ROMAN WOLFE 2: Classroom Terror

Dear Diary, What do you say to someone who asks you how many people you’ve killed? What if that person with the curious mind is your ten year old daughter? What if your daughter has seen you kill viciously, but in self-defense? Do you ignore her or lie to her when you’ve always tried to be honest with her? Is answering with a lie better than the truth? I thought it was, but, luckily, I didn’t have to lie. I kept my response short, bland, generalized. I simply told Grace that I had killed, in self-defense, when I was in the Vietnam War and let it go at that,─ no details, no heroic stories, no showing of medals and no bragging. I wasn’t proud of what I did in Vietnam, though other, higher ranking, military people were. Was all the killing worth it? Not to me. Not to the dead, nor to the amputees, nor to the physically and mentally wounded, not to the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) victims, nor was it worth the civil strife in America. I told Grace that, in my opinion, Vietnam wasn’t worth saving from the communists; not at the cost of over fifty-eight thousand American lives. The world is littered liberally with unjust opinions─ perhaps mine is one of them─ and lies, even in the bible-thumpers. Truth and justice are often lost in the shuffle and complexity of everyday life, while lies, much too often, become tools of everyday life. It’s nice to think the best of people, but being realistically honest is more important to me. So accepting lies, fantasies and/or myths, that encourage self-deception, and demand a rigid, unquestioning mind-set, without proof, is a life I can’t live. There definitely are atheists in foxholes; they fight just as hard and die just as easily as anyone else. The good may die young, but the honest die bravely without religious lies burning their tongues. I cannot believe that an ancient storybook (like the Bible), in which religious mythology is interpreted differently all over the world, should be the standard for guiding one’s modern life. Logically, it’s like asking millions of people to still believe that the universe operates as it is said to have operated in a book that was written two thousand years ago, and to believe this voluntarily, unquestioningly, without regard to two thousand years of technical and scientific progress. It requires a mentality that’s capable of vast, self-imposed ignorance, a mind-set with the ability to deny the immense strides in progress and knowledge that science has made during two millennium and to revere the myriad religious fallacies and myths that have been exposed during those two thousand years of knowledge and progress. So religion, all religions with a supernatural God, to me, are exactly as Richard Dawkins has stated: “Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.” Billions of people believe in a personal God (Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc.). But I think that the existence of a God described by Christians, Jews and Muslims is a world-wide lie; perhaps not a deliberate lie, not even a white lie, but simply a grandiose lie that people both like and need to believe. It’s an example of a lie that people desperately want to believe, despite its irrationalism, despite its lack of proof, despite its nonsense. Ironically and technically, we are all atheists whether we want to accept it or not, because most modern people do not believe in the ancient Gods of Rome or Greece or the Gods of any other early civilizations. We are all atheists when it comes to those Gods. But, to their credit, atheists simply believe in one less God and that God is the God of the Christians, Jews and Muslims. So what gives these religions, that bathe themselves in myth and false pride, the right to decide how modern, knowledgeable people live their lives? Is it coercion? Fear? Intimidation? Heritage? Popular religions are an immense tangle of falsehoods, exaggerations, impossibilities, contradictions, inconceivable fantasies, absurdities, irrational thoughts, out-right lies, revisions, errors of consistency, ineffable thoughts and concepts and, in many cases, just plain nonsense. Religion loves the Aristotelian tradition of articulating opinions, fantasies and myths without requiring any objective support. That’s the only way they can survive. I wonder, how many religions there are in the world? Over one-hundred, maybe? And they all differ in numerous and significant ways, yet each considers itself to be the true advocate of God. That fact itself has the thunderous ring of human ignorance, confusion, error, desperation and centuries of deceitful manipulation, with the end result being millions of lives using guidelines of mythical, ritualized dogma entrenched solidly in most of the world’s societies and cultures. So, I ask myself, what is truth? Perhaps truths and lies are simply evolutionary. Perhaps knowing when to lie and when to be truthful is a characteristic of the human genome, something in the DNA sequence that assists humans to survive; survival of the fittest. Lying convincingly could save someone’s life or the lives of others, whereas telling the truth may get someone killed and vice-versa. Perhaps when it came to evolutionary survival, belief in falsehoods was advantageous. Perhaps so advantageous that religious falsehoods were needed, liked, kept and obeyed without question. Then belief was easy; whatever mom and dad believe is what all their children believe, ad infinitum. But truth, lies and religious myths don’t bother me as much as the fact that I’m uneasy with the knowledge that I can so easily and skillfully kill and that I’ve done it too many times. For me, it’s a disturbing feeling, unrelated to religion, that makes me question my own humanity, even when justified by war or self-defense. But that’s probably as it should be or killing would be much more prevalent. When I’ve killed, I’ve taken away all of a person’s sunny days, all his hopes and dreams. I take away all he has and all that he could have had. I take the most precious thing life has to offer, life itself, and I annihilate it for all eternity. How could I not think about that? How could I not feel guilty about that? I only know a few things for certain─ though I cannot prove them beyond all doubt. One of those things is that God, all Gods, are myths. Perhaps useful myths, but still myths, and another thing I know is that the truth will, many times, not set you free, but rather, it will imprison you physically and/or emotionally. Evil watches us, sometimes invades us and even commands us, especially those of us with major character weaknesses and whose portals are invitingly open to Evil’s invasion. We can each look into ourselves and find that darkness, though few people have that kind of courage. Evil has always been there; it’s a primordial, innate, human characteristic. I also know that evil is immortal, but not omnipotent. It can’t be wounded or killed. It occupies the shell or the husk of a person. It claws, rips, dissolves and destroys the brain’s sanity and the brain’s ability to use logic and reason as guidelines for a happy life. It has been well documented, by physiologists and psychiatrists, that most happy people have important, similar character traits, but that most unhappy people are unhappy in their own unique ways of forming feelings of discontent. But killing a person whose husk evil occupies does not kill the evil. Evil simply finds another shell to occupy and to eventually destroy. And evil has thousands of brothers, sisters, cousins and friends that perform the same function in their struggle against the forces of good.