“That's me in the corner. That's me in the spotlight losing my religion.” – R.E.M.
I make no bones about the fact that I am an atheist. I am not agnostic. Agnostics believe in the existence of some sort of deity or over-arching creator and/or controlling force in the universe. No. I am what used to be described as a secular humanist and believe that the universe functions all on it's own with certain immutable scientific laws all of which are amenable to objective proof a/k/a the scientific method.
To give the background context, I am the child of Jewish parents. I was brought up in the Jewish faith (at least they tried). I was subjected to five years of Hebrew School (two hours two days a week after regular school plus two hours on Sunday mornings) along with all the stress on attending Saturday morning services, either upstairs with the adults or junior congregation. Hoo-boy did I resent those six extra hours a week along with the extra school work for which I was held responsible. This was made even worse by the fact that the Catholic kids got time off from regular school every Wednesday afternoon to go to catechism class. But my reasons for losing the faith really did not relate to the extra burden of work. It was deeper and predated Hebrew School
One of the first books I had was a little Jewish prayer book for kids, I suspect from my maternal grandfather. In it, there was a stylized picture of e good lord (which flew in the face of the 10 Commandments thing about graven images, but I digress). It showed an old bearded man. From the time I was old enough to understand the concept of the Judeo-Christian deity, I was taught that He was all powerful and omniscient and perfect. Well if He was all powerful, why couldn't he make Himself look like a young guy? When I asked that question, my grandfather told me I was being disrespectful. I was somewhat chastened by that answer but I also noticed that I had not received an answer to the question I had asked.
The second thing that the prayer book did was it taught me the prayer to say every night before I went to sleep. For years, I said that prayer as I lay down to go night night with my stuffed bunny rabbit. Then, one night, it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if I DIDN'T say my prayer. So I skipped it one night, laid down with Bunny...and woke up the next morning feeling NO worse for wear. That was the end of worrying about saying my prayer before going to sleep. When my mother asked me about it I just said I didn't need to say it anymore. She had no good answer other than that I SHOULD keep doing it. No explanation why, just that I should.
Early in my Hebrew School ordeal, I asked the following question. "Why did God speak to people in the bible then suddenly he stopped talking to people?" The answer from my teacher was something along the lines of, "Well, because those were biblical times." When I persisted in attempting to get an explanation of what that meant, I got sent to the principal's office for showing a lack of due respect. That was compounded by the fact that my mother worked for the synagogue so I was in double immediate deep kimchee. (Years later when I heard George Carlin talking about Catholic school and getting answers along the lines of "Well, it's a mystery," I was reminded of this incident. As he put it they made questioners out of them and it made them lose the faith.)
So I was well on my way to losing the faith by the time of my bar-mitzvah. The important thing about passing that milestone was that it meant the end of Hebrew School. When my mother made the hideous suggestion that I continue with Hebrew high school, it was one of the VERY few times my father ever said no to her after I had already expressed my vehement opposition. Hebrew School was like hitting myself in the head with a hammer. It felt so good when I stopped.
I knew that I could not possibly buy into the whole story of Jesus from the virgin birth right through the whole resurrection so Christianity held no attraction for me. Judaism, at least, made some objective sense in that, other than the whole God thing, most things had some reasonable basis. I continued to think of myself as a Jew. Before we got married, my wife converted to Judaism and we were married by a rabbi. Part of that was sheer cowardice on my part in not standing up to my parents and insisting on a civil ceremony. When our daughter was born, we had her named in a Jewish ceremony. But we raised her with an awareness of both religious traditions. We told her that religion was her choice and when she got old enough she could decide for herself. We had a Christmas tree at the same time we lit the candles for Channukah. (And, yes, it's always been a Christmas tree, not a Channukah bush.)
My father had died when I was in high school and for a year, I went to services at least once a week to say Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead). I didn't believe in what I was doing but I felt guilty to NOT do it. When that year ended, I basically had had it with going to services. My mother remarried when I was a college freshman and the family into which she married was very into Judaism. I just could never feel a part of the scene and the alienation increased. Not only was I the one who had lost the faith, I had even married someone who was not born into the faith. Subtly, I always felt like the black sheep.
I'm not sure where I drifted into flat-out atheism but I went through a period where I experimented with Zen. What I liked (and still like) about Zen is that it is independent of belief in a deity although belief in gods is part, hence my having drifted away from it.
I think the final recognition of my total loss of faith came when I was watching an episode of Carl Sagan's classic TV series "Cosmos." In one episode, he said, "We are all star stuff." When I understood that he meant that everything around us with the exception of hydrogen and helium had been created in the hearts of now dead stars, I was blown away. That answered the question for me as to where did I come from. At some point every atom that is "me" was created by the cataclysm of a star exploding. There was the scientific explanation...and there was the final rupture for me and religion. I had become a secular humanist.
Since then, I have recognized that the universe works by immutable laws. Whether or not the Big Bang is actually the scientific explanation for how the universe began, there is a scientific explanation for everything around us. I don't understand mathematics beyond one and one making two, so I can't prove these things myself. But I have learned enough about cosmology to understand the nature of the laws of the universe. I have learned enough about quantum mechanics to understand that Einstein was wrong when he said that god does not shoot craps with the universe. He was wrong in that quantum mechanics teaches that at the sub-atomic level, random chance operates. If we accept the omniscient and perfect god of Judeo-Christian belief, random chance has no place because he has predetermined everything. Sorry. Nils Bohr, yes; magic sky-person, no.
I find Richard Dawkins to be most illuminating. His book “The God Delusion” has provided me with another favorite quote. “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” If a person believes in any particular deity, whether it be Odin, God/Allah, Vishnu, Zool, he or she, by definition, rejects all other god-beings. Therefore, everyone is atheistic about all those other gods.
If we accept the concept taught in Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition that God/Allah is a perfect being, I have several questions. Why did a perfect being find it necessary to create something? If a being is perfect unto itself, it should have no need to create anything. Next question. If said being is perfect, how could Satan have rebelled against him? Rebellion implies displeasure and how can a perfect being do anything except be perfect? Finally, if a being is perfect, why does it need prayer from its creations? And a related issue to that last question is how can a perfect being get mad? Oh, and on the subject of creation, it implies a beginning and an end which flies in the face of the everlasting and always was god being.
I touched on quantum theory earlier. The basis of quantum theory is randomness. Accepting that, there is no way for a being to know everything that is going to happen where everything is subject to random behavior. This explains why a pair of literally identical twins, raised with identical experiences will still turn out different. Random behavior at the sub-atomic level will, inevitably cause a divergence at the microscopic level which will eventually translate to the macro level.
I also believe that humans are only one of many sentient species in the universe. It is estimated that there are as many as 200 billion galaxies in the known universe. Each galaxy has between 10 and 200 million stars. Who knows how many planets orbit all those stars. But, to me, it is inconceivable that we here on our little spaceship earth are the only beings who happened to have a planet that was just right for life to evolve. (Yes, I said it. I also believe in evolution.) Therefore, unless every single sentient race is identical to humans down to the molecular level, how could we have been created in god’s image? It’s impossible to prove, but statistically it just does not wash.
Now, having said all this, I do not begrudge anybody their individual beliefs. To try and force my lack of belief on them is as unacceptable as it is when I find believers trying to force their religious convictions on me. Belief or lack thereof is an intensely personal thing. I may disagree with your belief but I will fight for your right to practice what you believe as long as such belief does not impinge on me or the government. I take the Establishment Clause very seriously and recognize that it protects atheists as much as Jews, Christians of all types and all the other religions out there.
So there it is. These are the reasons for my atheism. It started with my asking questions for which no reasonable answer could be provided. When I began comparing the ideas of simply “believing” or “having faith” with the logic of science, science won out hands down. And I don’t apologize for it any more than I expect you to apologize for your own belief. We are all passengers on spaceship earth. Peace.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Owning a Cat is an Oxymoron
“Once was a time, in New York's jungle in a tree, before I went into the world in search of other kinds of love, nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.” – Rod McKuen, “A Cat Named Sloopy”
The first pet my wife and I ever owned as a married couple was a cat named Gremlin. Actually, his full name was Gremlin Meshugina Kittums. (For those of you not fluent in Yiddish, “Meshugina” means crazy.) With only two breaks, we have always been owned by at least one cat. Notice I said that we have been owned by cats. I first encountered that concept in Rod McKuen’s poem quoted above. (By the way, the full text can be found here: http://www.why-not.com/cats/sloopy.htm and on his album “At Carnegie Hall.”) But until I finally lived with a cat, I never really understood it. You may buy or acquire a cat by other means but it is the cat that chooses who it will own. An axiom is that “Dogs have owners; cats have staff.” And once you accept the fact that you are a life support system for the cat that owns you, you have truly understood life with a cat.
I came to be a cat person quite accidentally. The extent of my pets while growing up was a couple of turtles and a couple of goldfish. We lived in an apartment house and the excuse was always we didn’t have the room. I was also aware that my parents actively disliked cats. I recall my mother disparaging them and my father once kicking one at my uncle’s house that sprang out of nowhere to attack his foot. My fraternity decided to adopt a stray named Ralph with only two dissenting votes, mine being one of them. As the medical bills piled up, those two dissenting votes proved to be prescient.
So, it came as a bit of a surprise, when we acquired Gremlin that he became a source of unending amusement. He had two favorite activities. The first involved the cocker spaniel we also acquired. He would lay in a chair in the living room. When the spaniel walked past, he would leap, wrap his fore paws around her hind paws, tackle her, then bolt. The second was the result of the apartment’s architecture and shag carpet of the 70s. It was a two-floor apartment and the steps were open with no risers and were carpeted. Gremlin would latch onto the carpeting and climb up the underside of the steps, emerging through the one at the top, run down and start the process again. Unfortunately, when we moved from California, we had to leave him behind.
Our daughter Sara’s first cat was a gray long-haired female kitten that we named Kitty because that was a word she could say at the time. Kitty was one of the few we ever bought. She was also one of the sweetest cats we ever had. We have pictures of Sara carrying her by holding her around the neck. The poor animal’s eyes are bugging out and her tongue is hanging out but she never once scratched her. She was also the first cat that took ownership of me. I didn’t recognize it as such because it was an unfamiliar concept, despite having known McKuen’s poem for years. She would wait until I was sitting in a comfy chair or on the couch and drape herself over my shoulders, purring happily. She may have been Sara’s cat but I was her person.
Kitty had died not too long after we moved in with my in-laws while I went to grad school. My in-laws had a black, long-hair named Itsy-Bitsy whose name was shortened to Bitsy because it was easier for Sara to say as a toddler. It amused me that Bitsy seemed to be wherever I was. I still did not understand the concept of being owned by a cat. After we moved to West Virginia, we were without a cat because our landlord would not allow us to have any pets. But whenever we came home, there was Bitsy, attaching herself to me wherever I was. It was a source of never-ending wonder and surprise because I still did not picture myself as a cat person.
When we returned from WV, one of our first acquisitions was a condo and a Himalayan female that we named Kaitu (Like the Himalayan mountain, K-2… get it?). For whatever reason, she took an active dislike to Joy. She didn’t last long and she never really fit in.
There followed several less memorable cats and then came NoNuts. NoNuts was a fairly good-sized buff-colored longhair male who my mother-in-law had acquired. She never really seemed to settle on a name for him alternately calling him Buffy, Tuffy, Scruffy, Muffy or names of a similar sound. They decided to have him neutered and dropped him at the vet the day they were leaving for Florida for the winter. They told us to pick him up and keep him for the winter and they’d take him back when they came back north. As a joke, we started calling him NoNuts, for obvious reasons. By the time they returned from Florida, he only answered to that name and he would not let them anywhere near him. so NoNuts became our cat, one of the very few males we ever owned.
NoNuts was a tough guy who preferred spending time outside but he also took ownership of Joy and was devoted to her. When we moved to a new house, he went out one day and never came home. We were devastated because we had lost three other cats in a similar manner shortly before that. When we were finally able to sell our old house, the night before the closing, we did a walk-through. From the back yard I heard a cat crying. I opened the door and in walked the scrawniest, filthiest, skinniest version of NoNuts you can imagine, with one paw stuck through his flea collar. He had gone out that day and gone where he thought home was. He had lost about half of his weight and had existed by eating the small frogs around the swimming pool. About a thousand dollars in vet bills later, he had become the golden cat. But he was home with us. He stayed with us until he was over nineteen years old, apparently healthy right up to the point where he was suddenly unable to care for himself. We let him go and allowed him to be put down because it was his time. We, especially my wife still miss him.
To me, the gold standard in cats was Butter. We adopted her from the vet. She was a long-haired gray kitten. On our way home in the car, she lay like a lump in my wife’s lap. As soon as we got her into the house, she ran for the darkest corner of the kitchen and would not come out. We left her alone and put out a dish with food and water. Eventually she came out. We were unsure of what to name her but I settled on Feather. That was until she got comfortable around us. She was one of those cats who would repeatedly and strongly butt her head against your hand until you pet her. Thus, the name Butter. The week we got her, my wife had to suddenly go to Florida because her mother was hospitalized. She was gone for almost a month. In that time, Butter started sleeping next to me and attached herself to (well, took ownership of) me. She would drape herself over the computer monitor when I was sitting at the computer and would let one paw hang down in front of the screen. Sometimes, she would crawl into my lap and refuse to leave while I sat at the keyboard. She was one of the cats that went out one day and never came home. I still miss her.
We had three cats that came from one litter: Pyscho, a long-haired black, female, Tribble, a tuxedo-colored short-haired male and Trouble, an almost identical slightly smaller female. Psycho was laid-back and gentle once she grew up. She earned her name as a kitten by climbing the drapes and walking along the curtain rod and by laying on the top edge of a doorway to the half-bath off the family room. Trouble and Tribble wound up being renamed Baby Boy and Baby Girl because we kept mixing up their names. They were just sweet cats. Psycho was also unique in that she was allergic to her own cat dander and had a constantly runny nose. All three of them, at various times, went out and never came home.
After Butter disappeared, we adopted another long-haired gray female I named Suvwi, the Klingon word for “warrior.” When we got her she was a tiny kitten but she faced down my mother-in-law’s French poodle. Okay, the poodle wasn’t very large but he towered over her and she stood her ground. She quickly took ownership of me and was another who would sit in my lap while I was at the computer. I had decided, by then, that the cats were no longer going to be allowed to be outside cats. We had lost too many already.
Sara had a couple of cats that she raised as kittens, April and Trinity. She brought them with her when she moved back in with us for a while. April is a long-haired female calico tabby who is dumb. If T.S. Eliot had written about her in Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, she would be April, the cat of the Short Bus. Trinity was a gray long-haired Tabby. Sadly, she lost her tail due to a wound and something went wrong inside her and she could not eat. In mercy, we had her put to sleep. April is still with us. Her favorite thing is to pull a pair of socks out of my drawer, carry them downstairs in her mouth, then yowl as if she has had a kitten. Like I said, April’s not too bright. In fact, she’s as dumb as a dog.
A friend of Sara’s had a tiny short-haired white female with colored spots around her ears and a calico striped tail. Her name was Rascal or Cally for short. The friend’s younger child turned out to be allergic to cats so Sara brought her home to us. She was tiny, even by small cat standards and we quickly renamed her Little Bit. For the longest time, we could not figure out why Suvwi was constantly beating her up. When Suvwi disappeared, Little Bit was suddenly attached to me. Then it became clear. Suvwi had been guarding her turf and her ownership of me from Little Bit. Now that Suvwi was gone, Little Bit owned me 100%. I have never had a cat as devoted as she is to me. If she had her way, she would be touching me 24/7, 365 days a year. She literally follows me around the house when I get up to do something. If she is awake and I’m home, she is wherever I am. And she’s still tiny. And neither Little Bit nor April are allowed to go outside. At all!
I have long said I will never own another dog with the possible exception of if I was ever to need a seeing-eye dog. But I will never be without a cat. I am a cat person, lock, stock and barrel and will always be. Who knows, maybe I WAS a cat in a past life.
The first pet my wife and I ever owned as a married couple was a cat named Gremlin. Actually, his full name was Gremlin Meshugina Kittums. (For those of you not fluent in Yiddish, “Meshugina” means crazy.) With only two breaks, we have always been owned by at least one cat. Notice I said that we have been owned by cats. I first encountered that concept in Rod McKuen’s poem quoted above. (By the way, the full text can be found here: http://www.why-not.com/cats/sloopy.htm and on his album “At Carnegie Hall.”) But until I finally lived with a cat, I never really understood it. You may buy or acquire a cat by other means but it is the cat that chooses who it will own. An axiom is that “Dogs have owners; cats have staff.” And once you accept the fact that you are a life support system for the cat that owns you, you have truly understood life with a cat.
I came to be a cat person quite accidentally. The extent of my pets while growing up was a couple of turtles and a couple of goldfish. We lived in an apartment house and the excuse was always we didn’t have the room. I was also aware that my parents actively disliked cats. I recall my mother disparaging them and my father once kicking one at my uncle’s house that sprang out of nowhere to attack his foot. My fraternity decided to adopt a stray named Ralph with only two dissenting votes, mine being one of them. As the medical bills piled up, those two dissenting votes proved to be prescient.
So, it came as a bit of a surprise, when we acquired Gremlin that he became a source of unending amusement. He had two favorite activities. The first involved the cocker spaniel we also acquired. He would lay in a chair in the living room. When the spaniel walked past, he would leap, wrap his fore paws around her hind paws, tackle her, then bolt. The second was the result of the apartment’s architecture and shag carpet of the 70s. It was a two-floor apartment and the steps were open with no risers and were carpeted. Gremlin would latch onto the carpeting and climb up the underside of the steps, emerging through the one at the top, run down and start the process again. Unfortunately, when we moved from California, we had to leave him behind.
Our daughter Sara’s first cat was a gray long-haired female kitten that we named Kitty because that was a word she could say at the time. Kitty was one of the few we ever bought. She was also one of the sweetest cats we ever had. We have pictures of Sara carrying her by holding her around the neck. The poor animal’s eyes are bugging out and her tongue is hanging out but she never once scratched her. She was also the first cat that took ownership of me. I didn’t recognize it as such because it was an unfamiliar concept, despite having known McKuen’s poem for years. She would wait until I was sitting in a comfy chair or on the couch and drape herself over my shoulders, purring happily. She may have been Sara’s cat but I was her person.
Kitty had died not too long after we moved in with my in-laws while I went to grad school. My in-laws had a black, long-hair named Itsy-Bitsy whose name was shortened to Bitsy because it was easier for Sara to say as a toddler. It amused me that Bitsy seemed to be wherever I was. I still did not understand the concept of being owned by a cat. After we moved to West Virginia, we were without a cat because our landlord would not allow us to have any pets. But whenever we came home, there was Bitsy, attaching herself to me wherever I was. It was a source of never-ending wonder and surprise because I still did not picture myself as a cat person.
When we returned from WV, one of our first acquisitions was a condo and a Himalayan female that we named Kaitu (Like the Himalayan mountain, K-2… get it?). For whatever reason, she took an active dislike to Joy. She didn’t last long and she never really fit in.
There followed several less memorable cats and then came NoNuts. NoNuts was a fairly good-sized buff-colored longhair male who my mother-in-law had acquired. She never really seemed to settle on a name for him alternately calling him Buffy, Tuffy, Scruffy, Muffy or names of a similar sound. They decided to have him neutered and dropped him at the vet the day they were leaving for Florida for the winter. They told us to pick him up and keep him for the winter and they’d take him back when they came back north. As a joke, we started calling him NoNuts, for obvious reasons. By the time they returned from Florida, he only answered to that name and he would not let them anywhere near him. so NoNuts became our cat, one of the very few males we ever owned.
NoNuts was a tough guy who preferred spending time outside but he also took ownership of Joy and was devoted to her. When we moved to a new house, he went out one day and never came home. We were devastated because we had lost three other cats in a similar manner shortly before that. When we were finally able to sell our old house, the night before the closing, we did a walk-through. From the back yard I heard a cat crying. I opened the door and in walked the scrawniest, filthiest, skinniest version of NoNuts you can imagine, with one paw stuck through his flea collar. He had gone out that day and gone where he thought home was. He had lost about half of his weight and had existed by eating the small frogs around the swimming pool. About a thousand dollars in vet bills later, he had become the golden cat. But he was home with us. He stayed with us until he was over nineteen years old, apparently healthy right up to the point where he was suddenly unable to care for himself. We let him go and allowed him to be put down because it was his time. We, especially my wife still miss him.
To me, the gold standard in cats was Butter. We adopted her from the vet. She was a long-haired gray kitten. On our way home in the car, she lay like a lump in my wife’s lap. As soon as we got her into the house, she ran for the darkest corner of the kitchen and would not come out. We left her alone and put out a dish with food and water. Eventually she came out. We were unsure of what to name her but I settled on Feather. That was until she got comfortable around us. She was one of those cats who would repeatedly and strongly butt her head against your hand until you pet her. Thus, the name Butter. The week we got her, my wife had to suddenly go to Florida because her mother was hospitalized. She was gone for almost a month. In that time, Butter started sleeping next to me and attached herself to (well, took ownership of) me. She would drape herself over the computer monitor when I was sitting at the computer and would let one paw hang down in front of the screen. Sometimes, she would crawl into my lap and refuse to leave while I sat at the keyboard. She was one of the cats that went out one day and never came home. I still miss her.
We had three cats that came from one litter: Pyscho, a long-haired black, female, Tribble, a tuxedo-colored short-haired male and Trouble, an almost identical slightly smaller female. Psycho was laid-back and gentle once she grew up. She earned her name as a kitten by climbing the drapes and walking along the curtain rod and by laying on the top edge of a doorway to the half-bath off the family room. Trouble and Tribble wound up being renamed Baby Boy and Baby Girl because we kept mixing up their names. They were just sweet cats. Psycho was also unique in that she was allergic to her own cat dander and had a constantly runny nose. All three of them, at various times, went out and never came home.
After Butter disappeared, we adopted another long-haired gray female I named Suvwi, the Klingon word for “warrior.” When we got her she was a tiny kitten but she faced down my mother-in-law’s French poodle. Okay, the poodle wasn’t very large but he towered over her and she stood her ground. She quickly took ownership of me and was another who would sit in my lap while I was at the computer. I had decided, by then, that the cats were no longer going to be allowed to be outside cats. We had lost too many already.
Sara had a couple of cats that she raised as kittens, April and Trinity. She brought them with her when she moved back in with us for a while. April is a long-haired female calico tabby who is dumb. If T.S. Eliot had written about her in Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, she would be April, the cat of the Short Bus. Trinity was a gray long-haired Tabby. Sadly, she lost her tail due to a wound and something went wrong inside her and she could not eat. In mercy, we had her put to sleep. April is still with us. Her favorite thing is to pull a pair of socks out of my drawer, carry them downstairs in her mouth, then yowl as if she has had a kitten. Like I said, April’s not too bright. In fact, she’s as dumb as a dog.
A friend of Sara’s had a tiny short-haired white female with colored spots around her ears and a calico striped tail. Her name was Rascal or Cally for short. The friend’s younger child turned out to be allergic to cats so Sara brought her home to us. She was tiny, even by small cat standards and we quickly renamed her Little Bit. For the longest time, we could not figure out why Suvwi was constantly beating her up. When Suvwi disappeared, Little Bit was suddenly attached to me. Then it became clear. Suvwi had been guarding her turf and her ownership of me from Little Bit. Now that Suvwi was gone, Little Bit owned me 100%. I have never had a cat as devoted as she is to me. If she had her way, she would be touching me 24/7, 365 days a year. She literally follows me around the house when I get up to do something. If she is awake and I’m home, she is wherever I am. And she’s still tiny. And neither Little Bit nor April are allowed to go outside. At all!
I have long said I will never own another dog with the possible exception of if I was ever to need a seeing-eye dog. But I will never be without a cat. I am a cat person, lock, stock and barrel and will always be. Who knows, maybe I WAS a cat in a past life.
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