Thank you Randy.
So this post may be a selfish one for me, but I hope that you share in my excitement.
"My Story"
"My name is Randy McCauley. I am a Sergeant in the Army and have been a professional soldier for 25 years now. I am a family man and a devout atheist. This is not even close to how I had originally planned for things to end up but, thankfully, the best laid plans of mice and men...
I was born and raised in a small
town. It was in this small town that I
learned about right and wrong, god and the devil and the powers of good and
evil. As a child I don't recall
ever being taught to fear or hate other religions but I also have no memory of
other religions being discussed. I
don't remember ever questioning aloud the obvious (even then)
contradiction between our gentle, loving god to whom we were taught to pray every night, and the reverence that was often heaped upon "god-fearing Christians".
That seemed like a big one to me.
Fear?
Really?
I think that I
understood, the way only a child can, that the Old Testament god was fire and
brimstone and that the New Testament god was love and forgiveness. I knew it was still the same "one god"
but, hey, I was just a kid and had better things to do with my time than to
think about these things. As far as that
goes, if I were to be honest, Batman had more relevance in my life at that
point than God did. Sure I went to Sunday School every week and said my prayers
every night but the songs and prayers were things that I learned by rote and
did because they were part of my routine.
If Mom didn't wake me up I wouldn't have been that worked up about missing church but there
was no fucking way was I missing Batman!
My parents rarely went to church with us and
there was a volunteer who would pick up all the neighborhood kids for Sunday School then drop
us off again afterward. So my parents (and plenty of other parents too) barely had to get
moving in the morning, other than to get us ready for pick up and that was Mom's job. All things considered, going every week was a
lot of fun. It was the Salvation Army
for Christ's sake. There were no nuns to
hits us and, as far as I know, no one ever got raped. (Plus the stories were pretty exciting.) There
was always plenty of slaying and slewing and even a good ol' smiting now and
then. Those two towns where people had poopy sex and wanted to rape angels got
nuked and Lot's disobedient wife got turned into a salt-lick. Ahh, good times...good times, and we'd be home
just in time for lunch and to spend the rest of the day playing war or cowboys
in the field behind our house.
My Father was fairly strict and we had plenty
of normal social and familial rules but nothing so crazy that I have to tell my
therapist. Mostly they were about how to get along and not get on our parent's
nerves. We said grace before meals when
Mom made us but the rules (for us kids) that we saw as religious were things
like not swearing (Mom and Dad got to swear), not smoking and drinking (except for
Mom and Dad) and no "unclean thoughts or deeds" (?!?) which made
absolutely no sense to me until I was a bit older.
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| I've more than made up for it since those crazy time... (I love you Mila!) |
So, all in all, not terribly hard but all kids misbehave. Fortunately, this was covered too. Getting forgiven was easier with God than it
was with Mom and Dad. You had to promise
both that you wouldn't do it again but God couldn't look at you all
disappointed when you inevitably fucked up and did do it again! Of course even our loving, gentle and
forgiving God was jealous so if you didn't pray, go to Sunday School and think
only clean thoughts you knew that he would cast you down into the fiery pits of hell to roast and torment for all of eternity, but it would be for your
own good. Kinda like going to bed without dinner because you said shit at the
table...
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| except you NEVER GET TO EAT AGAIN. |
All in all, it seemed to me like the easiest few rules that I had ever
heard and I figured that I was a shoe-in for Life Eternal! After all, I hardly ever swore where people
could hear me, I almost always went to Sunday School and, since I was only a kid, what
the fuck sort of dirty thoughts could I have?
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| Other than her of course! |
A tremendous fear of sin, guilt over
any form of sexual desire, feelings of inadequacy over the state of my soul
and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and defeat with regards to 'big S' (salvation) are the gifts that I received from religion.
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| Yea, thanks religion. |
On the other hand I got my strong work ethic
and need for independence from my parents.
In their imperfect ways my mother taught me about charity and my father
gave me a love for the outdoors and, in a mid-20th century way, a respect for
nature. In normal life religion as a
subject never really came up, but it was always there as the elephant in the room. And I knew that we were
the protestants and that "those" people were the Catholics. Nobody really used the word "Christian" back
then because we were all Christians. I
remember trying to sort out which of my friends were the "normal"
protestants like us and which were the "nutty" ones who tried to be Catholic by taking communion and saying confessions. For some reason it really seemed to
matter. For us their crucifix was a
symbol of suffering whereas our bare cross was a symbol of salvation.
Does that make any sense at all? Even as a kid I was pre-programmed to judge such things.
Around the time I was ten it started
becoming apparent that the world was a far more complicated place than I had
thought and I began exercising a little something I later learned to call
critical thinking. Basically, I decided, it goes
like this:
If it sounds like bullshit,
you need to start asking questions because in the end there's a pretty good
chance that it really is bullshit and you really need to know. Otherwise you could end up dedicating large
amounts of time, energy and your life to bullshit. I started off by pointing out to my Sunday
School teacher that if Adam and Eve were the first and only people on earth,
then it follows that the world was populated through incest, but that's a sin,
isn't it? That was my first note sent
home.
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| My memory is hazy but I am pretty sure this is what it said..... |
Later, I learned that slay and slew
meant kill and killed and that the Israelites killed non-believers by the
thousands in the name of God. Men,
women, children and even animals were put to the sword or burned. Nowadays we all know that even if god speaks
to you directly and tells you to kill it's murder. Things like that are only okay if he speaks
to you through your government. I'm not
making this up. This is the result of many
conversations I had as a kid with adults and pastors. I was seriously worried about soldiers and
police officers but I was assured that the commandment should be correctly read
as "Thou Shalt Not Murder" which made sense to me and filled me with
relief. Unfortunately, I wasn't stupid and I again asked the question that
seemed most obvious which was "What if you go to war with another Christian nation like Germany or Italy?". That was a phone call and a visit. As it turns out it only counts
what your government is (Nazi, Facist, Pinko) and not what the people you are
killing believe in. Much later in life I
learned that it also seems to go a long way with god that we are the Western
democracies and mostly white. Who knew?
As I was just a kid, this again, gave me a feeling of relief. I could still stand proudly on 11 November
and offer a prayer to god everlasting that the souls of our brave departed
soldiers be granted peace. As the years passed I was even magnanimous enough to
attempt an ecumenical prayer.
I remember as a teen listening to and watching
the troubles in the Middle-East on the CBC and, on my own, began fearing words
like Jihad, Mohammad and Allah. The
people who used these words were against us and our entire way of life. They were as bad or even worse than the
godless communists but, thankfully, were far less of a threat to us in the West
because they lived in huts and didn't even seem to have proper uniforms let
alone ICBM's. In fact, the Muslim nations
didn't even really figure into it for my crowd (as we knew from the book of
Revelations that, although the Apocalypse was going to start in the deserts of
the Middle East, it would be fought between the godless USSR and the god-fearing
christian states of the west (re: NATO)).
What could be more obvious than that to a child of the Cold War 70's and
80's? This attitude grew and became a
personal virtue for my friends and I as we changed gradually from boys to young
men and it began to even make a lot of sense and even seem kinda likely when
the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. I think
that of all my friends I was the last to reject this as a philosophy but not
until my late teens.
For years I coasted on a vague
knowledge of what Christianity was and what it was to be a Christian. As I said, everyone I knew was a christian of
one sort or another and most of my friends even went to church so, at fourteen
when I was away at Summer Cadet Camp and we saw some guys try to get out of
two-hour church parade by claiming to be atheists, we were quite rightly amused
when they were told to decide if they were roman catholic atheists or
protestant atheists.
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| Not sure where, but Catholic Atheist is in there somewhere... |
The Chaplin's were CF Officers so the connection between religion and patriotism was easily
strengthened within us. Every Sunday had a big
hint of Remembrance Day to it and we were always in uniform.
Much later in life, when I was really
no more mature, I joined the Army and was exposed to many different types of
people with just as many different views and I felt fortunate to have the
opportunity to talk to them and either help them evolve their views or have
mine challenged or changed. Deploying to
foreign lands and meeting various peoples with religious ideas that they were
actually willing to kill and die for impressed the hell out of me...at
first. Being the focus of such
dedication tends to wear thin pretty fucking fast in my experience. I had read a lot and tried to educate myself
on religion and spiritualism but when faced over and over again with the pain
and destruction that people, and I mean mostly men, were capable of inflicting in the name
of god I could not, finally, learn to make sense of it.
I began to wonder, and wonder in a very
serious way, why god had had such a change of heart from the old to the new testament and was now more than content to let us kill each other on a scale
never before seen? I certainly wanted to
know why we could be so dead-set against
Sunday shopping, yet never question why god would favour a sports team with a
big win, but yet still let a childhood friend of mine be burned to death along with his
sister by their own Dad? What kinda of a deity would look at his day's work and not go "What the fuck was I
thinking?"
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| This guy, that's who! |
Local children as well
as little African boys and girls were being starved and defenseless men, women
and kids around the world had to suffer beatings, humiliation and execution. At times these things would be happening only
a short distance from the front gate of our well defended and well stocked
camps and yet the troops with God on their side were forced to sit idle. Some were even forced to watch and record the
atrocities. I know that many suffered
horrific emotional damage from these experiences but I also know that many were
only concerned with getting the job done and getting their extra pay and a
medal.
We are told from an early age that
god answers all prayers. We are also
told that sometimes the answer is "No". It was while witnessing man's inhumanity to
man, woman, child and beast that I became utterly convinced that either the
almighty's decision making paradigm was really out of wack or that he was just
a giant cunt.
Either way there was some
explaining that had to be done.
In the
meantime I was confronted by such childish platitudes as "He works in mysterious ways" and "He will never give you a burden that you cannot
bear" and "God's plan is unknowable". Perhaps having faith in god and an afterlife
would help those watching on TV, but looking at a small child's charred corpse and
trying not to choke on the ham-stench, I couldn't help but think about how heavy
a burden that must have been for her to bear. Today when I hear these same
platitude used to explain things I am disgusted and ashamed.
My wars are over and I am home for
good now. I lost my faith in a real and
personal god a long time ago and have been struggling with what I actually am
and how to fit this into who I am ever since but suddenly (or over time, who
bloody knows how these things really happen?) I realized that this was
me. There was no point in holding god to
account and demanding some sort of reconciliation. God was not going to answer for these, his crimes, against humanity or for the evil in the world.
There never has been evil in the world.
There is no supernatural force that drives
some people to rape, murder or genocide just like there is nothing keeping me
from committing these acts myself, except that I don't want to. I don't find these things helpful in creating
a society that is worth living in and that I would want my children to live
in. My wife and kids are not good people
because they are determined to get into heaven or in order to avoid some sort
of punishment, but because they have genuine empathy for the human experience. They know not to cause pain and to promote peacefulness for the sake of peacefulness alone. There is no force of evil and there is no
force of goodness. There is just you and I and the decisions that we make every
day to determine how we will live.
More
importantly, there is no god.
These days when I am at the cenotaph
on the 11th day of the 11th month, (and I am there. Every fucking year!) I don't stand
proudly and pray for the many thousands of the fallen. I stand with my wife in front, holding her
waist to keep from flinching when the cannons sound and I weep silently for the
countless lives ended permanently and promise myself to remember those I
knew. I don't believe in an afterlife
and I don't believe that we will ever see them again. They are not in a better place. They are gone and we allowed them to go. We will remember them and that will have to
be enough but we must not let this continue.
The enemy is not "them".
It is any of us that cling to bronze-age mythology or any faith-based
doctrine which keeps individuals from making clear headed, intelligent
decisions in the here and the now.
Let it be."
Great post Randy.
And well made point. Don't let dogma lead you to decisions. You don't need a book to tell you the difference between right and wrong. If you don't know that on your own, then there is a problem. You have a lot of tools with which to make those decisions.
Empathy. Experience. Love.
Remember, the enemy is not "them". It's your responsibility to ensure that the enemy is not "me".
Thanks again Randy.
and as he taught me to say.....
Peace
Great post Randy.
And well made point. Don't let dogma lead you to decisions. You don't need a book to tell you the difference between right and wrong. If you don't know that on your own, then there is a problem. You have a lot of tools with which to make those decisions.
Empathy. Experience. Love.
Remember, the enemy is not "them". It's your responsibility to ensure that the enemy is not "me".
Thanks again Randy.
and as he taught me to say.....
Peace
