Green Oasis

My wife and I watched parts of To Catch a Predator last night, the one where guys chat online with people who they think are underage, arrange to meet with them for sex, and arrive only to be greeted by all of America sharing their most shameful moment. I cheered the television crew on months ago when I first started watching this show, but something strange has started to happen. I don’t think the producers of the show wanted me to, but I started to have compassion for these sexual predators.

As chance would have it, I heard on the radio yesterday that this television program caused a man to commit suicide.

Louis William Conradt Jr., of Terrell, Texas, a Dallas suburb, was suspected of being one of those men, except he didn’t show up at the house. That didn’t stop the TV producers and police from showing up at his, though, and as officers knocked on his door and a camera crew waited in the street, Conradt shot and killed himself. (Associated Press)

The radio hosts, the kind that are paid to act like brain-damaged teenagers, related this story, basically said good riddance, and danced on his grave. Their callousness elicited my compassion. Wouldn’t someone mourn for this destroyed life?

I’ll openly admit that I have ephebophilic tendencies. I gather from the term “jailbait” and popular humor that I’m not alone in the adult male population.

I and most of those who are similar to me choose to abstain from acting on any attraction we feel. We know it’s wrong to prey on an adolescent’s inexperience. We shrug off the attraction and go on with life. I don’t lose sleep over it because I’m not ashamed. I chalk it up to being a human being and forge ahead.

There is so much hatred and fear surrounding sexual predators these days. It sells an awful lot of commercial airtime. Sometimes it’s easy to forget who sexual predators are. They are not some alien species. They are our neighbors, our friends, our brothers, our husbands, our fathers… our sisters, our wives, and our mothers. They are us. We are them. They are human beings who cross a perilously thin line. Are the rest of us so different?

We seem to be afraid to acknowledge that pedophilia (for example) is one aspect of human nature—an aberrant and harmful one—but human nonetheless. Whatever it is that separates a pedophile from a non-pedophile is uncomfortably thin. We prefer to think of them as aliens rather than see their humanity, rather than acknowledge the thin ice below us. There but for the grace of Fortune go I.

As I watched the news crew publicly shame those men, I allowed myself to see something that I hadn’t noticed before. I watched as their hopes and dreams died. The weight of what the future held for them made some weep, some get physically ill, and some just sit dumb with shock. These were weak, stupid people, not inhuman monsters. The show put a human face on sexual predators.

I want to protect my children above all else, but I am not insensible to the suffering of these men and the tragedy of human frailty.

Can atheists be spiritual? I hope that after reading further you will be able to answer this apparently oxymoronic question with a comfortable “YES”.

The latest Humanist Symposium led me to a beautiful article answering the question can atheists be spiritual?. It expresses a lot of my own thoughts and feelings. It brightened my day.

I wish there was a better word for it, but the last year or so has been a time of increased spirituality and openness for me.

The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Sometimes living without the hope that my former religion provided still sucks. When I think about my daily life and inevitable death, it all seems aimless. I question why I keep going.

Other times, I love being alive. I give death and despair a big Fuck you! and sing my full-hearted song of joy and irrational hope for the unseen Spring.

When I regained consciousness, I was playing a Gameboy. The orthodontic surgeon had removed all four of my wisdom teeth earlier that day. This was my first and only experience with general anesthesia. I remember a nurse pushing a dose of something into my arm. Then I thought to myself I wonder when this is going to start wor—. I never finished that thought. The anesthesia brought my thoughts to an abrupt halt mid-word. I hazily remember a nurse helping me to my mother’s car. The next thing I know, I’m playing Tetris.

I was OK at Tetris. The highest I had ever reached was level 9 or 10. The blocks start dropping much faster at level 9. I could never last very long after reaching those levels. But I reached level 12 on the game I was playing when I regained consciousness!

I played a lot over the next few days. I soon reached level 18 which is wicked fast. It’s only a theory, but playing Tetris while unconscious must have somehow rerouted my neural pathways to be more optimal for Tetris.

When I was in the third grade, a kid knocked me down on the playground. I hit my head on the asphalt. At least I think I remember it that way. That’s the story my teacher told my parents when they took me home from school. My mom said that I asked something like “Where are we going?” She answered me. Only a minute later I asked the same question again. Repeat ad nauseum. I didn’t regain full consciousness until that night when we were picking up my little sister from an ice show at the university arena.

When I was older, I asked my mother about this incident. She told me that I was never the same after that. I read less after that day. This was a shocking thing to hear, especially since I still believed in a spirit which directed the physical body. My spirit was still the same, so how could my personality change? Who was I before? Would I be smarter, sexier, happier if my head had never hit the asphalt that day?

My mother now denies ever having said what she said.

I have no idea how my next lapse of consciousness happened. All I remember is regaining consciousness flat on my back, staring at the ceiling above the living room couch. I remembered staring at the ceiling for what seemed like a very long time.

While I was staring, no thoughts crossed my mind. Zero. Zip. Nada. I didn’t realize that I was staring. I had no concept of my self. I didn’t interpret what I saw. The word “ceiling” never entered my awareness. I was simply aware of my sensory experience as raw input. I had no desires, no emotions, no self-awareness. You could say that I was a merely sentient being.

It wasn’t until higher brain function returned that I began to interpret my experience and remember that what I had been doing. The experience can only be described as peculiar. I imagine it was similar to what it’s like to be a camcorder.

I had a dream years ago. I saw the mountains which surround the valley I grew up in. I was flying in the middle of the valley. I turned and saw a mile-wide tornado come from behind the mountains in the east. It moved deliberately closer to me. Dirt and debris orbited its center. The debris coursed through the air, but took ages to make a single circuit. The sound of it filled my ears with the terrifying roar of a lion and the menacing rumble of an earthquake. Its terrible power shook me. Nothing withstood its passing. As the dark tornado towered over me, I felt ultimately small and vulnerable. I knew that the tornado concealed a being of alien mind and unimaginable power, that my very soul was in peril. I averted my eyes from the awesome power of the Other concealed in this pillar of cloud. For the first time in my life, I knew what it was to Fear the LORD.

In another dream, I found myself floating in the middle of utter darkness. I heard a far away hiss. The hiss got louder gradually becoming a buzz. The buzz became a yell. The yell became a scream. The scream became a demonic shriek that overwhelmed my dreamtime ears and filled my mind. On the brink of being overwhelmed, I awoke. The shriek ceased, but I was still surrounded in the complete darkness of midnight. For a few heart-pounding moments, my sleep addled mind wasn’t sure which world I was in. I feared that at any moment the source of that terrible sound would leap at me from the darkness.

I fell asleep in a chair. I was a missionary visiting another missionary companionship’s apartment. I woke up and felt and heard a dark, malicious presence skulking around the apartment, threatening the lives of the three other missionaries. I heard it come through the door and dart from one hiding place to another. I realized that I had to warn the others. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t yell a warning to them. I was paralyzed and powerless where I lay. My sense of dread was unbearable. I struggled to do something. I finally woke up completely and the malevolent presence vanished.

Consciousness is an curious thing. I’ve never done any entheogenic drugs, but normal life has still been pretty trippy all the same if I think about it.

What odd experiences have you had in the borderlands of consciousness?

The following message (along with the others that I’ve received) makes me really happy that I created the contact form. Can you help Eric out? I think it would help to hear from both sides of this situation. He writes:

Jonathan,

I recently stumbled across the link to your blog on the Letters From a Broad site. I immediately paid attention because your philosophical musings and search for meaning post-Mormonism almost exactly mirror my own. You also have a wonderful talent for writing about them, which makes your posts a real joy to read.

Another way in which we are similar is the family heartache our recent ”change of mind“ causes our families. The difference is, I haven’t told my family yet, not even my wife. I realized about two years ago that Mormonism is not true and went through a gradual process of redefining my beliefs, first as a deist, then a hopeful agnostic, and finally (as of this writing!) an agnostic atheist. I was at BYU earning a degree in geology and could not rationalize my religion to make room for the scientific method. Like you, I find inspiration and solace in science and philosophy, and in the innumerable spontaneous moments of joy spent with my children or in nature.

The reason I am writing is because I just read your wife’s post about when you broke the news to her, and the lengthly comments that followed. You see, sooner or later I have to break the news to my own faithful, believing wife. I want this experience to be as painless as possible and am concerned, as you were, of the possibility of divorce or lasting anger. I seriously believe our relationship and her compassion are strong enough to survive, but I need to choose the right time and place.

We are living with our two children in [Outer Darkness] right now and will be here for another 3 1/2 months. Before coming, I told myself I would tell her after we returned home. I didn’t want to make an already difficult ordeal even more difficult, especially since she would be cut off from her support network (mother, sister, and ward family). Lately, however, I have been overwhelmed with a desire to finally come out of the closet and stop hiding the most real part of me of me from the people that matter most. I have so many thoughts I want to share on my blog, but I need them to hear it from me before they stumble across it on my blog. (I briefly—for about 1.5 seconds—considered making another blog for these thoughts and not sharing it with them, but that reeks of the same “double life” crap I am trying to leave behind now.)

I was contemplating telling her a couple of weeks from now (while still in [Outer Darkness]), but when I read your wife’s post I stopped. If her pain and anger will be anything like those your wife experienced, I would rather her be home with her support group—as I will likely not be part of it for a while. The flip side of this is that if the support group is persuasive, it could lead her away from me and even closer to orthodoxy. In [Outer Darkness], at least, there is a chance we could rebuild our relationship from the ground up in love and trust, together.

After all you have been through with Lacey, do either of you have any advice for me at this stage in my journey away from Mormonism? I need to know how to minimize the suffering of my wife (and our possibility of estrangement or divorce), while at the same time allowing for my own freedom and growth.

Feel free to post any or all of this letter on your site, if you like. I am not interested in remaining anonymous. I can’t post these thoughts on my own blog just yet, so I greatly appreciate the opportunity to share these thoughts with you.

Thanks,
Eric

Eric, I hope you won’t mind that I have redacted your message slightly to preserve your anonymity just a while longer. If you really want to out yourself, you can do so in the comments.

Let me gather my thoughts which I’ll post in the comments later. Actual employment is calling. Have to pay the bills somehow!