A little further on, Genesis 3:22 seems to offer some explanation but it just creates more bewilderment while doing so. God says that Adam, because he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, has now “become like one of Us,” presumably the angels and whatnot. God seems nervous and goes on to suggest that if Adam were to now eat from the tree of life he would achieve eternal life and—it doesn’t say explicitly—but the implication is that he would become another God or something?! God is so unsettled by the prospect that he banishes Adam from the Garden and installs an angel guard with a flaming sword at the gate to prevent the peculiar, ill-defined catastrophe. This is all so weird—no one has ever mentioned this stuff in Sunday school! And what a baffling scenario to create in the first place, these excruciatingly tempting trees with such profound influence on the nature of existence.
Soon thereafter, Adam and Eve’s children, Cain and Abel, have a conflict because God is not happy with Cain’s sacrifice to him. The whole notion of sacrifice is kinda odd as well, especially at the beginning of time when you have the whole Earth at your disposal. It seems like you’d need to slaughter an entire species or burn down a whole forest to make it count. Anyway, Cain is so upset that he kills Abel. Then God banishes Cain to some other land, called Nod, where Cain finds a wife. Huh? There’s another land with people in it?
Okay, this is obviously not just about “literal” versus “figurative” statements anymore—apparently, you also have to read between the lines. Unequivocally, I see, the Bible demands speculation outside of what is explicitly stated. In the case of Cain, there must have been some sort of activity outside of Eden, not yet discussed in the Bible. Perhaps there were other Gardens of Eden throughout the world, and Genesis only told the story of one such place. Making this maneuver in the first book set a precedent that would be necessary quite often throughout the rest of the Bible. No problem, though, I see how it works. I’ll keep reading.
But then Genesis 6:6 makes the peculiar assertion that the “the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.” This seems to corroborate the suspicion that the earlier chapters had raised, that God was actually kinda human. He apparently doesn’t really know the future and is essentially flying by the seat of his pants like the rest of us. He could apparently make mistakes and even have regret about them. When it said that man was created in God’s image, they weren’t joking!
So God decides to destroy humankind. Here we go again. I was no nautical engineer, but I had perused enough National Geographic magazines to know there was no way that two of every animal could fit on Noah’s ark. They give the dimensions—I looked up a “cubit”—that vessel’s just too small. It probably wouldn’t have provided enough space to house the fauna of Madagascar, not to mention its flora.
Alright, well, like Cain, the story of Noah must have just been one such story. There had to be other arks throughout the world, like one for Kenya, one for Vietnam, and probably a couple for Brazil. My suspicion gained momentum when I looked up Mount Ararat in our encyclopedias and learned it’s really not that tall, in the grand scheme of things. So, there must have been something on the order of fifty other peaks across the world that were not flooded, either, that could have landed the other arks. Yes, there must have been multiple arks, because it also seems unlikely that Noah and his family were the only humans who had earned the right to stay alive. And, of course, if there were not other arks, Noah’s family would have to engage in all sorts of gory incest in order to repopulate the world. And we learn later that incest ain’t gonna fly. That’s one topic upon which God and Darwin agree!
As a young Christian learning the Word, I’m still feeling okay despite these obstacles in Genesis. But I am somewhat nagged by the demand that I have to augment the information in the Bible in order to make the Bible work. It’s not that I expected the authors to state everything clearly, but it’s just bothersome that I’m being granted liberty—or, more accurately, required—to figure out so much on my own. I may have been prepubescent but I was old enough to have a sense of the perils of subjectivity (although I didn’t know that specific word at the time). Subjective interpretation is fine in some contexts, like studying a painting, but it’s risky in others, like law and morality and issues of eternal life. A guide can’t be too subjective, otherwise it’s useless—why have a guide at all? I guess the trick is learning where to draw the line. This must be what “spiritual growth” is all about.
Nevertheless, I petered out somewhere in Exodus, not long after I got confused again when God killed what must have been thousands of apparently innocent little boys in order to get Pharaoh to bend to his Will. That simply defied any sort of rationale I could possibly conjure. Fuck this; I’m skipping to the New Testament. I had dabbled there enough already to know that it would be much more palatable. It even seems to give us permission to discard much of the Old Testament, with all of its confusion and boredom. For example, 1 Timothy 1:4 says not “to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the administration of God which is by faith.” Besides the paradoxes and tedium of the Old Testament, I had been getting the vibe that the New Testament was simply more relevant and useful in modern times because Jesus had somehow changed things.
But, damn it, turning all those pages to find the New Testament, now I’m bothered by the very fact that there’s even a distinction between “Old” and “New” testaments, and that there was some sort of transformation between them. God was supposed to be perfect—but how can something perfect change, that is, improve? He must not have been perfect, then. In addition to creating man in the first place, God made another mistake: He had been too strict on him during Old Testament days. Jesus got him to lighten up.
And although “old,” that testament is clearly bigger than the new one. How much of it has truly expired? How do I know what to discard and what to keep? Is it all there just to show how much better Jesus made things? It couldn’t be that, because the Ten Commandments are in there, along with the 23rd Psalm, as well as the part about God making humans in his own image, all of which are still very popular today.
And I can’t understand why I get to exist in New Testament, post-Jesus days, and am therefore able to reap the benefits of Jesus’ first coming. It feels unfair to me, reminiscent of what I now know is called survivor guilt in the context of trauma. Why do I get to live in the kinder times, and basically do what I want, as long as I truly feel sorry and ask for forgiveness later (which I always did, being a very guilt-ridden little boy), while millions of people before me had to constantly walk on eggshells, lest they get covered in boils, plagued by frogs, or turned into salt? That was another frustrating story for me: I bet Lot and his family wished that God was being figurative when he told them not to look back upon Sodom and Gomorra.
Well, the New Testament was much more engaging and easy to read than the Old, as advertised. Unfortunately, it also had plenty of contradictions and head-scratchers of its own.
Matthew 18:3 tells us we need to be like children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but right down the street at 1 Corinthians 13:11 the suggestion is to grow up. John 3:16 says all I have to do is believe in Him to be saved, but Matthew 19:24 adds an alarming caveat: If I’m financially wealthy, the odds are greatly reduced, comparable to those of getting a camel through the eye of a needle! Speaking of which, his “only begotten” son? Why does everyone emphasize that part like it’s so important? Was God himself somehow limited to having just one son?
Ephesians 6:5 makes some troubling statements that slaves should obey their masters, with “fear and trembling.” I had learned about Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman in regular school, and their whole take on slavery made a lot more sense to me. This seriously raised the question of whether the Bible is truly timeless, as all the pastors of my church had always proclaimed. It’s wrong here, hands-down. That slavery part was clearly written for people of a time and place wh
ere slavery was acceptable, but we all know now that it isn’t. I had seen Roots and knew all about the life of American slave Kunta Kinte: That shit was fucked up! I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but later I would begin to wonder: Has the Bible actually fostered violence and oppression at times? Maybe slavery was acceptable such an inconceivably short time ago—in this country—because the Bible said it was.
Similarly, 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 tells us that women aren’t supposed to speak at church, but instead “if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home.” But some of the most respected people in my church are women! And some of them don’t merely speak at church, some of them speak in tongues, allegedly compelled by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, it was a woman who touched me and catalyzed my salvation, and got me here in the first place. What gives? Something is happening at my church that seems miraculous, but the Bible is suggesting that it shouldn’t be happening at all. Are those women sinning? Are the men sinning by listening? Are we not a real church? What if we are wrong about our version of Christianity, like the Baptists and others might argue?
I suspect I could go on like this for quite some time, if I hadn’t simply given up my quest to read the Bible altogether. I have to admit: I really haven’t read most of it.
But it’s not all my fault! The contradictions, ambiguities, and confusions made it so that I wasn’t finding the Bible a useful part of my quest. On the contrary, it was becoming a bit of an obstacle. Sure, sometimes it could be comforting, such as when it suggests that I will inherit the earth someday, me being meek. But I began to doubt even the comforting statements such as this. What exactly does “inherit the earth” mean? How do I know the author wasn’t simply being figurative again? Even worse, how do I know the statements I find comforting won’t expire someday, like those oppressing women, slaves, and homosexuals—and those condoning harsh corporal punishment, such as hitting your child with a stick? Heck, maybe the meek have already inherited the earth, figuratively or something, and from now on they would be trampled by capitalism and other bullies. I’m completely disoriented. Going in circles. I’m done with this Book.
Fine; I would still be a Christian, I just wouldn’t be a Bible-reading Christian. I needed to loosen up. Just because all these claims about the Bible being holy and whatnot have now become dubious, by no means does that have to imply that God and Jesus are not real. Apparently, man was just not very good at writing about them. I had been learning elsewhere that we simply cannot fully comprehend the Lord. Perhaps poor Bible-writing was just another manifestation of that.
The good news was that loosening my grip on the Bible was not always a bad thing. It also afforded the ability to question—if not disregard—some of the scarier stuff that I didn’t want to believe was true anyway. For example, perhaps the Apocalypse and hell are not quite as tormenting as suggested by avid Bible readers. Now that was a nice thought, because I couldn’t be so childish to assume that everyone I know and love is going to make it to Heaven. Maybe hell is really just more of a limbo, a nothing, but just described as fire and brimstone to scare people, or because the authors really didn’t know and that had been their best guess … or perhaps they were describing Hell figuratively.
Overall, regardless of how much I had to recalibrate my reverence for the Bible, I honestly didn’t undergo any fundamental spiritual changes otherwise. Most importantly, I felt just as moral as ever, because my beliefs in God, eternal life, and how to get to the latter were steadfast. I continued to go to church (although I had no choice to skip it anyway), and I still had spiritual moments, both in the pew and elsewhere.
Most reliably, I continued to find comfort through prayer. Regardless of the injustice suffered by Lot’s wife or American slaves just a few generations ago, God was listening to me, helping me, comforting me. Some version of heaven still awaited after this “necessary evil” of my life, and that’s all that really mattered.
Well, despite all that good stuff, I started experimenting with drugs and by my mid-late teens was using fairly steadily.
I suspect some agnostic and atheist readers would like for me to argue that the spiritual turmoil I’ve been discussing thus far drove me to drug use, but I honestly can’t do that, at least with certainty. Some hardline Christians might even suggest that drugs were God’s mechanism to smite me for not being able to consume his Word, or for telling him to fuck off after a spanking. Of course I can’t agree to that, either. All I can say with certainty is that having Jesus in my life, or at least my relatively Bible-free version of him, sure didn’t keep me from drug use.
And mine got pretty bad, too. I went crazy a couple of times, and I think I might have even have died once.
* * *
1 Gaither, B. (1963). He touched me. [Recorded by The Bill Gaither Trio]. On He touched me. [Vinyl record]. Nashville: Heart Warming Records. Many sources indicate that Bill’s wife, Gloria, also helped write the song.
2 Genesis 2:17. All Bible quotes in this book are from the New American Standard Bible, Reference Edition. (1975). Chicago: Moody Press.
CHAPTER 4
Not Necessarily Stoned, but Beautiful
I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have perilled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness, and a dread of some strange impending doom.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It’s all the same Way and it leads no whither.
— Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
REMINISCENT OF HOW I DISCOVERED IRON MAIDEN, I was turned on to drugs in very ironic fashion. When I was young, like in early elementary school even, my dad bought some World Book Encyclopedias from a door-to-door salesman. Like some kind of almost-autistic kid, I became a bit addicted to these and would spend large parts of many days in self-imposed seclusion poring over them. I was enthralled by everything they had to offer, whether it be astronomy, kings of England, snakes, ships, or now-defunct nations, like Upper Volta. I was so young when I first began this habit that I wasn’t able to read well or interpret some of the mathematical figures. However, instead of feeling discouraged, this only added to my sense of awe.
One day when I was in the fourth or fifth grade, I was browsing the L volume and settled on the entry for “literature.” It included pictures of specific books in order to provide examples of the types available—fairy tale, history, and so on. As an example of an educational book, it depicted the cover of one called What You Should Know about Drugs. The letters on the front were all spaced-out 70s psychedelic; it was apparently about drug abuse and users. I was drawn to it and somewhat frustrated that I couldn’t reach into the L encyclopedia and open it. At the time, I was only interested in drugs academically and quite frightened of the notion of actually using them. But I wanted to see what that book had to say.
And I’d be damned: My library at Alex Sanger Elementary school had it—and it did not disappoint. Of course, there were respective chapters on marijuana and alcohol. Those were worthwhile, but nothing compared to the one on, say, heroin. What could possibly motivate someone to do a drug that could so readily kill you? But I mostly wanted to read about the even weirder shit, the stuff I had hardly even heard of.
So it was the chapter on LSD that really grabbed me. I can still remember it clearly, thirty-some-odd years later, especially the subjective accounts of people’s acid trips—one guy told a story about doing it at school! He described how sitting in class, presumably under fully lighted conditions, he began to perceive that the tiles in the floor became wavy and eventually morphed so that seaweed grew up from them. When his teacher came into the room and sat down, flames came up around him and then out of his head. When the flames started heading towards the kid, it was a little too intense so he excused hims
elf from the class.1
Reminiscent of hearing The Number of the Beast for the first time, my fear was again tinged with titillation. Before I finished that chapter I had an epiphany of sorts, perhaps the first epiphany I ever had: I was going to do LSD some day! Not soon—no, I would have to be more grown up. But there was no way in hell someone was gonna have an experience like that without me. I wanted to trip, and I was certain that I was going to eventually.
But of course I didn’t start with LSD; I started with weed.2 My brother was three years older than me and had already started smoking with some neighborhood hooligans, making it just a matter of time before I would have my opportunity. I was real nervous at first and my brother was not very enthusiastic about letting me do it, apparently because he felt some duty to keep me clean. Nevertheless, we broke the seal during the summer of 1982 and I have to say it was a riot about which I have no regrets. That was one of the best summers ever. One of the hooligans had cable TV, which was not terribly common at the time. We sat around all summer long, getting high and watching MTV and rated-R movies, most significantly, the ubiquitous classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Yes, I learned about sex from Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Despite the horror this thought might bring to many parents, looking back on it now, I don’t think it was unhealthy and it was about as good a way to be exposed to sex as any other. Judge Reinhold taught me that masturbation was nothing to be ashamed of; in fact, it could be funny! And Jennifer Jason Leigh’s sexual adventures—which culminated in settling down with the wholesome dork—made me consider, early on, that looks and popularity are not everything. Really, that was a great movie for me at the time. And of course, the young cast was one of the greatest ever, hands-down.
Optimistic Nihilism Page 7