by A. J. Jacobs
They ask me, eyeing my unkempt beard, why I’m visiting the atheists club, and I tell them about my project. They seem relieved, at least, that I’m not an Orthodox Jew or militant Muslim. But further discussion will have to wait.
“Shhhh-shhh.”
The shusher is Ken, the leader of New York City Atheists. Ken looks a bit like Jackie Mason, but a strapping, broad-shouldered Jackie Mason. He’s at the front of the room, wearing a blue-and-white atheist baseball cap. My neighbor, the one with the Darwin hat, tells me that Ken worked at IBM for thirty-seven years, and instead of golf, atheism is his retirement hobby.
Ken starts with the week’s announcements. They are looking for guests for the weekly atheist cable access TV show.
Also, the weekly movie night will be at five-thirty on Thursday, and they will be watching the Nazi war-crime film Judgment at Nuremberg.
“Judgment at Nuremberg?” says a bald guy in the back. He doesn’t seem happy.
“Yes,” says Ken.
“What does that have to do with atheism?”
“You’ll see,” says Ken.
“It doesn’t seem like it has a lot to do with atheism.”
“It has a lot to do with atheism. And a lot to do with skepticism.”
The bald guy was, as you might have guessed, skeptical.
Then Ken goes into his sermon proper—the importance of confronting “believers.”
“We have to stop being polite. We may not make as many friends. But we have to say, ‘The Bible is literature, not history.’”
“Moussaka! Who has the moussaka!”
Ken pauses while the waiter delivers the moussaka. There’s only one server, causing some “feed the multitudes” jokes.
“You know the saying there are no atheists in a foxhole?” says Ken. “You know what? I think they should stop praying and dig a deeper foxhole.”
“Greek salad? Who ordered the Greek salad?”
Ken is a good speaker, even charismatic, as close as you can get to a godless preacher. He has a booming voice, he slaps the palm of his hand to punctuate a point, he all but says amen. Problem is, no one believes Ken’s authority derives from God—which means it’s much harder to command attention. There’s lots of murmuring and cross talk during his sermon.
I leave the meeting early—child-care duties—but return a week later to chat with Ken. He says his road to atheism began when, as a kid, he figured out there could be no Santa Claus.
“It just was not feasible to deliver all those presents,” he says. “This was before FedEx.”
So Ken was tipped off to the Santa Claus falsehood because of faulty logistics. Very IBM of him, I think.
“I started to ask myself, what else are they telling me that’s not true?” says Ken.
I ask him if it’s hard to lead a group of atheists. Like herding cats, he says. Atheists aren’t, by nature, joiners. “They’re individualists,” he says. Which perhaps explains why we had thirty separate checks for lunch.
Ken has, in fact, boosted the group’s membership and started some programs. But go to an atheist meeting, and you’ll see why the religious lobby doesn’t have to worry about the atheist lobby quite yet. You’ll see why there are no soaring atheist cathedrals and why hotel room nightstands don’t come with a copy of Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell in the top drawer. It’s hard to be passionate about a lack of belief.
Recently, atheists have made a good effort, with authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens acting as the movement’s antipopes. But if organized religion is Goliath, then organized atheism still qualifies as David.
Keep your tongue from evil…
—PSALMS 34:13
Day 70. A lot of my friends expect me to speak like a walking King James Bible. They want me—or at least my alter ego Jacob—to spout words like thou and woe unto and whosoever shall. I get a lot of emails that start “Give ear, O Jacobs.” And phone calls that begin, “Verily, I ask thee, would you like to meet us for pizza?”
I try to play along as best I can (“Yea, I shall rejoice in a feast of pizza”). But it’s not high on my list of priorities. Such language is more a reflection of seventeenth-century England than of ancient Israel.
No, speaking biblically requires a far more radical change than raising my diction a few notches. It requires a total switch in the content of my conversation: no lying, no complaining, no gossiping.
They’re all hard, but let me just focus on the gossip for a bit, because that’s turning out to be a killer. The Bible has at least twenty passages condemning gossip. In English editions, translators use words such as slander or talebearing or unwholesome talk or evil tongue.
This means I can’t join in when my coworkers discuss a certain boozy actress who scribbled obscenities on a bathroom mirror, or the rumor that a news anchor is about to ditch his wife for a younger woman. That’s a feat in itself, but I expected living biblically would require that.
The problem is, if you really want to be biblically safe, you should go much further. You should avoid almost all negative speech whatsoever. Here’s how one of my Bible commentaries defines evil tongue: “This refers to any derogatory or damaging statement against an individual—even when the slanderous or defaming remarks are true—which if publicized to others would cause the subject physical or monetary damage, anguish, or fear.”
In other words, about 70 percent of all conversations in New York.
In Hebrew, evil tongue is called Lashon hara, and the rabbis compare it to murder. As the Talmud says, “The gossiper stands in Syria and kills in Rome.” Many Christians have a similar concept about negative speech. As Paul says in Ephesians 4:29: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”
Parts of the Bible do allow some types of bad-mouthing—a gentle rebuke is OK, as is warning your friend that he’s about to open a coffee shop with an embezzler. But for the most part, all sniping, snarkiness, disparaging, mocking, scoffing, and scorning is off-limits. Which is beyond difficult. I fail on a daily basis. An hourly basis.
Consider the scenario I faced last weekend. Julie and I went to a wedding on Long Island; the bride and groom, thoughtfully enough, had hired a van to schlep the guests back to New York. However, there would be no napping on this ride. Instead we would be forced to eavesdrop on a very loud, very drunk goateed guy.
For an hour, without pausing, he pontificates to this pretty blonde he’s trying to pick up. She hears the following (as does everyone else):
“My one-man show Why Try is a dissertation on suicide,” he announces. “It’s very funny. I have a very funny mind. Death is funny. I haven’t been to a funeral that I haven’t laughed at.”
She nods politely.
“My teacher said to me, ‘You are a great actor.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ And I don’t. All I know is the process.”
Oh, man, I wanted so much to lean over to Julie and mock this bloviating putz with his greased-back hair and his pompous Buddy Holly glasses.
He continues:
“Whhhhhy do I admire George Clooney? I’ll tell you. He wants to do something for society at large—and beyond.”
I want to point out to Julie that he overpronounces his t’s and wh’s.
A couple of minutes later, apropos of nothing, he says:
“I’ve always wanted to write a comic strip called Grizelda of Drunkopolis.”
When it becomes clear—even to him—that this woman is not going to climb into bed with him, he tries to engage the other passengers. Including me. A mutual acquaintance had mentioned that I write for a trivia magazine called Mental Floss. This is his way in. He shouts:
“Mental Floss Man over there! Mental Floss!! Tell us some trivia!”
His tone makes it clear that my job is not on the artistic level of his one-man show about suicide. I demur. After we get off the va
n, I hold back for three minutes. Julie and I just walk silently to our apartment. But there’s something to the hydraulic metaphor in human behavior: the steam keeps building up and up in my brain. I have to let it out.
“Can you believe that idiot?” I say finally, as we wait at an intersection. “‘Society at large—and beyond?’ What is beyond society at large? Society at large is beyond.”
Julie just nods her head. She knows.
Maybe taming my tongue will be good for me in the end. But it’s pretty hard when you’ve got a world filled with idiots from Drunkopolis. It’s like asking me not to breathe or blink. All I can say is, I’ll keep trying.
And they fell on their faces…
—NUMBERS 16:45
Day 72. I’ve bought a lot of books this year, but this new Amazon delivery is a big one: the autobiography of my ex-uncle Gil. When I open the box, the first thing that strikes me is this: Gil is not opposed to graven images. The cover features no fewer than eleven photos of Gil. Gil in front of his hippie bus; Gil with his eyes shut, smelling flowers; Gil perched regally on a red armchair.
The book is called Coming Back to Earth: The Central Park Guru Becomes an Old City Jew and was published in 2004 by a small Jewish press. It was banned by some rabbis in Israel because, among other things, it contains four-letter words. I start to read, and it doesn’t disappoint. His life is crazier than I anticipated, even if you make allowances for the occasional James Frey–like fabrication.
Gil grew up in a secular Jewish family in upstate New York. He became a financial consultant in Phoenix—and a successful one, by his account. But he felt something missing. So he dropped out and reinvented himself as a hippie.
Some of his adventures are typically hippie; the things you might see in an early Dennis Hopper film: He dropped acid and passed out for three days. He ate nothing but watermelon for two weeks straight in an attempt to cleanse himself. He got high in an opium den in Pakistan. He was arrested for skinny-dipping in Virginia. His wardrobe consisted of a tablecloth.
But other escapades are outlandish even by hippie standards. Gil trekked to an ashram in northern India where he lived in a squalid yard with five thousand other devotees. The ashram’s guru—a man with a huge Afro and a crimson-colored robe—would emerge from his house every day but never deign to speak to Gil. Gil waited for weeks.
Finally, one day, the guru’s pet elephant, Gita, went on a stampede in the ashram yard. Panic everywhere. Gil stood up, “threw my hand in the air toward the raging elephant and screamed, ‘Stop!’” The elephant stopped. From then on, Gil had a place in the guru’s inner circle. This allowed him to meet John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who were disenchanted with their own guru—the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—because, writes Gil, “he couldn’t keep his hands off Mia Farrow’s butt.”
Gil came back to New York and opted to go into the guru business himself. He decided that God wanted him to start his sect on a bench on the corner of 86th Street and Central Park West. He sat there, gazing at the tip of his nose for eight months, amassing—by his account—dozens of followers who sat at his feet, soaking up his vibes: seekers, stockbrokers, poets, and movie stars (Sally Kirkland!).
Did I mention that he wasn’t speaking at the time? Gil had given up vocal communication, remaining silent for three years. He dispensed wisdom (for example, “smoke the best bag first”) to his followers through a sign language of his own invention.
Eventually Gil moved his “family” to Ithaca, New York. He lived in a yurt by a pond, meditating for—he says—twenty-three hours a day. All of his needs were attended to by his worshipful followers, who, by the way, had been given brilliantly sixtiesish names like Rainbow, Bliss, and Banana Tree. And I do mean worshipful. They literally fell on their faces in front of him.
Gil’s Hindu phase came to an abrupt end when he read a pamphlet someone left in his bathhouse. It was about Christianity. Gil became a born-again Christian leader who, among other things, battled demons and healed a homeless man.
That phase, in turn, came to an equally abrupt end when Gil started to read the Hebrew Bible more closely. It was during this time that Gil followed the Bible literally: When he made tassels of yarn and attached them to every corner he could find on his clothes, and when he tied a wad of cash around his hand.
He eventually switched to more traditional Jewish practices. And nowadays, he spends his days in Jerusalem binding tefillin on tourists at the Western Wall and holding Shabbat dinner for young seekers. But I get the feeling that Gil is a very unorthodox Orthodox Jew. One of his theological precepts is that everything is God, sort of a Semitic pantheism. Other Hasidim say that God is everywhere—but Gil takes it to the extreme.
He writes that he was once sent to a psychiatrist who diagnosed him as a megalomaniac. Gil writes: “I had to look it up in a dictionary. It said, ‘someone who believes they are God.’ I had to agree with that. I not only thought I was God, I thought (and still think) all is God.”
Gil’s life inspired another obscure book that I figured I should read as well. Called Yea God, this 1980 biography painted a much darker picture of Guru Gil. If Gil’s was the Disney version, this was the Grimm’s.
Here we meet a Gil who was sexist (men in his cult got cushy yurts, women had to suffice with tepees) and controlling (he went so far as to instruct his followers how to go to the bathroom properly). Worse, according to this book, Gil sometimes smacked around members of the family. And here’s the crazy part: They allegedly liked it. “Thank you for loving this one enough to beat him,” it quotes one follower saying, in the odd third-person language of the family. (Gil says he was “out of his mind” during this part of his life, so he can’t remember everything, but that the allegations about his violence are overblown.)
There’s a scene about the father and mother of one of Gil’s cult members. They feel like they no longer know their daughter—who has started to refer to them as her “body family.” It’s a heartbreaking story. And it makes me understand what my grandparents must have gone through when Kate became Gil’s number-one follower.
It’s exactly what I was always most afraid of with religion. To embrace religion, you have to surrender some control. But what if it’s a slippery slope, and you lose all control, slide right past the Judeo-Christian mainstream, and end up in a yurt kneeling in front of a guy wearing a tablecloth who has renamed you Lotus Petal?
It’s why I don’t know what to do with Jasper. If I give him some religion, then he might become obsessed and go Guru Gil on me. Then again, if I give him no religion, he could descend into moral anarchy. They’re both so risky. I feel like I can’t win.
You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
—EXODUS 20:4
Day 75. I’ve added another commandment to my Most Violated List: no making images. It was a surprise entry. Until I focused on it, I didn’t realize the pervasiveness of images or how often I made them.
The loose interpretation of the Second Commandment—which starts out “You shall not make for yourself a graven image”—is that it prohibits idolatry. God is telling us not to bow down to golden calves or carved pillars.
But the more severe interpretation, which still echoes through Judeo-Christian tradition today, is that we should allow no images whatsoever. No drawing or sculpture or photography. No painting, unless you’re Rothko or Mondrian. This is because the latter part of the commandment forbids us from making the “likeness of anything in the sky, or earth, or in the water.” Which pretty much covers it.
The strictest adherents in America right now are probably the aforementioned Amish. Modern-day conservative Islam is also famous for its avoidance of images. It’s the reason why the Taliban shut down all movie theaters and riots erupted after that Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad.
Since I’m following the Bible literally, I figure I should take a rigorous
approach, somewhere between the Amish and the Taliban. Which is enormously difficult.
I can’t absentmindedly doodle. I can’t use smiley face emoticons, which I never used anyway, but it was nice knowing I had the option. I can’t turn on the TV (though I decide that it’s OK to watch TV if it’s already on, because that cannot be construed as “making an image”).
I used to entertain Jasper by doing Google image searches of his favorite animals; no more. This is probably good, because typing in something like kitty inevitably turns up a woman in a skimpy cat outfit licking her hand.
I’ve tried to stop taking photos. Well, as much as possible, anyway. When I balked at snapping a picture of my wife and her mom at her mom’s birthday, Julie said, “Can we have a sidebar conference, please?” The result of that tense negotiation: I’ll take this photo, but after that, I’m done.
Granted, my starvation diet from images can be a headache. This morning Jasper dumped his Play-Doh on the table. And, as usual, he instructed me what to make. He’s now moved beyond grunts to a vocabulary of twenty-odd words.
“Ball!”
“How about a circle?” I respond.
I figure Platonic shapes are OK. I make a circle.
“Car!”
“You want to see a square?” I make a square.
“Nemo,” says Jasper. (Nemo is Jasper’s word for any type of fish; as a good protoconsumer, he speaks in brand names.)
“Here you go,” I say, making an oval. I’m starting to run out of shapes.
Jasper seems disappointed by my Play-Doh geometry. I feel ridiculous for refusing to make him a fish, but I also know that I have to do this experiment full bore, or else I’ll risk missing out on key spiritual discoveries. No cutting corners.
At least I have plenty of historical precedents. The Second Commandment played a huge part in the Protestant Reformation. Several Protestant leaders—including John Calvin—urged the removal and/or smashing of paintings and statues from churches. Riots erupted in Switzerland and Scotland, among other places. Aside from provoking idolatry, images were thought to be a sign of human vanity. People were trying to compete with the God of creation.