Skip to main content

At 78

By Carl S ~

This author reached the age of 78 recently. I didn't like 77. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that 78 rpm was the speed of phono records when I first heard music. ( It wasn't until many years later that my ‘first love’ became "stereo" reproduction.)

I feel funny knowing that the people I admire the most have not lived as long as me. Ravel, Carl Sagan, Bach, Bartok, Pasteur, Beethoven and Shostakovich, come to mind. At the age of 75, I asked myself what I would do for the next 25 years of my life, but by then the course had already been decided for me. I had taken the leap from writing letters to the editor into another direction. These I have been sharing with you.

In the beginning, I found FFRF listed in the back of "The God Delusion." After joining that organization, I started receiving Freethought Today, their newspaper. In one issue was a letter from Galen Rose in Maine. What do you know; he was in the local telephone book! Thus began a friendship and continuing contributions to this site.

I remember as a child going to the movies for ten cents, and watching a newsreel of a completely leveled Japanese city. For years I thought it was of one of those destroyed by atomic bombs. Later, I found out about the carpet bombings that were ongoing before the A-bombs. The effects stayed with me. Now it is unimaginable, as my friend pointed out, that we would engage in warfare with either Japan or Germany. As my old army buddy, who was stationed with me in Germany in 1960, reported to me after going there in 2014, "It's hard to believe we ever went to war with those people."

I remember watching, in the 1950's, on a black and white TV, footage from space captured by a rocket with a camera attached - proof that the earth is indeed round. My father and I watched Sputnik go by overhead, from our front lawn. I watched news of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, who remarked, "I didn't see God up there."

These are the most interesting of times. You and I can travel at 60 mph while listening to Baroque music. Talk about time travel! I can pass by a local church built in 1775, wherein for decades believers believed that their illnesses were the result of "sin" and not viruses or unsanitary conditions. The people who lived in Baroque and other periods could never have envisioned our times. And the future holds promise of getting even better, healthier, less ignorant and fearful, as amassing information about reality increases.

I remember an old sign hanging up in a garage, "I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better." I’ve been a believer and I'm a non-believer. Non-believer is much better. I had been celibate for years. It never agreed with me. Now I'm not. Guess which is better. Perhaps I've always been "different;" being bounced from parochial schools to public schools, and even being a one-time victim of a pedophile could make you feel that way. It seems I've always seen things unobvious to the average person. No apologies. Having an actual choice between the two, I think "different" is better, and maybe not just for me. "Different" people make the difference. (For instance, both WizenedSage and I agree: It is only those on the outside of religion who can free those held captive within.)

When I first began to think about those next 25 years, some things stood out. Keep writing, for one. It’s only recently that another choice I made revealed itself: to help save the world through a "women and children first" policy. Women and girls need education everywhere and at all times. They need empowerment, choices, and freedom from male/religious domination. I want to see all women now wearing imposed veils and burkas throwing them off and revealing the hair they are naturally proud to have. I want them to eventually feel very comfortable after doing so. Freeing women changes the world. (I have a report from one of the women’s charities I contribute to: in some African villages, when the women in them became educated and thereby contributors to their families, the rate of domestic violence decreased by 85%.) Everywhere women are freed up there is social progress for the betterment of all. This is a proven fact. And religious tradition is the greatest enemy of their liberation. It must be fought against. And as for children, my readers know how opposed I always will be to childhood indoctrination that keeps them from being curious, questioning, and accepting of their naturally endowed goodness. These are my missions. There is plenty to be done.

Someone suggested that atheists should write their own obituaries. This sounds gruesome to me. But on the other hand, it would keep the survivors from writing crap about a non-believer, implying, among other things, the person "really" believed, etc. So, here's an idea for my obit: Carl S. was an atheist-humanist. Atheist by birth, humanist by choice. Carl is with you no more. "He" has gone to that state before he was born, pre-womb, and becoming once again the elements born of stellar explosions. Don't say that you really knew him, because all that you really knew was the surface, not the person; it’s what 99% of the population accepts. Since this is so, he would like you to know you couldn't possibly “know" your "God" or "Jesus" either. What most people know of him or you yourself is usually hearsay anyhow. Neither will what remains of Carl be in any condition to see, hear, taste, touch, smell, or otherwise "experience" another life. (Lawd knows how this would be interpreted by my wife’s churchgoers. They'll probably still be singing their after-life song of, "I'm gonna find out.") Like another Carl S. (Sagan), "he wanted not to believe, but to know." Go and do likewise.

I'm headed over to the DVD player to look at the seafloor life no other generation knew existed. And I'm taking along a good strong cup of coffee, which I'm really, really, going to enjoy. May there be more power to women and ever more possibilities for the children. May there be less and less of religious power. May it not end with a bang, but with a whimper. Meanwhile...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

The Blame Game or Shit Happens

By Webmdave ~ A relative suffering from Type 1 diabetes was recently hospitalized for an emergency amputation. The physicians hoped to halt the spread of septic gangrene seeping from an incurable foot wound. Naturally, family and friends were very concerned. His wife was especially concerned. She bemoaned, “I just don’t want this (the advanced sepsis and the resultant amputation) to be my fault.” It may be that this couple didn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. It may be that their choice of treatment was less than ideal. Perhaps their home diabetes maintenance was inconsistent. Some Christians I know might say the culprit was a lack of spiritual faith. Others would credit it all to God’s mysterious will. Surely there is someone or something to blame. Someone to whom to ascribe credit. Isn’t there? A few days after the operation, I was talking to a man who had family members who had suffered similar diabetic experiences. Some of those also suffered ea

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Reasons for my disbelief

By Rebekah ~ T here are many layers to the reasons for my disbelief, most of which I haven't even touched on here... When I think of Evangelical Christianity, two concepts come to mind: intense psychological traps, and the danger of glossing over and missing a true appreciation for the one life we know that we have. I am actually agnostic when it comes to a being who set creation in motion and remains separated from us in a different realm. If there is a deistic God, then he/she doesn't particularly care if I believe in them, so I won't force belief and instead I will focus on this one life that I know I have, with the people I can see and feel. But I do have a lot of experience with the ideas of God put forth by Evangelical Christianity, and am confident it isn't true. If it's the case god has indeed created both a physical and a heavenly spiritual realm, then why did God even need to create a physical realm? If the point of its existence is to evolve to pas

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two