I met Marc at the laundromat (an excellent place to meet people, by the way). We’re both camper-dwellers, both desert photographers. He’s about sixty-five, cuts hair (quite well, as it turns out), and has considerably more ear-jewelry than I. We talked a little photography and RV stuff, and he gave me some insight into what it’s like living in Cottonwood. I told him about my blog project, and I told him about the broader mission on which I’d been called out west.
He informed me that he didn’t approve of organized religion. “I’m not an atheist, though my family thinks I am. I like to think of myself as spiritual; I’m just not interested in any religion that makes me want to go stand in front of a train for being a queer.”
“Well, you want to do an interview?” I ask.
“Sure!”
“I’m kind of into organized religion, you know?”
“I gathered.”
…
Marc looks at the world from a few different perspectives. The first is science. He’s totally comfortable with the idea of the universe popping into existence out of nothing and apart from any prior cause, because that’s what science says happened in the Big Bang. Similarly, the idea of living organisms (which he envisions as nearly as complex as a computer) arising accidentally out of a combination of the right chemicals under the right conditions strikes him as perfectly reasonable. He isn’t particularly interested in the details of cosmology or biology, but unlike some Christians he knows, who don’t even believe dinosaur bones are real, he generally trusts the scientific establishment to properly explain the origin of the world and of life.
“So,” I ask for clarification, “you don’t believe in a creator?” He pauses. “Well, that would seem to go against what I just said about the Big Bang. So, no, I don’t think there was a creator. But I am interested in earth-based religions, and I do think there’s a divine power that oversees everything now that the universe has come into being.” And with this I’m introduced to the second lens through which Marc interprets reality: the Cosmic Energizer. He refers me to the works of Dr. Joseph Murphy as being particularly influential in his thinking.
“I believe in science,” he says, “but I also believe in the power of the human subconscious. And, no, I’m not at all prepared to explain how these things fit together, so don’t ask.” He says that he actually engages in a form of prayer, though its less a practice of asking for things and more a way of affirming things that already exist, perhaps even of bringing them into existence.
As far as human beings, these are to Marc just more highly evolved animals and without any greater intrinsic value than other organisms. However, when I jokingly express consequent alarm at his unhesitatingly smooshing an ant on our table; he assures me he’d be much more reticent so to treat any person.
Humanity, Marc says, being merely an accident of nature, doesn’t have any particular purpose. Nor are humans truly bound by any external morality. If someone believes something to be wrong, then for them it’s wrong, but not otherwise. Similarly, other than natural consequences that sometimes follow particular actions, there really isn’t any objective penalty for moral failure. The closest thing that exists to final justice is a kind of karma, but even that system of reward or retribution only holds true for those who believe in it. If someone doesn’t believe a particular act to be wrong or doesn’t generally believe there to be any penalty for wrong-doing, then, apart from possible natural consequences, there will be no reckoning.
These basic principles hold particularly true with respect to Marc’s sexual ethics, which, being the primary source of his disinterest in and antagonism toward the Christian faith, we talk about a good deal. Generally speaking, as Marc sees it, all consensual sexual activity is legitimate. He excepts from that general rule sex with children. He acknowledges that there are people that have such desires, but says that it’s a desire he’s never understood. He also disapproves of sex outside of an agreed-upon exclusive relationship, because that would involve the breaking of a promise. Aside from these exceptions, all other forms of sexual activity, he thinks, should be allowed and accepted.
It’s this outlook, it appears, that places at the top of Marc’s list of values the virtue of tolerance, a virtue that, would his principles permit it, he would wish to profess as a universal moral obligation; it is society’s failure to exercise such tolerance that gets him the most worked up. It is also this outlook that seems most responsible for his antipathy to Christianity. “I can’t endure a religion, he says, “that would condemn me to hell for merely pursuing desires with which I was born.”
When I offer that the Christian faith condemns every last one of us for pursuing desires with which we were born, and calls all people to fight against many of their own natural desires, the particular focal point of his irritation becomes clearer. “Yes, but Christians never treat their own ‘sinful’ desires in the same way as they treat mine.” He goes on to describe instances from his own experience of professing Christians, including his own family, “cherry-picking” from the Bible, consigning him to hell for his lifestyle while exercising perfect indulgence toward their own sins, sins condemned by the Scripture with equal clarity. Christians have hypocritically mistreated him in this way his entire life, he says. “I don’t trust them. Any of them.”
Marc has suffered in a number other ways through his life. He’s a recent cancer survivor, still experiencing residual symptoms from chemotherapy. He’s been negatively impacted by a number of government policies, usually at the hands of Republicans. And he doesn’t have a great deal of hope for society as a whole. People will probably be as disappointing as they always have been, he says, and there really isn’t any reason to think that we’ll ever achieve any kind of utopia.
As far as the hope offered by the Christian faith, he finds it as unattractive as he finds it unconvincing. “Did Jesus Christ rise from the dead? Probably not, it’s much more likely to just be wishful thinking on Christians’ part.” He pokes fun at my expressed hope to be with Christ at death and then risen to eternal life as “spending some time on the clothesline.” To him, there’s no way for us to know what happens to us when we die and no way to do anything about it anyway, so he doesn’t see any point in dwelling on it. “I’ve never understood why you Christians feel like you have to go round selling the faith. If it’s really worth anything, it ought to sell itself.”
“Well, I hope that,” I start to say … “You hope that someday I’ll join your team?” he says with a smile. “Well, yeah, sure,” I say with a smile of my own, “but what I was going to say was I hope that someday I might at least be a Christian you feel like you can trust.”
“Well, you don’t seem completely unreasonable,” he says, “and I enjoy our conversations. Maybe we can keep them going.”
I tell him that I’d like that very much.