Storm With a recently-relaxed download quota (February being a smaller month than normal), I've had the chance to examine a few Youtube videos that I'd been hitherto avoiding, such as this gem from Australian
Spicks And Specks presenter,
Tim Minchin, titled
Storm. What I found the most troubling about
Storm after hearing it was, well, twofold. The first thing that struck me was the periodic bother that I was myself, just as obnoxious to those people around me, spattering my mere science knowledge around, relying on evidence and a curious, inquisitive, information and evidence-driven view on the world while disregarding those people around me, being self-satisfied in the smug confrontation with
Storm as if I'd either be able to pull it off nearly so well,
or that I would ever have the courage to let rip on someone, stranger
or otherwise about their views that I saw as bullshit. It's difficult when dealing with a stranger - not something I've personally had major issues with when the sake at stake is my own, such as when I told someone at a friend's wedding that I wrote pornography and was a staunch antitheist, prompting her gobsmacked response that she was a Youth Group Leader. The issue is that invariably, I'm going to always be dealing with someone who believes in something stupid in one of two ways. Either I'm going to be having a short ricochet off a person in which case I can't really hold out hope for the influence I have to be a positive one.
Consider the scenario. I meet a person who believes in bullshit. I am myself, my unvarnished, skeptical, evidence-driven self and voice my opinion wholeheartedly on their views. Alluvial silver is hogshit, quantum healing hands is a lie, cold reading is a circus trick that's been embraced by people as a religious experience and without actually thinking things through, these people have sold themselves as sheep to a concept that rewards them only insofar as a greater, sadder insanity would. Then that person can either react in one of two ways.
- First, the person might hear what I've said, and, in all seriousness and consideration, take to heart what I've said. They will consider the verve and the passion with which I've said it, and perhaps some part of what I've said will linger in their mind, catching fertile ground where it can amidst the lies and the bullshit. Over time, the person might enquire after such things, and come to the evidence and understanding that I have, because let's face it, unlike Christians, I can't sit around and say 'Oh, god will do the rest of the work.' It's up to me to make my point as best I can in favour of actually thinking, because they're not going to do it for me or even meet me half-way.
- Wander away muttering to themselves My, aren't atheists rude?
Either scenario makes me wary. The first sounds foolishly optimistic and can put me in mind of a fear that I might have failed a chance to spread knowledge and enlightenment, and the latter sounds all too realistic. Worse, both sound just as nastily proseltysing as my faithful family do when they talk about setting 'a christian example.'
But it's the Spousal warning in
Storm that really sets me on edge. How many times have you been told to
be nice? My mum says it all the time. My wife says it too - about her mother, my mother, my grandmother... and she's not wrong. That's where the worst case scenario really raises it head. That you're not dealing in a random dinner party gathering with a complete nobody you've never dealt with nor will ever have to deal with again, but rather are hearing your grandmother talk about her wonderful homeopathic remedies, your father talk about his christian teachings, your mother continue on the topic of her faith as it applies to her schoolwork, your sister's willingness to indulge in extrabiblical activities but her equal rejection of evolution as a science, or even a mother-in-law who tells you she talks to god when she's not suffering from a degenerative mental condition.
It's those moments, those
be nice moments that make my gut clench. Christians talk about the burden of responsibility they hold when they deal with people who aren't Christians, why they're not instantly and constantly proseltyising to everyone they deal with. After all, every person they only meet once might be a person that they could have saved from Hell. Most of them get away with it by either cravenly cowering under the blanket of Divine Will and the Good Example, concepts that really do nothing but assuage their personal guilts.
But the thing is, am I really being nice by avoiding this? Am I really being nice by letting my grandmother buy water pills and indulge her placebo effect? I suppose it's a better way to indulge her hypochondria, but that's exceptionally condescending a view to have, isn't it? Isn't all of this?
This is the problem with it. I can't respect these mindsets. I can respect people, but if a person tells me that they believe in fairies or that they think god talks to their minister in private, then I just can't appreciate this person's perspective on the world around them because they're operating under false apprehensions and making up stories that make themselves feel better. I am left with a feeling that I'm a
bad person for this, for appreciating and respecting science and disrespecting religious or magical thinking. And that, to me, is a shame. I'm constantly left with a very silly variant on survivor's guilt, stunned that my mother and my father and my sister are sunk so deep in this idiocy that they can't help but wallow in it, while I stand on the sideline wondering how much guilt I can assuage from them.
The worst of it comes in those moments of truth when I consider what's going to happen when my father passes on. If he asks me to pray with him, if he prays for me, if he wants me to read a Bible verse at his funeral - things that I fear he will do, because I know my father well enough to know that he thinks that this entire excursion in my life towards rationalism and freethought is just the same thing as nipping out to the bathroom for an hour or so during the more boring sermons - then what do I do? Can I say to my father, in his last hours:
Those words fly no further than the roof, dad.I have developed a great love for Fox's step-grandmother lately. She and I spoke about her recently-departed - recently? It was over a year ago, wasn't it? - husband, and how, without a faith to lean on, we both instead remember him for who he was, for what he did. We miss him - I knew the man in only the most halting snippets of his life - but he... he was a great, wonderful man with a whole host of flaws and just as many admirable traits that for their quality outshone the stigmatic moments of grouchy arrogance. He was so interesting and engaging to speak to, and in those glimmering moments, showed a real sweetness that I've seen carried on in his son, hidden like rubies in a coalmine.
And I think to myself that I will never be able to truly share a moment like that with my sister when my father's gone. She'll think it's all okay - that he's in heaven, so his death didn't really matter, and all the more hideously, his life wasn't all that important, just a prelude to the real show, put in place only so he had enough time to get his hand stamped and get in the queue.
These are the places my mind goes when I am left alone. This is the sadness I think I bear uniquely amongst my friends, who all seem so wonderfully close and connected to their families. I might be wrong, which isn't really a warm comfort, merely showing that others share in my sadness at being connected to, and loving, a person who wears a daily delusion that forever separates their mind from yours, and worse, their mind from the glorious reality in which we actually
are.
*draws a breath*
This is why we need people like Tim. Because honest to god, I hadn't laughed so hard at anything all week as I'd laughed at Storm when I first saw it. It's wonderful, direct, it's well-written and it's not belaboured. And quite frankly, when my thoughts stray too far in these places I need a bit of a laugh... even if it's at a fictional hippy's expense.