Green Oasis

Alan Watts: I

Alan Watts (via freshminds)

This dovetails nicely into the subject matter of The Mind’s I.

When I try to step into the religious frame of mind, I get a deep urge to scream and run for the hills. Religious ideas feel like ill fitting clothes on a sweaty, sticky summer day. They chafe and confine. Their irksome restraint gives me no moment of peace. I want to leap out of my confining clothes and into a refreshingly cool shower.

Such has been my experience as I try to explain why we need compassion for people whose inclination and perhaps action deviate from cultural norms. I hoped to demonstrate the need for compassion by using religious ideas and doctrines so that my religious interlocutors could see the need. I don’t expect them to become atheist. I just hope to speak up for true compassion.

But God looms large over the shoulder of the faithful. They might want to be more compassionate, but they first check with God who gives a slow, stern shake of the head. The faithful turn back around and say, “Sorry. God says homosexuals can’t get into heaven.” God hampers our native inclination to compassion. God kills our humanity.

People think they know the mind and will of God. The arrogance! Then they justify their own bigotry in his name. Their false idols sycophantically echo the believers’ prejudices back to them with the appearance of authority. When the compassion of their views is challenged, they assume that since God is Love, his laws are loving. The believer is satisfied that all is well in Zion (2 Nephi 28:21, 25).

If anyone needs me, I’ll be outside tilting at windmills.

I always had to translate my little brother and sister’s words for my parents. Growing up with them, I learned their language much better than Mom and Dad. Their tongues which were too large for their mouthes and their mental retardation prevented them from speaking as well as other children their age. My name was “Duhn’thin” for years. My brother or sister would say something and a blank look would cover my parents’ faces. I’d chime in with what they had said, and life would go on.

Their language was unintelligible to outsiders. I learned this when some neighborhood kids mimicked what they heard my sister say. “Duh, duh, duh,” they taunted her. I loved her and it hurt to see her mocked, but I didn’t want to be dumb by association. I stood by and left my sister undefended.

Years later in high school, I had a chance to redeem myself. I stood outside the locker room when one of the short school buses pulled up. I was looking somewhere else when I heard one of the guys yell “Dog! Ugly!” I turned around to see that my sister was the target of this attack. She attended the same school as I did; she had been mainstreamed as they called it. Redemption would have to wait for another day. The situation stunned me into inaction. I was too ashamed of my sister to stand up and defend her.

To this day, when I hear people say offhandedly “that’s retarded” it feels like an attack on my brother and sister, but I don’t say anything. How do I explain without seeming too thin-skinned?

Even though I loved my brother and sister, I often wished that they weren’t retarded. I wished that they could have been normal. Mormonism holds out that hope. It teaches that mentally retarded children were especially valiant champions in God’s cause during our existence before we were born. As perfect innocents, they are assured of their salvation and exaltation in God’s Kingdom when they die.

As a corollary, I would someday meet my brother and sister without the false burden of mental retardation. I have daydreamed all my life about the day that I would meet them and be able to have a normal conversation. I imagined how they would look: normal at last. They wouldn’t make people feel uncomfortable anymore. They wouldn’t embarrass me anymore. I would be proud to be their brother.

Maybe you can understand why it is heartbreaking for me to give up that hope. I now realize that there is no immaculate soul hidden inside my siblings, untainted by retardation. When they die, no sparkling gem will ascend to heaven. The retardation isn’t the illusion. My little brother and sister are retarded.

Instead of loving my brother and sister as they truly are, I have been hoping to meet someone who doesn’t exist. I have been ashamed of their true selves. I will never be able to talk to them, except in our shared language.

I was assigned to babysit my little brother one day when I was a teenager. All was well until I got distracted by a neighborhood girl. While I was talking to her, my little brother had somehow gotten up the street and was playing with a neighbor’s dalmatian. The dalmatian jumped up on my brother and ripped open his cheek.

I don’t remember seeing him until he had already come back from the emergency room. I had been so oblivious of the situation that my parents found out before I did and managed to take him to the hospital without me knowing. My brother still has the scars to prove it. I still regret that I was derelict in my duty, and that my brother payed the price instead of me.

I often hear that I should leave religious beliefs alone, that I should just live and let live. I’ve already highlighted one reason why I choose not to do that. My desire to do right by my brothers and sisters is another. My love and sense of responsibility push me to share what I’ve learned.

It is strange to me that some of my religious friends would prefer that I keep to myself and allow everyone to find their own way. The Judeo-Christian scriptures are replete with injunctions against this attitude.

Cain the murderer who was cursed from the earth which received his brother’s blood was the first to espouse this callous live and let die attitude when he uttered “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Jesus gave us the parable of the good Samaritan who succored his neighbor instead of leaving him in the ditch like two pious passersby had done. Jesus also esteemed the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves as the second greatest. From the tenor of Jesus’ teachings, I’m confident that his idea of love was not a passive, warm-fuzzy feeling of endearment, but an action which demonstrated our concern for our neighbor’s wellbeing.

The Mormon scriptures tell us “it becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor.” (D&C 88:81)

So why shouldn’t I warn my neighbors?

To be fair, I think most who tell me to leave well enough alone see what I say as destructive, not constructive. To them it seems that I am tearing down something good and dear to the believer. I see it differently. I must be completely honest about how I feel in order to show why I feel the need to warn my brothers and sisters.

Religion is a vapor of darkness which blinds our eyes and binds us down to the foolish traditions of our ancestors. It is a collection of the ideas of fallible men mingled with ancient scripture. It is a collection of half-truths and obfuscated wisdom which has outlived the peak of its usefulness. It feels good, so we don’t question its foundations. It is often the tool of the powerful to control the powerless, to lull them into complacency. Promises of rewards in heaven keep us from acting against the injustices in the only life we know that we have. It destroys our natural propensity to think and ask questions. It causes good people to do evil things. It diverts our energy and our resources from more useful efforts. Whatever benefits we derive from religion can be replaced by less destructive methods.

You may disagree, but if you try to step into my shoes for a moment, I think you’ll agree. If this is how I truly feel, then I would be a schmuck if I kept to myself.

Many of you are probably familiar with The Matrix. Neo, the main character of this movie, lives in a virtual world. He believes that it is the real world, but his real body lives in a vat where it is fed nutrients and hallucinations of a world that exists only in a computer and in his mind. Inside this virtual world, Neo is led to a mysterious figure named Morpheus who shows him how to escape the hallucination known as the Matrix:

Morpheus: I imagine that right now you’re feeling a bit like Alice. Tumbling down the rabbit hole?
Neo: You could say that.
…
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, or when go to church or when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.… Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
[In his left hand, Morpheus shows a blue pill.]
Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
[A red pill is shown in his other hand.]
Morpheus: You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
[After a long pause, Neo begins to reach for the red pill]
Morpheus: Remember—all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.

Essays have been written about this compelling choice between the red pill and the blue pill. Neo must choose between world as he knows it, and learning the truth—essentially between comfort and knowledge of the truth.

The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. (Herbert Agar)

The tension between truth and comfort has come up several times in discussions here. Truths exist which tend to make us unhappy. How much happiness will we sacrifice to know the truth? Speaking hypothetically:

• You love ice cream, but it’s going to give you early heart disease, do want to know the truth so you can prolong your life, or do you just want to enjoy your ice cream while life lasts?
• Some of your friends think you’re terribly boring. They only hang out with you because they like your mutual friends. Would you like to know their true feelings?
• Your spouse is having an affair that you don’t know about, but you have an otherwise happy marriage. Would you prefer to know the truth, or would you choose to be blissfully ignorant?
• Your child is going to die tomorrow from a sudden illness that the child doesn’t know about and that you can do nothing to prevent. Do you tell the child so they can spend their last hours knowing the truth, or do you want to spare your child the fear of impending death?
• Your belief in a loving God and your hope for an afterlife comfort you, but you find little objective reason to justify your beliefs. Do you choose to believe just because you want it to be true?

I have a lot of faith in the truth. I believe that it is usually better to know the truth even if the truth will make us unhappy. I trust that the sorrow that comes from knowing the truth will usually not last long, that greater peace and happiness flow from knowing the truth. Further, leading willfully ignorant lives because we fear knowing the truth doesn’t appear to lead to true happiness.

On this blog, the tension between happiness and truth most often comes up in the context of religious beliefs. Some commenters seem to imply believing in a probably false religion which makes us happy is better than knowing the depressing truth. This is a personal choice, but there are reasons to believe that this strategy does not bring optimal happiness.

For one example, medical science has healed more of the sick than religious faith. Our relatively disease free lives are thanks to science, not religion. Medical science has been advanced by those who were willing to set aside religious beliefs when they contradicted evidence. We are all much better off because of those who defied religious injunctions against desecrating the bodies of the dead in order to learn human anatomy, because of the germ theory of disease instead of believing that disease is caused by spirits or demons as the Holy Scriptures teach, and because of the theory of evolution which permeates modern biology but contradicts the creation myth in Genesis. So you could say that we are as healthy as we are in spite of religion.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. (George Bernard Shaw)

We are all faced with red pill/blue pill choices. It is our right to decide. I have chosen to err consistently on the side of truth unless there is a compelling reason to choose comfort. I hope that helps to explain why I am critical of what I see as false beliefs, why I can’t leave others’ religious beliefs alone. Truth for me is more important than personal discomfort.

So which do you choose: the blue pill… or the red pill?