Green Oasis

It was hot, unpleasant work in the middle of of a muggy upstate New York summer. My missionary companion and I had volunteered to help a family in the ward take down some old plaster. The plaster dust and real horsehair made the job even more unpleasant. The mother of the family introduced us to her daughter, a blue-eyed beauty just a few years older than we were.

I sensed instinctively that she had been one of the cool kids in high school. In all the strange circles I haunted in high school, I never got much respect from the cool kids. They relegated me to the periphery of social life. So when this woman was kind and friendly to me, it caught me off guard. It wasn’t long before I was smitten by her beauty and attention.

We learned that she had two sons and had been excommunicated from the Mormon church for giving birth to the first outside of marriage. She had wanted to remain a member of the church, but she found herself on the wrong end of a branch president who demanded too many details about her sexual experiences. Disgusted, she didn’t show up to her church court and the church leaders tried and excommunicated her in absentia. She had hard feelings because her father had maintained a temple recommend while sexually abusing his daughters. The inequity between the two situations pushed her farther from the church.

She became our project, to get her rebaptized.

We spent a lot of time with her and her family. We ate a lot of dinners there, mowed their huge back lawn, fixed problems with their house. I even bought the kids the Sonic and Knuckles expansion cartridge for their Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Genesis.

Things started to get a little weird after a couple of months. She and my companion sat next to each other on the couch one night, sharing a blanket. “It’s cold.” I wasn’t sure, but I thought they might be holding hands underneath the blanket. Then there was the time they accidentally watched a movie which showed a topless woman. “Oops!” Or how often we sat next to her in church with him next to her.

It became more and more obvious—even to me, Captain Oblivious—that there was something going on between them. This has to stop, I thought. It should have been me that she liked.

Jealously, I contacted my mission president and told him what I thought was happening. He reassigned my companion elsewhere, she was heartbroken, I got a new companion, and we were banned from the home that we had spent so much time in. That was how our six month companionship ended.

The mission president gave me a pat on the back for doing the right thing. He told me my companion had confessed to sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet with her and make out. My former companion later thanked me for getting him back on the straight and narrow. I felt like a punk. I didn’t turn informant because it was the right thing to do. I did it because I wanted to get my companion out of the way, to take revenge on him for stealing her away from me.

How often have I done the right thing simply because it is the right thing? As I look back on my life, the answer I come to is never. The reason I do things is because I want to do them. It only happens that most of the time what I want coincides with the moral thing to do, as it did in this story.

Even when I do something primarily because its right to do it, I am really motivated because I want to feel good about myself; I want to avoid a guilty conscience, or I can’t bear feeling empathy for the suffering of another. It all comes down to what I want, mostly irrespective of any moral law.

If God came down tomorrow and told everyone that he rescinded his moral law, that we could sin as much as we want with no consequence in heaven or hell, would human civilization descend into perdition? Would we break the hearts of our family by abandoning them? Would we take advantage of children and the mentally retarded? Would we kill babies for the fun of it? What sins would we commit that we aren’t committing already?

I can’t think of any.

I behave the way I do largely for reasons other than the moral law as taught in our houses of worship. I always have. Becoming an atheist has freed me from all religious constraints of heaven or hell, yet my behavior is mostly the same. I don’t cheat on my wife because I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t take advantage of people because I hate injustice. I don’t kill babies because that is repugnant to me.

I’m beginning to live my life according to the Law of Thelema: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law… Love is the law, love under will. I do what I want, like I always have. The only difference is that I am now unashamed of the actions that the pious would label as sin. I don’t sin more, just with a free conscience. My mental energies are now focused on real problems in my behavior, not petty stuff like drinking tea, or working on Sunday.

The moral law that I live didn’t come from above. I comes from within. It is the product of my true desires. I don’t need a fictitious deity to bully me into acting morally. It’s what I already want. You might want to give credit to God for creating me that way, for writing his law in my heart, but then he must also take the blame for all the sinning that I’ve done.

I prefer to take all the responsibility to myself.

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.

[Believing there is no God] informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day. (This I Believe by Penn Jillette)

I heard this essay on NPR months ago and enjoyed Penn’s clear, straightforward explanation of humanism (even though he never uses that word). It’s a good Sunday sermon to remind me why it’s good to be godless.

The third edition of the Humanist Symposium is now available. A post by yours truly has been included.