Suddenly the tower swayed and the part I was in fell off. This was moderately alarming, what with it being hundreds of feet in the air and me being inside it. But apparently it caught a gust of wind and rode it sideways a mile or two. It smashed into a beautiful lawn in front of a church. People came running to see what happened, but all of them except Mneme were far more interested in the building fragment than me.

I was fine. Mneme and I went to a movie, where the lady sitting on the other side of me was talking to us and eating our nachos. It turned out that the movie was actually some kind of training class for future Mission: Impossible team members. (Because you have to have nachos for that, obviously.) They picked teams to go on the assignment, and I got picked last – sitting there by myself in a big empty auditorium.

There are a few things interesting to me about this dream.

1) Falling. I wasn’t terrified – frightened, alarmed even, but not terrified. And heights are generally pretty scary for me. Being in a piece of skyscraper that’s falling to the ground would probably in fact frighten me to death long before I hit the ground. Curious that my subconscious didn’t go there this time.

2) Getting picked last. Despite the fact that I’m nowhere near athletic, I don’t have a lot of awful memories about getting picked last for stuff in school. In the neighborhood where I grew up, I wasn’t usually picked last. I wasn’t asked to be a receiver or an outfielder much because I’m barely decent at catching and I’m all but hopeless at throwing. But if you want me to swing a bat or tackle someone, I can do that tolerably well. (Besides, if you’re doing impossible stuff, Mneme and J are your go-to people, not me. And I just fell out of the sky, so cut me some slack.)

3) The church. I think about church and Christianity a lot. I was listening to NPR the other day, and they mentioned that until the evangelical movement really started becoming more mainstream most people had no idea what a “born-again Christian” was. This startled me. I just figured that everyone who went to church (except maybe Catholics) knew all about that. Which shows you that what I really know about my former faith is far less than you’d think, considering all the time I spent studying it and being immersed in it.

Anyway, it seems significant that I landed in front of a church. Not sure what it means, exaclty. I didn’t spend the time in free-fall praying.

Something to think about …

EDIT: Also 4) no Paula Patton? Come on, subconscious. Not fair.

Probably I like the sound of my own brain too much. I used to think that made me deeper and my life more meaningful than others’. Where they wasted time on silly things like bonding with others over shared experiences and growing pains, I was alone in my room thinking deep thoughts like “It’s weird that I still don’t have a girlfriend” and “I bet I’m going to be really awesome some day”.

I’m probably always going to be an introvert. Obviously I could go out and be more social. I really should be: despite all my quirks, neither I nor anyone else on this earth should try to live in isolation. We are social animals and we need each other. But my baseline preference to spend a higher-than-typical amount of time alone probably won’t change. I find it hard to imagine accomodating a serious relationship like that – never mind the extremely slight chance that Miss Right will fall into my arms as I sit in my living room, I’m not sure how I could persuade her that my need for alone time isn’t in conflict with her need to be with me (or a rejection of my need to be with her).

I tend to see relationships as obligations. I owe something to those who have chosen to befriend me. I am required to be interested in them and supportive of them. Debits and credits, give and take, all of it requiring balance and constant awareness. And I’m not entirely sure that’s an inaccurate or unhealthy way to look at it – I do owe my friends something, after all.

The trouble is that I don’t really guess my ability to pay what’s owed. I let myself off the hook because loving and being a good friend doesn’t come naturally to me: it’s risky business, it requires vulnerability and putting yourself on the line for someone else, and that’s scary territory for me. It’s funny that I don’t shrink from my elaborately romanticized notions of romantic commitment, but committing to friends and family is something I have to learn and practice.  Probably because I’ve built the idea of being in a relationship with a woman into this Holy Grail in my mind – the end-all be-all of perfect and permanent happiness – whereas being a friend is something more everyday, more “the norm”.  I still have a lot of the Hollywoodized ideas of relationships in my mind.

And of course, being a depressed person with BPD and poor self-esteem, I tend to underestimate why on earth anyone would want anything to do with me. (Or I veer off into narcissism and just assume that the mere fact of my presence in someone’s life is a benefit that outweighs the negatives of dealing with my crap. My head is a mare’s nest.)

So being my friend is more anthill than picnic blanket. I can be a good friend. Those who know me will tell you that there have been times they could count on me, times I was a delight to be around, times I was supportive and helpful and loving. It’s not always narcissism and abuse – I’m capable of changing my behavior and managing my conditions.

But I get lax. I used to think it was that I wasn’t hard enough on myself, but really it’s more to do with not holding on tight enough to what makes my life better. I want my life to be a plateau, not an upward slope: I want to reach some point where I can say “good enough” and just kind of coast. And I’m quick to assume that the place where I’m standing is that plateau, that since it’s better than the usual depressed and isolated nightmare that it’s fine to stand there. But I’m standing on a dune, and wind and tide are whittling it back down into the water. It’s the frog in the pot letting the water get hotter.

I let things slip. And then when I catch on, I beat myself up for doing it. I decide I’m not worthy, that I shouldn’t try to get up because down is where I belong, because justice demands blood. Let that be a lesson to me! The burned hand teaches best.

But that assumes a brain better-wired than mine. Mine treats pain as a thing to be avoided at all costs. If it hurts, don’t try to find a way to do it that won’t hurt and don’t think of the pleasure beyond the pain: just don’t get hurt again. Mneme often talks about how none of us are getting our deposits back. And I remember the third servant in the parable of the talents.

I picked up my old paperpack copy of “Dune” the other day. Early in the book a priestess subjects the teenage protagonist to the test of the gom jabbar: he must keep his hand in a fire or be killed instantly with a poisoned needle at his neck. After the test, she reveals that the fire was only simulated and his hand is unhurt. The object of the test is to verify his humanity – an animal would gnaw its leg off to escape the trap, but a human sees her way to the other side of the pain and a greater good.

I don’t think I would  pass the test of the gom jabbar right now. I want my life painless and simple, something handed to me. If it costs I’d rather not. But that gets me only what I have. That gets me seconds on  a clock, more days where I’ve made no memories and put nothing in the bank against the inevitable rainy day.

She’s right to say that I was a very angry atheist for a long time. A friend once said that it wasn’t so much that I didn’t believe in God as that I was very angry with God. And there was a lot of truth to that. I remember standing out in thunderstorms daring God to strike me down. I remember writing essays (bound, signed, and numbered for maximum pretentiousness) about how belief in God was irrational, self-destructive, and anti-human – and giving them as “gifts” to my friends, who are all people of deep faith.  I remember telling them over lunch that I couldn’t  possibly be friends with religious people because they were irrational and destructive – right after they’d spent the morning helping me move. I remember arguing that my faith in my understanding of reason could not be considered faith because it was reason, which was the opposite of faith. When my friends pointed out that they didn’t appreciate me stomping all over their beliefs, I remember trying to dodge behind the “well, I’m speaking about religion in general – it’s not my fault if that shoe fits your individual foot, so you shouldn’t be offended” trick. (What a load of crap.)

I was an angry, irrational, inconsiderate jerk. And I very much regret all of it. I  had no business treating people like that, or being so obstinate about it. Youthful mistakes, yes, and certainly my mental illnesses played a role, but I still made choices I shouldn’t have and did and said things I had no right to. I was an ass.

It really started when I read Rand. I met a guy in college who was very into Ayn Rand. He was smart, articulate, and funny. At first he was a friend of a friend, but we hit it off very well and soon he was one of my best friends. We used to take these long meandering walks through the neighborhood after midnight, talking for hours about all the stuff college kids bat around so passionately: the meaning of life, the existence of God, politics, philosophy.

He talked a lot about Rand and how her ideas had changed his life completely. I admired his confidence and the clarity of his ideas. So I read “Atlas Shrugged”, and like many other young people it hit me like a sledgehammer. It was like the little voice in my head that had always told me “You’re better than them, you’ll show them someday – they’ll see, they’ll get theirs for not seeing how you’re better” had just found confirmation in a book. Now I knew why I was better, and I could prove it, and all that stuff about myself that I’d cherished and everyone had tried to drill out of me was actually good and sacred.

At first I was actively opposed to religion, just like Rand. I wanted to “crush the infamous thing”. I told myself all my attacks on others’ beliefs were really for their own good, and for the good of the world: it dovetailed nicely with the evangelical mindset I was brought up with, and it gave me an excuse to feel and act superior. I was saving them from their “souls”! I was shining the light of sweet reason in on their dark, superstitious lives.

Except I wasn’t. For one thing, while I am lucky enough to be very smart (even brilliant on a good day), I am basically the village idiot in that circle. My family is a bunch of geniuses: people renowned in their fields, rising stars already burning bright and ascending fast. They’d never say so, because they are all far too decent to brag (and indifferent to that kind of competition). And I don’t want to give the impression that they tolerate me despite my relative lack of intellectual heft, because honestly it’s more like they tolerate me despite my frequently being a colossal ass. They have no interest in comparing brainpower — “they care about that like they care about interstellar dust”, to paraphrase Parker. What matters to them is who you are as a person, not your IQ score or your bank account or your social standing or other meaningless nonsense.

They understood their faiths (and mine) better than I did. Still do. They tried to make some sense of my Rand obsession, but given their better critical thinking skills (and less emotionally compromised judgment) they couldn’t really make sense of it. I think of my transition from evangelical Christian to  Objectivist fanatic as essentially trading one “missed the point” emotionally stunting and hyper-judgmental cult for another. Instead of worshipping a stern judge in the sky forever separating the sheep from the chaff, I worshipped a Russian immigrant who condemned her protege to impotence for breaking off their affair. Tomato potato.

But one reason concepts of absolute morality (like my parents’ brand of evangelical Christianity, or Objectivism) fail is that there are always cracks in the facade. As an atheist I’d learned to delight in obsessing over odd minutia like the story of Christ condemning the fig tree, or Lot’s response to the mob that wanted him to let them have their way with his angelic guests. That cuts both ways. My friend was convinced that the best way to save our society from its irrational ways was to hasten its inevitable collapse – something like the way Morpheus justifies killing all those poor security guards who are just as trapped in the Matrix as he was once. And the more I looked at Objectivism, the less sense it made.

I never could quite understand Rand’s assertion that ragtime music was necessarily a more rational and emotionally healthy choice than say, Led Zeppelin. Or that while a woman certainly could be President, an emotionally healthy woman wouldn’t want to be. And I couldn’t reconcile her love of science and reason with her refusal to accept that smoking causes cancer – even after she lost a lung to it.

Add in learning that Rand was stubborn, unstable, and deeply manipulative in shocking ways, and it came to me that my idol was clay well past her knees. Even she couldn’t live the way she said everyone should. And while I grant that no one’s perfect, it’s not compelling to say “do as I say, not as I do” like that.

So I stopped being an Objectivist. No more meetings, no more newsletters, no more periodic re-reading of “The Fountainhead”. But I was still an atheist, and still pretty militant about it: religion was going to destroy us all, no question. But there was no need to try and destroy it. Its influence faded over time. Given enough time, it would just fade into obscure corners of our culture – and good riddance to it.

Here’s where the transition gets fuzzier. One of my weaknesses is that I hold on to the wrong parts of my past. I hold on to the hurts, the slights, and the obstacles I couldn’t overcome. I remember my failures (when I see them as such), and all the good stuff goes into a box marked “Okay, That Happened, Now What?” I don’t hold on to the stories of how I beat the odds and triumphed over adversity or became a better person: they’re like items on a to-do list that get deleted as soon as they’re checked off. Been there, done that, moving on.

I can’t point to a particular moment or even a process when I started accepting others’ faiths. I don’t recall how I got here from that angry, abusive place I was in for all those years. Here’s what I think happened, but it may well be a narrative I constructed after the fact – if the past is another country, mine is more often Narnia than Norway.

I started hanging out at That Other Place. I think when I first got there I was still in my “moderately militant” phase: less “crush the infamous thing” and more “we will inevitably evolve beyond this nonsense”. I loved that place, and the people I met there. Still do, for the most part.

But one thing that plagues unmoderated forums like Radio Paradise is trolls. Some people would rather call scorn and derision “style” and wield it like a cudgel on anyone they disagree with or think less of. Some people just enjoy wreaking havoc – as Alfred said, they want to  ”watch the world burn”. And they tend to make the whole place less enjoyable as a result.

So i started arguing for more civility. Not restraint imposed from outside, by the owners of the site or by some self-appointed forum cops, but from within: self-restraint. The recognition that others and their views deserve as much respect as we expect for our own. I believe that practicing that self-restraint (something text-based interactions make easier than real-time face-to-face interactions) would make a huge difference: it might not stop the true trolls, the griefers and Jokers, but it would keep a lot of foot-in-mouth moments from escalating into full-on flamewars. And I believe that if we focused on the idea and not the adherent, if we worked on disagreeing without being disagreeable, we could get a lot farther both as friends and as intellectuals. Civility is a powerful force.

But it’s hard to have any credibility as a voice for self-restraint and respect for diversity if you don’t walk the walk.  You can’t really say “hey, stop saying all Republicans are evil”  if you’re also trying to sell the idea that all Christians are deluded. Either the logic works or it doesn’t, and in both cases it very much doesn’t. The brush is too broad, the strokes are too sloppy.

Besides, if religion is already on its inevitable decline, why push it? And does it really make sense to think that one day everyone will come to realize that there are no gods, that the world will one day be as monolithic in atheism as it never was in theism? Of course not. There will always be religious people. As soon fight the tide as fight people’s need to find meaning and order in a chaotic world, and the infinite ways they find to fill that need.

I stopped thinking I could prove there was no God. I couldn’t even construct a decent argument to shut my father up, much less someone smarter. I was all hat and no cattle, really. I tried to bolster my arguments by reading Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not A Christian”.

And I couldn’t stand it. Russell gave his book the wrong title: it’s not so much “Why I Am Not A Christian” as “Why Christianity Is Laughable and Stupid”. It’s not a defense of or explanation for his atheism so much as it is a condemnation of Christianity. It felt petty and mean-spirited to me, like a mockery of everything millions of people held dear – and for no better reason than the fact that he didn’t agree.

Mneme took me to her church: a community church, intensely and directly involved in issues of social justice. It was full of bright, articulate, passionate, creative people who had a deeper commitment to the fundamentals of their faith (love, compassion, justice) than to a narrow, rigid interpretation of the rules. They took “even as you have done unto the least of these” and “love your neighbor” very seriously, and very joyfully. And not once did anyone there even look at me funny for being an atheist. It didn’t matter to them that I didn’t share their faith. As happy as they would have been to share it with me and see me find the same joy and meaning in it they did, they completely respected that I had chosen a different path.

(Maybe this isn’t a narrative. I don’t know that I’m getting the order of events right, and I’m not even sure it matters: the strata are muddled, the carbon-dating confused, but the pots and shards are still there.)

It floored me. It was like I finally understood what Mneme and J and all the others had been showing me and telling me all along: that even though we all grew up in different flavors of the same kind of rigid, form-over-function, letter-of-the-law fundamentalism, that wasn’t really what it was about to them. What we’d been taught growing up wasn’t what Christianity was about at all. It wasn’t about judgment and arcane rules and rituals observed for their own sake. It was about community. It was about consciousness raised to a joyous art. It was family and passion and love and commitment. Open arms and open doors, the new wine in a new skin, no more whitewashed tombs or Pharisaical autocratic condemnations.

It made me miss my old faith. It’s not foxholes that make me wish I still believed in God. It’s loneliness. I grew up with the church at the center of my social life, and some of my fondest memories are things like potuluck socials and church camp and Christmas pageants. (Not Easter. I wasn’t a morning person.) I was tempted to convert back, honestly.

I started realizing that there was more to Christianity than so-called “fundamentalism”. I didn’t really know my former faith as well as I thought I did, and many of the vices for which I’d so vigorously condemned the whole concept of religion really only applied to a narrrow and fringe-y interpretation of Christianity followed by a dwindling number of hardcore radicals. There was a way to practice Christianity that truly respected the idea of building His kingdom here on earth. There were Christians who started out in a very different place but wound up where I aspired to be, and that meant that Christianity couldn’t be a purely malevolent force. If through faith these people could be motivated to such good and joyous works, then how could I just condemn faith out of hand?

I couldn’t. It took a while to put that into practice. I had to remind myself time and again to take a step back, pick a smaller brush, and control my strokes more carefully. The problem with the Phelps clan isn’t that they’re Christians, or even that they’re radical fringe wackaloons. It’s that they’re bigots. Plenty of people are Christians and even radical fringe wackaloons without being bigots, so why drag them into it when the bigotry is the problem? The problem with the Republican party isn’t that Republicans (or even conseratives in general) are all control freaks bent on imposing their will, it’s that the party started pursuing a “engage the radical elements” strategy a few decades back and got themselves hijacked by the social conservatives they taught to organize. (That last is Mneme’s analysis, by the way, not mine. Unless I’m remembering it wrong, in which case the errors are my own.)

But eventually it sunk in. My head is thick, but not entirely impermeable. (Close, though.) I can’t expect space without granting space. I can’t even prove the sun will come up tomorrow or that 2+2=4, much less that my way is the One True Path. So where do I get off putting others down for what is ultimately just a different form of faith than my own?

As a Christian, I never had to explain myself.

I never had to tell anyone that no, I didn’t worship a two-thousand-year-old zombie. I never had to explain that I didn’t want to make every child pray in school. I never had to justify my views, never got the “really? you believe that?” look from people I met, never had to explain why I celebrated the holidays.

I certainly never had to explain that while I’ve never been in a foxhole under fire, I’m still very confident of my commitment to my ideals. It was assumed that my faith was central to me, and that it deserved respect accordingly.

But somehow belief in one god less than most makes me strange and threatening. It’s assumed that I mock the faith that brings meaning to millions. It’s taken for granted that I want to ban wonder, beauty, and all that’s noble save cold material reason. I  think I’m smarter than everyone and I want to take away the very things they cherish most.

I wish it went without saying that none of that is true. I am not some snide, joyless automaton bent on crushing every trace of spirit, mystery, and meaning. I am not a rigid doctrinaire who finds offense on every coin and oppression behind every prayer. I  don’t find those legged fish funny anymore, I don’t find contradictions in the Bible to be particularly compelling counterarguments, and I don’t mind if anyone prays for me.

What I mind is the fact that I keep having to explain this. What I mind is the fact that many people find it easier to make room in the world for any flavor of belief other than disbelief. Why should it be so unfathomable that I can find wonder and beauty in the world?

I was a teenager the last time I went to the Grand Canyon. I’d seen it before when I was between first and second grades, and I remember my father telling me then about the amazing natural processes the Lord had set in motion to produce such an amazing thing. The second visit was different: somehow he’d become convinced that it all had to have been done by the direct intervention of God, that all those millions of years of uplift and erosion and the drainage of a vast inland sea had never happened.

All this, he thought, was made for us. Planned and shaped carefully that we might know the power and glory of God. And I can understand the wonder in that. It speaks of love and devotion, of another profound gift given with open heart to generations yet to be born.

But that wonder does not speak to me: it’s a plucked string tuned to a key that sounds discordant in my ears. Tell me about the variety of the world, the sheer random glory of all those incredible happy confluences that brought us here. Out of all the people who could have conceived a child, out of all the possible combinations that could have come from the joining of their lineages, there was just one that could have been me – and here it is. Out of all the possibilities – a sea still rolling ceaseless tides in the middle of our continent, a different balance of the tectonic tensions on which we balance like a fractured shell on a still-liquid egg, the stone layered differently to shield the bones of the earth – there was just one combination that could have made those rose-hued rocks rise in majesty over a thin ribbon of river. And there it is.

I feel lucky. I don’t need a world made for me and a destiny written in stars dead and gone a million years before I was born. I need wide-open spaces, freedom, and a world of miracles that mean something to me: the miracle of a butterfly’s wings on the other side of the world, not an artisan differing from me only in scale.  I need a way to understand the world that makes more sense than “trust someone you’ve never met”. (My sister says that atheism suits me better than religion: that’s one reason why.)

Give me the chance to chart my own path in the wild and answer to my own judgment. Let me see how incredibly lucky we are for every inch of this world and every instant of this life. Let it not be a gift given but a treasure happened on and cherished.

I used to say I could prove there was no God. I’m a little wiser now. I can’t prove it.That doesn’t bother me. My atheism is a choice, a form of faith, just as carefully chosen and deeply professed as the faith of any Muslim or Christian. (For the record, no, that doesn’t make me an agnostic. An agnostic isn’t prepared to choose, which is another legitimate choice. I feel very comfortable in my choice, even while recognizing it is a choice.)

And it’s the best choice for me. I have no problem letting others make that choice. I don’t know what makes my choice so strange and threatening that it can’t be accepted.

I know that a lot of atheists are angry, dogmatic revolutionaries. They want to break our addiction to Marx’s “opiate of the masses”, to hang every crime and tragedy committed in faith’s name around the necks of the faithful. (If Christ hadn’t died for his followers’ sins, he’d surely be expected to now.)

But it’s not faith that burns books and heretics. It’s dogma. It’s that intransigent intolerance of any way other than your own – the unwillingness to accept that the songs you don’t sing are just as musical and beautiful as the ones bound in your heart like  blood. And just as it has no monopoly on truth or beauty, religion certainly has no monopoly on dogma or intolerance.

Religious belief is one of the last bastions of nearly unchallenged privilege in our society. Challenging the right to primacy of males, Caucasians, and even heterosexuals seems to me  more accepted in the mainstream than challenging the primacy of  religion. I’m certainly not going to argue that as an atheist I endure more injustice than women, the LGBT community, or any number of ethnic/cultural minorities. But this isn’t the Pageant of Oppression, either. Even one injustice is one too many, and our acceptance of it makes us all less.

Is it really so much to ask for others to do likewise? To just accept that I believe in a world without gods or angels or demons or any other manifestations of the supernatural? To accept that it is just possible for others to live in a way that is foreign to you, and that there’s nothing wrong with that?