Fastened to a Mast: The Cross of Belief

In many parts of the world today, when a child is born, he or she becomes metaphorically bound to a cross of belief. The child is instructed that he is a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or of some other belief system. We all can see that these are not statements of truth when they are made to a child.  A Christian is an adherent of Christianity.  A Jew is an adherent of Judaism.  A Muslim is an adherent of Islam.  All such  statements imply a decision of belief.  All of us can see that the uneducated child has not yet achieved the knowledge necessary to make an informed decision as to what he or she will believe.

Sometimes these statements are not made directly, implied instead in phrases such as "We are Christians..."  To be fair to the child, a more truthful statement would be more instructive.  Parents would say something like: "We are Christian, and we would like for you to join us in  our celebrations as you grow up and become educated." The parents would then ensure that the child receives a complete education.

However many children are  commanded along the lines of "You are Christian," or "You are Muslim, " or "You are Jewish." The child usually receives such instructions from those he most admires: his well-meaning parents, siblings, caretakers and teachers.  Recognizing their good intentions, the child  will take these instructions to heart and then survey the world. Within his own internal language, within his developing court of reason, the child thinks along these lines:

“I am one of this religion, and so are my loved ones, but none of us is one of those other religiions. All of those others believe that they have the truth and that we do not. My parents would never give to me to believe something that is not true so therefore only we have the truth and with good reason then these others cannot be trusted.”

Thus the child's court of reason has become corrupted by the false instruction. The child has accepted what he has been told as truth and become cornered within the prejudice of mistrust.    In some parts of the world, the child risks corporal punishment if he or she wishes to debate the truth of statements such as these. Some of them are truly trapped by nothing more than a false idea that is however protected by fear and violence.  They find themselves fastened tightly to the mast of the cultures ancient ship, sailing in sorrow past the islands of the children of man with whom they would have otherwise in joy shared this, their only epoch. 

The world today has not yet created the document that will specify their human rights. Some parents believe that they own their children and as such owners they are free to instill and enforce whatever beliefs and fears  they wish.  Their children are defenseless against such onslaughts, not being allowed the freedom nor the education to challenge the fears and beliefs of their parents.

If we are created then we can all see the rights granted to us by our creator. Our children are created and entrusted to us and we can respond to this love of God by raising them in love,  truth and fairness, ensuring that they will have the right to believe as they wish and the education with which to make a decision.  To do less than that is a betrayal of the trust that has been placed in us.  And if we are not created, we can all with reason see the rights that we ourselves should declare and grant to one another.   In both cases, we can all see that the human rights of children are the same and that among these rights are the rights to a full education and the rights to freedom of belief.

Therefore atheists and theists have a common ground of understanding and belief with regard to the human rights of children. And we who have inherited freedom, and parents who are beginning to understand what they must do to free their children, together with those who are still in silence bound, have a common goal to declare the rights of children and to enact them for all of time.

Your Honor

Presenting here within your court of reason, sworn as I am to tell the truth, I will labor to present the truth as I know the truth to be.  I will be reliant upon you to evaluate each claim and then to judge my testimony as a whole, to determine what truth, if any, should be carried forth and proclaimed as truth by you. 

I present for your consideration the following two numbered claims:

1. This next sentence is infallible truth.
2. Two apples and two bananas represent five pieces of fruit.

If you pre-judge the first claim to be true, then you must believe the second claim is true.  In order to maintain belief that the second claim is true, you must suspend consideration of any evidence outside of the two claims above.  If you do so, then the second claim becomes truth for you because you have been prejudiced by the fallacy of the first claim.

This particular fallacy, argumentum caecium, is the argument from blindness.  The argument from blindness is a claim about the content of claims that have yet to be made.  At the time the claim is made, there can be no certain knowledge that the claims that will follow will be aligned with the first claim.  On its face, on its own merits, the first claim is an empty argument and therefore it can only serve to induce prejudice if believed.  As a fallacy it is perfectly named because it requires blind faith to believe it.

Seated as you are in your own court of reason, you have the right to consider the first claim to have been made in bad faith and to dismiss it with prejudice, which means that you will consider any further testimony by the claimant with a lesser degree of trust.  However, you need not make a finding of bad faith if you determine that the claimant was simply mistaken in his belief or inadequate in his expression of argument.  However in any case it must be dismissed as prejudicial as a rule of honor prior to the hearing of any further claims.

There is honor in your court of reason.  You yourself know the truth of everything you have said and done.  You know your courage and your fear, and you know your plight in life. You have recorded the truths you know in your memory and you correct them when you must in the face of new knowledge.  You may not speak the truth, for many different reasons, but you know the truth, the truth about yourself. 

Consider now the very first paragraph of this article. There is a claim of intention to present the truth accompanied by a request for evaluation as to whether the truth was indeed presented.   There is the implied argument that I might fail.  All truthful claims are appeals to reason.  I am counting on the honor in your own high court of reason.  For this I should well address you as “Your Honor.”

A holy book is a binding together of separate pages of printed language.  The language is assembled by one or more speakers or writers over time and the words are printed on the pages of the book.   The pages are bound together to make the book.  The book is then presented to you for your evaluation and judgment.

On one of the pages of the book it might be stated that the entire book to which the page is bound represents infallible truth.   How will you interpret that claim?  You can see that it is a fallacy.  Though it was written or spoken as a claim of truth, you can find that  it was not intentioned as a claim of truth as such a warning that the testimony to follow may not worthy of trust.  If you believe the writer to be well intentioned, you might make a finding of good faith and allow the testimony to continue.  You might then proceed to read the book to judge it on its own merits, dismissing prejudice wherever else you might find it. 

The person who hands the book to you might make a similar claim, that the book is the infallible truth. Once again, you have to decide how to interpret the fallacious claim.  After making a judgement of good or bad faith, you can now decide whether or not to evaluate the book to determine if any parts of it can be proclaimed as truth by you.

You might find yourself living within a family or a culture where your proclamations of truth are constrained to be in agreement with your family, teacher, government, religion, or brotherhood.   If so, then, in order to live a reasonably comfortable life within such constraints, you might find that you must proclaim something other than the truth. My claim is that there is no shame in this. In effect, you are a prisoner and all of us who live in free societies recognize this and even further, we give you the benefit of the doubt.  We can see that you are so constrained.  We are considering steps that might be taken to remove the constraints on your liberty and on your right to proclaim the truth as you see it.

It will not be easy.  It will not be soon. You might not live to see yourself in liberty and for this I must apologize for I was born to a free society.  I have inherited liberty.  As such I am to be the faithful steward of liberty across the generations of man or I will be something less than that, and there is no form of acceptable life that is less than that.  I can let it languish or I can labor to extend it further to the other people of the world.  My testimony is but a part of that generational spanning labor.  My labor might be small or late but it shall not fail because I am not the only steward of liberty left in this world.  There are many others who will carry on seeing it through, that liberty is extended finally to you and to your people.  Some of you are women.  Some of you are children.  Some of you are men who are trapped.  You would free your family but then you would all be punished by those who will not allow a doubt to a system of belief.

You might be one of those who believe you must withhold liberty of belief from those within your family or culture.  You might have made a prejudiced decision to believe a claim that a book is infallible and having placed your faith in that single fallacy you have believed all of the following claims without question, not allowing any other evidence into your court of reason.   And following logically on those claims you feel you must punish  all those within your reach who will not worship the mythical being predicated on the fallacy.    You have a mistaken belief that the children born into your culture are born of your belief and can be of no other belief, that you own their liberty of belief. You are trapped by this belief because you have punished others in its name and that therefore there is nothing left to do but to hope the mythical being exists and to continue to worship him.  Otherwise, you yourself must judge yourself in the harshest terms, having denied liberty to those who were entrusted to you. You share a brotherhood with others such as yourself and you know your brothers will strike you down if you proclaim the new truth you are beginning to see. You suspect that many of them, as well as you, wish they could escape from the fallacy of this belief. But you know that they also fear to speak the truth.  The fear is not because you fear that the mythical being will strike you down, but that your own brother will strike you down if you question the system of belief. This is the silent understanding that your entire brotherhood shares and not one of you can dare to speak it out loud.

It is to you, and to this brotherhood of you, it is to the honor to all of you that I must appeal.  Observing the trap into which you have fallen, how will you free your people when you yourselves can hardly make a move?  It will take great courage, some of the greatest courage the world will ever know. And some of your acts of courage will never be known to any other because they cannot be published.  They will be known only by you, guessed at by those like me, and in the future, in later days, by the people you freed who will look back on time and understand, long after you and I have left the earth. You will be an agent for truth, an agent for liberty, there shall be honor in your court of reason, you shall heal the world.  You might not speak the truth until it is safe to do so, but you will act upon the truth to free your people from oppression.  You will begin to make your plans and to act this very day.

The God who exists, if any God exists at all, will cherish your acts of honor.  She is not the God you have been told about. The God we can all see, by observing the decisions of God, does not require us to believe or even to continue to live.  She understands the trap into which we sometimes fall, traps of enforced beliefs, beliefs that induce us to cause sorrow to the children she has created.  She creates them and entrusts them to us to see to their education and liberty.  She has entrusted them to you.  What will be your honorable response to her act of trust?  Will your final acts be known to her as honor when she lifts you from where you have fallen?

Whether or not we are created, liberty is created and carried forth across the generations by the free will decisions and acts of honorable women and men.  It is true, God might not exist, but we are humanity, we are amazing miracles in an amazing universe. We are thinkers, we have free will, we can maintain honor within our own high courts of reason. We can extend liberty to each other, we can live as repositories of trust for one another, we can be our brother's keeper.

In the Arms of Twenty Angels

With these sad events of Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut we can all see that if God exists, she does not interfere in the affairs of our world, at least, not in a manner that we can directly see. But, what is it that she does, after all? It is true that if she exists, then it is she who does create these children and then entrust them to us, and that even today, this morning, she pondered existence and although she was not required to do so, she did make her decision, and thousands of newly created infants were created and delivered into our world, into our trust.

If there ever was a boy who grew to be so troubled he could not engage in trust, it was this boy Adam Lanza. And all of it comes down to trust. We have no better strategy than to trust each other. We knew he was troubled, we were unsure how to help him, but we trusted him to carry on, as best he could, in trust with us as co-administrators of the world of peace that we labor to build. We trusted all of them, these boys who armed themselves to slay the innocent. We trusted Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, we trusted James Holmes and Seun-Hui Cho.

The rational theist, and the rational atheist comes face to face with the single question that underlies all moral thought: "Am I my brother's keeper?" We never needed a bible to come to that question, it is the fundamental moral choice that we all face in life. We can live as repositories of trust for one another, or we can be something less than that.

So, who are these boys? Are they our brothers? Do we take the time to know them? Do we even look at them?  Do they look themselves in the mirror and see boys who just cannot fit in? Do they believe we see the same when we look at them? Do they see themselves as not quite so beautiful in form and, thinking this must follow, not quite so beautiful in spirit? They see the beautiful ones, a world of beautiful children, some of them their classmates. But for themselves they must believe they are defective in their internal souls to reflect a countenance that even they cannot accept. They fail in social skills; they make mistakes in speech and movement in desperate clumsiness to just be one of the children of the world. And we do not know of the betrayals of trust that they endured. Some of such events are unspeakable, they have been endured in silence, some of them have been betrayed by the very ones to whom they had been entrusted as newborn children.

And they are here amongst us, hidden, they are all around, and some of them are sisters too, and all of them are lonely. Can we see them as ones to love? If we cannot how will they ever know it? So for atheists, how can we teach ourselves to care from them, to keep them?

And if we wish to believe in God, if we cannot see them with the same loving eyes as she who gave them life, they never will know love, until once again they find themselves in her arms after they have died and like all of us, reach out to her in the sudden relief and joy of remembrance of her being.

But Adam, poor blessed Adam, who if she exists is then the created child of God, he will avert his eyes from hers in a chemistry of burning tears, “I cannot be here,” he will say, “I cannot be with them. I do not belong here, I must be punished, I must be sent to hell, I must suffer forever, I am worthy of nothing more.”

“Who is it that with whom you cannot be?” she will ask.

“I cannot be with such as these,” he will say, for they will be surrounded by the twenty children. “I do not belong with them.”

“And with me," she will ask, "will you not belong with me?”

And he will miss her, of course he will, for it is her face, her eyes on ours, that is the last thing that we know of her, after she has created us and before she sets us to sleeping in our mother’s wombs. And it is the first thing we remember, our souls quickening in excitement at the pending reunion, after we have died. But Adam will have cut himself off form that, in the cruelest of self-punishments, in the knowledge of what he has done.

“No!” he will think to himself, “I will punish myself very well, I will not reach for her..." and his thoughts will trail off to the kinds of pain that only self condemning souls can know, those who in her very presence shut themselves off from her, refusing to be baptized once again in her beauty and her wisdom, these things we most cherish of her, these things we miss so much.

“Will you not open your eyes to me?” she will ask, holding him in her arms.

“I am terrible in my spirit,” he will say, “I am not worthy of even death, I must be sent to hell and forced to live in everlasting pain.” His cries will be those of halting anguish, some that can be heard and some that are heard only within in his spirit, the anguish only she can also hear.

“But it has been so long, Adam," she will say at last, "so very long, since I have last seen your eyes on mine.”

And he will open his eyes at that, at the thought of her alone in time, and like a newborn he will cry for her, like babies we all shall cry.

And she will raise him up to comfort him and in his ear she will whisper what we have always known, “There shall be no hell for my beloved children, you will find another way. I will send you back to the world, to find another way.”

“I am no good for them, you must send me to hell,” he will cry, “I cannot undo the things I have done. I cannot bear my memory.”

“Don’t cry Adam,” a small voice will rise, then another, then all twenty, because they are young children and these are the things young children say while they are still young children, “Don’t cry, Adam.”

His anguish will reach the place where she herself will move to kiss him, to send his soul to sleep, and she will examine him and contemplate all of the memories he wished he could abandon. She will know with us all of our memories, every one of them.

“He is sleeping now,” she will say to them, to the twenty children.

“Can you fix him? Can you make him better?” they will ask.

“I can make him beautiful,” she will say, and then she will. She will re-create him as an infant, waiting to be reborn.

And they will see in their astonishment, when once again his eyes are opened, his memories are clean and new, his baby face is smiling at the sight of his beloved’s eyes, she kisses him once more to sleep and sends him to the world to be reborn, as she sends each one of us to the world entrusting us to each other.

“He was so sad and lonely, who will take care of him?” the children will ask of her, "Can we take care of him? Can you send us back to the world with him, to take care of him?”

And these blessed children and their teachers and Adam's mother will remember the diamonds in her eyes when she kisses them each back to paradise, to the world she has created, the garden we never lost, the world where we awaken to find ourselves entrusted with created life.

We know because we see her beauty and her love that she takes care of us after we have died. She brings us close to her and holds us in her arms for as long as we wish to stay with her, She answers all of our questions, she gives to us the things we need, and we grow to love her beautifully, so beautifully we hasten to be reborn again, to hasten to the world to love her children, to hasten to the world to love each other, to hasten to the world to love the things she loves.

And they will all be teachers, and they will teach the children with whom they shall be entrusted, they will teach them to love each other, to leave not a single one behind.

They will teach them in kindergarten, to pair off and draw paintings of each other with crayons. The children will look into each other’s eyes, and count the freckles on each other’s cheeks and they will draw pictures of each other, with crayons and paper and in their minds.

And they will switch the parings, so that each one spends some hours in the eyes of every other. And at the end of the year they will each carry home 20 painted pictures of their friends.

And the teacher’s shall free the children from all fate that might have otherwise been forced upon them. The children will learn to choose their own names and their own beliefs and their own religions. They will understand that they are all in this together, that all they have is trust, that if God exists she is very beautiful and that even if she does not they do awaken in a world to find themselves entrusted with each other.

And they will keep drawing pictures of each other, in every grade thereafter. They will learn each other’s names and learn of each other’s lives, not a single one left behind. And they will keep drawing pictures of each other, when they meet in colleges and places of work, they will get to know each other. They will learn to know each other’s eyes and when they get older they might cry when they show these pictures to their grandchildren telling them it has been so long since I have seen her eyes on mine.