The Holdout

by Gracjan Kraszewski

  Brent says nothing.

  “Look,” I say. “Maybe this analogy can explain original sin. Those who deny it claim people are born spiritually perfect, spiritually healthy, whatever you want to call it. And because they are naturally perfect they don’t have to do anything to stay this way. They don’t have to pray, don’t have to go to church services, don’t have to read some book, don’t have to do anything, least of all repent of anything, because nothing can change what they believe to be the true original state of man: unblemished. But I think this can be argued against by appealing to human hygiene. Brent, are we naturally clean? Does our breath and our body odor require any maintenance or not? What if a person never brushed their teeth because bad breath is a bronze age myth and I don’t need toothpaste? What if they never showered because I smell just fine, thank you very much? Just as it’s obvious that body odor and bad breath exist so too is sin obvious. It’s literally all around us, it’s the easiest Christian doctrine to prove. And so just like if we do nothing about our personal hygiene it all goes to rot fast so too does our spiritual health; both have to be maintained, each in the respective fashion. Both the bad hygiene and the bad habits have to be overcome by different methods of cleaning.”

  Brent shakes his head. “No. Religion is just…no. No, no, no. Myths and lies and mind control and make believe, fill in the blank, whatever. Plus there are so many objections to faith that I haven’t even made…no.”

  “Make them,” I say.

  “What?”

  “The objections. Make your objections to religion.”

  “No,” Brent says, “you are my friend, after all. Who knows why, but you are. And, believe it or not, I don’t want to hurt your baby-back bitch sweet view of the universe and ruin your whole life and send you crying home to mommy.”

  I laugh, heartily. Brent joins in. Both of us laugh for a good ten seconds or so. “C’mon,” I say, “this is my favorite part of our friendship. We can talk about anything. Make your objections.”

  “Ok,” Brent says, “how can you believe that Christianity is true, I mean actually True, when there’s a bunch of myths, and by myths I mean stories that people once held to as actually True that you believe are now myths, that are exactly like the Christian stories that you still say are True? Look at the story of the Flood. That’s in the Epic of Gilgamesh, with Utnapishtim and his wife, the search for eternal life all that…long before Noah and the Ark. Or, how many stories are there about a God-child or a type of Holy Family like Christians venerate in Jesus, Mary, and Joseph? Look at the Egyptian story, which you and all Christians regard as either false or just a myth, of Osiris, Isis, and Horus?”

  “To me that’s more evidence for Christianity, not less,” I say.

  Brent laughs. “How?”

  “Because I think that the prevalence of many stories like the Incarnation, like the Flood, a vast tradition of something like the Fall points to the reality of the actual events. I think that many versions of a type of Holy Family, of a Divine Saving Son, even if not directly like that but similar to that, points to the fact of an actual real Holy Family and a real God-Man. If Christians were the only ones with these ‘stories’, if they were fully unique and singular and had no connection to mankind otherwise, I think they’d be far less plausible. You hear one rumor that a volcano blew somewhere, one singular news story about it; or, you hear hundreds of rumors and news stories about the eruption, even though many are differing in degrees slight or great and many are contradictory…doesn’t the large collection of voices make an actual eruption more plausible because so many people are talking about it? Even though, being limited stupid humans, they can hardly get the facts straight?”

  “What about all the gods, though?” Brent asks. “Why should anyone accept the Jewish-Christian God as God, as the One GOD? Why? Richard Dawkins made a great point about this when someone asked him what he’d say to God if there actually is one and he met him after death. Dawkins said he’d first ask, “who are you?” Are you Yahweh, Zeus, Krishna, and so on.”

  “Same answer as to the many myths,” I say, “If Jews or Christians were the only ones who believed in some type of God and the rest of human history was indeed thoroughly atheist, believed in no spirits no angels nothing supernatural, then I think the case for God would be weakened. But every culture ever on the face of the earth has had belief in gods, in supernatural forces, all that. To me this points to the reality that there actually is a True God, an actual satisfaction for the divine that all people seem to have hardwired onto their hearts.”

  “Satisfaction for the divine my ass,” Brent says, “it’s all Bronze Age caveman woo-woo. ‘Oh, flash of white light strikes my cow in ass…all hail the Light god. Look, water falls from sky, it is rain god pissing.’

  I laugh. “But you’re constructing a completely fake argument. Christianity is nothing like those primitive ‘religions.’ ”

  “Sure it is. It arose in darkness. Two thousand years ago. No one would let that stuff pass today.”

  “You’re bullshitting me now,” I say, “Arose in darkness? It arose in the heart of the Roman rule over the world, just when the Great Empire was getting started. A time when people actually cared about big questions and philosophy was in a golden age. And if not in a golden age then at least one much more golden than ours. This was the time when people knew and debated the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. A time when Cicero had the type of celebrity that today is reserved for pop stars. People back then actually had half a brain, maybe more. They were way better at thinking, debating, philosophizing, then we are. Back then people actually thought critically through problems and had a true skepticism based on facts in a real debate…almost scientific if I can use the term. And look at today. How many people, and I mean so called ‘educated people,’ can name one teaching of any serious philosopher? How many people today think about anything? It’s just not useful anymore, doesn’t fit our hyper-pragmatic lens to everything. We have better things today like reality TV. If there’s ever a time for a religion to arise in darkness it’s now, today. Get a good looking person to push a message, someone skilled in sophistry and someone who can coin nice sayings like ‘believe in yourself’ or ‘the Universe wants you to be happy’ and you can attract tons of new ‘disciples’; a new religious movement is only one tweet away.”

  “Just because people are dumbasses now doesn’t mean they weren’t then,” Brent says.

  “Your logic is circular. Anyone who is religious is a dumbass. Why? Because only dumbasses are religious.”

  “Truth hurts. Sorry.”

  “That’s not truth, of any kind,” I say, laughing. “And I don’t think you have an understanding of the God you claim doesn’t exist. The only thing you, and all atheists, can do is show who God is not, but you do that with ridiculous strawmen that have no logic.”

  “No logic? Believing in some type of Spaghetti Monster that isn’t real is the exact definition of illogical.”

  “That’s my point! That’s it! ‘Spaghetti Monster.’ If God is anything, He’s definitely not that; a Spaghetti Monster or some type of cosmic teapot Russell talked about floating around somewhere in the ether.”

  “No, that’s exactly what believing in God is like.”

  “It’s not. The ‘Spaghetti Monster’ is a stupid, childish attempt to make a mockery of God or religion or who knows what that is actually the ultimate self-troll. How many people believe in a real Spaghetti Monster? How many martyrs are there for their faith in the Spaghetti Monster, how many miracles attributed to him, her, it? How about the Spaghetti Monster ‘theology’ as the driving framework for a civilization, for art, something worth fighting and dying for? And yet for the real God there is evidence of this, all these things, in an almost unlimited quality. So this attack, honestly, is to me the stupidest one of all the atheist tropes…c’mon, y’all are better that that,” I smack Brent across the back.

  “How do you explain, though,” Brent says, �
��how awful and terrible the God of the Old Testament is? He’s tribal. He’s genocidal. He revels in hate and the destruction of innocents. Oh, but wait, ‘God is Love,’ right? He’s so loving he had his only son come to earth to be tortured to death to appease him. How can you serve a God who is obviously an evil god?”

  “A couple of things with that,” I say. “First of all, who are you calling ‘evil’? What is ‘evil’? That’s religious terminology. If you do away with God and eternal standards of right and wrong there is no good and evil, you are then actually beyond it like Nietzsche wanted to be. Why is genocide, hate, and destruction ‘evil’ if there is no God? Good and evil aren’t natural terms. Nature is red in tooth and claw, right? Killing is good if it makes you the top of the food chain, if you become the Übermensch.”

  “That’s not true. You don’t need religion to be a good person,” Brent says.

  “I’m not disagreeing that there are in fact non-religious people who act ‘good,’ who are moral people. What I’m saying is that morality has to have an eternal foundation, an immutable standard because without it, it can change at any moment.”

  Brent shakes his head. I continue,

  “Why is the God of the Old Testament so ‘evil’ as you say? What if I asked you to turn that on its head. Why do we deserve mercy? We, as in humanity. Why shouldn’t God just blow us all away into oblivion? We committed the original sin, not—

  “Please. Shit,” Brent says, “Can you ever answer a question without your book of fables? I swear you talk about original sin as much as I talk about getting laid.”

  “Just listen to me,” I protest. “You asked the question, you dumbass WASP piece of shit excuse for a former ballplayer—

  Both of us laugh heartily. Brent can take it as good as he dishes it out.

  “Seriously,” I say, still laughing. “Here’s my answer to the question. Take it or leave it. I don’t know what happened in the Garden of Eden. I fully believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God but not every word is literal. Genesis is not a science book nor do analogies render the meaning of something less true. So, my point is, I don’t know if the original sin was literally the eating of a forbidden piece of fruit or not. It’s not important. What is important is that God made man in a state of perfection and gave him everything he could ever want. The reason for the prohibition on something was that man had to prove to God that he did, in fact, love and desire God above all. Without the free will to reject God man would be nothing but a puppet, forced to love God, and that’s not love, right? You can agree with that. A man only knows his wife loves him if she has the chance to say no. If you force her to marry you, you never know if she does in fact love you or not. It has to be uncoerced. So God, who is love, who is LOVE itself, made us with a free will just for that reason so that we might use our own free choice to choose Him above all and then it would be known, without a doubt, that the relationship was a free one founded on true love not something forced.”

  “And we fucked it all up,” Brent says.

  “Didn’t we? Yeah, I’d say so. And that’s what I think is so underappreciated in understanding original sin. This wasn't something small like your kid keeps getting his hand stuck in the cookie jar. This was more like you open your house to a person out of pure charity and tell them they can have all they want, your house and your stuff actually fulfills every desire of their heart, but hey, please don’t go in the basement, okay? No problem, right? You were homeless and had nothing and now you literally have everything and all you have to do is stay out of the basement. Well, you go into the basement, get a crowbar down there and then beat the host and his family to death and then set the whole place on fire. Multiply that times infinity and that’s probably the gravity of original sin. That’s what we did to God. And look at God, look how truly loving God is. He doesn’t just blot us out, like he should, like any sane person would. No, he makes contact with a chosen group of people promising them descendants as numerous as stars and sand, promises a Messiah, a Savior who happens to be God Himself, the very Word through which all creation came into being, the Word that becomes flesh in the womb of the Woman who crushes the head of the serpent, He the new Adam and she the New Eve, reversing the original sin that had sundered us from God, and this Messiah suffers the most excruciating death on a cross for us, not to appease God for He himself is God as well as man, but just for love of us, to bring us back into relation with Him and how do we respond? Largely with cold indifference, apathy, our attitude’s basically: so what?”

  Brent exhales. “Remind me to bring a catechism next time I talk to you,” he says, sarcastically. “You lost me halfway through.” Brent spits into the water. “Look what religion does to real people, real issues. Look at the whole right to die stuff. People who have no business telling others what to do with their own lives still do. And it’s usually your lot, the Catholics.”

  “You’re taking about euthanasia?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re for it?”

  “Yes,” Brent says. “But you’re not, right?”

  “No,” I say. “We don’t own our lives. God does. God is the only one who can decide when they begin and end.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’m against euthanasia, abortion, cloning,” I say, “all these things are the same playing God type garbage that eventually leads to genocides.”

  “What?” Brent asks, “what the hell?”

  “Damn right,” I say. “It always begins that way. With euphemisms like ‘choice’ and ‘right to end of life options’ and ‘mercy.’ It begins with old people choosing their own time of death. This becomes the norm and then doctors start thinking hey this isn’t a bad idea. Maybe we can gently coerce people into choosing this (Need to lower the booming population, right Malthus?) You know, the way retirement is assumed to be fixed at age 65, maybe we can kind of fix a societal death age at 75, maybe 80; for the good of society, of course. Then, if that’s not getting us the numbers we need, we’ll just remove the optional part of it altogether. But we’re not prejudiced against the old, no. Just like we don’t want them to suffer their old age needlessly, and be an undue burden on their families and caregivers, what kind of monsters would we be if we allowed the mentally handicapped to suffer their mental illnesses, the physically deformed their physical limitations? Death is a release. It’s the humanitarian thing to do.”

  Brent shakes his head, “That’s crazy.”

  “Is it?” I ask. “Or do these things always spring from humanitarian concern? From wanting to end ‘needless’ suffering? It’s always the nicest people who, thinking they are doing the ‘suffering’ a favor by killing them, start the snowball rolling down the hill. Removing needless suffering isn’t as sexy as creating the perfect superhuman society. Hey, original sin is bullshit, right? We can be perfected. You don’t think the American eugenicists of the early twentieth century believed this? That perfection was just a few eliminated undesirables away?

  All we have to do is get rid of the societal fat; get rid of the old, the infirm, the invalids, the mentally handicapped, the physically damaged. And why stop there? These people obviously deserve to die but what about those who aren’t contributing anything to this progressive perfection project? Bums, lazy do-nothings, maybe even some wacko religious nuts who might be the only people who will protest and stand in the way of our evolution?”

  “I just don’t think that’s possible,” Brent says. “People don’t do that, they don’t do that, what you described. You don’t have to be religious to have a conscience.”

  “The problem is that there’s no brake,” I say. “There is no line in the sand. I don’t want to kill, or clone, or euthanatize anyone, period. And this can be said taking religion completely out of the picture. I don’t want to do these things because they are repulsive on the grounds of common sense alone. But, more importantly, I don’t want to do them because I fear God. If I perpetuate genocide I will go to hell. God will judge me when I
die and I will go to hell.

  Religion doesn’t just give you just this negative reason, and by negative I mean a reason not to do something, but it also gives you the positive reason of not committing these crimes out of authentic love of God and love for your neighbor. That mentally challenged man in the wheelchair is my brother, he is made in the Image and likeness of God just like me, just like anyone else. He is precious. He is indisposable.

  But without God, without the negative and positive religious brakes, why not kill him? And by kill him I mean ‘humanely terminate his existence.’ Why not? There is no God and so God will not judge. This man is not my brother. He certainly has no inherent God-given dignity for God does not exist; as God is myth so too is man a myth, the myth being that he is anything more than an animal, he is, rather, as dignified as a slug stuck to the side of the road. Are we humans not just primordial sludge and stardust, sentient beings purely by chance floating around in an absurd universe that never meant anything and never will men anything? Why not eliminate him? Why should he have to suffer? Why should I have to look upon his suffering?”

  Brent reaches into his back pocket and puts in a heavy pad of tobacco in his front lip. He spits three times on the dock. He offers me some. I decline.

  “I’ll tell you this,” he says, “I agree with you on abortion.”

  I am so shocked to hear him say this I don’t say anything. “You’re against abortion, right?” he asks, “you’re ‘pro-life’, right,” he asks, exaggerating the quotation marks in a mocking fashion.

  “Yes,” I say.

  Brent nods. “Before you get back on your Vatican soapbox know that my stance has absolutely nothing to do with religion. You should know that by now.” Brent spits a brown stream of tobacco juice into the water. Baseball players are very skilled at this. “I hate ‘pro-lifers,’ ” he says, again with the exaggerated air-quotes. “I think they are probably the most obnoxious people on the face of the earth. Their marches, their signs, those photos of the dismembered babies…it’s sick. But,” he exhales, “I do agree with you crazies on this one.”