“Goines On” Submission to the State Library of North Carolina’s 2021 Writing Contest

Moristotle is the
pen name of
Morris Dean,
a grateful patron of
the Library for the
Blind & Physically
Handicapped

[The submission was constructed from a string of eight vignettes that were posted on Moristotle & Co. between May 11 & June 20, 2020:

“Real people”
“Goines speaks to G”
“The tome was empty”
“The Jesus experiment”
“A Jessica experiment”
“Previous Jessica experiments”
“Evidence of things not seen”
“Heavenly Productions, Ltd.”

The State Library announced in April 2022 that Moristotle’s submission won 1st Place.^*]

Forty years ago, when Goines was a little beyond the middle of his career at IBM, he thought of time spent watching movies or TV series as “escapist” – time away from “real life.” For that reason, he was caught off guard and surprised, a few episodes into watching the Israeli TV series Shtisel, to realize that the characters of most of the dramatizations he watched were as real to him as the actual people he interacted with. Goines truly cared about some (or most) of the characters he encountered in various dramas, perhaps especially in the case of Shtisel.
    Actors wear make-up, costumes, etc. to portray the characters they are assigned; they come across as real, as likable, as lovable – or as deplorable – as real people. The plight of a character Goines liked or maybe even identified with inspired concern for the character, apprehension that things might go wrong for him or her, relief or pleasure when things worked out.
    And beyond the feelings that Goines had for fictional characters and actual people, he didn’t know much more about actual people of his acquaintance than he knew about the fictional characters in dramas. Goines couldn’t see inside the head of an actual person, even of Mrs. Goines – who still in some ways remained a mystery to him. And a dramatization sometimes revealed more about what is going on in a character’s head than many actual people are willing to reveal about themselves.
    Characters in films could even be tactilely real when Goines considered that, theoretically, he could have been on the set during filming. He might even have talked with the actors, having previously asked them to please remain in character. He could shake their hand, maybe feel the fabric of whatever costume they were wearing, even exchange hugs with them – if they hit it off.
    Goines felt validated to discover that the tenth episode of the 1st season of Shtisel illustrated the reality of fictional characters.
    Malka Shtisel, the grandmother, is unconscious in a hospital following a fall down stairs. Her son Shulem discovers a list that Malka has made naming individuals she wants to remember to pray for each day. Shulem recognizes that a couple of the names on Malka’s list belong to characters in a TV soap opera she loves to watch.
    The episode of Shtisel even explicitly suggested the equality of fictional and actual scenes by having the camera pull away from Shulem talking about his mother’s list to reveal that the scene is being projected on a TV monitor, which Malka is watching from the vantage of some heavenly half-way house where she is pondering whether to die or return home from the hospital.
    Goines widened the field of representation to include other representational arts besides dramatic story. What about short stories, novels, paintings, sculptures? Goines looked at the two bird figurines atop the Goines’ TV cabinet and was astonished at how quickly, automatically his heart opened and went out to the two birds. Even sculptures and statues apparently manifest some reality of the individuals or creatures they represent, in terms of evoking feeling responses. Was all representational art, ideally, capable of such emotional reality? Would the “cathartic” cleansing or purification that Aristotle philosophized about in his Poetics even be possible if the characters in a stage performance were not real to the audience?

Goines’ nephew reported that his mother, who was almost 90 and not expected to last much longer, was doing better, “thank the Lord Jesus for that,” and Goines had automatically said amen, for he too was glad his sister was doing better. But Goines knew that his nephew was aware he didn’t subscribe to the divinity of Jesus, and Goines felt a tinge of regret that he had said amen. Perhaps unwisely, he clarified, “I meant amen to your mother’s improvement, not to Jesus’ having anything to do with it.”
    But his nephew immediately jumped at the opportunity that Goines had inadvertently opened up: “I have a book that would change your perspective. It’s written for a scholar like you. Would you read it?
    Goines didn’t consider himself a scholar. He had more or less proved he wasn’t one by dropping out of a doctoral program after a single semester years earlier. But he was curious, so he said, “Sure, send me the book.”
    When the book arrived a couple of weeks later, Goines was dismayed by its weight. What was this, an encyclopedia volume? Its title was The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Evidence I & II Fully Updated in One Volume to Answer the Questions Challenging Christians in the 21st Century – 814 pages, 40 chapters organized in four parts.
    Amazon touted it as “destined to equip believers with a ready defense for the next decade and beyond.” For only $48.90 new.
    Its author was Christian “evangelical apologist” Josh McDowell, who Goines surmised didn’t consider Goines a prospective reader. McDowell’s objective seemed to be to arm Christians who might be attacked. Goines felt under attack himself, to have had this tome recommended to him.
    Goines wondered idly whether anyone had studied McDowell’s compilation looking for openings by which to attack Christians. Goines couldn’t imagine going to the trouble. How could a non-believer stand to get into all of this? Goines himself had long ago spent time inside Christianity, and a lot of time trying to figure out what he was doing there, and why he should remain. But he never could figure it out. It was empty for him.

Inside the McDowell book Goines’ nephew had placed a cordial handwritten note that suggested Goines might “start with the table of contents and go to the chapters that pique your interest.” That didn’t sound too daunting, and Goines was bound to try it.
    His nephew had also written out four Bible verses, one beginning, “For the word of God is living and active...,” and another beginning, “All Scripture is breathed out by God....” Goines was familiar with the notion that the Bible (and the scriptures of other religions) were “inspired by God.”
    Receiving the book reminded Goines of an experiment he had proposed a few years earlier, to try to determine whether open-minded agnostics could “experience Jesus” if they were carefully shepherded through a procedure modeled on those of major Christian church denominations. Did a person actually experience Jesus, or just imagine he did? Clearly, some people believed that they actually experienced Jesus, but could the truth or falsehood of that belief be established?
    Goines noted that author McDowell had a background similar to that of New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, several of whose books Goines had read. Ehrman was a generation younger than McDowell. The two men had both gone to Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois. Presumably, both men started out being into Jesus. But while McDowell’s religious faith redoubled over the years, Ehrman’s faith evaporated into agnosticism as to whether God even existed. Had Ehrman stopped “experiencing Jesus,” or did he come to realize that he never had experienced him, only imagined it?
    Like Goines, Ehrman had given up his faith after years of wrestling with his doubts, while McDowell had thought his doubts away and seemed to have achieved virtual certainty: true-belief. How did these two men differ, psychologically? How was McDowell different from Ehrman and Goines? Do true-believers differ from other people in some way that can be detected scientifically?

The day after remembering the Jesus experiment, Goines thought of a corollary, or reverse experiment, one that would seek to establish whether a stand-in for Jesus could elicit the same sort of experience. If so, then that would suggest that it wasn’t the nature of Jesus (or of his stand-in) that produced the Jesus-experience phenomenon, but something about people’s psychology.
    Such an alternative experiment would construct a fictional character (“Jessica,” say) and clothe her in attributes of divinity, supernatural power, etc., similar to those attributed to Jesus. Actors would be recruited to play the pastor and deacons and compose a “congregation of believers” in which to immerse subjects and call on them to confess their sins, accept Jessica, and be saved.
    Providing a congregation was important; Goines had been struck by something one believer he knew had said about experiencing Jesus, that the experience was ecstatic when it occurred in the company of a multitude of fellow believers.
    Thinking of that believer now, however, Goines remembered being told by other Christians that they didn’t really much like going to church because they found many of the people there obnoxious in person.
    Clearly, the two attitudes suggested that there might need to be two experiments, one with a rousing congregation and a second in which subjects might go on a retreat with one or two actors playing evangelists, say, carefully schooled to avoid saying or doing anything obnoxious.
    Goines would question all subjects who “answered the call” – in either version of the experiment – as to what happened. How would they describe their experience? Did they feel saved? Did Jessica speak to them? Did they feel absolved? Did they feel that Jessica had changed their lives? Etc.
    Actually, Goines suddenly realized, Jesus was basically as fictional a character as the made-up Jessica, even granting that someone named Jesus had traveled around Galilee preaching and assembling disciples and eventually troubling the authorities so much that they ended up executing him. All of the vast rest of this Jesus’ resume had been constructed, reconstructed, copied out, argued over, misquoted, glossed over, and come down to us in a variety of versions depending on churches and their denominations. If much of the story were to be believed, it had to be on faith.
    Remembering his musings about the psychologies of Josh McDowell versus Bart Ehrman, Goines reckoned that these alternative experiments should also try to identify the attributes of individuals who are susceptible or not susceptible to a Jesus-type experience. What was it that made people one way or the other? What allowed people to become true-believers, unshakably attached to something that other people saw no basis for believing? And what protected non-believers from being taken in?

On his walk the morning after imagining the Jessica experiments, Goines realized that, in a way, they had been conducted many times already, by religions other than Christianity that indoctrinated their followers in the same sorts of ways to believe that if they did or believed thus and so, they would be recompensed for whatever suffering, pain, injustice, or other injury afflicted them, and saved from death in the end. It had even been conducted by jihadists, who were well known to recruit suicide bombers by persuading them that a heaven populated by virgins was only a dynamite blast away. Clearly, there were as many “interested parties” producing some version of a Jesus experience as there were religions (and communities and family groupings within them). And most people seemed to believe more or less what their parents and their neighbors believed. Indoctrination could be overwhelming, at least in the short run.
    And what was such an act of belief anyway? Goines wondered. What modes of perception or faculties of mind are involved? Is it intuition? Is it imagination, fantasy? A “sixth sense”? What are people doing when they accept as absolutely true something for which they have no credible evidence? What is the act of taking on faith?
    Goines’ head was sparkling, shooting these questions off to his muse, and he looked forward to relaxing with a cup of tea with Mrs. Goines after he got home from his walk. Amen to that!

Goines’ notion the day before, that faith itself could somehow seem to amount to evidence, kept nagging at him. He now remembered a Bible verse to that effect, the opening verse of Chapter 11 of a letter to the Hebrews in Jerusalem, thought to have been composed about 30 years after Jesus’ crucifixion: “...faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” – as though faith, or true-belief alone could transform a thing believed into a fact. The resurrection of Jesus, for example, which the letter writer seemed to think lacked other evidence. Otherwise, why the need for faith?
    Goines wondered whether the writer was also stating a psychological insight here – that some mechanism of mind, when our hope is strong enough, can persuade us that the hope will manifest?
    Life is perilous, and every living creature is born under a death sentence, with many an act of Nature (tsunami, earthquake, hurricane, flood) and act of man (mayhem, murder, rape, and worse – slavery, war, genocide) and accidents and diseases along the way....
    Not to mention inequality of circumstance and opportunity. Some people are privileged and powerful, others disadvantaged and exploited. Among people it is much as among species of animals: some are figuratively or literally slaughtered and eaten, while others do the slaughtering and the eating.
    The victims of either chance or human abuse might naturally hope for some sort of “Last Reckoning” at which the tables would be turned, themselves to have their suffering made up for somehow, and their oppressors to be stripped of their power and wealth, and punished.
    Goines was mostly satisfied, even happy, with his own life on Earth, and he was grateful to have wanted what he had, even if he’d not always had what he wanted and was daily sad for the suffering and deaths of humans and other animals. But he acknowledged that some people were profoundly dissatisfied and unhappy – not wanting what they had, having failed to get so many things that they wanted. He could understand their hope for heaven, their need to believe they could count on it. He had a few close blood relatives like this.
    Goines hoped – for his loved ones’ sake certainly, but for all innocent victims as well – that there was a heaven, whether he qualified to go there or not. For their sake, he was willing, if it would help, to give up the place there that was presumably reserved for him (in the event he accepted Jesus). Goines’ heart seemed to him to literally swell at the thought his life had pretty much been “heaven on Earth” and he could forgo further life elsewhere for someone who needed his spot. Anyway, after all, he believed his death would be the end of him, so it wasn’t as though he would be giving up anything.
    Goines continued for some minutes to experience a rich afterglow. He didn’t think he had ever felt more beatific.

The psychology of “faith the substance of things hoped for” wouldn’t let go of Goines. He wondered about scientists who believe in the divinity of Jesus. Do they accept Christianity’s doctrine of salvation out of a deep need to know things beyond science’s reach, things they can then expect God to reveal to them someday?
    Remembering his college logic studies nearly 60 years ago, Goines thought of another thing the writer of the letter to the Hebrews in Jerusalem could have been doing with the “faith is evidence” maneuver – establishing an axiom to throw in whenever he couldn’t prove something any other way.
    And by saying that “faith is the evidence of things not seen,” did the writer also mean to imply the converse, that lack of faith – in heaven, for instance – positively prevents a person from experiencing it? If so, then it was incumbent on the early Christians to go out and evangelize their own loved ones – to start with – so that they might all ascend into heaven together.
    Or, Goines conjectured darkly, was the author hinting at magic? Later in his letter he recalls that Abraham, by faith, “when he was tried, offered up Isaac...his only begotten son.” If there was a magician in that sordid episode of the Old Testament, Goines shivered to think, it had to be Yahweh himself, cruelly conjuring Abraham into thinking that Yahweh actually meant for him to sacrifice his son. Of course, Goines reflected, Yahweh might well have meant it, at least at the time, going by what all else the Old Testament says about him.
    And then Goines began to think of the people he knew who said they couldn’t bear to live without the hope that they will be reunited with their loved ones someday. Was Goines a loved one someone wanted to be reunited with?
    His thinking fell silent as he rethought the act of his nephew’s sending him that book, in the apparent hope that it would “change Goines’ perspective.” Goines had perused the book’s table of contents without feeling his interest piqued by anything – rather the opposite: for Goines the tome was empty. But Goines was coming to understand that his nephew cared about him and wanted to see him in heaven someday....
    Goines had the intuition now that if there was an afterlife – he didn’t believe there was, but then he didn’t know there wasn’t – he would be there, to see and be seen by his nephew and anyone else who might long to be reunited with him. For Goines didn’t believe that afterlife – if there was an afterlife – was produced, staged, and directed by Christianity or any other religion –Heavenly Productions, Ltd.? – so how could some religion or other exclude Goines from the cast?
    Goines proposed to Mrs. Goines that he heat a kettle of water for some lemon and ginger tea.
    “And maybe some of that pumpkin bread I baked?” she said. Amen to that!
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