itself can be our oyster.
Yes, we atheists make our own morality, and forge it from the pieces we find around us. But it is hardly non-existent. It is all around you. All you have to do is be willing to see it.
Consider, for example, this:
Causing people to suffer because you hate them is terrible. But causing people to suffer because you've forgotten how to care -- that's really hard to understand.
-Julian Bashir
They'll remember - it'll take some time and it won't be easy. But eventually people in this century will remember how to care.
-Benjamin Sisko
It is said by some of the religious folks on our side of the political divide, "The right doesn't own faith". It's the motto of Street Prophets. And, it's very true.
But there is a corrollary to that: The religious also don't own faith.
While far Christian rightists indulge their nihilistic vision of an Armageddon that will spirit the Christian faithful (and only the Christian faithful) off to a wonderous never never land, there is another kind of faith.
There is faith in Humanity. (You capitalize God, I capitalize the other). Yes, I am a secular humanist as well as an atheist, my evil thereby compounded exponentially!
How ironic, then, that so many Christians appear to see cold nihilism in atheism. Do we have a public relations problem? Can any of you see, a warm, caring, indeed even faithful, abiding atheism, that finds God merely irrelevant in terms of the big problems of this world?
So, my liberal Christian friends, maybe we aren't so far apart after all. We can find common cause, because in the broader sense we believe in many of the same things .. at least where ideas and dreams touch this reality.
Out of the cold darkness, of death and severing and the anguish of a long shattering fall, a light shines. Not your light, Christians, but light, nonetheless. And it is not an evil one. Very much the opposite.
Because, you see, I am actually not lost, hard as it may be for some of you to believe. While that goes against every tenet of Christian dogma, it is nonetheless true.
And despite our disagreements on the eternal questions, together, we can articulate a more all encompassing universal morality than a wholly Christian one. There are real, human, hurting beings out there that the Democratic Party can help. Don't cast them aside, don't Sistah Soljah because of some misguided need on the part of some to match the bloody mindedness of the right, point for point.
Can't we?
As the Vulcan IDIC motto goes, "Infinite diversity in infinite combinations".
The strength of the left is in its diversity, and diversity is strength (maybe something for those who demogogue on illegal immigration from the left as well as the right oughta think about, occasionally).
And that is the problem with the right wing monoculture. It is not strong, it is hard, and brittle, and weak at the core. For you, on the right, religion will not save you in the end.
As for you on the right, religious or not, Christian or not, who have destroyed this country and are well on the way to destroying the whole world, I've got only one thing to say here:
When you remember your HUMANITY, and realize it is actually not subordinate to your religion, I'll be here, waiting. Because, resistance is NOT futile.
And for the rest of my friends, of every religion and culture and creed who want to make a better world, peace and friendship:
Now, my friends, let us together kick some Republican butt.