Fear itself
Nothing to worry about from Seize You on the Dark Side of the Moo
Fear Itself
She finally understood what book burning was all about after reading Paul Theroux's novel featuring that photographer woman. Picture Palace indeed. Literature was more than apt to wreck your life. Throw the whole thing into a tailspin. Run you off the road and run you over, and then back up and run you over again for good measure.
[Image courtesy of Flying Spaghetti Monster Bible.]
That is to say, book burning vaguely in the Fahrenheit 451 vein. Book burning not as a direct destruction of propaganda, rather as insurance against profound thought. Deep thought is the fountainhead of unease, though, as any perspicacious reader is well aware, The Fountainhead is a hot mess of gobbledygook.
Ayn Rand was a world class nutter.
Still and all, Bradbury's Clarisse was afraid of the violent streak in her fellow citizens, whereas Sandy, our current protagonist, found herself bothered to the bone by their faith.
What was it that photog's father had said? He'd never hire an Irishman as a chauffeur? That is, he'd never hire a person who believes in an afterlife to do a dangerous job—which means, let's not mince words here—he'd never hire a person hell-bent on heaven to do something on which his own safety depended.
Damn straight!
But this gets really, really complicated really, really fast. Right?
Not employing an Irish Catholic chauffeur is a pretty easy choice for most of us. Sandy was in no position to hire a driver, after all. She wasn't going to hire an armed body guard, a crane operator to lift a car over her house, nor a knife thrower to bind her to a spinning disk and fling swords between her outspread limbs. But.
(Lift a car over her house? Sword throwing? What?)
The over-arching thrust of it was that one ought be very wary. Wary of, well, the whole idea. You trust your life to someone hopelessly convinced that “eternal life” was a “real” thing, and you were slapping your fate and fortune on a cherry-red hot plate. “Ouch!”
Scary wasn't the half of it!
Christians with their “heaven”—sure. But what about Muslims with their umpteen virgins? Or the Hindus with their life after life after life? Or whatever it was with the Buddhists? Were the Shintoists any better? Confucians? What about the Zoro-astrians? Taoists? Even North American indigenes who seemed thoughtful enough most of the time purportedly hold out for a “happy hunting ground.”
Then the Pew Research Center published a survey indicating that 72 percent of Americans believe in heaven. Whew! If that doesn't put the fear of belief in you, what would?
Sandy reduced her travel mode to walking, and yes, it was a major inconvenience. There's only so far a regular person with a regular job and regular necessities can perambulate in 21st Century America. Fortunately her job, the co-op, a hardware store, her dentist and her doctor, her best friend and a second-run movie theater were all doable in her Reeboks. Distance equals time, or is it the inverse? Sort of Einsteinian when you think about it. If you think about it. Sandy did.
So, no. Sandy wasn't in the market for a chauffeur. Or a taxi. Or an Über. Or a Lyft. Nor a bus. (I mean you read about drunk bus drivers in this city all the time, hell-bent on heaven or not.) But such a profound insight precluded driving herself! How could you trust a driver in the oncoming lane, or approaching a stop sign on a cross street, if there was a 72 percent chance that driver was gliding along in quaint and blissful optimism that death was merely a passing inconvenience?
The sidewalk, at least, was somewhat safe—walking toward the oncoming traffic, natch.
Vehicular dismemberment wasn't the half of it, however.
Food safety should bring any thinking diner up short. How did she know for certain that the produce manager, her boss, the supermarket's corporate CEO and Board of Directors, the FDA inspector, the FDA inspector's boss, right up to the Dumpling in the White House, were non-believers? She didn't. She couldn't. Careful rinsing and thorough cooking of purportedly organic food was logically imperative, crossing her fingers regarding the water.
Seventy-two percent of the employees of the City water works posed a similar threat, after all.
Fast food restaurants were (and are) beyond the pale.
How about appliances? Same problem different chain.
A wobbly wire could burn down your home! A loose screw could screw you. Permanently. (Belief in heaven being pretty much the definition of “having a screw loose.” But why let it loosen your own screws? She intended to stay well fastened.)
Don't get her started on newspaper ink. Do you have any idea what's in that stuff that rubs off on your fingers while you're working a crossword? I didn't think so.
Sandy tried to find some solace contemplating the others. The 28 percent. Perhaps they were the safety mechanism keeping mortal mayhem in check. But, no.
Pew—and damn them, why did they have to publish their surveys anyway?—had established that only about 3 percent of the U.S. population self-described as atheist, atheists being the only people she imagined she could feel entirely comfortable trusting with her corporeality. Another 4 percent claimed agnosticism, which was a “maybe” in the realm of confidence. (I mean, really? You can't decide?) But, Pew didn't even let that pleasant “well-enough” alone. No. Oh no.
Eight percent of self-identified atheists believe in God or a universal spirit. What? Well, that's what Pew says. A black and white contradiction in terms. Yet, on the other hand, 9 percent of Americans who don't self-identify as atheist say they don't believe in either a god or a universal spirit. So there's that. Probably they don't like the term, poisoned as it has been in the popular imagination by long association with godless communism and jumbled up with Satanism or Scientology.
So, doing a little math at which Sandy is handy (did I mention she's a CPA?), 2.76 percent of her neighbors (this being a reasonably progressive little city) were atheists who didn't believe in God, and maybe another 9 percent were non-atheists who shared healthy non-belief. It seemed pretty clear that belief in a god or some such was a necessary precondition for faith in an afterlife. Right? So a hair more than one in ten of her peers were very likely to be trustworthy in matters of life and death. Atheists, she had read, were far less likely than believers to steal, rob, assault, murder, lie, cheat, or for that matter, divorce, not that she was thinking of marriage. They weren't immune to mental disorder, of course, but then again, they were obviously “thinking.” They skewed brighter than the average bulb.
Yet—and damn Pew again, leaving no sleeping dog to its repose—the survey claims that five percent of atheists and 14 percent of agnostics do believe in heaven. What on earth is that all about? You can't even depend on an atheist to be a rational actor?
But rationality can be a lonely lot and Sandy wasn't one to languish in solitude. Fortunately her nextdoor neighbor, Jeremy, a confirmed heaven-eschewing atheist, invited her to a Halloween party that opened a viable path to a joyful and noodly future.
“Wear a colander,” he suggested. “You'll fit right in.”
“A colander?”
“On your head,” came his reply. “Or a pirate costume.”
“Pirate?”
He winked. “You got it.”
Sandy went with the colander as the simpler option, not having an eye patch, a tri-corn or a wooden leg handy.
The gathering turned out to be that of the local devotees of Pastafarianism—the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster—on the highest of their holy days. Holy because almost no one hassled you for dressing like a pirate or wearing a colander on your head when everyone else was running around done up as a witch, an elf, a ghost, an ex-president or a robot.
Everyone she met that evening proved to be rock-solid rational and happy as high tide clams. Their faith, so to speak, had set them free. The arc of their universe was al dente. (“Carbo Diem!”)
Jeremy explained, “We Pastafarians reject Darwin's assertion that humans are descended from apes with whom we share a mere 99 percent of our DNA, and rather choose to believe we are all descended from pirates with whom we share 99.9 percent.”
“You can't be serious!” Sandy retorted.
“We don't need to be!”
Going further, regarding their deity (“He boiled for your sins!”) Jeremy added, “The Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world for unknowable reasons not so very long ago and FSM fiddles with data to make scientists believe the universe is 13.8 billion years old rather than newish.”
“Funny,” Sandy muttered, “It doesn't look newish.”
Sandy soon became a regular practitioner of the rites of Pastafarianism—for instance, arranging meat balls on a plate of spaghetti so they looked like eyes, talking like a pirate on Talking Like a Pirate Day and so forth. She and Jeremy became an item, which was pleasant on that front.
She quickly came to understand the Pastafarian catechism. “FSM is the possessor of Every Perfection. Existence itself is a Perfection. Therefore the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists!”
Before long though, she learned of a schism amidst the followers of His or Her Noodliness regarding the origin story. While all of them agreed that “In the beginning FSM created a mountain and trees and pirates” there was a sharp divide between those who believed he/she created midget pirates or regular pirates. The non-midget crowd pointed out that no tiny skeletal remains had been discovered, while the midget afficianados were certain that FSM had hidden the evidence in the same manner as diddling with the speed of light, radioactive decay, quasars, pulsars, dinosaur footprints and bones and all the rest. After all, if you can invent a whole written and architectural and biological and paleontological history of a planet, and so forth, before the so-called 19th century when it all really started, disposing of midget remains was a no brainer. And FSM uses his/her noodle(s)!
Then too, there were some among the flock who held that the age of this planet or the entire universe was not really worthy of debate insofar as FSM had been present from the beginning no matter when that beginning was, but had only been revealed to humans in 2005 by the prophet Bobby Henderson. Henderson had also handed down the revelation that climate change (AKA Global Baking) was a direct result in the decline in the number of pirates in the world.
Still and all, the Pastafarians Sandy met drove efficient, even electric cars, bought LED lights and kept the thermostat fairly low in the winter. They were having great fun but they weren't nutters like Rand or the Dumpling in the White House to name just two. Nor did any of them play golf, which in itself was reassuring.
So, to get back to our story, Sandy was still walking everywhere and in the bargain lost ten pounds she'd intended to lose for nearly ever, not to mention that she'll probably live longer for the exercise she's getting. She was enjoying her new friends and her new lover. But here's the thing: she attended a funeral for a former teacher, Roger Bentoff, deceased after a difficult tussle with cancer. The educator had been an important influence in her life back in high school, a seeming pillar of rationality despite his Baptist roots, and Sandy was drawn to honor his life by attendance.
What struck her, rang her mental chimes, banged her gong, lit her marquee, was the profound grief expressed by Bentoff's family and fellow parishioners. They were very evidently not thrilled that dear Roger had headed off to nirvana despite their professions of certitude that “he's in a better place,” and “he's joined his Mama and Papa,” and “his suffering is over now.” By their demeanor they gave every evidence of sharing her conviction that he was simply dead. Full stop. End of story. Which got our dear protagonist to thinking.
Perhaps all those people Pew queried only professed belief in heaven because it was either; a) the “correct” answer, or b) that it was a comforting idea, a source of solace given the obvious and ominous truth that none of us are getting out of here alive. IF that was the case—and the more she mulled the muddle the more likely it seemed—THEN the world was suddenly a whole lot less scary. Or to state the obverse, those oncoming drivers were probably every bit as intent on maintaining their corporal existence as was she.
Why it has taken two thousand words for our protagonist to resolve her literature-induced case of nerves is left for wiser minds than mine to discern. But she's driving again, though she still likes walking, and really, that's enough. We can be happy for her.
Still and all, Sandy remains deeply perplexed by the thought that five percent of atheists believe in heaven.
Aren't you?
*****
This is that rarest of rare stories in my vast body of work, though I use the term “work” advisedly. No footnotes!
Copyright© 2019 Cecil Bothwell All rights reserved