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Well, here I go.  Most of my writing on adult subjects  has a strong religious and spiritual subtext.  Recent interactions on the internet have further piqued my fascination with God, god, gods, religion, spiritualism,  humanism, atheism, and various iterations in between. 
 
So much about religion is fascinating, perhaps  nothing more so than the passion it arouses and the level of intolerance  associated with more extreme adherents.   As such, let’s start with a basic  premise and build. 

I posit as follows: Any belief system, whether  devoutly religious or defiantly atheist, that has among its canon a notion of   superiority is inherently flawed and dangerous. For it is only from a position of  superiority that we can set aside empathy and regard another human being as  “lesser.”  And once a person, or  even worse, a creed or culture, takes that first critical step of regarding  another [insert  “person,” “creed,”  “culture,” “race,” “religion,” “sexual orientation,” etc.] as “lesser,” it is
but a small step to declare this same group as less fit-to-live than those  occupying one’s own exalted status.   The remaining step of putting those beliefs into action is but a breath  away - whether it be restricting your child acceptable playmates, strapping a  bomb to a bus, or fomenting a culture of genocide.   They are rooted in the same insidious concepts of singularity and  superiority.

 Ironically, for the overwhelming majority of us,  our religious persuasion is nothing more than an accident of birth.   We make no considered choice but rather adopt with childlike innocence  whatever belief system is passed onto us from our loving parents.   The implications of this are both ironic and powerful.   It is ironic insofar as no religious zealot would ever concede that they  would willingly – if not blindly – have adhered to entirely different belief  system if they had just been born into it.  This would undermine the whole notion  that they were uniquely chosen and anointed.  If so questioned, the zealot would  likely respond with some circular and fatalistic argument that their god had  chosen him/her and their “people.” 
Being born into this faith was no accident.   Of course, the few that actually do chose and change beliefs will lay  claim to even a higher exalted status for themselves and their one true  belief.

 And who could dispute the power of our family,  extended family, and later our peers, to influence the very core of our  beliefs?  We all must accept that
were we raised in a family and extended family that “taught” us to fear, hate,
and, if necessary exterminate, we would all almost certainly adopt and endorse
this “faith.”  Add an insular  element – a component of nearly all extremism – and the potential for the  intrusion of reality is controlled and the ability to dehumanize the heathen  outsider is further assured.


Whether you are religious or not, beware the “monopoly on  salvation” mentality.  Yes, even  an atheist can adopt the same insular and hateful mindset.   Witness the militant atheist who “knows” that there is no god.  He is no less arrogant than the
bible-thumping hate-mongering racist “Christian minster” relegating all but his
select followers to damnation for daring to take another path to salvation.  So dear reader this all comes down to  but one thought – tolerance.  The  debates of god,“his” existence, the truth of religious history, the meaning of  the Bible, the Koran, the Gita, the gnostic texts, etc. are all fascinating  subjects for the most lively and spirited of debates - a debate all religions  should embrace.  In fact, it is  perfectly fine and indeed desirable to embrace and enjoy your own faith.  However, the faith of another need not  threaten our own.  It can in fact  enhance it.  What wonders there are
indeed in the thoughts, teachings, and cultures of others! 

So I offer one aspect of any religion to reject, isolation.   Reject the notion that yours is the one true belief.   Reject the notion that adherents to other religions have some lesser  place before god than you.  And for  God’s sake, reject the notion that you or “your people” have been “chosen”  exclusively for anything.

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Stigma of the Mind

 Were we to walk down the street and observe someone with a
deformed and mangled extremity, would if ever occur to us to comment, “Hey,
check out the loser with the funky hand.”    Similarly, if someone took ill and became riddled with blisters, would we   even think of commenting pejoratively on their appearance?   Of course not, that would be cruel, inhuman, uncivilized.  
 
Yet, from a very early age, most of us are most  assuredly conditioned to comment on another’s intelligence openly and  cruelly.  How easily words like  “stupid, idiot, retard”roll off our lips as if such traits were perfectly fair  game for mockery!  Yet, does this  person have any more choice over their mental capacity than the cripple over his  shortened leg?  Yet somehow many of  us – myself among them –grew up in an environment that somehow strangely attributed some sort of fault to mental shortcomings.   It was okay to be ugly, crippled, sick, and sickly – compassion
abounded.  But don’t dare be  unintelligent!  This was clearly a  fault and shortcoming, and you were fair game for ostracism. 
 
This is assuredly all the more true for mental  illness.  How easy is it to comment
“Oh, never mind them; they’re crazy.”   How easy is it to dismiss someone as “nuts” and even have a laugh at  their expense from a position of righteous superiority? 
This sadly translates how even a compassionate family might regard a  mentally ill child or sibling.  We  hide them; we are embarrassed by them; we treat them as if they, and we, are  somehow at fault.  We find any  encounter with mental illness unbearably awkward and run for the exits.

 How odd is it that we can accept illness or  defect in any other part of the body with no associated stigma yet find no such  compassion for a “defect”in its singularly most complex organ – one in which  even the most minor variation (quantitatively akin to blister on our foot)  manifests itself in a behavior outside of our acceptable norm. 
It makes you wonder how far we have come from deeming the mentally ill as  evil or possessed and hiding them away in a dank  dungeon.

I  have often thought that it would not be all bad if all of us had some personal
encounter with mental illness.  There could be no more humbling yet therapeutic experience.   And perhaps, just perhaps, such an experience would recommend a moment’s  hesitation before words like “fool, idiot, psycho” depart our  lips.
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As parents, there are few lessons more important than that of teaching our children personal responsibility and the importance of good choices.  Indeed, a closing comment in my 2009 children’s book on prejudice deals precisely with judging other by their choices not their appearance.  Yet, it seems that there is a continued effort in society to objectify everything so that almost any bad decision becomes not a matter of choice but simply the result of some addiction or disease that could not have been controlled or avoided.  Once we shift responsibility for our actions to some uncontrollable, we throw individual responsibility right out the window.

It is only a matter of time (or not see below) until some group postulates that we really have no choice at all in anything we do.  Rather, we are all a product of genetics and environment that given a specific set of stimuli  are predestined to make a certain choice under certain circumstances with mathematical certainty – whether it be to help someone or murder them and steal their last dollar, we never really had a choice.   Yet anyone who has ever faced a crisis of conscious, whether succumbing to temptation or resisting, know this intuitively to be untrue and is aware  of a conscious decision one way or the other.  There are good and bad decisions as surely as there are good and bad people.  So let’s all give some thought before we obligingly pigeonhole any behavior – including our own - into some neat diagnosis or addiction that absolves the actor their from actions and consequences.

Epilogue

I was curious so before "publishing" this blog I had a quick look on the web.  Just Google “illusion of free will.”  This theory is nothing new.  Have a look at:

http://www.physorg.com/news186830615.html

“But Cashmore, Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, says that many biologists today still cling to the idea of free will, and reject the idea that we are simply conscious machines, completely controlled by a combination of our chemistry and external environmental forces.”

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First, let me say that I have been depressed and been around those suffering from clinical depression.  I know first-hand how absolutely debilitating and paralyzing it can be. 

This is not meant to be flippant, but I wonder how many of those looking for chemical cures for depression while nonetheless enjoying a fairly opulent lifestyle might benefit from doing some good onto others this holiday season – or any time for that matter.  What might be the therapeutic effect of seeing up close how lucky and blessed we truly are coupled with the feeling of self worth than can only be experienced when helping another human being and experiencing true heartfelt gratitude?  It would also seem to be a whole lot better to have something to do and think about other than one’s own depressed state. 


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On observing human interactions, it seems to me that the the smart people seem to ask the most questions while those less cerebrally-endowned seem to have all the answers.

This may also perhaps explain why those with the answers seem to be perpatually disgruntled while those with the questions walk through life with a constant sense of awe and wonder.  Having all the answers must be both boring and frustrating.
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As some of you may know, one of my hobbies is model building: ships, airplanes, other stuff.  Right now I am building an aircraft carrier model with some help from Lucas.   Sitting on the shelf, awaiting some attention is a “ginormous” model of the Starship Enterprise NCC-1701 (“no bloody a, b, or c”!).   I have ordered some specialty kits for lighting etc., and if I ever start, this will be a long project – and a labor of love.

As I looked at these various pale blue styrene injection-molded parts laid out before me, I began to wonder why on earth I would be relishing such a boyhood project with fifty looming much closer ahead than forty is behind.  Trying to explain the allure of this campy sixties show and its many spawned movies etc. is probably about as easy as explaining why I prefer one style of music over another – impossible; you kind of either “get it” or you don’t.  I can tell you this, I can remember countless evenings with homework etc. behind me and settling in for the late night Star Trek on WPIX 11 and feeling like a was spending a few minutes with friends before lights out.  To some of you this no doubt sounds incredibly lame, i.e., “get a life.”  I could cite statistics on how “Trek” fans tend to be intelligent, educated etc. and have gone on to become great scientists and engineers (witness Stephen Hawking, who has even appeared on TNG), but that would not prove much of anything. 

We Trek fans probably also watch NASA TV, and thrilled to the photos of the Mars rovers.   Most of us probably think that we must push into space despite all the problems on earth “because it’s there,” and because exploring is as natural a part of man’s nature as eating and drinking.   When we stop exploring, we stop living.  Others no doubt think this is nuts and that no foot should step into space while a single mouth on earth remains to be fed.  And you have a compelling argument as well.  However, perhaps more as a matter of faith or instinct, we must always explore for the sake of exploring just as “beauty is its own excuse for being.”

Perhaps the one thing about Trek though that goes beyond science, and exploration, and quirky/campy characters its message of hope and optimism.  Underlying everything Trek is the notion that we will still be around in three hundred years, and we will be a better, kinder, united, and open-minded form of human; that we will come in peace seeking life “in strange new worlds.”  Small-thinking territorial earthly disputes will be a thing of the past and a united earth will venture out compelled by the drive to explore and to learn. . . and to make friends.  Idealist and utopian?  Of course it is!  But why aspire for anything less? 

And of course we still get to kick some Romulan ass from time to time!

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Learn from others and adapt, but also respect your own style and resist changes to it unless you yourself believe that the proposed change improves it.  There are many styles of writing and many do’s and don’ts.   Remember to distinguish dogma – like good grammar – from doctrine like style.  Take for example narration.  The doctrine is that all stories – particularly children’s stories must stick to one style of narration.  Sometimes, it works to take some liberties with this “rule” - for emphasis, for example.  It can sometimes work to blur the distinction between the character and the narrator.  In my latest book, the narrator comments on an annoying teenagerthat always slept late – “because that’s what teenagers do.”  In this case, the narrator is actually slipping into the voice of the main character and expressing the characters disdain.  The true omniscient narrator would not make such a biased remark.  I think it works and that reader effortlessly follows this "slippage."

My point here is stick to your guns if you like the way something unconventional in your writing works.  Don’t let some editor tell you that doctrine is dogma.  After all, it’s your name after the “by”!

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Yes; there is corruption and “ill gotten gains"   Yes, there are people who thrive through the misuse and exploitation of others.  However, I believed now as I believed growing up that this is more the exception than the rule.

I grew up firmly middle class.  There were many friends and families below and above us in the economic strata literally within blocks – if not houses – from us.  As children, we knew intuitively who was "better off" than we were.  If someone’s father (I’m not being sexist, when I grew it t was pretty much the dads who went to work) had a job that involved air travel, particularly international travel, they were in the upper tier.   Some parents worked in tee-shirts, others in suits.  Although there might have been a little envy for the “things” others had, the cars they drove, etc., we never resented people for what they did or what they had.  If someone was educated, worked at a desk or in an office, we were raised to respect their achievements, not disdain them.  We admired those who succeeded and we generally believed that they had earned and deserved what they achieved.  The notion that we should resent people for what they did and what they had would have been entirely foreign to us.  We respected doctors, teachers, lawyers, business owners and whole host of careers as representative of what could be accomplished in our country – some with and others without much formal education.

Somehow, I slept through a cultural transformation.  It seems to me that anyone who has not themself achieved has been given free license to resent and disdain those who have.  The societal assumption seems to be, “you cannot possibly deserve more than I have no matter how hard you have strived and worked for it.”  I do not know where this came from or where it started, but is seems to go hand-in-hand with the entitlement mentality that has become ingrained in our culture - particularly our youth.  It seems having something has increasingly little to do with actually deserving it.

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Clearly it is the lot of every generation to bemoan the music of the generation that follows.  Fine; now it’s our turn.

I will not linger endlessly on this point, but it seems to me that every generation is destined to have its music imprint on it in its critical teen and early twenty years.  And no music is likely to mean the same thing to us again for the rest of our lives.  I have some musical training – training that my children have now outpaced.  I also had the pleasure of growing up and around great friends that were gifted and dedicated musicians.  As such, I was lucky; I had wonderful guides to the music that was evolving around me through the seventies – firmly locked into the progressive rock era.  We listened actively to bands like the Who, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Yes, to name a few (I could go on at greater length, but you get the idea). 

And I use the term actively listened for a reason.  Listening back then was an active process.  Who does not have some memory of picking up a new LP from a great band, running it home – perhaps with some friends and quietly and intently ACTIVELY listening to it - reading the liner notes, checking the line-up, etc.  We would listen again and again, dissect the music, talk about time signatures, guitar riffs, base lines, how “tight” the band was, what influences were present; was this a natural progression from the last album or a new direction?  We were listening to composers and compositions – not just a bunch of songs.  Who can forget their first listen to Tull’s Songs from the Wood. ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery, or Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.  These were more than just songs or pop, they were revelations.   Indeed they were and are timeless.  I am quite certain that someday historians will look upon these works and others like them with the same regard as great classical compositions of old.

I will not attack the current generation’s music, but I do feel extremely lucky to have grown up at a time of such musical giants and genius with a great bunch of friends.  I have also been lucky enough to share some of these masterworks with my own children - and see them actually enjoy them.  I hope it lasts!  Maybe it will even “imprint.”

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