Reading a recent interview with Samuel Wilson Fussell, I was reminded how brilliant his book Muscle is, and it appears that Fussell has no stomach for self-promotion or a literary career. For him, life is about authenticity and pursuing everything the only way he can--through obsession. My favorite part of the interview with Dr. Michael J. Joyner is where Fussell talks about our "rectangular" existence:
7) You are now a hunting guide in Montana is that correct? I realize it is a probably a long story about how this happened but have you again entered a subculture which features intense physical experiences and camaraderie?
Sam Fussell: I am not a hunting guide in Montana. I am a hunter in Montana. And this is why: a man drives his rectangular car into a rectangular supermarket lot. He passes the other rectangular cars on the way to park in his rectangular parking spot. He exits his vehicle and walks to the market. Along the way, he picks up a rectangular shopping cart. He pushes his cart into the supermarket. The supermarket, as a building, is a large rectangle.
The man pushes his cart to the frozen meat section. He eyes the offerings. The meat, be it chicken or beef, is wrapped in a rectangular package.
The man leans forward and selects a rectangular package of meat from the display and proceeds to the check-out line.
He places the meat on the rubber moving counter, the counter in the shape of rectangle. He pulls from his wallet, which is the shape of a rectangle, a bill. The bill is the shape of a rectangle. Though he could have used a debit or charge card. Also the shape of a rectangle.
So why do I hunt? Why am I a subsistence hunter who hunts all of his meat from the woods instead of buying it from the store?
Because life is not rectangular.
Because the meat I eat is earned not with a piece of paper but with my own sweat and work in the woods. Through detective work: tracking animals, learning their habits, their proclivities, etc.
I have set up 12 different treestands in a 40 mile or so range in the Rocky mountains directly behind my house.
Every one of those stands is set up for a specific reason and for a specific species.
And when I take an animal’s life, I gut them, then bring them out of the woods by power cleaning the animal over my shoulders and on to my back.
That experience is not rectangular.
I am a hunter and not a hunting guide by choice. The last thing I would want to do is to accept money for leading a guy who has not done the detective work and has not bothered to learn the land or study the species and take him to put him in position to make a shot on an animal he has not earned. This is sick, to me.
It’s all about earning it.
Ten years ago, I moved to Montana because I didn’t feel connected to life or to much of anything where I lived in Philadelphia.
I was breathing, but I wasn’t truly alive.
I felt disconnected from that which matters.
Hunting connects me to that which matters.
There are no mirrors in the mountains. There are no agents in the mountains. There are no proxies in the mountains. There is no bullshit in the mountains.
And, on that score, when I moved here, I learned to dive. Which leads us to ‘what I do.’
I am Diver 16 on the Flathead County Sheriff Dive Rescue Team. We work, as a team, to recover bodies from water in my area. They range from homicide victims to suicides to accidental drowning victims. We recover guns or weapons or bits of guns used in murders. We recover and salvage vehicles that have been driven into the lakes or ripping rivers or still ponds.
We work in whitewater. We work underneath the ice. We dive up to 130 feet deep to do our job.
We work in, sometimes, clear visibility, where you can see 30 feet or so, to zero visibility, where you cannot see your dive watch in front of your own eyes.
We train for zero visibility by duct-taping our masks to blackness.
Underwater, under the ice or in zero visibility, we are connected to a ‘tender’ on-shore. We wear a harness and are connected to a rope line. We communicate with a language based on rope tugs.
I have recovered, with this team, many victims and reunited them, in a body bag, with their grieving relatives, sobbing onshore.
We risk our lives to help other people. To try and mend something that is broken. To help make something awful just a little bit better.
Have I ‘entered a subculture which features intense physical experience and camaraderie?’
Abso-fucking-lutely!
And the muscles that remain are used, in practical application, to actually help people in need.
It is well known that perfect love has no fear. As we read in 1 John 4:18: "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love."
So if you fear the God you've made terms with, fearing this God is burning your loved ones in hell and fearing this God is less than loving for authoring eternal hell, you have no perfect love.
I envy Christians who love God with all their heart and accept that their God puts people in eternal hell. But part of me does not envy them because part of me thinks they are being complicit in this cruelty. This cruelty has caused nervous breakdowns in many as we read in this Tentmaker post.
The prayer would be, "Give me perfect love, God, so I don't continue to be of two minds, a divided soul, crushed by my ambivalence."
The Bible doesn't say that people choose hell. The Bible states that people are actively damned into hell, and they do so craving forgiveness and crying out "Jesus is Lord" but they are damned anyways because that's the will of God. Read the Book of Revelation. That's canon.
Honestly, few things are more pathetic than trying to find someone whitewashing hell. It's God actively condemning someone to pain and torture, intentionally, because God wills it to happen. That's what the canon says. That's what tradition says. The Diet Coke hell that's supposedly 'freely chosen' is nonsense.
And all this talk of 'choice'? You really think that every single Jewish victim of the Holocaust that died faithfully believing that he or she was close to God is now burning in a lake of fire forever... as a matter of choice? That they wanted to go to hell? No, they looked at a world with thousands-- literally, thousands-- of religious traditions and abided by the one that they sincerely felt brought them closest to the divine. And yet that's not good enough... the Holocaust wasn't good enough, and so those Jews are now being strung up on the rack and stabbed repeatedly (as well as goodness knows other tortures) right now as we speak. What sense of morality and ethics can you have while claiming to believe in such a repellent, evil doctrine as belief in hell? Sheesh.
The equally offended Croquet Player writes:
There are plenty of things to find preposterous about religious beliefs, but the concept of hell has to be one of my favorites. "Love me, worship me, and do as I say, or I will torture you forever, with no way out for you. Oh and by the way, it's only because I love you." That's a classic abusive relationship. It would be hilarious if some poor people didn't actually take it seriously, and cause themselves a great deal of pointless anxiety and unhappiness. To say nothing of terrorizing small children with the tale. Really quite sickening when you think about it. (Oh, and how lighting-fast some religious types are to consign everyone who doesn't share their particular views to hell. They love it like a schoolyard bully likes your lunch money.)
Mario Alzone and I started attending the church’s Wednesday night youth group meetings after I got invited by some of my high school classmates. They didn’t just invite me out of the blue. I had been obsessing over the song “Supper’s Ready” by the British band Genesis, and at school I had asked some Christian classmates questions about the song’s lyrics, many of which were taken from the Book of Revelation. What are Gog and Magog? What is the significance of the numbers 666? What is the New Jerusalem? My classmates said the pastor could answer my questions at the youth group meeting, and that there would be complimentary lasagna and Kool-Aid.
My best and only friend Mario had no curiosity about the Book of Revelation or for deciphering Genesis’ quasi-religious lyrics; however, he loved free meals, especially since he was “bulking up” in his quest to be an international bodybuilding champion. Bodybuilding was our shared passion since I had met him during my freshman year of high school. Three years my senior and having hulking trapezius muscles that gave him nickname “No Neck,” Mario told me he wanted to be so big and muscular that he no longer wanted to look human. He aspired to be a horned monster with webbed toes and fingers that instilled fear and awe in the hearts of men. “To get really big,” he had said, “you’ve got to eat the steak fat and throw away the meat. You’ve got to drink the fruit cocktail syrup and throw away the fruit. And after your workouts you should have a nurse push you around in a wheelchair to allow your muscles maximum recovery.”
He wanted to prove all his doubters wrong by someday being so muscle-bound that when he took off his shirt people would fall to the ground, weep, and worship him as Lord.
After a few weeks of attending the megachurch’s youth meetings and being told that we “had to make a decision for Christ,” Mario was expressing doubt over the concepts of heaven and hell. “Truth be told,” he said, driving me to the Wednesday-night youth group in his candy apple red Ford Ranchero, “I need to see it all on film. Jacques Cousteau captures his underwater journeys in his documentaries. If I’m going to give up fornication, there had better be movies that convince me that hell is a real thing, not just some scare tactic.” Mario would have to hear the heavy French accent of Jacques Cousteau, submerged in the bowels of hell, describe in detail its horrors before he gave up fornication, for Mario was a disciple of the flesh, a regular at the Moonlight Ranch and other such establishments where he could fulfill his ambition to be a Billy Goat.
As we wound up the hill and approached the giant three white crosses that towered over the nondenominational mega worship complex, Mario continued to say that renouncing the flesh would be especially hard during the summer when, as we were prone to tanning at the lake after working out at the gym, his lust meter tended to rise to unbearable levels.
To add to his doubts about joining the church, his favorite bodybuilder—and mine—1978 Mr. Universe winner Mike Mentzer was an atheistic, self-described existentialist philosopher fond of quoting Nietzsche and other likeminded thinkers in Muscle Builder magazine. “If Mentzer ever finds out we’re listening to these fairy tales with these sheltered little brainwashed children, he’ll laugh at us. He may even have us kicked out of the International Bodybuilding Federation.”
“He can laugh all he wants,” I said. “I for one don’t want to go to hell.”
Unlike Mario, I didn’t need the Jacques Cousteau footage to be haunted by eternity. I was having nightmares about burning in hell. One morning, I screamed out to Jesus to save me so loudly I woke myself up. One Sunday when Alzone and I were in the church’s private prayer quarters after a service in which we were invited to accept Christ as our personal savior, I told the pastor about my dream of burning in hell and how I screamed out to Jesus to save me. On the way home, Alzone scolded me for telling the pastor about my dream.
“I should kick your ass. Were you trying to make me laugh in there, or what?”
“What’s so funny about having a dream about burning in hell?”
“No one has dreams like that, asshole. You’re making that shit up. You decide to be a comedian all of a sudden. I had to pinch myself to stop laughing.”
Ironically, I had to pinch myself to stop laughing when Mario asked the pastor if fornication was a sin. For Mario, accepting the Lord as Savior might be achieved if he could strike a deal with the pastor, persuading the minister to give him a special dispensation for the sins of the flesh, a kind of fornication allowance. But the heavy-set double-chinned pastor with a green plaid suit, long bangs, and bushy mustache made it clear that there were no exceptions when it came to sex before marriage: Fornication was a sin. The pastor’s pronouncement made Alzone sink in his chair and pout like a petulant child.
That fornication was a sin and should be avoided at all costs was reinforced at a recent youth meeting when the pastor showed us a Josh McDowell film in which the evangelist lectures the importance of preserving one’s virginity before marriage. McDowell’s presentation was peppered with jokes that made Mario cackle like a drunkard, but when the message sunk in, that celibacy was a sign of obedience to God, he became sober.
On the drive home from the Sunday service, Mario said he doubted he would be able to abstain from sex. Mario and I had had a recent conversation with his older sister Brenda, an attorney, about his struggles with the Christian faith and his attempts at chastity. We were in Mario’s room when she told us abstaining from sex before marriage was not realistic. Then she looked at the wallpaper in his bedroom. It featured topless women. Mario was literally living inside a room with wall-to-wall breasts. She smiled and said, “Is this Christian wallpaper?” Then she looked at the cache of Playboys and similar magazines stacked on his desk next to his Incredible Hulk piggy bank and said, “Are those Christian magazines?”
I said we should tear down the wallpaper and burn the magazines in his backyard. Mario wouldn’t let me touch the wallpaper, but he agreed to burn the magazines. We stacked the magazines on the grass in Mario’s backyard, doused them with gasoline, and threw a lit match on them. Soon, charred pages and ashes whirled in the wind making a huge mess, a sort of porno apocalypse, and Mario’s 300-pound squinty-eyed father emerged from the house presumably having been wakened from a nap. He was wearing nothing but white boxer shorts and black socks. His hair was disheveled. His thighs were covered with thick black hair, but his oversized calves and shins were bald from the constant friction provided by his black nylon socks. He scowled at us and said, “Clean up the mess, dumb shits,” before disappearing back into the house.
As we approached the youth service parking area, Mario told me he was still struggling with his vows of chastity, especially in the absence of a Jacques Cousteau documentary about hell. “Take away sex,” he said, “and what’s left?”
“Salvation,” I said.
“What if it’s not true?
“What if it is?”
Neither of us was familiar with Pascal’s Wager, but unknowingly I was operating on that principle. Better to be safe, and avoid hell, than be sorry. But for Mario, hell insurance wasn’t compelling enough to stave off the impulse for fornication. And he didn’t believe the young church members were abstaining from sex either. “Look at those women at church,” he said. “All made up with false eyelashes, eyeliner, short skirts, with their boobs hanging out. You don’t think they’re there to get laid? Shit. Everyone wants sex, my friend. Christian, Muslim, Jew, and atheist alike. It’s in our blood. It’s what makes the world go round. And guess what? God gave us the desire, so why should He condemn us?”
“No one said it was going to be easy.”
A week ago, we were discussing the sin of fornication with his mother in the kitchen. She was seated at the table having her 2 P.M. martini. Behind her was a wooden plaque her husband, the manager of a linguisa sausage processing plant, had nailed to the wall. It read, “The man makes the living, and the wife makes the life worth living.” Mario’s mom told her son he didn’t need to worry about sex before marriage. “We’re Catholic,” she said. “In our religion, we can have all the sex and alcohol we want from Monday through Saturday. Then on Sundays we confess our sins to the priest.”
“How do you get to Heaven?” I asked.
“Just lead a good life, which means don’t commit murder, don’t steal, and don’t cheat.”
Regarding the latter, I knew that Mario’s father was being investigated for income tax fraud, but I kept my mouth shut.
The giant three crosses cast a shadow over the Ranchero as Mario looked for a parking place. After telling me how much easier it would be for us to be Catholic, he said, “Screw these youth meetings. Screw chastity. Maybe we should go to my parents’ church. There’s more leeway.”
“The Bible tells us that God will not be mocked.”
“You take the joy out of life. I should stop hanging out with you.”
Giving up on the Catholic angle, he turned to atheism, bringing up Mike Mentzer again, and my grandfather, a socialist atheist, who believed sex before marriage was healthy and recommended it for men of our age, words that made Mario venerate my grandfather as his lifetime hero.
“Mentzer and your grandfather would both agree that young men like us should not be repressing our sexual desires. And believe me, it’s going to be harder during the summer. It’s bikini season. Do you know what that will do to our testosterone?”
“I don’t want to go to hell,” I said bluntly.
“But how do you know?”
“How do I not know? And what about the biblical prophesies?” I had been reading excerpts of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth to Mario and scaring both of us about The End of Times. “We’re entering the nineteen-eighties. We may be living in the age of the Anti-Christ, the Mark of the Beast, and the Rapture. Do you want to get caught with your pants down?”
“If she looks good, why not?”
“Shit, Mario, this is not a joke.”
To add to my fear of hell, I was spending a lot of time listening to the scariest Voice of Hell on Planet Earth, Family Radio’s Harold Camping. His cranky, humorless voice dripped with contempt for the “lovers of the flesh” who were doomed to scream for all eternity in the flames of hell. Listening to Camping’s voice on the radio, I felt like the trembling Cowardly Lion in the presence of the Great Oz. Camping specialized in damning the human race as if he relished in his position to be a spokesman for a God who saved only a remnant according to his own discretion. “I don’t know about you,” Camping once said on his radio show, “but the idea of going to bed at night unsaved with the fear of not waking up and your next moment of consciousness being in eternal damnation is enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. If I were you, I would throw myself at the Mercy Seat of Christ and say, ‘Oh, Lord, if it would be if it would please you to be saved from the hell that I deserve, please, Lord, save me.’ And then perhaps, Lord willing, you could find mercy.” Over and over Camping told callers to his radio program that being afraid of hell was the best thing that could ever happen to them because, after all, the fear of the Lord, Scripture tells us, is the beginning of all wisdom. Unbeknownst to himself, Camping seemed to take gleeful delight in talking about hell and how only “a remnant were chosen to be saved according to God’s private pleasure.” Whom God saved and whom He destined for hell were none of our business, Camping was fond of saying. It was all in his divine discretion. When callers protested Camping’s God that predestined a remnant to heaven and the overwhelming majority to hell, he would end the call with a passive-aggressive curse of politeness: “May the Lord richly bless you.”
I detected something profoundly disturbing in Camping’s interpretation of Scripture, but at the same time part of me wondered if he was doing nothing more than unflinchingly taking the Scriptures for exactly what they said and his integrity refused him to sugarcoat the “good news.” I was probably addicted to his extreme rhetoric, which smacked of misanthropy and delighted in cheering for a god who would consign the overwhelming majority of the human race to eternal hell. Perhaps something sick in Camping spoke to something sick inside myself. Perhaps there was a part of me that was just as misanthropic as he was.
Whatever my motivations for listening to Camping, whenever my mother heard his radio show through my bedroom walls, she’d come into my room and tell me to turn that shit off. And I could take my Bible and throw it out the window, and if I didn’t do it, she’d do it for me.
My mother was a secular Jew who saw Christianity as being too often an anti-Semitic force as it accused Jews of being Christ killers. And the notion that our family members who had died in the Holocaust had to face an even greater hell, provided by the Christian God, after their death in the concentration camps didn’t sit well with her either. I agreed with her that this notion of hell was morally abhorrent, but unlike her I could not disbelieve in this doctrine that offended me.
In her concern for my disturbed condition, she used her connections to arrange that I speak to a couple of liberal pastors, kind-hearted men whose formula for getting into heaven proved far more generous than Harold Camping’s, but their implied universalism, the belief that everyone eventually gets to heaven, never sunk in. Reading the words attributed to St. Paul and Jesus and listening to Harold Camping and others convinced me that being a Christian was about being saved from eternal hell. “Weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth” in the outer darkness was the result of knowing that you had the chance to get saved, but that you had told God to shove it. You were more interested in asserting your own will, your own selfish desires, and making yourself the Lord of yourself. You were the defiant Frank Sinatra singing “My Way” to God. The price to pay for loving the Darkness more than the Light was not just moral dissolution here on Earth but eternal torment in hell. The torment of the damned was to look afar at the believers ecstatically feasting at God’s table while they watched, outsiders looking in, forever banished from the things they longed for.
My mother accused the Christian faith of being a disgrace for at least two reasons. For one, in Judaism there was no such "sickness" as the belief in eternal hell. For two, the Christian religion was tinged with anti-Semitism. This became evident at the megachurch I attended when one night, around Easter season, a film was shown about Jesus, probably taken from the Gospel of Luke. In one scene as the dark-skinned hooked-nosed Jews threw rocks at the light-skinned blond Jesus, the white Christian audience gasped in disgust at the dark complexioned Pharisees, and a young woman sitting in front of me said, “That makes me sick!”
One of the legacies of Christianity is that since it proclaims to be the true religion and since Jews are accused of no longer being God’s chosen people in their rejection of Christ, the Jewish people represent not only hostility to Christ but a chosen people who squandered God’s love due to their stubborn defiance and who must suffer eternal hell. They are, by the very Christian narrative championed by St. Paul, a lost race that in their rejection of Christ have abandoned their heritage and are no longer the rightful heirs of God’s promise. Therefore, they are deserving of scorn, pity, or worse.
During my high school years, I observed that disdain for the Jews was evident outside the church as well. Kids at school used Jew as a verb whenever they tried to get a price down on something during a negotiation. The story of Judas Iscariot, the greedy Jew who sold out Jesus for twenty pieces of silver, forever branded Jews as money-hungry scoundrels.
My senior year in high school I had a crush on a girl, Sandy Templeton, who worked for a Jewish doctor and one day at school, not knowing I was half Jewish, she told me working for this obnoxious Jewish doctor was too much for her, that she would avoid Jews for the rest of her life. Then there was my very best friend Mario whose father read the weekly newspaper The Spotlight, an ultra right wing anti-Semitic publication that denounced Zionism, accused the international Jewish community of crazy conspiracies, and denied the Holocaust, or at the very least, claimed it was an exaggeration. Mario told me when he was a little kid he had a Jewish babysitter who was so cheap she turned off the heat in his house and he almost froze to death. I imagined his parents re-told him the story over and over during his youth, so that he grew up believing, “This is what the Jews do. They kill their children—and others’ children if they’re given the opportunity—with their cheapness.”
When I told Mario my mother was Jewish, he said he knew it all along, that he “could spot a Jew a mile away,” and that the implication was that his accepting me, a Jew, as his friend was an exception, not a rule.
In spite of the anti-Semitism that he had absorbed from his father, Mario had been my best friend since I was fourteen and he ended up embracing my Jewish socialist grandfather as his own, being drawn to my grandfather’s warmth and wisdom more than his father’s disdain for his family that made Mario and his two older sisters walk on eggshells whenever they were in their father’s presence.
For nearly five years Mario and I were inseparable. We dreamed of becoming bodybuilding champions, becoming successful enough in our bodybuilding obsession to live in the Bahamas, running our own gym, and being professional bodybuilding ambassadors while beautiful women fed us protein drinks from coconut shells. Our shared delusion had excluded the rest of the world from our circle so that we had no other friends, and now I branching out, attempting to get Mario and me to enter a wider circle, and to my mother’s lament this religious circle was infested with anti-Semitism.
In spite of my misgivings about Christianity—my suspicion that it really was anti-Semitic, my assessment that eternal damnation was an unjust punishment for the finite sins of the human race, and my sense that St. Paul’s writing style smacked of excessive piety and self-aggrandizement—my fear of hell proved too great to fight and one night at a youth meeting when I stood up to accept Christ as my savior, I was congratulated by Christians, many who attended my high school and who had been eagerly waiting for me to become saved.
Word spread about my conversion, and at the next day at school a classmate approached me, shook my hand, and looked into my sad eyes. “Why don’t you look happy?” he asked. I was in fact the saddest man in the world, joining a religion whose God damned people for all eternity, but I didn’t tell him this. Nor did I tell him that my Jewish grandmother, who had died a year earlier from leukemia, weighed heavily on my soul because some of my new church friends told me she was in hell. I had begged God to save me from hell, but there was nothing I could do about dead Jewish family members who didn’t know Jesus. The idea of them suffering in hell made it feel impossible for me to experience the perfect love of God. And I was told if I questioned God’s perfect love I myself would go to hell. I told myself I didn’t need to have all my doubts and questions answered right away. The important thing was to get my hell insurance. Then I’d have some breathing room to let God answer the questions that continued to pester me.
During the summer, a couple months after my conversion, I left the San Francisco Bay Area to spend time with my grandfather in Los Angeles. He was still grieving the loss of his wife who had died from leukemia seventeen months earlier. I didn’t dare tell him what the church people had told me about her eternal fate. But I did tell him I was going to church. I knew he wouldn’t be happy. He was an atheist socialist whose favorite philosopher in college was Nietzsche, a man some of the church people called the “Anti-Christ.” He asked me why I had turned to religion, and I told him I was afraid I was going to hell. He laughed and said that once I started college and talked to history and philosophy professors they would set me straight; they would show me that religion was nothing but a bunch of fairy tales and a bogus creation designed to control the masses. He said that most religious people he had met over the years were weird. I didn’t want my grandfather to think I was a weirdo or a stupid person who believed in fairy tales, but I was hurting. My whole world had collapsed when I discovered the universe was ruled by a god who threw people into eternal hell. And I was commiserating with people who were telling me my grandmother was damned. I tried to explain my fear of hell to my grandfather and he said, “If you want to be afraid of hell, be my guest.”
It was just like my grandfather to not argue with me about my beliefs. He must have known that arguing wouldn’t change my mind. When he and I spent time at the machine shop with his best friend and fellow socialist Forbes Sherry, he told him about my fear of hell, and Forbes, a small wiry man who worked over sixty hours a week in his machine shop and gave all the money he could to the socialist movement, said to me, “Don’t let them suck you into their cult. That’s all it is—a cult just like the rest of them.”
Calmly, my grandfather said, “I think it’s too late.”
I felt wounded, perhaps even dead inside, upon hearing this because I knew what my grandfather said was true. How could an idea so powerful and so terrifying, once implanted inside someone, ever truly vanish? Only a miracle would make it do so, or I would find a way to make a peace with the God of heaven and hell. For me, God was a real being to be feared, but for my grandfather, God was the product of fairy tales, ancient stories made up in the desert during tribal warfare, and were best discarded in favor of secular, practical strategies to help build a better world.
I envied my grandfather for having no fear of hell and for seeing the Bible as nothing but fairy tales. His life seemed so much easier than mine. The only thing he seemed to fear were birds—poultry in particular—because his siblings threw a headless chicken at him, the legend goes, when he was a little boy and he had a lifelong phobia to all forms of poultry, so that on Thanksgiving the hosts had to make him a special dish featuring a non-bird protein. Once when we were at someone’s house that had some kind of pet macaw outside a cage, my grandfather cowered and his whole body shook until the owner put the bird in another room. So there you had it. My grandfather cowered in the presence of birds. I cowered in the presence of the New Testament God.
If I had to choose between a lifelong fear of chickens and a lifelong fear of hell, I’d take the chickens.
I often long to have my grandfather’s point of view, that the Bible is a bunch of man-made fairy tales, but the fear of hell is so deep inside me I feel I can’t afford to be wrong because if I am wrong I’m totally screwed.
But here’s a problem: I’ve found that pursuing religion for hell insurance doesn’t work. There’s no real love there. There’s a ton of guilt that afflicts me on both sides: On one side I feel guilty for not believing enough in the Bible in not only all its doctrines but its purported events: Noah’s Ark, Lot’s wife becoming a pillar of salt, the parting of the Red Sea, Christ’s resurrection, His Crucifixion accompanied by earthquakes and the opening of the tombs with the dead walking out of those tombs, etc. On the other side, I feel guilty for submitting to the God of Wrath because in my demand for the certainty of hell insurance, I am making a Faustian Bargain, violating my conscience by embracing a religion that has the morally bankrupt doctrine of eternal hell. Ironically enough, pursuing Christianity as a hell insurance policy causes me to lose my soul. I’m trying to save my life and I’m losing it. And those aren’t my words. They belong to Jesus.
Jacques Cousteau’s Bird’s-Eye View of Heaven and Hell
Mario Alzone and I started attending the church’s Wednesday night youth group meetings after I got invited by some of my high school classmates. There would be complimentary lasagna and Kool-Aid. Mario loved free meals, especially since he was “bulking up” in his quest to be an international bodybuilding champion. Bodybuilding was our shared obsession since I met him during my freshman year of high school. Three years my senior and having hulking trapezius muscles that gave him nickname “No Neck,” Mario told me he wanted to be so big and muscular that he no longer wanted to look human. He wanted to be a gilled monster with webbed toes and fingers that instilled fear and awe in the hearts of men. “To get really big,” he had said, “you’ve got to eat the steak fat and throw the meat away. You’ve got to drink the fruit cocktail syrup and throw away the fruit. And after your workouts you should have a nurse push you around in a wheelchair to allow your muscles maximum recovery.”
He wanted to prove all his doubters wrong by someday being so muscle-bound that when he took off his shirt people would fall to the ground, weep, and worship him as Lord.
After a few weeks of attending youth meetings, Mario was expressing doubt over the concepts of heaven and hell. “Truth be told,” he said, driving me to the church in his candy apple red Ford Ranchero, “I need to see it all on film. Jacques Cousteau captures his underwater journeys in his documentaries. If I’m going to give up fornication, there had better be real evidence, not just hearsay.” Mario’s crude personality was off-putting to women, but he boasted of going to Moonlight Ranch and other such establishments where he could fulfill his aspiration to be a Billy Goat.
As we wound up the hill and approached the giant three white crosses that towered over the nondenominational worship complex, Mario continued to say that renouncing the flesh would be especially hard during the summer when, as we were prone to tanning at the lake after working out at the gym, his lust meter tended to rise to unbearable levels.
To add to his doubts about joining the church, his favorite bodybuilder—and mine—Mr. Universe Mike Mentzer was an atheistic philosopher fond of quoting Nietzsche in Muscle Builder magazine. “If Mentzer ever finds out we’re listening to these fairy tales with these sheltered little brainwashed children, he’ll laugh at us. He may even have us kicked out of the International Bodybuilding Federation.”
“He can laugh all he wants,” I said. “I for one don’t want to go to hell.”
Unlike Mario, I didn’t need the Jacques Cousteau footage to be haunted by eternity. I was having nightmares about burning in hell. One morning, I screamed out to Jesus to save me so loudly I woke myself up. One Sunday when Alzone and I were in the church’s private quarters after a service in which we were invited to accept Christ as our personal savior, I told the pastor about my dream of burning in hell and how I screamed out to Jesus to save me. On the way home, Alzone scolded me for telling the pastor about my alleged dream.
“I should kick your ass. You trying to make me laugh in there, or what?”
“What’s so funny about having a dream about burning in hell?” I asked.
“No one has dreams like that, asshole. You’re making that shit up. I had to pinch myself to stop laughing.”
Ironically, I had to pinch myself to stop laughing when Mario asked the pastor if fornication was a sin. For Mario, accepting the Lord as Savior might be achieved if he could strike a deal with the pastor, persuading the minister to give him a special dispensation on the sins of the flesh, a kind of fornication allowance. But the heavy-set pastor with a green plaid suit and bushy mustache made it clear that there were no exceptions when it came to sex before marriage: Fornication was a sin. The pastor’s pronouncement made Alzone slink in his chair and pout like a punished child.
On the drive home, Mario brought up Mike Mentzer again, and my grandfather, a socialist atheist, who believed sex before marriage was healthy. “Mentzer and your grandfather would both agree that young men like us should not be repressing our sexual desires.”
“I don’t want to go to hell,” I said bluntly.
“But how do you know?”
“How do I not know? And what about the biblical prophesies?” I had been reading excerpts of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth to Mario and scaring both of us as we approached what appeared to be The End of Times. “We’re entering the nineteen-eighties. We may be living in the age of the Anti-Christ, the Mark of the Beast, and the Rapture, and you want to get caught with your pants down? Shit, Mario, this is not a joke.”
To add to my fear of hell, I was spending a lot of time listening to the scariest Voice of Hell on Planet Earth, Family Radio’s Harold Camping. His cranky, humorless voice dripped with contempt for the “lovers of the flesh” who were doomed to scream for all eternity in the flames of hell. “I don’t know about you,” Camping once said on his radio show, “but the idea of going to bed at night unsaved with the fear of not waking up and your next moment of consciousness being in eternal damnation is enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. If I were you, I would throw myself at the Mercy Seat of Christ and say, ‘Oh, Lord, if it would be if it would please you, Lord, to be saved from the hell that I deserve, please, Lord, save me.’ And then perhaps, Lord willing, you could find mercy.” Over and over Camping told callers to his radio program that being afraid of hell was the best thing that could ever happen to them because after all fear of the Lord, Scripture tells us, is the beginning of all wisdom. Unbeknownst to himself, Camping seemed to take gleeful delight in talking about hell and how only “a remnant were chosen to be saved according to God’s private pleasure. Whom he saved and whom he destined for hell was none of our business. It was all in his divine discretion.
I detected something profoundly twisted and demonic in his interpretation of Scripture, but at the same time part of me wondered if he was not twisted and demonic at all; rather, he was unflinchingly taking the Scriptures for exactly what they said and his integrity refused him to sugarcoat the “good news.” I was probably addicted to his extreme rhetoric, which smacked of hatred for the human race and gleeful cheering for a god who would consign the overwhelming majority of the human race to eternal hell. Something sick in Camping spoke to something sick inside myself.
Whatever my motivations for listening to Camping, whenever my mother heard his radio show through the walls in my bedroom, she’d come into my room and tell me to turn that shit off. And I could take my Bible and throw it out the window, and if I didn’t do it, she’d do it for me.
My mother was a secular Jew who saw Christianity as being too often an anti-Semitic force as it accused Jews of being Christ killers. And the notion that our family members who had died in the Holocaust had to face an even greater hell, provided by the Christian God, after their death didn’t sit well with her either. I agreed with her that this notion of hell was abhorrent, but unlike her I couldn’t not disbelieve in this doctrine that offended me. In her concern for my disturbed condition, she used her connections to arrange that I speak to a couple of liberal pastors, kind-hearted men whose formula for getting into heaven proved far more generous than Harold Camping’s, but their implied universalism, the belief that everyone eventually gets to heaven, never sunk in. Reading the words of St. Paul and Jesus and listening to Harold Camping and others convinced me that being a Christian was about being saved from eternal hell. “Weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth” was the result of knowing that you had the chance to get saved, but that you had told God to shove it. You were more interested in asserting your own will, your own selfish desires, and making yourself the Lord of yourself. You were the defiant Frank Sinatra singing “My Way” to God. The price to pay for loving the Darkness more than the Light was to suffer eternal torment in hell.
My mother’s accusation that the Christian faith I was pursuing was tinged with anti-Semitism became evident at the megachurch I attended when one night, around Easter season, a film about Jesus was shown. In one scene as the dark-skinned Jews threw rocks at the light-skinned blond Jesus, the white Christian audience gasped in disgust and a young woman sitting in front of me said, “That makes me sick!” One of the legacies of Christianity is that since it proclaims to be the true religion and since Jews are accused of no longer being God’s chosen people in their rejection of Christ, the Jewish people represent not only hostility to Christ but a chosen people who squandered God’s love due to their stubborn defiance. They are, by the very Christian narrative championed by St. Paul, a lost race deserving of scorn, pity, or worse.
I observed that disdain for the Jews was evident outside the church as well. Kids at school used Jew as a verb whenever they tried to get a price down on something during a negotiation. I had a crush on a girl who worked for a Jewish doctor and one day, not knowing I was half Jewish, she told me being around one Jew was bad enough and that I could take all the others on her behalf. Then there was my very best friend Mario whose father read the weekly newspaper The Spotlight, an ultra right-wing anti-Semitic publication that denounced Zionism and the insidious actions of the international Jewish community. Mario told me when he was a little kid he had a Jewish babysitter who was so cheap she turned off the heat in his house and he almost froze to death. When I told him I my mother was Jewish, he said he liked me and implied I was more of the exception than the rule.
About a month ago, I started re-reading Bart Ehrman, Christopher Hitchens, and others because I'm still grappling with the fear of hell and being an agnostic, or what one might call a tormented skeptic. I came across (again) Neil Carter's diatribe against the hell doctrine.
What if I'm wrong? The stakes seem so high. At least I'm not alone.
When I first learned about the need for getting saved, I understood hell as an eternal lake of fire. I hadn’t yet heard comedian and entertainer Stephen Colbert, a Catholic, describe hell in more philosophical terms as a person’s separation from God’s perfect love. As a seventeen-year-old, I saw hell as an eternal concentration camp, and I was terrified of going there and of living in a universe created by such a terrifying God.
The idea of Christian God sending my Jewish grandmother and others to hell made me feel estranged from God, which ironically is Stephen Colbert’s definition of hell. I wish I could have a conversation with Colbert about this estrangement, about the nature of hell, and whether or not Colbert believes my grandmother is in hell. To add more balance to the dialogue, I would want to include comedian Julia Sweeney, who does a performance Letting Go of God, about her journey in and out of Catholicism. And just to get things really interesting, I’d like to invite George Carlin, who was no friend of religion. While I doubt I’ll be scheduled to be on Colbert’s TV program to discuss this topic any time soon, it would be consolation if I could attend lively debate between Colbert, Carlin, and Sweeney.
I envy all three of those comedians, not just because they are exceptionally talented but more so because they have all made a decision, one way or the other, about religion. As I write this I am fifty-four years old, and I remain a tormented agnostic, one who has doubts about the inerrancy of the bible but whose fear of hell remains. Worse than being a tormented agnostic, I am what James in the New Testament called “the double-minded man who is unstable in all he does.” I am damned because as Franz Kafka once wrote, you must produce the truth inside yourself or perish. I find it pathetic that I would want George Carlin and Julia Sweeney to fight my battle for me. This condition makes it a challenge for me not to venture into self-loathing.
In any event, back when I was seventeen, I was faced with a crisis that afflicts me to this day. The crisis, as I see it, consists of three parts. One, I am afraid of hell. Two, I am depressed that the universe might be created by a God who puts people in hell. My third biggest fear is that the religion I need to follow to make not go to hell makes me so miserable. I tried to be a Christian and it was like a misery and a death that was antithetical to the connection I felt before I knew about religion and hell. In other words, I found religion and lost God. As Lenny Bruce said, he saw many people losing their religion and in the process finding God. Go figure.
Before I knew anything about being saved from hell, I remember a beautiful sadness I experienced the previous summer when I was sixteen. My grandmother had died a few months before, and I was spending the summer with my grandfather. I was sad about losing my grandmother, of course, but I didn’t have a fear of hell at the time, so I wasn’t obsessing over my grandmother’s eternal fate. That summer in Los Angeles Steely Dan’s popular “Deacon Blues” was getting a lot of radio airtime. The song is so sad. It’s about this saxophone player who drinks scotch whiskey, has illicit affairs, lives as an outcast, is afflicted with depression, doesn’t sleep at night, but has a code to be true to himself. He is the “expanding man” and he is free because no matter how bad life gets, inside and out, he maintains his authentic self. The song became a sort of anthem for me that summer. “Deacon Blues” was like a religion in that the song for all its melancholy, stirred something hopeful and beautiful inside me. And this is from someone who doesn’t like alcohol.
A year later when I was afraid of hell and I was attending church, I had found a new religion and a new sadness, but there was no beauty in the new religion. I didn’t’ feel the connection to something higher in myself like when I listened to “Deacon Blues.” Rather, I felt caged-in, coerced into submission, and separated from myself. I was not the expanding man. I was the constricted man. I was a balled-up nervous wreck, the embodiment of repression.
Here’s a crazy memory I have about the loss of my old self. On my high school graduation day, a girl who had an inexplicable crush on me gave me a gag gift—a blue baseball cap with Mercury’s wings on it. The wings were bright yellow and contrasted with the light blue cap. I remember wearing the hat all day. I still wore the hat after school. It was after dinner, and I sat on the floor of my room while praying to God to understand how he could be the attainment of perfect love while sending people to hell. I remember my recently divorced mom and her friends coming into the room to congratulate me for graduating, and I lowered the bill of the cap over my eyes so they couldn’t see that I was crying.
I was supposed to be happy that I had graduated from high school, and I was supposed to be happy that I had been saved. Church members were so elated for my conversion and my quick study of the Bible, but I felt empty inside. I don’t think I could acknowledge it at the time, but deep down I must have known I had betrayed myself. My faith was supposed to bring me completion and fulfillment. Jesus talked about the abundant life and the pastors talked about the perfect unconditional love of God, but I found myself missing the guy who could sit and listen to the real sense of sadness from “Deacon Blues.”
When I was seventeen, I was watching Pat Robertson on television talk about the despair that afflicted secular society. He referred to a popular song at the time, “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. Dust was the only thing secular society had to offer, the preacher said. Sad and befuddled, Robertson shook his jowls at the camera and asked rhetorically, “What is it with all this dust?”
To me, songs like “Dust in the Wind” and “Deacon Blues” were part of the poetic lamentations tradition of the Old Testament. It was good to unleash one’s despair in a song or a poem. Ecclesiastes was like that. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a melancholy streak and music spoke to that more than Pat Robertson’s bleached fundamentalism. Sad music was about embracing one’s despair and confronting one’s despair was cathartic. Kierkegaard wrote, “Despair is not knowing it.” “Deacon Blues” made me know my despair so that as a contradiction I was no longer beholden to that despair.
Perhaps it’s my fault, but the way religion has filtered through my brain has been destructive and repressive. It’s pent up my despair and all these decades since hearing “Deacon Blues” on the radio I still long for what feels like the real religion I experienced before I knew anything about religion.
Sometimes when I talk to Christians and tell them I’m an agnostic, they tell me to pray about my doubts to Jesus, that he will have compassion on me, and answer my prayers. I’m usually touched by the compassion I hear in these Christians’ voices, but the painful part for me is that I find it difficult to tell these well-meaning people that I’ve been praying to Jesus about this pain and doubt for decades, but that the suffering has continued unabated. In fact, I find it even more difficult to say that I wonder if the Christian God as I experienced him has been an impediment to my growth as a human being and has been the very source of the pain I’ve been praying about.
When I was seventeen some Christian boys I knew at school shared with me some books about The End of Times, which scared the hell out of me. Sooner than I could think, I was at their church, attending Bible studies, getting baptized, and preaching salvation to other kids with the aid of some Campus Crusade for Christ religious tracts.
At the youth group meeting where I stood up to accept Christ as my savior, I was congratulated by Christians, many who attended my high school. Word spread about my conversion, and at the next day at school a boy I didn’t know well approached me, shook my hand, and looked into my sad eyes. “Why don’t you look happy?” he asked. I didn’t tell him the truth, which is that my Jewish grandmother, who had died a year earlier from leukemia, weighed heavily on my soul because some of my new church friends told me she was in hell. I had begged God to save me from hell, but there was nothing I could do about dead family members who didn’t know Jesus. The idea of them suffering in hell made it a challenge for me to experience the perfect love of God. And I was told if I questioned God’s perfect love I myself would go to hell.
This estrangement from God grew worse and worse: The more I thought about the church people who felt privileged to tell me my grandmother was in hell the more angry I became and the more angry I became the more I started backpedalling on the faith.
During the summer, a couple months after my conversion, I left the San Francisco Bay Area to spend time with my grandfather in Los Angeles. He had just lost his wife to cancer. I didn’t dare tell him what the church people had told me about her eternal fate. But I did tell him I was going to church. I knew he wouldn’t be happy. He was an atheist socialist whose favorite philosopher in college was Nietzsche, a man some of the church people called the “Anti-Christ.” He asked me why I had turned to religion, and I told him I was afraid I was going to hell. He laughed and said that once I started college and talked to history and philosophy professors they would set me straight, they would show me that religion was nothing but a bunch of fairy tales and a bogus creation designed to control the masses. He said that most religious people he had met over the years were weird. I didn’t want my grandfather to think I was a weirdo or a stupid person who believed in fairy tales, but I was hurting. My whole world had collapsed when I discovered the universe was ruled by a god who threw people into eternal hell. And I was commiserating with people who were telling me my grandmother was damned. I tried to explain my fear of hell to my grandfather and he said, “If you want to be afraid of hell, be my guest.”
I envied my grandfather for having no fear of hell and for seeing the Bible as nothing but fairy tales. His life seemed so much easier than mine. The only thing he seemed to fear were birds—poultry in particular—because his siblings threw a headless chicken at him, the legend goes, when he was a little boy and he had a lifelong phobia to all forms of poultry so that on Thanksgiving the hosts had to make him a special dish featuring a non-bird protein. Once when we were at someone’s house that had some kind of pet macaw outside a cage, my grandfather cowered and his whole body shook until the owner put the bird in another room. So there you had it. My grandfather cowered in the presence of birds. I cowered in the presence of the New Testament God.
If I had to choose between a lifelong fear of chickens and a lifelong fear of hell, I’d take the chickens.
I often think it would be nice to have my grandfather’s point of view, that the Bible is a bunch of man-made fairy tales, but the fear of hell is so deep inside me I feel I can’t afford to be wrong because if I am wrong I’m totally screwed.
But here’s a problem: I’ve found that pursuing religion for hell insurance doesn’t work. There’s no real love there. Ironically enough, I’m trying to save my life and I’m losing it. And those aren’t my words. They belong to Jesus.