Maybe I am one of the poor slobs who was predestined to perdition because I couldn't believe God wasn't really something better than a vindictive hard ass.

(This is me writing to a former little league team mate, Jack, after having caught up with his auto-biographical notes for the graduating class of 1969 which included so many of my grade school classmates from the town in which I grew up and was raised):

I started out at WIU as a music major, but music majors (with vocal emphasis) had to take 24 more credit hours to graduate than did any other major at any of the departments. And anyway, all I wanted to with my music was to play it. So I took the easy way out and switced my major to math, told everyone I would become an actuary upon graduating, and did. Made a lot of money, too, by most peoples' stamdards. Then one day, it hit my like a ton of bricks - I was counting the sick, counting the dead, raising premiums on the aged and the infirm, and helping to design and price manipulative products to be sold by the unscrouplous to the unwary. And now, I am about to begin another iteration of my career, merging my love of making music with fund-raising for 1st responders, village & park district employees, and public education.s AND I SLEEP very well at night. Mark Jack writes back: I am back into playing music too. I have memories of great emotional connection with audiences and really taking people to places they could not otherwise go. So far I have not had that kind of experience. Maybe it was all in my own head, or maybe I lost it or just have not recaptured it. I will keep at it and see what happens. After my message to you I remembered that your father had been a much admired teacher (Math as I recall), but that he had left Streator High a year or two before I started in 1964. So that meant you would have left town before you went to high school and never attended SHS or were in the SHS band. I have a few strong recollections of you, and I recall that you were a really nice guy. Do you remember that Dave Raymond and I used to call you "Walkee" because, as a batter, you would avoid swinging, hoping to get a walk so you could get on base. I wasn't much of a hitter and the only time I ever got on base was on an error or fielder's choice. I have a recollection of you hitting grounders to me once in the infield. So you would have been eleven years old and I was twelve when we played on the same team. I have a twelve year old and it struck me that you were a lot more mature, as I remember you, than he seems to me to be, and I suppose I remember myself as more mature as well. It may be that I don't appreciate the full depth and complexity of my son's inner life, and the interaction he has with his peers may be pretty much what I experienced. What sort of music are you doing? Do you play alone? I play guitar, electric and acoustic, and sing songs from the fifties, and sometimes earlier up to the ninties or so.  It is good that you can make some money doing it. I don't really make much money--just enough to help pay for equipment, gas, strings, my wife's dinner tab if she shows up.  As a judge I felt some ambivalence about being part of some of the injustice that has become law. I justified it because I was acting as a professional, and I felt a certain humility about it that prevented me from substituting my own personal views, rather than professionally determining what the law was and following it. I wasn't certain enough that I was right that I was prepared to nullify the law established by the people, pathetic as the results of democracy sometimes are, and make my own law. Of course I may have just been rationalizing, because there was always plenty of pressure to be a right wing ass hole. If you sentence a guy to a long term in prison, everybody, including the clerks, bailiffs, and the janitors come up and tell you "Good Job!" If you give somebody a break and give him probation nobody says a thing to your face, but you find out people are running your ass down behind your back, and even distoring the facts to make you look even worse. So, all in all, I am glad to be out of the business of dispensing retribution on behalf of an unforgiving and Draconian society. AS I was doing it every day, I didn't even consciously feel any stress or conflict, but after I was out of it I experienced a delayed reaction, and realized I had been internally in dissonance with myself. I had a family to support and five kids to put through college and being a judge provided nicely for those needs. I had lots of free time to spend with the family, and it was well worth the price I paid, but I am relieved to be out of it. From your remarks, it appears that God is something very real to you. I have never had much faith. I have studied a lot about religion and the history of Christianity. I have been trying to sort out those portions of it that are clearly of human origin, as opposed to the things that might actually come from and relate to God. Of course all of it, other than what one might experience in the form of revelation or internal communication from the Holy Spirit,comes from another person, whether it be the Gospels or the letters of Paul, who was a murdering persecuting religious fanatic, before he supposedly was spoken to by the Lord on the road the Damascus. As a Criminal Defense attorney I met a few people over the years to whom the Lord had supposedly spoken, so I am sceptical of the breed, particularly when, like Paul, they have a history of violence for the honor and glory of God. So far the best I can do is to conceive of God as the most perfect idea and entity I can imagine, without the traditional human flaws projected upon him, such as wanting people to bow down and worship him, and punishing people for eternity because they can't believe in him. Maybe I have faith that God isn't just the great feudal baron in the sky, imagined by a midieval society, and coincidentally demanding of his creatures, the same duties owed by vassal to Lord: fealty and obedience. Anyway, that is what my defense will be, if there really is an afterlife and one is judged by the standards of the Reverand Jerry Fallwell. Maybe I am one of the poor slobs who was predestined to perdition because I couldn't believe God wasn't really something better than a vindictive hard ass.  As I am so oft' wont to do, I replied, totally lacking in originality, with the song lyrics from Jethro Tull's Aqua Lung Album (Wind Up): When I was younger and they packed me off to school And they taught me how not to play the game I didn't mind it if they groomed me for success Or if they said that I was just a fool So to my old head master, and to any who cares Before I'm through I'd like to say my prayers I don't believe you,  you've got the whole damned thing all wrong, He's not the kind that you had to wind up on Sundays. So I left there in the morning, with their god tucked underneath my arm, their half-assed smiles, and the book of rules So I asked this God a question,  and by way of firm reply, He said, "I'm not the kind that you have to wind up on Sundays." So you can excommunicate me On my way to Sunday school, let all the preachers harmonize these lines: How can you tell me that I am my father's son When that was just an accident of birth I'd rather look around me, compose a better song 'Cuz that's the honest measure of my worth In your pomp and all your glory You're a poorer man than me as you lick the boots of death born our of fear. When I was younger and they packed me off to school And they taught me how not to play the game I didn't mind it if they groomed me for success Or if they said that I was just a fool So to my old head master, and to any who cares Before I'm through I'd like to say my prayers I don't believe you,  you've got the whole damned thing all wrong, He's not the kind that you had to wind up on Sundays. So I left there in the morning, with their god tucked underneath my arm, their half-assed smiles, and the book of rules So I asked this God a question,  and by way of firm reply, He said, "I'm not the kind that you have to wind up on Sundays." So you can excommunicate me On my way to Sunday school, let all the preachers harmonize these lines: How can you tell me that I am my father's son When that was just an accident of birth I'd rather look around me, compose a better song 'Cuz that's the honest measure of my worth In your pomp and all your glory You're a poorer man than me as you lick the boots of death born our of fear. I don't believe you, you've got the whole damned thing all wrong! He's not the kind, that you have to wind up on Sundays. Jack replies, almost immediately.  Aha!, Thinks I. A KINDRED SPIRIT! I recall hearing Ian Anderson sing that song at the University of Illinois Assembly Hall in the winter of 1971-72. I can understand a person getting angry at the religion and social and political dogmas that have permeated his consciousness. The reason we get angry is that even though we think it through, those ideas are still there working and affecting our emotions, in spite of our efforts to reject them. But the fact is, we humans are social animals and there is very little of us that does not involve interacting with others. Most of what we do, we do to try to impress somebody, and sometimes the people we try to impress are our parents, even a quarter century after their deaths, or some peers we remember from high school, whom we haven't seen in decades. But those folks are there in our imaginations, watching and judging us, and we are still trying to prove we are worthy of their respect and admiration. A person has to make the best of it, and try to get along with the burden of culture that he must carry through life, and perhaps carve some sort of identity and meaning out of the material reality and all the social bullshit. I would like to believe that God, if it exists, is not the personification of all the worst human traits- vindictive, authoritarian, and the greatest imaginable ego tripper. But it is hard to cast off six thousand years of Western Culture, create my own alternative culture, and really believe in it. I think it most likely that when we die our consciousness stops, the molecules in our body are recycled through the biosphere, and that is the end of us. If I am right, I will never know I was right. If I am wrong I will, according to the rules of the wind up God of our culture, be tortured forever for not arriving at a required state of belief. Conventional Wisdom is almost always wrong, so it is probably wrong about the nature of God, and I think it unlikely I will be tortured forever. I try not to feel angry about the disturbing notions my culture has infused into my consciousness. This is the way it has always been in human history. That is just the way we people are. We have to have religion to satisfy our need for cause and effect, and also as a means of social control, to justify the positions of the ruling class and to con the serf class into working their asses off and getting those same asses shot off fighting to protect and expand the holdings of the rulers. We also need the promise of pie in the sky to compensate us for having to eat shit on the earth. Actually, we in this particular time and place in history, have it better than any working serf class has ever had it and we don't have to eat too much shit. So the sensible thing to do is to enjoy this great opportunity we have to experience what life has to offer. I have a nice wife, wonderful kids, access to lots of books, fairly good health for an old fart, and I am retired and will probably never have to work again. My turn to exist and be conscious is about three fourths done, but I still have that one fourth left, and so I will try to savor it before the merry-go-round stops and they haul me off in a box. I think what I am describing here is something like Epicureanism.