Thor's Day: Doubts

Of belief & disbelief

By Morris Dean






Apprehensive atheists agonize:
What if what Christians say believing buys
    is true? I'd miss their salvation,
    suffer vexatious damnation,
and miss partying with believing guys.

Thor's Day: Everyone's question about God

If God exists, how....?

By Morris Dean

A news article earlier this week recognized the anniversary of an American soldier's arrival at a Nazi concentration camp:

Them's the breaks

Bryan Cranston stars
as Walter White

Episode 5 in Season 1 of Breaking Bad ("Gray Matter," which aired on February 24, 2008) features a speech by high school chemistry teacher Walter White that could have informed Sam Harris's thinking about free will.
    In the first episode, Walter was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and resorted to selling crystal methamphetamine to provide for his family when he is dead. But he didn't let his wife (Skyler) know he was sick until the fourth episode.
    Having learned the news, Skyler becomes determined that Walter will undertake chemotherapy, and she doesn't hesitate to let Walter's wealthy former graduate school research partner know or to urge Walter to accept his old colleague's offer to pay for everything.
    But Walter resists.
    In an emotional power play, Skyler engineers an intervention to show Walter how much his family loves him and needs for him to do the therapy. Her sister and brother-in-law don't behave as she expects, they think it should be Walter's decision.

But can it be Walter's decision? That's the question Sam Harris raises.
    Walter responds in as affecting a speech as you can hear in television drama (or in feature film):

Sometimes I feel like I never actually make any of my own choices. My entire life, it just seems I never had a real say about any of it. With this last one—cancer—all I have left is how I choose to approach this...What good is it to just survive, if I am too sick to work...?I choose not to do it.

    [I didn't think I could quote that verbatim, given the difficulty of writing down dialogue from a Netflix download, but then I thought of YouTube, where you can actually see the scene:]



    So, Walter refuses...until, as usually happens with all of us, the balance of forces shifts in favor of the stronger ones' tending toward our compliance. "I'll do the therapy."

Friday I asked what if Judeo-Christian ethics had been all-life affirming (rather than in-group-affirming)?
    A friend commented simply that not enough people think and feel the way I do.
    And probably no one in ancient times thought or felt that way. The forces that produced the Judeo-Christian ethic could have produced no other ethic than the one it did produce. And the forces working now can but have us slaughtering and eating animals, fighting to control oil, tearing down mountains to mine coal, driving just the fuel-inefficient automobiles we do, building pipelines across tracts of wilderness, decimating rain forests, continuing to overpopulate the planet.
    Like Walter, we might individually resist—or become conscious that something in us seems to want to resist—but happenings both within us and around us continue to roll on just the way they individually and collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.
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Wiktionary on "Them's the breaks"
[follow-up]

Have a blessed day

I said on Saturday that while in Atlanta last week I had a couple of times slipped and "created god" by uttering formulas like "Thank god" and "What a godsend." I of course made no believing reference to "god"; the utterances were habitual in the same way a person might automatically say "Fine" in response to a "How are you?" The interesting thing about my slips was that they didn't bother me. That's a good thing. It seems to indicate that I'm becoming at least somewhat desensitized to the possibility that someone might infer I'm a believer, even though it's important to me both that I am not and that the people I care about know it.

But anyway, this morning, as I stepped out of my commute van in Chapel Hill, I intentionally said to my fellow passengers, "Have a blessed day." That blessing (for it's literally a blessing, a good wish for another person) doesn't involve the word "god" but I think it's fair to say that it's more often than not taken as invoking "god's blessing."

I of course didn't mean it that way, given that I believe there is no god to bless anybody. People who depend on god to take care of them are routinely disappointed. When things turn out their way there are always more reliable explanations, if only the laws of chance. I meant something more like, "Be lucky today" or "May good things happen to you today." In that regard, perhaps my favorite saying (blessing) is "Good on you," or even "Good on you to overrunning cup" (a reference to the Twenty-third Psalm¹, for which I don't apologize, nonbeliever or no, the image is so poetically inspired).

In choosing to say "Have a blessed day," I consciously (and deliberately) used a formula that resonates with my audience. If you read me here consistently, you may remember that most of the members of my commute van pool are believers, even regular church-goers.

It strikes me that in using their language, I made a step toward reconciliation. Without compromising my nonbelief, but also without flaunting it.
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1. "my cup runneth over." –Psalm 23:5