The Paper Box
One particular morning in my second year of college is etched on the walls of my mind. I was in my first apartment. I remember that it was morning because my first thought was go go outside to a paper box and get a newspaper. I can see the walls of my apartment in my memory as I walk out of the door, down the hall, and out the front door of the building. As I broke the threshold of the front door, I noticed a lot of commotion on the street. I was only slightly puzzled at first at why there was so much activity, but I continued toward the paper box, which was just a few steps down the sidewalk from my apartment building. As I got closer to the box, I saw a car collide with another on the street. It was not far down the street, and across from my side of the street. It was noisy, and there was a little screaming. Then, suddenly, there were people running down my side of the street, away from where the accident had happened…but not seemingly involved in the accident. I began to wonder a little more, but just then I stepped in front of the paper box. I reached into my pocket for a quarter, placed it in the slot, opened the box and removed the top paper.
As I let the hinged door of the box slam shut, my eyes were fixed on the headline. It was one of those big headlines as if to announce major news. I’ll never forget it. All around me it was noisy and chaotic as I focused on the headline. The headline read…”GOD IS DEAD”.
I grasped the paper with both hands as if trying to keep from being swept away by some unseen force. I started screaming. I wasn’t screaming words, just…”Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhgh!”
My own screaming woke me up. I was dreaming. To this day, it is the worst nightmare I have ever had. I was sitting up in bed as I awoke, and I was perspiring. Drenched. That was when I first seriously contemplated the possibility that God did not exist. What I immediately understood about my dream was that I thought God was the source of all goodness, and once it was revealed to humanity that God did not exist, all need to be good and decent had ended. Chaotic destruction had replaced the order that was held in place, to some extent, by a population that valued order, and believed consequences ensued from disorder. Suddenly all bets were off.
I don’t have nightmares anymore. I have not had one since. I do have bad dreams, but they are more like watching a film with an annoying plot. I don’t experience fear, and certainly not terror. Even scenarios which seem like life threatening situations never rise above the puzzle solving energy. Sincerely, I have not had the paper box level of terror in the 40 years since I had that dream. In the time since that dream, I have worked as a cop in L.A., and come across numerous dead bodies, once only pieces of a dismembered body. Not a single nightmare resulted. I actually sleep really well.
The only time anything approaching terror ensues is while I am awake, and once I turn on the news. Whether it is Neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville Virginia, or the elimination of Roe v. Wade, or the murder of Trayvon Martin and the eventual acquittal of the defendant…and the many, many similar incidents that seem to happen on a weekly basis, my terror seems to only be inspired while I am awake.
04/22/2023 @ 1:38 pm
“To die, to sleep – to sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub…” (Hamlet)
04/23/2023 @ 6:23 am
robin williams hamlet
nothing but the dead of night …
time for an OMlet
ahoy! steak n’ eggs
whoa … she’s got legs!
04/23/2023 @ 10:07 am
Hear you. Sometimes it’s all I can do to open up WaPo.
Perhaps this is why humans started religions. Daily lives full of terrors, disease, brutality, sudden death, marauding neighbors, evil kings, tigers and bears, and mystery, so much mystery. With things as they are today, we may have some insight about why they explained the unknown as a guy in the sky with reasons. If they petitioned, worshipped, and did ritual things, maybe he’d tell them what to do. Shreds of comfort and hope.
I think this is what the present day extremist evangelists are all about. Everyone is frightened of world wide killer viruses, of nuclear weapons, of world leaders ready to burn it all down, of climate change, of immigrant ‘invasions’. Simplistic labels like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are comforting and offer the illusion of knowledge and blessed certainty. Those who go all in may sleep a little better at night, better than critical thinkers anyway. Knowledge, even when it’s made up knowledge, is power.
Btw, I knew god once, while sitting at the edge of a pond one summer, frozen in an eye-lock with a bullfrog, for almost half an hour. I’m not being flip. We exchanged everything in our mutual stare. I understand the human desire for the holy and the sublime.
Re: bodies and the body parts. In Tibetan Buddhism, there’s a practice to meditate in the charnel grounds. The idea is that you watch buzzards carry off our tidbits, and contemplate our impermanence. Pretty sure I could not do that, but in a real way, you have. Maybe that’s behind your lighter dreams.
04/23/2023 @ 10:46 am
I hear you too. And I thank you for sharing that. Respectfully, I offer a clarification re: God. I am not opposed to the possibility that God exists. I struggle to find my own definition of God. The only certainty I have about God is that it is not the individual rewarding one football team with a touchdown while punishing the other with allowing it. I think that God is an invention of the human ego. German soldiers had a belt buckle in WWII that said, “Gott mit uns”. They were wrong, of course, but not because he was “mit” anyone else. In my view, “God” is the impartial everything. It is the touchdown, and the failed defense. It is the bullfrog and the person watching him. God is the victim and the murderer. God is simply all that is, and “good” vs. “bad” are what we apply to our experience with it. “Good” vs “evil” are how we try to relate those experiences truthfully. Yes, I am drawing a distinction between bad and evil. Bad is how it happens to us. Evil is how we use that which is real honestly or falsely.
Religion is where I have the problem personally. Religion doesn’t have much use for truth. It is much more concerned with submission. So, if we go to religion with our fears about what is happening in the day, we are answered with somnambulant solutions. In my view, God exists in the tiny texture of a fingerprint that allows us to grasp a tool, rather than some magical ray that emanates from our fingertips allowing our hands to grasp a football, and our opponents to miss it.
04/23/2023 @ 12:01 pm
Agree. What humans call god for me is the mystery and miraculousness of nature. When the Hubble photographs were published, they confirmed what humans seem to know instinctively: how small we are, how great the universe, and how beautiful. I feel hardwired for that. When I walked into Notre Dame the first time, I burst into involuntary tears. Same, with the Hubble photos. Humans tried really really hard to create man-made sublime in those cathedrals, and did a pretty good job, yet lying in the grass, away from ambient light on a clear night, looking up at the galaxy, there’s the real thing.
Also agree about evil, that it does exist. I wonder about human self-awareness. Those who do what most call evil always have a sense of great purpose.
I used to do illustrations for a popular science magazine back in the day and illustrated a couple of articles for Frans de Waal, a biologist who specializes in primates. I knew nothing about primates, so got to speak with him by phone multiple times to ask questions about the illustrations. He wrote a fascinating book, ’Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes’. Ten pages in, you realize that they are like us, we are like them, in that everything in our lives pretty much boils down to sex, power, and politics. They plot, they deceive, they cheat, they coup. They form groups to raid, murder and rape other ape communities. Not exactly the adorable funny animals we used to visit in the zoo as kids. Do they practice evil? I think by our human definitions, yes, because power.
While I’m on the primates. Bonobos are a matriarchal species. The females have all control. They have sex with whomever they wish, with both females and males, and often before a big group meal, dining together without males, who then get what is left. Males accept this, and are gentle and non-aggressive. If reincarnation is real, I’ll take a turn as a bonobo, thanks 😉
04/23/2023 @ 12:18 pm
“Galileo’s head was on the block
The crime was lookin’ up the truth
And as the bombshells of my daily fears explode
I try to trace them to my youth
And then you had to bring up reincarnation
Over a couple of beers the other night
And now I’m serving time for mistakes
Made by another in another life time…”– Indigo Girls
I love the serendipitous synchronicity of this conversation. You brought up reincarnation, and it made me think of the lyric. And as I copied the lyric I see that it involves “daily fears” exploding.
And even more, I created a video with this particular song, and the video is about being a fan of the Cleveland Browns, and how miserable that is. Oddly enough, I jokingly used football in our discussion about God.
04/23/2023 @ 7:21 pm
I know so little about football, but the juxtaposition of it with the unexpected in your vid is fun–baby photos, Galileo, art, and Indigo Girls (have loved Indigo Girls too, since forever).
Synchronicity is cool and Jungian concepts are back, especially in politics. I was just listening to Lindsey Graham on the news tonight. Talk about the shadow.
04/23/2023 @ 4:33 pm
EZ IF
As it all beholds glint and gleam,
we walk on islands toward the stream
cognizant our dream, always alert
silent prayer that we know
forevermore LISTEN
Hell again as the storm clouds glisten
04/25/2023 @ 1:39 pm
Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the ‘God’ question:
He makes it difficult to argue, disagree, or remain ambivalent…
04/25/2023 @ 2:29 pm
I agree with him. I’ll go you one further.
I arrived at the conclusion in the past year that power is inseparable from evil. The use of power to benefit oneself can only subjugate or take from another. Therefore, the pursuit of God (omnipotent) can only return an empty set, or an individual dedicated to service and humility. The supreme being would have to be the most servile being. The awareness of self for God would have to be something like the opposite of itself, the awareness and manifestation of the lack of self.
Thus, the concept of an omnipotent God can not exist with itself or within a universe that contains the concept of highness, goodness, purity, power, etc. All definitions begin to erode and dissolve themselves except for oxymoron.
04/29/2023 @ 2:17 pm
Effervescent! Our great Dr. Tyson perhaps rings the bell for: ————————————————————->English poet and scholar who is best known for the epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), an account of humanity’s fall from grace… Mil·ton (mĭl′tən), John 1608-1674.
God only knows! As so well dramatized by Dennis Hopper / Apocalypse Now / when he deifies Marlon Brando: HE KNOWS ! Hence, we read, we write, we persevere and await dawn’s early light. Three then four drifters who’d do well at Iwo Jima atop Mount Suribachi [facisims’ defeat is more than emotive reflex]
Never hopeless noir impossible. The river finds its way. No need to race as everything is in place. Yearn to learn. ‘Mould be interesting to cast Michael Moore as our U.N. Ambassador! Imagine logistics distributing pints of Ben & Jerrys to the malnourished. Or a nano-physics umbrella on the North Pole. Indeed: house the people living in the street … “That’s the Power of Love …!” LO;} JP Hart
04/29/2023 @ 5:02 pm
Gone for milk, honey, tooth whitener and that Nordic ‘chine made of recycled bottle caps (don’t know much ’bout history … other than heavenly cause) Sue, Danyell and me are rotating at the wheel no more than 500 miles per turn, turn, turn. Parentheticly we have to get away and get down on our knees and pray {…} I am listening to Jean Twenge: Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America’s Future {…} what’d want? FREE WATER 💦What’d we get?
Purple Rain {…} collective earringingcringing from today’s multiple homicides. Who chats among us? .. between the crosses row on row
05/11/2023 @ 11:09 am
Interesting that definitions of God always involve omnipotence, omniscience, and perfection. Also interesting that your definition of God focuses on submission. I come from a tradition where we are expected to argue with God. Also, submission is in some ways a stage. I look at it from the standpoint of God the Parent. When you’re a kid, obedience is necessary, but the long term goal is to provide enough of a moral foundation, to essentially light a moral pilot light, such that we act by conscience that has presumably been educated into us, along with the process (also based on biological maturation – to a far greater extent than most people realize and it takes way longer than most people realize) of how to approach moral decisions.
Omniscience doesn’t work. The Bible has a divine learning curve. Mankind before Noah was essentially a mistake, with the worldwide board being nearly erased.
Omnipotence is a more interesting question. The problem with omnipotence is that God can’t exercise it if people are going to have the option of being good voluntarily, which is an enormous privilege. With exercised omnipotence comes a world of basically inanimate puppets. That isn’t moral or interesting.
I’m not arguing in favor of religion or God. I’m just saying that some of the arguments against religion are based on assumptions that aren’t universally valid.
From the resident theist.
05/11/2023 @ 11:56 am
Do you remember that film about the Orca whale titled, “Free Willy”? Some point after that series of films became a fixture came the snarky mugs and t-shirt which read, “Catch Willy and make him do tricks.” That was an obvious reference to the fact of Willy having been an aquatic park performer/attraction. And from that, came the snarky criticism of Christianity which went, “catch Jesus and make him do tricks.”
That line about Jesus was the center of a discussion among several friends, my wife and me. That is a shorthand version, in a very irreverent way, of a perspective that sees God in the way that you just described. That view is essentially my view. Some might say that this is disrespectful to Jesus. It isn’t. I see it is tweaking the nose of those who would capture the divine for their own purposes. Some may see no distinction. To me, it is as big as all that is.
05/11/2023 @ 3:25 pm
I never saw Free Willy though I certainly know of it.
The thing about miracles is that most are about credentialing. They’re rarely the point. There is nothing sacred and certainly nothing unusually moral about changing water into wine. It is, as you pointed out, a trick.
I find that a lot of Christians are distracted by this. One cool thing about Judaism, though they don’t generally express it this way, is that faith is a means to an end. We believe that conduct is more important than faith and we believe that God believes that. The biggest religious question isn’t Who but What.
So – using the Christian events as narrative – God has found that prophets aren’t doing the trick sufficiently, so instead of sending prophets to tell the people how to live a moral life, he’s going to have a biological son and send him to show them how to live one. This is, in my eyes, theologically feasible. And so Jesus is born and sets a number of really good examples. He constantly reaches out to the marginalized. He says one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard in theology: Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone, a thing that resonates enormously with me because I am of the opinion that there are two competing priorities in religion: vigilance and compassion, and that whenever a sect or religion emphasizes compassion we’re fine but whenever one emphasizes vigilance we end up in trouble, and he blatantly favors compassion here. He looks at the wealthy strolling past miserable poverty without giving it a second glance, throws his hands up in disgust and says “I’d be easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get one of these guys into Heaven.” He sees a bunch of guys using the Temple for financial gain rather than for divine purposes and throws them out – a phenomenon that is often found in televangelists, particularly those pushing prosperity theology or whatever it’s called. I love this stuff. It’s Jewishly moral. But if God is going to send someone to carry a message to people in general, when we get the messenger and open the pouch, how feasible is it that the message is going to say “worship the bearer?” like some sort of weird take on Rosencrantz and Gildenstern? That’s not what’s in the pouch. What’s important is looking in the pouch.
Because, ultimately, religion has to have a divine purpose. There has to be a reason a deity wants faith other than ego. God isn’t Tinkerbell; if God exists we don’t have to clap to keep Him alive. I’m grateful but I don’t think for a minute that gratitude is the point, like I don’t think that faith is the point. I think the aforementioned pilot light is the point because that’s what makes God a successful parent and being a successful parent is as sacred as it gets.
05/11/2023 @ 2:23 pm
4 sure! sweet VA + me