Optimistic

Nihilism
 Optimistic
Nihilism

A Psychologist’s Personal Story

& (Biased) Professional Appraisal
of Shedding Religion

David Landers, Ph.D.

IM Print Publishing
Austin
Thank you for purchasing this book!
A portion of royalties will be donated to hunger charities.

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© 2016 by David Landers. All rights reserved.

However, you likely do not need permission to quote this book. The legal doctrine of fair use permits
you to quote reasonably sized portions of a work such as this for the sake of—among many other things
—“criticism, comment … or research.” Just cite the source accordingly. For more information about
quashing the “Culture of Fear and Doubt” surrounding copyright practice, see Reclaiming Fair Use:
How to Put Balance Back in Copyright by Aufderheide & Jaszi (2011, University of Chicago Press).

Personal stories from David’s clinical practice herein have been used with permission and/or thoroughly
disguised to protect the confidentiality of the persons involved.

General cover concept by Matthew Arnold, cargocollective.com/mattarnold

Other graphics and consulting by Lance Myers, lancefever.com and Egan Jones,
eganjones.com

First Edition;
ISBN 13: 978-0692440780
ISBN 10: 069244078X
For my mom, whose hard life was not a test, experiment, or
example.
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I
was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in
this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years
put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of
responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and
the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred
million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and
with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
— Mark Twain

When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity

before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the
infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am
afraid … I marvel that people are not seized with despair at such a miserable
condition.

— French mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal (born 1623)

 Contents

Introduction

1 Ignorance and Bliss

2 Fear Itself

3 Growing Up with God

4 Not Necessarily Stoned, but Beautiful

5 Candide, Dionysus, and Gravity-Induced Loss of

Consciousness

6 The Doomsday Defense

7 The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways … but Evolution Just

Works!

8 Antitheism and the Disprivileging of Religion

9 The Meaning—er, I Mean Sanctity of Life

10 What Does a Nihilist Look Like?

11 Monster-Jam Epiphany, or When Cameras Took Over the

World

Appendix How to Ruin Your Kids without Even Trying

Notes
Acknowledgements

About the Author

 Introduction

I’VE WRITTEN THIS BOOK largely in response to modern popular books on

atheism, such as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher
Hitchens’s God is Not Great. Although I agree with the vast majority of the
sentiments presented in these works, I find the authors’ tones unnecessarily
condescending and hostile towards believers.
If we modern atheists truly want our message to be heard, we need to
rein in the vicious and degrading attacks. Hostility never convinced anyone
of anything; it’s only engaging for the people who are already on your side.
Anyway, everyone should know by now that faith, by definition, is exempt
from logical argument. We’ll make a lot more progress if we can just calm
down and live by example. (Not to mention, our hostility suggests that we are
insecure, which we should also examine.)
So, my book employs a different approach, being a more personal and
(hopefully) poignant read. As I share how I ventured from being a very
devoted, God-fearing child to a profoundly atheistic adult, you’ll see that I
was miserable as a Christian—on the brink of suicide at times—but have
been much more functional and content since converting to atheism. Now, if
you don’t enjoy autobiography so much, don’t be discouraged: A clinical
psychologist by trade, I’m able to tell my story with frequent interjections of
psychological discussion, the stuff that everyone likes to read about, such as
mental illness, drug addiction, and even violence.
Although not degreed in philosophy I’ve studied it informally for much
of my life, so I’ll also include input from the masters, from Lucretius to the
band Suicidal Tendencies. Be aware that I’ve tried to keep the psychological
and philosophical discourse intellectual and provocative while accessible to
—and perhaps even fun for—the lay reader. I want my book to appeal to
Richard Dawkins and his disciples, but also to high school students and such
who are only just beginning to ask questions about spirituality.
 Chapter 1 sets the stage for the rest of the book, being a casual
conversation about contacting reality and being honest about it, potentially
always. As far as religion is concerned, I believe that we actually all know
the truth deep down (that it’s the product of humans, not divinity), the more
interesting issue regarding how much of that truth each of us is willing—or
able—to endure.
In chapters 2 through 4 I’ll disclose how my home life as a devoted
Christian child was fraught with turmoil and even abuse, leading to
dangerous substance addiction as a teen and onward to significant mental
illness as a young adult.
In chapter 5, I’ll walk you through the philosophy, history, and science
that I found in college that slowly whittled away my faith. Since becoming a
full-blown atheist, studying psychological defense mechanisms (chapter 6)
has helped me understand why humans feel that they need religion. This
cemented my newfound atheistic position, but also has helped me to become
compassionate towards those who remain faithful. Understanding evolution
(chapter 7) has contributed as well simply by making so much sense.
Evolution really is beautiful, the more you understand it. In fact, many of us
atheists find a godless creation much more fascinating and precious than one
created by any deity.
Chapter 8 is the most Dawkins-esque chapter of the book, as we
discuss the toxicity of religion. I try to keep it civilized, but arguably violate
my own proposition that we drop the hostility. It’s hard to not get angry, and
I’ll explain why.
Chapter 9 takes it all up a notch, more so than many popular modern
atheist writers seem to want to venture, by openly and frankly exploring
nihilism. Nihilism, as used in this book, is the position that there is no
objective purpose to or transcendence from our lives beyond that endowed
by evolution: that is, making and raising babies. However, I’ll argue that this
perspective doesn’t have to entail chronic despair. On the contrary, I will
explain (as have others) that such a nihilistic perspective may ironically be
the one that honors reality the most. It helps us to be present in every moment
and to be sensitive to the existence of others, as well as to the universe at
large, much more than an authoritarian commandment ever could.
Chapter 10 is a more personal snapshot of myself at the time of this
writing. I’m asking readers to spend some time in the mind of a self-
described nihilist and see what it’s like. It’s probably not what most people
would expect.
Chapter 11 winds it all down with some relatively explicit advice on
how all of us—atheists and believers alike—can approach living in a more
wholesome manner, based on some of the principles we’ll have discussed
throughout this book.
Finally, I’ve included an appendix that complements the self-help feel
of chapter 11 but does not discuss spirituality directly at all. Here, I present
the often-ignored but exceedingly invaluable topic of emotional validation.
Emotional validation is the interpersonal dynamic in which we attend to and
acknowledge the inner experiences of others, especially those of our growing
children but also those of the adults in our lives. Comprehending these
dynamics should enrich your life, regardless of how spiritual you are. If
nothing else, it may help explain why a psychologist like myself is so
obsessed with being in touch with reality.
 CHAPTER 1

Ignorance and Bliss

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an
overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of
beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be
paralyzed to act.

— Philosophical anthropologist Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

ON THE FIRST DAY of my Introduction to Forensic Psychology class each

semester, I enjoy beginning to dispel the common misconceptions of the field
for my students. Indeed, the notion of forensic psychologist tends to conjure
fantastic and dramatic scenes: a charismatic criminal profiler donning night-
vision goggles, bursting in on the serial killer “dancing around his room in a
pair of his mommy’s panties, singing show tunes and rubbing himself with
peanut butter.”1
As I have to explain to my students, Hollywood has greatly
sensationalized the field; it’s not like this at all. In fact, criminal profiler is
somewhat of a mythical profession. Last I heard, even the FBI has had, at
most, about a dozen profilers working at a time.2 Turns out, most are not even
psychologists: They’re police officers or FBI field agents who have worked
their way up the ranks in their respective institutions. And the punchline is
that research suggests that they’re not particularly helpful. Although they tend
to contribute to investigations, they can rarely claim most of the credit for
actually solving them. Critics will go further, pointing out that criminal
profiles can even impede progress—or worse—by focusing investigators’
efforts in the wrong direction. Infamous failures include the D.C. Sniper
(who virtually no one expected was African-American) and the 1996
Olympic Centennial Park bomber in Atlanta (which led to falsely accused
Richard Jewel’s picture being posted all over the world as the prime
suspect). Due to documented inaccuracies such as these, expert testimony
regarding criminal profiles is not likely to be allowed in many courtrooms.
“But, Class, don’t be disappointed!” Back on Earth, doing real forensic
work as a psychologist is very exciting. I don’t get to arrest serial killers, but
I do get to do competency-to-stand-trial and insanity evaluations on real
criminals—a small minority of whom have killed before, some perhaps even
serially.
To perform my duties, I get to be a psychologist, a lawyer, and a
detective—all rolled up in one. The psychologist meets the defendant face-
to-face and uses his training to nail down the right diagnosis and to comment
on competency or insanity, whichever the case may be. Of course, sometimes
the right diagnosis is malingering, that is, the defendant is trying to act crazy
when he isn’t. Alternatively—and perhaps even more challenging and
interesting—the defendant may be dissimulating, that is, trying to act well
when he’s actually mentally ill. This is a lot more common than you might
suspect! People with psychosis typically don’t want others to know about it.
When someone starts spouting off all about their hallucinations and paranoia
in the first few minutes of a meeting, I’m naturally suspicious.
Besides the psychologist, the lawyer element has to know the law,
which often provides its own definitions of psychological constructs,
whether “insanity,” “dangerousness to self or others,” or “sexually violent
predator.” Reading the law can be engaging, especially if you have an
obsessive personality like mine. In the law, every and and every or counts,
sometimes punctuation alone leading to heated debate regarding the original
intent behind the law in question.
And finally, the detective part gets to pore over police reports and other
records, which rarely disappoint. If you like gore, sure, sometimes you end
up with crime scene photos, in all their blatant, Technicolor cruelty. With the
increasing accessibility of video, criminals are more often recording their
crimes. Sometimes it’s as mild as a school yard vendetta, but other times it’s
torture, the kind of shit you might see in a Rob Zombie movie. I honestly
don’t care for the hard stuff much myself anymore and have basically stopped
looking, unless it’s clearly relevant to the evaluation at hand. It rarely is.
I suspect that many of my colleagues find this work rewarding because
they feel that they’re contributing to some greater good for society. However,
I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a bit more selfish, appreciating the work more
for the compelling personal experiences it provides. I often describe forensic
evaluation as a very “existential” enterprise, in that it provokes a lot of
introspection and contemplation, which is what really gets me up in the
morning. Although traumatic at times, the work has also helped me mature in
a healthy way by putting things in perspective, the little things over here and
the important stuff over there. I’ve never felt as thankful as I have on any one
of the hundreds of occasions while driving away from a jail or psychiatric
hospital having just completed a psychological evaluation. I’m so thankful
because I’ve got my sanity and I’m free. You know, the basics. Now, there’s
something less gratifying about feeling good when it comes at someone else’s
expense. But, back on the other hand, there’s also no denying that sunlight
feels about as good as can be once you’ve been deprived of it for a few
hours, surrounded by insanity, stink, and injustice.
Confidentiality restrictions prevent me from discussing my own cases
in much detail, but I can discuss those that are declassified. One of the most
provocative in all of forensic psychology is that of Alvin Bernard Ford. In
my class, we talk about him at the end of the course because that’s when we
cover the death penalty. However, for my book, it makes for a better
beginning. So, go brush your teeth, put on your jammies, and get ready for
bed, and I’ll tell you his story.3
Alvin was attending high school in Florida during the late 1960s when
public school desegregation in the South was in full swing in the wake of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. His high school, Lincoln, was converted into a
middle school, so he and other black students were transferred to Palmetto
High to be a part of this momentous chapter of American history. School staff
say that Alvin took it all in stride; besides a period of what appeared to be
traditional senioritis, he was “a good student … from a nice family.” He
seemed to handle integration relatively well, as he “wanted you to know he
was black but he didn’t push it.”
No doubt, Alvin’s high school résumé was a lot more distinguished than
mine: Vice President of the Science Club, Vice President of Future Farmers
of America, a member of Future Business Leaders of America—and he
showed a cow at the county fair! Alvin played basketball and was a
linebacker on an 8-2 football team, his coach describing him as “hard-nosed,
very aggressive … One of our best players. First string. Very reliable.”
Alvin’s senior yearbook photo shows a handsome young man who just seems
to exude athleticism. He looks like the kind of black guy that a white kid like
me always wanted to be friends with, in hopes that some of his cool would
somehow make me cool by association.
After high school, Alvin tinkered with the idea of college but ended up
working instead, first at a Red Lobster. While still legally a juvenile, he was
caught (along with some accomplices) stealing $3,000 worth of automotive
supplies from a moving company. As often the case for such a first offense,
adjudication was deferred and he was placed on probation. I’ve never come
across any speculation about the psychological dynamics behind the decline
in Alvin’s behavior, but I have to wonder if it was the earliest manifestations
of what would later be full-blown schizophrenia.
In any event, Alvin later worked at another restaurant in Gainesville
where he became assistant manager. However, it was apparently too much
responsibility and he lost the job. Ironically, he next landed a position as a
guard at a state prison, very near the same facility where he would eventually
be imprisoned for the rest of his own life. Completing another twist, Alvin
lost that job in the early 1970s because he was arrested on suspicion of
having robbed the same Red Lobster where he worked after high school. He
allegedly forced the manager at gunpoint to open the safe, leaving with
$4,000. However, the case was dropped because of dubious eyewitness
testimony. For reasons that seem unclear, Alvin couldn’t keep steady
employment thereafter, and suspicions are that he turned to dealing drugs.
Again, I speculate that his mind wasn’t quite right.
What is more clear is that on July 21, 1974, twenty-year-old Alvin and
three accomplices attempted to rob a different Red Lobster from where he
had previously worked, this one in Fort Lauderdale. The whole thing went
down in broad daylight, the robbers wearing stocking masks like something
out of one of the myriad television police dramas of the time. During the
robbery, a couple of potential witnesses escaped, so Alvin’s accomplices
bailed. Alvin lingered and was the last to leave, perhaps not quite as willing
to give up as the others.
Officer Dimitri Ilyankoff was the first officer to arrive on the scene, and
he did so alone. He was a 15-year veteran of the police force, “quiet, soft-
spoken and [he] loved to fish … Next to his family, he loved the water most.”
When Alvin and Officer Ilyankoff surprised one another at the back
door of the restaurant, the latter was armed with only a clipboard. Alvin shot
him twice in the abdomen. A witness who had been watching through the
slatted door of the closet in which she was hiding testified that Alvin ran to
the officer’s car but the keys weren’t there. He returned to Ilyankoff, who
was wounded but in the process of radioing for help, and demanded the keys.
Once he acquired them, he took Officer Ilyankoff’s own revolver, pressed it
behind his ear, and executed him. Ilyankoff was the first officer murdered
while on duty in Fort Lauderdale since the force was founded way back in
1911. His wife would later hold a private memorial service and spread his
ashes at sea from his boat.
At Alvin’s trial in 1975, the judge described him as a “human animal
that does not deserve to live in the company of civilized man,” and he was
indeed sentenced to death by a jury. He attempted a few appeals over the
years, routine as far as I know, except that on one occasion his execution was
delayed less than 15 hours before he was to be electrocuted to death. At any
rate, each of the routine appeals ultimately failed.
While on death row, Alvin had initially been functioning well, all things
considered. However, after some time, he became “uncooperative,
threatened to ‘kill me some crackers (guards),’ had been found in possession
of homemade weapons, [and] smashed his black-and-white television.” He
eventually demanded that his remaining appeals be terminated and that he be
executed. The state was willing to oblige, but Alvin got another stay, again
less than 15 hours before the moment of truth—but this time it wasn’t routine.
This time, his defense was arguing that Alvin was not mentally fit to be
executed, and the associated arguments would ascend the judicial ladder, all
the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.
It was revealed that behind all of the hostility was a bizarre web of
psychotic delusion. In the early 1980s, after hearing of a Ku Klux Klan rally
in nearby Jacksonville, Alvin had come to believe that the organization was
conspiring with others to somehow force him to commit suicide. He felt that
the guards in his prison were involved, and that they had been killing people
and burying their bodies in the prison walls. According to the United States
Supreme Court syllabus of his case,

he began to believe that his women relatives were being tortured

and sexually abused somewhere in the prison … The hostage
delusion took firm hold and expanded, until Ford was reporting
that 135 of his friends and family were being held hostage in the
prison, and that only he could help them. By ‘day 287’ of the
‘hostage crisis,’ the list of hostages had expanded to include
 ‘senators, Senator Kennedy, and many other leaders.’ … Ford
appeared to assume authority for ending the ‘crisis,’ claiming to
have fired a number of prison officials. He began to refer to
himself as ‘Pope John Paul, III,’ and reported having appointed
nine new justices to the Florida Supreme Court.

Particularly relevant for his legal situation, Alvin apparently no longer

believed he could be executed: “I know there is some sort of death penalty,
but I’m free to go whenever I want, because it would be illegal and the
executioner would be executed … I can’t be executed because of the
landmark case. I won. Ford v. State will prevent executions all over.” (Ford
v. State was Alvin’s earlier routine appeal, which he lost.) Record has it that
Alvin also felt he was immune because “he owned the prisons and could
control the Governor through mind waves.”
Alvin’s case opens an unfathomable can of worms; it probably deserves
a whole book unto itself (apparently there is one, but I have to admit I
haven’t read it). We could talk about the diathesis-stress model of
psychopathology, the well-accepted notion that individuals may carry genes
that predispose them to a mental illness such as schizophrenia, but the illness
lies dormant unless a traumatic stressor (such as sexual abuse, homelessness,
and of course, imprisonment) arouses it.4 We could talk about psychosis and
the different types of delusions, at which point we’d have to investigate the
fascinating relationship between grandiosity and paranoia, which kinda seem
mutually exclusive at first glance but often go hand-in-hand. We could devote
significant time to discuss whether Alvin was feigning his illness. Certainly,
some folks suspected he was, but most, including the justices of the United
States Supreme Court, believed it was real. Based on what I’ve read, I
concur. Some folks can fake psychosis quite well for a few minutes, maybe
even hours, but not for months or years. Not like that. As I tell my students,
often the most difficult part of interacting with a malingering defendant is not
busting out laughing at their poor attempts to act crazy.
Cases such as this also raise all sorts of ethical issues, some quite
nuanced. One of my favorites regards the psychiatrists who prescribe the
medications for insane death-row inmates such as Alvin Ford. That is, the
psychiatrist’s Hippocratic Oath says something about “I will keep [the sick]
from harm and injustice.” Not even considering the “injustice” part, is it right
to treat a delusional patient, if successful treatment necessarily means he is to
be put to death?
These issues are all wonderfully provocative, but the one that I am most
compelled to consider is the following: What would I prefer if I found myself
in a situation like Alvin’s? Would I keep the delusion that I’m in control
and that I’m going to survive, or would I take the treatment, exit the
delusion, and face the reality of my execution? Let’s simplify, and assume
there’s no physical pain either way. What I’m interested in is the mental
aspect, the awareness of impending annihilation—or not—all else being
equal. And all you have to do to venture to the other side is take a pill,
Matrix-style.
When teaching various psychology courses over time, I’ve conducted
informal polls of my students regarding what they would prefer in a situation
similar to Alvin Ford’s. About two-thirds to three-fourths have preferred the
delusion, at least when queried on the fly. Although my classes have not
exactly comprised a random sample of the population at large, their position
corroborates my hunch that most Americans prefer the delusion over the
truth.
Well, Class, you’re out of luck: The United States Supreme Court ruled
that it would be cruel and unusual to execute Alvin in his delusional state.
Paradoxically, however, one rationale provided is that executing the
delusional “simply offends humanity,” partially because we have an
obligation to “protect the condemned from fear and pain without comfort of
understanding.” Legally, at least in the context of execution, appreciating
when and why one is about to die is regarded as the more humane option.
Otherwise, to address those cases in which the convict is simply so
delusional that “fear and pain” are not likely to be at issue, the Court
included another rationale to postpone executions: In these cases, execution
would now have “questionable retributive value.” Of course, it’s not all
about treating the convict humanely. We do want him to suffer, but only for
the right reasons.
There was one specific rationale that may be easier to digest: Executing
the insane does not permit him to properly prepare for death, such as by
seeking atonement. Alvin Ford seems to be an exquisite example: He thinks
he’s the Pope, that he’s the one who has the authority to forgive others!
I’m not sure if this makes me smart or stupid, but I see the situation
more like the Supreme Court than like the majority of my students. Not just
the prepare-for-death issue, but the other issues of humane treatment as well,
however grotesque and twisted the situation is overall. That is, I have always
had the opinion that I’d want the pill, if given a choice. It’s a reflexive
position over which I really don’t even have to deliberate. I feel like I want
to know if I’m dying, and why. Give me the pill, remove my delusion, so that
I can die lucid. In my gut, knowing the truth simply trumps peace of mind. I
need to be in touch with reality as much as possible, regardless of how much
it hurts.
In the highly recommended The Wall, Jean-Paul Sartre’s character
Pablo apparently feels similarly. He’s just been sentenced to death by firing
squad, to take place at dawn only hours away. In the interim, he’s falling in
and out of sleep in his holding cell:

Perhaps I lived through my execution twenty times; once I even

thought it was for good: I must have slept a minute. They were
dragging me to the wall and I was struggling; I was asking for
mercy. I woke up with a start and looked at the Belgian: I was
afraid I might have cried out in my sleep. But he was stroking his
moustache, he hadn’t noticed anything. If I had wanted to, I think I
could have slept a while; I had been awake for 48 hours. I was at
the end of my rope. But I didn’t want to lose two hours of life:
they would come and wake me up at dawn, I would follow them,
stupefied with sleep and I would have croaked without so much as
an “Oof!”; I didn’t want that, I didn’t want to die like an animal, I
wanted to understand.5

It’s a pretty passage to me, obviously horrifying at the same time.

Now, in an effort to be as open-minded as possible, I’m forced to
entertain the notion that maybe the pain or true realization of dying will
change my mind. Perhaps I’ll want the delusion, when push comes to shove.
David Ulin quoted much maligned celebrity atheist Christopher Hitchens in
the Los Angeles Times, in a memoir of the latter’s death in 2011:

“Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half

ago,” [Christopher] observed in his final column for Vanity Fair,
“I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced
 with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order
to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense … However,
one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar
principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I
find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used
to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement
that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”6

I chose to open this book with Alvin’s story because it is such a wonderful
metaphor for religiosity. In a sense, we are all like Alvin Ford, each facing
our imminent mortality and with a choice whether to acknowledge it. Alvin
can take a pill to face his while we can join a religion to deny ours.
Although it will be difficult to conjure a scenario more provocative
than Alvin’s, it can still be engaging and enlightening to contemplate the
dilemma of acknowledging reality in other contexts as well. Back here on
Earth—specifically, on bar stools at happy hour, I recently ended up chatting
it up with a medical student who was completing her residency in a hospital
emergency room. She was visibly unsettled when she told me a story about a
young man not far past adolescence who died on her shift due to a poisoning
of sorts. His was not a peaceful death. It was very dramatic, with hollering
and flailing and other dying behavior, the likes of which I had never heard or
even seen in a movie, Hollywood or otherwise. The closest thing that comes
to mind is a vague memory of a cartoon of Bugs Bunny having a heart attack,
or I suppose he had been faking one.
The resident was emphatic when describing the climax of her story:
When surviving loved ones approached hospital staff, they insisted that the
supervisor tell them that the young man didn’t suffer. The doctor was happy
to oblige, reporting that he passed calmly like most of us fantasize about,
without as much as a chest-grab. “Thank you,” as if Doctor Soandso was the
messiah saving souls.
During a staff debriefing, doctors and doctors-to-be explored the
Hippocratic Oath, again, the one about not doing harm. Supporters apparently
argue, “What’s the point of causing more suffering in this situation, when
soothing is so readily available (for the survivors, that is)?”
Of course, this is a personal opinion, a value judgement not necessarily
shared by all medical professionals. For the record, I personally doubted the
doctor’s choice, despite the circumstances, and wonder whether it was right
to lie to the survivors, in the Grandest Scheme of the Cosmos. I can imagine
myself responding to an order like “Tell me he died peacefully” with
something more akin to “I’m so sorry, but I can’t,” and cross the subsequent
bridges accordingly. Admittedly, I am speculating. At the moment of truth,
and given a history of working in the war zone that is an ER, I might pull a
Christopher Hitchens and tone it down even more.
Worth noting, other professionals on record have publicly condemned
the notion of doctors lying to patients, at least in other contexts. I recently
came across an article explaining that prescribing placebos is becoming
increasingly popular in Germany, even advocated by the German Medical
Association under certain circumstances.7 The article was largely about the
ethics of the practice (scientists do know that placebos can be effective at
times; that part is hardly debatable). Apparently, the American and British
medical authorities regard the deception as unethical. More specifically, a
professor of medicine at Harvard condemns the practice, adding “That’s
what I call lying … It would be unacceptable in the US [where] we have a
commitment to transparency … The Germans seem to be saying that it’s OK
to lie a little.” For argument’s sake, I know of at least one American ER
doctor who believes it’s okay to lie a little, too.
Personally, I’ve learned from experience that I simply can’t do it. I have
to tell the truth, and may even be a bit obsessed with doing so. I had to tell
my roommate in college, Roman, who has been one of my closest friends
since age 16, that I believe he was the one who accidentally killed our cat. It
was an absolutely horrific experience. After a night of University of Texas-
sized keggers, he had driven home and, in a moment of frivolity and
rambunctiousness, parked his car in the front yard. Our cat, “Dog,” was
nowhere to be seen the next morning, until finally Roman found her, mortally
wounded, lying in the grass not far from where his car was still parked. It
physically hurts me to type this story even now, more than twenty years later.
Roman was in tears, panicking like I had never seen him before or
since. He somehow picked Dog up, put her in a cardboard box, and rushed
her to the vet, but she succumbed. We hadn’t talked about it much for a while,
until Roman finally asked me months (was it years?) later, very calmly but
directly, during some other beer and/or pot buzz we were sharing, if I thought
it was him. He was so solemn; I’m not exactly sure what he was hoping I
would say. He might have been like that poisoned kid’s loved ones, begging
for me to lie to him, or maybe he really needed to know the truth. Either way,
I had to tell him. I said, calmly and without condemnation, “I think maybe you
did.” He just kinda looked down and didn’t say much. I don’t remember if I
said anything else or just left it at that.
Somehow, I simply felt it was wrong to lie about a Truth that was so
serious, about an event that was so significant to our lives. Telling the truth
seemed more important than averting suffering. Maybe suffering shouldn’t be
avoided at all costs. Maybe if we would just face the horrors of our lives
they wouldn’t be as horrible as we anticipate. And even if they are, maybe
they should simply be respected and experienced as the horrors that they are.
I suspect many readers have difficulty with this position, at least
regarding some of the examples so far. But I also suspect everyone has a
point at which the painful truth is preferred. Consider if your spouse or mate
was cheating on you, like having an affair with someone at his or her office.
Would you rather know, or would you rather live your life, and maybe even
go to your grave, ignorant? It’s interesting: Romantic cheating is something
that we’re usually more interested in knowing about. With cheating, we can’t
tolerate—well, being cheated. Here, we are not merely out of touch with
reality; someone to whom we’re emotionally attached is intentionally
deceiving us, and we won’t be the object of that. Sure, we’ll deceive
ourselves till the cows come home. As long as we’re in control of the
deception, it’s okay.
That said, we mustn’t forget Landers’s First Law of Psychology: “It
depends; exceptions abound.” Ask Elvis:

Honey, you lied when you said you loved me.

And I had no cause to doubt you.
But I’d rather go on hearing your lies,
Than go on living without you.8
Coming down even a little closer to Earth, let’s acknowledge that we have to
choose to be honest (or not) almost every day. And when I say “be honest,”
I’m talking about both to ourselves as well as to others.
At the time of this writing, it’s 2010 and I recently returned from a jaunt
to San Antonio with some friends to see defied, pioneer heavy metal band
Iron Maiden. Now, I was never a true “Maidenite,” but had become intrigued
as a kid, ironically, when I first heard them on this Christian anti-rock sermon
my parents had given me on cassette tape. The preacher guy played a few
samples to present the blatant satanic messages from the band’s infamous
album The Number of the Beast. I, too, was shocked and even a little scared
—but also a bit titillated. It would actually be one of the first albums I ever
bought. I remember listening to it, literally in turmoil, rocking out but at the
same time stressing over my soul.
By the time high school rolled around, I was a pretty faithful wannabe
Maidenite. I had most of their albums and knew most of the words to the
songs therein, but I had never seen them live. Roman and I had this pastime in
high school where we would sit in the parked car, roll up the windows,
smoke a joint, and blare whatever Iron Maiden we had over the stereo. We
called it, aptly, The Iron Maiden Experience. Sometimes, we would invite
Maiden virgins to join us, in hopes to convert them to our Club. We actually
did impress a couple of folks, I think. As you can imagine, this rich history
made going to see them, finally at the age of 40, a momentous occasion.
Perhaps I would finally earn the right to call myself a true Maidenite. If
nothing else, I was finally gonna buy a fucking t-shirt with their raging
skeletal mascot, Eddie, on it!
To set the bar even higher, the Paladia cable music station had recently
been airing Flight 666: The Movie, this fantastic documentary about the
band’s world tour in 2008. It gave me chills—I couldn’t wait to see how the
show would be live, finally! So me, Roman, “Wally,” and our one true
Maidenite friend, “Big Mike” DeLeon, all piled into my tiny Nissan Sentra,
clown-style, and made the eighty miles to San Antonio. We were literally
giddy, with an Iron Maiden classic mega-mix blaring over the stereo the
whole way, leaving the faintest trail of cannabis exhaust through the Texas
Hill Country in our wake. The slightest hitch was when we got there, Mike
seemed a little uncomfortable, being the only Hispanic in the Alamodome,
but otherwise … it was perfect. (And that’s a joke about no Hispanics being
there.)
 Oddly, the band opened with a song I hadn’t heard before. A slight
letdown, but I was still riding the wave of energy and excitement that got me
there. After that, they played another unfamiliar, slightly disappointing song.
Uh oh: My buzz was starting to take a hit. Then another. With each unfamiliar,
slightly disappointing song, I could feel my wave slowly dissipating, until it
hit me kinda hard: They’re not gonna play any classics! This is one of those
damned, fucking Here’s-our-New-Album tours, Like It or Lump It. Shit fuck
hell damn!
How dare they deprive me of the profound experience of reminiscence
I paid to have! And it wasn’t just me: The tension in the stadium felt thick. I
could tell that many other people were equally disappointed, but trying to
behave as if otherwise. I’m not sure how many—maybe even a majority, but I
could feel it, regardless. It was salient as people started sitting down way
too early. The crowd had noticeably (granted, not dramatically) thinned
before the show was over. It was truly dull, and at least a bit depressing.
Afterwards, wiping the remnants of our beer/pot buzzes away at a
nearby Taco Cabana before we hit the road again, I took the floor. I was
nervous but my irritation egged me on, so that I emphatically proclaimed this
was “the biggest disappointment of my adult life.” Sure, I was using
hyperbole to make a point, but the show really did suck. This was bad, and I
wanted to be the one to admit it, goddamnit.
The reaction of my friends was palpable. They had seemed
disappointed before, too, but no one had said so aloud. After my
proclamation, everyone seemed to shift from private disappointment to a
more overt, public depression, joining me. No one repeated my hyperbole,
but neither did anyone contest it, at least not convincingly.
And then I felt bad. Should I have kept my mouth shut? I felt like they
felt worse after I spoke, because by doing so it somehow let them see through
their defenses and realize that the show was indeed lame. (The psychological
principle of cognitive dissonance predicts that the more money one spends
on his Iron Maiden ticket, the more difficult it becomes to admit he didn’t
like the show—ours were $50 each!) Had I not said what I did, each would
have been much less in touch with the depressing reality.
Roman later confessed that another friend of ours, Jennifer, had actually
warned him earlier that the show sucked; she had been to opening night just
twenty-four hours before in Dallas. He hadn’t wanted to say anything, afraid
it might ruin the show for us. On the contrary, now I was irritated at him for
not warning me.

No, I don’t think we must tell the truth always. Trust me, I have a few secrets
about myself, family, and friends that I would never offer, and would refuse
to disclose even if confronted directly. Aside from secrets per se, I’ve
simply had ill feelings at times towards some of my loved ones that I’d rather
them never know about. And, for some reason that I don’t fully understand, I
feel it’s relatively appropriate to lie to children sometimes. Helping a kid
cope with and learn about death via “doggie heaven” and the like doesn’t
necessarily feel like a sin to me. I can’t guarantee that I’ll use doggie heaven
myself if I ever have kids, but I certainly see the value in not risking
overloading children with the brutal truth, lest we traumatize them. I’m just
not so sure about adults. Perhaps facing the brutal truth is part of growing up.
Freud thought so (I’m saving his quote on the topic for later.)
Back on the original hand, I kinda wonder how high the risk is—we
haven’t tested being honest with kids very much. However, in the
wonderfully engaging documentary The Nature of Existence, Roger Nygard
interviews some kid, Chloe, who has apparently been raised atheistic by her
parents.9 At least she has been permitted atheism by them. She looks about
twelve or thirteen years old at the time of the interview, but her poise and
confidence are almost unsettling. She definitely does not seem traumatized or
deranged. If anything, she’s a little cocky about her position, just like so many
grown-up atheists. She asserts with an almost-devious smile, all the more
peculiar because there are braces in it, “There is no afterlife … there’s no
heaven, no hell—you die. Boom! Dead.” Later in the program she adds, with
precocious wisdom, “I think truth is what we’re all really searching for, isn’t
it? Even though sometimes it’s more fun to search for it than actually find it.”
Amen, you little brat.
Austrian philosopher Kurt Baier may have argued that there’s less risk
in raising a kid atheist than Christian. It seems there’s less to lose if the kid
grows up atheist, because she can always convert to Christianity later. On the
other hand, once raised a believer,
 when the implications of the scientific world picture begin to sink
in, when we come to have doubts about the existence of God and
another life, we are bitterly disappointed. For if there is no
afterlife, then all we are left is our earthly life which we have
come to regard as a necessary evil, the painful fee of admission to
the land of eternal bliss.10

I hope by now you’re asking yourself what you would prefer in each of the
instances above, and others like them. Many such scenarios are worth
contemplating from both sides, you as the one telling the lie and you as the
one being deceived.
Is it acceptable to be a party pooper and tell your friends when you had
a terrible time at the show you’ve fantasized about for decades?
Alternatively, are you willing to hear your friend declare he had a terrible
time? Would you mind taking a pill that works, even if it’s not really a
medication? Could you prescribe one, if you were a doctor? Would you lie to
your roommate so that he could come to believe that he did not accidentally
kill his cat after a keg party? Would you want to be deceived if you
accidentally killed your cat? Do you need to know if your lover is cheating
on you? Could you cheat? If a loved one recently passed, and suffered a great
deal while doing so, would you rather know how it happened, or be lied to
about it? Again, if you were a doctor, could you lie about it? And most
importantly, at your execution, would you rather understand what’s about to
transpire, or instead believe that you’re the Pope who’s the one controlling
the switch?
Most of my respective preferences are pretty obvious for me. I have
few regrets about disparaging the Iron Maiden show, although I have to admit
that the experience didn’t feel good or bring us together. I could have faked
it, and I bet everyone would have bought in and the ensuing mood would
have been different. But it would have been fictitious. A false representation
of reality, which feels somehow unacceptable—bordering on obscene—to
me.
 Honestly, I wasn’t sure at the time if telling Roman about the cat was
the right thing to do, but now, having done it, it feels right. Wake up—this is
important! While writing this book, I asked him about the experience, twenty
years later, and he told me that he did indeed want to know the truth, that he
asked me in the first place because he thought I’d tell it. If you’re reading
between the lines (you better be!), you’d be correct to suspect that this whole
experience ultimately brought us together, rather than pushed us apart. My
guess is that the truth has the capacity to bring people together like this much
more than telling lies does. And even if that’s not always the case, even if
lies are just as good sometimes or even better, I still feel like lies are wrong,
almost always.
Now, Elvis Presley, you were one of the first celebrities I ever adored,
but screw you: I would be destroyed to find out that I had been engaged in
romance under false pretenses. No thanks; I don’t want any part of that. I
don’t even want my girlfriend to lie to me when I ask her, “How are you
doing?” If your day sucks, it’s okay to tell me. And that doesn’t just go for
girlfriends; it goes for regular friends as well and even strangers, if they’re
up to it. Let me see your reality, so I can know and try to say something kind
accordingly, instead of tricking me into disregarding it via small-talk. Of
course, it’s your prerogative, but at least be aware that you don’t have to hold
back on my account.
And Doctor, I don’t want you to lie to me, either. It hurts to think of my
loved ones suffering, but I’d rather know the truth. Sure, you can spare me the
gory details, but don’t make up shit out of concern for my feelings. This is not
about me. If you feel it’s important to cater to me at this time, realize that I
believe it’s more respectful to the deceased and his or her dying experience
if I comprehend the reality of how it transpired. And not only do I need to
know how it happened, I need to know why it happened. If it was a drug
overdose, I need to know if it was accidental or intentional. This helps me
construct the reality and respond appropriately, which I believe honors that
dead person’s experience, regardless of how brutal the reality is.
Curiously, for me, the most ambiguous of the scenarios we’ve been
discussing is the placebo. No, I couldn’t lie to a patient about it, out of
respect for her autonomy, but I don’t think I’d be too upset to learn that a
doctor had lied to me about it. It’s interesting to contemplate how this latter
situation may be different from the others. At first glance, it seems to be the
least emotionally laden of the scenarios. There’s less, if any, emotional
betrayal when given a placebo. In each of the other instances we’ve
discussed, the lie prevents the deceived person from experiencing the
appropriate emotions that are due to the cosmos.

1 Brad Pitt’s character Detective David Mills in the movie Seven. The quote is from a draft of the
script by Andrew Walker dated August 8, 1994 as retrieved from
http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/seven_production.html. In the actual movie, Mills imagines it’s the
killer’s “grandma’s” panties, but he doesn’t mention the show tunes. I would have gone with grandma’s
as well, but kept the show tunes. The movie citation is Kopelson, A., Carlyle, P. (Producers), & Fincher,
D. (Director). (1995). Seven [Motion picture]. U.S.: New Line Cinema.
2 These perspectives on profiling are from the textbook I use in my class: Fulero, S. & Wrightsman, L.
(2009). Forensic psychology (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Other forensic psych texts that I’ve
perused share similar sentiments.
3 Adapted from the following: Two separate stories from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune by White, D.
(1984, July 21), “Decade of uncertainty darkens case of Alvin Ford: Former Palmetto man waits on
death row” and “Slain officer’s memory is inspiration to department”; also, Ford v. Wainwright, 477
U.S. 399 (1986). I found the newspaper articles via Google News.
4 In my practice, I observe that imprisonment is indeed one of the more common predisposing events to
psychosis. Solitary confinement and/or rape while there seem to raise the probability of the illness
emerging, from which some inmates never recover. After you’ve met enough of these patients, you
really start to feel that our prison system is inherently cruel and unusual, at least for some inmates.
5 Kaufmann, W. (Ed.). (2004). Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (p. 292). New York: Plume.
6 Ulin, D. (2011, December 17). Christopher Hitchens’ first loyalty was to the truth. Los Angeles
Times. Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/17/entertainment/la-et-1217-christopher-
hitchens-20111217
7 Associated Press. (2011, April 1). German medical group pushes placebos. Globe Newspaper
Company. Retrieved from
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2011/04/01/german_medical_group_pushes_placebo
s/
8 Turk, R. & Handman, L. (1926). Are you lonesome tonight? [Recorded by E. Presley]. [Vinyl record
single]. New York: RCA Victor. (1960).
9 Nygard, R., Tarantino, P. (Producers), & Nygard, R. (Director). (2010). The nature of existence.
U.S.: Walking Shadows.
10 Baier, K. (2008). The meaning of life. In E. D. Klemke & S. M. Cahn (Eds.), The meaning of life:
A reader (3rd ed., p. 106). New York: Oxford University Press.
 CHAPTER 2

Fear Itself
There is no terror in a bang, only in anticipation of it.

— Alfred Hitchcock

BACK IN THE FALL OF 1990, I was still living at home with my parents at the
getting-too-old-for-this age of twenty. One Sunday evening, after an
extraordinary road-trip bender the likes of something out of Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas, I retired to my room to watch TV so that I could
detox and start dreading work in the morning. “Retiring” at the time meant
watching Operation Desert Storm, while my parents did the same in the
living room.
I can still remember lying on my bed watching Patriot missiles and M-1
tanks and night-goggle vision and all, which aroused one of my peculiar old
childhood fears: being drafted. The anxiety of the thought forced me into the
present moment, as anxiety can do, so that my senses seemed to become a bit
more acute and I became a little too conscious of my body. My heart felt
gross inside my chest, all full of blood and squeezing according to some
biological hocus-pocus that I didn’t understand. The thought of being so out
of control of the process made me feel vulnerable, unsure of why my heart
must necessarily keep beating.
The human circulatory system is too complicated; there are so many
places where something can go wrong. Things can clog and electrical signals
can get out of whack. Some hearts just stop beating altogether. What does it
feel like when the heart fails? Does it feel differently depending on how it
fails? Why am I thinking like this? Perhaps my brain knows my heart is about
to stop, and these are the last thoughts of a dying man. As my anxiety spiraled
out of control, the beat became even more salient, and harder and faster.
More biological and out of my control. I panicked.
Suddenly and viciously, I was completely certain that I was going to
collapse and die. Equally certain was that I wasn’t going to die, but that I
was losing my mind. Regardless of what was happening—and despite this
being the first time for it to transpire—there was an eerie feeling of
familiarity, as if this had always been a part of me, my destiny, and that it
would always be like this, for whatever eternity is for me. It was so surreal:
Perhaps I had already died, and this was my hell?
I formulated an unfathomable goal, to just stand up and get to the living
room where my parents were so they could help me, just in case I wasn’t
actually dead yet. Every movement I made was done with utter terror, as if
my continued existence somehow depended on every thought and muscle
contraction. I’ve never felt so much “in the moment.” But this wasn’t Zen or
Nirvana; it was the opposite, a quintessential suffering of cosmic
proportions. Transcendent, but hellish.
Miraculously, I made it to the living room, in a daze, and announced to
my parents bluntly, “Something’s wrong with me.” The words came out
surprisingly calmly, given the horror I was feeling inside. The rest is a bit of
a blur. I recall my mother acting strangely and seeming upset herself. Did she
leave the room? Months later, if not years, she would finally tell me that my
announcement made her have a panic attack, because she knew right away
what was happening and what was in store for me. That was the first time I
ever learned of my mother’s panic disorder. Since then, I’ve always
supposed that she panicked that night because a great fear of hers had been
confirmed, that she had some role in passing panic to me. Even if true, I don’t
hold any sort of grudge. My mother was a sweet lady but just wasn’t
comfortable expressing it.
She also told me later that she gave me one of her Valiums but I
honestly don’t remember that. What I do remember, however, is sitting on the
couch while my parents continued to watch Desert Storm (or was it just my
dad?), afraid to be alone in the event I went crazy again or died again and
needed help. Inexplicably, I did calm down on the couch, even became
sleepy, and eventually went to bed. Now that I think about it, I must have
taken something. I calmed down too well, given what had transpired.
I went to work the next day at my cubicle, cheap-tie office job at the
Blockbuster Video distribution center, feeling almost normal, but also with
this strange sense that an ominous seal had been broken. Sure enough, that
night, Monday, it happened again—same Bat Time, same Bat Channel. And it
happened again Tuesday evening as well. I went to the doctor on Wednesday,
and got some Valium of my own, my first real prescription ever. But oh, there
would be more. So many more.
I was to take 5-10 milligrams every four hours, which I did. It worked
pretty well; although it made me a little groggy, it dramatically reduced the
number of panic attacks I was having. I still had a few, but they were
different, truncated, like if you took a 10-minute panic and compressed it into
30 seconds. I’d be totally incapacitated but it would pass so quickly that no
one could tell. I remember it happening one time while I was driving. As far
as I know, I didn’t swerve or anything but I remember feeling like it had been
dangerous. Anyway, regardless of how much the Valium did help overall, the
doctor told me I couldn’t take it for more than a month because of its
addictive potential.
My doctor, a general practitioner I picked somewhat randomly from my
insurance referral list, was ultimately not qualified to handle my case. After
my month of Valium vacation, he had me come in to discuss the next phase of
my treatment. He mentioned that he had just returned from some conference
on bipolar disorder, and he quizzed me regarding the symptoms that he had
apparently just learned about:
“Do your thoughts race sometimes?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess … especially when I’m panicking.”
“Are you moody?”
“Hell yeah, Doc—-that’s the story of my life! I’m kinda down a lot, but
sometimes I just feel great, for no reason, out of the blue.”
And that’s all it took: I was now a bipolar patient! I actually remember
feeling somewhat soothed being diagnosed as manic depressive, because my
education up to that point (comprised of a couple of community college
general psychology courses and Jimi Hendrix’s song on the topic) had taught
me that it was a serious condition, and my condition definitely felt serious. I
felt validated, and assured that I’d be receiving significant attention as a
result. Alas, over the years, after much more education, including face-to-
face interaction with real bipolar patients, I’d learn he was so incredibly
wrong and that bipolar disorder is commonly misdiagnosed as such by
armies of unqualified professionals like him.1
 The punchline about my doctor is that not only did he misdiagnose me,
but he also gave me the wrong medication for my misdiagnosed condition! I
got Mellaril—an old antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia. It’s not
really for bipolar disorder. Which I never had.
And I can tell you from experience it doesn’t work for panic, either.
Instead, it made me more depressed than I had ever felt in my life. I
remember telling a therapist later that I would have killed myself during that
time but I was so apathetic I just didn’t have the energy to do it. I remember
not being able to eat, because everything was dirt and clay in my mouth. And
I started panicking daily again, off the Valium. I called my doctor and he was
kinda short with me, and told me to double the Mellaril. That didn’t help,
either.
The only good advice that he gave me was to find a therapist. I had
already learned in my community college psych courses that meds are a
band-aid, not a panacea, and that therapy would be necessary to make
legitimate, enduring improvements. I first visited some clinic in Dallas that
was supposed to specialize in anxiety disorders. I was in really, really, bad
shape the day I went for my intake interview. It was around Christmas of
1990, the worst I have ever felt in my life. I had been taking the new dose of
Mellaril, and to boot, I was sick with the flu. I remember being so
disoriented from my anxiety and the medication that I wasn’t even sure if I
was physically ill at the time, even though I was visibly shaking with the
chills. So, I kept my appointment, on a dreary and rainy Texas winter
evening. I remember being so nervous and shaky that I could hardly talk. The
lady who did my intake was really sweet and sensitive, kinda grandmotherly,
but she apparently didn’t have the authority to tweak my meds or intervene
otherwise. She called someone else whom I never got to see, a Wizard of Oz
of sorts, and almost seemed to be pleading with him or her when stating that
“I have this young man here, and he is really anxious, and needs to see
someone.” I was sitting there, shivering, excited about the prospect of
something changing, but I was denied a visit with The Wizard for the time
being. I remember sitting in the car in the parking lot afterwards, trying to
conjure the energy and courage to drive home, and feeling scared in a new
way because the notion of suicide was starting to feel like a legitimate option
for the first time. And it wouldn’t stop raining, and my windshield wipers
sucked. As with my first panic attack, there was this layer of creepy feeling
that this was my destiny, that I had somehow known, all my life, that all of
this would come to pass and that these were The Moments of Truth, unfolding
according to some cruel prophesy.
I reluctantly called the anxiety clinic later in the week to discuss the
next move, but the lady with whom I spoke broke the camel’s back.
Inconceivably, she seemed insensitive, apparently not appreciating the
gravity of what was happening to me. While talking about counseling, she
told me something to the effect of “You don’t know how to live! You have no
self-esteem.” I was so puzzled by her tone because she sounded critical and
confrontational, the last thing in the world I needed at the time. Defensively, I
said, “No, I’m actually very confident,” referring to my abilities as a
functioning citizen, not quite appreciating the difference between self-esteem
and confidence at the time. She corrected me, pointing out that the two are
distinct, but again her tone was abrasive and condescending. I didn’t like
where this was heading, so I didn’t sign up for that shit. And fuck you, bitch,
for talking to me like that when I was damn near ready to die.
I continued in despair like this for a few more weeks, trudging through
my job, pushing pencils over TPS reports with the hope of a slave or
prisoner of war, until my appointment with a psychiatrist finally arrived. It
was at the infamous Timberlawn, a private psychiatric hospital in Dallas.
The place was somewhat legendary and had always been so dark and
mysterious to me, like a haunted house on the hill where children had been
murdered and eaten—or worse. I had heard that there were people there who
cut themselves on purpose, a notion about which I was so horrified but kinda
intrigued.
Well, it turned out that the place was very bright, clean, and nice. Even
better, my doctor was not frightening in the least, but somewhat angelic,
especially in the wake of the previous professionals before him. I remember
him well, decades later, a Jewish fellow with afro-ishy hair; he reminded me
of Ron Silver as Alan Dershowitz in Reversal of Fortune. He was calm and
his voice was really soothing, slightly effeminate but not over-the-top. He
wasn’t the least bit confrontational or insensitive like all those other fuckers.
When I told him I was taking Mellaril, he laughed ever so slightly and just
said, “Let’s stop that.” I immediately felt a tremendous sense of relief,
knowing I was in better hands. He put me on imipramine, a popular
antidepressant at the time used for treating anxiety disorders. He also gave
me some more Valium, but just a few for emergencies. Okay, this all sounds
much more reasonable. First glimmer of hope in weeks, since around
Thanksgiving.
My favorite moment during the interview was how he asked me,
tenderly but matter-of-factly, “Are you suicidal?” I paused, feeling
embarrassed, but was so moved by the whole experience of being asked for
the first time that I felt obliged to be open and honest. I looked down,
avoiding his gaze, and said, “yes.” I didn’t cry, but part of me wanted to. His
reaction was brilliant, in that he didn’t really react much at all, and he just
quizzed me a bit more, a quiz that I myself have now given hundreds of times
since: “I can tell you’re really upset and having a hard time, and I’m sorry …
Now, lots of people feel suicidal from time to time. But I need you to tell me:
Do you have intentions to harm yourself—are you in danger?” Energized by
the whole interaction, I responded, truthfully again, “no.”
Unfortunately, Dr. Dershowitz would be the only skilled professional
with whom I would interact for some time. We got my meds in order, but I
continued to have panic attacks. They were definitely not as frequent as
before, happening about twice a week instead of daily, but they remained just
as frightening. Plus, during the down time, I was often worried about the next
one that could happen at any moment. I had some agoraphobia as well, but it
was kinda backwards from the traditional: Instead of having a fear of public
spaces, I was more afraid of being alone because if I really did have a heart
attack no one would be around to save me. So, for example, driving in the
country was a reliable context for panic. But I couldn’t win: There was also
a significant social component, in that I was also afraid that if I shit my pants
or had a seizure in public the associated humiliation could almost be as bad
as dying or going insane. Another cruel paradox was that drinking a few
beers made me feel normal, even good, so that I was truly immune to panic
when buzzed. Alas, a hangover was another one of the most dependable
prompts for an attack. It’s true what they say about things going up having to
come back down.
Disenchanted with the experience at the anxiety clinic, I figured I’d try
just contacting a psychologist directly. Again, I turned to the PPO list for my
insurance company and found a guy who was close to home. My sense was
that he was particularly successful, but our therapy was pretty much a bust.
We just talked, which of course was nice and maybe helpful on some level,
but I don’t feel that we connected in a meaningful way, nor did we address
the panic directly enough. Oddly, the conversation I most vividly recall is me
telling him—sincerely, I wasn’t trying to be tacky or anything—about a
recent blow job that led to the best orgasm I had ever had. My therapist
suggested that perhaps it was so good because this gal was able to make me
relax more than I had during previous sexual encounters, so I wasn’t worried
about performance. That made a lot of sense to me, and I think he was right.
But it didn’t help my panic attacks at all.

I moved to Austin that fall, in 1991, to start school at the University of Texas.
That was the most exciting time of my life, getting away from home for the
first time, reuniting with my friends who had made the exodus from Dallas to
Austin before me, and becoming immersed among young, vibrant, beautiful,
and open-minded people like I never had before. I recall walking around that
campus, literally, with a big grin on my face as if I was the luckiest person
alive. It was perfect.
Except I was still panicking. I soon signed up for a therapist at the
university counseling center and was assigned to a youngish, Hispanic
psychiatrist-in-training who was apparently doing his residency or
something. He kinda reminded me of how I might eventually be as a therapist,
his suit obviously cheap and his tie askew, seeming slightly unsure of himself
but smart and compassionate nonetheless. Indeed, we connected better than
anyone since Dr. Dershowitz at Timberlawn. But this wasn’t enough, either.
We conversed meaningfully, but again didn’t address the panic as directly as
necessary. The attacks kept coming, even at school sometimes, so that I had
to leave class every now and then because I’d start freaking out that I was
gonna shit or piss my pants or throw-up or pass-out or something. I never
did. I was actually doing really well at school, making straight As almost
every semester. I loved studying, and would bust my ass doing so at least
four nights a week. On the weekends, though, we partied like rock stars.
Rock stars who really loved beer and pot. There didn’t seem to be any hard
drugs in Austin back then, the good ol’ days. I hadn’t even heard of any
white, powdery substances since I left Dallas.
Summers turned into falls, and falls into springs (there is no legitimate
winter in south-central Texas). Imipramine was switched to Paxil, and John
Mackovich—praise the Holy Name of Jesus—gave way to Mack Brown.
At some point, I learned that the psychology department (my major) had
a professor, Dr. Michael Telch, who was apparently some sort of guru on
panic disorder and was running a progressive treatment laboratory that was
allegedly producing results that were virtually unheard of in psychology,
some estimates of success being greater than ninety percent. Dr. Telch had
been a graduate student of the venerable Dr. Barlow at Stanford, a name with
which I was already familiar so early in my psychology education. I
contacted the lab and signed my ass up.
Because the treatment was part of a research program there were both
treatment and control groups; I was randomly assigned to a group that was
obviously some sort of control. Mine was a group therapy format, about 10
panic-ers altogether, very open-ended, where we basically just talked about
whatever we wanted, but of course anxiety was often center stage. Our group
leader was a really good listener, and really pretty. I enjoyed going to those
meetings. All the patients were sweet people; no one was the least bit
obnoxious. Everyone was self-conscious and sensitive, apparently to a fault.
But if the world was more like my group, there would be no war, that’s for
sure.
When that didn’t work (as it wasn’t expected to), the same group was
provided the experimental treatment, which was supposed to work. It was a
cognitive-behavioral exposure therapy, analogous to what might be used to
treat, for example, a specific phobia of spiders. The idea is not new, the
bottom line being that if you face your fear—in increasingly manageable
doses as supervised by a therapist—the fear will eventually lose its steam.
Over 300 years ago, philosopher John Locke described the process of what
is now called systematic desensitization (although I suspect he wasn’t the
first, either):

Your child shrieks, and runs away at the sight of a Frog; Let
another catch it, and lay it down at a good distance from him: At
first accustom him to look upon it; When he can do that, then come
nearer to it, and see it leap without Emotion; then to touch it lightly
when it is held fast in another’s hand; and so on, till he can come
to handle it as confidently as a Butter-fly, or a Sparrow. By the
same way any other vain Terrors may be remov’d; if Care be
 taken, that you go not too fast, and push not the Child on to a new
degree of assurance, till he be thoroughly confirm’d in the former.2

And so, through the longest run-on sentence of the Enlightenment, Locke
captured the essence of anxiety treatments that we use regularly today.
Seriously, this really is how we do it. If you are afraid of spiders, we
find something spider-like that you can handle, something that arouses your
anxiety to about a 4 or 5 on a 10-point scale. For some—no kidding—this
might be simply saying the word “spider.” Once you have confirm’d your
assurance of that task so that your fear decreases to a 1 or a 2, we raise the
bar and find some other 4-5 stimulus to get used to, which might now be a
cartoon drawing of a spider. We keep doing this until you’re ready to hold a
dead spider or even be in the room with a live one.
If you have a fear of contamination we do the same thing but switch dirt
for the spider. If it’s speaking in public, you give me a speech and we work
up from there. Such exposure therapy is also part of treatment for trauma (you
telling your story of victimization is one potentially feared stimulus to
engage). Exposure can even be used in treating personality disorders. For
example, a narcissist may become accustomed to failure if exposed to it in
manageable doses and processed with a skilled therapist. Of course, some
exposures are trickier than others because the feared stimulus is not readily
accessible, but there are options. For example, with a fear of flying some of
the exposure can be done via virtual reality. And so on.
With panic, much of the exposure involves provoking peculiar physical
and psychological sensations. Leading theories assert that people who suffer
from attacks are sensitive to internal cues, that is, bodily sensations that
trigger a “false alarm” that the person is in danger, thereby activating his
“fight or flight” response unnecessarily. Such internal cues include dizziness,
heart palpitations, and shortness of breath. So, we practiced becoming
accustomed to spinning in chairs, jogging in place, and breathing through a
straw (not at the same time, at least at the beginning). For some patients, the
primary trigger for panic is depersonalization—the strange feeling that one
is not himself, as if he is stuck in some sort of waking dream. To approximate
such experiences we were instructed to stare into a mirror. Turns out that
staring into a mirror for 10-15 minutes can create some very peculiar
subjective experiences. No kidding: I hallucinated, and it wasn’t trivial. In
fact, one time when doing this away from the lab as “homework,” I panicked
and had to call someone to calm me down. The other very interesting
exercise that might surprise you is that we breathed from a bag of carbon
dioxide. Apparently, many patients are “chronic hyperventilators”; perhaps
due to chronic, low-grade anxiety, they don’t breathe as deeply as normal and
instead do so in a choppy, shallow manner. Breathing as such disrupts the
proper ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide in the body which can contribute to
uneasy feelings leading to panic. All that hippie crap about taking slow, deep
breaths to relax isn’t just annoying mumbo-jumbo; there’s a medical
explanation for why that feels good.
Well, as clever as all this may sound, I was part of the 2-5% or
whatever who didn’t respond to the treatment and kept panicking just as
before. Fortunately, for ethical reasons, I was not shoved out the door but
provided a graduate student therapist-in-training instead so we could keep on
truckin’. My therapist and her supervisors must have thought I needed a lot of
help, because we began with twice-a-week, one-and-a-half-hour sessions.
Jessica and I connected very well and would ultimately cure my panic.
We continued the exposure therapy at first but it didn’t seem to help, again. I
suppose she just needed to see for herself. But we talked about everything,
much deeper than I had with my previous therapists. I dove in headfirst,
caution to the wind, not hiding anything. I told her about how there had never
been any affection in my home, that the only self-esteem I got from adults
came from teachers at school. I told her about how hard I was spanked as a
kid, and how I was forced to sit at the kitchen table for what seemed like
hours because I was too “finicky” and food I couldn’t eat would not go to
waste. I told her about all the drugs I had done. We talked about sex and
masturbation and fantasies. I told her about the time when I was a little kid
and found a baby blue jay wandering alone in the middle of the street. I
didn’t know what to do because I had been told you weren’t supposed to
touch baby birds or their moms might reject them. I ran inside to tell my
parents but couldn’t get any help. When I ran back outside to do something, it
was too late: It was a blue pancake, the car that had run it over being
nowhere in sight. I told Jessica how I was crushed, destroyed, because I had
made a bad decision and wasn’t able to save the baby by myself. All I
fucking had to do was corral it out of the street without ever touching it. It
would have been so easy.
And we talked about my deteriorating faith. I had grown up in a very
God-fearing home: Although the emphasis was on the fear, I had always had
a legitimate, functional relationship with Him. Even in college, despite not
having been to church in years (outside of weddings and funerals), God had
remained central to my life and identity. But it was college education that
chipped away at my faith, and as doubt began to overtake me I was starting to
feel “bitterly disappointed” just as predicted by Kurt Baier cited in chapter 1
of this book. I remember Jessica attempting to soothe my existential distress
by noting that “there are different degrees of belief.” This felt like another
challenge to my “black-and-white,” “all-or-nothing” thinking problems at the
time, as she was trying to argue that one can believe without believing 100%.
But I couldn’t buy into it. Once the seal broke on my doubt, there would be
no stopping it, just some delays.
One day, while talking as such (I honestly don’t recall the specific
topic; it could have been anything from God to masturbation), I had a full-
blown panic attack right there in that little, windowless, almost-
claustrophobic excuse for a therapy room. I remember feeling it coming on: I
began to feel unreal, a little too present in the present moment. And then a
sense of doom, as if something catastrophic beyond my imagination might
occur soon, like the sun might explode and annihilate all of existence. My
ears buzzed a little and my vision became grainy. It was hard to speak, but I
managed, “I’m starting to have one now.”
Like Dr. Dershowitz, her reaction was remarkably calm; she might have
even have smiled, just a little, and not inappropriately. She took my hand
gently but it wasn’t soothing as one might predict. Instead, it added to the
discomfort but, classic David Landers, I didn’t dare say this out loud for fear
that it might make her uncomfortable. Then, the panic washed over me, that
tidal wave of doom and tension and incoherence for the thousandth time—no,
this was actually the first time this had ever happened. But then it passed,
like it had a thousand times before.
About a month later, I noticed—surprisingly casually—that I hadn’t had
a panic attack since that evening in therapy. It was 1995, and this was the
longest I had gone without an attack since it all started in 1990. And then it
became clear to me why it finally stopped, that we had previously been
missing a critical trigger, the one to which I needed exposure therapy, my
Locke’s Frog: publicity. That is, I had kept my anxiety too private until then,
as I had been so terrified of others seeing it and appreciating how defective I
was. By finally having a panic attack with someone, and telling her about it
as it unfolded, and her being present with me throughout the whole thing,
from beginning to end and beyond, that incredible, indescribable force had
finally lost its—well, force. I didn’t panic again for many more months, and
only about three more times ever. And these were only on isolated, peculiar
occasions, that is, when accidentally smoking too much pot. These never led
to a legitimate relapse.
Surprisingly, once my panic was cured my emotional life really didn’t
improve dramatically otherwise. Honestly, I barely noticed a difference, at
least in the immediate aftermath. That said, I had been changing in other ways
aside from panic reduction; most significantly, as I alluded to moments ago
and will detail later, it was during those years of therapy with Jessica that I
also gave up God and became an atheist. Now that I think about it, finding
atheism and losing panic were approximately coincidental. I suspect some
readers would like me to decisively proclaim that dumping religion cured me
of panic, but I don’t recall feeling a clear connection, at least at the time. On
the other hand, in retrospect, it’s hard to argue that those two momentous
developments weren’t related, at least to a degree. In any event, what I do
recall is that I stayed in therapy for quite some time after both religion and
panic left me because there was still plenty of other crud to work through
regardless.
I suppose the reason my emotional life didn’t improve much otherwise
once the panic left is because my anxiety was actually much older and deeper
than what became evident that Sunday evening watching Desert Storm. Panic
—while a very salient manifestation of my distress—was only the tip of
some other iceberg.

1 Most of the people I meet in my practice who think they have bipolar disorder actually have a more
traditional moodiness/anger problem, related to a personality disturbance or some degree of trauma. But
doctors like the bipolar diagnosis because insurance companies readily pay for the treatment; patients
like it because it readily qualifies them for disability benefits. So, no one’s complaining. To make matters
worse, the meds kinda work, falsely validating the diagnosis (heroin would also reduce their anger but it
doesn’t mean it’s diagnostic or appropriate). Some of the drugs for bipolar actually have abuse potential,
so some folks don’t even take them, instead selling them on the street to supplement their government
checks. Similar dysfunctional dynamics popularized ADHD before bipolar, and autism since. We need to
be much more careful, so that disorder “awareness” does not become disorder hysteria.
2 As quoted in: Hergenhahn, B. R. (2001). An introduction to the history of psychology (4th ed., p.
119). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. The original work is Locke, J. (1693). Some thoughts concerning
education. London: Printed for A. & J. Churchill.
 CHAPTER 3

Growing Up with God

He who spares his rod hates his son, But he who loves him disciplines him
diligently.

— Proverbs 13:24 (NASB)

MY PARENTS OFTEN REMARKED about having been saved by the Lord around
the time I was born (ironic, now that I think about it). They always gave the
impression that this was some sort of dramatic event, but—as with most
issues in the Landers family—they never discussed it openly. Over the years,
I gathered that their pre-Christian days included, at worst, some degree of
alcohol consumption, but I suspect it was nothing compared to how much I’d
drink when I was the same age. Rumor has it they met in a bar, a notion about
which they always seemed embarrassed but that I somehow found endearing.
For as long as I can remember, we had been attending a First Assembly
of God in northeastern Dallas at this modern and imposing TV-evangelical-
looking structure. Some of my earliest childhood memories are set in or
around that building. I can literally remember, albeit vaguely, being in a crib
at the church nursery while my parents were engaged in some other church
function. When I was old enough, I started Sunday school. And when I wasn’t
quite old enough, my parents started making me go to Big People Church. I
was restless and didn’t understand much, but I didn’t dare complain openly,
for fear of bringing judgement from my parents, or worse, from Above.
Ours was a very Pentecostal production, with regular laying-on-of-
hands and speaking-in-tongues. I got to see it all up close, occasionally some
grown-up speaking in tongues while standing right next to me—my own
father, no less, who was a frequent flyer. I’d sneak a peek at his face, careful
not to look too long, like you might when negotiating a solar eclipse. It was
frightening to me at times, but I was mostly in awe. Still am, in a way. I
obviously don’t believe in Jesus any more, but I still think that shit’s real,
whatever it is.
As a family, we were entrenched in that church. For most of my life
growing up, both of my parents actually worked there, my mom as a teacher
in the day care and my dad as the maintenance man/groundskeeper. Because
Dad needed to be available in case of any sort of crisis, he was essentially
obliged to be there at almost every service, twice on Sunday and once on
Wednesday. He wasn’t too keen on going alone, so typically we all went. But
that’s not the only reason we did. My dad was a quintessential Man of the
House, a bit puritanical, the kind of dad who might quote Old Testament
scripture in casual conversation or when lecturing us. Now, he wasn’t
exactly Carrie’s mother from the Stephen King story, but no kid of his was
going to sit at home and watch TV while he and everyone else were at
church. Mom was a less assertive believer. She seemed as faithful but not as
devoted; I suspect we would’ve stayed home with the TV if she had been in
charge. Instead, we had our own personal pew space, informally reserved on
account of our almost perfect attendance over the years, sitting in the same
spot, conspicuously missing if we weren’t there.
I remember feeling so upset some Sunday afternoons, packing up the
weekend early to get ready for another freaking church service on Sunday
evening, only having been home from Sunday school for just a few hours.
Those were the days before cable television, and it always seemed that the
best TV shows for the entire week were on Sunday night, like Mutual of
Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Instead of being a joy, that theme music for The
Wonderful World of Disney was often a cue that it was time to get up from
the living room carpet and clean up for church. It always felt cruel and
unusual to have to trade in Mickey Mouse for some grown-up church service
that I really didn’t have the capacity to follow in a meaningful way. I never
understood why I couldn’t just have my private relationship with God and
skip it. The public relationship, at that big scary building around all those
adults, would never do the private one any justice anyway. I was a lonely,
distressed kid; God was sometimes the best company I had, and quite often
the only comfort I had. I spoke to Him daily, and prayed more formally every
night before sleeping, diligently and methodically thanking him for the
blessings and asking forgiveness for the sins of that day. Praying like this was
not negotiable: I wouldn’t go to sleep without it. As I prayed, I’d feel a calm
come over me. He was listening and I felt safe and no longer alone. Life
wasn’t great, but it was tolerable with prayer.
There was something wrong with our church anyway, manifested as this
cycle of conflict between different factions of the congregation that peaked
every few years. The first time happened when I was too young to be privy to
goings-on, and too young to figure it out myself. All I know is that some
contingent of the congregation had “run off” Pastor Salter, a man I always
saw as intimidatingly angelic. His replacement, Pastor Brach, was also
railroaded out a few years later. After that, representatives from the national
First Assembly of God ruling body or whatever stepped in and somehow
supervised the hiring of the next pastor. It was so weird: Each week a
different preacher was on the pulpit, essentially auditioning, each quite
distinct from the rest. Some were hard-core fire-and-brimstone
motherfuckers, while others were calm and soothing. Fortunately, we ended
up with Pastor McCoy, one of the sweetest human beings I have ever
encountered, hands-down. His entire family seemed so pure, to truly embody
the essence of Christianity, the way you really expect it to be but is rarely
realized. They were all glowing with joy, and it always seemed so real. Still
does today, in retrospect, despite my evolved cynicism since.
In any event, being in my early teens, I was now old enough to
understand what was transpiring when even our sweet Pastor McCoy and his
family were excommunicated (I’m running out of verbs here!). The problem
with the McCoys was that the old-timers wanted a more traditional, preachy
sermon, instead of this younger, more progressive man who liked the idea,
for example, of incorporating a drum set into the musical portions of the
service. I remember it getting nasty, people arguing loudly in the halls after
church sometimes. Sure enough, my dad and our family friends were in the
middle of it all, on the pro-McCoy side. I remember spying from afar,
worried that it was going to come to blows, but it never did.
Back at home, things were rough for me, and always had been. Don’t
get too excited: I don’t have a dramatic horror story to tell, nothing like
David Pelzer’s of A Child Called It fame, whose mother allegedly starved
him and assaulted him and tried to make him eat vomit and feces. My
problem was a lot less dramatic, a lot more commonplace. My problem was
that I was an anxious and sensitive kid, and neither of my parents was
affectionate or otherwise accommodating. You’ll see, I was doomed
nevertheless.
There used to be a debate in psychology regarding whether our personalities
and psychological symptoms and strengths come from nature (that is, our
genes) or nurture (that is, our upbringing). I say “used to” because there’s not
much of a debate today: We know it’s both. Of course, genes and upbringing
interact in complex ways, so many questions remain regarding the relative
roles of each. And of course it depends on the condition in question. Some
mental health issues may be determined almost entirely by genes (for
example, some intellectual disabilities), while others, by definition, require
an experience (for example, trauma). However, most development occurs on
the middle ground, in that our genes form the foundations upon which life
experiences have their impact. Sometimes the genes provide a strong
foundation of strength and resiliency, but at other times a shaky one of
sensitivity and susceptibility. Even with trauma, one person’s bad day could
be another person’s life-changing calamity, depending on their respective
inborn temperaments.
I haven’t had the privilege of genetic testing, but I get the sense that
less-than-optimal genes have been running in my family. I couldn’t help but
notice growing up that my mother’s mother, my Mamaw, was an
exceptionally anxious woman, with the kind of anxiety that just seemed
psychiatric as opposed to psychological—that is, more natured than nurtured.
For as long as I can remember, even when I was really too young to
appreciate what clinical anxiety was, she always seemed so nervous, her
voice quivering when she talked and her hands shaking when she chain-
smoked. On rare occasions, my mother did violate the apparent Landers
Policy of Secrecy and disclosed a few tidbits that confirmed some of my
suspicions, such as that Mamaw had once spent some time in a state hospital
for a “nervous breakdown” of some sort. Keep in mind that back in those
days, “nervous breakdown” could mean anything from full-on psychotic to
just pestering your husband too much. But a few more tidbits over the years
suggested something legitimate, something about a profound fear of spiders
that bordered on delusional … and something about a fear of intruders in the
home, so that one of my mother’s duties as a little girl was to search the
house upon returning from the grocery store or whatever, to look under the
beds and in the closets to make sure someone hadn’t snuck in while they
were gone. That’s what I mean by psychiatric and genetic, not psychological
and learned, if that makes any sense. My mom got some of those anxious
genes, and so did I. I can almost feel them in me sometimes, manifest as
extreme self-consciousness that can smell a little like paranoia. Often when I
hear laughter in public, especially when I’m alone, I reflexively assume it’s
directed at me, and might even do a scan to make sure my zipper’s up. When
taking my turn in line at the post office or ATM I can almost hear the
disdainful thoughts of the impatient people behind me, wanting me to hurry; at
times I’ve kinda felt an impulse to turn around and tell them to fuck off, but
never have.
As you might expect, Mamaw wasn’t well equipped to be the best
mother. On other rare occasions, my mom made vague allusions about
physical abuse in the home, the real thing, Pelzerarian. She talked, very little,
about long days waiting desperately for her fireman father to get home so it
would be safe again. I think one of the kids may have even had to go the
hospital once, or at least should have. That apparently changed things,
alerting my grandfather to what was going on while he was at work fighting
fires, and he put a stop to it. Better late than never, but surely some damage
was already done, and it didn’t fix everything.
So, even if our genes had been perfect, my own mother obviously
hadn’t received the best education on how to be an effective parent, so my
own nurture got off to a bad start shortly after conception in 1969. In her
womb, I was apparently exposed to alcohol and amphetamines on a fairly
regular basis. Those were the days before fetal alcohol syndrome had even
been formally named, and it was not uncommon to give pregnant moms diet
pills so they wouldn’t gain weight while pregnant. And “diet pill” in 1970
didn’t mean green tea extract or ginseng: They were real amphetamines not a
whole lot different from today’s methamphetamine. It’s probably not a
coincidence that those are the two drugs—alcohol and meth—that would
later provide me with the most comfortable highs in adolescence and early
adulthood. I truly believe that my fetal brain was exposed to these, got a little
wired-up to accommodate them, and now feels a little deprived without them
(or, alternatively, feels relatively whole with them).
I’m quite confident that I didn’t get a lot of attention from my parents
during infancy. Mom once told me that I was an exceptionally quiet baby,
rarely demanding attention. I strongly suspect this suited my parents well,
facilitating a policy of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” when choosing whether
to interact with me. Neither of my parents ever had the gift of warmth, but for
different reasons. To finish mom’s story, I would repeatedly have a peculiar
experience during my college years when I would bring a girlfriend or other
guest home with me for a holiday. At some point, I’d leave my guest alone
with my mom while I went to the bathroom or whatever, my mom always
lighting a cigarette as I exited the room. Later, when I was alone again with
my guest, she or he would tell me that while I was away my mom unloaded
about how she always loved me but was afraid to try to show it when I was
little, because her mother hurt her so badly and she was afraid she would
somehow do the same, so she just kept her distance. I’m not sure if that’s all
there was to it, but it is validating to know that she knew something was
wrong. And it makes me really sad to think about all of this, not just for my
own sake but also for that of my mother’s, and her mother’s, and so on.
My father’s problem was simply egocentrism, but a caricature of the
same that we all have. My mother would often joke about it, his
conversations often being obscenely one-sided. It really was remarkable—a
recurring joke from an animated sitcom featuring Homer Simpson or Peter
Griffin—how my dad would demand that you listen when he spoke but he
would reflexively drift off when it was your turn. Of course, it’s not funny
when you’re a baby, learning about reality and forming a sense of identity
and self-esteem. Through education and experience, I feel that this is one of
the most underrated parenting skills one can have: simply paying attention to
your kids. Many psychologists (including this one) believe that there is no
free trial period. Even the littlest of babies is noticing how and to what
degree his parents are interested in him, and he’s forming ideas about his
identity as a being and his value and role in the world. His little brain is
growing very rapidly, making relatively permanent connections, all in the
context of getting attention—or not.
Worth noting, I don’t really recall ever feeling neglected. My only
memories are of perceiving emotional solitude as normal, perhaps even
preferred. Was that preference natured or nurtured? Does an independent
baby have leave-me-alone genes that allow, or even provoke, parents to keep
their distance? Or is it more nurture: Has the baby simply learned very early
on that there’s no use trying? At any rate, Mom did describe one exception
where I demanded attention, that I would go ape-shit whenever my diaper
was dirty. I remain a bit obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness and order
today, and have to entertain that my diaper fits were more about nature than
nurture, because it’s difficult to imagine how I could have learned that
response so early. On the other hand, we can’t forget Landers’s Second Law
of Psychology: “You never know.”
I don’t remember anything about wearing diapers, but I do remember
fear being an integral part of my childhood experience, along with solitude.
Regardless of how it all came about, I was such a scared little kid, just like
my chain-smoking grandma, tense most of the time in general but also cursed
by myriad irrational phobias. I threw the cliché tantrum on Santa’s lap during
my preschool years, and another on the first day of kindergarten. I was
terrified of elevators and even escalators. I was afraid of heights in general
and amusement park rides in particular. I was scared of water. I couldn’t put
my head under water, whether at the pool or even in the bathtub. In fact, for
some time, I couldn’t even put my head under a running faucet. During my
early bathing career, my mother had to rinse shampoo out of my hair like they
do at a salon, except she would use a cup. Getting water in my eyes made me
think I was gonna drown. Swimming pools during summer were never fun for
me. For most of my childhood, it was a humiliating chore, until I finally
became comfortable swimming in my early teens. I’m not sure how that
happened; the fear just dissipated, just like most of the others.
There’s more. I was deathly afraid of blood, always having a fit if I
saw any coming out of me, in any capacity. Drops, even. More dramatically, I
was terrified of anything that resembled a medical procedure. But just like I
had never really been cut or never nearly drowned, I never really suffered
any medical invasions, only vaccinations and such. One of my earliest
memories is of my dad, a doctor, and several nurses wrestling with me so
that I could get some kind of shot in my butt. I was screaming bloody murder,
seriously, like it was the end of the world. I also have the vaguest memory of
problems getting my polio vaccine. Yes, that’s the one where there isn’t even
a shot to take: All you had to do was eat a sugar cube. I remember waiting in
line for that, and I remember being afraid, but I don’t remember anyone trying
to comfort me. I certainly don’t recall anyone explaining that there was no
shot. Who knows, maybe they did and I just didn’t believe them (which
would be interesting in itself). My clearest memory of the whole ordeal is
that some time afterwards I was told that I was “the only kid who cried”
there.
Most of the emotional dysfunction at home would probably best be
characterized as emotional neglect, but sometimes it felt more like emotional
abuse. I vividly recall one evening, ten years old, when my dad and I were
watching our gigantic, full-of-mysterious-tubes television and Burnt
Offerings came on. It’s this creepy horror movie starring Karen Black and
Oliver Reed about a family staying in a haunted house, à la The Amityville
Horror. It was so fucking scary; I was too young to be watching it.
One scene was particularly frightening, in which Oliver Reed—who
was somehow quite imposing by default, somehow reminiscent of my own
dad—momentarily became possessed by a house spirit and attempted to
drown his son in the pool. It probably didn’t help that the boy, played by Lee
Montgomery, was named David. I became overcome with fear in a way that I
had not experienced exactly before or since, and I just started to weep, lying
there on the living room shag.
Unsure of what was happening and what to do, I slowly looked up to
my dad as he sat in his Scary Dad Loungy Chair. His reaction to my panic
was precisely antithetical to what I needed—perhaps more than ever before
in my life. When he realized I was crying and groveling for help, he appeared
frustrated, maybe even mad. At the very least, he was quite inconvenienced
and disappointed. He responded by saying one thing, while kinda shaking his
head and sighing: “You’re such a pussy.”
I did what I could: I retreated, at least emotionally. Physically, I just
continued to lie there, watching that movie and soaking in the trauma. I
remember feeling deeply unsettled by the whole experience, like something
broke, something that wasn’t going to be easy to fix.
Perhaps adding to the confusion and disorientation of it all, I never felt
bitter toward my dad for how he treated me—just detached, estranged.
Maybe I wasn’t bitter because I always knew that it wasn’t his fault, just like
my mother’s distance from me wasn’t her fault, either. For Dad, there was
something about a physically abusive stepfather, a “drunk” who used to hit
my sweet Granny, maybe even in front of my dad. And something about my
dad threatening to kill him if he didn’t stop. That’s really about all I know,
except maybe his stepdad died young (from alcoholism, maybe cirrhosis?).
Regardless of how forgiving I am to my father, incidents like the Burnt
Offerings one messed me up, setting me up for others, like the Stratego
calamity. Someone had given me the Milton Bradley board game for my
birthday or Christmas when I was still a preteen. I hadn’t planned to actually
play the game with anyone, preferring to just tinker informally, alone, with
the board and all the neat little parts that came with it. I opened it all up and
was strangely captivated by the orderly rows of the 80-something game
pieces, half red, half blue, all bright and laced with gold pictures of bombs,
flags, and various soldiers. In my excitement, I dumped the pieces out onto
the floor. But as I began to study them more closely, it struck me that I would
never be able to put them back in the holder exactly the way they had come
because I had not studied them carefully enough while housed. Inexplicably, I
became so upset at this that I began hitting myself in the face with my fists. I
didn’t hurt myself badly; I don’t recall bleeding or leaving any marks. But I
hated myself for screwing that up forever. I knew it could never be returned
to the peculiar order in which it came, and I knew I couldn’t tell anybody
about my distress because they wouldn’t understand and couldn’t help
anyway. If I was a pussy for crying at a horror movie or at a polio vaccine,
what on Earth would be the meaning of this?

As far as physical contact goes, most of it in my family growing up had been

what most psychologists today would call violent, that is, my dad whuppin’
me and/or my brother real good. I can’t say I never did anything wrong, but
these spankings were clearly excessive. At least I know that now. At the
time, I was relatively confused about them.
It would often start with Dad lecturing me about some transgression,
usually a pretty mild one. Mischief, or a lie, not exactly a little white one, but
neither a big black one. This would snowball, sometimes all on its own,
without any input from me whatsoever. His blood pressure would rise, face
turning red, veins growing on his forehead. He’d start yelling at me and then
something would click, the decision to strike. He’d say something like, “I tell
you what, I’m gonna tan your hide. C’mere to me …”
He’d approach me in what felt like a charge and I’d crumble to the
floor in fear. I’d start bawling before my dad even touched me, because he
was so big and scary looking and I knew what was about to happen. When I
was younger I’d literally beg, “DADDY! PLEASE DON’T!” He’d grab me
by the arm, and hold me up, and strike my ass with his gigantic open hand,
seemingly as hard as he could, but he would always deny that afterwards. I
couldn’t manage a strike-count, but it often seemed to go on until he got tired,
but I’m supposing it would be around 10 strikes that simply felt like forever.
Sometimes, he’d use a belt. I have vague memories of having to pull my pants
down to get ready for some of those. Sometimes, me and brother would both
get spankings, and for some reason I was usually second. This added a whole
new layer of trauma to the whole experience, having to watch my brother get
his, waiting for mine. Sometimes I’d have this ridiculously irrational hope
that I would somehow be granted amnesty by the time he was done with my
brother. My brother was older and tougher than me, so he would require
more work before he threw in the towel and started crying. I can remember
seeing the moments when my brother succumbed, the transition between
angry defiance and pitiful, painful subjugation.
I can’t deny it: I clearly was the “pussy” of the two, screaming bloody
murder during mine. My mom told me once afterwards that if I didn’t stop
hollering so much the neighbors were gonna hear. She seemed somewhat
confused about my wailing, implying—whether she meant to or not—that my
spankings weren’t so bad and that I was overreacting. More routinely, dad
would invalidate the experience by apologizing afterwards and stating the
clichés, such as “I do this because I love you” and “This hurts me more than
it does you.” But it was hard to feel the love in that beating, and equally
difficult to see how it could have hurt him more than me. He would also
explain how he didn’t hit me as hard as he could. Reflecting on this today, I
don’t think that’s true. I think he deceived himself into believing that he had
been pulling punches because he was unconsciously aware, deep down, that
he had lost control and he felt bad about it.
A couple of times, Dad would hug me after a spanking, which, outside
of the context of the beating I just took, would have appeared sincere. But,
given the context, it felt remarkably inappropriate. It’s difficult to find the
right word, but I want to call it obscene. Touching me like that, following a
beating like that, had the slightest tinge of what I imagine sexual abuse must
feel like. I never felt invested in those hugs. I just wanted them to be over,
just like the spankings before them. On top of it all, I also recall feeling
confused and guilty about those feelings: How can a son reject his dad’s best
hug, regardless of the context? And those really were his best hugs; I don’t
recall being hugged much otherwise throughout my life. I don’t think me and
my mom hugged until I was 21, visiting from college, and I initiated those.
Once, after me and my brother had been spanked for arguing (seriously,
we hadn’t been physically fighting, although I think we had said some hateful
things that my dad overheard), my dad made us hug. I love my brother, and
love hugging him today, but there was something obscene about this order as
well. We had just been infuriated at each other, for which we had then been
physically overwhelmed and hit by Dad, and now we were being forced to
embrace each other. I remember we were both in our pajamas, as this had all
transpired at the breakfast table. Both of our pajamas were more like veils,
very thin because they were cheap to begin with and were now old and worn;
we might as well had been naked. To this day, I still remember how confused
I felt hugging him, like on some level I really did care for my brother and
was sorry, but the way I was literally being forced to show it was perverse.
In any event, my spankings largely spoiled any chance of me and my
father having a meaningful relationship. Outside of confusion, my most
salient reaction was anger. I remember thinking that you’ll be sorry. I hated
you, at times, and wanted to physically harm you, and definitely would have,
if I had had the capacity. That’s probably not what you were after.
Anyway, the hatred always dissipated, but a compelling disinterest
always endured, akin to the taste aversion that comes after a vicious bout of
food poisoning. And just like a taste aversion, it can last a long time, forever
even.
All that said, I honestly don’t feel like I hold a grudge today. This part
of my book is not about getting revenge on my dad, that’s for sure. In fact,
I’ve been tormented at times over how or even whether to publish all of this,
because I feel sorry for him. I’m only doing it to vent a little of my own pain,
to spend some time on the anti-corporal punishment soapbox, and—for the
sake of the rest of this book—to show that having God in one’s home doesn’t
necessarily guarantee a good home. Spankings sure didn’t help my
relationship with Him, either. I also felt anger towards God after a good
whuppin’, so much so that on a couple of occasions I broke down again once
I was alone, shooting my finger to the Heavens, yelling “FUCK YOU!” to
God, tears flowing down my face. I fantasized about taking my anger out on
His House, vandalizing the sign out front so that instead of reading “First
Assembly of God,” it would say “First Ass of doG” or simply “FAG.”
I finally did experience healthy human contact when I was about twelve or
thirteen years old, at Christian summer camp. Camp was unexpectedly fun
that year. I spent a lot of time on the miniature golf course, where I had
become a force with which to be reckoned. That was also the first time in my
life that I realized that there’s something worthwhile about playing
horseshoes. I never liked competitive games so much, win or lose, but
horseshoes really resonated well with me, and still does.
In the evenings, following dinner, there were more serious, church-like
events. As with regular church back home, I went somewhat begrudgingly,
but I don’t think much more than anyone else. Sure, I’d rather have been back
on the putt-putt course or chunking horseshoes, but I also had enough faith
and conviction to not gripe too much on the way to the chapel.
One night’s meeting was particularly serious and momentous, a younger
person’s version of what often went down at Big Church on Sunday evenings
back in Dallas. As my father and other major church figures would often
remark, “the Holy Spirit descended” on us, so much so that it eventually
became clear there would be no sermon—only worshipping. We were getting
down that night, praising the Lord full throttle.
It never felt creepy. No one ever whipped out a snake and started
dancing with it or anything like that. Instead, we were just singing songs and
holding our hands up, like you see on television advertisements for gospel
albums. However, this was less dramatic. There was no soft-filter lens on the
camera; everything was acutely distinct. The ambiance was generally
pleasant, but there was also a sense of something awesome in the air. It was
so serious, no laughing matter. I can’t fathom someone being irreverent at a
time like that, not even George Carlin, if he had been there.
After some time, in a relative lull, the leader of the event asked if
anyone in the audience was ready to come forward and be saved. Until that
moment I had assumed I was already saved because I had believed in Christ
all my life and always prayed to Him so well. However, it became as clear
as anything had ever become clear before that I had actually been lacking
something, and that this was my Time. It would be some kind of
unpardonable sin to pass it up. I might as well have been standing in the open
door of a crashing, burning airplane, parachute on, helmet, goggles, the
works. Gotta jump, buddy!
Scared to death but knowing what I had to do, I abandoned my
inconspicuous seat among the pews and headed down to the altar, joining the
handful of other folks who hadn’t dawdled as much as I had. With increasing
confidence, I got down on my knees and put my hands back in the air, but
higher this time.
It felt like I was on a stage, the volume of everyone’s worshipping
around me and the overall intensity of the experience now blaring. I was still
scared and not sure where it was all headed, but it felt big, wherever it was.
Along with the fear was a seemingly inconsistent sense of security, because I
was hardly in control: Something else, something bigger than me, was
guiding me through those peculiar motions. It was scary, but right, in the
cosmic sense. I was at the center of the entire universe.
Then, I felt someone next to me. It was Patsy, my mother’s oldest friend
from all the way back from her high school; she was a chaperone. Right
away, I could tell she knew exactly what was happening inside me, but she
still asked, “Are you ready to receive the Lord?” I nodded. With a reassuring
authority, clearly from experience, she knelt down beside me, to my left, and
put her right hand on my shoulder, and that’s when all Heaven broke loose.
Magic went into me from her hand; I felt something electric, but calm
and soothing. I exploded into tears, hands in the air the whole time, feeling
some of the most profound emotions I ever had in my entire life. Something
was touching my hands, too—that whole gesture finally made perfect sense to
me. You surrender, and then you are touched; He holds you. I knew that I was
Forgiven, all was well, and I was finally Saved, for real. It all made such
wonderful sense, profoundly, unambiguously. That was the hardest I had ever
cried, outside of being spanked. The popular hymn would resonate for some
time to come:

Shackled by a heavy burden,

‘Neath a load of guilt and shame.
Then the hand of Jesus touched me,
And now I am no longer the same.

He touched me; Oh, He touched me,

And oh the joy that floods my soul!
Something happened and now I know,
He touched me and made me whole.1
Indeed, my relationship with God had suddenly matured and reached new
heights. I was no longer a painting of a kid in his pajamas praying at the side
of his bed. I was now the real thing, like the grown-ups of whom I used to be
in awe. I could raise my own hands in grown-up church now, and was even
qualified to “testify,” if the Holy Spirit ever moved me as such. If nothing
else, I’m going to Heaven. Praise him.
Patsy must have told my parents about what happened, because shortly
after camp was over and I returned home my dad approached me to talk
about it. I remember it pretty clearly, him saying, so seriously, “I hear you
were filled with the Holy Spirit.” I was kinda shy about it, like I wanted to
keep it private, just like everything else. But I was apparently in the club
now, wise. It was exciting, but also a little frightening, as the bar of
responsibility had been raised higher. There was no turning back.
It took years—decades, even—before I realized that it wasn’t a spirit
that had touched me that evening. It was just Patsy.

Enthused by my experience at camp, I became determined to read the entire

Bible, to become a serious student and realize my newfound status as an
adult Christian. I picked up my New American Standard version one day and
started reading from The Beginning.
Inconceivably, however, in the wake of my salvation, I immediately
found the Bible disorienting and frustrating. Don’t jump ahead: I don’t recall
doubting during that fledgling period, but I clearly recall feeling quite
confused right off the bat.
Not far past the front cover, God tells Adam not to eat from the “the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil … for in the day that you eat from it you
shall surely die.”2 Further down the same page, however, Satan assures Eve
that she won’t really die, but instead her eyes will be opened, like God’s, so
that she can appreciate the difference between good and evil, as implied by
the tantalizing tree’s name. And the damnedest thing happens: She doesn’t die
that day as God promised, but instead her eyes are opened, as Satan
predicted! What an unfathomably bizarre way to begin the Bible: God
doesn’t tell the truth, but Satan does? I can tell this isn’t going to be easy. One
doesn’t simply read the Bible—it’s work! Or maybe art, which I’ve never
been too good at.
I’m being too rigid. Perhaps a “day” is not to be taken literally: Perhaps
Eve would die later, in a God-day, which could be years. That makes some
sense, as it fits with the notion that the earth also wasn’t created in six
“days,” as we now know via science. This is tricky, though, because a “day”
was defined in Genesis 1, with the sun going up and down, which sounds like
the same “day” of today. But maybe the issue is not about time at all. Maybe
when God said, “you shall surely die,” he meant it figuratively, like it’s your
innocence that will perish. Or maybe he wasn’t being figurative at all:
Maybe He just changed his mind about killing Eve.
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 where 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 himself 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.

I eventually did do LSD, at sixteen, a seasoned stoner by the time and a pretty
good drinker as well. I had been talking to my experienced friend Chris about
it for a while in preparation, our conversations feeling more like some sort of
spiritual consultation than anything else. At the time, Chris worked (actually,
lived) at Theater Gallery in Deep Ellum, the most punk venue in the punk
scene in Dallas in the 1980s and early 1990s. One night I had made
arrangements to spend the night out in hopes to make it to my first big show
there, Bad Brains. As fate would have it, the show was sold out and Chris
couldn’t sneak me in, given the significance of the event and my status as a
mere wannabe. However, he was able to score some LSD, so we decided I
would do that instead once the show was over and Chris was relieved. He
would be my sober “guide,” something that was highly recommended among
the more responsible acid-using crowd. The stuff that we were doing in
Dallas in the late 80s always came on little pieces of paper, about a quarter-
inch square. My first had a relatively boring graphic, just alternating orange
and blue stripes. Except mine was just orange stripes, because it had
accidentally had been through this guy Brian’s washing machine and the blue
had washed away. I think Brian just gave it to us, or maybe it was $5. We
didn’t even know if it was going to work.
I waited around outside for the show to end and for Chris to be free,
smoking and drinking out in the streets, but not as much as usual because I
didn’t want to pollute the adventure to come. We went back to Chris’s house
some time after midnight and I finally swallowed it. I had an experience that
would become very familiar, although the first time was the best, in ways.
For the first 30 to 45 minutes, nothing happened except natural
giddiness and nervousness about what was to come—and, in this case, if
anything was going to happen at all, given the washing machine factor.
However, after about an hour something salient and novel did come over me,
although its quality was somewhat unexpected: a discombobulated feeling of
numbness and stupidity. I wasn’t discouraged, though, as my guide informed
me this would be transient. As with most of the LSD experience, the feeling
is difficult to describe but I somehow felt like my brain was purging, doing
the neural equivalent of a colon cleanse to get rid of the old and to prepare
for the new.
Sure enough, the numbness only lasted for a few minutes until it was
replaced by the opposite and more compelling and enduring sensation: My
mind became extraordinarily clear, centered and lucid, in the present
moment, eventually to a degree that was far beyond what I had ever
experienced before during any sort of non-LSD consciousness—including
being born again at camp years before. As intensely spiritual as that
experience had been, it was still an event that occurred on Earth, an event
that could be adequately conveyed in words, whereas LSD was
otherworldly, very far from describable. A real writer, Aldous Huxley, came
closest to capturing the profundity of psychedelia with words:

“There seems to be plenty of it,” was all I would answer, when

the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it,
but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course,
have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another
universe. My experience had been, was still, of an indefinite
duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one
continually changing apocalypse.3

“Popping” was the best I could ever come up with, to describe this sensation
that each moment was inexplicably more profound than the last, despite being
perfectly convinced that the last was as incredible as a moment could be. But
now I prefer “a perpetual present made up of one continually changing
apocalypse.”
 As dramatic as these transitions were, I felt surprisingly comfortable
during them. Any previous concerns about having a “bad trip” felt so remote,
grossly unfounded, utterly ridiculous. Bad trips were off in some other
universe, with Huxley’s watch. Clearly, this consciousness was the right one;
the other one that I had been in for 16 years was the one of which to be leery.
I would always use derivatives of the word rapture to attempt to describe
the feeling, and was so overcome with it that I just sat there, mouth agape,
looking around at the room, myself, and at Chris, speechless except able to
utter an occasional “Wow …” or “Dude …” Everything looked so amazing
and beautiful, and it all felt so … rapturous. Chris was smiling the whole
time, because he knew. He would occasionally ask me, “Isn’t tripping cool?”
And I would just say something, slowly, like, “I had no idea …” Indeed, no
amount of book reading or interviewing seasoned users had prepared me for
this.
Similar to the rapturous feelings and sensations of enhanced
consciousness, the visual hallucinations on LSD felt surprisingly
comfortable, ego-syntonic, as some psychologists say—that is, a part of me,
not alien or intrusive. The most simple scene on LSD, Chris’s living room
even, was much more beautiful than anything I had seen in real life
otherwise, whether landscapes, beaches, mountains, titties, whatever.
Everything within eyesight—the floor, the rug on it, the walls, pictures,
vases, and knickknacks—was more resolved, every color was brighter and
more saturated, so much so that many colors seemed like they had never been
perceived before. Every surface was literally vibrating, but comfortably,
with a life that I had never noticed before but that had obviously been there
all along. The longer I looked at anything the more alive and hypnotic it
became, relatively expansive surfaces such as walls, floors, and ceilings
being particularly vibrant tapestries for hallucination. At first glance, such a
surface might be merely emitting an aura or shimmering, but if I held my gaze
it would suddenly come alive and begin swirling, waving, and melting,
somehow depending on its actual physical traits on Earth. Regardless, it was
mesmerizing, beautiful, and as real-looking as real could be. There was not
even the slightest sense of intoxication—although I never forgot I was on a
drug. But it was hard to imagine how anything would look the same again
once it was over. I’m forced to borrow from Huxley again: “I was seeing
what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by
moment, of naked existence … ‘This is how one ought to see, how things
really are.’ And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this,
one would never want to do anything else.”4
Evident without any provocation whatsoever were what we all called
“tracers,” that is, the smeared afterimage of anything that moved across your
visual field. Whenever Chris walked in front of me, from one side to the
other, he would leave a continuous trail of himself that could grow to several
feet long, then once he stopped, it would catch up to him and be absorbed
with such salience that I could almost feel or hear it smacking his reality.
With a lit cigarette in a dark room we could readily create what looked like
ribbon dancing or time-lapse photographs of kids waving sparklers on the
Fourth of July.
Chris did a great job at being my guide, usurping Patsy, you know, the
woman who had taken me on my relatively measly spiritual adventure at
camp previously. He kept showing me stuff that I might enjoy, like album art,
books, trinkets, and rocks. Eventually, once he became convinced I was
comfortable, he raised the bar a little. He told me that in order to really see
what LSD can do, you have to sit still and stare at something so that it has
time to manifest. He suggested I stare at my hand. It didn’t sound like a
strange request at all at the time; in fact, it sounded like a great idea. So I sat
down, him right next to me, and I just stared at my hand, palm facing me,
fingers fanned out comfortably.
After a few seconds, the skin on my hand began to undulate, to pulsate,
as if something were inside it, moving and wanting out. Again, it wasn’t
scary at all—just mesmerizing. The undulations gave way to melting, my skin
a river of wax running down my wrist and out of sight, but a fantastic, M.C.
Escher-type perpetual melting so that there was always more hand to come,
never any blood, muscle or bone. Over time, this gave way to more
idiosyncratic hallucinations, so that eventually five little eyeballs formed,
one on each of the most distal joints of my five fingers, you know, where your
fingerprints are. Each looked like the eye on the back of a dollar bill, just an
eye, looking at me, but they were alive, each blinking at its own pace,
independent from the others, and each seemed to have its own little
expression or personality even. I was completely enthralled by this scene,
like I have never been enthralled before, and for some reason it was funny. I
just giggled at the magnificence of it all. Then, each eye morphed further, so
that they were no longer eyes but some other living shapes—my fingertips
became little clams, like those barnacles that attach to garbage in the Gulf.
As the eyes that had been blinking before, the clams were snapping, little
mouths that didn’t make any noise, and each continued to have its own
personality of sorts. I kept giggling; I must have had the most wonderful smile
on my face.
Later, when I was “peaking,” the hallucinations would come much more
readily, requiring less staring to get them going. I remember us going into the
kitchen because Chris wanted to see if I’d like to try some food. While he
was digging through the fridge, I perused the little dining/bill-writing table in
the corner and found an 8 x 10 piece of paper, only it was filled with a
magnificent design, akin to an oriental rug—curly, ornate, symmetric with
paisleys, but the detail was so fine I couldn’t begin to speculate how it was
drawn. I studied it, soaked it in while Chris kept digging through the fridge.
The picture looked unworldly, like it must have been printed by alien
technology, but I realized I had taken a drug and of course it wasn’t from
outer space. Still, I asked Chris, incredulously, “Dude, where did you get
this?” He looked at me, incredulous himself—I think he thought for a moment
I was joking—and said, “That’s a blank sheet of paper.” And apparently it
was. I put it down kinda abruptly, startled. Good news is, that was the most
unsettled I became all night, those few seconds.
Turns out, food is kinda gross when you’re tripping. I can imagine
someone converting to vegetarianism after the experience. Some things, like
oranges and orange juice, are orgasmic, but meat is just gross on LSD,
reminiscent of how it’s depicted in a Jan Svankmeyer film (I bet that dude is
“experienced”). And you’re not horny, either. I loved to touch things on acid,
but never wanted to touch another person, especially their goo. People look
ugly, usually, but in a comical way, not necessarily frightening. They’re all
bulbous and meaty and start to melt if you look at them too long. And your
own skin feels kinda grimy; all things considered, the last thing on your mind
is sex. You’re way, way beyond it when on LSD. It becomes a trivial thing,
something that lesser beings do because they don’t have this.
Eventually, when the sun was about to start coming up, Chris felt
comfortable enough to leave me unsupervised and decided to go to sleep. We
both got into his big bed, slumber party-style. He told me not to leave the
room because his folks would be getting up soon, and he fell fast asleep. I
just lay there and kept having the time of my life. I took a hand-held mirror
with me to bed and just stared into it. My face, like my hand earlier, began to
look kinda peculiar, as if it wasn’t mine anymore, like I was wearing a mask
but it was part of me at the same time. Then, in what was now a well-lit
room, as clear as day, that mask (my face) began to distort. My upper lip
became a huge harelip, grotesque but hilarious. I had to strain to not laugh out
loud and wake Chris, but I was literally shaking with stifled laughter as my
harelip kept growing, proceeding up to my nose, then through it and beyond,
all the way between my eyes and up behind my longish hair. My eyes began
to crawl about my face similarly until the face in the mirror became wholly
unrecognizable as a face. I shook my head and it started over.
The hallucinations finally began to dwindle and I could tell that I was
coming back to the world, which was an experience in itself. I had been so
far away that I had kinda forgotten what regular reality was like. I guess
that’s why they call it “tripping.” Despite how profound it had all been, I had
had my fill and was ready to be back, back in the world of obligation, worry,
and pretension. It’s strange: LSD may be the only drug that can truly be
satisfying, where you sincerely feel that you’ve had enough.
On the other hand, there was also a slight sense of sadness, because this
had clearly been the most captivating eight hours or so of my life. I’m a bit
embarrassed to admit it, but yeah, there was a feeling of revelation, as if LSD
had been waiting for me all this time and that it was my new best friend. It
was the most marvelous thing that had ever happened to anyone, and
resonated with me perfectly like nothing else before or since.
Important to note, even though LSD made my salvation at church
summer camp years before pale in comparison, it didn’t diminish the value of
that previous experience. At least for the time being, the glory of tripping
existed in parallel—not in lieu of—the glory of Jesus. If anything, the net
effect of having taken LSD only raised the bar of my expectations of heaven.
If God would allow me to have the psychedelic experience on Earth for five
ridiculous dollars, via 200 millionths of a gram of a drug derived from a
fungus that grows on rye, of all things, imagine what must await me after
death! Certainly, heaven would ultimately make even LSD pale in
comparison.
Despite being so smitten, I only tripped about thirty times over the next
three years or so. It just didn’t feel like something that should be summoned
frivolously. I respected it, even revered it, the way boy scouts are taught to
respect the wild, like bears and rapid rivers and freezing mountainsides.
These things are beautiful and magnificent but you gotta behold them
cautiously or they can turn on you and even destroy you.
 Alas, I eventually became reckless and broke the cardinal rule of
tripping: I took some acid impulsively, and sure enough had a trip that was as
hellish as the first had been wonderful.

Everyone learns in LSD 101 that you don’t take it under certain
circumstances, like when you’re upset, anxious, or depressed—or when you
have obligations in the near future. My mistake was that I took it one evening
when I knew I had to be home later that same night and there simply wasn’t
enough time to let it run its course; I was 19 and still had something like a
curfew, which was definitely in effect that night. Tripping in my house was
just a terrible idea; I might as well be doing it at school or at a job interview
—way too risky. If nothing else, my house was just too small, and my room
was kinda in the middle of it, a converted den that also served as a bit of a
thoroughfare. There were two doors to my room, one on each end, and I
couldn’t even close them because the window air conditioning unit that
cooled the whole house was in my room. There was nowhere for me to hide
in my house, a luxury I always envied of my peers.
I had actually tripped the night before, coincidentally with Chris. We
had spent the entire day having a great time at the Galleria, one of the fancier
shopping malls in Dallas, in the north, Ross Perot part of town. Without
having slept that night, the next day I was telling my homeboys about the
Galleria experience, which got them excited so that they wanted to trip that
evening themselves. So, we went out and got some more acid, including a hit
for me, in the stupidity of my sleep deprivation. It was “Saturn,” this
notoriously “serious” shit with a picture of the planet on it. I think it was
around eight o’clock when we “dropped,” and I had to be home by two a.m.,
not negotiable. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.
After an hour had passed and I didn’t feel anything I made another
mistake by beginning to hope that it wasn’t going to work. I had never tried to
trip two days in a row before, but I had read that we build tolerance to
hallucinogens very quickly. Maybe I wouldn’t get off at all or perhaps if I did
it’d be relatively mild. Contrasting the hope that it might not work was a
wish that it would hurry up and start, if it was going to happen at all. I had to
be home in about five hours—if it starts later versus sooner, I’m gonna be
peaking right about the time I have to go home! Fuck.
We got in the car and drove around to do the usual playground circuit,
to play on swings and look at the trees and stars and stuff. Tragically, I
eventually did begin to get off, a record two hours after I took the acid. And
the initial weird, unsettled feelings never gave way to comfort as they had
thirty times before.
I started feeling anxious, but decided not to say anything, partially out of
simple courtesy: I just didn’t want to bring anyone else down. Not entirely
irrational, I was kinda afraid that if I told them I was having a bad time it
might be contagious and cause someone else to become upset, too.
As the hallucinations started, there was an unpleasant tone that I hadn’t
experienced before. Things were ugly as they often are on acid, but for the
first time it wasn’t cartoon-y and comical. Ugly was finally bad. Everywhere
we went, everything had this moss growing on it—a damp, greenish-black
moss that was thick and disgusting. I didn’t want to see it, but it was
everywhere, on the ground, on cars, and even on my friends.
Miraculously, over time, the anxiety and tension seemed to level off and
maybe even wane. Perhaps getting through a couple of hours without the
others noticing increased my confidence; they were clearly having a good
time, and I never had any paranoid feelings involving them directly. I was
beginning to feel pretty sure I wasn’t going to have a bad trip, the kind you
read about in the newspaper or hear via urban myth. I had only been close,
thank God.
When it was time for the guys to take me home, I actually thought I
might be alright. Perhaps once I was alone the pressure of having to keep my
freak-out a secret would dissipate and I could just ride out the rest in peace.
All I had to do was avoid my parents, which shouldn’t be too much to ask.
They were almost always asleep this late.
When we got to my house, the lights were indeed out and my folks were
apparently asleep, which was a momentous relief. I don’t know what the fuck
I would have done if they had been awake; probably would have just ran
away. There’s no way I could have faced either of them like that. The cat
would have finally come out of the bag, whatever that would have meant.
I took a piss at the bush where I always did when coming home simply
drunk and/or stoned, in order to minimize commotion once I got into our little
three-bedroom house. As I looked up into the trees while standing there, the
silhouette of branches and leaves against the lighter night sky looked as they
always did on LSD: flat and surprisingly symmetric, like those snowflakes
you made in elementary school with scissors and construction paper, except
much more detailed and the paper was black. Also unlike paper snowflakes,
the whole scene was alive, a gigantic kaleidoscope turning in various
circular motions. It was beautiful but ominous, because I was definitely
tripping, just like I had been the day before at the Galleria, only now I was
about to enter my scary-ass home, a place I had never really felt perfectly
comfortable, even when sober.
Making it to bed did not go well. The front door was locked, and I
didn’t have my fucking key. A little panic: If the backdoor is locked, I’m
stuck. I’d have to wake someone up to get in, but would probably opt to just
stay outside until I either sobered up or one of my parents woke up and came
to get me. There was no telling how that would go down, but I’d rather be
late and relatively sober than on time and tripping like this. They would
know, or the tension would simply be unbearable and I’d have to tell them.
At the time, I could fathom this ending up as a trip to the ER somehow. I had
to avoid facing them at all costs.
I had to climb our cyclone fence to get into the back yard and to try the
back door. As I walked up to it, our 100-plus pound Alaskan malamute,
Amber, was there to greet me. She was giddy to see me as you normally like
a dog to be, but at the time I couldn’t trust her and was even kinda scared,
like she might somehow sense how different I was on LSD and maybe not
even recognize me. I really had some paranoia that she might attack me as an
intruder. I talked to her, and reached out slowly, as if she was some huge dog
I was meeting for the first time, not one with which I had snuggled for years.
She didn’t bite me or anything and instead behaved normally, but I didn’t
dawdle.
Praise Jesus again, the backdoor was unlocked. However, ours was a
noisy backdoor, and it did its worst when I tried to sneak in. But the lights
were out, and clearly no one was up. Cool. All I had to do was go about
fifteen feet across the kitchen into my converted-den bedroom and jump into
bed and act like I had been there for some time. Our house was a pitch-black
cave, so there was little concern about anyone seeing how dilated my eyes
must have been at this point. I snuck into bed.
I made it! All I had to do now was sit in the dark and sober up. Granted,
this could take hours, but it wasn’t like I was in jail or the ER.
 But I was tripping really hard now; I swear to God it was still getting
more intense by the moment. As usual, the air conditioner mounted in my
window was loud as fuck and it was freezing cold. And it was so dark. My
mind soon started wandering like it had never wandered before. And then …
unbelievably … the goddamned, motherfucking phone rang.
Our phone rarely rang, much less at 3:00 in the morning. Presuming
crisis, I was immediately concerned that one of my friends had started
freaking out on his acid, too, and had been busted by his parents. It must be
one of my friends’ parents calling to wake up mine so that they could bust
me, too. I had this crazy paranoid thought that the parent would suggest
something sinister for punishment, like for my mom to act weird to freak me
out, so that the punishment would be appropriate for the crime. You know, the
ol’ smoking a pack of cigarettes when you get caught smoking for the first
time.
I had to get to the phone before anyone else, which was actually a cinch
because it was in the kitchen, much closer to me, and I was the only one who
was so incredibly awake.
When I answered it, I quietly asked, “Hello?” I was scared shit-less
like some hot chick in a horror movie about to get murdered. There was just
silence, but the other person didn’t hang up. I couldn’t hear anything. I said,
“Hello” one more time, feeling like my voice must be quivering, but I wasn’t
sure. I hung up the phone gently, so as not to make any more noise, and
prayed it wouldn’t ring again. I headed back to bed, with only memory for
navigation.
Staggering through the darkness—unfuckingbelievably—I suddenly
collided with another human being. It was the end of the earth—I totally
expected a gigantic knife to land in my chest next—but it was just my mother.
She had gotten up to answer the phone and I hadn’t noticed. Reflexively, and
inexplicably, I said something that sounded magically appropriate, like “Oh
my God—you scared the crap out of me! It was a prank call.” She just kinda
mumbled, apparently not even half conscious, and presumably retreated back
into the darkness. I climbed back into bed.
With my anxiety stirred-up like a hornet’s nest, my mind quickly became
lost again when I was alone in the pitch-black darkness of my room, the air
conditioner blaring white noise or something similar. There was nothing else
salient to capture the attention of my mad, racing mind, so it turned on itself.
Lying there in the darkness, I eventually became profoundly disoriented, but
paradoxically hyper-conscious; there was no element of sedation to help me.
Eventually, I could no longer hear the air conditioner but instead a cacophony
of sounds, and they were loud: simultaneous bells, whistles, sirens, various
musical instruments, controlled by mad devils who were trying to make the
most horrible sound ever.
Eventually, the bed I was lying on seemed to vanish, leaving me to exist
without any sort of tether to Earth. This progressed so that I began to lose my
sense of connection with my body as well, which was not pleasant. My sense
of my size became distorted, like I couldn’t tell if I was big or small.
Everything was just relative but without a single reference point whatsoever.
Eventually, I couldn’t feel my body at all, as if it was shapeless, but I was
somewhere. I was only a consciousness, flitting about the darkness, truly
mad, in the way I had always fantasized madness might be. More than fully
conscious, but unfathomably uncomfortable, relentless, horrifying.
I had to stimulate myself somehow or I was going to start screaming. I
somehow managed to turn on my jam box that was next to my bed and put on
the headphones, which were already plugged in, thank God. But when the
little red power light came on as I flipped the switch, it wouldn’t be still: It
immediately took off, in a circular motion, spiraling out and away from its
original place in space until it disappeared into the distance. Further alarmed
by that, I lay back down, and alas, the noise from the radio wasn’t helping. I
was so incredibly disoriented—I’m not making this up for dramatic effect—I
couldn’t comprehend anything I was listening to. When the DJ talked, I
couldn’t understand the words he or she was saying. When music played, I
couldn’t tell what kind it was, like country or rap or big band or salsa. At
least as afraid as before, I turned it off and took off the headphones.
I entertained the idea of waking my parents and telling them I needed to
go to the ER. But I couldn’t, not because I was worried about getting into
trouble, but because I was paranoid. I was afraid of what I would see if they
were in the light: They might be grotesque, deformed—or even demented and
evil. I was afraid they might lose control and try to hurt me for punishment,
and even wondered if it might not be my parents at all sleeping in that room!
I needed light—I needed to see. The one in my room was too bright and
could wake my parents, so that wasn’t an option. I eventually decided to go
to the bathroom and pretend I was taking a shit for a while. I was able to get
in there and close the door without incident, and only then did I turn on the
light. The brightness was painful, but so much more comforting than the hell
of my room. As soon as I looked at my face in the mirror, it immediately
became a mask and melted. As intense as this was, it was relatively familiar
and quickly brought me back to Earth—granted, LSD Earth. There was still
something dangerous about hallucinating in my own home, but at least I could
tell once again that I was simply on drugs. I used to like melting in the mirror.
I sat on the toilet, pants down and all in case someone walked in and
wondered what I was doing. I sat there and observed another familiar and
comforting tripping scene, the little black tiles on the bathroom floor
beginning to shimmer and move, realigning themselves in various patterns
never intended by the carpenter who put them there. Some of them would
lean, like little solar panels trying to maximize contact with the sun. Thank
you, tiles.
But I couldn’t stay. Someone was gonna need to pee themselves, and I
couldn’t risk another confrontation. I went back to bed. Realizing that light
was the key to sanity, I’d just have to risk it. I turned on the little black-and-
white TV next to my bed but turned the brightness way down so that I could
barely make out the images on it. That was the trick: It was so much better to
have a visual reference point—I just needed some reality, and this would do.
I lay there in bed like that for the rest of the night, watching very dim I Love
Lucy episodes and such with the sound off. I apparently fell asleep like that,
but I don’t know when.
I later woke up to the normal sounds of my folks bustling around in the
kitchen, having coffee and breakfast and whatnot. The world seemed normal,
but I wasn’t anymore. I was sober, but was very unsettled, in a way that felt
kinda permanent. I’ve often told people, including my therapists over the
years, that I felt like something “broke” that night. I even felt violated,
betrayed by LSD, even though I knew it was my fault. The most magnificent
experience I knew had now become the worst experience I had ever had,
hands-down. I was lost, in a way.
And it wouldn’t be the last time. I obviously couldn’t do LSD anymore,
but I’d be traumatized by other drugs as well.
Cocaine got me less than a year after my bad LSD trip; I was still about 19.
After some other long night of partying, I found myself stranded in Deep
Ellum, as everyone else had trickled away home or to late-night breakfast
joints and I had missed all the boats while holding out for the best one.
Luckily, I eventually ran into a friend from high school, but unluckily he
didn’t have a ride, either. As the crowds in the streets continued to thin we
were starting to get nervous, because the walk home was long and
necessarily through one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in Dallas. As
hope was dwindling, we finally found a ride to an unrelated high school
party that was closer to our neighborhoods to the east.
The party was essentially over by the time we got there, but a salient
aura remained from what had transpired earlier, a sea of empty keg cups and
niches of improperly disposed cigarette butts. There were only about ten or
twelve people left, some uncertain number of whom were crashed throughout
this guy’s spacious and fancy house; his parents were out of town,
presumably very far away. The kid himself was a big-time wrestler at a
neighboring high school, one of those overly energetic jocks who liked to
party hard and even fight sometimes. Those guys always made me uneasy, as
loud macho guys typically did. But they were always nice enough to me,
despite the fact that they were athletes and I had salient punk leanings.
After high-fives were done, I and the three or four other people who
were still clearly awake went out back to smoke a joint. But this was no
ordinary joint: I watched the guy roll it, and it was about half weed and half
cocaine. I had never smoked cocaine, but was ready to try. It had been a long
night and I still felt edgy and geared up. I remember thinking that this would
probably get me off real good, but then I’d finally be able to crash.
We passed that thing around the four of us in the darkish back yard, the
porch light bouncing off beer cans and keg cups strewn about. I’ll never
forget the smell of the joint: It really didn’t smell like weed at all, but just
synthetic chemicals. It was gross, and tasted bad. I only took a couple of hits
or so, but I took big ones, thinking that the more I could get off, the harder I
would crash. It was gonna be hard to sleep on the floor at this place. I needed
to get really tired.
Sure enough, I started getting fucked up fast, and within moments was
having an unexpectedly good time. I felt high, really high—drug high, not pot
high—particularly energized and excited. Suddenly, I wasn’t worried about
crashing anymore. This was gonna be a special fun time, something I hadn’t
bargained for. The joint disappeared; we all held our positions in the
smoking circle, but paired off, everyone talking with a lot more enthusiasm
than when we started.
Over time, I kept getting more and more fucked up, beginning to hope
that I’d level off but I never did. I eventually had to stop contributing to the
conversation altogether, as I became disinterested in talking, and at some
point began to find it hard to say anything at all. No worries; I’d just listen
for a while.
We went back inside, and I was feeling less and less comfortable, a
little lightheaded and weak, some stings of anxiety starting to come over me.
We sat down at the dining room table under this very parental-looking
chandelier that seemed so out of place after having smoked coke just thirty
feet away. We each took a side of the square table, my friend ending up
opposite me. He was talking energetically, obviously very high off that joint,
too, but definitely having a different experience than I was. I was beginning
to feel quite uncomfortable, bordering on scared.
Then I started to hallucinate. My friend suddenly had a broken jaw, his
face distended on one side, but it didn’t prevent him from talking, and even
smiling. Then my hearing began to fail, in that the volume was fine but I
could no longer understand what the others were saying. My vision became
grainy, remarkably so, like the snow on a TV set, but I could still make out
the forms of the others on the screen. Something was definitely wrong, and I
was about to freak out, but I had no idea what that meant, or how to approach
it. Am I supposed to say something to the others, or just let it happen,
whatever it is?
My ears began to ring, loudly enough so that I couldn’t even hear the
garbled speech of the others anymore. That was it. Reflexively, I stood up
and walked out of the dining room and into the living room. I’m not sure if I
thought moving around would help, or if it was more of a metaphorical run,
the flight portion of the fight-or-flight response. But, of course, there was
nowhere to run. I remember there was a mirror on the ground, leaning against
the wall, presumably because the party had caused it to fall, but it wasn’t
broken. I could only see my legs in it, Vans skater shoes, white socks, and
shorts, but I felt disembodied: Those things didn’t quite look like mine. This
walking around business wasn’t helping. In fact, things were getting worse,
so I headed back to the Table of Doom. At least there were people over
there.
 The last thing I remember was my vision tunneling from the edges
inward, so that all I could “see” was the back of the dining room chair
nearest me; I don’t know if anyone was sitting in it. Something else, not me,
decided to reach out for it. As I did, the tunnel vision became cliché,
darkness closing in on the back of that chair like the end of a Looney Toons
cartoon. Everything went black before my hand touched it, but I could still
feel the trajectory of my hand reaching in that direction. But instead of
making contact when it should have, the chair became a fog and my hand just
passed right through it, and then I lost consciousness. That’s all, folks.
I often tell people that this unconsciousness felt deeper than when
asleep, and was instead more akin to being under general anesthesia during
surgery. That sense that you have when you awake from sleep, that you were
still existing despite having been asleep, was never there.
I became conscious again, at least a little. I still couldn’t see—
everything was completely black. I couldn’t really hear, either, or at least I
couldn’t understand what I was hearing, but it was like there was noise. And
I couldn’t move, but I felt like I was moving—violently, like I was being
wrenched around by an extraordinary force, like a shark attack from Jaws or
a Satan attack from The Exorcist. At one point, it felt like something hit me
hard in the face. The wrenching went on for just a few seconds, and then I
was gone again, super-asleep or in surgery or dead or whatever.
I came to again, only this time everything was almost okay. I could
totally see again, and there was no TV snow or broken jaws. I was obviously
on the ground, because what I could see were five or six faces above me in a
circle, all in shock, a scene from a comedy where I had been knocked out by
a blow to the head or groin. The faces were frozen, and so was I. Yes, I was
totally paralyzed, but felt surprisingly well, all things considered. I
desperately wanted to move so that I could tell them it was over and that I
was okay, but couldn’t. Then, suddenly, as if my invisible restraints had
burst, I popped off the ground, onto my feet and started saying, out loud and
repeatedly, “I’m OK! I’m OK!”
And I was. It was the damnedest fucking thing: I was totally sober and
pretty clear-headed otherwise (which is generally inconsistent with a major
seizure, which tends to leave one disoriented in its wake, but I don’t believe
seizure activity can be ruled-out entirely). I did have a really bad headache,
but that was welcome compared to what had been happening. After the initial
shock left the room, someone got me some water and aspirin and they put me
on the couch. I didn’t argue; I was so fucking tired. Indeed, I fell asleep—
mission accomplished! Thank you, cocaine.
When I woke up the next morning, I felt tired, disheveled, and broken,
very reminiscent of the day following my bad trip on LSD. However, there
was much less betrayal this time, I guess because I hadn’t had a relationship
with cocaine before. And, frankly, this seemed to confirm some sort of
suspicion that I may have had all along, that cocaine was gross,
unpredictable, and potentially dangerous. Still, the sense of trauma was there
again, a general sense that I was less safe than I had been the day prior. I felt
uncomfortably mortal, now knowing very intimately what it’s like to have my
Self be at the mercy of my guts and chemistry and physics. Realize that I still
identified as Christian at the time—quite strongly—but I lost that sense that
He was necessarily taking care of me. For the first time in my life I began to
appreciate that I really had the capacity to put myself in harm’s way, that God
would not always have my back if I tempted him with my recklessness.
Adding to the uneasiness of it all, I would later learn that while I was
unconscious, one of the other party attendees (whom I didn’t know
beforehand) had proposed that they drag my body to the front yard and call
911, saying that they found me this way. I guess I couldn’t have blamed him;
what difference would it have made? I’m glad it didn’t get that far.

Perhaps the drug to which I felt most addicted, in the traditional sense, was
methamphetamine. That’s right: speed … crank … The Devil’s Dandruff.
Like many drugs, meth has been greatly misunderstood by nonusers. The
subjective experience is much more about euphoria than velocity. It actually
has very little to do with restlessness or the jitters—at least until you start to
come down. I’ve done a lot of drugs, most of the main ones except heroin,
and I gotta say the euphoria of meth is the best, next to, of course, aptly
named ecstasy. Turns out, the A in real ecstasy, MDA, stands for
amphetamine, the whole awesome word being
methylenedioxyamphetamine. Yes, they are chemically similar, and meth
does feel a lot like ecstasy, just not as intense. Unless you shoot it, from what
I’ve been told, as I never went that far myself.
 You might also be surprised with whom I was using. One tends to
associate meth with trailer parks in Missouri, with all their mullets and pit
bulls and “professional” wrestling. However, the scene in Dallas that also
did a lot of speed was comprised of wealthy, talented hair stylists. They
were a well-dressed, attractive, hip, sometimes gay community that might
charge over $100 or more a haircut, which was very pricey in 1990. They
went to the fancy, upscale bars in Dallas and didn’t break many laws
otherwise.
After the cocaine fiasco, I eased my way into it because I didn’t want to
risk another overdose or whatever the fuck that was. However, I had learned
enough in school and so forth that meth, despite the bad reputation, is actually
a lot less toxic than cocaine, at least acutely. It’s almost unheard of to
overdose on meth, whereas people often die from cocaine. Cocaine can
cause heart attacks, strokes, or seizures in susceptible individuals. The main
threat from meth, if you overdo it, is becoming temporarily psychotic and
acting a fool (which, of course, can also be dangerous).
Besides euphoric, meth made me remarkably confident socially, which I
now believe was a large part of why it was so reinforcing for me. I’ve
always been lonely, but nervous about meeting people, especially girls. Meth
just turned this upside down. Whereas I was Woody Allen when sober, I was
Clark Gable on meth. And it wasn’t an illusion: Girls readily gave me their
numbers when I was high on the stuff. Sadly, though, I’d rarely call because
Woody Allen would set back in before I had the opportunity.
One night, very late, I was so high that I got lost (in my hometown),
stuck in one of these weird meth-obsession-things that can happen sometimes,
where I refused to do anything but keep trying, only to realize hours later that
I had literally been driving around in really big circles and not making any
progress. Eventually, I got pulled over by a cop for a tail light or something.
It was a woman, and she was real friendly to me, almost strangely so. I
swear to God, for a moment I felt like I was in a porno, like she might push
me around and make me fuck her in the back seat of her car. In reality, all that
happened was that she gave me directions out of there … but she was smiling
the whole time, having absorbed my infectious friendliness, just like
everyone else did when I was high on speed.
That’s all great and good, but the reason why meth doesn’t work in the
long run is because—more than any other drug I’ve done—the crash is as at
least as aversive as the high is wonderful. There is a host of uncomfortable
physical symptoms and you become so incredibly anxious, a new kind of
anxiety that you haven’t experienced before, a profound edginess combined
with disorientation and hypervigilance that can morph into paranoia. You can
even hallucinate a little, but the tone is more bad-trip than good.
It’s hard to pee, and sometimes you leak a little. I’m not sure if it’s
related, but yeah, your dick shrinks smaller than it has ever been, like when
you’ve been swimming in an arctic ice-fishing hole. It’s so dense from the
compression that it feels hard as a rock—or, I guess I should say, as a boner.
Speaking of which, you can get so horny that it hurts. If you dare masturbate,
your dick then becomes huge, now bigger than it’s ever been, making you feel
like a porn star—a very proud one, at that. I’ve marveled at the size of mine
during these adventures. Sadly, I never had a gal to share it with, so there
were no witnesses, and these were the days before camera phones.
But much more compelling than your mind-boggling range of dick size
are the anxiety and disorientation. I recall one particularly distressing crash
that started at a friend’s really cool high-rise apartment in downtown Dallas.
Several of us had met there after a night of partying in Deep Ellum; actually,
it had been the second consecutive night for some of us, essentially sleep-
free heading into day three. We were watching Sunday morning TV, which
had been fun until the final remnants of buzz gave way to the first signs of ick.
Mine came on exceptionally fast, and I started having these peculiar
hallucinations in which I couldn’t really tell what we were watching. It was
definitely some sort of nature documentary, but precisely which part of nature
they were showing wasn’t clear. The screen was full of flowing motion, and
for a moment I was pretty sure it was a time-lapse sequence of budding
flowers. But as I squinted and peered at the screen, my perception suddenly
shifted and I could tell that it was instead turbulent ocean waves. The
experience was not the least bit pleasant but quite alarming, so I kept it to
myself. I was starting to feel physically weak around that time as well, like I
might pass out if I wasn’t careful. I needed to lie down soon, but I couldn’t
do it there with so many people around. I had to get out.
I told my friend I was crashing hard, so he gave me the keys to his
apartment which was a significant distance but not inaccessible. I staggered
to my scooter parked on the street, wondering if I was gonna faint or
otherwise fall before I could sit on it. It was sunny, and the world was
bustling and loud and full of incredibly sober people, greatly intensifying the
unsettling feelings I was having.
 I did sit down, and yes, started driving. I was feeling wobbly and like I
was leaning more than I possibly could have been, which prompted me to
consider pulling over a few times. I decided against it because I didn’t want
to prolong the suffering any more—I just had to get to a bed, or even a floor,
where I could just be alone and freak out in private. It was so goddamn hot
wearing that fucking helmet; I felt like I wasn’t breathing very well, either.
Amazingly, I did make it, and finally felt some relief when I opened that
apartment door. It was quiet and there were plenty of places for me to
collapse. My friend wasn’t even moved in yet so there was no bed or even a
couch, but the carpeted floor would do just fine.
I went to the bathroom to piss. When I unbuttoned my shorts, both those
and my boxers just fell to the floor because I had lost a notable amount of
weight over the weekend. I’m not exaggerating: You lose enough weight in
even 24 hours while on speed that it’s visibly apparent. Sometimes your
clothes no longer fit as they did when you put them on before you first went
out. I took my shirt off to take a closer look in the big ol’ mirror in the
bathroom, and saw a familiar sight: me, as lean as I had ever been. I can’t
lie; you look kinda hot, like a competitive swimmer or Calvin Klein model.
But there’s some creepy stuff going on, too. Your hair and fingernails are
noticeably longer than they should be, which seems to corroborate the hunch
you’ve been having that you’ve aged more like a week than the two or three
days that have actually passed. In case you’re wondering, don’t get any ideas
about tinkering with meth to lose some weight. The weight comes back with a
vengeance because once the drug is totally gone from your system, you’re
very hungry. Ravenous, like a castaway. That’s the best part of recovering
from a speed episode, indulging your appetite when it finally comes back,
and you realize you’re gonna live.
Appreciating my emaciation and such hastened my desire to get my ass
to bed. I’ll never forget that feeling: I didn’t really expect to sleep. It was
more like I was preparing to pass-out, and I just needed to make sure I was
lying down when that happened so I wouldn’t hit my head or something. I
found a comfy looking spot on the floor whereupon to crash and curled up in
the only blanket I could find. As I lay there, waiting for unconsciousness,
something especially frightening began to happen. I would eventually lose
consciousness, but each time I did, I would awaken suddenly, gasping for air,
feeling like I had stopped breathing each time. A couple of times I awoke so
suddenly and startled that I jumped up off the floor, as if the smoke alarm had
gone off, but it hadn’t. Strangely, I was so tired and over the whole
experience, the fear wasn’t even enough to keep me awake. I basically just
told myself that I don’t care if I die in my sleep, I just want to be
unconscious, regardless of the mechanism. This approach somehow calmed
me, and I eventually stopped waking up gasping for air.
The next time I woke up, it was dark outside, and I had no idea how
much time had passed. But praise Jesus, I felt pretty normal, outside of
ravishing hunger—which was reassuring itself, verification that it was all
over. I found a quarter somewhere and called my mom from the pay phone
down the street, still not knowing for sure what day it was; I assumed it was
the same night of the gasping-for-air morning. When mom answered the
phone, she wasn’t alarmed, confirming my suspicion that a whole other day
hadn’t passed. Whew.

One more meth story and we’ll move on. The incident was particularly
momentous because it was the final nail in my serious-drug-use coffin, finally
scaring me enough to make me call it quits. It took a delusion—a very pure,
classic one that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It literally lasted
only seconds, but was so frightening I can’t imagine how I could have
endured any more than that.
I had already been awake for about 40 hours, having partied
enthusiastically the night before and yet to rest entering the second night. For
me, this was a “bender.” I could rarely make it all the way through that
second night and into the third day, because of shit like this. I was always
baffled at my friends who could stay awake on speed for four, five, or even
more days at a time. (Which is nothing for someone who shoots it: Serious
intravenous users will stay awake for weeks or even months on end,
surviving on mere cat naps along the way.)
On the second night of my little bender, I ended up hanging out with
some folks who were more like drug buddies than friends, except for one,
Dan. I really liked him, but he was so sweet and nurturing that it kinda made
me uncomfortable. Paradoxically, he spent a lot of time with some relatively
seedier people on the fringes of our larger crowd who just creeped me out.
Some of them used heroin, which was a little more than I wanted to be
around, and there were also rumors that some of them had a history of sneaky,
antisocial behavior to get their drugs at times, which was also just not
acceptable in my more intimate circle of friends. I know, methamphetamine
ethics. Who would’ve thunk.5
I had run out of speed but happened to have a hit of ecstasy, in a
capsule. Dan wanted to get high, too, so we decided to split it but snort it. I
remember worrying that this approach would waste the precious nectar but I
ended up being surprised at how high it made me.
A bunch of us were sitting around on the carpet, conversing
enthusiastically, and someone was rolling a joint. I ended up sitting next to
one of the creepy people, this guy who dressed like an 80s metal hair band
idiot. He also made me nervous because when I had met him once before he
had been smoking heroin. But I was sufficiently high not to care too much, so
I engaged him. It didn’t work, though. I remember him seeming all grumpy
and telling me something to the effect of “Dude, you’re bothering me talking
about how high you are,” as if he was jealous and this was somehow socially
inappropriate. I reckon it was, to a junkie who only has pot to smoke.
I turned away, got into the pot circle, and took a few hits. Eerily
reminiscent of my cocaine overdose many months prior, the pot smoking had
an adverse effect, as I started feeling less high and increasingly
uncomfortable. Like before, I got quiet and had no choice but to just see what
would happen.
The joint landed in my hand again, and I figured I would take a final hit,
just to not be a pussy. It was little, just a token drag, so I could just pass it on.
After I did to the person on my right, I looked across the circle to see Dan’s
creepy girlfriend staring at me. Next to her was this other creepy kid whom I
never quite understood but I always got a bad vibe from, and he was staring
at me as well. They were staring at me together, not talking, but with clear
expressions of anticipation on each of their faces. I started to hallucinate,
subtly, but as convincingly as ever. Their faces were kinda bright, their eyes
wide, and their mouths turned up at the ends in sinister grins, like the Joker
from Batman. Sinister was the hallucination. Their faces were the epitome of
it, grinning together, in cahoots about something, something about me.
Then it hit me like a freight train: I was absolutely positive that they had
poisoned me with the marijuana, which explained why I had begun feeling
uncomfortable. They had been watching me, waiting for the poison to hit, and
now it was. I had no fucking idea what kind of poison it was—it could make
me lose my mind or maybe even kill me—all I was sure of is that I had been
poisoned, intentionally and maliciously, for their sinister enjoyment.
I leapt up from the carpet, saying something aloud like “Holy Shit!” and
stormed from the room. Dan followed me to investigate, reflexively and with
a calm resolve that somehow suggested he knew what I was feeling and that
he knew what to do, which soothed me significantly, right off the bat. We
ended up alone in the other room, door closed, and I was crying, pretty good,
like I hadn’t in years. He had some Valium, the most precious asset of the
habitual meth user, and gave me one, and it worked as advertised. I calmed
down after a while and fell asleep, back on the carpet. For a third and final
time, when I eventually awoke I was much, much better, but broken
somehow.
And that about ended my meth run; I think I was 20 at the time. In fact,
that was about the end of all of my “hard” drug use. I did some things a
couple more times over the next few years, as you do when kicking a bad
habit, whether it be cigarettes or a girlfriend who isn’t working—but that
was effectively the end, that night crying on Dan’s carpet, absolutely positive
that I had been poisoned. The marijuana smoking also slowed to a crawl
thereafter, but of course I kept drinking too much for a while, until the panic
attacks started.

1 Gorodetzky, C. W. & Christian, S. T. (1970). What you should know about drugs (p. 50). New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
2 No, I’m not a big fan of the gateway drug hypothesis. I suspect many people have been like me,
destined to do hard drugs regardless but starting with pot simply because it’s the most readily available.
I’ve known a lot of stoners in my time, and the vast, vast majority of them have not used harder drugs,
at least chronically.
3 Huxley, A. (1954). The doors of perception (p. 21). New York: Harper & Row. Huxley actually took
mescaline, a drug whose effects are very similar to those of LSD.
4 Ibid., p. 17; 34-35.
5 The term antisocial is one of the most misused in all of psychology, not just by laypersons but also by
some of my colleagues. Antisocial means against society: dishonesty, irresponsibility, rule-breaking. If
you like to spend a lot of time alone, you are asocial. Many antisocial people are actually very social.
 CHAPTER 5

Candide, Dionysus, and Gravity-Induced

Loss of Consciousness
And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme
Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of
the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

— Thomas Jefferson, “To John Adams,” April 11, 1823

AS I SUGGESTED EARLIER, although I first began using drugs around the time
my spiritual turmoil began, I honestly can’t assume that drugs caused that
turmoil (nor that the turmoil caused the drug use).
However, I did have a ground-shaking experience during high school
outside of drug use that clearly did change my world-view, in a manner that
put my faith on a more slippery slope than the mere chinks acquired during
middle school via my labored attempts to study and understand the Bible. As
part of an English class assignment—I think it was during my junior or senior
year—we were assigned Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism (from 1759!).
I had been expecting some boring Great Expectations or Scarlet Letter
tedium, but instead ended up reading the whole thing in just a couple of
sittings, laughing all the way. (Granted, it’s only about 100 pages, and small
ones, too.) I would read it several more times over the years, its message
soaking in a little deeper each time.
Voltaire was at issue with Gottfried Leibniz, a
philosopher/mathematician at the time, an optimist who championed the idea
that ours is the best of all possible worlds because God would not create an
imperfect one. In Candide, the philosopher Pangloss (representing Leibniz)
has taught everyone in his master’s castle not to question the evil in the
world, or even to be discouraged by it. The castle inhabitants live by the
mantra that everything happens for a reason, which Pangloss has instilled in
them well. All of his students roam the earth essentially brainwashed, taking
the horrors of their lives in zombie-like stride. Here, the “toothsome”
Cunegonde is telling her crush, Candide, about all of the goings-on since they
were separated prematurely by disaster:

I was in bed fast asleep when it pleased heaven to send the

Bulgars into our beautiful castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh. They slit
the throats of my father and brother, and hacked my mother to
pieces. A great big Bulgar, six feet tall, seeing that I had passed
out at the sight of all of this, began to rape me. That brought me
round. I came to, screamed, struggled, bit him, scratched him. I
wanted to tear that big Bulgar’s eyes out, little realizing that what
was taking place in my father’s castle was standard practice.1

I don’t think there’s anything funny about rape, but that’s a funny passage. It’s
funny because the joke isn’t about rape. The joke is about people who have
become so delirious with optimism, that they—on some level—excuse rape
and other misfortunes, or have at least become unable to fully acknowledge
them for the horrors that they really are. Some people can’t completely
appreciate the terrors of the world because they have indeed convinced
themselves that this is the best of all possible realities. Misfortune, and even
terror, must have a place. God wouldn’t have it otherwise.
Before Candide, constructs such as hope and optimism had had some
sort of diplomatic immunity; it would have been blasphemous to make fun of
those. Sure, I had seen hilarious and grotesque irreverence before, such as
Eddie Murphy in Delirious, but this was different. Eddie Murphy joked
about Michael Jackson, homosexuality, and bitches, but I had never seen
anyone make fun of optimism before!
But once Voltaire made me laugh at it, a seal broke; my vision cleared
significantly and I felt liberated. Of course, it couldn’t possibly always be
true that “Everything happens for a reason,” despite how assuring it sounds
and how everyone nods and smiles when we make such claims. Perhaps this
kind of reflexive optimism is a mass hysteria. And perhaps it can even be
insensitive and toxic.
 My spankings growing up had never felt as if they were for the best,
despite how my dad and the Bible always asserted they were. I had always
realized they were technically legal, but the bottom line is that they were
attacks, assaults, by none other than the adult who was supposed to be the
most important person in my life, the person who was supposed to protect me
from harm. With post-Candide vision, I could finally stop trying to
rationalize how my whuppin’s must have brought out some good in me. On
the contrary, it became easy to see that the most likely experiences they
brought about were anger, depression, and estrangement from my father—and
later, drug abuse and panic disorder that would almost kill me.
And of course it wasn’t difficult to find much more intense suffering in
the world than mine. Not even considering the glaring examples of genocide
and famine and such, it seemed likely that for many people—perhaps even
the majority of people who have ever lived on Earth—life is (or was) very
hard, much harder than mine. It really can be unfair, and for many, full of
relentless suffering. For some people at some times, assurances like “Think
positive!” or “You can do anything, if you believe!” are unrealistic and
therefore potentially discouraging or even offensive. As I thought about it
carefully, I realized that encouragements like that had often nagged me,
despite having been inspirational on occasion. Finally, having met someone
else who found such imperatives vacuous (at best), I didn’t have to feel so
dark about feeling that way. And who would’ve guessed: My companion was
some French dude from centuries ago who probably wore one of those
ridiculous white wigs with all the curls and whatnot.
I had always thought my Candide experience was somehow unusual,
that it was an odd catalyst for any sort of epiphany. At one point while
writing my book I was even wondering if I was being silly to include this
part of my story. Damnedest thing, though, in 2012, over 20 years after I read
Voltaire’s book the first time, I read Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not
Great. Christopher didn’t think my experience was unusual at all:

Their [Pierre Bayle’s and Voltaire’s] method certainly tended to

be irreverent and satirical, and no reader clinging to uncritical
faith could come away from their works without having that faith
severely shaken. These same works were the best-sellers of their
time, and made it impossible for the newly literate classes to go
on believing in things like the literal truth of the biblical stories.2
Not only must the literal truth of the biblical stories become suspect, but also
the literal truth of the inspirational passages between them. For example, 1
Corinthians 10:13 asserts that “God … will not allow you to be tempted
beyond what you are able … to endure.” Verses like that simply don’t seem
to apply to some of the people I’ve met more recently while working as a
psychologist, like those who have had auditory hallucinations of the voice of
God himself ordering them to do evil things. Clearly, some people are
tempted beyond what they can endure, beyond what is reasonable and fair.
Heck, some people aren’t even graced with temptation! For an obscure
but illustrative example, there really is a condition called REM sleep
behavior disorder in which people tend to act out their dreams, some of
which, of course, are violent. Because of this, some people with the
condition have seriously assaulted or even killed their loved ones without
even being aware of what they were doing. This particular phenomenon is
rare, but that’s not comforting to the victims, as obscurity rarely is. And as
you consider other rare but similar phenomena they begin to accumulate so
that rare becomes occasional. So occasional that most of our United States
have an insanity defense so that one can defend herself by arguing that her
mental state (or total lack thereof) prevented her from appreciating that what
she did was wrong. Again, it’s not common, but people do win these at times
—and they should—because sometimes people truly know not what they do.
It seems, then, that the state law of Arkansas can be more realistic and
reasonable than the Holy Bible!
Now, you’re not gonna win an insanity defense if your primary mental
illness is drug addiction, kleptomania, or pedophilia. However, at least in the
realm of drug addiction, I have to entertain that some of those folks have also
been tempted more than they can endure. Personally, I have known an
inordinate number of people who have died from using drugs—good, fun,
charming, successful, beautiful people even. Similarly, I’ve met quite a few
people who were unable to resist the temptation to commit suicide, some of
them just children. I just find it hard to entertain that all of these people are in
hell as a result. Once you start to appreciate what the real world is like,
Candide also starts to seem a lot more realistic and reasonable than the Holy
Bible.
Well, despite all my criticism of and frustration with the Bible, I’m
actually not discouraging reading it. Even today, my own book complete, I
truly believe that the Bible is beautiful and wonderful in places. I just don’t
believe anymore that it’s holy or divinely inspired, and I haven’t since I was
a kid. Lots of things can be inspirational despite being secular, from the Tao
Te Ching to Shakespeare to Calvin and Hobbes.

As far as I know, no one in my immediate family had ever graduated from

college. My maternal grandfather had at least attended some, at Austin
College in Sherman, Texas, but apparently didn’t graduate; family lore has it
that he got distracted by his promising football career or flying fighter planes
in World War II. Besides him, my dad sometimes alluded to some leaf on our
family tree, way out on a low branch somewhere, who had been a physics
professor. But that was it. My own father didn’t even finish high school. So, I
was completely clueless about how college worked and just followed my
friends on their own adventures, the first stop being Richland Junior College
in Dallas, which was only about ten-minute’s drive from home. That really
worked well for me, affording a chance to get a clue while still living at
home.
My dad had always viewed my potential college experience with some
trepidation, for college was where many persons have their Christian faith
challenged, with all the freethinking and pot and pussy and whatnot. And,
frankly, he was right. At least about the freethinking and the pot; I was never
much of a player.
But yes, my very first semester, in the wake of the Voltaire experience
in high school, I took an introductory philosophy course at Richland that
smote me about as thoroughly as the French man’s little book. I’ll never
forget that class or the instructor; if I had been a girl or gay, he would have
been my first professorial crush.
We learned about Plato’s forms, Kant’s categorical imperative, and
Berkeley’s idealism. But perhaps most compelling was Descartes’s
proclamation, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). Do you know
where the statement came from? Descartes had been on a bit of a mission to
distill undeniable truths, facts that simply could not be doubted. And that’s
the only one that endured. “I think, therefore I am.” I am having thoughts,
therefore I must be existing, in some capacity. I might be asleep or dreaming
—shit, I might even be dead—but whatever I is, I exists at this moment. A
verb can’t exist without a subject!
The accompanying message was that we can’t really know anything
beyond cogito ergo sum. Everything else—everyone else—could be
figments of my imagination, and may not even exist at all. But I know, at the
very least, that I am existing, that I am. This is the only notion of which I
cannot be skeptical. Everything else beyond this warrants skepticism.
The idea resonated profoundly with me and would serve as the perfect
foundation for my forthcoming college career. Perhaps all undergrads should
begin their educations with an Intro to Philosophy course as such, the first
lesson of all being to doubt everything you’ve been told to date, and
everything you’re gonna be taught from here on out—including all this crap
about Descartes in this class!
As extreme as it all sounds, it is a guiding principle behind both our
legal system and science. If you are going to make a claim that someone has
committed a crime against you, society will entertain your claim, but the
burden of proof to support it lies on the prosecution. We’re not just gonna
lock someone up because you or the state says so. Science works similarly.
Again, society will entertain your claim, whatever it is, but the burden of
proof lies on you to produce the data to support it. Otherwise, it’s just a
claim.
The implications for religion are so glaring that it’s difficult for me to
decide how to transition to the next topic. Perhaps I should clarify that
despite being so moved I wasn’t done with Jesus yet. I had been raised in a
home that couldn’t care less about skepticism and science, a home that
preached “You shall not force a test on the Lord your God,” that the essence
of faith is “the conviction of things not seen.”3 And I still had faith while in
community college. Good ol’ fashioned Christian faith. Descartes made the
most tremendous amount of sense to me, but I was able to keep logic and
faith separated from one another, at least for the time being.

Only two or three semesters after Intro to Philosophy starring Rene

Descartes, I took a very general, relatively unstructured psychology course in
which we were assigned to read a book called The 3-Pound Universe. Not
coincidentally, I had already perused it in the library on my own time, but
was now thrilled to be obliged to buy it and read some more. It was a great
book for me, a smorgasbord of provocative topics in psychology with a
fairly strong emphasis on altered states of consciousness, from dreaming to
schizophrenia and beyond. It was particularly engaging material for someone
who had just completed his own adventures in LSD and was ready to start
studying to become a legitimate psychologist.
One passage that caught my attention real good comes from interviews
with John Lilly. He’s the guy who invented sensory deprivation tanks where
you float in body-temperature salt water in total darkness. According to the
book, Lilly invented these contraptions in an effort to better understand the
experience of dolphins, which he had been studying for his career. Today,
people use them to meditate and such. Lilly’s adventures apparently inspired
two Hollywood movies: his dolphin work, The Day of the Dolphin (1973),
and his LSD trips in isolation tanks, Altered States (1980). Yes, I’ve seen
and recommend the latter, but don’t know much about the former.
In any event, part of the interview goes as follows:

“You know,” [Lilly] adds, “[mathematician Kurt] Gödel’s

theorem, translated, says that a computer of a given size can model
only a smaller computer. It cannot model itself. If it modeled a
computer of its own size and complexity, it would fill it entirely
and it couldn’t do anything.”
“So the brain can never understand the brain?” we ask.
“That’s right.”4

I honestly don’t know if Gödel’s (or anyone else’s) theorem translates as

such, but the proposition that the brain simply does not have the capacity to
ultimately understand itself seems plausible, given the circularity. And I
actually found the notion reassuring, particularly from a spiritual perspective
(at least initially). If consciousness cannot be fully understood, that is,
explicitly reduced to biology, chemistry, and physics, the possibility remains
that there is something more to it, that perhaps there is a “soul,” or something
akin to one, that endures when the body dies. Perhaps other non-Lillian
scientists scoff at the notion of eternal life simply because it’s beyond the
domain of human science. But maybe there’s nothing mysterious about the
human soul at all: It’s just as real as the stomach and liver and everything
else but simply outside the realm of understanding because it’s the thing
trying to do the understanding! Perhaps aliens with more complicated brains
would laugh at us for being so confused and might see our puzzlement over
the soul amusing. Suddenly with this type of thinking, it seems that science
and religion are finally standing on some of the same ground. My slippery
slope just became a little less slippery and sloped. I could cling a little
longer.
This optimism was bolstered in a very well-written chapter later in the
book, “Border Stations: The Near-Death Experience.” The authors, Judith
Hooper and Dick Teresi, do a great job of presenting data and arguments
both supporting and challenging the near-death experience (NDE), with its
“tunnel, brilliant light, out-of-body-travel, [and] panoramic life flashbacks,”
followed by “un-shakeable belief in postmortem survival.” Being one who
cherished the notion of postmortem survival, it was relatively easy for me to
pay attention to the pro-NDE arguments and rush past those from the
naysayers. As objective and reassuring as ever, Judith and Dick close with
this: “The NDE, if it is genuine, raises questions to which there are no
answers … Sorry, but we have to leave this chapter without an answer.”
Unfortunately, however, I just couldn’t let Lilly, Gödel, and the
incomprehensible go. These are things that I liked to contemplate, and
eventually too much contemplation spoiled the truce I had established
between science and religion. That is, for the first time in my life I began to
truly appreciate the convenience of spirituality.
I had previously learned in my Intro to Psychology class that human
brains simply do not like ambiguity. Although everyone seems to agree that
this is the case, no one seems to know why. With amusing circularity, the
explanations that I’ve heard seem far-fetched, if not downright silly—yes, the
explanations themselves are more evidence supporting the notion, in that they
all feel like desperate, unsatisfying attempts to answer the question!
It soon became clear that one way to solve many of the restless, nagging
paradoxes and incomprehensibilities is to throw God into the mix. Things
like the beginning of time, the nature of space before the Big Bang, and the
current edge of the universe—all of these mysteries are suddenly tidied up
nicely when we clump them into one big mystery, an incomprehensible God
who specifically has a commandment that we should not question or test him.
 Since it’s not necessary to go as far as the edge of the universe to be
perplexed, everyone can benefit from the salve of gods. In a passage I like to
read over and over, Ernest Becker asserted that the mere act of existing can
be intrinsically baffling, if not frightening:

William James and … [Rudolf] Otto talked about the terror of the
world, the feeling of overwhelming awe, wonder, and fear in the
face of creation—the miracle of it, the mysterium tremendum et
fascinosum of each single thing, of the fact that there are things at
all.5

I don’t know a lick of Latin, but that term resonates well. And so does
“overwhelming awe, wonder, and fear … of the fact that there are things at
all.”
God can fix these discomforts of contemplation, and others as well—
including the most popular, perplexing, and unacceptable problem of all:
mortality.
Indeed, perhaps the most inconceivable notion for me to comprehend is
that of me no longer existing! I’m not even sure if I can do it, partially
because the act of trying to do so involves the very activity that I’m trying to
imagine not happening (that is, I’m trying to think of not thinking, analogous
to the old “Don’t think of a white elephant” imperative). Eternal life, whether
in Heaven or Hell, solves this problem as well. (Of course, most of us are
biased towards the Heaven alternative.)
In these ways, God serves as bookends for the incomprehensibilities,
corks for the holes of perplexity. All we have to do is have faith, and
suddenly the paradoxes of our feeble minds are no longer paradoxes. God
started time, and God will end it. Trees and dolphins and geodes are here
because God put them here. Dying is not really dying; it’s more like going to
sleep, only much, much better.
Comfort ensues.
Not for me, though. I was officially beginning to doubt my Christian
affiliation at this point. Not that I was legitimately considering any other
formal religion any more seriously. Maybe Buddhism, but I never saw it as
much of a religion anyway.
Once I got my freshman credits under my belt, stopped using drugs (except
for alcohol and pot), and got a clue about how college worked, I followed
the exodus of friends who had left Dallas the year before for The University
of Texas at Austin. I majored in psychology, of course. That was all I had
ever considered for a major, except for a brief stint fantasizing about
photography. I guess I entertained philosophy as well, but everyone had been
discouraging me with the obvious, that there’s not much a job market for
philosophers.
Choosing a minor was much more difficult. Professors advised me to
toughen up my transcript by taking more biology and math courses and such.
However, I was neurotic as hell about putting my coveted GPA at risk. So,
still eager for more philosophy, I took a class on ethics, along with an
elective from the same department called Classical Mythology. The
mythology professor was one of the best I had ever had, so I went with
Classical Civilization as a minor, partially motivated by the prospect of
taking more classes with him. That was smooth sailing. My GPA would thank
me.
And I did take another class with Dr. Gonzales: The next in his series
was called From Paganism to Christianity, which surveyed pre-Christian
religions of the European and para-European world, some with which I was
quite familiar (like Norse), and others that I had never even heard of (like
Mithraism).
Despite being incidental, the assaults against Christianity were many
and vicious. I know they weren’t intentional because much later, after the
course was over, Dr. Gonzales would disclose to me during his office hours
that he himself was Christian (Baptist, even?). The realization shocked me
because his class was the final nail in the coffin for what was left of my
Christianity, and for organized religion at large, for that matter.
I hadn’t been particularly moved by the delightful stories of Classical
Mythology, as we discussed them somewhat superficially and with frivolity.
For example, we had learned that Dionysus was the god of wine and
partying, an instant fan favorite among us college undergraduates, we being
obsessed with beer and titties and whatnot. However, in From Paganism to
Christianity we delved deeper, learning that Dionysus was born of a virgin
on December 25th. In fact, we learned that other gods were born on the
winter solstice as well, like Egyptian Osiris and Persian Mithras, the
connection apparently being that this was the most important day of the year
to many ancient peoples, as it signaled the coming of longer, warmer days
and the growing of crops. As I now hear many a pagan declare these days, it
turns out that “the reason for the season” may not be the birth of Jesus per se,
but the optimism of turning the corner from winter to spring, and hence, more
abundant food and better health for all.
We learned about myriad other parallels between the ancient gods and
Christianity, each being a backhand slap to the face because I had always
assumed that Christianity was unique and original. Naturally, there’s
controversy and it kinda depends on whom you ask, but yes: The manger, the
virgin birth, the disciples, the miracles, the temptation, the last supper, the
betrayal, the resurrection, the ascension, et cetera—it’s arguably all been
done before. As we proceeded through From Paganism to Christianity, it
became increasingly doubtful that Christianity is original at all. Even those
non-ridiculous parts of the Bible that I had continued to cherish, like the
Golden Rule, are covered elsewhere, including Hinduism, Judaism,
Buddhism, and yes, even Islam.
Perhaps a reason Christianity has endured and become so popular is
because it is a relatively new version of the same age-old myth, founded in a
bit of a chronological sweet spot. The relatively modern minds who wrote it
borrowed some things from older religions that had staying power but they
were smart enough to whittle away much of the absurdity that had doomed
some of those more ancient religions. However, the context in which
Christianity was pitched was not so modern that it could be subjected to
uninhibited and widespread criticism (as an even newer religion would be,
for example, if it was presented today). Perhaps a perfect storm of time and
context allowed it to gain a particular momentum that would take centuries to
undo—at least for modern society; it came undone for me personally during
the course of that class. Once the seal was broken and I became able to
critique Christianity without fearing for my soul, it became glaring that it was
expiring as well, with its endorsement of slavery and the oppression of
women and homosexuals and so on.
Even before From Paganism to Christianity, college had been teaching
me something else, that every individual and every culture is centric:
Everyone believes that he, and his time, are it, the one that matters the most.
Humans are narcissistic by nature, and so necessarily are, too, the cultures
they comprise. Individuals (and societies) feel more in touch with reality
than the people who lived before them or who currently live on the other side
of the river. But their narcissism doesn’t allow them to contemplate how the
people on the other side of the river are thinking the same way about them, or
how the people of the future will look back at them with pity. They believe,
or know, that their beliefs are correct.
Ironically, I found that studying the history of religion was one of the
best catalysts to help me step outside the centrism and narcissism, to see how
childish it is to be so self-assured about something that can’t really be
defended. It became easy to imagine how that I might have an alter-ego over
in Iran, a Muslim college student who is 110% sure that his religion is right
and that mine is wrong—just as I have felt up to this point about his. How
incredibly self-centered of us. We’re both equally wrong, because our
respective beliefs are not based on reality; they are based on what we have
been told, different myths endorsed by our respective cultures.
As I started to appreciate the fiction of it all, it was hard for me to
imagine my classmates—many of whom I assumed were Christian—not
having similar experiences. I would sometimes look around that gigantic
auditorium, looking for a sign on anyone’s face, but there was nothing out of
the ordinary there. Just some traditional looks of engagement, a few smiles,
some sleepy faces, and a lot of pretty girls. No one seemed as aghast as I felt.
Me, I was forced to finally admit that I had not only been wrong about the
Bible, but was also wrong about God and Jesus, even my very liberal, ill-
defined versions of them.
But once again, the realization was not a catastrophe. As the dust settled
from this disturbance, I realized I was simply still maturing, that I would
have to continue to adjust and adopt the next label, this time agnostic theist,
one who believes in a god of some sort but is unsure of his nature. I will
even continue to pray, but I’ll have to address “god” instead of “God” when I
do.
Instead of conceptualizing the different religions of the world as
mutually exclusive—and therefore all false—we can focus on the other side
of the coin, that they are actually all congruent. God is too great to be
understood by feeble human minds. Different cultures necessarily have
different conceptualizations of him because each has been forced to attempt
to describe him through the eyes of his own times and peers. Osiris is
actually Mithras is actually Zoroaster is actually Jesus. We’ve been
worshipping the same god all along.
And what a crying shame that so much war and destruction have been
born of religious conflict when we haven’t even been in disagreement. I
guess that’s human nature; I have to understand that. Not forgive it, but
understand it. Egocentrism, ethnocentrism. But I’m gonna be a bigger and
better person and see through all that crap. “Spiritual but not religious,”
that’s what I am.

A few semesters after From Paganism to Christianity, in 1993, my paternal

grandfather died of natural causes. He was old, like most of the Landers
when they succumb. I didn’t know him well, and probably hadn’t spent more
than a hundred hours with him total, if that. But he always seemed like a
sweet guy; I have no recollection of him being mean or even abrasive. He
was tallish and thin and sometimes smoked a pipe. Like lots of kids, I was
captivated by that smell. I kinda revered him, as children often do adults who
are calm and not oppressive.
Besides his pipe, I have a couple of fond and poignant memories of
“Papaw.” Once, during some holiday (I think Christmas), he, my brother, and
I had what we would later refer to as a “farting contest.” It wasn’t planned,
but totally spontaneous, one of those moments in which the planets were
simply aligned just right, with three boys left alone, each a little gassy. I can
still remember laughing uncontrollably, and watching Papaw lose it as well.
We connected that day, at least a little.
I also remember when Papaw’s memory started to slip. His was the
relatively kind type, in that he never seemed distressed about it. I recall
another special occasion, definitely Thanksgiving this time, when we were
all crowded around the TV watching the Cowboys game with him. Papaw
was a little disoriented and would lose sight of which game we were
watching: During those moments in which the network would show a
highlight from the Lions game earlier, he’d jump up and shout, thinking it was
still the Cowboys (hey, our colors are similar!). When we corrected him,
gently, he laughed and didn’t seem embarrassed.
 When he died, I took a little time off from school and drove up to
Bronte or Winters or whatever tiny, dilapidated West Texas town that was for
the funeral. We call that area “west” despite how central it is on a map. It is
quite west-ish, if you consider the population density of the state, which is
concentrated towards the east. In any event, I had to borrow my ex-
girlfriend’s car, because mine was old and feeble and I just didn’t want to get
stranded out there in that desolation.
The funeral was much more tidy than I felt one should be, but I’m not
sure why I anticipated otherwise. There were only like eight of us, my little
family of four and my dad’s brother’s equally small family. I can’t recall if it
was at a church or a funeral home; the two may have been the same out there.
It could’ve been a school for that matter—the place didn’t have any
spirituality whatsoever. I don’t remember seeing a casket. Maybe he was
cremated.
Since I had spent so little time with my grandfather we weren’t really
attached in a meaningful way, beyond his pipe and farting and peaceful
senility. So, I just kinda went along for the ride, trying to look sadder than I
felt and just watched the others. It was very intimate: The eight of us, plus the
minister, were sitting in a circle on some of those cheap folding chairs you
might find at a small-town convention center. My dad and uncle were having
uncannily similar experiences to one another, which were quite intense and
therefore antithetical to mine. It was a little unsettling, bordering on
frightening, one of those moments when you’re really alive—there’s no
bullshit; real, profound stuff is going down. As the minister was talking—and
it was a very Bible-laden service—my dad and uncle both had their eyes
closed and appeared to be in deep, passionate thought. Every time the
minister would say something about Papaw not being gone but instead being
with the Lord, and all of us being reunited with him later, they would say,
“Amen! Praise his name! Yes, Lord!” and stuff like that. But neither of them
looked happy; this shit wasn’t Sunday school. They both looked so incredibly
serious when they spoke, yet oddly comfortable at the same time, as if they
had done this many times before. I’ll never forget that scene, how they were
both doing the same incredible thing, whatever it was.
About three quarters of the way through the minister’s spiel, my feelings
of awkwardness suddenly transformed to clarity. I was hit so hard by the
freight train of epiphany that I was seriously concerned that the others must
be able to tell by the look on my face: This ceremony is not for Papaw.
 This ceremony is for my dad and his brother, the two who have been
hurt the most by this inconceivable event, that is, the loss of their father.
Sitting there in that little room with my little family, it suddenly became so
perfectly clear why we even believe in Heaven and have ceremonies like
this to assert its existence. It’s not that different religions are different
cultural mechanisms to access the same universal truth; it’s that they’re all
different cultural fantasies to soothe the same universal fear.
It’s literally unbearable when our loved ones die.
But somehow we keep existing. We miss our loved one, but we’re
probably—on some level—at least equally concerned about our own
impending demise. Typically, we can’t even really conceive of our own
demise, but it becomes as tangible as ever, sitting in the room with the corpse
(or ashes) of what used to be the Most Powerful Being in our lives. That god
who used to feed us, keep us warm, and save us from every conceivable
disaster, is gone. We’re as close as ever to death, but we still can’t fathom
the notion completely.
So we don’t. We refuse to even try. Instead, we choose to believe it’s
not happening at all, and that it’s not going to happen to us, either.
Sitting there, among all the “Amens” and angels, it all came together—
Candide, Descartes, the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum, Dionysus, and
now my dead grandfather—and pushed me over a line so that I snapped and
became an atheist. It was all so sudden and striking that I didn’t even have a
chance to indulge agnosticism, that is, the position that one is simply unsure
whether there is a god. No, I was too compelled for that. All religions, all
bibles, all gods, all religious ceremonies, all conceptions of heaven —and
any hopes about any of these being valid or real—have simply been hoaxes,
ways to turn this particular unbearable situation into a bearable one.
Driving back home to Austin afterwards, I reminisced about the first
funeral I had ever attended, that for my mother’s father (the fireman) back in
1989, when I was still enthusiastically regarding myself as Christian. That
man had always been an atheist, something that we never really talked about
openly, as if he had been a child molester or something. But when he died
there was chatter that he must have “found the Lord” right towards the end.
People were citing things he had said or done over the last months or years
of his life to support their optimism. I remembered having embraced those
comforting thoughts myself back then as well. But now, driving home as a
born-again atheist, I could only feel cynical. I mocked the notion that had
comforted me before, asking myself, sarcastically, “Did anyone ever go to
hell?” Not in my family, apparently. I kinda felt like a fool for ever buying
into any of this religion crap, and so now it was time to be a dick about it.
Well, just as the dust had settled after realizing Christianity couldn’t
possibly be the only spiritual truth, the dust would settle after converting to
atheism. I still hadn’t given up on transcendence entirely! I just had to loosen
up even a little more. Now I would appeal to the most ambiguous conception
of immortality possible, not of a soul per se wandering around in heaven but
that of my “consciousness”—somehow involving a god-free Energy that
Binds Us and quantum physics and other things that will never be fully
understood. Since education and rationality had made it impossible to have
faith in anything describable, I would just have to subscribe to something that
couldn’t be put into words. As ambiguous as the notion was, it helped make
sense of some loose ends, like that tidbit from the near-death-experience
chapter of The Three-Pound Universe, the tidbit that I’d been trying to ignore
up to that point:

Even more remarkably, dyed-in-the-wool atheists were just as

likely to have NDEs as born-again Christians—although the pious
more often communed with a biblical God, the nonbelievers with
a “warm presence” or a holy light.6

Of course: If we atheists can have near-death experiences then eternal life

must have nothing to do with any god or religion. It obviously has more to do
with science—wonderfully non-exclusive, all-forgiving science. I’ll continue
to call myself “spiritual but not religious,” only now the “spiritual” will refer
to the belief that quantum physics (or something) is in charge of it all.
All of these developments were validated by Omni magazine articles
and well-made documentaries featuring celebrity intellectuals like Deepak
Chopra. They spoke with authority, charisma, and a glow that made it clear
that we new-age spiritualists finally had it all figured out, that science and
spirituality are the same, and no one will be left out. Now that’s really
beautiful: a universe where everyone is granted eternal life. And again, what
a shame that the rest of humanity can’t see these truths, but instead continue to
kill each other because they’re too immersed in their respective myths.
Why is religion so ubiquitous? Granted, I’m not a real religious scholar, but
I’m personally unaware of any significant society throughout history that has
been primarily atheistic. The ubiquity (or near ubiquity; I hate to say
“never”) of religion suggests it must have a role in satisfying fundamental
human needs.
Over two millennia ago, the amazingly open-minded-before-his-time
Lucretius identified one of the most likely reasons religion has always had
such appeal:

For, in good sooth [truth], it is thus that fear restraineth all mortals,
Since both in earth and sky they see that many things happen
Whereof they cannot by any known law determine the causes;
So their occurrence they ascribe to supernatural power.7

Today, I still find myself truly in awe—even a little scared sometimes—

when I’m beholding a Texas summer thunderhead approaching. And I’ve got
the luxury of weather.com to find out how dangerous it actually is (or not),
including a “map in motion” to see exactly where it is and when it will
arrive, if at all. Nevertheless, I’m still a little scared, and very much in awe.
Imagine how a dark, gigantic cumulonimbus cloud with lightning and
thunder must have appeared to the people of Lucretius’s time—how could
they not posit an angry god behind it! They weren’t stupid; it’s actually fairly
rational, given what they did know at the time. Again, they had to have an
explanation—not explaining it was not an option. Kudos, Lucretius, for
already doubting it all, decades before Christ was even born.
In a book that is as engaging as its title, Existential Psychotherapy, the
venerable psychiatrist Irvin Yalom elaborates:

Human beings have always abhorred uncertainty and have sought

through the ages to order the universe by providing explanations,
primarily religious or scientific. The explanation of a phenomenon
is the first step toward control of that phenomenon.8
He provides a coherent example, of

natives [who] live in terror of the unpredictable eruptions of a

nearby volcano … their first step toward mastery of their situation
is explanation. They may, for example, explain the volcano’s
eruption as the behavior of a displeased volcano god … [as a
result,] a course of action is available that augments their sense of
mastery: if the volcano explodes because the god is displeased,
then there must be methods of placating and eventually controlling
the god.

Absolutely. One way to treat fear of the unknown is to know it—even if you
have to trick yourself into thinking you know it!
Again, one doesn’t need a volcano nearby to benefit from the salve
afforded by gods and creators. Even the Garden of Eden or modern Toronto
will conjure the uneasy feelings Ernest Becker discussed, “the mysterium
tremendum et fascinosum of each single thing, of the fact that there are things
at all.” And for those throughout history who have not been so inquisitive to
be haunted by the mysterium, other phenomena of the average person’s life
would have demanded contemplation otherwise. British biologist Lewis
Wolpert, from his Six Impossible Things before Breakfast:

Edward Tylor was an early thinker on the reasons why belief in

the paranormal was near universal across history and different
cultures. He argued that people were from the earliest times
deeply puzzled by two phenomena: the difference between a living
and a dead body, and the nature of the people in dreams. This led
to the belief that life could leave a body and go wandering, as it
does in dreams … [raising the] possibility of ultimate immortality
[which] was, and still can be, very comforting … Sleep is itself a
sort of paranormal experience, and dreaming of a dead person
would make it more so. And illness, in early times, must also have
been almost a paranormal experience, as would be childbirth, the
causes being mysterious.9
What fascinating propositions! We think childbirth is a miracle today:
Imagine how miraculous it was ten thousand, a hundred thousand, or a
million years ago!
Letting go of my centrism, I can see that Volcano People were not really
doing anything different from what Old Testament People were doing:
placating a god. And maybe New Testament People are no different from Old
Testament People. Sure, sacrifice has become less vogue over the years, but
I’m not sure that, for example, sacrificing a beautiful Sunday to go to church
is qualitatively different. We’re still trying to placate (that is, influence, or
even control) God so he doesn’t abandon us. By influencing our gods through
appeasement, we feel safer.
And even when we’re not sacrificing, we pray. Prayer also offers a
sense of control. When I pray, I’m communicating with God. The more I
believe he hears me, the more in control I must feel, whether it be over a
volcanic eruption or my presentation to the shareholders at work next week.
Faith, then, does not offer only hope: It affords a sense of control, or agency.
“Potency,” Yalom calls it.
Through all of my adventures as a psychologist—student, patient,
licensed practitioner—I’ve become convinced that a sense of control is one
of the most fundamental human needs, perhaps on par with eating,
socializing, and mating. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman taught me about one of the
more compelling and poignant manifestations of the need for control, that is,
by explaining the mysterious but surprisingly common response to rape: self-
blame.10 In a nutshell, many victims would rather blame themselves than
admit that the world is a chaotic, unjust place where horrible things happen
to innocent people. By taking the blame, she preserves her belief that the
world is meaningful and fair, but also attempts to convince herself that she is
actually in control so she’ll be able to avoid another catastrophe in the future.
In fact, Ronnie argues that the rest of us blame victims for the same reason:
We don’t want to consider that innocent people are victimized randomly,
which makes us feel safe and in control. Furthermore, when we blame
victims—whether of rape or poverty or whatever—it helps us minimize our
obligation to help them.
On the other side of the violence coin, it seems that many perpetrators
commit violence to assert their control over the world. So many people who
are violent as adults were themselves beaten down as children. They had no
control, which can be excruciating, humiliating, and devastating. When they
begin to find themselves in a position where they can dominate someone else,
whether those opportunities begin to appear during their own childhoods or
later, some of them take advantage of the situation, and it’s reinforcing to
them to exercise some control when they couldn’t before. It’s like payback, in
a way, only displacing it from his perpetrator to another innocent victim,
someone who was innocent just like he was way back when.

If studying classical civilization had not ruined my faith, studying psychology

probably would have anyway. People who spend their lives studying the
brain are no longer intimidated by it—nor by consciousness, personality, or
its other products. Yes, even the human brain starts to make sense so that one
no longer has to throw up his hands and chalk up human nature and
experience to souls and spirits or ill-defined cosmic energy fields or
whatever. Now, I’m not going to suggest that we will necessarily understand
the mind perfectly someday (recall the John Lilly/Gödel paradox discussed
above, the proposition that something can’t completely understand itself).
However, heading in the direction of understanding may be sufficient to
convince one that even the human mind is a product of nature and doesn’t
require a God to have created it. Something profound definitely happened to
me when I eventually began to appreciate that the human mind is
understandable, even if not by me specifically.
We know that the human nervous system is comprised of billions of
neurons that transmit electrical signals along their lengths. Most of these
lengths are very short, fractions of a millimeter, while some—for example,
the ones that transmit sensations from your big toe to your lower spine—
might be a meter long. They really are like biological wires, the long ones
even have biological insulation called myelin.
At the end of the neuron, the electrical signal that travels across the cell
causes a chemical to be released into the extra-cellular space so that
neighboring neurons can receive it. If those neighboring cells receive enough
such neurotransmitter, they will initiate their own electrical signals which
they can then send elsewhere. And these processes—the electrical
transmission, its transformation into a chemical signal, and back into an
electrical signal—are understood quite well. Not perfectly, but there’s not an
alarming amount of mystery about them anymore.
Those wires running from our toes and other appendages are organized
neatly as they enter and ascend the spinal cord up into the brain. There are
actually two separate systems working in parallel: one for touch sensations,
and one for pain. The touch fibers cross over as they enter the spine and
ascend the opposite side (so, your left toe touch fibers ascend the right side
of your spinal column). However, the separate pain fibers for that same toe
don’t cross over until later (so, your left toe pain fibers ascend the left side
of the spinal cord). Turns out this separation of church and state may serve a
functional purpose, and hence may have been naturally selected: If we suffer
an injury to one side of the spinal cord, we only lose touch or pain to that
side, not both. Apparently, if you lose the touch on one side, it helps you
function if you can still feel pain, as there is some degree of overlap between
the sensations.
Ascending the spinal cord to the brain, the fibers remain neatly
organized so that those innervating one body part tend to stay close to those
innervating nearby body parts (so, the fibers for the index finger ascend the
spinal cord next to those for the middle finger). The organization continues as
you ascend the cord and as additional fibers from more elevated parts of the
body are added. At some point, if you were to view a horizontal slice
through the cord, parallel to the ground, you would have a rough
somatosensory map of your body. You could stimulate this thing with an
electrical probe and create feelings of touch (or pain) throughout your body
in a quite predictable manner.
And the orderliness continues as the fibers arrive at the brain,
spreading out over the wrinkly cortex so that those brain parts that process
touch in the foot (the right foot in the left hemisphere—don’t forget the
crossing-over!) are next to those areas that process touch in the calf of the
same leg … and so on.
Of course, those parts of the body where touch is more important (for
example, the hands) will involve more brain tissue than those where touch is
less important (for example, the abdomen). Fingers can peel fruit, husk seeds
and nuts, and manipulate sticks and stones; abdomens just don’t need that
kind of precision. Our lips also use more brain than one might suspect. Using
them for articulating speech sounds and eating and such demands a lot of
brain area, too. Some of the side effects of this are good (for example, it
makes kissing such a rich experience), but others are bad (a sore or zit
around the lips hurts like hell). By the way, all of this organization is not
unique to humans: It works the same way in other mammals but varies
accordingly so that, for example, rats have a large area of sensory cortex
devoted to their whiskers.
Many students are surprised to learn that the genitals have relatively
little brain devoted to them, genitals being the centers of our universes.
However, despite how good orgasms end up feeling, genitals themselves
don’t actually have good spatial resolution—they’re more like abdomens
than fingers. Sure, they love to be touched, but they’re not so picky about
exactly where. Diffuse pressure works just fine, as long as it keeps moving.
And it’s not just touch; the other senses and such are processed in
orderly fashions as well. Right next to the somatosensory cortex processing
touch, there is an analogous motor cortex that is devoted to producing
motion. As with the somatosensory map, the amount of brain tissue devoted
to each body part is in proportion to how important motion is for each
respective body part (again, fingers being big, abdomen being small, and in
this case, genitals get virtually nothing).
Sounds are processed in a different part of the brain than touch, and that
area is also neatly organized, so that sounds at 1,000 Hz are processed near
those that process sounds at 1,500 hertz, and relatively far from those that
process 10,000 hertz, and so on.
The organization is most remarkable in terms of the visual system. As
your imagination may be suggesting, yes, images of the environment are
indeed projected onto the back of your eye via a system of lenses not unlike a
camera. When photons of light strike light-sensitive cells in the retina, they
initiate a surprisingly not-as-complex-as-you-might-expect process in which
the electromagnetic energy of photons is transformed into a biological, neural
signal, similar to how neurotransmitters relay messages from neuron to
neuron throughout the rest of the nervous system.
Some of the neurons from the eye are only indirectly involved in seeing,
as they detour to the primitive “reptilian” midbrain where things like eye
movements and pupil dilation are controlled (this is why a “vegetative”
patient like Terri Schiavo with profound loss of cortical, “mammalian” brain
tissue can still appear to be looking around but she’s not really “seeing” in
the traditional sense). Those fibers that do the actual seeing travel to the
thalamus, which fine-tunes and filters the information, contributing to the
smooth and steady perception that we’ll eventually see. (Interesting to note:
Last I heard, the thalamus is one place where LSD has its effects, essentially
reducing the brain’s ability to make vision smooth and steady.) From the
thalamus, visual stimulation goes to the visual cortex at the back of the brain,
where it is further processed and ultimately brought into consciousness.
Magnificently, the seeing fibers arrive at the visual cortex in an orderly
fashion analogous to the other senses, so that portions of our visual field that
are near one another are processed near one another in the cortex. Does this
mean if we could look directly at a brain, itself in the process of seeing, that
we could see a picture of our visual field on the brain’s cortex?
Not exactly—but almost! In the early 1980s, Roger Tootell and his
colleagues injected a monkey with radioactive glucose, which is absorbed
into neural cells as they become increasingly active (that is, stimulated). He
directed the monkey’s gaze towards a screen upon which a stimulus was
displayed, something akin to a wagon wheel (the monkey, of course, is under
general anesthesia; it doesn’t know what is happening, just like when you had
your wisdom teeth or gall bladder removed or whatever).
The monkey is later sacrificed for science, and its brain is studied.11
Unfathomably, the section of brain that is devoted to processing the area of
real-world space occupied by the light-wheel literally has a freaking
“picture” of the freaking wheel on it! No, you wouldn’t actually be able to
see the wheel on the brain if observing the brain directly while all of this
was happening, but the radioactive glucose allows us to see which cells
were most active, in retrospect.
The very sobering point: Brains are surprisingly orderly, sensible, and
predictable, just as you would imagine an evolved machine to be. The more
you learn about brains, the less amazing—no, let me take that back—the less
mysterious they are. And as the brain becomes increasingly demystified, the
less we have to assume something spiritual or transcendent behind it all. And
the less we have to assume spirits behind the brain, the less we have to
assume spirits behind anything else.
Now, I readily admit that somatosensory, motor, tonotopic, and retinotopic
maps do little to account for the more complex human experiences, such as
memory, abstraction, and self-awareness. However, the unfortunate but
fascinating phenomenon of epileptic seizures does.
Recall that a seizure is the problem in which neurons in the brain
become hyperactive, firing spontaneously and excessively, whether due to
genetically inherited anomalies or to environmentally acquired injuries. In
some seizures, consciousness is maintained but one can lose control of her
motor functions. A shaking might start in her fingers because the first cells to
run amok are in the finger part of her motor cortex discussed above. But as
the hyperactivity spreads over the surface of that strip of brain, it takes over
her hand next, then arm, then shoulder, then head—a devilish puppeteer who
will even go as far as to make her crap her pants. Some patients may engage
in more complex behaviors, like she might eat or brush her teeth while in an
epileptic trance—or even go to a party and have a great time, believing
afterwards that she had been at home sleeping.12 Spastic cells in other areas
will affect the senses so that one might feel a wind that isn’t there or smell
oranges or feces for no legitimate reason.
The most interesting experiences occur when the temporal lobes are
affected, those parts of the brain that seem particularly important in emotions
and memories. A temporal lobe seizure may overwhelm the patient with joy,
fear, sadness, rage, nostalgia, or even orgasm. Déjà vu is common in this
condition because it, too, is nothing mystical but just another short circuit of
sorts. Memories might be superimposed on reality, like for Oliver Sacks’
patient Mrs. O. C.: “I know you’re there, Dr. Sacks. I know I’m an old
woman with a stroke in an old people’s home, but I feel I’m a child in Ireland
again—I feel my mother’s arms, I see her, I hear her voice singing.”13 It
seems, then, that even our emotions and memories—those parts of us which
we cherish and pride for making us particularly human—are mechanized in
the brain, at least to some degree.
When that most highly esteemed profession of brain surgery came
about, doctors began to treat seizures by destroying (or sequestering) those
brain cells that continue to misfire despite gallons of medication. Amazingly,
these surgeries are done while the patients are awake so that the surgeon can
poke the brain and consult with the patient in order to make sure she’s in the
right spot.14 And sure enough, by applying electrical current to different parts
of the brain via a tiny electrode, the surgeon can control the patient a bit like
a puppet, eliciting experiences akin to those described during spontaneous
seizures.
One of the prolific pioneers in the field, Wilder Penfield, specialized in
evoking sights, sounds, and other subjective experiences that were often
difficult for patients to describe. Some of these appeared to be
hallucinations, such as when patient #36 reported, “Yes, I hear … a woman
calling … It seemed to be at the lumber yard … [but] I have never been
around any lumber yard.”15 Other hallucinations were more like memories,
as they were verified to have been based in actual experiences, such as that
for patient #38: “Yes, Doctor, yes, Doctor! Now I hear people laughing—my
friends in South Africa … two cousins, Bessie and Ann Wheliaw.” Penfield
could also cause emotional experiences with his electrode: One patient
laughed, another cried—but fear was most accessible. Patient #30 reported,
“Yes, I felt just terrified for an instant.” Number 15, a 14-year-old girl
exclaimed, “Oh, everybody is shouting at me again, make them stop! …
Something dreadful is going to happen … I saw someone coming toward me
as though he were going to hit me.” Other patients had more spiritual-like
experiences, like #14 who apparently felt some sort of transcendent
connection to Penfield’s anesthesiologist: “I almost spiritually spoke to that
woman” (the anesthesiologist was actually male). Number #23 reported, “I
am going to die … God said I am going to die.”
That we can conjure God’s voice with an electrode is actually not as
surprising as it is interesting. Popular neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran
explains that “Every medical student” is taught that spontaneous seizures can
cause patients to have “deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a
feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communication
with God.”16 Whether due to more subtle, enduring brain dysfunction or
simply because such patients are so moved by the spiritual seizure
experience, some “become preoccupied with religious and moral issues even
during the seizure-free … periods.” Many experts now wonder whether some
historical religious figures from Joan of Arc to the Apostle Paul may have
had temporal lobe epilepsy themselves, as some of their experiences were
apparently consistent with the diagnosis.17 The more you read about all this
stuff, the more you begin to entertain the demoralizing, frustrating accusation:
“It’s all in your head.” Not just our fears and insecurities, but also our
religion.
 Yes, for whatever reason evolution deemed fit, there clearly are brain
areas or mechanisms that mediate spiritual experiences. Seizures can
stimulate these pathologically, or we can stimulate them deliberately by
taking LSD or ecstasy and such. As Lewis Wolpert says, “A simple drug like
LSD could only have such effects if the circuits for these experiences were
already in the brain.”18 I don’t think we know why they are there, but they
apparently are.
And maybe we don’t even need seizures or LSD to stimulate them!
Lewis goes on to discuss the provocative hypothesis that hypnosis has a role
in—if it cannot explain entirely—elements of religious ritual. Hypnosis is
one of the more mysterious phenomena in all of psychology, on par with
dreaming, if not more interesting in ways. Now, we know that hypnosis
cannot force people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise, so don’t get any
crazy ideas about using it to get laid or having people rob banks for you.
However, Lewis cites mind-boggling research showing that hypnosis can, for
example, induce anesthesia or hallucinations or—get this—cause one’s
physical reaction to a skin-prick tuberculosis test administered to one arm to
manifest on the other (non-pricked) arm! Given that, it’s a little anticlimactic
when Lewis cites other research showing that people can be hypnotically
induced to recount events that haven’t even happened, such as having heard
gunshots in the night or, of course, being abducted by aliens.
Hypnotized people are apparently not lying about their hypnotized
experiences; those experiences are kinda transpiring, at least on some
neurological level. For example, Lewis also describes brain imaging
research showing that persons perceiving black-and-white images but told to
perceive color under hypnotic suggestion show activation in the color-
perceiving parts of their brains! No, this doesn’t mean that one can affect the
environment with her mind (like bending spoons or whatever), but it does
mean that she can affect her own body with her brain (a finding that must
have some relevance for the well-documented placebo effect).
If hypnosis can make the visual areas of our brains see color when
color isn’t really there, then hypnosis can make our temporal lobes have
spiritual experiences when spirits aren’t really there. While reading Lewis’s
discussion, all I could think of was my own father speaking in tongues at our
church when I was a little kid, vis-à-vis aboriginal ladies I’ve seen more
recently on some anthropology documentary, becoming “possessed” by
spirits while dancing around a fire. Given what I know now, it seems more
than plausible that my dad and those ladies have been doing the same thing:
hypnotizing themselves through the rituals endorsed by their respective
cultures, thereby stimulating those spiritual centers in their temporal lobes
and having profound experiences of altered states.

I lost the last bit of my own spirituality one day while perusing books about
death and dying on the fourth floor of the colossal Perry-Casteñeda Library
on the University of Texas campus. It wasn’t long after my Papaw’s funeral in
the mid-1990s, the ink not yet totally dry on my new Proud Atheist card.
Although I was no longer able to entertain the notion that God or any other
god was real, I was still clinging to notions of immortality through some ill-
defined mechanism, something that must involve quantum physics and energy
fields and other stuff that I would never fully understand. The near-death
experience (NDE) gave me hope—particularly that part about atheists having
NDEs as often as anybody else, which I naturally interpreted to mean that life
after death is for everyone. But even that all fell apart when I came across G-
LOC. Whatever breeze had been left in my Sails of Belief in Immortality
before that moment finally stopped blowing. I felt it quit, no kidding, standing
there; I remember the exact spot.
G-LOC stands for “gravity (or g-force)-induced loss of consciousness.”
The basic idea is that if one is suddenly subjected to increased gravitational
forces, such as during extreme maneuvers in a jet fighter, she can go
unconscious. Medically, the phenomenon is understood well: The force of
gravity simply forces blood from the brain so that it pools in the lower
extremities and such. Losing consciousness via G-LOC is essentially the
same as natural fainting or excessive bleeding, the only difference being that
blood leaves the brain for different reasons. Regardless of why blood flow is
compromised—whether it be to low blood pressure or extreme gravity—the
brain is one of the first organs to succumb, largely because it has the highest
elevation and because it demands so much blood way up there. Indeed, this is
a function of fainting: to lower the head so that a relatively meager heartbeat
can feed the brain adequately, which helps facilitate recovery and prevent
brain damage.
 While flying a jet, you can’t afford to faint or to put your head between
your legs to prevent fainting. So, pilots are trained in those carnival ride-
looking human centrifuges to test their limits and so they can learn to identify
and cope with G-LOC before it overwhelms them (for example, by slowing
down).
Thousands of pilots have been run through these things in laboratories,
allowing researchers to study and quantify the G-LOC experience with
significant precision. And the punchline: Many pilots, at some point during
G-LOC, experience dramatic altered states, eerily—or I guess I should say
not so eerily—similar to NDEs. Yes, healthy pilots in G-LOC can experience

tunnel vision and bright lights, floating sensations, automatic

movement, autoscopy [sensation of seeing one’s own body from an
external perspective], out-of-body experiences, not wanting to be
disturbed, paralysis, vivid dreamlets of beautiful places,
pleasurable sensations, … euphoria and dissociation, inclusion of
friends and family, inclusion of prior memories and thoughts, the
experience being very memorable … , confabulation, and a strong
urge to understand the experience.19

No wonder atheists have NDEs as often as Christians: It’s because the NDE
is a medical phenomenon, not a spiritual one. And no wonder dying people in
India tend to see Hindu deities, those in New Guinea see sorcerers, and
Native Americans see “Native American objects such as a ‘war eagle,’ deer,
moose, bow and arrow, and moccasins.”20 It’s not because life after death is
for everybody—it’s because life after death is for nobody. Even the mighty
NDE is just another fucking neurological malfunction.
Now I understand why NDEs seem to be associated with some kinds of
dying and not others. Your brain has to be deprived of oxygen to have the
pleasant dying experience, like through cardiac arrest, bloodletting, or
choking. I’ve never heard of an NDE associated with blunt force trauma to
the head, even though people almost die from it all the time. Surely, deities
and angels would not have some sort of preference for certain types of dying,
showing up and offering comfort during a drowning but turning a cold
shoulder to a hammer to the head. That obviously would not make sense. But
G-LOC makes sense.
 Now I understand why all the “research” supporting NDEs is merely
anecdotal, that no legitimate controlled experiments have ever validated the
phenomenon. The clever experiment would involve putting distinct objects or
signs in particular places throughout emergency rooms so that they could only
be seen by a hovering out-of-the-body spirit. According to physicist Victor
Stenger, “This experiment has been tried several times without a single
subject succeeding in reading the message under controlled conditions.”21 In
other words, autoscopy is not real, either. It’s just another hallucination. Of
course it is, given it’s part of G-LOC. Sure enough, turns out autoscopy can
also be elicited during brain surgery.22 I suspect before too long the whole
“near-death” experience is going to be something we can purchase for
recreation, just like a massage or tour of the Louvre.

At least for me, spirituality can no longer be defended in the face of these
medical explanations. I’m afraid that the most sensible assessment is that we
really are just biology and chemistry, held together according to the laws of
Newtonian physics. Indeed, quantum physics no longer offers an out, as real
scientists, such as astrophysicist Dave Goldberg, are now taking the floor to
inform us that the new-age spiritualists have misunderstood quantum physics
and falsely advertised it through, for instance, the “abomination” of a film
What the #$*! Do We Know? Dave specifies that “It is remarkable (and
frankly, alarming) the degree to which quantum uncertainty and quantum
weirdness get inextricably bound up in certain circles with the idea of a soul,
or humans controlling the universe, or some other pseudoscience.”23
I suspect that the faithful would retort by arguing that none of these
biological explanations for experience and behavior mean anything, that God
simply allows his spiritual centers of our brains to be fooled by LSD and
seizures just to provide more temptations for us to rise above. You’ve got to
have faith. This is what faith is all about: ignoring demoralizing logic and
reason and embracing hope unconditionally.
But I can’t do it anymore. I’m tired of trying to make all of this work.
It’s too much, a cruel and unusual challenge to my faith. I’m perfectly
convinced now that spirituality is all in our heads, our so incredible—but so
incredibly fallible—brains, with all their glutamate, glycoproteins, and other
goo. Of course there’s no ghost in the machine. It’s just a machine.
And my machine hurts! I don’t want to die. Mark Twain was wrong
when he argued that annihilation will be okay because we’ve already
experienced it before we were born. He’s wrong because there’s a critical
asymmetry that he’s overlooking: When we didn’t exist the first time, we
hadn’t had the experience of being alive yet. Now that we have existed, our
second episode of annihilation will necessarily have a different quality, as it
will rob us of the life that we cherish so desperately, and there will be no
other episode of existence in which to look forward.
No, I see our situation more like Blaise Pascal, and “marvel that people
are not seized with despair at such a miserable condition.”

1 Voltaire. (1990). Candide. In Candide and other stories (R. Pearson, Trans.; p. 18). Oxford: Oxford
University Press. (Original work published 1759).
2 Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great (p. 264). New York: Twelve.
3 Luke 4:12 and Hebrews 11:1, respectively.
4 Hooper, J. & Teresi, D. (1986). The three-pound universe (p. 277). New York: Dell Publishing.
5 Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death (p. 49). New York: The Free Press.
6 The Three-Pound Universe, p. 306.
7 Lucretius. (2007). Lucretius, from de rerum natura (On the nature of things). (W. H. Brown, Trans.).
In C. Hitchens (Ed.), The portable atheist: Essential readings for the nonbeliever (p. 3). US: Da
Capo Press.
8 Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy (p. 342). New York: Basic Books.
9 Wolpert, L. (2007). Six impossible things before breakfast (p. 144). New York: W.W. Norton.
10 Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992). Shattered assumptions: Towards a new psychology of trauma (pp.
123-132). New York: The Free Press.
11 Regarding animal research, I wouldn’t do it, either. However, it’s important to realize that literally
millions more animals are euthanized at animal shelters than in scientific laboratories every year. If you
want to save animals—which I agree is a noble cause—you’ll get much more bang for your buck by
focusing on the neutering and spaying movement or by volunteering at your local animal shelter as
opposed to, say, protesting at universities that conduct animal research.
12 The Three-Pound Universe, p. 211-212.
13 Sacks, O. (1985). Reminiscence. In The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical
tales (p. 130). New York: Summit Books. See also: Sacks, O. (1995). The landscape of his dreams. In
An anthropologist on Mars: Seven paradoxical tales (pp. 153-187). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
14 It’s a bit ironic: Brain tissue itself doesn’t actually have pain receptors in it, so this doesn’t hurt. This
is also why a brain tumor can get as big as a baseball before the patient notices.
15 Penfield, W. & Perot, P. (1963). The brain’s record of auditory and visual experience: A final
summary and discussion. Brain, 86, 596-696.
16 Ramachandran, V. S. (1999). God and the limbic system. In Phantoms in the brain (pp. 175 &
179). New York: Quill.
17 For example, The Three-Pound Universe, pp. 1-3; 329-330; 352.
18 Six Impossible Things before Breakfast, p. 109; his discussion of hypnosis that follows is on p. 110-
115.
19 Whinnery, J. E. (1997). Psychophysiologic correlates of unconsciousness and near-death
experiences. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 15, 231-258.
20 Groth-Marnat, G. (1994). Cross-cultural perspectives on the near-death experience. Australian
Parapsychological Review, 19, 7-11.
21 Stenger, V. (2012, April 16). Life after death: Evaluating the evidence. Huffington Post. Retrieved
from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/life-after-death-examinin_b_1428710.html
22 For example, Blanke, O., Ortigue, S., Landis, T., & Seeck, M. (2002). Stimulating illusory own-body
perceptions. Nature, 419, 269-270. Actually, many of Wilder Penfield’s patients had described
autoscopic-like sensations decades ago.
23 Newitz, A. (2014, June 16). 10 scientific ideas that scientists wish you would stop misusing [Web
blog post for io9]. Retrieved from http://io9.com/10-scientific-ideas-that-scientists-wish-you-would-stop-
1591309822
 CHAPTER 6

The Doomsday Defense

I ain’t happy about it, but I’d rather feel like shit than be full of shit.

— Suicidal Tendencies, “You Can’t Bring Me Down”

BESIDES HELPING ME COME TO TERMS with my spirituality (lack thereof, that

is), college transformed my attitudes about other matters, and in similarly
dramatic fashion. The other ground-shaking life-changer was learning about
defense mechanisms, acknowledging their reality and how they affect our
lives, if not run them sometimes.
Indeed, as a young undergraduate student, I had been defensive about
defense mechanisms! I used to scoff when an instructor introduced the notion,
almost always in the context of Sigmund Freud and some nonsense about
penis envy or something. Hell, I had done LSD and had myriad other “mind-
expanding” experiences—there was no way some silver-spoon, douchebag
professor from New England was gonna teach me and my tattoos about
consciousness and reality! But I can see now that I was wrong, simply not
willing to admit that my contact with reality was somehow compromised. I’m
telling you now, it was (and it still is).
When teaching my own college courses these days, I don’t talk about
the transformation of my spirituality directly, given that it’s a little personal
and doesn’t flow well with many curricula. However, I do like to disclose to
my students how I was wrong about defense mechanisms, which often arises
naturally in psychology courses. At the very least, I’m hoping that students
will be encouraged to examine themselves and entertain the prospect that
they, too, might be mistaken about the notion as well, just as I was sitting in
the same seat twenty-something years ago. I want to demonstrate firsthand
that it doesn’t have to be humiliating to admit when you’ve been wrong. In
fact, as I argue to the class, such behavior can be liberating, if you allow it
to be. It’s hard to say it without sounding cliché, but there really is something
empowering about being able to appreciate and embrace our mistakes—
including our misperceptions of reality, and those of ourselves. You really
can’t grow without it. It’s excruciating at first but gets much easier with
practice.
So yes, after years of both receiving and administering psychotherapy
and evaluating thousands of patients—from disgruntled cheerleaders to
psychotic murderers—I have ultimately come to believe that defense
mechanisms are as real as biological organs, like hearts, lungs, and kidneys.
No, I’m not talking about all the details of wanting to kill your dad so you can
screw your mom, but the general notion of emotional repression is,
undoubtedly, a profound and pervasive part of our lives.
It’s fascinating to listen to neo-Freudian psychologist Phebe Cramer
speculate how the repression or denial of aversive stimulation begins as
early as any other human behavior. She cites her late colleague René Spitz
who argued that even the most fundamental act of sleeping may be “the
prototype of all defense.”1 Certainly, sleep is more about rest, recovery, and
growth than anything else, but I’m intrigued when I remind myself that
excessive sleeping is a textbook symptom of depression. I think about how
much I crave sleep when I’m down myself. Why? Because I want to avoid
reality, plain and simple. Sometimes when I wake up on a depressed day, I
don’t want to think or perceive or even be for a while—so I don’t: I go back
to sleep. If we appreciate sleep as a potential mechanism of denying reality,
we might conceptualize suicide as the epitome of it.
Phebe points out that infant life is strewn with frustration and excessive
stimulation. We’re failing at everything we attempt, whether sitting up,
crawling, or communicating with others. I’ve learned elsewhere that some
developmental neuroscientists suspect that simply being conscious as a baby
may be overwhelming at times, as one is still trying to learn the basics of the
most fundamental experiences, such as depth perception and how to predict
how something must feel in the hand depending on how it looks to the eye.
Perhaps some of the inexplicable crying we see so often is due to confusion
as much as anything else. Those toys we give our kids where they put blocks
of different shapes through holes is a lot more educational than some people
reckon; kids really are in the process of figuring all that stuff out. Given that
these issues had to be dilemmas at some point during our neural
development, imagine the perplexity that must be aroused when Daddy comes
home from work and slams the door on his way in and ignores me! All of this
has to be too much to handle at times, perhaps making sleep even more
precious during infancy than it is during adulthood.
As kids mature they acquire more options to avoid noxious stimulation
through more advanced motor movements and cognitive operations. Phebe
provides an elegant example of research in which a preverbal baby is left
with a stranger. When mom leaves the room, the baby cries. When the
stranger picks the baby up but positions her so that she can’t see who is
holding her, she relaxes a bit. However, when turned to face the caretaking
stranger, she turns her head to avoid looking at him (that is, she denies him,
or represses his presence—perhaps pretending, on some level, that it’s mom
holding her instead?). Sure enough, when the baby is not allowed to exclude
the stranger from her field of vision, she resumes crying. The whole scene
reminds me of similar behavior as an adult, when we reflexively cover our
eyes and ears when we don’t want to see or hear something, like during a
horror movie.
Repression gets much more interesting and sophisticated as we develop
even more control over our mental faculties. At some point, we learn how to
control our attention, including by numbing it down so much that it’s almost
like we’re sleeping while awake. Dissociation is a phenomenon with which
we’re all familiar, as it can happen even when we’re not being emotionally
defensive. When teaching, I like to illustrate via the example in which we
drive our cars along familiar routes and end up getting to our destination
without having really paid attention to what we were doing along the way.
We were on autopilot, our mind elsewhere, so much so that we might even be
alarmed that we made it all! Sometimes I cannot, for the life of me, recall
having passed through a certain traffic light, but I know that I must have. Such
“zoning out” is often used in benign situations to cope with boredom while
we sit in class or some other lecture, again almost forgetting where we are at
times. Regarding repression, something similar but more profound can
happen when we are being traumatized, such as being assaulted by another
person. Specifically, some of the most intense instances of dissociation we
hear about are actually common reactions to sexual assault. For an example
from the grey area between boredom and assault, I used to dissociate often
when my dad was yelling at me growing up. I’d be looking at him, nodding,
but my mind was elsewhere. I’m serious: I couldn’t recall what he said half
the time, despite the fact he was yelling quite loudly.
If we’re not good at dissociating mentally, we can numb ourselves
chemically. For some, taking drugs is the most efficient and certain
mechanism to repress discomfort and pain. If you don’t like drugs, you can
soothe yourself by overindulging non-chemical distractions, such as food,
sex, or shopping. Often when we suffer some losses, such as a romantic
relationship or a pet, we just shop for a replacement instead of facing the
loss head-on.
Of course, we can also repress without numbing ourselves or engaging
in distracting activity. Mature, adult brains can do all sorts of cognitive
gymnastics, altering our perceptions of reality while fully conscious and
sitting perfectly still and drug-free. A classic example to which most of us at
least have the capacity to relate is when we have been rejected by a romantic
interest and we reflexively discount them as “not my type anyway.” The
rejection hurts, but we defend against it by telling ourselves that there really
is no loss or suffering, that we actually got what we wanted. We pretend
we’re in control, calling the shots, but it’s pure ol’ fashioned denial.
Similarly, I often notice that whenever I proclaim “I don’t care!”—regardless
of the context (my voice often being snappy and raised)—I often do care, but
am simply trying to deny my anxiety, sadness, or shame. The most reliable
instance is when I’m accused of hurting someone’s feelings and I reflexively
assert that “I don’t care.” I do; I’m just trying to trick myself into thinking I
don’t, because I don’t want to admit I fucked up, especially like that.
Phebe tells of a more poignant, clinical example of denial:

An unusually attractive young woman, stylishly dressed in the

mode of her peers, entered my office for the first time. Despite her
“together” appearance, she was clearly distressed: Her hands
shook, her lips quivered, and she was struggling with losing
control. Within minutes, she was sobbing uncontrollably, the cause
of which upset I had not yet had the opportunity to discover. What
was striking (and has remained fixed in my memory) was her
reaction to the flow of tears and the heavy sobs. As the tears
continued, she said to me, “I’m a very happy person.” I looked at
her, somewhat questioningly, and she repeated, “But I really am a
very happy person.”2
The vignette captures an important essence of emotional repression: Denial
is not simply lying. Part of us is so convinced of the defensive version of
reality that we truly believe it is the case. These presentations are a dime a
dozen in the realm of substance use. I once evaluated an alcoholic woman in
jail who had to be treated at a hospital emergency room for alcohol
poisoning just days before I met her, and she looked at me straight in the eye
and told me enthusiastically that she did not have a drinking problem, like I
was a crappy psychologist for even suspecting she did. I’m telling you, this
stuff’s not just in movies. It’s very real. That was a real human being, with a
normal IQ; I know, I measured it myself. We deny other addictions similarly,
whether sex, gambling, shopping; you name it. Victims in abusive
relationships can deny like this as well, almost as if they are addicted to the
toxic relationships they are in.
There are many names for different maneuvers of repression, but the
goal is the same each time: to reduce emotional discomfort. Most people are
at least vaguely familiar with rationalization, in which we are almost
always engaging when we defend our questionable behavior by stating
“Everyone else does it!” The emotional discomfort that we’re trying to
reduce in these situations is often guilt or shame, which we try to deflect by
noting that our behavior is not so unusual. We’re in turmoil, however,
because we want something but part of us knows we’re violating one of our
principles in order to have it. Pay attention to how it feels the next time you
say “everyone else does it,” or when you feel tempted to say it. For me, there
really is a characteristic feeling, something I might call a numb irritability. I
can literally feel myself being stupid, and a little grumpy. I have to numb
myself out in order to buy into the deception, and I’m irritable because I
know others don’t believe me and are quietly challenging me.
There’s displacement, when we redirect feelings, often anger, from a
forbidden target to one over which we have more control. I watched the
movie 21 Grams while working on this chapter, and I think some
displacement may have been at play in that scene where hyper-religious Jack
Jordan, played by Benicio del Toro, was so hostile (abusive, in my opinion)
to his kids at the dinner table. Jack had been fired from his crappy job as a
golf caddy earlier that day, but he had to stifle his anger because his
immediate supervisor who had to do the actual firing was a good man who
was otherwise good to him, and the superiors who ordered the firing were
simply inaccessible. That evening, Jack’s kids are scuffling over a dinner
roll until the little boy hits the little girl on the arm. Instead of scolding the
boy, he forces the girl to present her other arm to the boy so he can hit that
one, too (à la “turn the other cheek”; so, not only is he displacing his anger to
his innocent girl, he’s rationalizing it via the popular Bible verse). After that
cruelty, he then ends up smacking the boy, too, anyway. The scene is a bit
creepy and disturbing: Jack’s behavior is clearly not about redirecting his
children; it’s about venting his anger towards an exempt stimulus to
vulnerable ones.
Splitting is a particularly interesting defense mechanism because the
uncomfortable feeling being repressed is a very specific one: ambiguity. As
discussed in various places throughout this book, human minds generally
don’t like uncertainty. For some, uncertainty is almost intolerable, so they
repress it by taking an extreme, polar position. Listen to Joseph Burgo, author
of Why do I do that? Psychological Defense Mechanisms and the Hidden
Ways They Shape Our Lives:

When we feel unable to tolerate the tension and confusion aroused

by complexity, we “resolve” that complexity by splitting it into
two simplified and opposing parts, usually aligning ourselves with
one of them and rejecting the other. As a result, we may feel a sort
of comfort in believing we know something with absolute
certainty; at the same time, we’ve over-simplified a complex
issue, robbing it of its richness and vitality … Feelings of anger
and self-righteousness often accompany this process, bolstering
our conviction that we are in the right and the other side in the
wrong. Ambiguity and compromise are out of the question because
they plunge us back into the painful realm of ambivalence.3

Joseph adds that splitting seems to be a fundamental part of politics; it’s what
polarizes many “polarizing issues.” Sometimes I wonder if much of the
enthusiasm of pro-choice activists also stems from splitting. Sure, many
women want to reserve the right to have an abortion, but I can’t help but
wonder if some of the fervor is defending against the pain of what having an
abortion really means. On the other side of the political coin, I wonder how
many conservative pro-death penalty and anti-gun control folk are actually
more on the fence than they are able to admit. For a more clinical example,
consider people you know whose feelings towards you seem to vacillate
from affection to hostility, especially during conflict. They’re splitting,
unable to conceptualize you as both good and flawed at the same time, so you
can only be one or the other at any given moment.
Projection is when you attribute to others your own unappealing traits,
such as anger. Others would describe you as an angry person, but you would
argue that you’re merely reacting to the hostilities of the rest of the world.
Reaction formation is when we behave in a way that diametrically
misrepresents how we really feel. Textbooks might illustrate via a person
with puritanical attitudes towards sex who is in reality a raging, horny sex
machine underneath. I know this sounds a little too Freudian, so I thought I
should include a citation: Professor Roy Baumeister reviews a study
showing that, as a group, women who report low levels of arousal to
sexually provocative stimuli exhibit more sexual arousal than others when
measured experimentally.4 Similarly, in some of the most hilarious scientific
research ever, he summarizes another study showing that homophobic men—
wait for it—are more aroused by male homosexual pornography than non-
homophobic men. Now, don’t panic if you’re a homophobe; this doesn’t
necessarily mean that you want to have gay sex. It just suggests that some part
of you, deep down, is not as averse to it as you want to be.
I like to conceptualize narcissism as reaction formation. Contrary to
some popular notions, narcissists are actually insecure underneath. The
arrogance and entitlement are often defensive maneuvers to hide intense,
deeply entrenched feelings of inadequacy and shame. I often teach my
students (somewhat jokingly, but not entirely) that a simple rule-of-thumb test
to distinguish narcissism from more healthy pride is to insult the person in
question. A person with healthy pride will not mind so much, but the
narcissist will become angry. (And maybe even lash out, so proceed with
caution!)
Intellectualization is when we distance ourselves from our suffering by
appealing to technical knowledge or abstract generalizations. Returning again
to the ubiquitous romantic breakup, we overanalyze the dynamics of our
failed chemistry, making assertions like “Better to have loved and lost, than
never to have loved at all!” It kinda helps, for moments, but some part of us
knows it’s total bullshit, that the loss hurts bad and doesn’t feel better than
anything. If we could see ourselves in the mirror, we might notice something
creepy about the smile that we’re forcing at the moment when we assert the
platitude. I’m serious: You can learn to see through it, and it’s unsettling
when you do. He’s saying one thing and acting like he thinks it’s the truth, but
you can kinda see the self-deception, this spacey look of disconnection
between what he’s saying and what he believes. People don’t seem entirely
human when this is going on, but almost robotic.
Some people live much of their lives in a spacey state as such, what
Phebe refers to as “Pollyannish denial,” citing none other than Voltaire’s
Candide. It starts as daydreaming as children, but some of us are so good at
it that

the fantasies, unaffected by external events, acquire a salience that

rivals external reality … Real events are then only recognized
insofar as they conform to the fantasy … it occurs among adults
who are overly optimistic, overly positive … The denial occurs
not in terms of a failure to perceive what is there, but rather in an
imposition of a highly personalized interpretation of what the
perceived events mean. The meaning is distorted to make it more
pleasant and more self-enhancing.5

So, when I explained in my chapter 1 that the experience of my college

roommate having accidentally killed our cat eventually brought us together,
some readers might be tempted to respond by asserting, “See—everything
happens for a reason!” But Phebe might suggest that you’re being defensive,
trying to deflect the full horror of what transpired by twisting it into some
“highly personalized” event that was orchestrated for us.
No, it didn’t happen for a reason. It just happened, and Roman and I
dealt with it the best we could. Despite eventually coming together, I suspect
that both of us would have preferred that it didn’t happen at all, and we could
have just become closer over something else less traumatic later.

As you read through these examples, from Phebe’s sobbing happy lady to
Benicio del Toro, you may be noticing a very important aspect of emotional
defensiveness: It’s so much easier to identify it transpiring in someone else
versus in ourselves. Phebe explains that this is largely due to the fundamental
nature of defense mechanisms: By definition, since they do lessen pain, it
hurts for the suffering person to see through them and to work through them!
To seek progress, then, necessarily means feeling the pain we’re trying to
avoid. In contrast, when observing someone else being defensive, we’re not
being thwarted by the pain that the defensive person is trying to avoid.
Furthermore, there’s likely a more general resistance to the notion that
we would ever be emotionally defensive. We are defensive about
defensiveness, even when we’re not in the immediate act of being defensive!
To ever be defensive would suggest that we are weak and can’t handle
reality, and therefore somewhat out of control of the situation at hand. Recall
my assertion earlier that a sense of control is one of the most fundamental
human needs, right up there with eating, mating, and socialization. Although
when employing defense mechanisms we are exercising some control, in a
sense, by tricking ourselves into a preferred version of reality, we
necessarily do this at the expense of admitting that we can’t handle the real
version. Otherwise, we simply don’t like the reflexive, unconscious nature of
defense mechanisms. To admit that we do such a thing makes us feel
mechanical, like automatons, simpletons of sorts. Less human, even.
But I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed about. Being defensive
is actually a very human trait, because humans don’t like pain. On the other
hand, we shouldn’t resign ourselves to a defensive lifestyle, because
courage is another human trait, as is the aspiration to grow.
Why are some people more defensive than others? As with any other
aspect of personality, nature (that is, genes) certainly plays a role. Some of us
simply have a sensitive temperament predisposing us to hurt more, and
therefore we simply have more pain to deflect. Phebe adds that
defensiveness is also nurtured into us depending on the amount of stress we
experience during early development. Recall the image above of dad barging
into the house after a long day at work, slamming the door, and running right
past his baby on his way to the shower. A single such event is unlikely to
affect the baby significantly, but if this type of interaction is habitual he’s
likely to feel rejected and unloved. A kid can’t just leave and find a new
family, so he’s forced to soothe himself using defense mechanisms. By the
time he’s ready to move out of the home he’s an expert.
Although repression will always have a place in our lives, there are
many reasons to aspire for a relatively defensive-free lifestyle. First, it
should be noted that repression doesn’t really fix anything; it’s just a band-
aid that helps us get by for the moment. Roy Baumeister cites other research
showing that “forcibly ejecting unwanted thoughts from the conscious mind”
can result in what Freud called “the return of the repressed,” that is, a
rebound effect in which the unwanted thoughts return with even greater
intensity than before.6 When we’re being defensive, we’re just postponing
pain, not curing it.
Otherwise, being defensive all the time prevents us from maturing and
realizing our fuller potentialities. As Phebe explains, defensiveness only
affects internal states, not the external reality. Abiding by the mantras such as
“Everything happens for a reason” may help diminish the pain associated
with irretrievable losses or mistakes, but it can also encourage passivity and
prevent us from seeing our own roles in our dysfunctions. I find in my
personal life and professional life as a psychologist that people who appeal
to “Everything happens for a reason” are often doing so to avoid taking
responsibility for the disasters they create themselves by making poor
decisions or by keeping toxic company. By attributing the ill effects of our
own mistakes to something orchestrated by God or the cosmos, we are less
likely to see our own role and therefore change our behavior for the better.
Finally, defensiveness tarnishes our contact with others, including our
loved ones. People who are good will respect us, feel closer to us, and like
us more when we can be vulnerable and sincerely say “I’m sorry” and when
we can openly discuss our fears and weaknesses. And they should like us and
feel closer to us, because we are closer when we interact with others in an
authentic manner like this. It shows that we trust them. And such behavior is
disarming—it gives the person we are talking to the opportunity to open up
as well. Most people do want to share their fears and other intimacies, deep
down. The irony is that as we work through our defensiveness, we actually
become stronger. We feel more alive, not less. Embracing our vulnerability,
and that of others, really deepens our interactions and allows wonderful stuff
to transpire.
Yes, it’s much easier said than done, but it’s doable with practice and
counseling. Don’t assume that just because I’m writing a chapter on
defensiveness that I don’t do it, either. I’m still learning, too, and always will
be. I’d like to share one of my biggest breakthroughs, which occurred just a
few years ago, I think it was 2005 or 2006; I’m sure I was still in graduate
school, but winding it down.
 I had been reading psychiatrist Mark Epstein’s Going to Pieces without
Falling Apart.7 As the title of his book implies, Mark teaches us to just let
ourselves hurt and to be mindful of our emotional pain as it unfolds. Pay
attention to it, but don’t make any value judgements—in particular, don’t
criticize yourself for hurting. It was reminiscent of the advice my one good
therapist, Jessica, had given me over a decade before which was still in the
process of sinking in: When having a panic attack, just let go and float down
that river, let it take you away, and don’t clutch at the reeds, lest you create
rapids that pummel your face. Stop fighting; just let yourself die. Enlightened
existential psychiatrist Victor Frankl called it paradoxical intent: Wish that
your greatest fears be realized, embrace your greatest pain and just see what
happens. When not resisting, you might see that the threat is not as bad as
anticipated.
It was Christmas break, and I had driven down to Dallas from
Lawrence to trudge through another holiday. After a long day of Christmas-
ing I retired to the guest room, with its nicotine-stained walls, prehistoric
blue shag carpet, and crappy TV. And gross: that decades-old reject mattress
that must have housed an inconceivable number of dust mites.
To wind down, vent about the depressing holiday, and postpone what
was sure to be a horrific bout of insomnia, I called my ex-girlfriend,
Victoria, who was now my regular friend. She had been the longest romantic
relationship I ever had, at a not-very respectable two years. As I tried to
engage Vickie on the phone, she seemed uncomfortable, eventually disclosing
that she was now in a committed romantic relationship with some other guy,
her first serious gig since we parted ways not that long ago.
I felt a grotesquely uncomfortable tension, a feeling I now recognize as
being emotionally crushed, but I was unwilling to admit it; I was defending
against it. Of course, I didn’t let her know I was even feeling uncomfortable.
When we got off the phone, there was a sense of finality, and it was so
fucking quiet. I could hear the goddamned dust mites crawling around in that
godforsaken mattress.
Then, Mark’s advice kinda snuck into my thoughts. Striking while the
iron was very hot and not feeling that I had anything to lose, I decided to do
what he had been suggesting: Just relax and pay attention to whatever I was
feeling, without expectation or judgement. Let go of the reeds and just let the
River of Distress take you wherever it would.
 Somehow, I was able to let go. I laid down, lights and crappy TV off,
just me and that comically lumpy bed and the nicotine stains hiding in the
dark.
It hurt so bad, but I just sat there and let it flow over me, like the Holy
Spirit did when Patsy touched me at camp decades prior. I didn’t cry this
time, but it hurt as bad as that had felt good. I felt like a needy person, a
needy person who now felt lonely and helpless because my girl was finally
gone—for real this time—and I don’t like to be rejected, because I do the
rejecting in my relationships.
And then, the damnedest fucking thing happened. After about—I don’t
know, not too long, ten or fifteen minutes … half an hour?—it started to hurt
less. And then, guess what: The next thing I knew, I was waking up from what
appeared to be a full night’s sleep! Unfathomably, I felt rested. It was one of
those awakenings like on a sleeping pill commercial, with the stretch and the
sun on my face, hair looking just fine, beautiful, fluffy white sheets, not a dust
mite around, and a big, fat smile on my face.
But no, I wasn’t cured. It did hurt some more over time, waxing and
waning, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt as much as it would have otherwise. If
nothing else, I felt less tense about being hurt. I just hurt, without the
American side effects of being upset about my hurt. I would be okay, and
keep on truckin’. The pain that remained did not have me. I now had it … or
at least we both had each other.

Keeping the aforementioned defense mechanisms in mind, one that has

particular relevance for my book is sublimation: when we cope with our
pain by compensating or distracting ourselves through productive or
prosocial behavior. Dramatic examples come from psychology textbooks that
often cite, for example, a physically abused child who grows up to become a
professional boxer. Another example might be a mother who has lost her
child to bullying who then becomes an anti-bullying advocate. More relevant
for the masses, one might cope with chronic loneliness or the loss of a loved
one by taking on extra duties at work or by filling his spare time
volunteering.
 It sounds fine; however, even productive, prosocial behavior can be
unhealthy if it has control of us, develops into an obsession, or otherwise
blinds us. Just as projection or intellectualization or other defenses can be a
way of life for some people, so can sublimation. Here, Irvin Yalom
summarizes the thoughts of his colleague, Salvador Maddi:

Crusadism … is characterized by a powerful inclination to seek

out and to dedicate oneself to dramatic and important causes.
These individuals are demonstrators looking for an issue; they
embrace a cause almost regardless of its content. As soon as one
cause is finished, these hard-core activists must rapidly find
another in order to stay one step ahead of the meaninglessness that
pursues them.8

Staying ahead of the meaninglessness that pursues us. That’s a very

provocative thought, that sometimes our ambitions are motivated by fears of
meaninglessness.
One important difference between crusadism and healthy sublimation is
that the person engaged in the latter is more in touch with why she is doing
what she is doing. She would be willing to acknowledge that she is an
activist for anti-bullying legislation because she lost her own child, and she
would be consciously aware that this simply makes it hurt less and benefits
society, and that although her child would appreciate it, it does not bring her
child back. Alternatively, the crusader would more likely deny unconscious
motivations, and become uncomfortable and even irritable when accused of
them—similar to how the person with unhealthy, narcissistic pride becomes
angry when you insult him.
If you think I’m a downer for questioning sublimation, you should hear
Ernest Becker. His scathing assessment, The Denial of Death, earned a
Pulitzer Prize in 1974. I find Becker’s book one of the most intelligent and
provocative works I’ve ever read, and definitely the most courageous, at
least among legitimate literature. Like Candide, The Denial of Death should
be required reading in typical curricula; both should be as popular as Romeo
and Juliet.9
Becker, like countless Introduction to Psychology professors
throughout history, noted how we humans are different from other animals
because we are endowed with the most miraculous abilities that neurons can
possibly muster: self-consciousness and abstraction, particularly, foresight.
However, unlike the vast majority of those psychology professors who
relentlessly applaud our self-awareness and abstract thinking—as if these
traits necessarily warrant celebration and pride because they distinguish us
from the lower animals—Becker courageously acknowledges that there is a
cruel, horrible side effect of putting the two together: terror.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is

ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food
for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to
have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an
excruciating yearning for life and self-expression—and with all
this yet to die.10

Becker’s book is way too intricate for a summary to do it justice, but the
essence of his point is this: We all know that we’re gonna die, but the notion
is so unsettling that we devote most of our lives trying to ignore or deny the
fact. In one of the greatest ironies in the history of existence, we can become
so obsessed with denying our fate that we often compromise the quality of the
limited time we do have!
One might assume that ignoring something as profound, ubiquitous, and
glaring as mortality would be much more difficult than denying, say, one’s
alcohol addiction. However, the denial of death comes with surprising ease.
First, of course, the notion is inherently distressing so we actively avoid
contemplating it deliberately. Otherwise, there are some more interesting
psychological dynamics that help us to keep those terrifying thoughts at bay.
Healthy humans, regardless of how rational and intelligent they may be,
simply have difficulty appreciating their mortality. Part of our brains knows
that we’re mortal, but our guts just don’t buy it. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
coherently summarizes the post-Freudian (that is, object relations) notion that
healthy parenting during infancy instills in us a sense of invulnerability that
ironically can prevent us from fully contacting reality as adults.11 A sensitive
parent listens to her baby’s cries and responds appropriately, whether
covering him with a blanket if it seems that he’s cold or offering her luscious
teat if he’s hungry. Alternatively, maybe the kid is just feeling alone and
having some sort of disorientation freak-out and just needs to be held and
soothed. The baby’s mind is too simple to comprehend the complexity of the
world around him and simply learns that every time he feels a need or urge it
is somehow magically resolved. He develops a grandiosity, essentially
concluding that he is the center of the universe, that it’s all about him, a
perspective called infantile omnipotence or infantile narcissism. Despite its
“infantile” origins and nature, as Ronnie explains, the “illusion of
invulnerability” endures into adulthood, in some form, so that even the most
intelligent of adults cannot readily appreciate her mortality deeply. Studying
Ronnie’s book, I suspect that it’s no coincidence that someone like me, who
has virtually no memories of being comforted during childhood, grew up
feeling the opposite of invulnerable, that is, particularly vulnerable—and
would eventually be writing a book about getting in touch with our
vulnerability.
Colluding with the omnipotence with which many are blessed (or
cursed) are more fundamental cognitive obstacles to contemplating our
mortality, even when we are willing to try. As we discussed earlier when
considering the conveniences of believing in God, a consciousness cannot
really contemplate itself no longer contemplating. Trying to imagine no
longer imagining is a paradoxical task, like trying to force two powerful
magnets together at their positive poles. Mundane thoughts are much more
accessible, so this is where we spend most of our time by default.
Perhaps an amalgamation of the two aforementioned issues, our
experience of self is simply too compelling to equate with the “selves” of
other creatures that we know are mortal, such as people who live on the
other side of the world or even our beloved pets. Now, I’ve been doing this
psychology thing for a while, but I’m not going to pretend that I understand
self-consciousness or that I can explain what the self is. But what I do know
is that mine—my self—is the most salient experience I have—to say the
least! I’m the most real thing there is to me. In fact, I’m the only thing that I
really know is real, à la Descartes’s cogito ergo sum. How could the
universe possibly continue to exist without me—I am reality! My self-
consciousness (whatever it is) is so conspicuous and distracting that it
overwhelms my ability to appreciate my true essence, that I’m really just
biology, chemistry, and physics.
But sometimes when I’m looking at and contemplating my cat while
she’s engaged in her feline business, I have these brief Beckerarian moments
of clarity in which I can’t help but see that we’re really not that different.
We’re both just biological tubes. On one end of our tubes, we each have this
mechanical device with exceptionally strong and hard parts fit to consume
nourishment. Also on that side of our tubes are the perceiving parts: the eyes,
ears, and nose that direct the rest of our tubes towards things that they need
and want, like food and sex, and away from things they don’t, like big scary
dogs. Farther down the line, our tubes digest the food that we’ve crunched
and—with a peculiar circularity—nurture all the parts necessary to sustain
our tubes and ambulate them around the world in search of more food. And,
of course, we both have backsides, where all of our nonfood matter is purged
from our systems.
It seems that the only real, qualitative difference between me and my cat
is that the frontal lobes of my brain are more developed, having apparently
exceeded some sort of critical mass that has afforded awareness, both of my
“self” and of the future. And sure enough, here I am, terrified, while my cat
doesn’t give a shit. She’s over there taking a nap right now, and I haven’t had
a great night of sleep in months. Ultimately, all because she doesn’t realize
that we’re both food for worms, but I do.
And of course this is the primary reason we defend against our true fate.
If we ever are able to appreciate our mortality, we simply can’t tolerate it.
The notion that we are merely animals, that our existence is finite just like
our pets, that our inconceivably magnificent selves will someday no longer
be evokes terror in us. In fact, it’s wholly unacceptable.
So, we don’t accept it. We defend against that terror, using the same
defense mechanisms we use to fend off any other pain and discomfort, like
when we get fired from our jobs, when our ex-girlfriends start dating
someone else, or when our parents didn’t pay us attention growing up.
We suppress the terror consciously. We repress it unconsciously. We
distract ourselves from it. We intellectualize it, we rationalize it, we even try
to laugh about it, but deep down we know it’s not really funny and all we
want is to be young again, or at least to not age anymore. The irony of all of
this is so profound: We’ve developed frontal lobes to our brains that allow
us to think abstractly, to marvel at existence, but this very gift scares us so
much that we have to dumb it down in order to function! “The irony of man’s
condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and
annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from
being fully alive.”12
 Back to sublimation, in some ways it seems to be the perfect defense
mechanism against existential terror. Becker felt that the fear of death is “a
mainspring of human activity.”13 Beyond the traditional, obvious rewards of
staying busy (such as making money and gaining notoriety from our peers),
rat-racing keeps us distracted and therefore shields us from contemplation
and the discomfort that it brings.
If we’re lucky, we may even create something that will endure beyond
us. Now that’s good treatment for one’s terror: Sure, worms may eat me, but
I’ve left my mark. A part of me will still exist, even when my body is gone. I
will not be completely forgotten. Any time even a single person, some other
existing entity, is interfacing with my mark, it’s almost like I’m still existing.
Personally, I’m ready to admit that a large motivation for writing the
book that you’re reading—with all of its narcissistic autobiography and
egocentric grandstanding—is to cope with my own anxiety about not existing
anymore. The thought can horrify me, but there’s something about putting my
life story and thoughts into a book that makes it hurt less. At times while
writing I’ve felt almost frantic, wanting to finish this thing before something
happens to me, like a car accident or stroke or something. I don’t have a
problem admitting all this; it’s all so simple and obvious. And again, being
honest with myself and embracing my insecurity makes me feel more real and
alive than when I try to deny it.
Such acts of creating are also great for a society en masse, so no one
else is complaining. Indeed, Becker asserted that rat-racing as such “is the
repression on which culture is built.”14 If I’m following him correctly, he’s
suggesting that culture (that is, society) is, to some degree, an
epiphenomenon, a side effect of the cumulative effects of each individual’s
fear of death. I’m sure it’s more complex than that, but I also think there’s
more truth to it than it may seem at first glance.
Cultures come in all shapes and sizes: nationalities, ethnicities,
political parties, states, cities, football fan bases, criminal gangs, people
who are hearing impaired, and those who make movies. Culture offers much
more than the societies from which they are born: like-minded camaraderie,
a place to belong.
And with belonging, we begin to experience something transcendent:
that sense of security, maybe even some semblance of immortality. Our
cultures are bigger than us and will continue to exist after we’re gone, just
like some other guy’s book will for him. Belonging to something that is
relatively eternal is at least as good as producing something that is relatively
eternal. It’s more accessible by the masses, that’s for sure.
No wonder we are so proud and defensive of our cultures and even
aggressive when they are offended. However, the prospect that cultures
acquire some of their appeal because of our fear of death should cause us to
question whether our radical devotions to them are healthy. Jiddu
Krishnamurti had the courage to acknowledge the danger of so strongly
identifying with culture. It’s a radical stance, if not hyperbole, but bear with
us:

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a

European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why
it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of
mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by
tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to
understand violence does not belong to any country, to any
religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned
with the total understanding of mankind.15

If you don’t want to hear it from a hippie Indian, here a blue-collar

Caucasian conveys the point just as well:

Culture and tradition is always used as a positive thing, but I think

there’s many negatives to it, because it drives a wedge between
people, because one of the things about culture is that my
culture is better than yours. Who cares? … That’s why I’m not
patriotic. I’m not a flag-waver, I couldn’t care less. Because to
me, the most important thing in this life is being a human being …
I have no shame, you know, in saying that I’m not patriotic, or
anything, because it’s irrelevant to me.

That’s Mark “Barney” Greenway, the lead singer for iconic death-metal band
Napalm Death.16 I know: I don’t have any quotes from mainstream, popular
sources—which is a point I’m trying to make. Mainstream society doesn’t
make such comments because it’s blasphemous to criticize culture, just like it
is to criticize optimism. Such thoughts are demoralizing and unacceptable, at
least partially because culture is so deeply associated with belonging and all
the good stuff that it brings, perhaps even the denial of death.
Is all culture and tradition bad? No, of course not. As with anything
else, we need to practice rational, educated moderation. But culture and
tradition do become toxic when they begin to impose on the more important
rights of individuals. Iraqi founder of the Global Secular Humanist
Movement, Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, asserts most succinctly: “Society,
Culture, [and] Tradition don’t have rights. Individuals have rights.”17 When I
preach similarly and people try to argue with me on this point, I cite how, for
example, that physically beating one’s wife, female circumcision, and even
“honor killings” are practiced and accepted in some cultures. Obviously, that
shit’s not okay, regardless of how long the respective culture has been doing
it. Amazingly, some people will still look at me puzzled, at least in response
to some examples. And it’s not just right-wing, patriarchal traditionalists;
some ultra-liberal folk will as well, because they’ve become overly
respective of culture. These are people who are so obsessed with being
liberal that they’ve actually become closed-minded. “Crusaders,” according
to Salvador Maddi.

As reassuring as a culture can be, it’s often not enough. We need more.
Becker again: “Mankind has reacted by trying to secure human meanings
from beyond. Man’s best efforts seem utterly fallible without appeal to
something higher for justification, some conceptual support for the meaning
of one’s life from a transcendental dimension of some kind.”18 Of course:
God.
Quite clearly, the most enticing method to manage one’s terror is
religion. In addition to providing a soothing culture in which to belong,
religion makes everything we do much more meaningful than it seems. Our
behavior is no longer human (that is, animal) activity but now spiritual,
glorifying the Creator or otherwise becoming part of His Plan.
Most importantly, however,
 religion solves the problem of death, which no living individuals
can solve, no matter how they would support us … religion alone
gives hope, because it holds open the dimension of the unknown
and the unknowable, the fantastic mystery of creation that the
human mind cannot even begin to approach, the possibility of a
multidimensionality of spheres of existence, of heavens and
possible embodiments that make a mockery of earthly logic—and
in doing so, it relieves the absurdity of earthly life, all the
impossible limitations and frustrations of living matter.19

Yes, religion does solve all the problems of “living matter.” Death? Not a
problem, because it’s not really the end. In fact, something that is so much
greater than life that it’s inconceivable awaits me. Life until death? Well, it’s
not the drudgery it seems, because no matter what I do, I “do all to the glory
of God.”20 And when it all becomes too much to handle, I just put everything
in his hands. That may sound like a cop-out to some, but it’s not. Oh no, to the
contrary: The more I’m able to trust God and surrender to his will, the
greater being I am!
Indeed, one still gets to be a hero by pleasing his gods and deferring to
them even if he never does anything productive in his life otherwise. He can
even be destructive, having more incarcerations to his name than dollars, but
still be heroic by practicing, in some ill-defined capacity, religiosity. A
mantra of some of the forensic patients I meet at work these days, often
expressed in the medium of tattoo, is that “Only God Can Judge Me.” The
perspective would be comical, if some of the perpetrators weren’t using it to
justify acts of violence and even murder. And of course it’s not just gangsters;
many law-abiding, white-collar folk employ a similar maneuver to validate
the less productive things they do, too.
Otherwise, insofar as adulthood has deprived us of that “illusion of
invulnerability” that we experienced during infancy and childhood, God can
bring it back. Becker paraphrases psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel: “people have
a ‘longing for being hypnotized’ precisely because they want to get back to
the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence, the ‘oceanic
feeling’ that they enjoyed when they were loved and protected by their
parents.”21
 And religion does even more: It puts reason in its place. Religion is the
one forum where we are not only allowed to ignore logic, but we are
commended for admonishing it. In religion, faith is king. And the more
faithful you are (that is, the less logical you are), the more heroic you get to
be.
Religion is truly brilliant. No wonder it’s so popular. It really can cure
everything.

Coming down the home stretch of The Denial of Death, I felt disappointed as
I began to realize that Becker had no solution for us atheists. He never gets to
the part about the joys of being liberated from repression. On the contrary, he
teaches that “Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of
the waking day … It can’t be overstressed, one final time, that to see the
world as it really is is devastating and terrifying.”22 Dang, man; I was afraid
of that.
So, apparently Becker was not suggesting that we abandon all of our
defensive quests for immortality, despite their ultimate futility. There is a
place for some repression. He asserts that

when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical.
True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the
cultural causa sui [that is, meaning-of-life] project, there is also
the necessity of this project. Man needs a “second” world, a
world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live,
dramatize, nourish himself in.23

But we have to be careful. Repression becomes neurosis when “the

techniques that they have developed for holding [the terror of mortality] at
bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself.”24
Recall Yalom’s crusadism from earlier. Even ambition and productivity can
be destructive and unhealthy if they have us instead of us having them.
 Worth acknowledging, being choked as such is just fine for some folks
—it can even be addictive. We really can get caught up in our neuroses,
perhaps because they are preferable to the alternative, that is, fully engaging
reality. Becker: “Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that
he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal
misery of life.”25 People like Freud and Becker seem to be suggesting that
even our neuroses can have an ulterior function, as they can distract us from
the real anxiety that we should be having.
Sure enough, one of the first things they prepare us for while studying to
become psychologists is that some patients will quit just as they start to get
better. I now appreciate why, because even pain can be paradoxically
soothing, if it’s familiar and predictable. Sure, it hurts, but at least I know
what to expect from day to day. Plus, if I change—even for the best—it
necessarily means that I’ve been wrong about reality until this point. Never
mind; I’ll just stay put, as I prefer predictable and right. Finally, another fear
with which improving patients must cope is responsibility, as they lose their
entitlement to be cared for, to be swaddled.
So, then, what is mental health? Becker suggested there really is a
middle ground, an amount of repression that allows us to navigate life but
without camouflaging reality so much that it cripples us or even makes us
dangerous: “A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death,
and reality …”26 It’s okay to use whatever you need to get by, but if you’re so
invested in the mechanisms that give your life meaning and a sense of
immortality that you’re being selfish, antagonistic, or destructive, then you’re
being counterproductive, in the grand scheme of things.

I’ve encountered criticisms of Becker’s perspective that are pitched

something to the effect of the following: “Why would evolution, if it’s so
sensible, equip us with such a debilitating fear of death in the first place?”
Well, it didn’t. Most of us, even us existentialists, don’t routinely kill
ourselves. Sure, there has always been suicide, but not many people resort to
it, proportionally. In fact, even today—a time in history in which I suspect
suicide is relatively common, if not peaking—it remains unusual, something
on the order of 0.01% of the world population a year.27 As long as large
portions of the population are not suiciding, the gene pool doesn’t mind too
much. So, existence and the fear of death may be overwhelming for some
individuals, but it’s not, on average, for whatever reasons.
Otherwise, genes couldn’t care less if the organisms who carry them
are merely depressed or anxious, as long as those organisms continue to
procreate. In fact, we all know that feeling bad doesn’t necessarily deter
humans from wanting to have sex—indeed, it may encourage them! For many,
nothing treats a case of the blues like a good ol’ roll in the hay. And for more
chronic existential anxiety, what better way to cope with one’s mortality than
by mating and making a baby, a fresh new person that is half of you, literally.
Although still not debilitating for most, the fear of annihilation must be
as rampant as ever in modern times, as technology keeps us overly informed
regarding the mayhem throughout the world. Mass media has not been
available for most of human history, so we have only recently become
confronted with the actual extent of human suffering, destruction, and hatred.
Typically, for the average person throughout history, facing death has
probably been a relatively infrequent event. And when it did happen, it was
typically a more intimate experience, followed by legitimate interpersonal
mourning with others—instead of simply putting the paper down and having
to go to the office.
Today, it’s a challenge to avoid being bombarded with news stories and
images that affirm our mortality, in Technicolor and very large numbers. So,
of course we’re freaked out. And of course we cope by distracting ourselves
through rat-racing, shopping, and trying to leave our marks through
accomplishments, including children and books like this one. And of course
society isn’t complaining, because our productive distraction is the machine
that makes society function. And of course religion has irresistible appeal,
because it readily accounts for all the chaos without demanding much
introspection, contemplation, or analysis, instead appealing to faith. Perhaps
religion itself is just another mindless distraction.

1 Cramer, P. (2006). Protecting the self (p. 52). New York: Guilford Press.
2 Ibid., p. 64.
3 Burgo, J. (2012). Why do I do that? Psychological defense mechanisms and the hidden ways
they shape our lives (pp. 83-84). Chapel Hill, NC: New Rise Press.
4 Baumeister, R. F., Dale, K., & Sommer, K. L. (1998). Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical
findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projection, displacement, undoing, isolation,
sublimation, and denial. Journal of Personality, 66, 1085-1086.
5 Protecting the Self, p. 45 & 60.
6 Baumeister & Sommer (1998), p. 1085.
7 Epstein, M. (1998). Going to pieces without falling apart: A Buddhist perspective on wholeness.
New York: Broadway Books.
8 Existential Psychotherapy, p. 450.
9 Despite all the worthy praise, some of Becker’s discussion is dated, such as the suggestion that
homosexuality is necessarily a symptom of pathology (e.g., p. 118).
10 The Denial of Death, p. 87.
11 Shattered Assumptions, p. 13-14, etc.
12 The Denial of Death, p. 66.
13 Ibid., p. xvii.
14 Ibid., p. 96.
15 Krishnamurti, J. (1969). Freedom from the known (p. 51). New York: HarperOne.
16 Greenway, M. B. (2012, September 6). Interview by MK Ondergrond. [Audio recording, with video
animation]. Retrieved from http://www.facebook.com/MKOndergrond (Italics added, I think.)
17 Al-Mutar, F. S. (2012, November 30). [Facebook post].
18 The Denial of Death, p. 120.
19 Ibid., p. 203.
20 1 Corinthians 10:31.
21 The Denial of Death, p. 132.
22 Ibid., p. 59 & 60.
23 Ibid., p. 189.
24 Ibid., p. 178.
25 Ibid., p. 271.
26 Ibid., p. 204.
27 According to the WHO, there are about 800,000 suicides a year (out of about 7 billion people). World
Health Organization. (2014, September). Media centre - suicide fact sheet. Retrieved from
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs398/en/
 CHAPTER 7

The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways …

but Evolution Just Works!
What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for
organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding
flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the
gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and
then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue … Creation is a
nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for
hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures.

— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

IN THE SUMMER OF 2005, I and a fellow graduate student at Kansas, Adam,

took a road trip to Keystone, Colorado to go mountain biking. I was so
excited I could hardly stand it. There was no snow and hardly anyone else
around so we essentially had the place to ourselves, free to explore that
majesty as much as the sunshine would allow. We had a sweet setup, too,
another old friend’s timeshare condo right at ground zero, so we could just
jump on our bikes and be in the mountains in no time.
About two or three hours into the very first ride of the trip, we found
ourselves significantly removed from civilization, heading down a gradual
slope through an open field, the type that simply demands that you go fast. At
thirty-five years old, I didn’t care as much about velocity as I might have in
my twenties (and even then I was never much of a sensation-seeker), but I got
carried away by the scenery and the trail ahead of me, so took the lead and
sped ahead with reckless abandon.
After I had gotten some good speed, something on the order of 25 miles
per hour (don’t laugh—that’s fast on a bike, especially in the dirt), the trail
suddenly became more of a rut, a tiny canyon about eight or ten inches wide
and equally deep. I hit a rock or a hole or something, which forced my front
tire into the right wall of the little canyon-rut, and it bit like someone had
thrown a crowbar into my spokes. I flew over the handlebars and hit the
ground with that violent, vicious feeling so characteristic of a high-impact
crash, where you’re totally helpless, your existence completely in the hands
of physics, but it kinda doesn’t matter because everything is such a blur. I hit
the ground hard as hell, something serious happened, and I rolled and finally
came to a stop in some tall grass, remarkably far from my bike. I was all
disoriented, only as you are after such chaos, not even sure if I was
conscious or not, for a moment.
As my faculties began to return I reflexively surveyed the damage.
Obviously, at the very least, my right shoulder was totally fucked, but I
wasn’t sure in precisely what manner. I had broken my left collarbone in high
school gym class twenty years earlier, and it felt quite reminiscent of that. On
the other hand, in addition to that familiar extraordinary pain, the whole
shoulder joint just felt all distorted and wrong, giving me the impression that
I had dislocated something this time. But after I conjured the nerve to look at
it and touch it, it appeared it was indeed broken. Compared to the prior break
in high school, this time the respective halves of the collarbone had shifted
more dramatically, producing a very distinct lump and neighboring cavity on
the other side of the break. Feeling sick and faint now. Head down. Deep,
slow breaths.
I lay there for a bit, just to give myself time to calm down, which I
eventually did. Once the dust settled, everything began to feel increasingly
similar to my previous break and I became pretty confident that nothing novel
and catastrophic was happening, like internal bleeding or organ rupturing.
Coincidentally, Adam had gotten flats in both of his tires right about the
time I wrecked; I suppose he had run through some thorns or something that I
had missed. I didn’t feel like waiting for him to fix them because I knew I
was gonna be in excruciating pain until I got to the ER, which was very far
away, where ever it was. So, I cradled my arm and started walking back up
the deceptively tranquil trail from whence we came. Adam would fix his
tires, then bring both of the bikes and the rest of our shit back.
While walking through all that gorgeous country, I continued to calm
down and even hit a stride of sorts, and ultimately had a very compelling
experience, one of the most ever for me.
 It was a beautiful day, like 70 degrees, sunny with a few good clouds,
and whatever perfect humidity is. And it was also perfectly quiet, and I was
perfectly alone, like I often aspire to be while vacationing in the wilderness.
Even though it had become pretty clear I wasn’t dying, the thought of death
was still a little more accessible than usual. But the experience remained
oddly peaceful. I remember feeling that I would prefer to die in a place like
that, on a day like that. Just sit down and fade away, looking at the mountains
and trees and clouds. It was one of those rare moments in which I was kinda
willing to die.
Alas, as with every peaceful moment in history, the calm eventually
gave way to some anxiety. My mind wandered to the prospect of some wild
dogs, a bear, or some kind of large cat finding me in my ridiculously helpless
state—which began to make the thought of dying suddenly less appealing.
There is no way in hell I could have run, much less climb a tree or rock or
something. It would have been an incredible challenge to even get a hold of a
stick to try to scare a predator off. Right, good luck actually fighting it or
them. With a broken collarbone you might as well be tied up.
And, strangely, broken collarbones are not that rare. I’ve broken two
bones in my life—my respective collarbones. It seems weird that human
beings are so vulnerable but we’ve managed to make it this far. What a
pusillanimous little bone, but how incredibly incapacitated you are when it
breaks. To make up for it, they tend to heal well on their own; the doctor
typically doesn’t place it, and there’s no cast, just a sling. But you have to
have time to rest. When undisturbed, the fractured portions bleed marrow or
some other goo that dries and binds them back together. Later, that stuff
calcifies, and voila, you’re good to go. Again, the key is you have to rest and
stay pretty still. Not such a big deal in the United States in the 20th and 21st
centuries. But what an incredibly big deal back in caveman days!
I hadn’t had much formal education on evolution at the time, having only
picked up the basics of natural selection from high school biology books, the
Discovery Channel, and fleeting regards during my liberal arts college
education. But, walking alone through the Rocky Mountains debilitated like
that, with relatively realistic thoughts of being consumed by wild cats or
bears, some of it started to come together in a very tangible way. Suddenly, I
was able to appreciate natural selection more than I ever could before—
particularly the part about social bonds. I could almost taste it!
 Camaraderie was a life-or-death issue during the course of our
evolution. Back in caveman days (I’m told that we actually didn’t evolve in
caves; it was more like savannas), when you broke a bone, solitude could
very likely result in your death, because, if nothing else, you would be easy
pickings for all sorts of hungry critters. However, if similarly broken—but in
the company of other people—the situation changes dramatically, as you now
have someone to help you more effectively shoo away danger while you
recover.
So, Pleistocene men and women needed the company of others—there
was nothing frivolous about spending time with friends those days. This is
not to suggest it wasn’t fun at times; indeed, it must have been—it had to be
immediately reinforcing one way or another, or it wouldn’t have been so
popular! Alternatively—more like simultaneously—extended solitude must
have felt repulsive.
Evolution must have selected this arrangement. Over time, those people
born with mutations rendering them repulsed by company or satisfied with
solitude were much more likely to be devoured when they broke their
collarbones because they were more likely to be alone when it happened.
And once devoured, they could not mate and pass their I’m-fine-with-
solitude genes into future generations.
On the contrary, those people carrying genes lending them to prefer the
company of others, or to be repelled by solitude, were much more likely to
survive, to live through broken bones and infections, and eventually mate
with other similarly social humans. Ergo, the I-need-company genes were
spread around a lot more effectively than the I’m-fine-with-solitude genes.
And, whoomp, here we are today, endowed with a need to connect with
others and to belong to cohesive social groups.
Many people are reluctant to even entertain such dry and technical
accounts for the human experiences that we hold so dear, such as
camaraderie. I recall myself bristling at such notions when I was still
clinging to a more spiritual slant to the nature of existence. But now having
experienced the transition to godlessness firsthand, I see the resistance like
Ernest Becker, that one reason we reject these explanations is because we’re
afraid to mechanize ourselves and identify too closely with beasts, lest it
suggest we are less special than we feel.
However, over here on the other side of the spirituality fence—and
about as far from that fence as one can get—I’m thrilled to announce that,
paradoxically, I feel enriched by the evolutionary perspectives of my
behavior and experience. Camaraderie somehow feels more real and
legitimate—perhaps even more meaningful—when appreciated as a
phenomenon that has been honed through millions of years of natural
selection, as opposed to having been instantaneously imposed via a magical
finger-snap by Zeus or whomever.
I feel even more connected to others, both my friends and even
strangers, in a way that is more tangible than ill-defined spiritual forces that
are purported to do the same. My drives become part of my essence, a
natural essence that I share with virtually every human being ever, Christian
or Muslim, alive or dead. No, I’m not suggesting that every time I eat a
burger that Joan of Arc or some al Qaeda terrorist in Qatar can somehow
taste it, but it does make me feel less different from people in general. We all
have similar desires and fears—especially the fear of mortality.
Nor am I saying that teaching evolution is going to bring world peace,
but I think it may have more potential than the effort to reconcile the world’s
religions. The latter simply cannot happen entirely; too many religions are
mutually exclusive, and there’s too much at stake. That’s the problem with
immortality: It’s too inspirational. What I do notice, however, is that my daily
life has more peace when I appreciate the similarity between me and
everyone else, that we’re all on the same boat to mortality, and on some
level, we’re all afraid. It helps me, for example, be mindful of my
interactions with others, whether it be my girlfriend or the checkout lady at
the Quik-E-Mart.
Evolution doesn’t just connect me to people: It even connects me to
lower animals, who have similar—if not exact—versions of the same drives
that I do (even though those animals may not be complicated by the ability to
contemplate their experiences while having them). But realizing that I’m like
the animals hasn’t encouraged me to act like one, as I suspect many religious
people fear it should. However, it has helped me feel less guilty for wanting
to act like one, and has helped me to forgive myself when I actually do act
like one (which isn’t very often). For me, this secular, humanistic forgiveness
feels more satisfying than the blind, frivolous forgiveness I used to get from
Jesus. Ironically, it was spiritual forgiveness that had become routine after a
while, insincere, and easy to abuse.
The evolution of socialization had to involve more than simply keeping
company with others. Socialization works best when our company likes us,
to some degree. They have to feel devoted to us and perceive us as
worthwhile, dependable, valuable, attractive in some way. Otherwise,
they’re less motivated to care for us when we break our collarbones, nor
will they be interested in having sex with us once we’ve healed.
With this in mind, we can now begin to appreciate how negative
emotions, such as guilt and shame could fit in to the picture. (Psychologists
do make a distinction: We experience shame when someone catches us doing
something we feel is wrong, whereas guilt is relatively private, in that it
doesn’t require the publicity.) Pleistocene men and women who carried
genes that created ill feelings when they perpetrated behaviors that were not
conducive to the camaraderie of the group—such as stealing—would be less
likely to commit those antisocial behaviors. As a result, they would be held
in higher esteem in the group and treated preferentially, increasing the odds
of their survival. Certainly, if I find two of my clan members in a precarious
situation and it’s up to me to make a sacrifice to help—but I can only tend to
one—I’m gonna help the guy who shared his extra carrot with me last
summer and let the guy who flirted with my cave-wife burn. And so,
something like that, morality was born. It’s worth mentioning that we’re
talking about the average cave-person. Sure, shameless/guiltless folk can
survive in a group as well (at least in limited numbers) as long as they also
have genes endowing them with the gifts of manipulation and secrecy. Such
folks have survived just fine; we call them “sociopaths” or “psychopaths”
today.1
Perhaps surprisingly, again, this evolutionary perspective orients me
and provides direction—ironically, more so than the Bible ever did.
Understanding my guilt and shame as products of millions of years of
laborious development, a matter of life-or-death for my ancestors hunting and
gathering on the African savannas millions of years ago, I feel like I have a
legitimate reference to guide my behavior. All I have to do is learn to pay
attention to my feelings, how to identify when I’m feeling guilty or ashamed.
Nowadays, this compels me to examine my behavior and scrutinize it
carefully, and I can make a decision based on how my options sway those
negative feelings. The trickiest part has been working through the defense
mechanisms and actually contacting the guilt and shame—just like physical
pain, human minds don’t like to feel them, so they reflexively try to push them
away. But once you begin to contact them, this system becomes more reliable
and less confusing than the Bible, which is ambiguous and will inevitably
give you contradictory advice if you read it long enough. Perhaps guilt was a
gift from God after all. Administered slowly, over millions of years of
evolution on the African savannas.

The overarching mission of the field of Evolutionary Psychology is to better

understand modern human behavior by explaining why and how it was
naturally selected. A real evolutionary psychologist, Leda Cosmides, along
with her anthropologist husband, John Tooby, have formalized a discussion
about the role of evolution in modern mental illness.2 The notion they
present, profound for me, begins with the fact that evolution is (typically) an
extraordinarily slow process. However, one of the products of evolution,
modern humans with their abstracting frontal lobes, has discovered
technology. Relative to evolution, technology proceeds very quickly. It’s
even accelerating, that is, it feeds itself and goes even faster as new
advances are realized.
So, as the simplest of calculus would predict, technological advances
have now greatly outstripped our evolutionary adaptations. Ergo, we now
find our current selves housed in bodies and minds that are still optimized for
ancient living conditions, that is, hunting and gathering in tribal communities,
living outdoors, and being intimately engaged with nature and other humans
on tasks directly related to survival. As you can see, there is a glaring
mismatch between how we were designed to live and how we are actually
living today. Not surprisingly, this can lead to both physical and
psychological distress. Surely, people have been discussing the irony of the
pitfalls of luxury ever since luxury was invented. Leda and John’s notion of
“development-environment mismatch” seems to explain a lot of it.
They open the discussion by exploring non-mental health issues, that is,
more medical examples, such as the “trivial” instance of overeating (by
“trivial” they probably mean that this is a commonly cited example, as
opposed to suggesting it doesn’t matter). Pleistocene men and women were
equipped—that is, naturally selected—to crave fat, salt, and sugar because
these are particularly nourishing to human bodies and brains. The craving
and appreciation for these foods are strong because such valued foods were
relatively scarce back when the craving developed. In other words, there
was a match between the supply and demand that functioned well. Today,
however, at least for many of us in bountiful America, our supply is
effectively endless, but we’re still equipped with the same cravings that
were suited for a much smaller supply. Ergo, we’re obese and ridden with
heart disease and tooth decay—which Leda and John describe as “virtually
unknown in populations that [still] hunt and gather.” It’s also no wonder that
hunger satiety takes time to set in: Everyone’s quite familiar with how much
easier it is to overeat than to under-eat. When Pleistocene women and men
were fortunate enough to land some deer, they didn’t stop after they had
enough. They kept eating, and didn’t start to feel full until way after they
were actually full, because there might not be any more deer for a few days.
Stuffing oneself back then could have been a life-or-death issue. Ironically,
the tables have turned, huh!
I suspect that experts who really know what they’re talking about could
go on forever, but I have just a couple more examples of development-
environment mismatch you might find engaging. One I enjoy teaching in my
college classes whenever the discussion arises goes as follows. We did not
evolve on boats, and therefore boating can be a terrible experience for many.
This is because the brain on a boat is receiving conflicted messages, to
which some people are particularly sensitive. The motor cortex and feedback
from the legs are telling the boater that he’s standing still but his vestibular
system is telling him that he’s in motion. For the human Pleistocene brain on
land, such confusion was an alarm, the only natural deduction at the time
being that the organism had consumed something poisonous. Ergo, the safest
thing to do in such a situation would be to vomit. So, here we are today,
conquering the planet with our boats—but for many, the earth wins, leaving
the vanquished heaving over gunwales, feeding its fish with their vomitus.
(By the way, a similar phenomenon happens at some movies—The Blair
Witch Project in 1999 was notorious for inducing nausea in patrons, with its
bouncy camera simulating movement while we were really just sitting in
seats—me on the edge of mine, for sure; that movie worked well for me.)
And for those tough guys who make fun of the vomit-prone for being
sissies, the joke’s on you: Given a mass poisoning of our primitive tribe, our
sensitive, barfing comrades are actually most likely to survive—and after all
the macho guys with the cast-iron stomachs die, the “sissies” get their
women!
 While the iron is hot, we might as well venture into defecation. Bear
with me; we won’t stay long. But yes, I’ve taken up backcountry hiking over
the last few years and have been moved by how much more magnificent a
bowel movement is when squatting in nature versus sitting on a toilet. I’m
serious: If I ranked all of my best dumps ever, the entire top 10 would consist
of natural ones, despite comprising such an infinitesimal portion of total
dumps taken. The irony is that by creating a situation that makes us more
comfortable overall (that is, the toilet), we’re putting our colons in an
unnatural position that impedes the crapping process.
Okay, that story was a bit of a set-up (although it is totally true!). I was
also interested in arousing icky feelings in you, which I suspect are quite
rampant by now. But I’m not trying to be crass—I want to talk about those
feelings, and suspect the discussion may proceed best if the feeling in
question is fresh on your mind. The point: That feeling of disgust that you are
feeling right now is also naturally selected. A genetically endowed repulsion
to feces (and rotting food and so on) has self-preservation value—that is,
avoidance of infection—while genes endowing any sort of attraction to such
infectious things will soon become scarce in a gene pool. That revulsion is
strong and deep, not just for hilarious playground jokes, but because it needs
to be.
Of course, the repulsion is more complex than this, but that’s likely
where it starts, evolutionarily. And of course, our culture has also
indoctrinated us to steer away from feces and such, to not even discuss such
matters, which complements well our innate revulsion. But as many an
evolutionist has noted, the rules of our culture are often simply resonating
something that natural selection has already established, in this case “Stay
away from doo-doo because it is so gross that it can be dangerous. No matter
how hungry you are, don’t eat that, despite the fact it just came out of you.
Don’t be near it; don’t even talk about it.” Other naturally selected laws of
human nature endorsed well by culture include “You must beget children, but
not with your own kin” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you.” Our cultures enforce these rules, but it’s an easy job in most instances
because the foundation is already there. I’m not even sure if “enforce” is the
right word; it may be more like embrace.
Back to poo, Ernest Becker takes it all to another level, arguing that our
revulsion to feces and such, both personal and cultural, is not only about
health but also related to our fears of mortality. He talked about “gods with
anuses” to describe the duality of humankind, in respect to our narcissistic
claims of having conquered the earth—but while we still have to shit, just
like the rest of the animals.3 Sure, we wipe our dirty butts, but often
ineffectively. We even get it on our hand sometimes!
Becker says that the relatively animalistic behaviors like defecating are
taboo because they are potent reminders of our mortality. To acknowledge
them puts us on the same playing field as animals, and animals are mortal and
don’t have souls, so shitting and humping like them raises doubts that perhaps
we don’t have souls either. What kind of god would make us so different
from the beasts (that is, immortal), but also so similar (that is, with urine and
ejaculate and menses)? In a truly spiritual universe, an immortal being
wouldn’t even have an asshole, nor would it breast-feed its children like a
dog. So the more we can disguise our animal parts and behaviors—with
deodorant, clean underwear, scented toilet paper, feminine products, and
nursing blankets—we can distance ourselves from the animals and convince
ourselves that we’re different. So different that we can live forever!
Becker goes on and on, culminating in what I am sure is the greatest line
from any literature, ever since the beginning of the written word: “No
mistake—the turd is mankind’s real threat.”4
It’s true. The rectum and its product really do put us in our place. I’ve
had mild bouts of hemorrhoids in the past, managed adequately with over-
the-counter preparations for such. I’m not trying to be gross frivolously! I’m
dead serious, just like Ernest Becker was: I’ve never felt more beastly than
when applying ointment to my sphincter ani externus. The experience puts
me in touch with my animality even more than crapping in the woods.
I like to imagine chatting with Ernest Becker about this stuff, sitting in
rocking chairs on the porch, drinking cold beer. I can just hear him now:
“Yeah, Dave, it’s really hard to believe in God with your finger in your butt.”
I’d laugh. “Yeah, well, I’ll see your anus, Ernest, but I’ll raise you a
masturbation. That’s right: gods who beat-off.” It’s easy to understand why
masturbation is so shunned by religion, it being arguably more vile than
crapping, and hence even more incompatible with immortality. Plus,
masturbation has the benefit of being even more private than crapping, which
affords people the opportunity to deny that they even do it at all! Privacy is
what makes it a sin. Crapping would also be a sin, if we could at least
pretend that we don’t do it.
 We’d go on and on. We’d rant about “gods who kill their babies,” that
is, abortion. Permitting abortion is about as incompatible with spirituality as
any human behavior possibly could be. As long as abortion is legal, we’re no
better than the lion king when he kills entire litters sired by other lions in
order to get their inferior genes out of the pool.
Similarly, we can’t permit voluntary euthanasia of dying, consenting
adults because to do so would also make us too beastly. I can’t speak for
Ernest, but I might even argue that in a world without spirituality, even
suicide would be respected, at least in some cases. Yes, sometimes I think
that when survivors of suiciders call the deceased “selfish,” it’s actually the
survivors who are being self-centered.
In any event, Leda and John skip the evolutionary (and spiritual)
discussion on feces and apply their development-environment mismatch
notion to mental distress, such as anxiety. When I’m teaching this stuff to my
college classes, I often begin with the example of fear of heights. A fear-of-
heights gene would have been very beneficial from the beginning of human
existence, as we don’t need to be goofing around up in trees or on rocky
precipices. We need to get what food we can and get down, carefully, lest we
fall and break our collarbones and—well, you know the rest. A mutated gene
that caused one to crave heights and to be frivolous about them would have
been less likely to stay in the pool, for reasons that should be obvious. And
no, it’s not strange that a minority of modern people are thrill-seekers with
relatively less fear of heights. They would have served us normal people
well at times when the only food around was in a tree or up on a precipice.
And when they did bust their ass fetching it, we healthy scaredy-cats would
tend to them, for reasons that should also be obvious.
So, today, most of us carry the relatively safe fear-of-heights genes. The
mismatch problem is manifest in that our technology presents us with many
more heights—and much more incredible heights—than our ancestors had
been experiencing during evolution. We have buildings, bridges, and
airplanes—accessible heights that our ancestors rarely encountered, if ever.
When you put those Pleistocene-era fear-of-heights genes into modern
people, we’re much more likely to be afraid, and even overwhelmed, given
all the heights to which we have access.
No wonder I’m so inconceivably afraid of flying! Can you imagine
anything less natural? I’m supposed to be walking in a field, looking for
berries, roots, and maybe—if I’m lucky—a wounded miniature
hippopotamus-horse-pig thing, but instead I find myself in this inconceivably
complex tube made from steely rocks that travels hundreds of miles per hour
several miles above the earth! That’s right: You’re the one who’s weird, if
you’re not afraid.
And there will always be people afraid of flying, because those fear-of-
heights genes will never be weeded out of the gene pool unless, for some
reason, the fear of heights somehow causes that majority of the population to
mate less. So, for example, if the World passed (and enforced!) a law that we
must only fornicate on precariously high watchtowers, then the fear-of-
heights genes would finally begin to disappear over time.
The development-environment mismatch logic can be applied to myriad
other psychopathologies. One of the first things we learned in panic disorder
treatment is that the panic attack is essentially a natural fight-or-flight
response being initiated out of context. Fight-or-flight evolved to help us
survive when confronted with threats to our physical integrity, like saber-
toothed cats or even strange people who have a different skin color than us.
However, today, the mechanism is triggered in unnatural contexts (such as
while sitting in a classroom or at a board meeting) because of the
accumulation of modern stressors, such as our grades, romantic failures, our
pending presentation, and last week’s layoffs. Once the fight-or-flight
response kicks in, it only gets worse as you continue to sit in that meeting—
you’re supposed to be fighting or running by now! So, yes, when you find
yourself in situations of escalating stress as such, one possible treatment is to
whup someone’s ass (I’m kidding; going for a jog will be more effective
overall.)
Fear of crowds seems like an easy one to grasp (given we didn’t
evolve at shopping malls or football stadiums), which may then provide a
segue into other experiences, such as suspiciousness or even some paranoia.
Evolutionists often identify male sexual jealousy as an adaptive
phenomenon, as unsightly as it can be. Functionally, however, it would
motivate a man to monitor his mate, not just to help care for her but also to
help ensure that he’s devoting his resources to raising his own genes
(including those jealousy genes), not someone else’s. It’s easy to imagine
how a relatively healthy jealousy mechanism as such could run amok in
today’s world, with so many people to monitor, in a much more mysterious
environment. Back in the good ol’ days, I knew most of the people around
me, or at least knew someone who knew the ones I didn’t. Today, my wife is
working miles away from home with all sorts of douchebags I’ve never even
met, checking her out at the copier all day, begging her to go to happy hour …
all while I’m busting my hump for The Man at the cable company so our kids
can have as nice of clothes as possible … at least I think they’re “our” kids.
Another instance of development-environment mismatch that seems
very relevant these days relates to posttraumatic stress. Psychologists who
practice therapy talk about vicarious traumatization or empathy fatigue in
which the therapist himself begins to show symptoms of anxiety that appear
to stem not from his own personal experiences but from being bombarded by
stories of trauma and suffering at work all day. People in law enforcement
and emergency medicine and such must have similar experiences. I strongly
suspect that something related is happening to laypeople as well, perhaps not
as dramatically but more widespread. For the masses, the stories of trauma
and suffering don’t come firsthand but through the media, but it’s sufficient to
unsettle them. Many of us today are probably walking on eggshells more than
we’re even aware, largely because some part of our unconscious (or even
conscious) is terrified about all sorts of calamity that we saw on the news
recently.
The mismatch reasoning can also be applied to our camaraderie
discussion from before. Over the last few hundred years, technology has
suddenly afforded us the “luxury” to live large portions of our lives in
relative solitude. Many of us choose to, I suppose because it seems easier,
given modern living conditions overall. However, just like crave-fat genes
and fear-of-heights genes, we still carry the I-need-company genes.
Remember, none of these genes are trivial: They are necessary to survive, or
at least were.
Perhaps cabin fever has a lot more to do with not being around people
than it has to do with spending time in cabins per se. I notice that I get a little
kooky when I spend too much time alone. But it’s amazing how easily this
kookiness, which includes depression but is not limited to it, evaporates
when something happens to remind me that I’m connected to others,
something as simple as a dinner or a beer with a friend, a casual phone call,
email, or text message. When those things aren’t accessible, a simple trip to
the grocery store can ground me sufficiently, at least for a while. Fellow
shoppers are sometimes friendly, and the cashier lady almost always is. After
being cooped up too long, I just need to be reminded that other humans are
accessible and potentially receptive to my efforts to bond. Interestingly, often
I can’t convince myself this is the case simply by contemplating it—I have to
demonstrate it, that is, by physically interacting with others. The reality is
more effective than the fantasy.5
And maybe those same better-to-be-around-people genes are why I feel
compelled to watch so much TV: Because I live alone and get lonely, and I
find the personalities on TV soothing. Television can be more satisfying than
reading a book or listening to music because I can see a human face and even
get to know the person behind it a bit, so much so that it’s like they’re talking
to me sometimes. Hell yeah, I even talk back on occasion. This assessment
helps me feel less ashamed about watching TV, that is, to consider that maybe
I’m just feeding a gene that helped my ancestors survive. Sure, it’s kinda
creepy, but I’m also starting to understand why I get so sad when my favorite
celebrities die. I don’t really know them, but I am kinda attached to some
stars—they’ve kept me company over the years! I suspect this is part of the
reason why we can get so choked up during that part of the Oscars when they
review the celebrities who have died over the previous year. Like family
members, they arouse our feelings of mortality even more than other
relatively random deaths we see on the news. We really will miss them; I
don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed about.
And it’s also easy to see why we’re so addicted to virtual socializing.
When I’m lonely, that iPhone tune signaling a text message has been received
is so exciting, on an uncannily deep level. It’s moving because it’s
stimulating these ancient social reward centers of my brain, reminding me
that I’m connected after all. Sending a text message or getting a “Like” on our
Facebook post is a lot easier and more accessible these days than having a
face-to-face conversation, so we can readily experience more instances of
text messages and likes than we can actual human contact. It’s very similar to
the salt-fat-sugar craving: We can tickle those reward centers as often as we
want, to the point where it utterly devours our attention. But I think in the end
it’s not quite as satisfying, so we crave it, not unlike a heroin user craves his
unnatural fix. Again, it’s nothing to be ashamed about; just something to
contemplate.
And it’s easy to see why I’m so attached to my cat. A relatively sentient
animal can commandeer our social drive (the more sentience, the better),
even more so than people on TV can. That’s why we miss them while on
vacation, and why we’re destroyed when they die. They’re not people, but at
least they’re real, and we even touch. They comfort us physically and
emotionally, and us them. We care for them, not wholly unlike we’d care for
our own children, if we had them. I’m fairly sure that our pets stimulate the
same neural mechanisms that have evolved to compel us to care for our kin
and closest friends, although not necessarily as intensely.
Again, I find the evolutionary accounts for all of this suffering—from
movie-induced nausea to media-induced trauma to plain ol’ loneliness—
more validating than spiritual accounts. I admit, sadly, that evolution doesn’t
offer me eternal life, but it explains my suffering in this life, my real life that
I know will transpire. With evolution, when I’m feeling lonely and
depressed, I no longer have to wonder whether there’s something wrong with
my soul, or if I’m being punished for having been bad. And I’m no longer
utterly confused when God doesn’t answer my pleas for companionship,
leaving me to try to figure out how my solitude fits into some part of some
Plan or Test. These days, when I feel lonely and depressed, I can see that it’s
much more simple: It’s just my genes talking to me. They’re telling me that
being alone is not good for you. It’s dangerous to be alone. You need to be
around others, lest you get hurt or sick and become unable to care for
yourself or defend yourself. And you’re never gonna mate if you keep it up.
Be with others, maybe even mate, and you will feel good again (at least for a
while).
The Bible is relatively insensitive to many of these issues, and wholly
insensitive to others, such as our love for animals. And the Bible can’t even
begin to help us understand how a bullied kid might want to shoot someone at
school. But evolution does. It helps us understand how social isolation might
be one of the most powerful impetuses behind severe depression that we can
imagine, because social connection really is as critical to survival as eating
and having shelter. When a kid is singled out, ostracized, then humiliated in
front of groups of his peers who seem to have everything for which he longs
and needs, of course it can conjure the greatest anger on Earth and,
accordingly, the most ghastly fantasies of revenge. For those who actually act
out as such and kill themselves or others it’s likely more complicated, but at
least evolution gives us a starting point. All the Bible offers are cryptic
suggestions about cosmic plans and tests and about hope that it will all be
okay someday if we trust in Him and whatnot. It’s getting us nowhere, except
to hell in a handbasket, ironically.
Sigh: Even romance is finally beginning to make sense to me now.
I’ve never read Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus.
However, when I was a graduate student in Neuroscience at Texas in the late
1990s, I was fortunate to work in a lab right down the hall from Martie
Haselton who was a graduate student in Evolutionary Psychology at the time.
Martie has achieved much success since, currently a tenured professor at
UCLA and having toured her research on various documentaries and talk
shows, including The Science of Sex Appeal on the Discovery Channel,
multiple interviews with Diane Sawyer, and on … um … The View. But yes,
my first momentous lessons in natural selection were over lunch and not-as-
lame-as-you-might-think graduate student parties.
One of the most interesting notions Martie introduced to me is parental
investment theory, a grand idea born by Robert Trivers in the early 1970s
which ended up inspiring much of Martie’s research, and much of that of
Evolutionary Psychology as a whole before her. Parental Investment Theory
asserts that throughout the animal kingdom natural selection has influenced
the gender that invests more in begetting offspring to be more prudent and
choosy when selecting mates. In a nutshell, females of many species are
limited in how many total children they can have, so in order to maximize
their reproductive fitness they need to make every opportunity count as much
as possible. First, females are limited simply by time: Once pregnant, they
can’t get pregnant again for a while, and insofar as they are attached to their
babies after birth they continue to be obligated to them as they mature.
Otherwise, bearing children can be physically taxing on the female, and even
dangerous. Her fetuses steal her own nutrition and handicap her mobility.
Birth complications can literally kill mom. To cope with these limiting
factors, females have evolved to be relatively selective when choosing
sexual partners. They seek the healthiest males, that is, the ones most likely to
produce the heartiest children, as well as the most devoted and resourceful
males, that is, the ones most likely to stick around during and after the
pregnancy and help at least a little.
On the other hand, a male can invest relatively less in mating,
sometimes as little as a few moments of his time, a handful of calories of
energy, and a dollop of his endless supply of sperm. Males are not
necessarily obligated, biologically or otherwise, to tend to any offspring that
might result from a mating act. So, there’s been less selection pressure for
males to be prudent or choosy when mating. In fact, being aggressive and
indiscriminate works just fine from the male gene’s perspective. His
reproductive fitness, to some degree, will simply depend on how much sex
he can have. So, he’s adopted more of a shotgun approach, that is, to just
spread as much seed as possible, some of which is bound to stick. Whenever
he’s interacting with females, he tends to over-interpret their sexual interest
in him, encouraging him to make sexual advances even when they’re not
welcome. Better safe than sorry, as far as a male’s genes are concerned. I’m
just gonna open this can of worms but not actually explore it in this book, but
some have suggested that what is essentially rape may be a “mating strategy”
for the males in some species. The most likely instance I’ve seen first-hand is
ducks. It’s kinda disturbing to watch ducks do it.
As you read through this discussion, you can’t help but see the beastly
influence in modern humans. And there you have it: Men, Mars; Women,
Venus. Of course—particularly in humans—the dynamics are much more
complicated than this, so variety can still flourish in the system. And in
general, human males are relatively civilized, that is, feminine, compared to
males of many other animal species. Our promiscuity and competitiveness
and such are quite evident but not as glaring as they are elsewhere in the
animal kingdom. Many men are as attached to their children as much as their
wives are, and in some cases, even more so.
Nevertheless, there’s something exceptionally sobering as you begin to
compare animal mating behavior to human mating behavior. The similarities
become more apparent than the differences.
Martie’s Ph.D. supervisor at Texas, David Buss, is especially well
known in the field. In his evolutionary psych textbook, he describes the
mating ritual of the African village weaverbird:

When a female weaverbird arrives in the vicinity of a male, he

displays his recently built nest by suspending himself upside down
from the bottom and vigorously flapping his wings. If the male
impresses the female she approaches the nest, enters it, and
examines the nest materials, poking and pulling them for as long as
ten minutes. During this inspection the male sings to her from
nearby. At any point in this sequence she may decide that the nest
 does not meet her standards and depart to inspect another male’s
nest. A male whose nest is rejected by several females will often
break it down and rebuild another from scratch.6

Presumably as Dr. Buss intended, all I can envision when I read that passage
is modern man trying to engage the attention of modern woman by exposing
his Gold’s Gym muscles, Armani suit, shiny red Lexus, and—if he holds her
attention long enough—spacious, well-manicured lawn. Once in his home,
the female is quietly inspecting everything from dust bunnies to sheet thread
counts to prescriptions in the medicine cabinet. Throughout the entire process
the male is trying to charm the female, fawning over her, pretending he likes
children, and continuing to advertise his value and devotion by showering
her with fancy dinners, flowers, and eventually jewelry. If he’s ultimately
rejected by her and later by others, he’ll likely be compelled to adjust his
approach.
Now, I’m sure that love feels different for people than it does for
animals, that is, much more rich, spiritual, and cosmic, but we have to
acknowledge that regardless of how magical those feelings seem, they are
often misguided, suggesting that the feelings of love are just that: feelings. I
should clarify that the feelings are often misguided at least in terms of
America’s notion of love; in terms of evolution, they are guided perfectly.
Richard Dawkins paraphrases anthropologist Helen Fisher, who has
“beautifully expressed the insanity of romantic love” (my quotation marks are
not to imply sarcastic dissent; I totally agree with both Helen and Richard):

From the point of view of a man, say, it is unlikely that any one
woman of his acquaintance is a hundred times more lovable than
her nearest competitor, yet that is how he is likely to describe her
when “in love.” … Evolutionary psychologists agree with [Helen]
that the irrational coup de foudre could be a mechanism to ensure
loyalty to one co-parent, lasting for long enough to rear a child
together.7

I’m actually not sure who’s agreeing with whom, but yes: Just like physical
pain, the pleasure of eating animal fat, the fear of heights, camaraderie, and
guilt, perhaps love is also—to some degree—another naturally selected
experience for its functional role in passing our genes into the future.
Now, I don’t want to lose half of my readers before I even get to the
best part, so I want to be perfectly clear: I’m not arguing that there is no such
thing as enduring love. I’ve encountered many people who seem to have
found it; I’m truly happy for them, and I envy them. (That said, I don’t believe
in the notion of “soul mates”; as difficult as it is to find one, there are
countless people out there who could potentially fill the role for each of us.)
But enduring love is clearly not the norm. It seems that most people—
assuming they can find a mate at all—have to settle for something less. For
many, compatibility is the most reasonable longterm expectation, which may
not even include much legitimate affection at all. At worst, I see a lot of toxic
incompatibility that has never had any business being a relationship in the
first place. In the grandest scheme of things, I feel very confident to speculate
that if we consider all of the humans who have ever existed on Earth since
the beginning of time, the vast majority have died without having had the
opportunity to fully indulge true love. In contrast, the pangs of romantic love
are ubiquitous. Certainly, the vast majority of humans who have ever existed
have experienced the “irrational coup de foudre” of romantic love.
There seems to be some controversy over divorce statistics, but the rate
really has been about half in recent decades.8 And of course, many of those
who stay together probably shouldn’t, but they’re just trapped for various
reasons, such as family or cultural pressures (both explicit and implicit),
financial security, loneliness, fear, or just plain-old defensiveness (for
example, not wanting to admit they’ve been wrong all along). Now, divorce
statistics wouldn’t be so interesting if we knew that the divorcing couples
didn’t really feel in love when they married. But we can’t say that’s the case.
Instead, it’s routine for couples—even those who we all knew were truly in
love—to ultimately divorce. And it doesn’t just happen in trailer parks: It
happens to the successful, talented, intellectually endowed, Oscar winners,
and even royalty.
We’ve all been at some magnificent wedding that was like a scene from
a Hollywood movie, with beautiful flowers, a string orchestra, and some
bridesmaid we didn’t know who was practically bawling the whole time. We
were dazzled by the way the couple stared at each other and recited their
own vows; they were nervous and awkward at times but gave off an
undeniable aura that smote everyone in its wake. And the reception was
brilliant: We drank expensive champagne in real glasses, shared chummy
cigars, and there were adorable children dancing around in little tuxedos. It
was one of those rare occasions we actually enjoyed chatting with strangers
because magic was in the air. The whole time we were fantasizing that one
day we’ll be having a wedding like this of our own, because this is the real
deal, and that’s all that really matters in life. A wedding like this would fix
everything.
Shockingly—but uncannily routine—things die down and a few years
later that couple divorces, and sometimes quite nastily. Harsh critics will
argue that they were never really in love—that’s why it failed! But I don’t
buy it, and I suspect that many readers won’t buy it, either. I’m not ready to
disregard those feelings of passion as fake, partially because I’ve been
victimized, too.
I’ve met Her and become so overwhelmed that I can’t sleep, but that’s
okay, because I’m giddy and smiling all night long. I can’t focus the next day
at work because I can’t stop thinking about her, but that’s okay, too, because
the fantasies I’m having are much more engaging than my stupid job. When I
start to realize she might be having some of the same experiences, my
excitement increases without bound, and I start to have hopes about this being
It and me becoming whole. We make it to bed soon, but not before the tension
gets right to where it needs to be. By that time, I’m so consumed with
excitement there is no way to stop until every piece of her flesh has been in
my mouth, the overall experience being the perfect balance of affectionate
and dirty. Later, I write her poetry—lengthy, heartfelt stuff baring my soul—
and she loves it! It’s clear by this time that this is indeed It, as we spend an
inordinate amount of time staring at each other’s faces while holding hands
and not talking. At other times, we’re loud and reckless and the whole entire
universe can fuck off, because we’re the only two really in it.
Oops! Turns out, I was wrong. We both were. It didn’t work. Over time,
things happened and our perspectives changed. The fantastic feelings we had
were replaced by much less desirable ones, such as regret, embarrassment,
humiliation, and even anger. And here’s the most hilarious part: I’ve been
through this whole shenanigan more than once! And I know many of you have,
too. Praise Jesus for birth control. I’m sure I’d have at least one illegitimate
child by now if it weren’t for it—and by illegitimate I mean conjured by a
devilishly deceptive passion, an almost evil spell that tricked me as badly as
I’ve ever been tricked before.
 Of course, if I had made a kid, I’m absolutely positive that I would love
him or her, well beyond anything else in the world, including myself. I’m
proud to argue that I’m very feminine in this regard. All of those annoying
assertions you parents make that us childless adults can’t understand what it’s
like to have a child? I agree. The parent-child bond should be the greatest
bond in nature, not because Jesus is real, but because evolution needs us to
care for our kids even more than our spouses—perhaps even more than
ourselves at times. I don’t know what that bond feels like. I can’t imagine;
you’re right.
Again, it’s important to be perfectly clear: By no means am I trying to
suggest that our feelings towards our romantic partners are fake, not real.
They are real, just as real as the physical pain from a broken collarbone.
That’s the point: If the experience wasn’t convincing then it wouldn’t work!
Broken bone pain has to demand a certain behavior—in that case, utter
immobility of the broken part—or you could die. Similarly, we need an
extraordinarily powerful motivation to drive us to merge with another, to
forfeit any sense of privacy we typically have—or our genes could die with
us. We have to trust our mate, not feel vulnerable anymore, want them—need
them—so badly that we must rub our naked bodies against them as hard as
we can. We can’t be shy about their slobber and other juices—indeed, we’re
more likely to complete a successful mating act the more we’re willing to
embrace all that good stuff. Along the way and for some time thereafter, we
have to be so moved by the whole experience that we’re not interested in
anyone else. In fact, we’re so devoted to our mate (and our offspring) that
risking our lives for them would come naturally, without hesitation.
Love must be more special than physical pain because it faces a greater
challenge: transcendence. Pain and hunger and such are relatively simple
experiences in that the neurons that mediate them connect the stimulus site in
question (broken shoulder; empty stomach) directly to the brain parts that are
responsible to tend to them. However, love and other interpersonal
experiences, such as shame and camaraderie, are more complex, abstract, as
they need to promote behavior that transcends the individual, that makes
acting on behalf of or in reference to others rewarding (or aversive, in the
case of shame). Perhaps those warm feelings of spirituality that we
experience when we do a good deed or connect with someone else—
especially when we fall in love—is what natural selection has devised to
motivate such interpersonal, that is, self-transcendent, behaviors.
 Recall our discussions from previous chapters in which scientists have
shown there are spiritual mechanisms in our brains that can be stimulated
directly by drugs, neurosurgery, seizures, or even g-force. Those brain areas
must be there for a reason; they didn’t evolve for LSD parties. Perhaps they
evolved along with our consciousness to afford a feeling of profundity,
irrationality, so that we’ll do some crazy things we need to in order to
promote our genes—crazy things like behaving altruistically, even risking our
lives for others at times, or wrapping our legs around someone so they can
literally put their disgusting body parts inside us.9
Maybe that’s the only real difference between us and the weaverbird.
We both have the instinct to mate, but we humans have this self-
consciousness and rationality that are potential obstacles. Where the
weaverbird doesn’t contemplate its behavior, we have to transcend ourselves
and our fears, one of which is admitting that we are also beasts. We need to
feel bigger than our animal natures, à la Ernest Becker, so we glorify our
mating behavior as something much more meaningful and dignified than it
necessarily is. We buy flowers and diamonds and say beautiful things about
how love conquers all, but really its goal is just to make babies. Maybe
there’s nothing really magical about it. Maybe it is just fucking, clouded by
our wild imagination and insatiable need to distance ourselves from our
instincts, so that we can continue to feel spiritual—and immortal.
Transcendent when it’s working, love is devastating when it’s betrayed.
News stories (and real statistics) show us that one of the largest groups of
murder victims in this country is lovers and ex-lovers. Every time I see one
of these accounts, I wonder to what degree that couple also thought they were
in love. I think about their wedding and wonder if some of the guests there
had been overwhelmed with spiritual feelings, dabbing away tears with
fancy little monogrammed napkins. I wonder if the murderer himself had been
overwhelmed with romantic feelings at some point. His girl raised his
expectations to places where they had never been before. She was going to
save him, and all of his sufferings in the past would finally be forgotten
because the future would obviously be so different. Love is what he had been
living for all this time, and he felt so lucky to be one of the few who finally
found it. This was the kind of love that proves there’s magic in the cosmos,
that there is someone (or something) watching over us, and that some things
in the universe are truly eternal.
 If love was truly a cosmic, spiritual phenomenon, I don’t think it would
treat us like this. It wouldn’t be associated with so much deprivation,
deception, and destruction. Of course, not all love ends in murder. But
loneliness, infidelity, and temptation are norms. It’s all very mysterious, and
frustrating, when conceptualized as some kind of magic bestowed upon us by
God or the Cosmos or something. But it makes splendid sense when seen as a
product of our genes, chosen and honed over millions of years of evolution in
an effort to create babies. As far as evolution is concerned, passion works
wonderfully, in the vast majority of cases. Again, genes don’t care how the
individuals who carry them suffer, as long as babies are being made and are
at least given a fair chance to live to mating age themselves. Genes actually
like our loneliness and the irrationality that overwhelms us when we think
we’ve found a solution, our soul mate. And genes are just fine when lovers
go their separate ways, because now they can fall in love again and mate
elsewhere and enrich the gene pool more than they would have otherwise.
Albert Camus’s assertion was hyperbole, but poignant nonetheless: “there is
no eternal love but what is thwarted.”10

As much as I’ve been studying while writing this book, it has been unusual to
come across commentary such as this in which love is reduced to just another
product of natural selection. I suspect that many pure evolutionists do believe
that it can be, but they feel that the notion’s simply taboo. They don’t want to
be ostracized or to deflate their audience, so they just keep it to themselves.
Others give the impression that they, too, believe that love has some
sort of immunity from the denigration of evolutionary accounts because it is
indeed different, somehow spiritual. Love, for many of those who have no
other spiritual outlet, may be the last bastion against depressive nihilism.
Love can provide a purpose or meaning to life for those who have rejected
other mechanisms of spirituality. Perhaps love is the one human experience
that can replace spirituality and make life worthwhile without it. Because
love is the most transcendent of human feelings, it provides some vague
sense of immortality when we can’t find it elsewhere.
 But if we entertain the notion that there’s nothing spiritual about love,
that it is just a spiritual feeling mediated by neurons and hormones—just like
every other subjective human experience—we arrive at the beating-a-dead-
horse question for this book: Does it belittle the experience?
And the beating-a-dead-horse answer is once again: absolutely not!
Paradoxically, it may honor it!
Deferring to the evolutionary account does not prevent one from
experiencing love, no more than it prevents one from experiencing hunger,
physical pain, fear of heights, or guilt. However, it does put the experience
into some perspective, perhaps subduing it just enough so that it can be
managed instead of running amok and becoming destructive.
When we overindulge love at first sight, we may actually be behaving
less human than when we remain grounded and patient. Getting married
within just a few months of meeting is the equivalent of a dog getting a good
scent off some other dog’s butt, then mounting before introductions are even
finished. The more human reaction would be to practice patience. Get in
touch with your superego (the frontal lobes of your brain) so that it can
prevail over your id (the reptilian brain). The irony is that we think we’re
being more human by indulging the passion and sealing the deal, as if we’re
fulfilling some transcendental, spiritual prophesy, but we’ve got it all
backwards. We’re being deceived by our animal genes that just want us to
hurry. But we can beat them, once we understand them.
And apparently we are beginning to: The most recent data I’ve seen is
that we are waiting longer and marrying older, and the divorce rate is
declining!11 Let the excitement dwindle a bit—which it will, it has to—then
think about these extraordinary life-changing decisions. We need to make
sure that we really care about our mate after we’ve been mating for a while
and before we enter a legal contract—and, God forbid, before we bring
illegitimate children into the world, victims of our own impulsivity and
recklessness. This is an exceptionally common but serious problem with
families (and our society) today: Couples have children not because they’re
ready, but because they’re not ready. That is, they have babies because they
think bonding over children will help fix their crappy marriage that they
rushed into earlier … having rushed into them because they were so sure that
Jesus was on board with them the whole time.
I want to assure prudent readers by explicitly asserting that as I began
to identify with the animal side of human mating, I haven’t had the reaction
that spiritual folk likely fear, that is, to discard my morals and devote my life
to hedonistic debauchery, full of sex parties with panties and dildos flying
around my bedroom in a tornado of sweat and stink. No, the evolutionary
perspective has not become an excuse, carte blanche, or any other
dysfunction. On the contrary, analogous to my reaction to evolutionary
perspectives on mental illness discussed above, I mostly feel validated and
soothed. The evolutionary perspective finally helps me wrap my head around
my own frustrating experiences, such as my insatiable horniness and fear of
long-term commitment. It also helps me feel less guilty—but by no means
does my guilt disappear. In fact, my guilt becomes more honed and functional
compared to when it was associated with religion. Religious guilt always
seemed somewhat ambiguous and disorienting, as it tended to blanket my
whole person, making me feel that the issue at hand was not a particular
behavior but whether I was a good person.
In contrast, I’ve since learned that naturally selected guilt—once
contacted openly and honestly—is less deprecating, as it helps me focus on
my behavior as opposed to my character. The Bible simply ordered me to not
lust after someone else’s wife, but evolution does much more. First, it
acknowledges that the urge to commit adultery as such is actually quite
common and may even be “natural,” so I shouldn’t feel so depraved for
feeling lusty and tempted. I know now that the animal side of my genes just
wants me to mate, regardless of whom it hurts. However, I also realize that
there’s a more prosocial, human side to my genes that cherishes other social
bonds besides sex, social bonds that are built on trust and the golden rule.
When I succeed and forgo the adultery in the world of evolution, I have
something to really appreciate: Not that I followed orders like a good boy,
but that I weighed the options nature presented and I chose the relatively
human path, not the beastly one.
This is the exciting and even fun challenge of being a human living in a
world of evolution: engaging in a tug-of-war between the animal and human
sides of our nature. For most of us, we do have some say in how we behave
and we can foster our humanity, again, approximately what the Freudians
called the superego, and what neuroscientists now know is mediated by the
prominent frontal lobes of our brains.
To close my rambling monologue on evolution, I must cite Stephen J. Gould
who warns against over-applying natural selection to try to explain
everything.12 Just because something is the way it is doesn’t mean evolution
carefully selected it to be that way. Some things just are, or have stuck
around not because they help but because they haven’t been particularly
harmful. Stephen illustrates via the “puzzle” of the oddly small arms of
tyrannosaurus rex. He suggests these appendages were not honed to be small:
They ended up relatively small because they were simply outstripped by the
jaws and hind legs, which adapted so well by themselves that the beast just
didn’t really need arms anymore. In other words, the forelegs just got left
behind, and it didn’t matter.
It seems reasonable to assume that there are salient features of us
humans that were not necessarily naturally selected either, at least directly.
For example, I’ve felt that the evolutionary accounts I’ve heard so far to
explain our affinity for music often feel forced and are not very convincing.
Maybe there was no selection pressure to create and enjoy music, but our
appreciation of it is instead an epiphenomenon, side effect, or even
malfunction of some other adaptation. Maybe brains just like rhythm because
it gives them something to focus on besides their own thoughts running wild.
Such notions are intriguing because they suggest that some messiness,
and perhaps even mystery, will always be with us. It’s interesting to consider
which aspects of us humans are not necessarily here for a cosmic or even
useful purpose, but instead are fascinating leftovers or random gifts—or even
curses—from animals of eons past.

1 Some professionals make a distinction between the two terms, but inconsistently so it depends on
whom you ask; many of us consider them synonyms, and prefer psychopath. In general, they describe
someone who is callous and lacks empathy, negotiating life with manipulation and/or force in order to
suit his wants and needs. However, technically speaking, a person never has to break the law to be a
psychopath. You have probably encountered many more people with psychopathic tendencies than you
are aware.
2 Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1999). Toward an evolutionary taxonomy of treatable conditions. Journal
of Abnormal Psychology, 108, 453-464.
3 The Denial of Death, e.g., p. 51.
4 Ibid., p. 227.
5 This is the foundation of cognitive-behavioral therapy: The cognitive aspect means that we do need to
work on our thinking, but the critical behavioral aspect means that we must also act in order to learn.
6 Buss, D. M. (1999). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind (p. 99). Boston: Allyn
and Bacon.
7 Dawkins, R. (2006). The god delusion (p. 184). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
8 Miller, C. C. (2014, December 2). The divorce surge is over, but the myth lives on. The New York
Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-over-but-the-
myth-lives-on.html
9 Richard Dawkins extends the conversation to speculate whether a transcendent, irrational brain
mechanism naturally selected for love may have at some point become co-opted in mediating our
transcendent, irrational devotion to religion (The God Delusion, p. 185). It’s a fascinating, if not creepy,
notion … and conjures thoughts of the most sensual book of the Bible, Song of Solomon.
10 Camus, A. (1991). The myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien Trans.; p. 73). New York: Vintage
International.
11 “The divorce surge is over, but the myth lives on.” (NYT article cited earlier.)
12 Gould, S. J. (2007). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the
adaptationist program. In P. McGarr & S. Rose (Eds.), The richness of life: The essential Stephen
Jay Gould (p. 428). New York: W. W. Norton.
 CHAPTER 8

Antitheism and the Disprivileging of

Religion
One apprehension assails me here, that haply you reckon
Godless the pathway you tread which leads to the Science of Nature
As to the highroad of sin. But rather how much more often
Has that same vaunted Religion brought forth deeds sinful and godless.

— Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

YOU CAN’T WRITE A BOOK ABOUT ATHEISM without addressing the following
worthwhile dilemma: “If religion works for people, why not just leave them
alone? If it soothes them, gives them hope, and helps them function, why
challenge that—why all the hostility?”
Well, I promise my intention is not to make anyone feel bad, not even
the most radical, misguided Christians in the country. You could strap hate-
mongering, funeral-protesting, fundamentalist pastor Fred Phelps to a chair,
hook him up to some sort of brain implant device with “Feel Good” and
“Feel Bad” buttons, put me at the controls and force me to impose an
experience upon him, and I wouldn’t choose the bad option. I just couldn’t,
regardless of what he represents or what he has done.
No, I’d much rather help people feel good. Specifically, I’m hoping to
contact those folks sitting on the spirituality fence for whom religion is not
working. They are confused and distressed about spiritual and existential
issues and in need of some communion about it all. I would have loved to
have read this book when I was about twenty. I would have felt much less
alone and disoriented, knowing there is someone else out there like me
struggling with some of the same problems. So, yes, I’m actually more
interested in comforting others and connecting with them than I am in inciting
conflict. And if anyone’s faith is diminished in the process, I only hope that
it’s as good for them as it has been for me.
As part of that communion atop the spirituality fence, it’s perfectly
appropriate and natural to discuss whether religion (or even spirituality
without religion) can be toxic, which will inevitably antagonize some
readers. Besides the good religion can provide, is there also collateral
damage? Now, for a debate to be worthwhile, we have to assume that the
reward of an eternal life of bliss through faith is merely a fantasy. A real
blissful eternity would unfairly bias most people to defend religion,
regardless of how many problems it causes in this life, I have to assume.
If we resort to studying history, even Holy Bible-based religion
becomes easy to abhor. Some of the best fodder comes from the Inquisition
as, according to celebrity atheist writer Sam Harris, “there is no other
instance in which so many ordinary men and women have been so deranged
by their beliefs about God.”1 He explains that torture was officially
sanctioned by the Catholic Church as a method to interrogate alleged witches
and other heretics for several hundred years from 1215 to 1834 (that’s not a
typo; I double-checked it elsewhere). All it took to initiate an interrogation
was an accusation by your peers, of which attempts to recant would only
have resulted in them being punished along with you. The accused was
allowed to confess but the confession would not be accepted unless she
named accomplices, who were then interrogated as well. Despite the
inconceivable horror and injustice of this process, Sam suggests confession
was the easy way out, as punishment then might only be as bad as life
imprisonment. Apparently, the worst was saved for those who maintained
their innocence, as they would be subjected to torture devices such as “a
pear-shaped vise … inserted into your mouth, vagina, or anus, and forced
open until your misery admits of no possible increase.” If you were a
particularly stubborn victim, you might have your arms dislocated, your feet
roasted, or a cauldron of mice placed upside-down on your stomach until the
mice would “burrow into your belly in search of an exit.”
The men in charge of the Inquisition were not renegades; some were fan
favorites, like Saint Augustine. Of course, there was no shortage of
justification for their behavior from the Old Testament, but Sam argues that
even Jesus could be perceived as on board, as suggested by, for example,
John 15:6: “If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch,
and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are
burned.” Such verses are actually not unusual. I’d like to add, for example,
Matthew 10:34-35: “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I
did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his
father, and a daughter against her mother …”
Some defenders of religion will reflexively remark, “Well, that was all
in the past!” And this is one of the points at which we atheists get angry at
faithful people and feel so intolerant of religion in general. We’re angry
because you’ve just demonstrated what may very well be our greatest
grievance with religion: insensitivity to suffering. In order for you to
validate your religion and to maintain your faith that God is good and
invested in your safety today, you have to somehow account for the
Inquisition and other similar catastrophes of religion. No matter which
coping strategy you attempt to use, you invariably end up minimizing what
happened to those countless victims of Christ’s misguided sword.
I know what that denial feels like because I did it, too. I may not have
asserted “That was all in the past” out loud, but I definitely recall
contemplating something along those lines when I was a kid (or perhaps
struggling with is a more accurate characterization). Later, when I had
matured enough so that I couldn’t help but appreciate that the torture and
murder were real—and that they felt just as bad back then as they would to
us today—I had to adopt the more effective “The Lord works in mysterious
ways.” That is, I was forced to characterize the mayhem as a phenomenon
that was simply not for me to understand or even question. Either way, it’s all
denial. Typing this now, I can readily recall those numb feelings of emotional
defensiveness, kinda staring off into space in a daze, knowing on some level
that it really happened but just not letting myself embrace it and appreciate
the implications.
Once the defenses fall and we let go of faith, we are overcome by a
sobering clarity: Of course, a religion that ever failed so miserably must be
the product of humans, not divinity. There is no way that a god would sit back
and watch for 600 years while his highest priests tortured thousands of
innocents via the likes of anal vice until they denounced him. Something truly
holy would never have been subjected to such gross misunderstanding and
atrocious implementation in the past. It would be timeless, not a work in
progress; otherwise it reduces the billions of people who have lived before
us to some sort of experiments for our own well-being today, us living in
much better times. What a horrifically narcissistic and insensitive attitude
this would be, to disregard the past in order to soothe our own existential
fears about our own deaths, most of which will be quite pampered relative to
theirs. Again, I did it, too. And now I’m ashamed. In fact, it makes me
wonder if some of the hostility I have towards people who remain faithful is
projected, that is, I’m mad at myself for ever having been in so much denial,
too.
The truth is that we have come a long way so that religion is more
civilized than ever before. But this is not because God cares more about us
today than he did those living in the Middle Ages; it’s simply because we’re
smarter than we were back then. And, despite how far we’ve come, we’re
far from out of the woods. There’s still much more divinely inspired torture
and murder in the world today than there ever should have been, and
religious-based oppression of a less lethal nature remains quite rampant,
even in the progressive and privileged West. Overall, we are still in a state
of progress, meaning that we are actually an ongoing experiment for the
people of the future who will have even better religious lives than us, one
where there is even less murder of heretics and less oppression of slaves,
women, and homosexuals. We can all see where this is ultimately headed.
Eventually, someone’s gonna have to write a Brand New Testament that
usurps the New Testament. But it will be even shorter than the New, most of
the emphasis being on the Golden Rule—the punchline again being that
people have never needed spirituality to live the Golden Rule. They have
only needed spirituality to help pretend that they were different from animals,
that they have immortal souls.

Even if the terrorism and oppression motivated or enabled by religiosity

were to be completely eradicated, we’ll always have unjustified suffering
and innocent victims in other contexts. Just as we atheists believe that the
faithful can’t fully acknowledge the victims of religion throughout history, we
feel that they disregard the modern victims of relatively secular injustices as
well. Religiosity and the authentic appreciation of suffering are mutually
exclusive, as religions frame suffering as a necessary element of some kind
of plan. The faithless atheist sees it more clearly, raw and cruel, without
mitigation or meaning.
In God’s Problem, professor Bart Ehrman’s metaphor is exceptionally
provocative:

What would we think of an earthly father who starved two of his

children and fed only the third even though there was enough food
to go around? And what would we think of the fed child
expressing her deeply felt gratitude to her father for taking care of
her needs, when two of her siblings were dying of malnutrition
before her very eyes? 2

You can’t unread that passage.

So, yes, whenever I’m around people who are praying, whether at
dinners or any other ceremony, I don’t bow my head along with them. Today,
I look around—defiantly—because I’m not going to give thanks while my
siblings are starving before my eyes. Don’t get me wrong: I am thankful—
exceedingly thankful—for my food, but not to a God who would design things
as such. Indeed, I feel that my contact with reality helps me appreciate my
food more than a praying Christian. If the praying Christian truly appreciated
how lucky he is to have so much good food, he wouldn’t be offering thanks
for it! He’d be baffled like Bart Ehrman, and he would even feel guilty and
wonder what he has done to deserve such bounty. If he truly appreciated how
most of the world is hungry while he’s praying, he would begin to see the
obscenity of his prayer. He might even lose his appetite for a while, if he
really understood the problem, deep down.
By thanking God for our comfortable American lives of air
conditioning, grocery stores bursting at the seams with food, functioning
automobiles all our own, magical cell phones, gigantic wedding rings, and
yes, healthy children, we are—by default—validating God’s choice to
neglect the majority of the world who are deprived of these luxuries. Most of
those people don’t deserve their lot. They are victims of circumstance, born
there instead of here. Bart is absolutely right: Thankful prayers are offensive,
plain and simple.
At about this point, books on atheism often detail stories of horrible
crimes in order to jolt readers and to lay the foundation for a discussion on
how the magnitude of evil in this world can’t be reconciled with the notion of
a benevolent God in Charge of It All.
For my example of mayhem, I decided that I’d teach you about one of
the most disturbing phenomena in all of psychology, one that is rarely
discussed even in professional circles. I had merely speculated about this for
most of my own education, and wasn’t formally educated myself on the topic
until—shit, after graduate school, when I finally needed to look it up myself
because of my job. No professor during the countless psychology courses I
took between 1988 and 2006 ever delved into this. I’m not sure why, but I
have several suspicions.
Instead of explaining it myself I’m just gonna quote from a scientific
research article. The journal has a dry but descriptive title, as many do; this
one is Child Abuse & Neglect. Volume 22, number 10, published in 1998 has
an article called “Factors Associated with Sexual Behavioral Problems in
Young Sexually Abused Children.”3 This is not pornography; the point of the
journal, and article, is not for anyone’s enjoyment. Its purpose is to educate
professionals, like me, about very real phenomena, in this case, to help
identify which victims are at highest risk to abuse others, for the sake of
imposing treatment interventions and preventing further abusive acts.
In this study, researchers looked at 100 sexually abused children, aged
three to seven, in treatment centers. The authors were working in Toronto and
Calgary but only needed two centers to get their 100 subjects. In the end, they
found that two major risk factors for victims to become perpetrators
themselves include: (1) if they had been sexually aroused when they were
abused; and (2) if their perpetrators had been “sadistic.” And, sure enough,
some kids experienced both pain and pleasure when they were victimized.
The authors provide disturbing descriptions of the research that are
difficult to read, even for my relatively experienced and hardened self. This
is a blurb from what is usually the blandest part of such articles, the Methods
section, where the authors have to explain how they determined whether kids
had been aroused or treated sadistically when they were sexually abused. Put
on your serious hat:

For example, for arousal, the child either needed to disclose that
physical changes occurred in his/her body which would indicate
arousal (i.e., “Got tickly feelings in my pee-pee,” “My dinky got
hard like his”) or would actually show signs of arousal while
 disclosing or playing out sexual abuse (e.g., red face and heavy
breathing while disclosing sexual material, having an erection,
masturbating to flushing while enacting sexual abuse on dolls,
etc.). Perpetrator sadism was noted if the child disclosed how the
perpetrator “enjoyed” the child’s physical pain or discomfort or
enjoyed tricking the child into fearfulness or terror (e.g., laughing
at the child while hurting them, forcing the child to beg for the
abuse to stop while perpetrator continues laughing, etc.).

That passage is one of the most unsettling texts I have ever read. And I’ve
read a lot, as police reports are a routine part of my job.
I don’t know where to begin. All my life, ever since I was old enough
to realize that some kids are subjected to sex against their wills, I had never
imagined that it could possibly be anything like that. And apparently, that is
so common, you can research it—in peaceful and progressive modern
Canada!
I went to Carlsbad Caverns for the first time recently. Way down in that
most incredible place, my atheist friend who was with me, Wally, overheard
some woman say to her husband, “I don’t understand how someone could see
this and not believe there’s a God!” I like to imagine she was morbidly obese
and had her kid on a leash. Anyway, my reflexive, smart-ass response is that
despite how beautiful that cavern is, geologists can explain it perfectly,
without magic or anything else.
My more serious response is that, despite how beautiful that cavern is,
there are also little kids all over the world—right now—being sexually
abused in a manner that is simply unthinkable, but paradoxically manages to
turn them on to sex themselves, at the extraordinarily tender age of three.
They become what we call hypersexualized, and often go around abusing
other kids themselves, some of whom, of course, will also become
hypersexualized, and so on. Sexual abuse is here to stay; no public service
announcement is ridding us of that.
Carlsbad Lady, that’s one reason I can’t believe in God, or any other
divinity, for that matter. I see your magical caverns, but I raise you “forcing
the child to beg for the abuse to stop while perpetrator continues laughing.”
And of course it gets so much worse. At least those kids are alive. I
can’t help but think about the ones who are dead, whose final experiences on
Earth were being forced to beg for mercy, only evoking laughter from their
demonic, psychopathic killers.
Unfathomably, it can be even worse. We can find stories where victim’s
loved ones, whether during the Holocaust or a modern home invasion, have
to watch this truly unimaginable horror unfold before their own eyes before
they, too, are tortured and put to death—or perhaps worse, allowed to live.
Absolutely, unequivocally inconceivable—but it has happened, and it still
happens, and it always will. I’ve heard other war stories of pregnant, living
women having their fetuses cut from their wombs with bayonets, and stories
of SS Nazis putting born babies in bags and smashing them against brick
walls in front of their parents. I’ve lost sight of the citations, so I can’t
include those here, but it doesn’t matter. We all know that human hatred is
capable of such atrocities; we don’t even need the citations.
History is strewn with this sort of behavior, the volume of death in the
Holocaust so great only because the technology and context permitted it. Nazi
murderers were no more evil than anyone else; they just had the means to
exercise their hatred more effectively than anyone had before. Other efforts
since—including quite recently, such as in the Sudan, Rwanda, and Bosnia—
have rivaled that genocide at least in spirit, and would have gladly matched
the death count if the logistics had permitted them. That said, these more
recent endeavors have been allowed to spill much more blood than they ever
should have because the rest of the world hasn’t felt that the return on
investment has justified adequate intervention. We’re disconnected, whether
because those people are poor, black, or so far away. Whatever the reasons,
it must make it impossible for us to even fully appreciate that they are
people, because if we did we wouldn’t tolerate what happens to them.
Those victims may be foreign but the hatred, evil, and insanity are not.
Back home, the same awesome forces motivate murder all day, every day, on
our streets and in our homes, schools, and movie theaters. Our church—
God’s house—is not even safe, despite His assurance that “For where two or
three have gathered together in My name, there I am in their midst.”4
Christians will continue to defend Him, however. I can readily envision
some creepy painting, a deranged artist’s conception, of Dylan Roof shooting
up the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, with
Jesus sitting in the corner crying or perhaps escorting the deceased up some
cloudy stairway to heaven. And the vision makes me angry.
 I’ve read the various defenses that Christians provide for why God
permits such suffering in the world, and none of them are remotely satisfying.
No matter how you cut it, He is either cruel, apathetic, or incompetent.5
That is, he’s either (a) choosing to impose incomprehensible suffering; (b)
not imposing it but allowing it to happen; or (c) wants to intervene but is
unable.
Most Christians will quickly disregard option (c), which is fair, as the
notion of an incompetent god is somewhat paradoxical and defeats the
purpose of having gods at all; surely, the proposition has only been included
sarcastically. Based on my personal religious experience and training
throughout the first third of my life, my sense is that most believers subscribe
to a hybrid of schemes (b) and (a). That is, God generally employs a laissez-
faire approach to running the world, allowing Satan to tempt us and provoke
evil but intervening at select other times, whether in response to prayer or
unilaterally. In this system, God is not so cruel or apathetic. When a sinner
suffers, it’s punishment. If a believer is subjected to the exact same suffering
and survives, then it’s a test. If a believer does not survive the exact same
situation, then God actually favors her and is gathering her to His Glory. The
Power of Prayer works in a similar foolproof fashion. When our prayers are
followed by good things and we get what we want, God answers prayer.
When our prayers are followed by bad things, then our wishes were not in
His plan and we are being tested; perhaps we were even being greedy for
having asked in the first place and are now being bestowed wisdom and
strength.
Of course, some suffering and unanswered prayers will fall through the
cracks and seem to defy even this invincible scheme, such as those endured
by any given 100 Canadian child sexual abuse victims, at which point we are
forced to give up and assert that God works in mysterious ways that we are
too simple to comprehend—which is itself another test of our faith, perhaps
the ultimate test even. Indeed, the more incredible the horror is, the better
Christians we are for not doubting Him in the face of it. This maneuver is
reinforcing on two levels, as it not only helps numb ourselves to the horror,
but it also affirms our own immortality. Both aspects are soothing, and they
feed one another.
Well, any objective observer can see through the scam, if he only has
the courage to critique it. High intelligence is not necessary; absurdity on this
scale is glaring with just an open, rational mind.
 The universe is not divine. God is not good. Nothing is tending to our
prayers. Our beliefs in holiness and magic are merely coping strategies—
defense mechanisms—whose obvious and only goals are to help the living
feel better in the face of the brutality of reality.
And yes, Carlsbad Lady, your faith makes me angry. If you truly
appreciated the magnitude of suffering and evil in the world, you wouldn’t
believe, either. Your faith exists only because you are able to minimize the
evil. In fact, it is largely the reason that you can ignore it! Your faith gives
you the “strength” to wander the earth, soaking in God’s Glory while
anesthetizing you to His Negligence. You are Candide’s Cunegonde, satisfied
“that what was taking place in my father’s castle was standard practice.”
We need to stop it. As the innocent victims of torture, murder, rape, and
starvation endure their suffering, the least we can do is acknowledge the
reality of what is happening. These are not punishments or tests; they are the
natural acts of the cosmos simply unfolding as it does—heartless, mindless,
and cruel.
None of our rationalizations are helpful. It doesn’t matter if the
perpetrators are caught and executed. Capital punishment isn’t justice; it’s
vengeance, and unsatisfying at that. It’s unsatisfying because it doesn’t undo
the damage that has been inflicted, nor does it bring anyone back. It is yet
another coping strategy, of which we should be ashamed when it does seem
to work, because insofar as it soothes us we’ve equated the lives of the
psychopaths with those of their victims.
It’s commonplace during news interviews for the surviving loved ones
of victims of catastrophe to make assertions such as “I know the Lord was
with him when he passed.” However, because I do forensic psychological
evaluations for a living, I am, unfortunately, routinely able to compare the
news story with the actual police reports, and I can assure you that I know for
a fact that sometimes when we assume God’s presence, we’re simply wrong.
No, there was nothing peaceful about what happened. If there was any deity
present, it was the Devil; I’m afraid the Lord was nowhere in sight.
I have a stellar example in mind but am not going to detail it or even
provide a disguised version of it, out of respect for both the deceased and the
survivors. This is the part where I begin to feel less angry and more
sympathetic, as I couldn’t possibly blame a surviving parent, spouse, or
sibling for resorting to spirituality to comfort themselves in a situation like
this. The horror of real life can be truly inconceivable, wholly unacceptable,
forcing us to be unrealistic. This may be the ultimate reason why we have
religion in the first place. For some people sometimes, religion may be the
only viable option. I guess I have to respect that, or I’m the one being
insensitive.
While we atheists must not ridicule the defensive maneuvering of
surviving loved ones of such victims, the problem is that Americans—being
obsessed with optimism and meaning—tend to overreact to the lead and go
overboard. Our defensiveness has become a national pastime, a mass
hysteria. We watch the news and we say, somewhat superficially, “How
awful” the refugee crisis is in Syria, but we don’t really allow ourselves to
care. Before our sympathy even has a chance to gel, we’re distracted by a
stylish, noisy commercial about the newest smartphone or a news blurb on
what the celebrities wore at some posh awards ceremony last night. Come
Sunday, our preacher comforts us by reminding us once again that “The Lord
is close to the brokenhearted,” which validates our position to not get too
worked up about Syria and whatnot. After the service, we gaze at that
painting of Jesus carrying the baby lamb around his neck, and it’s
intoxicating. We’re drugged numb, brainwashed to believe that all of the pain
in the world is acceptable, if not meaningful. We are passing the test!
Every catastrophe becomes another opportunity to flaunt our optimism.
Like looking for Waldo, we’re vigilant for any sort of silver lining in the
horror. In 2011, after tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri killed over 150 people,
the internet was strewn with pictures of the cross left standing at the
otherwise leveled St. Mary’s Catholic Church there, as if that was some kind
of inspiration for hope. The irrational courage of the religious was described
succinctly by Freud, in what may have been one of his wisest sentiments:
“the secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes.”6 And so is the
secret of their insensitivity.
It’s not just the survivors of natural disasters. After every plane crash,
mass shooting, refinery explosion, or building collapse, some survivors are
literally glowing with thanks to the Lord while discussing the miracle of their
survival to a news reporter. Of course, the unspoken but glaring implication
is that the Lord chose to annihilate the victims who were right next to them.
Again, I can’t criticize the survivor. He’s delirious with trauma, and of
course doesn’t mean what he seems to be saying, that God esteems his life
more than those of the deceased, that his loved ones’ prayers for his safety
were more worthy than theirs.
 The word “hero” has become meaningless in America, as we spectators
throw it around recklessly to describe anyone who was really just in shock
and happened to survive a catastrophe, often driven by nothing more than a
traumatic daze. Those who were lucid just did what any decent normal, non-
heroic human should do. And of course this is how the heroes themselves
describe their behavior, as natural and unremarkable. The heroes are not
sensationalizing their behavior; it’s the rest of us, in an effort to cope with the
horror that we’ve just witnessed, in hopes that some similar hero will save
us if we ever end up in a similar situation.
I’m ranting. We atheist writers can’t resist it. It’s probably not only
because we’re angry at religion for minimizing the suffering in the world: We
also have more selfish concerns—specifically, we’re scared. We’re scared
because some of the people most “deranged” by the denial afforded by
religion are not merely being passive in the privacy of their homes. As during
the Inquisition, others are lawmakers and terrorists, so we feel threatened on
multiple levels. Religious people are capable of anything, no matter how
outrageous and disastrous. Part of the problem is that dying for one’s
religious cause lets him reap the benefits of that cause! Worth reiterating, “the
secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes.”
To calm and wind it down, I should clarify: I’m not questioning whether
looking at the world through Everything-Happens-for-a-Reason glasses helps
many people feel good. There’s an entire branch of psychology called
Positive Psychology that has produced volumes of research showing that
thinking and behaving positively really can improve our mood and
functioning. But, of course, just because something helps us to feel better
doesn’t necessarily make it right. Ask George Bernard Shaw: “The fact that
a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a
drunken man is happier than a sober one.”7
And of course, the exceptions don’t get much press, but they’re out
there. While recently perusing old issues of the Monitor on Psychology I
came across a news blurb, “Cancer survival not linked to a positive attitude,
study finds.”8 Reporter E. Packard summarizes a study by James Coyne,
Ph.D.: “Coyne and colleagues reported that emotional well-being in no way
predicted survival among patients with head and neck cancer.” I especially
appreciate how the article is closed: “Coyne believes it’s important to not
blame cancer patients who don’t adopt an aggressively positive spirit …
‘People have to do what’s comfortable with them, but they have to do it
without the burden of thinking they’ve got to have the right attitude to
survive.’”
What a refreshing dose of poignant and sensitive reporting—and in a
publication from the national association that represents my otherwise
Pollyannish field! This is a sad topic and this is sad news about it, but thank
you for just letting it be sad and not trying to twist the whole story into some
histrionic, Panglossian carnival about hope and optimism.
Now, I’m not suggesting that we flaunt pictures of body parts on the
news instead of those of the survivors. People really can be traumatized by
simply looking at a picture; you don’t have to be at the scene of a crime. But
we’ve distanced ourselves too much. We put too much emphasis on feeling
good.
Perhaps this is what Ernest Becker meant when he said that only by
dropping the defenses can we appreciate our real humanness. Once we shed
the comfort of spirituality, we will appreciate our mortality more deeply. As
a result, we will appreciate our losses more deeply, for what they really are.
Until then, we’re just children being sheltered.
Becker studied Freud, who believed we can’t grow up until we first
acknowledge that childishness:

True, man will then find himself in a difficult situation. He will

have to confess his utter helplessness and his insignificant part in
the working of the universe; he will have to confess that he is no
longer the centre of creation, no longer the object of the tender
care of a benevolent providence. He will be in the same position
as the child who has left the home where he was so warm and
comfortable. But, after all, is it not the destiny of childishness to
be overcome? Man cannot remain a child for ever; he must venture
at last into the hostile world.9

Religious folks fear that without faith there would be anarchy and chaos.
After all, as bad as things are across the world today, faith has gotten us this
far!
The problem with this reasoning is that we haven’t explored the
alternative much—in this hemisphere, anyway. It’s well known in atheist
circles that the happiest nations on earth are often the least religious,
including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The dynamics
behind such a correlation are certainly complicated, but evolutionary
psychologist Nigel Barber believes that the atheism-happiness effect is
mediated by economics. That is, the citizens of these nations are happy
primarily due to “a combination of national wealth and redistribution of
resources via high taxation and a well-developed welfare state.”10 In other
less alarming words, “European social democracies provide existential
security … a secure standard of living for everyone.” Italics added. The
suggestion is that once people achieve existential security through financial
stability, they’re less desperate to look for it in religion.
Meanwhile, back in the relatively religious “Greatest Country in the
World,” we pretend that we’re happy but the existential insecurity of
cutthroat capitalism running amok seems to be killing us. Americans are “less
healthy and more likely to die from disease or accidents than those in any
other affluent country … Even the best-off Americans … are sicker than their
peers in comparable countries.”11 We “have had a shorter life expectancy
than people in almost all the comparator countries and for the last three
decades the gap has been widening, particularly for women.” The United
States also leads affluent countries in teen pregnancy and STDs, as well as
overall AIDS, obesity, lung disease, alcohol/drug deaths, and homicide.
A country with those distinctions is not blessed or “under God.” That’s
a country with a lot of misguided public policy, and that is living in all sorts
of denial about it.
No, the atheistic society is not the dysfunctional one. While Nigel
Barber suggests that it’s the security of socialist leanings that fosters atheism,
I suspect atheism also fosters socialist leanings. None of the atheists I know,
if they were in charge, would ever implement or tolerate an economy that
sustains a division of wealth like that in America today. Most of us don’t
even esteem wealth personally. Being realists, we are acutely aware that
materialism is more about greed and addiction than security. Also as realists,
we are no longer able to ignore the suffering of those around us. We won’t
feel peace and security until our neighbors have them, too. That includes the
Mexicans, both those on the other side of town and those on the other side of
the border. We embrace immigration because it’s easy for us to see that we
might be immigrating, too—even illegally—if we had been born under some
of their circumstances.
 Even one of the most sensationally depressive philosophers of all time,
Arthur Schopenhauer, argued that a nihilistic view of nature could have the
paradoxical effect of binding us together:

In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had
better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence
towards one another. Nay, from this point of view, we might well
consider the proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir,
mein Herr, but my fellow-sufferer, Soci malorum, compagnon de
miseres! This may perhaps sound strange, but it is in keeping with
the facts; it puts others in a right-light; and it reminds us of that
which is after all the most necessary thing in life—the tolerance,
patience, regard, and love of neighbor, of which everyone stands
in need, and which, therefore, every man owes to his fellow.12

It’s a beautiful sentiment. Even the great Schopenhauer seems to find some
meaning in his pessimism.

People on the fence still clinging to religion often argue that there’s nothing to
lose if they’re wrong about it all. However, it seems there may not be that
much to gain, either—at least emotionally.
I hadn’t intended to write a research-laden scholarly book, but we have
to at least briefly consider some that addresses the relationship between
religiosity and emotional well-being. One of the most efficient ways to do
this is via a meta-analysis, that is, a super-study that combines as many
preexisting research studies on a topic as possible and reanalyzes the data
across them as a whole. It didn’t take me long to find one relevant for this
discussion: Smith and colleagues compiled 147 different studies that had
each already assessed the correlation between religiosity and depression,
altogether involving almost 99,000 different subjects.13 They found that when
looking at all of these studies together, the correlation between religiosity
and depression was -0.096. In the simplest of layman’s terms, this means that
religious people are less depressed than nonreligious people, on average.
However, of all the variation we might see in a population’s scores on a
depression test, religiosity only accounts for about 1% of it. Yes, that means
that 99% of the variation in our depression scores is not related to
religiosity. It’s related to other factors, like genetics—which other studies
show accounts for about 40% of the variation in depression.14 Indeed,
depression is a splendid example of a condition that results from
approximately equal contributions of both nature and nurture. But, as far as
nurture goes, religiosity is apparently only a tiny part.
That religion has the capacity to elevate mood is hardly interesting to
atheists, as we readily acknowledge that it can soothe people for non-
spiritual reasons. We’ve already explored many of these elsewhere in this
book. First and foremost, religion helps people believe in some sort of
immortality. Second, closely tied to the first, it provides a purpose when one
can otherwise not find one, that is, serving a god to earn that aforementioned
immortality. Third, religion teaches people that the universe is not as chaotic
and apathetic as it appears, but that it is instead under some sort of
meaningful control. Fourth, a religion offers its followers a sense of some of
that control (that is, via prayer). And even when prayer does not work, at
least it lends an ear when no one else will listen or if what we have to say is
too private for human consumption. Finally, regardless of whether one
attends church, religion provides a social community or culture that shares
one’s worldview, helping him to feel a part of something bigger than himself.
Contemplating these benefits (I’m sure there are more), it may seem
surprising that the research doesn’t show stronger positive effects for
religion—even given the assumption that the spirituality behind it is an
illusion!
I suspect that one critical problem can, to some degree, undermine each
of the benefits in the list: doubt. That is, many people who identify as
religious simply are not as convinced as they appear. Part of them knows
deep down that there was no meaning behind 9/11, the 2004 Indian Ocean
Tsunami, and the Sandy Hook shootings. Their defense mechanisms are not
that strong, so doubt ensues. Doubting the meaning of suffering on that scale
must be insidious, raising doubt about the meaning of less salient but more
personal catastrophes, and even the prospect of immortality, and so on. As
we explored in chapter 6, defense mechanisms only work so well. When
being defensive, we say things we want to believe, but our deepest reaches
know they’re not true, which creates a separate tension all its own.
Religiosity is probably less likely to produce its benefits when it’s
superficial and forced—which it must be at times, when reality overwhelms
it. Perhaps there’s even something more tormenting about trying to cling than
just letting go altogether. There may have been for me. I have to entertain that
clinging was at least contributing to the debilitating panic attacks I had for
five very long years, given that they went away around the same time I gave
up God.
Other large-scale, carefully designed and implemented—but
surprisingly elegant—research has shown that prayer specifically can have a
paradoxically toxic effect, at least on those receiving it following major heart
surgery.15 This study was gigantic: Sixteen authors (including MDs, RNs, and
PhDs) plus support staff studied 1800 patients at six hospitals across the
country, the entire study taking years to complete. Patients were randomly
assigned to treatment groups (receiving prayer or not) and their resulting
complications were assessed blindly (that is, by professionals unaware of
who was assigned to which group). The main result, again, not surprising to
us atheists: “Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free
recovery from CABG” (coronary artery bypass graft surgery). However—in
an obscenely cruel twist that even I don’t think is funny—people who knew
they were receiving prayers had more complications than those who were
unsure whether they were receiving prayers! In the paper, the authors don’t
offer a possible explanation for this latter finding, but Richard Dawkins says
that one of them has speculated elsewhere that perhaps those who knew they
were being prayed for became distressed because they felt some sort of
pressure, that is, akin to “performance anxiety.”16 All is not lost, however.
Other legitimate research has shown that prayer can help the person who is
praying, for example, by reducing his anger.17 Of course, religious affiliation
doesn’t matter, nor does church attendance; it’s simply the act of praying that
provides the benefit. Findings such as this suggest that prayer may be nothing
more than meditation, which is not a terrible thing, as long as you don’t
demand too much from it.
Besides doubt and its potentially deleterious effects, some people argue
that religiosity may actively stifle us in ways that could also sabotage some
of its potential benefits.
For someone writing a book with Nihilism in the title, I’ve read very
little of Nietzche. However, I have read a book about him, What Nietzche
Really Said. Scholars Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins explain that the
philosopher held that

believers exchange an active stance toward their environment for

the reactive stance of a pet or a victim. Instead of actively
engaging with their problems, they treat their lived experiences
like hieroglyphics whose real significance is decipherable only on
a different—supernatural—plane … this shift of focus amounts to
a complete falsification of our actual circumstances … For
Nietzche, this outlook is damaging to one’s ability to function and
flourish in one’s life. It obstructs one’s view of the real world,
addles one’s ability to see the real forces at work in one’s life,
and destroys one’s ability to recognize how best to address
them.18

In other words, faith—like other defense mechanisms—can rob one of her

agency. Responding to conflict by asserting “I’m gonna put it in God’s
hands” is often just an emotionally defensive maneuver to ignore the actual
problem. It turns out that the “real forces at work” may not be as mysterious
as they seem, but instead stem from the faithful person’s own bad choices or
personality/emotional dysfunction. These personal problems need to be
acknowledged and worked through, but faith provides an excuse to avoid
self-exploration and conflict resolution.
In The Nature of Existence, American multi-talent Julia Sweeney
specifically criticizes prayer in this regard, pointing out that it is not just a
cop-out, it’s a deceptive cop-out because it gives the illusion that we’re
doing something significant. Prayer is necessarily a compelling experience—
we believe, on some level, that we are communicating with God and
therefore affecting the universe! But if, in reality, prayer doesn’t work, we’ve
done nothing, or perhaps even done some damage via our complacency. Our
spiritual cultures encourage us to pray and applaud us for doing so, but they
may simply be teaching us to shun insight, agency, and growth.
For the moment, let’s just consider everyday opportunities to engage the
world actively and to mature emotionally (which can turn out to be much
more profound than “everyday” would suggest). For example, I recently had
an interpersonal conflict with a more seasoned colleague who was
effectively my supervisor at the time. Ours felt like nonsensical tension, the
type of head-butting that is commonplace in all sorts of workplace
environments. We were quietly at each other’s throats but the precise source
of the problem was not perfectly clear. In general, it just seemed unnecessary
and neurotic, on both of our accounts. It does take two to tango.
Now, if I had still been a religious person, I probably would have
conceptualized the situation as some sort of Test from Above. I definitely
would have prayed, at the very least asking God for the strength to endure my
insufferable colleague. And I probably would have found that strength,
because I’m good at being “strong” like that, as I’ve never been a
confrontational person, especially towards any semblance of authority. If I
had dared to pray for a specific solution or plan of action, I probably would
have just seen signs instructing me to do what I wanted to do, which was
nothing and I would have indeed just trudged through it. Regardless, because
the supervisory relationship was temporary, I ultimately would have
survived it and then chalked the “success” up to His Grace and whatnot. In
the event the situation had escalated and crashed and burned into a more
dramatic falling-out, then I would have seen it as God’s method to deliver me
from that evil, and I would have just accepted those new developments and
moved on, praying all the way. But I would have learned nothing, nor would I
have bettered myself.
Instead, as someone who sees no design whatsoever behind
interpersonal conflicts such as this, I knew that if I wanted the situation to
change I’d have to change it myself. Simply being strong and trudging through
it remained an option, but a less desirable one, in a secular life. Somehow,
the prospect of taking charge became irresistible, despite how frightening it
was for me. Finally, one day as we were winding down a routine
consultation, he asked me (a bit stuffily and impatiently, as usual), “Is there
anything else we need to cover?”
I was exceedingly nervous but responded, “Yes, actually there’s
something somewhat unrelated I need to talk about.” After breaking the ice, I
felt more confident than anticipated, and it all came out with uncanny
coherence: “I’ve been feeling some sort of tension between us, and it’s really
been getting to me lately. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but I just want
to know what I can do to help make it go away.”
He kinda froze for a moment, making it clear that he knew exactly what
I was talking about. Then, he snapped out of it and rambled a bit; I honestly
don’t recall what he said in response, except that it was somewhat vacuous,
just a cordial filler for the uncomfortable empty space. But the content didn’t
matter: The problem was solved simply by putting it on the table in a non-
confrontational way (“disarming” was the word one of my therapy
supervisors used to use that I have since adopted myself). From that moment
onward, our relationship has felt transformed for the best. We even have
some sort of bond now, having had that ridiculous, toxic experience together
—and having addressed it, just a little bit, but directly.
I’m quite sure that this panned out in a much more productive and
substantial manner than if I had taken the prayer route. Without the crutch of
prayer, I was forced to examine myself and see how I was contributing to the
problem (by being passive aggressive). I had to swallow my pride and take a
risk that was very outside my normal repertoire of behaviors. I had to utilize
an approach that I didn’t learn from the Bible, but one that I learned from my
secular education. As a result, I ended up connecting with someone in a way
that was wholly unexpected. Plus, I grew because I learned that I have the
capacity to make peace, all on my own. I don’t have to endure interpersonal
conflict; I can work through it. If my attempt fails even if I address it
appropriately as such, well, I’ve still learned a lot and made progress. I’ve
learned that the other person is not emotionally mature enough to truly
negotiate, and now I realize (no longer assume!) that this may be a situation
that simply must be endured. But at least I can now do so in relative peace,
knowing that I’ve done what I could and the problem’s not about me, it’s
about the other person. Now I can move on and nurture other relationships
with people who can negotiate.
Certainly, there is a time and place for surrender. Sometimes, putting
our suffering in God’s hands, whether we believe in Him or not, may be the
only real choice we have. Sometimes, conflict and suffering are wholly
inevitable and the only dignified way to proceed is with acceptance. The
tricky part is tapping “the wisdom to know the difference” between suffering
that is truly out of our control and suffering that we are indulging—if not
fostering.19 As a psychologist who is finally starting to feel somewhat
seasoned, I agree with Nietzche and Julia Sweeney that religion (if not
spirituality in general) can have the paradoxical effect of lending us to
passivity and, as a result, stagnation and frustration. We’ll continue to get by,
sure, but we may be more empty and conflicted than we advertise.
 When the problem at hand is a childish power struggle with our
supervisors, we (and our supervisors) may be the only victims of prayer. But
sometimes the repercussions are much more significant, such as in Julia’s
example of praying for the hungry. Here, it’s no longer a private problem:
Complacency becomes a global issue, with potentially catastrophic effects.
Obviously, lots of people have been praying to end hunger in Africa for an
ample amount of time, but not enough of those prayers have been answered.
The hungry don’t need prayer; they need palpable actions, such as donations,
volunteers, and global public policy development. Sure, we can still pray,
but we need to do more. We need to see God’s signs telling us to act.
Harvard humanist chaplain Greg Epstein explains that the issue reaches
far beyond hungry Africa and even has consequences for obese America. In a
call to the non-religious population to step up to the plate and address global
concerns (such as natural resources, war, and economy), Greg quotes his
former professor, theologian Gordon Kaufman: “This [ecological crisis] is a
different kind of issue than Christians (or any other humans) have ever faced,
and continuing to worship a God thought of as the omnipotent savior from all
the evils of life may even impair our ability to see clearly its depths and
significance …”20 I’m hearing the words of Nietzche, applied not to the
individual but to the world at large, and now with cosmic repercussions. To
put it simply, if we rely on God to save the earth, the earth is doomed. (I’m
gonna leave it at that and not start ranting again.)

In the documentary The God Who Wasn’t There, author Richard Carrier
shares an enlightening insight: He explains that he couldn’t indulge the
wonders of Heaven if he were to make the cut because it would be
unbearable to know that countless others are suffering in Hell—including
people he had known, and maybe even loved.21 Of course, we couldn’t
possibly be so childish to assume that everyone we have loved could have
done everything so right as to get into Heaven. Knowing, sharing your life
with—even loving—a Christian is not sufficient. The deceased has to
believe.
 I, David Landers, am obviously going to Hell, but most of my family
and many of my friends, who I’m quite sure love me, will be elsewhere. Oh,
man; why couldn’t I have stopped asking questions and just let it be? It’s
actually tragic that I didn’t die that night when I overdosed on cocaine,
nineteen years old, still believing in God. How will my loved ones feel in
the Heavens now, while I’m in hell burning, lamenting, and gnashing my teeth
in pain and regret? Will they feel all chummy with God and Jesus, laid back
up there, sippin’ on gin?
Apparently, yes: “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth:
and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.”22 Even before
the Bible told me so, my mother had. One of my most vivid childhood
memories is of asking my mother whether our recently deceased dogs, Tuffy
and Caesar, would be in Heaven. The answer was an unambiguous “no.”
That’s right: We never entertained the notion of Doggie Heaven in the
Landers home. Instead, I was taught that once in People Heaven, we simply
won’t be concerned about earthly matters, events and objects from our past
lives.
I remember being puzzled by this as a kid. I found it somewhat
reassuring, but somewhat unsettling at the same time. I loved my dogs, and
the thought of not caring about them anymore because of some ill-defined
spiritual transformation was not very palatable. I felt like I was being told, in
a backhanded way, that I was overly attached to our pets—and to anything
else on Earth that I anticipated missing upon its destruction. Today, I think
this is a terrible lesson for children (and adults, too, for that matter). Talk
about unpardonable sins: to disregard our existence—the one that we know
is real and to which we have access right now—for one that I’m convinced is
fantasy.
Freud again:

Of what use to him is the illusion of a kingdom on the moon,

whose revenues have never yet been seen by anyone? As an honest
crofter on this earth he will know how to cultivate his plot in a
way that will support him. Thus by withdrawing his expectations
from the other world and concentrating all his liberating energies
on this earthly life he will probably attain to a state of things in
 which life will be tolerable for all and no one will be oppressed
by culture any more.23

I suspect that most of my Christian friends and family don’t really believe,
deep-down, that I’m gonna be a wailing tooth-gnasher. The Bible affords an
easy out, one that I recall resorting to at times when I was Christian, the most
famous out of them all, John 3:16. All that other non-John 3:16 crap about
coveting, women speaking in church, and camels going through needles
doesn’t really matter, when push comes to shove, because it says very clearly
that we only have to believe in Him to be saved. Besides helping us to not
fret over our own sinful behavior, John 3:16 lets us fantasize about how our
non-Christian loved ones might have come over to our side at the last
moment. I’ve witnessed this before, in real-life, unfolding in real-time: the
Christian survivors of devout atheists fantasizing aloud that so-and-so must
have seen the light at the very end, the Moment of Truth. It’s so easy. Maybe
even Christopher Hitchens saw the light at his End—he did make that
suggestion about starting to see things differently once he started facing
cancer! All one has to do is believe. It doesn’t matter for how long, as long
as it’s sincere. Praise Him.
Continuing to listen to Richard Carrier, I had a realization, a bit of an
epiphany: If I do change my ways and make it to Heaven and somehow
become aware that others are dying forever in Hell, I’d try to be like Jesus! I
would approach God and request a deal: “Father, if I go down to earth and
die for them, would you stop being so hard on the unforgiven? Give them
even another chance … or perhaps let’s just make hell a little less hellish. It
just seems like too much.” Yes, I would give my life for the suffering of the
sinners, just like Jesus did! And I’m not bragging; wouldn’t we all do the
same?
Of course, I would need a guarantee that I would be resurrected after a
few days; otherwise, the deal’s off. And no funny stuff, God—don’t you dare
leave me dead! That must have been a concern for Jesus, that God might
betray him and leave him dead for a lot longer, like millennia instead of three
days—or what if he didn’t bring him back at all! Can you imagine? Then God
could go back to turning people into salt. Now that would have been a real
sacrifice: giving His life without the prospect of resurrection.
Now, one way in which I wouldn’t be like Jesus, though, is to insist that
you believe in me—in the absence of any legitimate evidence—to be saved.
That would be narcissistic; what kind of deity would glorify one of the most
detestable of human traits?
No, for me, one’s access to eternity would be weighed much more
heavily on, for example, how good she was to other people; I’d be relatively
forgiving about lapses of faith. To create a mind that’s curious, skeptical, and
logical—then condemn it for working correctly—would be absurd. No, I
wouldn’t be like God; I wouldn’t be “a terrible character” who is
“obsessed” with worship and punishment.24 I would actually be merciful and
loving. I’m not even sure if Hell would be necessary. Limbo would be
sufficient, at worst.
This is why my greatest concern about dying is not Hell. I’m too
confident there is no such place. If there does turn out to be a transcendental
spiritual entity of any sort, of course it wouldn’t be so ridiculous. My biggest
fear is that there is no transcendence at all. Just carbon, dopamine, physics,
and chemistry. Stardust, I’m told.

1 Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith (p. 79). New York: W. W. Norton. The rest of Sam’s discussion
cited here comes from chapter 3 of the same book, titled “In the shadow of God.”
2 Ehrman, B. D. (2008). God’s problem (p. 129). New York: Harper One.
3 Hall, D. K., Mathews, F., & Pearce, J. (1998). Factors associated with sexual behavioral problems in
young sexually abused children. Child Abuse & Neglect, 22, 1045-1063.
4 Matthew 18:20.
5 Different versions of the sentiment have been expressed by many, from Epicurus to Woody Allen.
6 Freud, S. (2011). The future of an illusion (W. D. Robson-Scott, Trans.; p. 52). Mansfield Centre,
CT: Martino. (Original work published 1927).
7 Shaw, B. (1952). Preface on the prospects of Christianity. In Saint Joan; Major Barbara;
Androcles and the lion (p. 418). New York: Modern Library.
8 Packard, E. (2008, January). Cancer survival not linked to a positive attitude, study finds. Monitor on
Psychology, 39(1), 14.
9 The Future of an Illusion, p. 85-86.
10 Barber, N. (2011, February 17). Does religion make people happier? Are atheists actually happier?
[Web blog post “The human beast” for Psychology Today]. Retrieved from
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201102/does-religion-make-people-happier
11 Boseley, S. (2013, January 10). Americans ‘are sicker and die younger’ than people in other wealthy
nations. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/10/americans-
sicker-die-younger
12 Schopenhauer, A. (2008). On the sufferings of the world. In E. D. Klemke & S. M. Cahn (Eds.),
The meaning of life: A reader. (3rd ed., p. 53-54). New York: Oxford University Press.
13 Smith, T. B., McCullough, M. E., & Poll, J. (2003). Religiousness and depression: Evidence for a
main effect and the moderating influence of stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 614-
636.
14 American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders
(5th ed., p. 166). Washington DC: Author.
15 Benson, H. et al. (2006). Study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer (STEP) in cardiac
bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory
prayer. American Heart Journal, 151, p. 934-942.
16 The God Delusion, p. 63.
17 Bremner, R. H., Koole, S. L., & Bushman, B. J. (2011). “Pray for those who mistreat you”: Effects
of prayer on anger and aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 830-837.
18 Solomon, R. C. & Higgins, K. M. (2000). What Nietzsche really said (p. 88). New York: Schocken
Books.
19 Quote from the “Serenity Prayer,” popularly attributed to American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (b.
1892). However, there’s controversy regarding to what degree Niebuhr’s version was original, some
attributions of authorship apparently going all the way back to Aristotle; see, e.g., Goodstein, L. (2008,
July 11). Serenity prayer stirs up doubt: Who wrote it? The New York Times. Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/11prayer.html
20 Epstein, G. M. (2009). Good without God (p. 148). New York: William Morrow.
21 Flemming, B., Jackson, A. (Producers), & Flemming, B. (Director). (2005). The god who wasn’t
there [Documentary film]. US: Beyond Belief Media.
22 Isaiah 65:17.
23 The Future of an Illusion, pp. 86-87.
24 Physicist Stephen Weinberg in: Denton, R. (Producer & Director). (2004). The atheism tapes
(Steven Weinberg episode). [Television documentary miniseries]. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation.
 CHAPTER 9

The Meaning—er, I Mean Sanctity of

Life
He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their
backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life
would become meaningless. “Do you want my life to be meaningless?” he
shouted … from across the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face
and was screaming irrationally, “I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive you
your sins. How can you not believe that he suffered for you?”

— Albert Camus, The Stranger

AGNOSTIC THEISM—the doctrine that there is some sort of god but its nature is
unknowable—seems to be replacing more dogmatic theisms these days,
presumably due to the natural intellectual maturation of the masses,
facilitated by ready access to eye-opening education through cable television
and the internet. The proclamations of the agnostic theists are becoming
somewhat cliché: “I believe that there is a god, but not the God in the
Bible!”; “I’m spiritual but not religious!”; or “I just believe there’s a cosmic
energy that binds us.”
In conversation, we often announce our spiritual-but-not-religious
stance with a sense of pride and conviction—almost glee at times—as if
we’ve figured out what the Christians have missed: the supernatural, some
sort of eternal existence, and a spiritual life without the irrationality and
oppression of the Bible.
But somewhat unsettling to me—and I am speaking from experience,
having been very spiritual but not religious myself in the past—that sense of
pride and conviction also has a dramatic, defensive feel to it, eerily
reminiscent to that of a Christian speaking at a funeral about how the
deceased is now with angels and whatnot. Certainly, the defensiveness stems
from different versions of the same wishful thinking, that we are more than
the Big Bang and evolution—but part of us, somewhere deep down—
suspects it’s not true. The agnostic theist has the same fears and needs as the
Christian, but his intellect and education have whittled away the stupid stuff.
But, just like the Christian, he still can’t face the prospect of absolute
mortality. So, he clings to whatever hope his modern intellect can possibly
endure. His intellect has corralled him into a corner, forcing him to make a
claim to immortality that is difficult to discount, even by modern standards,
because it’s not really clear what his claim even says.
“Dr. Landers, why not leave these people alone?”
Because I believe it’s critical to acknowledge that trading in God for
some more ambiguous Energy that Binds Us doesn’t solve many of the
fundamental problems of Christianity. Most relevant for my book, it does
nothing to address the magnitude of our suffering, the likes of “forcing the
child to beg for the abuse to stop while perpetrator continues laughing.”
Subscribing to the Energy that Binds Us merely shifts responsibility from
God/Jesus and places it elsewhere. If Bible God is not real but the Energy is,
well, the Energy is now the one who is cruel, apathetic, or incompetent.
Whatever’s in charge, its approach to running the universe is wholly
unacceptable, and our attempts to respect and defend it are insensitive and
offensive. As far as I’m concerned, fuck you, too, Energy that Binds Us! Only
when we regard Nothing as in charge can we truly be in touch with reality,
and therefore fully authentic and respectful of existence.
It’s been challenging to find people who seriously entertain a universe
wholly devoid of transcendence. There seems to be a bit of a belief gradient
even among atheists, some engaging in what almost feels like some sort of
camouflaged spirituality. And it’s not just laypeople. Towards the end of the
highly recommended and otherwise sound The End of Faith, Sam Harris—
one of the “Four Horsemen of the Atheistic Apocalypse”—argues that

the truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.
While there is much to be said against a naive conception of a soul
that is independent of a brain, the place of consciousness in the
natural world is very much an open question. The idea that brains
produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among
scientists at present … Consciousness may be a much more
 rudimentary phenomenon than are living creatures and their
brains.1

That passage literally startled me; I had to re-read it several times to make
sure I was consuming it correctly! But yes, I feel that Sam is committing a
leap of faith that is not qualitatively different than that of the agnostic theist,
or even Christian: That is, just because I don’t have a soul doesn’t mean that
my consciousness is necessarily going to die. Such notions are simply the
atheist’s Heaven, motivated by the exact same Beckerarian fear of mortality
that feeds formal religion, different only in that the behavior is more
sustainable in a more educated, skeptical mind.
I don’t enjoy singling anyone out, especially Sam, whom I regard as an
ally. He’s obviously intelligent and he seems really friendly, if not sweet, at
least for a famous atheist writer. Heck, he’s kinda handsome. But, he goes on
to defend his notion of a non-biological consciousness by asserting “And
there appears to be no obvious way of ruling out such a thesis
experimentally.” Italics added.
This is the mantra of the faithful, a violation of the most fundamental
tenet of science and logic—precisely what you had just spent much of the rest
of your great book criticizing! The tenet is that we can’t make a claim that
cannot be tested, then imply that the burden of proof lies on our opponent’s
side. My point: Until we have good evidence that consciousness continues
after death, logically we have to assume, or at least be prepared for the
possibility, that it doesn’t. And we don’t have good evidence that it does. I
don’t think we have any evidence at all, the closest thing being those
ridiculous ghost shows on the otherwise awesome Discovery Channel. So,
just like with Jesus, we have to resort to hope and faith.
One more jab and I’ll leave Sam alone. Two paragraphs after asserting
that there’s no way to rule-out a non-biological explanation for
consciousness, he discusses the exercise of conducting experiments on
meditation and prayer and so on to help better understand consciousness.
Sam then asserts “Such an enterprise becomes irrational only when people
begin making claims about the world that cannot be supported by empirical
evidence.” Again, I have no desire to embarrass or humiliate anyone, but I
was forced to discuss this in detail because it so exquisitely illustrates how
even the most intelligent, educated, and open-minded people on Earth can
also suspend their reason to defend against the fear of annihilation and
nihilism.
Sam’s in good company. Even Richard Dawkins confuses me in The
God Delusion when he argues that his “Darwinism”—which I had assumed
was the purist of evolutionary accounts of existence—should not be
associated with nihilism.2 I find the assertion confusing because I don’t see
how Darwinism can’t be associated with nihilism! Mustn’t the purist
evolutionary account necessarily be nihilistic, at least to a degree?
Granted, the word nihilism has myriad connotations; it’s not clear how
Richard’s using the term. (I tried to telephone him for clarification, but his
secretary said he was out on some sort of hippie love-in with Sam Harris,
sacrificing grain to the moon or something.) He seems to be primarily arguing
that a world devoid of spirituality does not have to be a world devoid of joy
—a point with which I wholeheartedly agree. However, at one point he
suggests that he, too, believes in some sort of transcendence.
Richard shares a letter of protest sent to him by some doctor who
writes with a “tormented” tone (indeed, uncannily similar to the judge I’ve
quoted above from Camus’s The Stranger). I don’t need to reproduce the
doctor’s letter in its entirety here, as I’m more interested in Richard’s
response to it. Basically, the doctor had attacked Richard’s Darwinistic
position as unacceptable because it destroys hope and must therefore lead to
distress and destruction. Richard responds, defending himself as not
nihilistic, at one point by stating that the doctor is confused when he accuses
Darwinism of “teaching that we … are annihilated when we die.” Richard
never elaborates what he himself believes happens when we die, but the
clear implication is that it’s something distinguished from annihilation. Now,
I’ve seen enough of Richard’s work to convince me that he doesn’t believe in
an afterlife of any sort, so I have to assume that he’s referring to how we can
survive through our good works and memories of us and such.
When I consider the permanence of my best works and fondest
memories, I reflexively feel somewhat assured and warm inside—but only
fleetingly. The comfort feels somewhat superficial and dramatic, and
ultimately gives way to nagging feelings that I am—once again—being
emotionally defensive against a harsher reality. It feels like I’m making a
last-ditch effort for some semblance of immortality, all other attempts up to
this point having failed: God, god, The Energy that Binds Us, and Sam
Harris’s disembodied consciousness-thing.
 When I scrutinize the situation as openly and as honestly as I can, I end
up finding little solace through my legacy. So sadly, even those more
meaningful impressions that we do make on others will not survive for very
long, in the grand scheme of things. I personally don’t feel that I have a rich
library of memories of most of my own grandparents, and I have literally no
memories whatsoever of their parents. The people of two to three
generations prior are well down the road to total annihilation. Critics will
cite the gifted and talented people throughout history who have been able to
change the world in a measurable way, but of course their numbers are
infinitesimal relative to the rest of us, and even they’ve only changed the
world; they haven’t saved it, or themselves, for that matter. And of course,
we have to acknowledge that there will be no memories of any sort
eventually: Even if the human race does not prematurely destroy itself
through war, overpopulation, or other ecological catastrophe, the earth will
eventually be devoured by the cosmos. It’s a matter of time before all
evidence that humans ever existed is gone.
These thoughts are sad and quite uncomfortable; I honestly don’t enjoy
thinking about them myself. Part of me wants to exclude them from my book,
but I can’t, because this is what my book is about. Indeed, in my book about
atheism, I am forced to assert that I actually agree, begrudgingly, that
“Darwinism … is inherently nihilistic … and [it means that we] are
annihilated when we die” (or shortly thereafter).
What happens if we take this plunge? It’s hard to tell; most of us are so
afraid that we’ll be overwhelmed with sadness and despair that we avoid
even entertaining such views as viable perspectives at all. We fear that we’ll
either spiral into a deep depression or lose control and run amok in the
streets, raping and pillaging to make the best of what time we have left, since
nothing really matters.
On the contrary, entertaining the notion can be profoundly edifying and
liberating. Sure, it will be dark and depressing at times—as it should be—
but the dark parts don’t have to consume us. The truth may even enrich our
lives in ways that the fantasies cannot.
Just as commonly as Candide is cited in books about atheism, Camus’s The
Myth of Sisyphus is often referenced in essays on the meaning of life. As a
tribute, I’m going to cite Jeffery Olen’s discussion, as he wrote the first
philosophy textbook I ever picked up, Persons and Their World.3
Unfortunately, I didn’t read the final chapter from whence this came until
many years had passed after I first bought the book in community college.
Recall that Sisyphus was the crafty Greek king who tricked the gods
into releasing him from Greek hell, for which he was subsequently punished
by having to roll a giant stone up a mountain for eternity, as each time he
reached the summit, the stone would roll down the other side. Jeffery
explains that Camus likened the human condition to the myth because, in the
grand scheme of things, “our actions here on earth are as futile and pointless
as the eternal task assigned to Sisyphus.” He elaborates that Camus believed
that “A world without God is a world without hope—for either an afterlife
or a life in this world with ultimate meaning.” If this most nihilistic
assessment of reality is accurate, would life even be worth living?
Jeffery believes that Camus would say that it would:

Since experiences are all we have, let us have as many as we can.

Let us also live them heroically … without any hope or regret,
without any illusions about their ultimate significance. Let us live
them with the sense that we, and not any God, are the masters of
our fate, and let us live them in revolt against false answers to the
problem of life … That Sisyphus is an absurd hero to Camus is not
surprising. What is surprising is this. Camus imagines Sisyphus
happy as he walks down the mountain to begin pushing the rock
back up. Why? Because he has made his own fate. And because he
can scorn the gods and his own situation. And because he can
continue to experience all that is around him. And because he can
go on without hope and regret. In short, because he fully
understands his situation yet goes on.

So there it is.
For the first time in my life while studying and contemplating purported
venues to a meaningful existence—from Christianity’s God to our own
legacies—I finally don’t feel the nagging tugs of emotional defensiveness. I
finally have something I can sink my teeth into and abide by without doubt, à
la cogito ergo sum.
Life is not about faith or obsessing about the future, whether with hope
or anxiety. It’s about simply existing, with courage, honesty, and
authenticity. These philosophers seem to believe that “What is the meaning
of life?” is a silly question. There is no objective meaning to, no extrinsic
purpose of, and no legitimate transcendence from the human condition. The
most meaningful experience starts with facing this meaninglessness
courageously!
I may not even need dreams to get by. I may not even have to aspire for
a legacy at all. Perhaps if I live moments heroically, in the here and now, the
legacy will take care of itself. And if it doesn’t, perhaps my life is still
valuable enough. I don’t even have to be particularly productive, as long as
I’m not destructive. Sure, I can still have aspirations if I want, but I shouldn’t
give them so much credit. My aspirations are not me, and they don’t make my
life any more worthwhile than my life without them. And they sure as heck
aren’t going to make me immortal.
Now, as much as I appreciate Camus’s Sisyphean metaphor, I must
dissent on one point. I’m reluctant to go as far as calling Sisyphus “happy”;
I’m leaning more towards resolved. Indeed, it was apparently Sisyphus’s
passion for life on Earth that got him into this predicament in the first place;
he must be longing for Earth while trudging up and down his hellish
mountain. Sure, defiance (in lieu of hope?) is giving him strength, but I don’t
think there’s any reason for him to feel “happy.” I can’t help but wonder if
Camus himself was being overly optimistic in his assessment of Sisyphus’s
emotional state, perhaps in an effort to soothe himself! That’s right: We
should entertain whether Albert Camus was being emotionally defensive
when he said, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”4
In any event, Camus’s contemporary, Bertrand Russell, seems to reflect
his more general sentiment, as do so many atheist writers:

In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of

outside forces; but in thought … we are free, free from our fellow
men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently
crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.5
Italics added. It’s a beautiful perspective, paradoxically contrasted to the
spiritual view. Instead of our earthly life being a “necessary evil” to trudge
through while we await heaven, the tables are turned. When there is no
hereafter, it’s our consciousness of this life that is so magnificent and
precious. As long as I’m not dead, I’m alive. This is the mantra of the
faithless: The miracle is happening right now, and you’re gonna miss it if you
don’t slow down and stop fantasizing about the future.
Russell adds that hostility towards our fate is not an optimal stance, as
some have accused Camus of harboring (for example, note Jeffery’s use of
the words “revolt” and “scorn” above when discussing Sisyphus’s
motivations):

But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be

occupied with an evil world … [In contrast,] the Stoic freedom in
which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires
but not of our thoughts … from the freedom of our thoughts springs
the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by
which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the
vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to
thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus
freedom only comes to those who no longer ask of life that it shall
yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the
mutations of time.6

When Russell talks about subduing our “desires,” he clearly is not referring
to subduing our passions; he’s talking about subduing our desperate wants,
such as the objects of our superficial and unfulfilling materialism.
These attitudes of Camus and Russell illustrate an unexpected outcome
of converting to atheism, and even to nihilism. We learn that hope is not
necessary to proceed, as long as we have some courage. Now that our vision
is no longer clouded by defenses, we see the truth more clearly: Hope does
often disappoint, regardless of what the Bible says. No, we don’t stop
experiencing hopes altogether, just the irrational ones. We can embrace harsh
assessments of reality and the human condition and keep moving forward
nonetheless. Not only that, we learn to appreciate existence in its own right.
We find every moment of life more precious than before, because
“experiences are all we have” now. We lose our attraction to materialism
and rat-racing, because we can now perceive them for what they are, clingy
acts of desperation to avoid these thoughts—these nihilistic thoughts that
won’t kill us after all—and which may actually enrich us, to our amazement.
The simplicity of this approach is wonderful. It’s accessible to
everyone and takes little effort, just realization. Realization that you are a
miracle, a conscious being who is able to witness, experience, and consume
the universe, so much of which will never even be perceived by a sentient
being. You don’t really have to do anything else other than indulge that
privilege, and just be; the one caveat being that you shouldn’t destroy. The
rat race for meaning ends here.
I remember rationalizing when I was younger, still very immersed in
Christianity but starting to doubt, that believing in God and following him
was less risky than rejecting Him, regardless of whether he existed or not. If
he was real, then of course I’d earn eternal life, which was indeed the plan
that I felt was unfolding at the time. If—just for conversation’s sake—I had
been deceived and he wasn’t real, then I’d still have led a wholesome life,
and nothing would be lost. But I just don’t see it like this anymore, as there is
something to lose by believing in God when he isn’t real: The deepest
appreciation for life and existence that can only come with a non-defensive
acknowledgment of its transience.

Besides acknowledging how life becomes more precious in general when it

is no longer eternal, various philosophers have noted that the finitude of our
lives has no bearing on the value of the specific things we do each day, both
big and little. American philosopher Thomas Nagel:

First, life does not consist of a sequence of activities each of

which has as its purpose some later member of the sequence.
Chains of justification come repeatedly to an end within life, and
whether the process as a whole can be justified has no bearing on
the finality of these end-points. No further justification is needed
to make it reasonable to take aspirin for a headache, attend an
 exhibit of the work of a painter one admires, or stop a child from
putting his hand on a hot stove. No larger context or further
purpose is needed to prevent these acts from being pointless.7

Similarly, in a provocative blog entitled “Death and the Meaning of Life,” a

Keith Augustine cites the value of other finite tasks, such as working on
political campaigns to having relationships with others to raising a child.8 I
know few parents who seem to believe that their experience of having raised
a child is somehow less meaningful for them because the process had to
effectively end.
We could go on forever, as virtually everything we do that makes up our
human lives is temporary, regardless of whether the lives they constitute are
eternal. Some more of my favorites are eating meals, hiking, going to school,
working, visiting friends and family, vacationing … Transience is the nature
of all human experience, and all non-human experience as well. Even the
cosmos will die, eventually.
For a brief aside, Keith specifies an interesting incongruity: “If human
beings were naturally immortal—that is, if there was no such thing as death
—there would still be a question about whether or not lives had meaning.” I
agree, but I suspect that people would not be so obsessed with the question,
and many would not be asking it at all. The question would not be so
emotionally charged, that’s for sure. We might be much less contemplative
overall if there was no more death. It makes us wonder what exactly do
people mean when they ask, “What is the meaning of life?” It seems that
some may really mean something more like, “Why even continue living,
knowing that I can’t live forever?” Perhaps we’re expressing a fear more
than asking a question.
Well, if you subscribe to a religion, you don’t have to ask the question,
because not only do you believe in immortality but you are prescribed a
meaning to your life: serving your god. For the religious, it should be
enlightening to consider the scenario in which your religion was real but the
immortality was not: Would you still care about serving god? Probably not so
much, to put it lightly. It’s because worship and religion are less about
serving God and more about earning eternal life. I suspect that very few
people really want to serve a god. Most are just after the eternal life part.
 I’m closing this section with lovable scholar of religion and myth
Joseph Campbell:

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I
don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what
we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life
experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances
with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel
the rapture of being alive … this is it … this point now is the
heavenly moment.9

In Existential Psychotherapy, Irvin Yalom outlines various ways in which

even us secular folk can experience “meaning” in our lives, or, as I prefer,
value. The first of two that I’d like to share is the hedonistic solution. No,
he’s not suggesting that we run amok in the streets masturbating, shoveling
down pizza, and looting electronics stores. Instead, he quotes a college
student who was asked to submit his obituary as an assignment for a
philosophy course:

Here I lie, found no meaning, but life was continuously

astonishing.10

Very well put, kid! I would have given you an A+. Irvin elaborates:

The purpose of life is, in this view, simply to live fully, to retain
one’s sense of astonishment at the miracle of life, to plunge
oneself into the natural rhythm of life, to search for pleasure in the
deepest possible sense … On this one point most Western
theological and atheistic existential systems agree: it is good and
right to immerse oneself in the stream of life.11
When Irvin Yalom (or anyone else) talks about living “fully” and immersing
oneself in “the natural rhythm of life,” we smile and nod but I’m not sure that
we’re always aware to what we’re agreeing. Many people overestimate
what needs to be done, as they assume that immersion involves frenetic or
sensational activity, like traveling the world or skydiving. Sure, these may
have their merits, but we don’t have to set our sights so high. In fact, we
might be missing the point when we do! If we truly appreciated the more
fundamental aspects of living, we probably wouldn’t be so driven to travel
or skydive and such. We wouldn’t be so desperate to do those things, that’s
for sure.
Instead, we’re talking about appreciating the mere act of existing.
Whenever we can do this, boredom becomes obsolete, as the most
fundamental activities become worthy of our time and attention. Taking a
walk. Marveling at nature: trees, birds, stars, your own consciousness. The
simple fact that we are here at all, along with oceans, comets, Facebook,
government conspiracies, and gridlock.
Once we learn to appreciate existence in its own right, so much else
begins to seem trivial and superfluous, things like shopping, fancy cars, and
even fashion and winning arguments. Other things become much more
relevant and rewarding, things like bicycling, charity, ecology, and
barbecuing with friends for football games. Overall, life simply becomes
more precious, even more so than conceptualized in religious schemes.
Although there is no objective meaning to life, its value is immeasurable.
Paradoxical to some, evolution may provide some guidance on how to
live fully and immerse oneself into the natural rhythm of life. Natural
selection has endowed us with fundamental drives and needs necessary for
survival. Once we appreciate how non-trivial this process has been, we can
find all the “meaning” we need in indulging them.
First, it’s telling to consider that our evolutionary ancestors were
probably not preoccupied with having a meaningful, enriching, or exciting
life like so many of us are today. They probably didn’t have the time to
obsess over such matters; instead, their time and mental energies were
necessarily focused on activities directly related to survival, such as finding
food, caring for children, and ensuring shelter. When they did have
downtime, they weren’t being barraged with commercials advertising how
much better off the rest of the world was, so they were never lured into rat-
racing. Our evolutionary ancestors were living on a much more level and
symbiotic playing field than we find ourselves today.
But what could be more fulfilling and rewarding than a life devoted to
survival? Ironically, it seems that our modern craving to find a meaningful
life is a bit of a function of—well, having a life that is already fulfilled!
Again, I don’t mind humbling myself to illustrate: I’m quite sure I wouldn’t
be so obsessed with writing this book if I was hungry and wondering where I
was going to sleep tonight. I’m writing because I do have a roof and food in
the fridge, and therefore a lot of time on my hands, which makes me restless.
In fact, I have so much time on my hands that I spend too much time thinking.
And when I think too much, I sometimes feel scared or empty or small. So,
I’m writing—and doing so many other things—to feel full and significant.
All is not lost. We don’t have to force ourselves into poverty or
abandon projects like book writing and such. But the more we can resonate
with our evolutionarily endowed needs, the more we can take some of the
pressure off and ease the desperation.
Assuming our basic needs for food and shelter are met, we can reach
the next level of fulfillment through social interaction and belonging.
Evolution honed humans as social creatures: We were simply more fit to
survive together versus alone. Today, however, our world is so luxurious that
we no longer need others to survive so, for one reason or another, some of us
gravitate to solitude—and this is our undoing; this is why we feel so empty.
For many who do engage the company of others, they just don’t appreciate
the significance and magnitude of what is transpiring: that they are in the
process of surviving. The irony is that when we’re sitting around with our
friends conversing about the meaning of life, maybe even feeling frustrated
and unsettled because we can’t agree upon a satisfying answer, the meaning
of life is unfolding right there at that moment! If your stomach is full and y’all
have a safe place to sleep later, and this person who you’re with cares
enough about you to pay attention to you and help you when you need it, you
have arrived. It’s happening. You are there, living a full life. Demanding
much more is being greedy, and actually spoils the beautiful simplicity that’s
literally right in front of our stupid faces. I like to imagine this is what
Voltaire meant in the last line of Candide by (spoiler alert!): “Now, let’s tend
to our gardens.” Let’s just live, and survive, and do what we need to do to
eat. It will work best if we work together, and depend on one another, and
appreciate each other for it. Let’s have communion, and marvel at the
indescribable magnificence of nature and the cosmos (without having to posit
gods behind it, now that we know better).
In light of the sentiment that prosocial interpersonal engagement is as
fundamental to human survival as eating and sexing, it’s not surprising that of
all the routes to meaning that Irvin Yalom outlines, “both religious and
secular, none seemed more important than altruism.”12
He describes Eva, a woman dying of cancer who “found meaning until
the end of her life in the fact that her attitude toward her death could be of
value to many other patients,” those “who might be able to use Eva’s zest for
life and courageous stance toward death as a model for their own living and
dying.” She volunteered on a hospital ward for terminally ill children, was in
a support group for patients with metastatic cancer, and even seemed to
administer some informal but productive psychotherapy to her own
oncologist, a “cold, steel-spectacled man,” softening his defenses and
allowing him to experience some previously hidden emotion with her before
she left us.
Now, we have to be careful so that if we do find some good in suffering
we don’t become so overwhelmed with cheer that we forget that the context
is suffering. Just because Eva was able to cope with the cruelty of nature
doesn’t make the cruelty worthwhile. I would be thoroughly offended if
someone would suggest—and they certainly would, at least implicitly—that
Eva’s purpose, the meaning of her life, was to counsel fellow cancer
patients. On the contrary, I suspect even Eva might have rather done without
the cancer and her associated ministry if she had had a choice. She may have
had several more decades in which to do nothing but knit and spend time
with her grandkids. Sure, not as sensational of a story, but at least she could
have had more life. And being tender with your grandchildren—that’s
meaningful, too. Eva didn’t need cancer to demonstrate her value. I suspect
most of us would rather be alive and uninspiring than inspirational and gone.
Another reason we have to be careful not to overemphasize the silver
linings of such tragedies is that we don’t want to ostracize the countless other
victims who are unable to find meaning in theirs, whether it be cancer,
natural catastrophe, trauma, mental illness, or poverty. Many victims are
unable to make the best of it, and do not die courageously but instead
debilitated with fear. While we’re happy for Eva for finding strength, we
should simultaneously validate the experiences of those who are unable to
cope. The weak victim is no less of a person. Indeed, he may warrant our
attention more than the Evas of the world.

1 Pp. 208-209.
2 The God Delusion, p. 213-214.
3 Olen, J. (1983). Persons and their world: An introduction to philosophy. New York: Random
House. The discussion and quotes that follow come from chapter 23 of the text, “The Meaning of Life,”
pp. 432-441.
4 The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 123.
5 Russell, B. (2008). A free man’s worship. In E. D. Klemke & S. M. Cahn (Eds.), The meaning of
life: A reader (3rd ed., p. 57). New York: Oxford University Press.
6 Ibid., p. 58.
7 Nagel, T. (2008). The absurd. In E. D. Klemke & S. M. Cahn (Eds.), The meaning of life: A reader
(3rd ed., p. 144). New York: Oxford University Press.
8 Augustine, K. (2000, December 2). Death and the meaning of life [Web blog post for The Secular
Web]. Retrieved from http://www.infidels.org/kiosk/article55.html
9 Konner, J., Perlmutter, A. H. (Producers). (1988). Joseph Campbell and the power of myth
(episode 6). [Television documentary miniseries]. US: Public Broadcasting Service.
10 Existential Psychotherapy, p. 436.
11 Ibid., pp. 437 & 431.
12 Ibid., pp. 431-433.
 CHAPTER 10

What Does a Nihilist Look Like?

But there are far better reasons for self-sacrifice than those that religion
provides. The fact that faith has motivated many people to do good things
does not suggest that faith is itself a necessary (or even a good) motivation
for goodness. It can be quite possible, even reasonable, to risk one’s life to
save others without believing any incredible ideas about the nature of the
universe. By contrast, the most monstrous crimes against humanity have
invariably been inspired by unjustified belief.

— Sam Harris, The End of Faith

IN MY LATE TWENTIES, as I began to accept that I was an atheist—and later, a

nihilist—I underwent some interesting changes and began to experiment with
some disturbing behavior. I started drinking more and tinkering with
relatively hard drugs again. I began to dabble in antisocial behavior, even
committing theft a few times, most notably that of a watch from a Dillard’s
tagged at something on the order of $150. One day I viciously keyed a car in
the post office parking lot, just because it was there, and nicer than mine.
Most embarrassingly, I became preoccupied with masturbation—even more
so than I had been during puberty! I’ll save the details of the progression for
some other book and just cut to the chase: But yes—I still have no
satisfactory explanation for this—I became sexually fascinated with the idea
of death and corpses. This culminated to a point where I would go to the city
limits and find animal roadkill, of all things, and bring it home in a plastic
grocery bag. Later, when the urge had gelled—I can’t believe I’m publishing
this—I would hold the lifeless creature while I—
Oh, stop. I’m kidding. Nothing really changed as I began to identify
with nihilism. In fact, I simply continued along the same path of ethical
maturation that I had already begun a lifetime before. In general, I’m only an
adult version of the ultra-hypersensitive kid I told you about in chapter 3.
However, by far, I have actually become more stable, moral, content, and
sane than I ever have been before—particularly compared to when I had
identified myself as a Christian with a cosmic purpose. Hence, the punchline:
If I had died when Christian—which was likely, given my risk-taking
behavior at the time—I would have died miserable but gone to Heaven. Now
I get to die much more peacefully, but I have to go to Hell.
The truth is, my substance use has slowed to a crawl, limited to
sporadic marijuana episodes, which I have regarded as quite an adventure as
opposed to the frivolous event it used to be when I was Christian. As an
atheist, I’ve literally gone years at a time without touching it. Whenever I’ve
ended up with a bag to call my own, I’ve rarely been able to finish it and end
up giving it away. No kidding, I had this one hilarious bag for about seven
years, making me the object of ridicule for my stoner friends. It was so dry
by the time a guest finally finished it off in 2010 that the buds were literally
collapsing under their own weight. Time had apparently made it very harsh,
as believe you me, that bag did not go gentle into the good night. There was a
large amount of violent coughing and retching, the likes of which I hope I
never have to hear again; I thought I was gonna have to give her CPR.
Despite all that, it still worked … according to legend.
I don’t get really drunk anymore, either. I mean, I suspect my blood
alcohol level is at legally intoxicated levels about once or twice a month, but
I don’t get trashed these days. And, as with smoking, I don’t drive if I go out
to drink; I ride my bike. It’s so much nicer to be outside on a bike instead of
cooped up even more illegally and dangerously in a car. Otherwise, I haven’t
even touched (or seen) harder drugs in decades.
And about the masturbation, it’s nothing to write home about, either.
Like my drug use, it had ironically been most problematic when I was
relatively spiritual, at one point arguably bordering on addiction. It was easy
to become addicted to porn, back in the good ol’ days, when all internet
websites were free and there was no advertising, so you could just run wild
for hours on end, touring the world’s naked people and all the incredible
things they will do to get off.
For the record, even at my worst, I was only drawn to the really hard,
bizarre stuff for academic reasons. A psychologist at heart for most of my
life, absolutely, I’ve been fascinated by coprophagia and bestiality and so
forth, but that kind of porn never stimulated me sexually. On the contrary, I’ve
been slightly traumatized by some of that. The problems that I did begin to
experience from more traditional porn were two related issues: chronic
libidinal agitation and the objectification of women. Now, at least at the time
of this writing, I honestly believe that the internet porn phenomenon actually
began somewhat healthily. That is, ready access to porn, particularly the
amateur stuff, convinced me that many of the women I would have previously
disregarded while clothed were actually more attractive than I had been
assuming. No kidding, I think amateur pornography helped me lower my
unreasonably high standards.
Alas, it kinda got outta control, and I found myself more preoccupied
about potential nakedness than I wanted to be. Eventually, the creepiness of
compulsively undressing everyone with my eyes began to overwhelm any
benefits. Fortunately—after I had become a devout atheist—I became more
able to appreciate what “objectifying” women means, because I realized I
was doing it, and I was ashamed. Not only does it disregard others and make
them uncomfortable—if not scared—it also degrades me and the quality of
my life. Objectifying women makes me superficial, and keeps me from being
present with others and connecting with them in an authentic, healthy manner.
Bottom line, I don’t look at porn much anymore. When I do, it’s just the most
basic Playboy-like stuff. And for the record, yes, my libido has been
diminishing to more manageable, natural levels. Still a way to go, but it’s
happening.
A third addiction that has become more manageable as an atheist
compared to when I was spiritual is sports. Like drugs and libido, sports
fandom is now something I have, whereas it used to have me. I can still
remember sitting at a bar somewhere on Sixth Street in downtown Austin,
back in 1992 long before it became the Jersey Shore, and watching then-
lowly TCU beat Texas for the first time in decades (yes, we’re talking
football here). I remember being so overwhelmed and pissed-off, and cursing
as viciously as I ever had, at least in public.
During a particularly bitter tirade, I spotted this girl sitting with her
friends over on the other side of the bar, and I’ll never forget the look on her
face: It was pity, tinged with a little fear. My hostile dysphoria was
disturbing her. Seeing her seeing me felt like a slap in the face and kinda
quieted me for the moment, but I’d continue to get pissy like that for quite
some time.
 However, after I got a few years of atheism under my belt, I really
matured in this regard. For instance, I coped so much better years later at
“Route 66” when Bob Toledo and his UCLA goons, Cade McNown, Skip
Hicks, and Danny Farmer came to Austin in 1997. They pummeled our asses
in our worst game since 1904. The final score was 66-3, having already been
a surreal 45-0 at the half. But David Landers—devout atheist by the time—
stayed for the duration because he didn’t want to be a fair-weather fan. I
distinctly remember thinking: If my team can’t leave, I’m not going to, either.
So, I and my friend Tom stood there among the other tens of fans remaining
and sang The Eyes of Texas at the end of the game with the humiliated Ricky
Williams, Casey Hampton, Leonard Davis, and Shaun Rogers. (That’s right,
football fans: Those guys were on the same college team. More rumbling
beef than the Fort Worth stockyards … broken that day, but each would rise
again in gridiron glory.)
Ernest Becker might have argued that we can be so emotional about
sports because our team is a culture upon which we rely for a sense of
belonging and esteem, and maybe even to help us feel bigger and better than
we really are. I’m pretty sure I was doing something along those lines back
when I was a “spiritual” person (ironically). Now that I see through that need
to feel big it has lost its grasp on me. Atheism has helped by grounding me in
other ways as well. For example, now that I am more acutely aware of the
suffering in the world, it has simply become impossible to get so worked up
over something that is intended to be recreation. Don’t get me wrong: I still
love spectating sports. It’s just that they no longer have the capacity to ruin
my day (or weekend, or following week).
Today, as a self-described nihilist, I still get all sappy and teary-eyed
every year when ESPN plays Jimmy V’s speech during their celebratory
week named in the coach’s honor. And I live for those emotional stories they
do on athletes’ off-the-field humanitarian accomplishments. While working
on this chapter recently, I was watching the 2012 Fiesta Bowl when they did
a piece on Justin Blackmon, the receiver for Oklahoma State University at the
time. He had formed a relationship with a nine-year-old cancer patient after
they met at some charity event. I cried when I saw it … and I just cried again
when I watched the piece on Youtube to remind myself of how it went down.
Oops, I just cried a third time looking at it again while editing. It’s the part
where the little girl says at the end, “He’s awesome, he’s an awesome player,
and I care about him, too, and I love him.”1
 It’s also around Tebow-mania time. There was a similar piece on Tim
Tebow recently, and I cried during that one, too. It doesn’t bother me that Tim
is religious; I appreciate his actions the same. I have no idea whether Justin
is religious, but I’m just pretending for a moment that he’s not (I think we can
assume he’s less religious than Tim, at least!). The point that I want to convey
is that, as a spectator, I love what each of these guys is doing, regardless.
Atheism hasn’t diminished my capacity to be touched by selfless human
behavior as such. Nihilism hasn’t either. No, I don’t believe that I or anyone
else has been put on Earth for any specific reason, which actually makes
what Justin and Tim have done more beautiful than otherwise. I like to think
they are two people who feel compelled to do those things just because they
see the suffering of others and realize they can alleviate some of it. Not
necessarily because God said they should, but because they want to, all on
their own.
Now, if I was spiritual, I’d be crying the same way, but there would be
an element in which I would be chalking up at least some of my feelings to
God’s grace or something. Instead, I see something more pure and real, a man
behaving selflessly when he doesn’t have to. Now that’s humanity, when
there are no spirits involved.
At least on paper, perhaps the most objectively salient improvement in
my life that seems to have corresponded with my transition to atheism was
the loss of the panic attacks. As I’ve said before, I can’t attribute the healing
to my spiritual transition altogether, given that I was in traditional treatment,
but the coincidence is difficult to ignore. The bottom line is that I was
panicking when I believed in spirituality, and around the time I gave it up the
panicking stopped.
But I have to be honest: Although the panic is gone, I’m still quite
neurotic. However, it’s usually in ways that tend to respect and soothe the
cosmos, as opposed to oppress it. It’s pretty obvious to me that I’m the
greatest victim of my neuroses.
I’m so sensitive toward animals that I have a very hard time even
killing bugs and will go way out of my way to avoid it. When I find one in my
apartment, I almost always catch it and place it outside, safely. Whenever
even a bee or a wasp gets inside (which seems oddly frequent at times), I
don’t kill it; I catch it with a jar and cardboard and set it free. Recently I
accidentally maimed one while attempting this, and it totally made me sad! I
placed it carefully on the patio, like a little kid might, hoping it might
somehow reattach its thorax if left alone, but it didn’t. I also recently killed a
fly in my apartment—this time with the full intent of doing so—but
reflexively responded by verbalizing aloud, “Awww!” I sounded like a
teenage girl confronted with a lion killing a zebra on the Discovery Channel.
And no, I don’t like watching that stuff, either. It totally freaks me out, and I
have to look away.
So yes, this nihilist would kill a fly, but he’d feel bad about it. And it’s
not about being a hippie or a Hindi or part of any other population that’s pro-
animal. I simply don’t like to destroy anything that’s alive. It just feels wrong
to frivolously snuff out the miracle of life, regardless of what medium it’s in.
The Big Bang is behind that fly, and millions of years of evolution and now it
has the magic of life. It’s wrong for me to crush it. I’m big, it’s little, and
once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. I’d rather just let it be and see what the Big
Bang has in store for it later.
I have a habit of making U-turns in traffic and stopping at the side of the
road to rescue animals who have ventured on or too close. And I’m not just
talking about kitties: In recent memory, I saved (at least temporarily) a turtle,
a tarantula, and a very large snake, the latter a good five feet or so in length
—and it was not cooperating! It hissed at me, struck its best cobra-pose, and
rattled its tail on the ground to try to scare me. I know enough about snakes to
realize that it wasn’t poisonous, that it was putting on a show, but neither was
I gonna let its nonpoisonous mouth molest me. So, I grabbed the only
elongated object I could find—the Rock-Chalk Jayhawk umbrella from the
trunk of my car—and spent about 15 minutes coaxing the dumb fucking thing
to retreat to a neighboring field. I honestly remember feeling sad afterwards,
realizing that it was going through all that rigmarole because it was scared,
and I don’t want to be the agent of anything’s fear, especially something so
helpless that I could easily have killed it, if I had wanted. Having the
capacity to dominate something feels awful to me; I don’t want any part of
that experience. To this day I simply cannot give my cat medicine because I
can’t tolerate forcing myself upon something that is necessarily gonna fight
back, and lose. Most of the veterinarians I’ve met think I’m a total pussy.
They don’t say it, but I can tell.
I know: It’s absurd, and I’m embarrassed … but it gets worse. When I
jog, I find myself frustrated at the little flocks of birds who fly away because
I’m coming through. It’s especially frustrating because I don’t want them
wasting their energy on me, but the little shits will fly off, only to land further
down the same trail in the same direction I’m heading, so they have to keep
taking off again as I proceed. Dude—just go perpendicular a bit, not parallel,
and we’ll be done with it!

I don’t like to make people uncomfortable, either. It’s so bad I can’t even
watch it. I don’t enjoy a lot of sitcoms because the topic is often about
someone being embarrassed. Just now, I had King of Queens on in the
background while working (I’m not a fan! I only caught the end while waiting
for the Heat/Knicks to come on), and the episode was about the husband
getting coerced into roasting his boss or something and he doesn’t want to do
it. He gets on the stage, and it’s going badly, no one is laughing—and I
literally had to change the freaking channel, for that reason. I’m not kidding;
embarrassment is not funny to me. It kinda hurts to watch. I’ve always been
this way. I loved Gilligan’s Island as a kid but often strained over the
inevitable. My favorite episodes were the unusual ones in which Gilligan
didn’t fuck something up.
In public, I walk slowly around old people because I don’t want to
make them uncomfortable, being some young whippersnapper bustling about
who might bump into them. I hate playing competitive games, video or board,
because I don’t enjoy winning much more than losing. I still like games like
horseshoes, though, probably because the activity itself is more salient than
who wins.
Yes, being overly concerned about the welfare of others contributes to
loneliness. In addition to the cliché narcissistic fear of rejection, I also have
an equally strong, if not stronger, fear of rejecting others. I often don’t make a
move because I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed, and I don’t want to expose her
to that, especially if I think she likes me. So, like board games, I typically
end up not playing at all. Frivolous sex hasn’t been very rewarding, either.
It’s a catch-22 for me: I love the fantasy of a passionate one-night stand, but I
don’t find myself attracted to most women who would indulge them. I’m not
judging people who do; I just feel like I have more traditional feminine ideas
about sex, that the best kind is the emotional kind, with some sort of
attachment distilled over time.
 I can typically find some sympathy for just about anyone, even some
people who most Americans find unsightly, including some fairly alarming
and violent criminals. Staff down at the county jail recently told me that I’ve
got a bit of a reputation for being able to complete evaluations with
relatively hostile psychotic defendants. But I don’t have magical powers. I’ll
tell you my trick: I care about them and their predicaments, and I just let
enough of that show so they can tell. Like I teach my students, just because
someone is crazy doesn’t mean he’s stupid. Many crazy people can tell when
someone’s concern is legitimate, and they often respond accordingly, just like
anyone else (not always, so again, tread with caution).
In my psychology practice, I always charge less than my colleagues,
sometimes on the order of half. I do this not only because I feel sorry for my
examinees, but also because I’m a socialist, and I even kinda like the idea of
communism, at least in theory. (Yet I remain mindful of the words of the
immortal Yogi Berra: “In theory, there is no difference between theory and
practice. But in practice, there is.”) In a capitalist society, professionals
abuse the public financially, to put it lightly, and I just don’t want to be a part
of that machine.
At the grocery store, I get my shopping basket from the parking lot, not
from inside the store, because I want to do a favor for the pimply teen who
has to fetch these things. If I come across a car with its lights left on in the
parking lot, I’ll turn them off, if it’s unlocked (I’m surprised how often they
are; what’s wrong with you people?). If the door is locked and I can’t fix it
myself, I write down the license plate and report it to someone in charge.
Inside the store, I pick up stuff that other people have dropped in the aisle.
When I check out, I always take off my headphones so I can be present during
the interaction with the cashier lady.
I’m always picking up trash, not just at the grocery store, but on hiking
trails, sidewalks, wherever. If I’m driving past trash in the road that’s too big
for me to handle, I’m one of those concerned citizens who calls the police. I
recycle almost obsessively, often carrying a can around with me for hours
until I can find a proper receptacle. I must look hilarious while jogging
because I might have a beer bottle in my hand that I picked up earlier down
the trail. I know the world is gonna be destroyed eventually no matter what I
do, but it’s the principle of the matter.
I’m a regular blood donor and am on the national marrow registry. I
sponsor a hungry kid in Africa through Save the Children. And I don’t
complain much about my own food. When I’m dining out and find a hair on
my plate, I pull it out, show it to whomever I’m with, and keep eating. I think
it’s mind boggling that we don’t find more shit in our food than we do! I
despise the mentality of the kind of person who freaks out about such things,
as if it’s a long-awaited opportunity to raise hell. Like some kind of
obnoxious hippie, I don’t have a chance to get mad at the hair because my
thoughts immediately go to hungry people and I’d feel like an unappreciative
asshole for bitching. I’ve never sent something back because it wasn’t what I
ordered. And no, I don’t think it’s the cosmos trying to enrich my life by
getting me to try something new. Someone just fucked up, like we all do, and
I’m not gonna let the food go to waste. Now, I’m not crazy: If the food is
cold, I’ll send it back for a warm-up, but insist they don’t start over. Nuke it
—don’t you dare throw that out!

Some Christians and meaning-mongers would be surprised that a foul-

mouthed atheist is easily touched by romantic movies, especially the ones
with transcendental/spiritual gobbledy-goo. When I was a Christian not long
out of high school, of course I cried at the end of Ghost. But even in college,
as I began dabbling in atheism, I still cried at the end of Far and Away (I’m
so embarrassed to admit that, but of course this chapter is all about self-
disclosure). And very recently, as a full-blown nihilist, I cried the hardest at
the end of Cherry Blossoms. The latter is probably less well known to the
mainstream, being German, but like many American movies, it’s about love,
death, and transcendence. In any event, this might be one of my favorite
movies of all time, and it moves me in a way that is almost unsettling. I ended
up buying the DVD, and am currently awaiting, eagerly, until I feel like it’s
been long enough to watch it again. In the meantime, whenever I want to feel
all mushy inside, I watch the trailer on the internet.
It’s not just me. In the documentary The Four Horsemen, Richard
Dawkins expresses a surprising sentiment. He explains that he

once did a British radio program called Desert Island Discs,

where you have to go on and choose your six records which you
 take to a desert island and talk about it. And one of the ones I
chose was Bach Mache dich, mein Herze, rein. It’s wonderful
sacred music and the woman questioning me couldn’t understand
why I would wish to have this piece of music [because it’s pious]
… It’s beautiful music and its beauty is indeed enhanced by
knowing what it means. But you still don’t actually have to believe
it. It’s like reading fiction. You can lose yourself in fiction, and be
totally moved to tears by it, but nobody would ever say you’ve got
to believe that this person existed and that the sadness that you feel
really reflected something that actually happened.2

I’ve read two of Richard’s books and lightly perused a third, and this is my
favorite sentiment of his I’ve encountered so far. It raises a lot of poignant
questions about the distinction between fiction and reality and the capacities
for each to affect us in a meaningful way.
I like classical music sometimes, but am far from versed enough to add
to Richard’s assessment. I have some favorite pieces, but I couldn’t name
them, and I certainly wouldn’t know who composed them without researching
it. But I can tell you that I have a very similar experience when I hear—wait
for it—Elvis sing An American Trilogy. Every time he belts out “Glory,
Glory, Hallelujah,” I get chills, like clockwork.
One morning after I had been editing this section of my book, I woke up
pondering these issues and lay in bed for a while fading in and out of sleep,
thinking about which songs I would take to my deserted island. I paged
through my favorite genres and when I got to spiritual-songs-that-are-
emotionally-provocative, O, Holy Night stood out. I got out of bed, poured
my coffee, and searched for renditions on Youtube, still in my pajamas, teeth
not brushed yet. I tried Whitney Houston’s first, as I’ve always been drawn to
her and her voice, but the video was a little too cheesy and I felt her version
apparently wasn’t intended to be the passionate type I was looking for. So, I
Googled the “most powerful rendition” of the song, and Celine Dion’s name
seemed to pop up quite a bit. Back on Youtube, I chose her video that
includes the lyrics so you can read along. When I played it—no kidding—I
cried harder than I had in some time, so much so I had to get a paper towel to
blow my blubbering nose!
Something deep is obviously happening here, but I’m quite sure it has
nothing to do with God being real, at least for me. In the moment, what did
cross my mind—or more like my heart—was more akin to Ernest Becker’s
discussions about our need, our longing, to have hope against annihilation. I
was longing for God to be real, to hold me because no one else ever did
adequately when I was growing up. Indeed, the whole thing felt a whole lot
like when Patsy touched me at camp. Contacting the longing prompts a
cathartic release of pent-up pain, and that feels good.

There are all sorts of entire books exploring why gods and bibles are not
necessary to lead a moral life, including Can We be Good without God;
Ethics without God; Good without God; Sense and Goodness without God;
and … The Moral Landscape. Most of the more general books about atheism
have at least a chapter on the topic. Despite how much believers may think
bibles are necessary for society to function, we atheists find the notion
absurd.
I actually haven’t read most of the books I’ve listed above, largely
because I don’t need any more convincing, having experienced firsthand the
transition from Christian to atheist without any apparent deterioration in my
morals (which, I suspect, have been average, at worst). Again, if anything,
I’ve become more moral since becoming atheist.
Otherwise, it simply seems self-evident that morality is a human trait
and not contingent upon religion or its manuscripts.
Morality is necessarily in our genes. Humans are social creatures—we
are not parasites, nor are we so-called solitary animals like cougars and
bears and skunks. Social species, by definition, cannot exist without morality
—they are social! If it had not been for naturally selected altruism and social
cohesion the world never would have become so civilized to write the Holy
Bible in the first place. As Christopher Hitchens said, “Human decency is not
derived from religion. It precedes it.”3 Or, as I like to say, “Morality was the
chicken that laid the egg of Christianity.”
Some of the most magnificent civilizations in history, like Greek,
Egyptian, and Chinese, were erected long before anyone even uttered the
name “Jesus Christ,” in vain or otherwise. And many others have been
erected since, like Mayan and Aztec, but in geographical isolation so that
they never heard of the Golden Rule of the Holy Bible, either—but they
apparently lived according to some version of it anyway. Of course, none of
these societies were perfectly moral, but I don’t suspect they were
particularly immoral compared to the average Holy Bible-reading society
throughout history. For example, I’ve been taught slavery had a role in
building some (if not all) of those ancient societies, but of course it also had
a role in building America—and much more recently! And I don’t recall ever
learning that the Bible had a major role in abolition in this country; if
anything, as we discussed earlier, the Bible seems to condone slavery. No, I
suspect that abolition was driven more by the increasing intellectualization of
American society, just like abolition has been driven in other non-Christian
nations as well. And I suspect that the world is destined for increasingly
moral behavior as time goes on, not because of bibles, but because of
advancing intellect, awareness, and the extinction of secrecy.
Careful scrutiny suggests that bibles are not particularly good guides for
ethical behavior. As we’ve been discussing, they very often simply assert
rules that most of us are already hard-wired to follow. It’s not like murder
was relatively rampant before the sixth commandment of the Holy Bible was
published and then significantly declined afterwards. Again, speaking from
experience, I’ve met quite a few people who have killed before and I can say
with confidence that murderers aren’t the least bit concerned about laws—
whether from penal codes or scriptures—when they commit their crimes.
When most killers kill, they’re on a different mental plane than the one that
considers rules and punishment. I suspect that very, very few people
throughout history on the verge of killing someone somehow changed their
minds at the last minute because they were reminded of the sixth
commandment.
Another reason many commandments don’t work in practice is because
they are sweeping statements too broad for widespread applicability. Reality
is too complicated and nuanced for rules like this; judging others or even
killing them has to be justified, under some circumstances. Ergo, some
subjectivity in interpreting the rules is not just allowed but becomes
imperative. And when subjectivity becomes an imperative part of
interpreting a moral code, that moral code loses a lot of its utility. As we’ve
already explored in this book, recall that the Holy Bible in particular
demands so much subjectivity that we have to decide which rules have
expired and must be disregarded entirely (again, I find those condoning
slavery and the oppression of women glaring examples).
And the punchline: For those commandments that just don’t suit us and
our peers, we simply ignore them, unashamedly. Even in this God-fearing
country, with some of the most radical Christians on Earth, adultery is
rampant—literally a part of our culture, commonplace fodder for television
sitcoms, dramas, reality shows, and news stories. Coveting is another
American pastime, as our capitalist society continuously indoctrinates us to
believe that we need things that we don’t. Largely for this reason, keeping the
Sabbath day holy is a long-lost tradition, Sunday now being an important day
for indulgence—because we have to spend so much of the rest of our time
working in order to stay ahead!
No, I don’t find the Holy Bible to be a very useful guide at all. I’m not
even sure if I did when I was a Christian kid just beginning to explore the
world of ethics. What I do recall, in retrospect, is feeling validated
whenever I read commandments, rules, or directions that simply resonated
with what I already felt was right. Now that’s what bibles are good for:
allowing us to nod and smile and feel assured that we’re good (good enough
anyway), that we’re behaving as our divinities desire (at least much of the
time). Overall, it seems that bibles are not as much about directing us to
immortality as they are about giving us hope that we’re already en route.
To end the suspense, recent research does corroborate the suspicion
that ethical behavior is not contingent upon religiosity. Wilhelm Hofmann and
colleagues monitored the ethical experiences of over 1200 adults, some who
identified themselves as religious, others who did not.4 Participants were
summoned via their smart-phones at five random times every day for three
days, at which points they documented whether they had committed a moral
act within the previous hour. Among many other interesting things that you
can read for yourself, the researchers found that “religious and nonreligious
people commit comparable moral and immoral deeds and with comparable
frequency.” I suspect this is surprising to many non-atheists, but perhaps it
shouldn’t be.
Imagine a catastrophic scene in a city, where, for example, an
earthquake or other disaster causes a building to collapse. Of those nearby
left unharmed, are the Christians rushing more quickly than the atheists to
help? My gut just says no, which the research seems to validate. One
difference might be, though, that in the aftermath the Christians would be
inclined to attribute their heroic efforts to their spirituality, while the atheists
would attribute it to nothing, or perhaps simply to fundamental human duty.
The Christian reinforces his spiritual beliefs by assuming a connection
between his beliefs and his heroism when there really isn’t one, not realizing
that nonbelievers were working right there alongside him the whole time.
On that note, Hofmann and colleagues also found that the religious
participants in their study, compared to the nonreligious, did indeed have
stronger psychological reactions to their behaviors. Specifically, they

experienced more intense self-conscious emotions such as guilt,

embarrassment, and disgust in response to the immoral deeds they
had committed, and more pride and gratefulness in response to
moral deeds.

The scientists are not saying that the nonreligious were guilt- or pride-free,
just that the religious felt these emotions more intensely. Presumably, these
superfluous emotions of the religious stem from them attaching greater
significance to their moral and immoral behaviors—that is, they believe on
some level that their behaviors are relevant for their immortality. One has to
wonder if this creates a cycle that feeds itself, so that the strong emotional
reaction reinforces the belief that the behaviors have cosmic significance.
The punchline is, of course, the dynamic is purely a subjective experience
and has no practical utility (for example, it apparently does not increase
moral behavior).
British philosopher Colin McGinn might argue that the emotional
experiences of the religious can actually be deleterious, somehow distracting
them and robbing them of a more authentic experience—if not even making
morality more tumultuous than it needs to be overall. In The Atheism Tapes,
he shares the provocative anecdotal observation that people who have
abandoned religion find moral behavior easier to come by than they had
anticipated:

And in fact it was better, because there’s a corrupting part to that

conception of God, which is the idea that you’re doing something
good because God will reward you and think well of you. And
that’s a corrupting idea. It’s much better to do what’s good
 because it’s good, and only because it’s good, and that’s your only
reason for doing it. But the idea you’re going to get the warm fuzzy
feeling, “Oh, God’s really pleased with me today, you know, I did
this,” that’s not what morality ought to be about.5

Absolutely: Commandments are, by definition, superficial. Morality

shouldn’t be about obligation—that cheapens it, no matter how “good” you
are. Following commandments because they’re commandments is servile, not
moral. Many atheists argue that the moral atheist is more moral than the
moral Christian, because she exercises her morality on a deeper level.
Christians talk about earning rewards in heaven, but atheists are moral for its
own sake, right here on Earth, with no secondary gain.
It’s also interesting to note that the schemes of commandments presented
in bibles are reminiscent of what psychologists call the authoritarian
parenting style, the “Do this because I told you so” approach. As any
introductory psychology text will explain, this is the unhealthy way to raise
children, relative to the authoritative parenting style that does not merely
direct our behavior but counsels us on the pros and cons of how we behave.
Sure enough, as secular households are becoming more popular in this
country, scientific data are coming in to show that

secular teenagers are far less likely to care what the “cool kids”
think, or express a need to fit in with them, than their religious
peers. When these teens mature into “godless” adults, they exhibit
less racism than their religious counterparts … Many
psychological studies show that secular grownups tend to be less
vengeful, less nationalistic, less militaristic, less authoritarian and
more tolerant, on average, than religious adults.6

Morality should involve contemplation, analysis, and open-minded

consultation with others, not reflexive allegiance to a system that has already
proven itself unreliable. Besides being outdated, the Bible’s contradictory
advice inhibits deliberation because it allows us to reflexively appeal to
whichever rule we prefer. If we don’t want to associate with sinners (such as
by serving homosexuals at our restaurant), we cite 1 Corinthians 15:33: “Bad
company corrupts good morals.” However, if we do want to associate with
sinners as such, we focus on how Jesus justified dining with them in Mark
2:17: “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who
are sick; I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” And just as we
shouldn’t reflexively depend on the Bible, we shouldn’t automatically defer
to our parents or cultures—whether religious or not—because they’ve
obviously been wrong, too.
Don’t be afraid to engage the turmoil of ethical deliberation! When I
was Christian, I recall as recently as an undergraduate in college, I had a
very adamant anti-abortion stance, bordering on belligerent. (And yes, I’m
quite certain that my rigidity was driven more by concerns related to my own
immortality than to the life of a fetus.) In any event, once I converted to
atheism, I experienced an obnoxious polar shift to the other side and became
an outspoken abortion proponent—again bordering on belligerent. I would
caustically joke about getting pregnant just so I could exercise my right to
abort. I fantasized about making a bumper sticker asserting, “I used to be pro-
choice, but now I’m not: ALL babies should be aborted!”
Today, I’m proud to announce that I’ve stopped the emotionally
defensive splitting and instead sit restlessly atop the abortion fence. Of
course, I’m not compelled by any sort of spiritual reason whatsoever. But, as
with any life, I simply find a human fetus a miracle of nature and I’m
uncomfortable with the idea of destroying it. And of course, I find that fetus
much more valuable than any other animal that I don’t want to kill needlessly,
whether a fly or a dolphin or anything else, because I appreciate what it can
become, a fully sentient being who may live life to its fullest, loving others
and having a generally worthwhile existence.
But on the other hand, I can see the position of the person whose
existence is already established on the earth, that is, the mother. If the state of
her affairs is such that the baby seriously threatens the quality of her life—
which in turn will endanger the quality of the child’s life—I can be flexible.
But damn it, then I waffle back to the other side as I consider the more
dysfunctional, miserable kids I evaluate for juvenile probation departments.
Many of them are precisely the ones whom liberals (like me) are talking
about when we argue how life can be so rough for an unwanted baby and her
family.
And now I feel disgusting for even typing that, having made even the
vaguest of suggestions that one of those kids shouldn’t exist. That kid’s life is
just as valuable, in my reflexive opinion, as the perfectly well-adjusted
honor-roll cheerleader prom queen.
So, I don’t know where I stand on abortion. I hope I never have to face
it directly, but if I do, I promise I’ll do more soul-searching than I ever have
before.
For a tangential but worthwhile aside, Schopenhauer’s position on
bearing children was comically depressing, but intensely provocative:

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason

alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man
rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to
spare it the burden of existence? or at any rate not take it upon
himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood.7

Ironically, the nihilist may be so ridiculously open-minded and respectful of

life that he actually has reservations about creating it. He appreciates the
responsibility, not being shortsighted by his own selfish needs. Notice how
so many people who consider becoming a parent assert “I want to have a
baby,” suggesting that the experience isn’t really for the baby, it’s for the
person having it. When they do have children, they often devote their lives to
molding them into their own images, as if they were on a desperate mission
to prolong their own lives. On the contrary, we nihilists frame the prospect of
procreation into a relatively selfless proposition: “Should I create a life that
necessarily has to exist but ultimately face annihilation?”

We talked earlier about how we individuals are reluctant to change, even

during those times in which evidence is accumulating to indicate that we’ve
been wrong all along. Societies experience a similar inertia, a commitment to
the status quo from which they do not like to veer. Just as with the individual,
societal changes are unsettling because in order to change we have to admit
that we’ve been wrong up until the point of change.
Criminal justice examples are readily accessible. For instance, if we
were to decisively abolish capital punishment, what would it mean for the
thousands of people we’ve already executed up to this point? That’s a tough
apology to make, that now we see the light, and we’re sorry we didn’t just
sentence you to life imprisonment instead. We’re especially sorry because
we’ve been pretty sure all along that capital punishment doesn’t even deter
crime, and we have known for sure that life imprisonment is cheaper for
taxpayers to fund. Yeah, I’m afraid that capital punishment has been more
about vengeance than anything else … the ultimate irony of it all being that, in
practice, we find that vengeance is not as satisfying as we expected, at least
in the long run.
Similarly, the American criminal justice system will eventually have to
acknowledge that it has unnecessarily damaged, if not ruined, thousands of
lives because of its long-standing hysteria about marijuana. We legitimate
mental health professionals (and I suspect most police who work the street
and are as intimately familiar with the issue as anyone) know that it’s
alcohol, not marijuana, that destroys families and kills. But even as this truth
becomes apparent, our society can’t simply adjust. We’re a bit addicted to
our past, having been so stubbornly blinded by, among other things,
Beckerarian assurances of security, such as tradition and culture, as
misguided as they can be.
A society, like an individual, is more authentic and healthy when it is
less defensive and more comfortable with change. Societies should also
engage ethical dilemmas and proceed deliberately, as opposed to reflexively
deferring to the status quo.
Imagine if the cigarette had not yet been invented but was now being
presented to us in the 21st century, in a nation without any smokers. We’re
being told that smoking is really enjoyable and will move billions of dollars
through the economy, but the catch is that they’re highly addictive and even
deadly, so much so that they will kill over 480,000 people a year in the U.S.
alone—approximately one in five of all our annual deaths.8 What would we
do with such a proposition? We’d laugh our own asses off while kicking the
salesman’s through the door.
Thinking through such examples, we begin to get the sense that this
nation under God doesn’t care deeply about human life. If we did, cigarettes
would have been banished years ago, firmly and sure. Instead, we’re willing
to forfeit countless lives (and strain our medical care system into stagnation)
because we don’t want to offend the addicts by removing a liberty that
they’ve already had for so long. And as easy as it is to pick on the United
States, the rest of the able world is just as guilty. If the United Nations really
cared for its fellows, it would not tolerate, as it has, the myriad ethnic
cleansing efforts that have occurred under its watch, which are too numerous
to discuss here.
If Americans were truly humanitarian, our national budget would look a
lot different than it does today. I never would have imagined throughout most
of my life that I would ever disparage NASA, but now, as a nihilistic realist,
I can’t help but feel frustrated with the institution. Perhaps the best way to put
it is like this: If I personally had one trillion dollars to spend, I wouldn’t
explore space; I would commit that money to ambitious, progressive projects
right here on Earth, such as education and criminal justice. I’d fund research
that is directly and unambiguously devoted to improving human life, such as
harnessing renewable energy resources or perhaps even converting rising sea
levels to potable water. Don’t get me wrong: I love outer space as much as
anyone, but I’d be happy to marvel at it right here from where I’m standing
(just as most of the rest of people throughout history have) if, for example,
social services for chronically mentally ill homeless people on this planet
could be served better. It’s gonna sound dramatic no matter how I say this,
but here it goes: We shouldn’t be exploring other worlds until we can feed
this one. Dramatic, but how could we possibly argue otherwise? Just imagine
trying to explain to some starving, shoeless kid who lives in a tin shack why
the mars rover is worth it. The scene sounds like a bit from a standup comedy
routine, and might be comical, if it wasn’t such an accurate depiction of how
insensitive our society can be.
Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer:

It is obscene that people are spending thousands of dollars on a

handbag or a pair of shoes when there are a billion people in the
world who are living on less than a [U.S.] dollar a day … What
should I be spending my money on and what does that say about
me, about my priorities [when I spend it on “luxuries and
frivolities”] … ? The ultimate ethical question is: How are you
going to live your life? And the answer that Western culture often
seems to give is: Consume a lot, buy a lot, and seek your own
pleasure.9
And we shouldn’t forget that many of the objects of our gluttony are
bestowed upon us through the suffering of others, like little girls working in
sweatshops in Southeast Asia or wherever.
The punchline is that we all know that consumption is ultimately
unfulfilling anyway, and we’ve known it for eons. Peter presents the ancient
Greek notion of “the paradox of hedonism”: The more we pursue pleasure,
the more it seems to retreat. But,

if instead you do something else that you think is worthwhile,

perhaps something that is ethically important, then you find that
you get a satisfaction in doing it, and then that’s not only the more
enjoyable thing to do, but of course also the more meaningful and
fulfilling thing to do.10

The sentiment is such a common one that it comes across as trite, cliché.
However—as is often the case with the obvious—we agree with the
sentiment but we don’t live it. We smile and say “How nice” and pretend to
appreciate it, but we don’t actually allow it to guide our behavior, at least
significantly. It’s way too easy to rationalize the status quo as acceptable
because so many are in on it. Plus, we have this mind-boggling sense of
entitlement simply because we were born here instead of there, now instead
of then.
We can better appreciate our greed if we consider all of the people who
have ever lived on Earth, currently or in the past. Compared to the vast, vast
majority of them, we Americans—even many of us who either can’t or
simply refuse to live gluttonously—still live like kings. Speaking for my
modest self, I have a climate-controlled, carpeted space whose roof doesn’t
leak. I have ready access to as much clean water as I could possibly
consume. I have more clothes than I can even store properly and I wear all
sorts of highly functional shoes. Some of my daily concerns include how to
make all of my food fit in the refrigerator, or what I will do today to exercise.
That’s right: My life is so luxurious that I have to figure out ways not to rest
but to burn calories, otherwise I’ll gain too much weight, risk diabetes, and
go a little stir crazy.
I’m not even sure if it’s a choice anymore. I simply can’t disregard the
suffering of others who don’t have my things by chalking it up to some
dynamic of a god that I can’t comprehend. I do appreciate the suffering of
those others, and I hurt for them. Definitely, the very least I’m going to do is
not be gluttonous when they can’t; it’s simply the principle of the matter.
You’ll never catch me owning a fancy car, living in an extravagant house, or
wearing expensive jewelry.
But I’m gonna do more than not be gluttonous. I’m also gonna donate
some of my money to charity as well, money that would otherwise be wasted
on junk in a futile effort to bring me happiness. And I’m gonna keep thinking
about what else I can do. Whatever it is, I’m confident it’s going to be more
productive than prayer.

1 Hostile critics will reflexively focus on the substance use problems Justin has had since joining the
NFL. If that’s your reaction, you should examine yourself: You may be splitting, that is, unable to
reconcile both the good and the negative traits in a person (as discussed previously in chapter 6).
2 Upper Branch Productions (Producer) & Timonen, J. (Director). (2009). The four horsemen.
Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science. You can watch the two episodes for free at
https://richarddawkins.net/
3 God is Not Great, p. 266.
4 Hofmann, W., Wisneski, D. C., Brandt, M. J., & Skitka, L. J. (2014). Morality in everyday life.
Science, 345, 1340-1343.
5 Denton, R. (Producer & Director). (2004). The Atheism Tapes (Colin McGinn episode). [Television
documentary miniseries]. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation.
6 Zuckerman, P. (2015, January 14). How secular family values stack up. Los Angeles Times.
Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0115-zuckerman-secular-parenting-
20150115-story.html
7 Schopenhauer, A. (2008). On the sufferings of the world. In E. D. Klemke & S. M. Cahn (Eds.), The
meaning of life: A reader (3rd ed., p. 47). New York: Oxford University Press.
8 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2014, November 20). Smoking and tobacco use - Fast
facts. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/
9 Taylor, A. (Ed.). (2009). Examined life: Excursions with contemporary thinkers (pp. 63, 62, 85).
New York: The New Press.
10 Ibid., p. 85.
 CHAPTER 11

Monster-Jam Epiphany, or When

Cameras Took Over the World
To a disciple who begged for wisdom
the Master said, “Try this out: Close
your eyes and see yourself and every
living being thrown off the top of
a precipice. Each time you cling to
something to stop yourself from falling,
understand that it is falling, too …”

— Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

WHILE ON INTERNSHIP at Arkansas State Hospital, I was able to check an item

off my bucket list when my friend Charlee and I went to the Monster Truck
rally in Little Rock. I’m not a true Monster Truck fan; we went for the
adventure, you know, to experience something far outside our true interests.
To be rude, we were looking for a freak show. That said, part of me secretly
expected to enjoy the trucks as well. Grave Digger would be there!
As far as the freak show was concerned, I was slightly disappointed.
Instead of outrageously wasted, mulletted Free Birds, the arena was mostly
filled with fairly average-looking families. The silver lining being that we no
longer had to worry about being assaulted, which had been a concern in the
back of my mind earlier. And the only beer poured on us was our own. No
kidding, we had to restrain ourselves not to become conspicuous!
Now, the trucks were not so disappointing; neither of us had a chance to
hide our excitement once it started. The noise was gloriously loud, even
alarming, but just under the threshold of discomfort or pain. And there was
this wonderful smell that I had never experienced before. It’s hard to
describe, but I can smell it right now in retrospect. It was mostly of spent
fuel, I presume, but there was also a hint of oil, grease, and some other sort
of metal experience that was a little more like a taste than a smell. It must
have been the exhaust, because it hit us like a freight train right after the first
full-throttle. You know you’re really at a show when you can taste it. Even
GWAR doesn’t have a taste.
However, I’m afraid the sound, smell, and taste were more impressive
than the visuals. Some of the jumps and car crushings definitely moved me,
but our show was mud-free. Apparently, Alltel Arena isn’t down with mud.
Figures. But ultimately, it would be okay: To fill the void left by the lack of
mud, there was funnel cake, cotton candy, and abundant brewskis. We made
do.
Indeed, unexpectedly, the most captivating visual had nothing to do with
the trucks, nor was it the antics of a fellow patron. As I was trying to watch
the scene unfold through my camera viewfinder, Chuck tapped me on the
shoulder and had me put my camera down. She had this look of amazement
on her face, like she just saw a ghost (a friendly ghost). She’s like, “Dude,
check it out,” and directs my gaze away from the floor and into the crowd
beyond, and sure enough it was astonishing, even more so than the awesome
truck currently doin’ doughnuts.
All of the previously darkened crowd area was now lit up with camera
flashbulbs, the density of which I had never seen before or since. It was like
getting a free fireworks show, but one where the technician accidentally
pushed the wrong button and sent everything up at once. And it lasted for a
while. And then kept going. It was really surreal.
The punchlines are several. First, had Chuck not been there to drag my
attention from my own viewfinder, I never would have noticed the fascinating
scene, which, as awesome as Gravedigger was, was the most memorable
moment of the whole night.
Second, as we all should know by now, these pictures suck! Not only
was I missing the spectacle of flashbulbs, I was missing them for a picture
that was doomed to compromise the reality of the less interesting scene at the
time!
Third, all the other photo-addicts were missing the more captivating
scene as well—but providing the captivating scene while doing so—and
only getting crappy pictures to show for it!
 The moral of this story: We’ve become addicted to picture taking,
largely in a desperate attempt to cling to passing moments. The irony being,
of course, we’re missing out on life, often for pictures that aren’t that great
anyway. We’ve become more focused on preserving the moment than we are
of experiencing it directly. We assume we can be present later when looking
at our pictures, but we never are, really. And now the moment is more gone
than ever. Spoiled, even.
Photography should be fun. But it’s unhealthy when our motivations
stem from desperation and the desperation has us instead of us having it, like
when we’re preoccupied about showing people how cool we are for what
we did, whom we saw, or where we went.
No, I’m not suggesting that we should stop taking pictures altogether.
But I am suggesting that we should examine our drives behind taking them,
especially when those are bordering on obsessional: Are we content and
having fun, or are we clinging?

As you approach the end of my book, you may be asking yourself, “Was this a
self-help book? But I feel like shit!”
Well, I don’t want you to feel bad, but if you do, it’s not necessarily
wrong. If you are feeling bad, it could be that you are beginning to question
unrealistic, overly optimistic attitudes about reality. But don’t panic: If you
are experiencing such a transition, I pray that it will be like mine, where you
ultimately end up in a much better place. Now, if it’s not and you instead find
yourself in a place where you feel overwhelmed, I encourage you to reach
out to friends or family, and perhaps even a professional psychologist. My
goal has never been to overwhelm anyone; I really do just want to help, or at
worst, do nothing.
I’m really not sure if this is a self-help book. I kinda regard it as more
of a story, an autobiography, but one that I hope might affect people in a
positive way. That said, I thought it might be appropriate to at least have a
more explicit self-help portion to this book, to translate some of the ideas
we’ve explored into more specific guidelines. To get started, we should
reiterate Irvin Yalom’s “hedonism” and altruism already discussed in the last
half of chapter 9. We won’t explore those again, but don’t forget about them;
they’re important.

LOWER YOUR STANDARDS

It’s somewhat ironic that the U.S. Declaration of Independence puts the
“pursuit of happiness” on such a pedestal. Many of us psychologists believe
that this is a bit of a paradoxical task: Just like love or sleep, happiness is
something that will elude us the more we crave it. In the words of the very
wise existential psychiatrist, Victor Frankl: “happiness … cannot be pursued;
it must ensue.”1
I don’t have all the answers myself, but I do feel that one part of
allowing happiness to ensue is to realize that happiness is not a chronic state:
It’s a transient one. If we expect it to last, instead of waxing and waning, we
will be doomed to frustration. If we can lower our standards to aspire for
contentment and peace—which actually allow for some unhappiness—the
most realistic manifestation of “happiness” may then ensue.
In his book Stumbling on Happiness, psychologist Dan Gilbert
summarizes droves of interesting research studies that, in a nutshell, show
that we humans are not good at predicting what will make us happy. In fact,
we’re so bad at it that we’re not even very good at correctly recalling what
has made us happy in the past!2
So, besides engaging a paradoxical pursuit in which the target eludes us
the more desperate we are for it, we really don’t even know what we’re
chasing! I’m afraid finding happiness is one of those frustrating paradoxes:
You have to learn how to quit trying in order to get there. And when you do
get there, you’re going to learn that it’s a different place than what you’ve
been fantasizing about all this time.

S LOW DOWN
Four-hundred years before Ernest Becker was a gleam in his father’s eye,
Blaise Pascal penned his almost-famous hyperbole:

I have discovered that all human misfortune comes from one thing,
which is not knowing how to remain quietly in one room. A man
who has sufficient means to live, if he knew how to stay at home
 happily, would not go forth to go on the sea or to a siege … I have
found that there is one very potent reason for it, that is, the
unhappiness natural to our weak and mortal condition, a condition
so miserable that when we think deeply about it, nothing can
console us.3

Caught in a bit of a philosophical circularity, Pascal was seemingly obsessed

with—if not tormented by—the way we humans are obsessed with diversion
and distraction! When he talks about hunting rabbits in the 17th century, he
could just as easily be talking about rat-racing or shopping in the 21st: “we
like the chase better than the capture … This hare would not secure us
against the sight of death and misery (who can save us from these?), but the
chase does secure us against it.” People

seek only a violent and energetic occupation, which diverts them

from thoughts of themselves … They imagine that having gained
their object they would then take their ease and enjoy it, and are
not aware of the insatiable nature of their desire. They sincerely
believe they are seeking repose when, in truth, they seek only
agitation … So life glides on. We seek rest by combating certain
difficulties, and when these are conquered, rest becomes
intolerable, for we think either of the troubles we have, or of those
we might have.4

There’s something so wrong—but strangely addictive—about the mental state

of being in a hurry, to escape the present moment by longing for the next. It’s
basic behavioral conditioning, negative reinforcement to be exact. A rat that
is being shocked will quickly learn to push a lever if that lever relieves that
shock. We’re the rats, boredom and contemplation are the shock, and hustling
and bustling are the levers we press to rid ourselves of contemplation—
particularly those thoughts of our “miserable condition,” that is, our
mortality. In this peculiar manner, self-imposed acute stress distracts us from
our underlying chronic distress.5
The more accessible distraction becomes, the more likely we are to
indulge it. That’s why we spend so much time buried in our phones and other
electronic devices today: Because we can! We press the lever impulsively,
frenzied, because it’s always there.
Even when we’re not physically bustling, we are mentally. I often have
this experience when I go for a jog down at the “Greenbelt,” this surprisingly
beautiful system of creek and trails that runs right through the middle of the
now overly crowded, loud, stylish, and frenzied city of Austin. The transition
from urban to rural can be quite dramatic and sudden, but I’ve learned if I
don’t stop, take a deep breath, and stop thinking and just perceive, I’ll never
make the transition completely. It’s truly an amazing experience: When I’m
lucky enough to remind myself to pause as such, suddenly the sound of birds
becomes surprisingly salient—as if I’ve just removed plugs from my ears.
Only then do I feel the peace I’m looking for, the best kind that only comes
from being outdoors.
When we first practice pausing and being present like this, it can
actually be uncomfortable, if not downright aversive. But, over time, it
becomes tolerable, then preferable, at least much of the time. Eventually—as
it becomes more natural—all sorts of wonderful things begin to happen.6
Today, when I drive upon a yellow light, I often slow down and calmly
stop instead of stomping the gas to beat it. It’s kinda nice to stop, because I
can use the down time to just sit and be grateful or contemplate the cosmos or
whatever. I remind myself how all this traffic came to be, and how incredibly
magnificent it is to be alive and how lucky I am to even have a car in which
to be stuck in traffic, and a refrigerator full of food waiting for me at home.
When I see people ramming the gas to get through the light, I kinda pity them.
I don’t think I’m better than them, but I feel like I’m on to something that
they’re missing.
The act of rushing creates distress, for both myself and others, that is
totally unnecessary. Alternatively, if I leave in plenty of time for my
appointment, I get to ponder whatever I want instead of being forced to be
angry at all the people who seem to be in my way. Regardless of what we’re
doing, if we’re in a hurry, we’re wasting time.
Of course, we have to hurry sometimes. But don’t let others suck you in
needlessly. The world will rush around you if you just let them. Instead of
racing your neighbor in traffic, whether driving or walking or pushing a
shopping basket, just put on the brakes, let them pass, and move in behind
them. It’s judo-locomotion, using the momentum of the world against itself to
make your passage more pleasant. When you assume your position behind
frenzied drivers (or shoppers) and watch them speed off, you’ll feel better
than when you end up in front of them. People in a hurry are some of the most
unappealing people around; I recommend just getting out of their way and
feeling sorry for them.

H UNT AND GATHER

Irvin Yalom (and others) has speculated that our evolutionary ancestors were
more content than us today, despite lacking technology—indeed, perhaps
because they lacked technology:

Furthermore, people of earlier ages were often so preoccupied

with the task of meeting other more basic survival needs, such as
food and shelter, that they were not afforded the luxury of
examining their need for meaning … [they] had other meaning-
providing activities in their everyday life. They lived close to the
earth, felt a part of nature, fulfilled nature’s purpose in plowing
the ground, sowing, reaping, cooking, and naturally and unself-
consciously thrusting themselves into the future by begetting and
raising children … They had a strong sense of belonging to a
larger unit; they were an integral part of a family and community
and, in that context, were provided scripts and roles.7

My dissertation advisor at Kansas, Stephen Ilardi, specifically

conceptualizes clinical depression as a “disease of civilization”—along with
other ailments such as diabetes and atherosclerosis, which are “largely non-
existent” in aboriginal cultures that still hunt and gather, like the Kaluli of
Papua New Guinea.8 On the contrary, depression is running amok in Western
culture, significantly increasing with every generation—despite the fact that
antidepressants are being prescribed about 300% more often than they were
20 years ago. So, Steve and colleagues researched the Kaluli to identify the
factors of their lifestyle that seem to be inoculating them from depression,
factors that Westerners are tragically lacking. And they found six: routine
physical activity; regular face-to-face social interaction; spending time
outdoors; sleep hygiene; anti-ruminative activity (that is, doing something
besides brooding); and a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Steve’s treatment
program, Therapeutic Lifestyle Change (TLC) simply prescribes the
depressed Westerner these lifestyle habits of the non-depressed Kaluli.
Overall, the results have been beyond Steve’s “wildest dreams.” For
example, he reports that mild exercise alone—thirty minutes of brisk walking
three times a week—has outperformed the antidepressant Zoloft all by itself
in clinical trials.

D ON’T MIND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE SO MUCH

There are probably countless ways in which our modern technolifestyle is
ironically compromising life for us. We considered in an earlier chapter how
that we may be chronically anxious due to overexposure to trauma via the
news. Similarly, it’s fair to wonder if we are more sexually aroused than
evolution ever intended (and therefore frustrated), due to overexposure to
sexual stimulation in advertising and such. Otherwise, through the news,
advertising, and just daily living, we can’t escape reminders that there are so
many others out there who have so much more than we do. This is not natural,
either, as we evolved in much less stratified societies than those in which we
find ourselves today. I suspect that a lot of modern unhappiness is not simply
being without: It’s being without and knowing that others aren’t, as their
wealth is constantly paraded in front of us.
Well, it turns out that we tend to give wealth more credit than is due. A
quite robust finding in psycho-socio-economic research is that once people
have their basic needs met—they can pay the bills and feed the family and
have enough left over for a little recreation—they tend to be as happy as
anyone else, even the richest of folk. Adding money on top of the basics does
not continue to increase happiness, as we poor people tend to fantasize. Dan
Gilbert again:

Economists explain that wealth has “declining marginal utility,”

which is a fancy way of saying that it hurts to be hungry, cold,
sick, tired, and scared, but once you’ve bought your way out of
these burdens, the rest of your money is an increasingly useless
pile of paper.9

Certainly, we overestimate the quality of others’ experience in all sorts of

contexts, besides that of their wealth. When you’re out on the town and
everyone else seems so happy but you’re oddly down, realize that many of
the people who are out are out because they feel good. For every person
seeming to have such a better time than you, there are countless others at
home in their pajamas channel surfing, feeling angsty and tormented about
whether to get up and do anything at all. And of course, if you could read the
minds of those other revelers who seem to be having such a great time, you’d
see that many are not as happy as they look. Many of them are faking it just
like you, wondering if they should be somewhere else. And even for some of
those who are actually feeling great, mediocrity (if not worse) is waiting for
them at home—that’s why they appear so happy at the moment!
Similarly, on social media, everyone seems to have more friends,
romance, fun, family, and vacations than we do. But you have to realize
you’re looking at a non-random sample; the joy that you see is usually more
of an exception than a rule. Most people post happy stuff because they are in
a good mood at the time. Overall, those people are just like you: They have
good times, and then they have bad ones. The average person just doesn’t
advertise the bad ones as much.
Besides comparing ourselves to others, we also have to be careful
about comparing our current selves to those of our narcissistic hopes and
dreams. I suspect that most people will never achieve the fantasy version of
themselves, and will therefore be disappointed insofar as they are attached to
those fantasies.
Is it wrong to have aspirations? Of course not, but aspirations can go
bad when they preoccupy us with the future so much that we can’t appreciate
how well we’re doing now, or if they otherwise doom us to failure later. We
should have aspirations; we just shouldn’t be too unrealistic about them.

CHALLENGE YOUR FALSE SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT

American comedian (and philosopher) Louis C. K. enthusiastically conveys
how spoiled and unappreciative we’ve become in our wealthy, greedy,
technologically advanced society:

People on planes are the worst … they complain … “That was the
worst day of my life! I had to sit on the runway for forty minutes!”
That’s a story in this country. That’s a fucking hardship, that you
had to sit on the runway. People will listen to that story. They’ll
 stop doing the dishes and turn around and go, “Oh, my god, really?
For 40 minutes? That’s awful! You should sue them!”

What happened then? Did you fly through the air like a bird,
incredibly? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you
partake in the miracle of human flight and then land softly on giant
tires that you couldn’t even conceive how they fucking put air in
them?

How dare you, bitching about flying! “[But] I had to pay for my
sandwich …” You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair in the sky!
You’re like a Greek myth right now. “But it doesn’t go back very
far, and I was sort of squishing my knees …”10

Besides not appreciating the miracles with which we engage daily, our
unfounded sense of entitlement makes us feel violated when subjected to
practical measures intended to protect us. I had to testify in court literally
days after Jared Loughner shot U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords at her
“Congress on Your Corner” meeting near Tucson, along with several others,
killing six, including a nine-year-old girl. To get to the actual courtrooms, I
have to walk through a security area with a metal detector. There was a UPS
guy ahead of me with a dolly of packages, and the guard asked him to unload
them so that each could be run through the X-ray machine. There was a lady
behind me (presumably a defense attorney), and she was just disgusted with
this process, sighing and saying out loud, clearly for everyone to hear, “This
is ridiculous!” She looked at me, seeking some validation, but all I could
give her was a blank stare, because that’s all I could do, being baffled.
I flew for the first time in 1995, at the tender age of 25. I remember
being absolutely dumbfounded at how easy it was to get on a plane and
potentially bring weapons with you—especially in the wake of the first
World Trade Center bombing. My jaw was still dropped when I took my
seat. If I had been in charge, 9/11 never would have happened. The irony is
stupefying: Our obsession with liberty has actually cost us much of our
freedom!
D ON’T LET CONSUMPTION BE AN AMBITION
One of the reasons that surplus wealth beyond what is needed to meet our
basic needs does not necessarily make us happier is related to one of the
greatest strengths of biological organisms, also one of the most fundamental:
We adapt to our circumstances. Observed on the level of the single brain
cell, repeated stimulation activates the cell less and less over time, called
adaptation or habituation. The good news is that it produces organisms that
are resilient in the face of chronic distress. We can adapt to the bad things in
our lives (within reason), such as divorce, physical disability, or even the
death of a loved one.
The bad news is that we also adapt to—that is, become bored with—
the good things in our lives. We always want something else because no
matter how satisfied we become we eventually adapt to whatever got us
there. The problem is most evident when we rely on accumulating things for
satisfaction. Adaptation is why we have pastimes like shopping (and, I’m
afraid, adultery). If owning things truly satisfied us, we wouldn’t shop so
much; we’d buy a few things and be okay.
When I was a materialist but trying to change, I found it helpful to use
the Alcoholics Anonymous mantra, “Fake it till you make it.” I would go to
the mall or whatever but force myself to leave the debit card at home so that I
didn’t even have the option to buy anything. It felt uncomfortable at first,
excruciating at times, but eventually started to put everything into
perspective. Without the option to buy, I simply felt like I didn’t want as
much as usual; I was no longer shopping but more like hangin’ out, which
became a more pleasant experience. When I did come across something I
really seemed to want, I promised myself I’d come back the next day (or later
in the week even) if I still wanted it. But it was amazing how often I’d lose
interest after sleeping on it. Not always, but something about waiting and
sleeping on it helped me distinguish between a compulsive want and a
relatively legitimate one.
“But what if it’s gone when I get back!” Well, the earth will continue to
turn, and you will then learn that you really didn’t need it after all. It may
sting for a moment, even for a while, but you’ll eventually forget about it. Off
the top of my head, I can only think of one thing ever that I wish I had bought
but didn’t (it was a neat set of china at an antique store in Leavenworth,
Kansas, circa 2003). Oh yeah, and I wish that I would have brought home this
dolphin vertebrae I found on the beach at the Gulf one time. I still think about
these things on the rarest of occasions, and I still feel a little bit of regret
about my decisions to pass them up, but those feelings pass pretty quickly.
Oddly, it’s almost like I appreciate the lost items more because I don’t have
them, reminiscent of that Camus quote about love, that the only enduring love
is that which never has the opportunity to be indulged.
Once I practiced deprivation by forcing myself to do without, not only
did I realize I didn’t need so much, it became clear that being a wanter
creates one of those vicious cycles in which the act of trying to fulfill the
desire only seems to exacerbate the need! I had an analogous experience
recently with beer. I took a month off from beer drinking, largely because I
just wanted to make sure I had all my faculties and energy to finish this book.
An entirely unexpected benefit was that I found myself more present and
comfortable throughout the day because I was no longer looking forward to
evening beers! The irony is that anticipating beer with which to wind down
later was actually winding me up at times, making me think I needed that
beer more than I did.
Another favorite passage from Anthony de Mello has been inspirational
in my quest against materialism: “Those who sleep on the floor never fall
from their beds.”11
I don’t think he’s simply saying that if we don’t have anything, we don’t
have anything to lose. I believe the message is deeper: It’s about a healthy
mindset, in that those who do not seek satisfaction through materialism (and
other doomed, superficial quests, like celebrity) are more grounded, content,
and more in touch with reality.
As many a bumper sticker has reminded us, Jesus was the quintessential
communist. One of the greatest hypocrisies on Earth is that Jesus and so much
of the Bible are all about minimizing materialism, rat-racing, and selfishness,
but here we are, the most Jesus-y and Bible-est country on Earth, and yet the
most materialistic, ambitious, and (in ways) selfish. We should not want!
Green pastures and still waters should be plenty.

D ON’T LET AMBITION CONSUME YOU

The following anecdote is one of the most compelling I’ve ever encountered,
hands-down. I read it somewhere years ago, but I haven’t been able to
relocate the source, despite my most valiant Googling efforts. As I recall, the
author had described a conversation between a psychologist and a
gerontologist (or was it a neurologist and an oncologist?). It went something
like this:

Psychologist: “Gollee, doing the work you do, you must

see a lot of people die.”
Gerontologist: “Oh, yeah. Almost every day.”
Psychologist: “Wow. I bet you hear a lot of incredible
things. Do people ever share with you
their greatest regrets in life? If so, is
there one particular regret that’s most
often expressed?”
Gerontologist: “Oh, sure; that’s easy. Unexpressed
affection. People regret not telling others
how much they cared about them.

I don’t know where to begin. Of course, the explicit message is a poignant

slap in the face, that we are overly shy about telling people that we care
about them—and what a horrific tragedy to finally come to terms with this
when it’s too late. It hurts just to think about it. Re-inspired by the passage
while editing my book, I recently told one of my best friends what I’d say at
his eulogy if he were to die before me, and it was a wonderful moment
indeed, one of the best I’ve had in a long time and will never forget.
More generally speaking, the story put me in the habit of looking at my
life from my fantasized deathbed. Nothing else has helped me more to keep
things in perspective. When I contemplate my life from my deathbed, my
accomplishments, such as my college degrees and frequent flier miles
earned, seem so much less important than they do from where I am now.
What matters more, suddenly, is whether I enjoyed my daily life or
worried it away or rushed through it. Was I as good to people as I could have
been? Was I present with and attentive to people and places and
experiences, or was I always preoccupied about moving onto the next one?
And, of course, did I tell my friends, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about you” or
“It’s good to hear your voice.” Or, God forbid, “I care about you.”
Why does this exercise work so well? On our deathbed, we are able to
see the world unpolluted by our ambitions and aspirations—we’re no longer
preoccupied about the future. And we’re honest, because the defenses are
down. If we can harness our deathbed vision now, we can begin benefitting
before it’s too late. One’s deathbed is a bad time to have an epiphany,
especially the ones about wasting our lives obsessing about success. You no
longer have time to mentally process your newfound realization, much less
do anything about it—such as live some of your life according to the
epiphany!
We Americans have to be particularly careful, as rat-racing to attain our
dreams is a cultural imperative. I worry that Americans experience an
inordinate number of deathbed regrets because of this drive. It’s so bad over
here that sometimes I wonder if it’s in our genes. There’s a phenomenon in
evolution called speciation in which the formation of new species is greatly
accelerated because some plants and animals are suddenly—at least in
cosmic terms—sequestered from the pack. It can occur, for example, when
land masses become separated by water, creating different ecosystems and
geographies, leaving the respective inhabitants to evolve down independent
pathways.
Perhaps the colonization of America was a speciation of sorts. It must
have taken a special type of person to get on a boat during the 16th-19th
centuries and make his or her way across the Atlantic Ocean to these
mysterious lands. Those people were dissatisfied with the status quo in
Europe, and ambitious and restless enough to do something incredible about
it. And here we are today: a nation of restlessly ambitious people. Americans

“for ever imagine the Lands further off are still better than those
upon which they are already settled”; if they attained Paradise,
they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west.12

That may sound like a compliment to some, but I think it can be more of a
criticism. We’ve finally run out of frontier but can’t seem to relax and enjoy
what we have. Sure, restlessness makes for some great conquest and
technological advancement, but we’ve run ourselves ragged in the process.
We’re going to go to our graves realizing that we rushed our lives away
trying to conquer.
It’s not just the American Dream of a successful career, loving family,
and cozy wine/cheese tasting parties with our successful friends. We run
ourselves ragged competing for minutiae, like finding the best parking spot.
I’m amazed at the effort people will expend to get a parking spot near the
entrance, like it’s some sort of life-or-death competition. Personally, I
always go straight to the empty part of the lot, in the back, and walk. The
walk feels good, and then I chuckle inside when I pass the person that I saw
waiting for a spot, still sitting in their car, all pissy.
Even our vacations are rat races, desperate attempts to see as much as
possible and to document how much fun we had. Pascal wondered, again
with hyperbole, if we’d even vacation at all if it wasn’t for the lure of the
attention we get upon our return: “one would not make a voyage never to
speak of it, and for the mere pleasure of seeing, without the hope of ever
talking about it to someone.”13
Speaking of “wanderlust,” in 2008 I had the pleasure to visit Moab,
Utah and the surrounding areas, easily one of the most fascinating and
beautiful places I’ve ever been. However, similar to my monster-truck rally
experience, an odder memorable moment was of a fellow photographer. I
was standing at a lonely fork in the trail one day, debating which way to go,
and this man holding a camera literally runs up upon me, panting and
sweating, and asks me which trail has the best arches so he wouldn’t waste
any time on the lesser of the two. I have to note, too, that he wasn’t
American: He was European—and Eastern at that! I was mortified, being a
big fan of Hungarian Bela Tarr’s movies—beautifully unhurried and
existential—now confronted with a man who could have been Hungarian
himself, acting an American fool. I always had this fantasy that Eastern
Europeans didn’t do this sort of thing, but I reckon they do, too. Sigh.
Of course, I’m not disparaging all ambition and recreation. Like
everything else, just own it—don’t let it own you. That includes everything
from your job to your vacation and even your volunteer work.

I spent Christmas 2011 at Big Bend National Park (just like I did in 2010) to
escape Christmas and capitalism and whatnot. I swear to God: Those Lexus
commercials where some chump gets his wife a beautiful car with a big red
bow around it make me feel ill. All I can think about are the people in my
very own town who can’t even afford one crappy car for the entire family
and so they have to ride the God-danged bus around. And those jewelry
commercials that open with some histrionic supermodel contemplating,
“How will I know that he loves me?” Darlin’, if proof means him wasting
thousands of dollars on metal and rocks for you to hang on your face, there’s
something wrong with your relationship, in my opinion.
In any event, that trip ended up being one of my favorite experiences
ever: It snowed when I was there! It was so beautiful and surreal, Big Bend
being in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, all rocky and cactus-y the vast
majority of the time. And the solitude was divine. I went about thirty hours
once without seeing another human being, or any evidence of their existence.
It was just me, hiking through the mountainous desert, bundled up quite
snuggly, trudging through the most perfect amount of snow there could be.
When I arrived in the evening of the fourth day to return my solo-hiker
pass to the ranger station at Panther Junction (so they know I made it out
alive), it was closed. The sun was setting and it was starting to become dark.
Something stirring in the cacti nearby broke the peace and abruptly grabbed
my attention. I could see an amorphous blob of animal, but was unable to
identify it. For a moment, I thought it might be a bear, and I kinda freaked out.
Then I heard another rustling, even closer to me, and could then make out the
perps a little better: They were collared peccary, a.k.a. javelina, these
adorable little pig-looking fuzzy monsters. (We’re not supposed to call them
“pigs,” however. Rumor has it that they’re not as genetically pig as they
appear—I read once they’re actually closer to hippopotami! I like to hope
that’s true.)
While I was trying to get a better look, this roundish family of humans
pulled in to the parking lot where I was standing, two pre-or-early-teens
sisters, their slightly older brother, and mother. I immediately rolled my eyes,
figuratively, and wrote the experience off as thereby terminated. But, I was
so wonderfully wrong: It got better. Forcing myself to be friendly, I pointed
the javelina out to the first sister who was running up, mostly just holding out
hope that she’d slow down and not scream and the critter would linger.
I’ll be damned: She was captivated as well, as opposed to spastic.
Then the rest of the family approached, one-by-one, mom, of course, bringing
up the rear, a nice, sincere smile on her face. I was suddenly impressed by
how they all behaved; none of them got too close, they just stood there, right
there with me, and watched. Amazingly, they didn’t scare it away, so the
moment continued. In fact, it continued for long enough that I eventually
walked off, when I was ready to tend to my business.
When I returned from the bathroom, the javelina and the kids had
relocated, the former now standing on an asphalt trail, just eying the kids, and
them in return, like some sort of Mexican standoff. The boy was crouched
down, literally less than ten feet from it, about to take a picture with his
phone. As it became clear that it was too dark, one of the sisters firmly but
politely told her brother not to use the flash, to just skip the picture,
otherwise he was going to scare it. Inexplicably, he complied. And he didn’t
even appear the least bit grumpy about it, instead seeming to agree it was a
good idea. They kept staring at the animal until finally it snapped, turned, and
trotted off, clippity-clop along that little asphalt path. One of the girls,
speaking for both of us, said, “Aww!”
I was especially moved by that one girl’s awareness and sensitivity, her
ability to have the experience and be present in it without disturbing the
cosmos by having to take a picture so that she could brag to her friends about
it later. And I was moved by her brother’s flexibility. I really liked that
family; it was a great end to an awesome vacation. My only regret is that I
didn’t say something to them, especially to mom, to let her know that her kids
make a great impression. I suspect she’d appreciate hearing that, but she
probably doesn’t need to hear it. They’re alright, and they must know it, deep
down. I bet there’s never been a lot of yelling in their home, and there’s been
little to no inappropriate corporal punishment. I bet those parents have paid
attention to each of those kids since each was born. Everyone listens to
everyone else in that family, at least much of the time. I know they do; I saw
it firsthand.

THE END
1 Frankl, V. E. (1985). Man’s search for meaning (p. 17). New York: Washington Square Press.
2 Gilbert, D. (2006). Stumbling on happiness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
3 Rawlings, G. B. (Ed. & Trans.). (2009). Pascal’s pensées; or, thoughts on religion (p. 65).
Charleston, SC: Bibliolife. (Original work published 1670).
4 Ibid., p. 66-67.
5 Quick psychology lesson: Negative reinforcement is when a behavior is encouraged because it is
associated with the removal of an aversive stimulus. Positive reinforcement is when a behavior is also
encouraged, but because it is associated with the addition of a desirable stimulus. Punishment is
neither of these: It’s when a behavior is discouraged by associating it with the addition of an aversive
stimulus.
6 I’m borrowing the term “pausing” from another highly recommended book, Tara Brach’s (2003)
Radical acceptance: Embracing your life with the heart of a buddha. New York: Bantam.
7 Existential Psychotherapy, p. 447.
8 TEDxEmory (Producer). (2013). Depression is a disease of civilization by Stephen Ilardi, PhD. [Video
lecture]. Retrieved from tedxemory.org ; For more info about the treatment, see http://psych.ku.edu/tlc/
9 Stumbling on Happiness, p. 218.
10 Louis C. K. (Writer, producer, & director; also produced by D. Becky, D. Bernath, M. Caputo, S.
Hartman, & C. Jenowitz). (2010). Hilarious. [TV special]. USA: Epix.
11 de Mello, A. (1988). One minute wisdom (p. 99). New York: Image Books.
12 Miller, J. C. (1943). Origins of the American revolution (p. 77). Boston: Little, Brown, &
Company. The portion in quotes is cited by Miller as follows: Lord Dunmore to Lord Dartmouth,
December 24, 1774, P.R.O., C.O. 5, 1533, Library of Congress Transcript.
13 Pascal’s Pensées; or, Thoughts on Religion, p. 43.
 APPENDIX

How to Ruin Your Kids without Even

Trying
… if you think that the greatest ideal in life is to be invulnerable, then you are
on your way to becoming geological rather than spiritual.

— Alan Watts, Still the Mind

PSYCHOLOGISTS ARE OFTEN STEREOTYPED as crazy themselves, driven to the

profession in hopes to one day understand their own pathologies. I’m not
thrilled whenever I realize I’m cliché, but I have to be honest and
acknowledge that this has definitely been the case for me.
I took my first formal psychology class over twenty-five years ago in
high school and, being crazy as shit, have had my nose to the mental health
grindstone ever since. Actually, as I explained earlier, I had begun studying
psychology informally even during elementary school because I had this
peculiar obsession with substance abuse. I had read several books about
drugs, grown-up chapter books, before I had even left the sixth grade.
Despite all the psychology I obsessively consumed, it wouldn’t be until
graduate school at the University of Kansas that I even heard of the notion of
emotional validation. Remarkable, because of all the psychological
phenomena I have learned about to date I feel it has been the most ubiquitous
and relevant issue in chronic emotional turmoil. I don’t know why, but it’s
strangely difficult to find it explicitly addressed in textbooks and such. I just
checked my bookshelf at home, and of the eighteen books that I thought might
discuss it, only three have the term (or some derivative thereof) in their
indices or tables of contents. So pay attention! If more people were more
acutely aware of how this works, I think the world would be a significantly
better place. I promise this is relevant for you, one way or another.
In a nutshell, emotional validation occurs after one person discloses his
or her inner experience to another person (typically verbally, but also via
body language), and the recipient/audience (validating) person consumes the
disclosure attentively. Although the listener may not agree with the speaker’s
experience, he accepts it as real (valid)—given the speaker’s circumstances,
including his temperament, if applicable.
For instance, a third-grader, at breakfast, nervously expresses to her
dad that she is scared about her spelling test scheduled later that day. Good
Dad validates her experience by disengaging from his paper—not by merely
peeking around the corner, but by putting it down so that his kid knows he’s
paying attention and isn’t taking her fear lightly. There are an infinite number
of validating verbalizations, but he could say something along the lines of
“Oh, Sweetie; I can see you’re worried. I’m sorry you’re stressed. I know
how important it is for you to do well at school. But don’t forget: I’m going
to love you no matter what happens!” It really is okay to talk like this; it’s
never killed anyone.
That’s a fantastic parent. First, he simply makes it clear he’s paying
attention. Then he acknowledges his kid’s suffering without belittling it. Next,
Dad offers reassurance, the greatest of which being that, ultimately, you don’t
need to be afraid because your greatest fear that my affection for you may
depend on this silly test is only that, a fear that is not well founded. And I
love the part where he doesn’t make promises about what’s gonna happen—
he leaves it open that she may not do well! But the earth would keep
spinning, even in the worst case scenario. Validate, then soothe; don’t
disregard, and don’t make unrealistic promises about things you can’t
control.
Alternatively, there are also an infinite number of ways to not validate
his daughter’s experience, that is, to invalidate it. Unfortunately, this process
takes much less energy and effort and is therefore the default response from
many preoccupied adults. The easiest way to invalidate is simply to not pay
attention, to remain buried in the newspaper, and simply grunt or something.
Even worse, dad could react with frustration and frown or scowl or say
something like, “Oh, honey, you’re such a baby. You always get worried over
nothing.” Of course, the sky’s the limit: Dad can be downright mean, or even
abusive. But we don’t need to illustrate the more dramatically invalidating
responses at this time; the subtle ones are sufficient. And by “subtle,” I mean
not obvious: Don’t underestimate the impact of subtle invalidations. For
invalidation to be toxic, it doesn’t have to be dramatic—it only has to be
habitual. Subtle and habitual can do the trick, at least in susceptible
individuals.

One of the diagnosable conditions associated with growing up in a toxically

invalidating environment is borderline personality disorder. At least where I
was educated, Marsha Linehan was regarded as the guru on the topic, having
written a popular treatment manual for professionals.1 It’s also worth noting
that in 2011 Marsha came out of the closet to talk about her own personal
experience suffering from the condition, complete with suicide attempts, self-
mutilation, and necessary but not-so-therapeutic psychiatric hospital
admissions.2 And for those who learned about borderline personality from
Fatal Attraction or some other Hollywood gig, don’t overemphasize the
whole self-mutilation thing, nor the psycho-violent aspect. Many very
disturbed people don’t hurt themselves or anyone else.
Marsha explains in her manual that kids who are born sensitive and
temperamental may actually elicit invalidating responses from their
caregivers. One possible dynamic is that a sensitive kid may often trip false-
alarms, so to speak, teaching the parent that the kid is overreacting (at least
from the parent’s perspective). So, when the kid experiences distress, the
parent is susceptible to respond as above: “Oh, honey, you’re such a baby.
You always get worried over nothing.”
The problem is that regardless how unreasonable it seems to the parent,
the child is truly experiencing distress. As Marsha explains, disregarding the
kid’s subjective experience impairs her ability to learn how to identify her
emotions. She feels scared, but you’re suggesting to her that what she’s
feeling is not fear, or at least it shouldn’t be. She can become confused about
what fear even is, not to mention its nuances.
If one doesn’t learn how to assess her emotions, she sure as heck isn’t
going to learn how to cope with them on her own. What you end up with is a
kid (and later, an adult) who has two primary options when stressed: (a)
emotional retreat/isolation; and (b) tantrum/overreacting. Option (a) is often
realized when the person does not feel that the world will understand
(because it hasn’t so far!). Option (b) may be realized when the stress builds
to unmanageable levels—the threshold for which will be relatively low in
such persons. The kid (or later, adult) is going to be heard one way or
another.
If these emotional examples feel a bit ambiguous, Marsha also provides
an example of one of my favorite types of invalidation that may be more
apparent:

Kid: “I’m thirsty!”

Dad: “No you’re not; you just had a drink.”

There really is a time in every kid’s life when he’s not perfectly sure what to
make of fundamental subjective experiences, even thirst or hunger.
Omnipotent Dad telling him that he’s not thirsty or hungry really can be
disorienting if he is indeed having such an experience. And if we can be
confused about thirst or hunger, imagine how easily we can be become
confused about something that is inherently more ambiguous, such as scared,
dizzy, or humiliated.
If you’re still skeptical, realize that kids aren’t even sure sometimes
whether they have been physically harmed. I don’t spend that much time
around children, but I’ve observed many times where one is running and
falls, pauses, and looks up at the nearest parent to get his/her reaction before
crying or not. Human behavior is usually more complicated to sum up in a
phrase, but I believe that one facet to this behavior is that the kid is honestly
not sure how to assess the severity of his situation. “Am I hurt? Should I be
freaking out here?” And we all know that (within reason) the crying is
determined as much by the adult’s reaction as it is by the kid’s physical
trauma. A cheerful “Oopsie daisy! Look who busted his ass!” is much less
likely to elicit crying than an hysterical “OH MY GAWWWWD!!! MY BAY-
BEEEEEE!!!” Hell yeah, we teach our kids our neuroses.
Another book from my shelf that actually devotes significant time to
emotional validation is Michael Hollander’s Helping Teens Who Cut. It’s a
great book, but I feel the title is somewhat unfortunate for my selfish
purposes here. That is, again, it may give some readers the impression that
invalidation and cutting go hand-in-hand. They don’t.
In any event, in addition to not learning how to comprehend one’s own
emotions, Michael adds that another “consequence of an invalidating
environment is that kids feel that life’s problems should be easy to solve.”3
Most of us know that in reality they are not, although we may see other
people’s problems as relatively frivolous. So, in addition to creating
confusion about emotions and feelings (and how to cope with them), the kid
feels inept. Inept makes her different, isolated, corroborating her suspicion
that “no one understands me.” Self-esteem takes a hit, because she’s being
taught that others must be more capable.
Of course, isolated incidents of invalidation are unlikely to have long-
lasting effects. Everyone is insensitive to their child at times, especially
during those moments when we’re preoccupied with ourselves because
we’re distressed, say, because of the layoffs at work or the engine light
having come on in the car today. The problem is that, in many families, these
invalidating interactions don’t occur in isolation. They are often habits, ways
of life, indicative of the parent’s own pathology that they inherited from their
parents (via both nature and nurture, but the emphasis is on the nurture here).
I should also point out that although I’ve been focusing on negative inner
experiences, validation is just as important in reference to positive inner
experiences. It’s not qualitatively different and can be just about as toxic
when we disregard our kid’s excitement, feelings of achievement, crushes on
classmates, and the like.
You don’t have to spy on a family at home to observe parents taking it
up a notch; it happens with alarming frequency in public. For example, at the
grocery store, I’ll hear a kid expressing what seems to be an innocuous
request, but the insensitive, preoccupied parent responds by ordering him to
“Shut up! I don’t care what you want; I told you that blah blah blah …” Or,
even worse, the parent swats or squeezes the kid, fingernails digging in real
good, enough to where pain was clearly inflicted. I saw this just the other
day, the most disturbing part being that the kid didn’t even really respond. It
looked like those nails had to hurt, but he seemed kinda used to it, sitting
there in the shopping basket chair. I wondered what it’s like at home for that
kid, as opposed to being in a crowded public place.
To take it up many more notches, off the charts, some psychologists
regard incestuous sexual abuse as the ultimate invalidating experience. This
is not a myth or the product of Hollywood dramatics. Often when a dad or
stepdad abuses his daughter, he prepares her first by arguing that he needs to
do it in order to teach her about sex or that it is otherwise “good for you.”
Others tell their victims that they really want to have sex, too, but that they
just don’t understand their desire yet, that sort of thing. I know sexual abuse
is one of the least pleasant phenomena on Earth to think about, even
academically, but it’s revealing to consider how kids of different ages might
experience abuse differently. Someone in their mid to late teens is unlikely to
fall for that manipulative shit the perp is arguing. Now, her victimization may
be the most disturbing thing that has ever happened to her before, but the
flavor of the disturbance will be different from that of a younger kid, less
complex. With the younger child, the parent still has much more authority,
including over the child’s own inner experience. By no means am I
suggesting that the kid somehow enjoys the experience simply because Dad
said she should. I am saying that the younger kid is less able to own her own
feelings. Even though dad may not be able to convince her that the abuse is
good, he can create an incredible amount of emotional confusion about
what’s going on. An older kid or adult victim knows how wrong it is. It’s
pure violation, without the added confusion about the violation—the
invalidation about what’s happening.
Worth adding, the cliché in psychological treatment circles is true, that
emotional pain associated with abuse can hurt worse than the physical pain.
Young victims are sometimes able to conjure the courage to break their vow
of secrecy with the perpetrator and go to someone else for help, like another
family member, often the mother. However, with surprising regularity, the
mom or stepmom or aunt or whoever will be overwhelmed with denial (or
something) and react by telling the kid she has a wild imagination or even
punish the kid for lying. I’m not making this up for dramatic effect: When
patients or whoever are telling you these stories, they often don’t cry when
they disclose the actual abuse, but they lose it when they tell you the part
about mom not believing them.
Perhaps you’re on board with this business of how emotional invalidation
can create an emotionally disturbed adult. Now try bearing with a little
psycho-hocus-pocus for a moment: Many psychologists will go as far to
argue that chronic invalidation can prevent one from developing a cohesive
sense of self. Now, I’m not going to pretend I have an adequate synopsis of
what the “self” is; there are entire books on the topic, none of which I have
read, at least entirely. And certainly, philosophers have as much right to
define the self as psychologists. That said, one psychologist, Marsha,
believes that

Emotional consistency and predictability, across time and similar

situations, are prerequisites of identity development.
Unpredictable emotional lability leads to unpredictable behavior
and cognitive inconsistency, and consequently interferes with
identity development.

So, early invalidation renders one emotionally volatile because she cannot
properly assess her emotions and subsequently cope with the bad ones
through self-soothing. Ergo, her emotional behavior has been erratic in the
past, and will continue to be so in the future. Insofar as one’s “self” is
defined by emotional, cognitive, and behavioral coherence across time,
identity is indeed disturbed.
David Shapiro, in this old-timey, kinda-but-not-too Freudian book from
the 1960s, Neurotic Styles, treads these waters as well, and somewhat
poetically, to boot. There’s a whole chapter on what he calls the
impressionistic cognitive style. Shapiro doesn’t discuss the invalidating
environment per se, but I don’t think anyone was at the time. Nor do we talk
so much about the impressionistic style; we call it borderline or histrionic
personality or traits, depending on details.
It’s fascinating to hear him discuss how such patients cannot own their
emotions, identify with them, or otherwise integrate them into their selves.
For example, such individuals

do not quite regard the content of their [anger] outbursts as

something they have really felt, but rather as something that has
been visited on them or, as it were, something that has passed
 through them … [One patient,] during the period of regret
immediately afterwards or later, [referred to it] as a mysterious
thing, something akin to a seizure, a strange passion that had got
her in its grip; in short, it was not something that she felt.4

Paradoxically, impressionistic persons may seem to present with

simultaneously intense but superficial emotions. Exaggerated, but somehow
shallow. Another of Shapiro’s patients had “periodic stormy, hysterical
outbursts of anger,” primarily towards her husband:

On one occasion, she is astonished that he tells her that he cannot

put up with it. “He really means it,” she says in amazement and
adds, “But I don’t mean the things I say.”5

Shapiro is clear that impressionistic reasoning has nothing to do with

intelligence, or lack thereof; everyone uses it sometimes, as they should.
Sometimes, impressions are all we have. But some folks can hardly
scrutinize their emotions and be skeptical of them at all, so they are readily
carried away, often ruled by fleeting feelings and whim. When particularly
pervasive, his or her

romantic, fantastical, nonfactual, and insubstantial experience of

the world also extends to his experience of his own self. He does
not feel like a very substantial being with a real and factual
history.6

It’s the damnedest thing: I’ve met many people from chronically invalidating
environments who assert, oddly but frankly, “I don’t really remember my
childhood,” and they truly will have great difficulty telling you anything
substantive about the experience. They deny having been overtly traumatized,
as one might suspect, but still remain wholly unable to describe what
existence was like until some time in their teens or so. These must be
examples of what Shapiro was describing. I think he’s suggesting that the
person has no coherent identity (or didn’t for a while) because they have
always been unable to experience their emotions as part of themselves. I
know, it’s very psychobabbly, but I think there’s something legitimate going
on here. One can lack substance because there hasn’t been much of a common
thread—that is, of emotional coherence and predictability.
It also needs to be clarified that despite using words like “self,” we’re
talking about brains. During our formative years, our brains are indeed
forming and therefore sensitive to early experiences. Some of the most
dramatic instances of so-called neural plasticity include the brains of those
who have, for example, lost their eyes to accidents early in life. In such
cases, the parts of the brain that are supposed to process other senses, such
as hearing, compensate by using more brain tissue than is typical, literally
commandeering those areas that had been destined for sight.
It’s fair to speculate that other experiences besides hearing and vision
—such as self-esteem and a sense of self—are also mediated by particular
brain areas or mechanisms. And just like those brain areas/activities
intended for hearing and vision, if they are not stimulated properly during
development, including by the seemingly trivial interactions with our parents,
they will not form correctly. (And for the record, neuropsychologists and the
like now believe that the “formative years” actually extend into early
adulthood, that is, the early twenties, at least in some respects.)

Of course, invalidation does not merely occur between parents and growing
children, although these are the most formative instances. Adults can
invalidate other adults, whether it be boss to employee, friend to friend,
stranger to stranger, or husband to wife. Opportunities for invalidation (or,
optimistically, validation) are sprinkled throughout our days any time we’re
interacting with another person. Unfortunately, in America, invalidating the
suffering of others is a pastime, right along with apple pie and Chevrolet.
Rumor has it that the town in which I live, Austin, Texas, has some of
the most intense cedar pollen levels on Earth, at least during the winter
months, December through March-ish. In places where it’s particularly bad
you can literally see clouds of green dust floating eerily in the air, a ghostly
specter, lurking for victims, like something out of a Stephen King book. The
“Green Death,” I call it. After a major emission, you may find that your car
has been painted green by the Death, so that you can write and draw pictures
in it with your finger—if you dare. Indeed, some people, like me, react quite
violently to this horrible tree’s discharge, describing it as ever bit as bad as
a full-on case of the flu, incapacitating and making one fearful of cracking a
window in their home, not to mention the prospect of going outdoors. A drag,
because it’s not really cold here in winter.
Despite the seriousness of the problem, you will often overhear
conversations such as this throughout winter:

Austin: “Hey, do you want to go out for a couple beers

later?”
David: “Man, I’d love to; thanks for asking, but I’m
feeling pretty sick today. I think I’m just gonna
stay in and watch the game.”
Austin: “Ahhh, c’mon! It’s probably just allergies!”

Instead of offering any validation or sympathy, people try to diagnose the

condition, and then behave as if this somehow solves the problem.
Apparently, in Austin, Texas calling it “allergies” is somehow supposed to
make it hurt less. Indeed, the diagnosis seems to convey, “Well, despite how
you feel, you’re not actually infected by germs. You need to buckle down and
keep on the move. We have shit to do, here in the A.T.X.!”
Of course, it shouldn’t matter what it’s called—it could be voodoo;
identifying it as such doesn’t change the subjective experience. How about
something like “Oh; I’m sorry you’re feeling sick. Yeah, you look kinda beat-
up; do you want to just stay in tonight? We could get a movie …” Personally,
I’m really appreciative of this latter, more sensitive and personable reaction;
just typing it like that makes me feel good! But, alas, I find it’s a bit of a pipe
dream to expect others to respond as such.
Another one of the more common invalidating responses that we use a
lot in America is when someone alludes to a significant experience from his
past that continues to have relevance in the present:

Jerry: “I still have a hard time being in the same

room with Douglas, ever since he hit on Sara
at that Christmas party.”
 Daniel: “Oh, C’mon! That was five years ago!”

I’m not encouraging the habit of holding grudges, but neither should we
simply disregard violations simply because a large amount of time has
passed. Maybe Jerry doesn’t trust Douglas, and maybe he shouldn’t. If I was
Jerry, I would wonder if Daniel has issues himself, like if he’s afraid of
conflict.
Another subtle—but significantly invalidating experience—occurs
when someone tells us about an exciting experience she’s had, such as a
vacation in the mountains, and our reflex is to immediately respond by
sharing a similar experience of our own. Instead of sharing her story with
her, we unconsciously (or even consciously) try to trump it by telling a better
story of our own:

Mary: “Hey, I just got back from Colorado; it was so

beautiful. The weather was perfect and we got
really close to an elk!”
Bob: “Cool! Yeah, I love the mountains. I got to go
to the Andes last year when I was touring
South America. A rare spectacled bear got into
our tent and ate my toothpaste! I got its picture
—didn’t you see my profile pic? It looks like
it has rabies! Ha ha ha!”

I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t tell your bear story; of course you
should. But slow down! Consume more about Mary’s elk first. Ask if
anything else interesting happened, or just how the rest of the trip was. Give
her a moment to be excited about her experience—and you be excited about
her experience with her—before you trump it with yours. And sure, one
might even consider not trumping it at all. Bring up your story on some other
occasion altogether, or maybe never! I know, that’s a pretty lofty suggestion. I
bet hardly anyone ever does such a thing, maybe Ghandi or the Dalai Llama
or something.
Even less sensitive of us, someone takes a risk and shares a story of
acute emotional distress, and we respond similarly:
 Mary: “I’m sorry I haven’t called in a while. I’ve
been pretty depressed since Rover died. It’s
weird: I’m lonely, but I don’t have the energy
to get together with my friends.”
Bob: “Yeah, I hear ya’ … I’m still not over my
Fluffy myself. But instead of withdrawing, I
find myself going out too much! Seems like
I’ve been drinking more than ever, and I’m in
some sort of rut.”

I used to pretend that maneuvers such as this were somehow empathic, that
sharing a similar experience of my own was somehow soothing to the person
who started the conversation. But now I believe it’s often self-centered.
Instead of exploring the other person’s distress with her, we use it as an
opportunity to vent our own frustrations. And, at the same time, we’re
backing away from the uncomfortable position in which we find ourselves,
that is, someone needing us to tend to them. Sure, some of the content of the
conversation suggests it is deep and personable, but it’s actually kinda
superficial, a ping-pong match of sorts—indeed, there can be something
almost competitive about it. I realize now this isn’t what Mary needs. She
needs Bob to say something more like:

Bob: “I’m so sorry! Rover was wonderful; I know

y’all were close. It sounds really disorienting,
to know what you need to do to feel better, but
to be unable to do that. Do you want to get
together and mope with me later? I’ll drive
and buy, if you’ll let me take you out.”

This response is more empathic because Bob makes it clear he heard Mary
and he conveys that he’s aware she probably has more to say than her first
line. He doesn’t use her moment as an invitation to get attention for his own
distress. Instead, he returns the conversation to her, inviting her to say more.
He does what he can to make it as easy as possible for Mary to say “yes”
about getting together, realizing that she probably needs to but doesn’t feel
like it. And sure, later, when they mope together over dinner and brewskis,
he can bring up his dead Fluffy.
The more courage it takes Mary to share her inner experience, the more
significant Bob’s insensitive reaction becomes. And the more it hurts Mary
when Bob invalidates her, the more it suggests she was invalidated as a
child. If Mary’s parents had validated her well during childhood—producing
a healthy validated brain in adulthood—she is more likely to see that Bob
isn’t the answer right now. She’ll move on, and maybe share her experience
with Dana instead.
However, if Mary was invalidated often growing up and now has an
adult brain that is wired for insecurity, she is much more likely to be
sensitive to Bob’s comments and feel disoriented as a result of the failed
interaction. She may wonder, consciously or subconsciously: “Am I
overreacting? Was it appropriate for me to even tell Bob about Rover? He’s
not helping! I just can’t be soothed … or maybe I don’t deserve to be … No
one understands me … they never have.” I used to scoff at the notion that
adult pain often stems from unresolved childhood pain, but I don’t anymore.
That shit’s real, man. Stuff hurts not just because it hurts now, but also
because it hurt back then. Yes, our adult experiences often tap our childhood
ones, both pleasures and pains.
Frustrated and worse off than when she started, Mary goes to a bar. She
gets drunk and laid because she needs to be touched … but then wakes up the
next morning in some strange apartment, feeling more disoriented than ever.
Tugging cigarette butts from her hair and wiping mascara dingleberries from
her eyes, she surveys the room, realizing for the first time that her homme du
jour is a skanky, Jersey Shore-type, way too young for her, even if he had
been perfect otherwise. He’s currently comatose, face down, a gigantic tribal
tattoo between his muscular, sunburned shoulders. Another tattoo—text of
some sort—is uncomfortably placed in the lower of his back, just above his
silk boxer-briefs. She doesn’t dare read it, already resenting his seed inside
of her more than she can hardly endure. The sounds of someone else fucking
are making it through the wall from the next room. Mary cringes, then spies
her own panties hanging off the corner of the aquarium right next to the bed
where she’s been sleeping all night. There are no fish—only some kind of
fucking lizard in there! It’s so big! Who has such a thing for a pet?!
You think I’m goofin’ around, but I’m serious! If you don’t want your
daughter to end up as an impulsive one-night stander, you better learn how to
pay healthy attention to her when she’s little! That’s how that ball gets rollin’.
Next thing you know, panties danglin’ from some douchebag’s iguana cage,
pullin’ cigarette butts and bottle caps from her hair.
Even another way to invalidate another’s distress is to reflexively offer
advice. Staying with the deceased pet example, we often say something like
“Rover died? Oh … well, you should get another dog! There are so many to
adopt—you can rescue one from a shelter; Rover would be happy.”
Getting another pet in the wake of just losing one is not a lot different
than going to a bar and getting laid. But this is the American Way. We don’t
like to suffer, we don’t like to see suffering, and we don’t like to talk about it.
We’d rather sweep it under the rug and replace it, sometimes before anyone
even notices.
Michael Hollander again:

The real shame here is that [one’s] advice might be right on the
money. [But,] For whatever the reason—maybe it’s a design flaw
—people are more willing to accept advice after they feel they’ve
been understood.7

Patients often tell Michael in therapy, “the advice was pretty good, but the
timing was terrible.”8 I see! We don’t know exactly why—perhaps it is
indeed a design flaw—but yes, a person in emotional pain needs that pain to
be acknowledged and experienced before they can move on and benefit
from advice, regardless of how valuable that advice is. Pain needs to be felt,
to run its course. Only then can one begin to address the more practical
issues of coping. Feel first, then cope. Let’s just call it a design flaw.
As I hope you suspect, this all takes a lot of practice. Once you begin to
train yourself to not respond with advice, for example, you may find yourself
instead imposing your own interpretations and hypotheses regarding what
others are telling you—while they’re in the process of trying to tell you
theirs. For example, Jerry up there may have approached Daniel about
Douglas more like this:

Jerry: “Man, I’m not looking forward to running into

Douglas. There’s something about him that
 bothers me. It’s hard for me to put my finger on
—-
Daniel: “Ahhhh, yeah, he talks too much about himself;
he doesn’t know when to shut-up!”
Jerry: “Well, yeah, but there’s something else—
Daniel: “Is it that way he always interrupts you when
you’re trying to talk?”

In theory, interrupting someone to finish his thought for him might work, if
you get his thought right. Sure, he might feel that you have the capacity to see
his side of the story, although he may remain annoyed that you interrupted him
and didn’t let him speak for himself. But, in the also likely event that you
don’t verbalize his concern accurately while interrupting him, you just create
more distance and isolate him.
Instead, postpone the interpretations until the speaker feels heard. Let
them tell you; don’t think you’re a fancy psychologist because you’ve got it
all figured out. The irony is that being a good psychologist is more about
listening first and then asking good questions than it is about figuring stuff out
for patients and just telling them. If you do figure out an issue, you don’t have
to specify it yourself: You can ask even more questions to help the speaker
come to the realization on his own! In counseling, as with emotional
validation proper, we need to “Think ‘mirror’ and not ‘mind reader.’”9
Before we switch gears and finish up, we have to acknowledge that
there are limits to the validating process—there is such a thing as being
reckless about it. To illustrate with an extreme example, we don’t validate
the paranoid delusions of psychotic patients. Now, we can validate their
feelings of fear associated with the delusion, but we have to be careful not
to validate the delusion per se. We can assert that it would indeed be
frightening if the FBI was following us, but we simply find it hard to believe
that they are. Of course, we encounter similar but less extreme instances
outside of the state hospital. Sometimes our friends really are misperceiving
reality, and relentlessly validating their experience without challenging their
perceptions may not be productive in the long run. But we can challenge them
with sensitivity. “Gentle confrontation,” I like to call it.
Also, some people really can be too demanding for comfort. My lecture
was not intended to encourage you to advertise every feeling you have in
every context. That’s called “dramatic,” or clinically, histrionic. Don’t do
that, either; it’s annoying as crap. As with most things, moderation is key.
People who cope with their neediness by excessively demanding attention
will only push others away, perpetuating the cycle of neediness.

I gather that the acknowledgment and expression of suffering are more

acceptable in some countries outside of the U.S.A. While on internship at a
state hospital, I was moved by a story that our Nepalese psychiatrist told one
day during our weekly psychopharmacology brown-bag seminar. I apologize,
Nepal, if I butcher the story, but I believe I can recount the essence fairly
accurately. He explained that following a death in his community, the family
of the deceased was essentially locked up together in a single-room dwelling
in which they had to remain together for a period of several days.
Communication between the grieving and the outside world was not
permitted. It was just you and your loved ones, along with the conspicuous
absence of the deceased.
The apparent goal of this seemingly peculiar arrangement was to permit
—perhaps more like force—the grieving parties to indeed grieve, thoroughly
and without reservation. Without television, telephones, or tele-anything else,
the persons in the dwelling are not distracted and have little choice but to
process, privately and together, what has transpired. I’m not sure how these
must have unfolded in Nepal, but it’s interesting to imagine how they might in
America. I wonder if the average American could even endure such a thing!
Sure, we have funerals, but I always sense that the energy in American
funerals is spent trying to deny that the person is actually gone, as opposed to
just soaking it in, like they apparently do in some places in Nepal.
More subtly, following a therapy session with an adolescent recently, I
was briefing his mother on her son’s progress. She herself was upset about
something unrelated, disclosing through tears that her brother was dying from
cancer. Mom was from Italy, where much of her family, including the ailing
brother, continued to live. She was obviously distressed because she was
separated from them, but the distress was compounded, she explained,
because she felt emotionally constricted and isolated in America. Back in
Italy, I learned, it is much more acceptable to discuss one’s emotional
distress with others. But here, she felt it was inappropriate, like she was
asking too much. It makes me so sad to even type that.
And, as usual, we don’t have to contemplate the extreme circumstances
of death and funerals to see how suffering is shunned here. An acquaintance
of mine, Joanna Barbera, is a charismatic and talented songstress here in
Austin. We were chatting recently after one of her shows, and she seemed a
little uncomfortable because of recent comments—that apparently felt, at
least a little, like criticism—that her music is “sad.” At some point, I tried to
comfort her: It’s not your responsibility to make the world feel good. In fact,
if people get sad at your music, you didn’t do that to them; you just catalyzed
their contact with a sadness they brought to your show. Same goes for books
like this one. I suspect many people would feel sad at times while reading it.
But I’m not making you sad. Don’t blame me or Joanna; blame the cosmos.
We’re just describing the way things seem to us. If it makes you sad, then you
probably agree, on some level.
And again, when did feeling sad become so wrong? Paradoxically, if
we just give ourselves permission to be sad, it eventually feels better than
when we try to cope by suppressing the sadness. Otherwise, we
psychologists believe that the meta-emotions, that is, the sadness and/or
anxiety—if not shame—that we feel about our primary sadness or anxiety
makes matters even worse. And the irony is that these emotions-about-
emotions are not even necessary. Western culture forces them upon us, not
Nature. We should just be sad sometimes, as God intended, without having to
feel guilty for feeling that way.

1 Linehan, M. M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. New
York: Guilford. The info I’m discussing comes from the introductory pages 2-4.
2 Carey, B. (2011, June 23). Expert on mental illness reveals her own fight. New York Times. Retrieved
from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/health/23lives.html
3 Hollander, M. (2008). Helping teens who cut (p. 71). New York: Guilford.
4 Shapiro, D. (1965). Neurotic styles (p. 126-127). New York: Basic Books.
5 Ibid., p. 123.
6 Ibid., p. 120.
7 Helping Teens Who Cut, p. 53.
8 Ibid., p. 54.
9 Ibid., p. 141.
 Notes

THE NOTES BELOW include elaborations and more complete citations in

reference to the epigraphs throughout this book (that is, the quotations that
introduce each chapter, as well as those in the introductory text of the book).

INTRODUCTION
Neider, C. (Ed.). (2000). The autobiography of Mark Twain (pp. 326-
327). New York: Perennial Classics. Twain’s autobiography was
published posthumously, by his design: “The very reason that I speak
from the grave is that I want the satisfaction of sometimes saying
everything that is in me instead of bottling the pleasantest of it up for
home consumption” (ibid., p. 326).

Rawlings, G. B. (Ed. & Trans.). (2009). Pascal’s pensées; or, thoughts

on religion (p. 36 and p. 7). Charleston, SC: Bibliolife. (Original work
published 1670). The Pensées is an unfinished, somewhat unorganized
collection of notes that Pascal wrote towards the end of his life “in the
intervals of painful and prostrating illness” (ibid., p.4). I’ve taken the
liberty to combine two non-adjacent pensées, but I feel this is
appropriate, given the disorganized nature of the work and the apparent
congruence between the two.

CHAPTER 1
Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death (p. 50). New York: The Free
Press.

CHAPTER 2
 The quote is popularly attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, but I haven’t
been able to find the precise source. Also note that a popular variation
states “the bang” instead of “a bang.” See, for example, the Academy’s
Facebook post on August 13, 2014, celebrating his birthday. I don’t
know which way it’s supposed to be, but I prefer “a.”

CHAPTER 3
All Bible quotes in this book are from the New American Standard
Bible, Reference Edition. (1975). Chicago: Moody Press. I still own
the very same Bible I read growing up, and it still gets a lot of use.

CHAPTER 4
Meyers, J. (2000). Edgar Allen Poe: His life and legacy (p. 89). New
York: Cooper Square Press.

Maugham, S. (2004). The painted veil (p. 172). New York: Vintage
International.

Of course, the title of this chapter is the famous line from: Hendrix, J.
(1967). Are you experienced? [Recorded by The Jimi Hendrix
Experience]. On Are you experienced? [Vinyl record]. London: Track
Records.

CHAPTER 5
Washington, H. A. (Ed.). (1854). The writings of Thomas Jefferson (v.
7, book 2, p. 284). Washington, DC: Taylor & Maury. Retrieved via
Google books, http://books.google.com

CHAPTER 6
Muir, M. & George, R. (Writers). (1990). You can’t bring me down.
[Suicidal Tendencies]. On Lights … Camera … Revolution! US: Epic.

CHAPTER 7
The Denial of Death, p. 282-283.
CHAPTER 8
Lucretius. (2007). Lucretius, from de rerum natura (On the nature of
things). (W. H. Brown, Trans.). In C. Hitchens (Ed.), The portable
atheist: Essential readings for the nonbeliever (p. 2). US: Da Capo
Press.

CHAPTER 9
Camus, A. (1989). The stranger (M. Ward, Trans.; p. 69). New York:
Vintage International. (Original work published 1942).

CHAPTER 10
Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith (p. 78-79). New York: W. W.
Norton.

CHAPTER 11
de Mello, A. (1988). One minute wisdom (p. 103). New York: Image
Books.

APPENDIX
Watts, A. (2000). Still the mind (p. 43). Novato, CA: New World
Library.
 Acknowledgements

THANKS SO MUCH, FRIENDS, for reading drafts or portions of my book and

being gentle but compelling with your criticisms: Madison “Smeller” Lowry,
Lewis “Pops” Hussing, Matthew D. Arnold, Lee E. Davis, his excellent
parents “Izzy” and Walt Davis, Aaron “Wally” Wallace, Steve Ilardi, Lance
Myers, Jessieca Melendez, and “Battlestar Gailactica” Gresham.
And you too, Donald “Grumpa” Skrabanek, now resting in peace. After
you were done, you told me that you believe in more of a “cycle of life.” You
were vague but passed away soon thereafter, before we had a chance to talk
about it, just a few days before your youngest daughter’s wedding. We had
the wedding anyway; I like to think that’s what you were talking about.
Spencer and Brittan: You are my family. If it wasn’t for you, your
sanctuaries, and your camaraderie, I really may have stepped off some sort of
deep end.
Thanks, too, Mom and Dad. It’s obviously been rough at times but, all
said and done, I’m glad y’all made me happen.
Hook ’em!
 About the Author

David is a licensed clinical psychologist in Austin, Texas specializing in

forensic evaluation (juvenile probation, competency to stand trial, and the
insanity defense). His formal education is from the University of Texas at
Austin (B.A., Psychology; M.A., Neuroscience) and the University of Kansas
(Ph.D., Clinical Psychology). While at Kansas, David earned the Irving-
Handelsman Graduate Student Award for teaching introductory psychology
courses and statistics. More recently, he has taught forensic psychology at St.
Edward’s University in Austin. When not working, he likes being outdoors,
spending time with friends, barbecuing, cycling/jogging, spectating sports,
and watching boring foreign movies.