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Essay: Atheists in Foxholes
Atheists in Foxholes
Series: Essay
Summary: Religion and its affects on our multiplicity.
Word Count: 3000
Notes: Winner of this month’s Patreon poll, and chock full of content warnings, including just about any you can imagine associated with religion: religiously-inspired abuse, body horror, deific parasitism, mental illness, Hell, death, asphyxia, rape, and suicide. I’m not happy with this one, but I’ve been trying to tell this story for two years now, with no success, and all-done beats all-perfect. EDIT: formatting cleaned up.
In 2019, I started seeing a shrouded skeleton lady in my headspace, who insisted she was not a headmate but an independently existing cosmic death entity, wearing a culturally appropriate guise for my psychological convenience. The only explanation I had was that my brain was breaking in a new way, so I bunkered down in hopes of waiting out the storm and ignoring this interloper until she went away.
It didn’t work. Instead, I had to start dealing with religion and its effects on our inner workings.
Like many of my headmates, I became an atheist out of self-defense. You know the story: religious abuser who claims victim’s existence is an affront to God and that abuse is God’s will. Rather than embark on a (long and tedious) analytical journey as to what religion was and how I felt about it, I side-stepped the whole thing by declaring none of it real and going atheist.
It worked great until the bony lady showed up. Then I started getting ontologically uncomfortable.
My atheism wasn’t a rigorously thought out philosophical position. It was an emotional one: gods are powerful, power corrupts, ergo gods were jerks and I didn’t want to live in a world with such assholes. I knew folks to whom religion brought positive things, but for me, it was a weapon to enforce obedience, inspire shame, and maintain control. Why bother myself with that?
But religion existed, whether I thought about it or not. As long as I ignored it, there were swathes of myself (and ourself) that I couldn’t deal with. Perversely, my atheism made it harder to uproot the family religion.
The Family Religion
Well, more accurately, our mother’s religion. Our father was a lapsed Catholic turned Jeffersonian deist. He celebrated Lent and Mardi Gras, occasionally suffered our mother taking us to church, and that was about it. His god was a deadbeat demiurge, an engineer who built the universe and abandoned it. He was willing to use our mother’s faith to his advantage, but I doubt he believed or even understood it.
Our mother was the religious one. And she had a very bad god.
Mom didn’t talk about it much, but she was raised fundy—joyless Southern Baptist, I think. It didn’t show up much except when she was in abuse mode, whereupon all the fire and brimstone would erupt. Her god was a petty, vicious thing. It demanded unconditional forgiveness of anyone above you in the hierarchy and unconditional obedience from anyone below. It’s not hard to imagine the results in a violent family with at least three generations of incest. And indeed, that was the point: to empower the powerful, subjugate the oppressed, and keep everyone in their place. Because God said so.
And then our mother got a demoniac for a child. Her god disapproved. (But if it hadn't been that, it would've been something else; that's how it worked.)
We were crazy children in an insane environment. We had no way to understand any of this. All we knew was that God hated us, God knew we should’ve never been born, and no matter what we did, we would burn in hellfire for all eternity. It says something that the trauma mules, Mori and I (Rogan) decided that the lake of fire was preferable to being alive. Mori suicided within a few years and got sent to the fiery pit; I was all set to join her within one and a half. And thus I got the bony lady’s attention.
The Unkillable Demon Boy
The way the bony lady puts it, there are a million different kinds of death. Death of cells, deaths of organs, death of limbs, death of hope, death of self, little deaths and big deaths, survivable deaths and irrevocable deaths. We are all in the process of constantly dying.
That said, she couldn’t help but notice that we kept racking up an unusual amount of death without fully succumbing, to the point she eventually took an active interest. Why were we constantly getting dumped on her doorstep, only to get dragged off again? So she came to investigate.
Mom’s preferred act of violence was asphyxia, which is extremely dangerous—especially strangulation, which she thankfully didn’t use much. Lethality is high, and it leaves few marks, making it an abuser’s favorite, especially since the victim is often confused, amnesiac, and uncoordinated afterward, coming off as intoxicated, crazy, and generally unbelievable.
As a teen, I knew there was no god waiting for me. But death comes for everyone. I didn’t dare hope for much back then, but I did hope to die, preferably soon.
When things got very bad, during the assaults, I would see the bony lady. Skeletons are supposed to be scary, but the sight of her always gave me hope, euphoria even, because maybe, mercifully, this would be the last time.
“Is it over?” I’d ask her. “Can I go now?”
“Not yet,” she’d always say. “Soon.”
“Soon” is a relative term to a cosmic entity, and after maybe six months of this, I cornered her.
“Fuck your soon!” I said. “When do I get to go home? I want to go home.” (“Go home” was our euphemism for “die.” It seemed less dramatic, more reasonable to say. After all, doesn’t everyone want to go home?)
She sighed. “You’re not going to. You’re going to survive this.”
This was the worst news I could imagine. I was not set to graduate high school and escape to college for at least six months, and only if I avoided impregnation. I thought of all the shit I’d have to eat, all the horror I’d have to endure.
And then I tried to take myself hostage. From death. It wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.
“No,” I said. “No. You can’t do this to me. I’ll kill myself!”
Her voice became sad and terrible.
“No. You won’t.”
And then she made it so I never could.
The Problem of Evil
The problem of evil goes as such: with all the agony in the world, how can a being be all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent at the same time?
I had grown up in a Christian milieu, however distorted, so I’d made the mistake of thinking the bony lady benevolent. She is not—or malicious either. Is a hurricane malicious? Is a volcano? Death is death. It is hard, painful, inexorable. It does not follow human whim or morality.
As an agent of destruction, the bony lady couldn’t build me up—she wasn’t omnipotent either. All she could do was destroy the parts of me that’d allow me to kill myself. It was messy.
It took a while for me to recover, and being a spiteful atheist with a death wish, I told myself that all this was in my head. That stupid skeleton had no power over me! She was just some stupid figment of my stupid diseased imagination, and I’d show her. I set myself to committing Mom-induced-suicide, but much to my distress, I kept surviving, and finally, I had to give up and work on living.
I survived the six months. I kept myself from getting pregnant. I went to a college 15 miles away and tried not to come home. Within seven months, all the memories had faded away. I settled into the “real world,” my comfortable fog, my atheism.
I didn’t want to think about gods.
Pause: The Belief Thing
This is hard to talk about. The self-conscious atheist in me sneers, “you don’t really believe this, do you?”
But what I believe is immaterial. My mind is crazy and illogical, and I’ve never gotten anywhere trying to force it to work the way I think it should. My only successes come from engaging with it on its own terms. Even if it isn’t true, I have to accept, understand, and deal with the family god—and not by disbelieving it to death, which has never worked here.
We only had children’s solutions to adult problems. We were unable to understand why our mother brutalized us with such holy-rolling sadism. Maybe we were subconsciously hunting for some explanation, some reason why, and it got filtered through our child’s madness.
Maybe there are gods, and they are assholes.
But whatever it was, our mind framed it like this: our mother’s god fed on agony. Everything it did, everything it taught, served that end. It would infest one generation and encourage it to break and brutalize the next so it could feed on them in turn, an ichneumon wasp of the soul.
Our mother had been parasitized by her god a long time ago. And now there was a new generation to feed on.
The Family God
I’ve never seen the family god. I’ve only heard its voice and seen its seeds.
The seeds were how it got you. But it couldn’t just put the seed inside you; you had to have a hole made in you first, and the family god had to either convince you to shove the seed into yourself, or get a previous host to force it in. (Yes, it is very Freudian.)
Even once it infested you, it couldn’t make you do anything. It just exacerbated your worst tendencies, ate at you like termites.
It bagged our headmate Rawlin first. We haven’t talked about him much, because there’s not much to say. All we know is that in 1999, he was a flawed but decent person… and he was dying. The family god somehow persuaded him to shove a seed into his chest, and it revived him… and since then, he’s been an obsessive, raging husk of his former self. The seed’s out of him now, but twenty years of infestation can’t be undone just like that; remove the termites, but the wood’s still damaged.
The family god tried to persuade me to seed myself in 2005, but I was having none of it, so it seeded me through Mom instead.
The first time it happened, the seed was sunk into my back, where I couldn’t see it. I don’t remember any sudden effect, the way Rawlin did. I mostly just remember fatigue, leaden despair, a longing to die. When I cornered the bony lady and tried to get her to kill me, she saw what’d happened and ripped the parasitized parts of my body out, taking both seed and my ability to suicide with them. Hurt like hell, and it took me months before I got my will to live back.
The family god kept trying, getting increasingly frustrated. It badgered me, harangued me, told me that the seed would fix me, make me lovable. When that didn’t work, it forced its way into me via other assaults, only for me to frantically gouge the seeds out of my headspace anatomy, ignoring the mess.
As I clawed my headspace body open, I would repeat to myself that none of this was real, it was all in my head, so it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
Very Bad Gods
People don’t like to talk about malicious gods. Either they’re demons (totally different!) or they’re some necessary part of the cosmic balance.
I grew up thinking of a god as a taxonomical category, or a D&D species: certain powers, certain strengths and attributes. But there are big gods and little gods, strong gods and weak gods. Nowadays, I think “god” describes not an entity but a relationship. And our family god was a very bad one.
At least it was not a powerful god; it was more like the abuser who proves surprisingly frail and pathetic once you leave its circle of influence. It was a god not because it was powerful, but because our mother treated it like one. She obeyed it, worshiped it, feared and adored it, even as it plagued her. Even as she made herself into a monster.
The family god didn’t make her do horrible things. She did horrible things because she chose to; her god just encouraged her. Gods may order, but people may choose to obey. It’s people who do God’s will. That’s what’s so scary about them.
As far as I know, even inside me, the family god couldn’t get me to assault my headmates; I’d already chosen not to do that anymore. All it could do was exacerbate my existing desire to die. It couldn’t get me to obey, any more than the bony lady could.
Fortunately for me, the bony lady doesn’t seem to value obedience.
Gods as Relationships
If gods are relationships, then in the milieu I grew up in, they were a very specific relationship. Gods, you:
• Worship
• Obey
• Fear
• Give things to/do things for
• Are categorically inferior to
It is a very transactional, authoritarian kind of relationship. I can’t be in one healthfully, and because I avoided all religious study, it took me a long time to learn that this religious relationship is neither universal nor required. In the Tanakh, Sarah laughs at God’s pronouncement that she’ll have a son, thus why he’s named Isaac (“laughter”). Some Catholics, to make their saints perform, will annoy them by burying their icons or taking their possessions away. A friend’s friend once told me of a place that, if the local god failed the people too often, they fired it. (As he put it: “When God gives you lemons, you get a new god!”)
The bony lady didn’t want my obedience, devotion, or fear. She appreciated candles and cheap wine, but as gifts, not offerings, and neither requested nor expected them. All she ever asked of me was to keep doing what I was already doing, and I couldn’t deal with that. Gods demanded things! It’s what they did! If she wasn’t demanding anything of me, that could only mean she was keeping her wants secret so as to punish me for not realizing them!
Sometimes, we treat gods as exaggerated versions of existing authority.
She waited for me to calm down, then tried to befriend me. But death is not warm and fuzzy. She did awful things to me, ripped limbs off of me, stood by while I went through unspeakable horror, and there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t do so again. A hurricane may not be malevolent, but can a human really befriend one? Even if the hurricane seems to want to be their friend? What is friendship to something like that?
My smug atheist brain wants to cling to the reality it knows, the way it wants things to be. It wants none of this to be happening, or if it must happen, then at least have it happen in a way that confirms my already-extant philosophy. I want to just be crazy. I want this to just be some symbol of internalized violation. I understand that. I can deal with that.
Sometimes, we don’t get what we want.
In 2019, I raged at the bony lady. I screamed at her like I had in 2006: why did she do this to me? What did she care whether I lived or died! She was death! She’d watched civilizations, planets, galaxies die, so what was one piddling human life in all that? Why wouldn’t she just let me die?
She didn’t get angry or defensive. She waited until I was done and said, “there are… results I want in the future. These results were highly unlikely to happen if you died.”
I could’ve asked her what those “results” were. She probably would’ve answered me. But I didn’t want to know.
“Was it a punishment?” I asked.
She sounded appalled. “No! You were at your limit. I needed you to go past it, so I did something terrible to you. There was nothing you could have done to prevent that.”
Sometimes, even if we get answers, we don’t understand them or find them satisfying. Sometimes, our understanding of reality shatters, and we can only look at the shards in our hands and sit with them. Nothing lasts forever. Everything dies eventually, even worldviews.
Even gods.
No Gods, No Masters
Back in 2019, before we knew anything about the family god, the bony lady explained to Mori, “you’ve crossed a very petty god. We can make it sorry.” Mori didn’t understand or really believe a word of it, but she’s always up for murdering gods, so she hunted down the family god in our head, set it on fire, bawled it out, and she and the bony lady either killed it or sent it packing. Regardless, it is no longer in us—though its seeds are. We’re still working on those.
Mori would say that nothing is more atheistic than tracking down the god that damned you and setting it on fire. But at the same time, what could be a truer expression that a god existed to kill in the first place?
The bony lady still comes around sometimes. I light her candles every once in a while, even though I don’t have to. A couple times, I’ve prayed to her out of sheer desperation for friends in trouble who I could do no more for. I’d pray through tears of impotent rage, and she’d listen, even if there wasn’t much she could do either; she’s an entity of death, not mercy. I watch the pandemic rage, killing millions, and I question the entity that has taken an interest in me.
I have no church, no teachings, no community. Just a dead family god and a chain-smoking skeleton who gives me the willies, neither of whom may exist outside my cracked skull—and I dearly hope they don’t. The worldview of malevolent, parasitic gods and alien, cosmic-scale death entities doesn’t give me peace, comfort, or enlightenment. It’s just another damn thing to deal with.
In the end, all I can say is, I’m trying to get free of the god relationships in my head and in my life. And I can’t do that without engaging with them directly.
“Are you a god?” I asked the bony lady in 2019.
“That’s very anthropocentric of you,” she replied.
“No, but really,” I said.
At first she wouldn’t answer, but after some pestering, she sighed and said in a strained tone, “I am something that some people may have at some point considered a god. But I don’t want your worship and don’t call me that.”
So I don’t.
Series: Essay
Summary: Religion and its affects on our multiplicity.
Word Count: 3000
Notes: Winner of this month’s Patreon poll, and chock full of content warnings, including just about any you can imagine associated with religion: religiously-inspired abuse, body horror, deific parasitism, mental illness, Hell, death, asphyxia, rape, and suicide. I’m not happy with this one, but I’ve been trying to tell this story for two years now, with no success, and all-done beats all-perfect. EDIT: formatting cleaned up.
“We’re gods,” he reminded her. “I don’t have to be fair.” --Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater, pg. 199.
“The worst possible relationships between humans and some mystically potent being or beings […] that I can imagine, would be […] parasitism. […] Those who think of themselves as ‘enlightened’ may in fact have been infected and, in some hideously intimate way, used.” --Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God, pg. 231-232.
“It is not external entities who are watching us and haunting us; we haunt ourselves.” --Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, pg. 46.
“The worst possible relationships between humans and some mystically potent being or beings […] that I can imagine, would be […] parasitism. […] Those who think of themselves as ‘enlightened’ may in fact have been infected and, in some hideously intimate way, used.” --Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God, pg. 231-232.
“It is not external entities who are watching us and haunting us; we haunt ourselves.” --Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, pg. 46.
In 2019, I started seeing a shrouded skeleton lady in my headspace, who insisted she was not a headmate but an independently existing cosmic death entity, wearing a culturally appropriate guise for my psychological convenience. The only explanation I had was that my brain was breaking in a new way, so I bunkered down in hopes of waiting out the storm and ignoring this interloper until she went away.
It didn’t work. Instead, I had to start dealing with religion and its effects on our inner workings.
Like many of my headmates, I became an atheist out of self-defense. You know the story: religious abuser who claims victim’s existence is an affront to God and that abuse is God’s will. Rather than embark on a (long and tedious) analytical journey as to what religion was and how I felt about it, I side-stepped the whole thing by declaring none of it real and going atheist.
It worked great until the bony lady showed up. Then I started getting ontologically uncomfortable.
My atheism wasn’t a rigorously thought out philosophical position. It was an emotional one: gods are powerful, power corrupts, ergo gods were jerks and I didn’t want to live in a world with such assholes. I knew folks to whom religion brought positive things, but for me, it was a weapon to enforce obedience, inspire shame, and maintain control. Why bother myself with that?
But religion existed, whether I thought about it or not. As long as I ignored it, there were swathes of myself (and ourself) that I couldn’t deal with. Perversely, my atheism made it harder to uproot the family religion.
The Family Religion
Well, more accurately, our mother’s religion. Our father was a lapsed Catholic turned Jeffersonian deist. He celebrated Lent and Mardi Gras, occasionally suffered our mother taking us to church, and that was about it. His god was a deadbeat demiurge, an engineer who built the universe and abandoned it. He was willing to use our mother’s faith to his advantage, but I doubt he believed or even understood it.
Our mother was the religious one. And she had a very bad god.
Mom didn’t talk about it much, but she was raised fundy—joyless Southern Baptist, I think. It didn’t show up much except when she was in abuse mode, whereupon all the fire and brimstone would erupt. Her god was a petty, vicious thing. It demanded unconditional forgiveness of anyone above you in the hierarchy and unconditional obedience from anyone below. It’s not hard to imagine the results in a violent family with at least three generations of incest. And indeed, that was the point: to empower the powerful, subjugate the oppressed, and keep everyone in their place. Because God said so.
And then our mother got a demoniac for a child. Her god disapproved. (But if it hadn't been that, it would've been something else; that's how it worked.)
We were crazy children in an insane environment. We had no way to understand any of this. All we knew was that God hated us, God knew we should’ve never been born, and no matter what we did, we would burn in hellfire for all eternity. It says something that the trauma mules, Mori and I (Rogan) decided that the lake of fire was preferable to being alive. Mori suicided within a few years and got sent to the fiery pit; I was all set to join her within one and a half. And thus I got the bony lady’s attention.
The Unkillable Demon Boy
The way the bony lady puts it, there are a million different kinds of death. Death of cells, deaths of organs, death of limbs, death of hope, death of self, little deaths and big deaths, survivable deaths and irrevocable deaths. We are all in the process of constantly dying.
That said, she couldn’t help but notice that we kept racking up an unusual amount of death without fully succumbing, to the point she eventually took an active interest. Why were we constantly getting dumped on her doorstep, only to get dragged off again? So she came to investigate.
Mom’s preferred act of violence was asphyxia, which is extremely dangerous—especially strangulation, which she thankfully didn’t use much. Lethality is high, and it leaves few marks, making it an abuser’s favorite, especially since the victim is often confused, amnesiac, and uncoordinated afterward, coming off as intoxicated, crazy, and generally unbelievable.
As a teen, I knew there was no god waiting for me. But death comes for everyone. I didn’t dare hope for much back then, but I did hope to die, preferably soon.
When things got very bad, during the assaults, I would see the bony lady. Skeletons are supposed to be scary, but the sight of her always gave me hope, euphoria even, because maybe, mercifully, this would be the last time.
“Is it over?” I’d ask her. “Can I go now?”
“Not yet,” she’d always say. “Soon.”
“Soon” is a relative term to a cosmic entity, and after maybe six months of this, I cornered her.
“Fuck your soon!” I said. “When do I get to go home? I want to go home.” (“Go home” was our euphemism for “die.” It seemed less dramatic, more reasonable to say. After all, doesn’t everyone want to go home?)
She sighed. “You’re not going to. You’re going to survive this.”
This was the worst news I could imagine. I was not set to graduate high school and escape to college for at least six months, and only if I avoided impregnation. I thought of all the shit I’d have to eat, all the horror I’d have to endure.
And then I tried to take myself hostage. From death. It wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.
“No,” I said. “No. You can’t do this to me. I’ll kill myself!”
Her voice became sad and terrible.
“No. You won’t.”
And then she made it so I never could.
The Problem of Evil
The problem of evil goes as such: with all the agony in the world, how can a being be all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent at the same time?
I had grown up in a Christian milieu, however distorted, so I’d made the mistake of thinking the bony lady benevolent. She is not—or malicious either. Is a hurricane malicious? Is a volcano? Death is death. It is hard, painful, inexorable. It does not follow human whim or morality.
As an agent of destruction, the bony lady couldn’t build me up—she wasn’t omnipotent either. All she could do was destroy the parts of me that’d allow me to kill myself. It was messy.
It took a while for me to recover, and being a spiteful atheist with a death wish, I told myself that all this was in my head. That stupid skeleton had no power over me! She was just some stupid figment of my stupid diseased imagination, and I’d show her. I set myself to committing Mom-induced-suicide, but much to my distress, I kept surviving, and finally, I had to give up and work on living.
I survived the six months. I kept myself from getting pregnant. I went to a college 15 miles away and tried not to come home. Within seven months, all the memories had faded away. I settled into the “real world,” my comfortable fog, my atheism.
I didn’t want to think about gods.
Pause: The Belief Thing
This is hard to talk about. The self-conscious atheist in me sneers, “you don’t really believe this, do you?”
But what I believe is immaterial. My mind is crazy and illogical, and I’ve never gotten anywhere trying to force it to work the way I think it should. My only successes come from engaging with it on its own terms. Even if it isn’t true, I have to accept, understand, and deal with the family god—and not by disbelieving it to death, which has never worked here.
We only had children’s solutions to adult problems. We were unable to understand why our mother brutalized us with such holy-rolling sadism. Maybe we were subconsciously hunting for some explanation, some reason why, and it got filtered through our child’s madness.
Maybe there are gods, and they are assholes.
But whatever it was, our mind framed it like this: our mother’s god fed on agony. Everything it did, everything it taught, served that end. It would infest one generation and encourage it to break and brutalize the next so it could feed on them in turn, an ichneumon wasp of the soul.
Our mother had been parasitized by her god a long time ago. And now there was a new generation to feed on.
The Family God
I’ve never seen the family god. I’ve only heard its voice and seen its seeds.
The seeds were how it got you. But it couldn’t just put the seed inside you; you had to have a hole made in you first, and the family god had to either convince you to shove the seed into yourself, or get a previous host to force it in. (Yes, it is very Freudian.)
Even once it infested you, it couldn’t make you do anything. It just exacerbated your worst tendencies, ate at you like termites.
It bagged our headmate Rawlin first. We haven’t talked about him much, because there’s not much to say. All we know is that in 1999, he was a flawed but decent person… and he was dying. The family god somehow persuaded him to shove a seed into his chest, and it revived him… and since then, he’s been an obsessive, raging husk of his former self. The seed’s out of him now, but twenty years of infestation can’t be undone just like that; remove the termites, but the wood’s still damaged.
The family god tried to persuade me to seed myself in 2005, but I was having none of it, so it seeded me through Mom instead.
The first time it happened, the seed was sunk into my back, where I couldn’t see it. I don’t remember any sudden effect, the way Rawlin did. I mostly just remember fatigue, leaden despair, a longing to die. When I cornered the bony lady and tried to get her to kill me, she saw what’d happened and ripped the parasitized parts of my body out, taking both seed and my ability to suicide with them. Hurt like hell, and it took me months before I got my will to live back.
The family god kept trying, getting increasingly frustrated. It badgered me, harangued me, told me that the seed would fix me, make me lovable. When that didn’t work, it forced its way into me via other assaults, only for me to frantically gouge the seeds out of my headspace anatomy, ignoring the mess.
As I clawed my headspace body open, I would repeat to myself that none of this was real, it was all in my head, so it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
Very Bad Gods
People don’t like to talk about malicious gods. Either they’re demons (totally different!) or they’re some necessary part of the cosmic balance.
I grew up thinking of a god as a taxonomical category, or a D&D species: certain powers, certain strengths and attributes. But there are big gods and little gods, strong gods and weak gods. Nowadays, I think “god” describes not an entity but a relationship. And our family god was a very bad one.
At least it was not a powerful god; it was more like the abuser who proves surprisingly frail and pathetic once you leave its circle of influence. It was a god not because it was powerful, but because our mother treated it like one. She obeyed it, worshiped it, feared and adored it, even as it plagued her. Even as she made herself into a monster.
The family god didn’t make her do horrible things. She did horrible things because she chose to; her god just encouraged her. Gods may order, but people may choose to obey. It’s people who do God’s will. That’s what’s so scary about them.
As far as I know, even inside me, the family god couldn’t get me to assault my headmates; I’d already chosen not to do that anymore. All it could do was exacerbate my existing desire to die. It couldn’t get me to obey, any more than the bony lady could.
Fortunately for me, the bony lady doesn’t seem to value obedience.
Gods as Relationships
If gods are relationships, then in the milieu I grew up in, they were a very specific relationship. Gods, you:
• Worship
• Obey
• Fear
• Give things to/do things for
• Are categorically inferior to
It is a very transactional, authoritarian kind of relationship. I can’t be in one healthfully, and because I avoided all religious study, it took me a long time to learn that this religious relationship is neither universal nor required. In the Tanakh, Sarah laughs at God’s pronouncement that she’ll have a son, thus why he’s named Isaac (“laughter”). Some Catholics, to make their saints perform, will annoy them by burying their icons or taking their possessions away. A friend’s friend once told me of a place that, if the local god failed the people too often, they fired it. (As he put it: “When God gives you lemons, you get a new god!”)
The bony lady didn’t want my obedience, devotion, or fear. She appreciated candles and cheap wine, but as gifts, not offerings, and neither requested nor expected them. All she ever asked of me was to keep doing what I was already doing, and I couldn’t deal with that. Gods demanded things! It’s what they did! If she wasn’t demanding anything of me, that could only mean she was keeping her wants secret so as to punish me for not realizing them!
Sometimes, we treat gods as exaggerated versions of existing authority.
She waited for me to calm down, then tried to befriend me. But death is not warm and fuzzy. She did awful things to me, ripped limbs off of me, stood by while I went through unspeakable horror, and there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t do so again. A hurricane may not be malevolent, but can a human really befriend one? Even if the hurricane seems to want to be their friend? What is friendship to something like that?
My smug atheist brain wants to cling to the reality it knows, the way it wants things to be. It wants none of this to be happening, or if it must happen, then at least have it happen in a way that confirms my already-extant philosophy. I want to just be crazy. I want this to just be some symbol of internalized violation. I understand that. I can deal with that.
Sometimes, we don’t get what we want.
In 2019, I raged at the bony lady. I screamed at her like I had in 2006: why did she do this to me? What did she care whether I lived or died! She was death! She’d watched civilizations, planets, galaxies die, so what was one piddling human life in all that? Why wouldn’t she just let me die?
She didn’t get angry or defensive. She waited until I was done and said, “there are… results I want in the future. These results were highly unlikely to happen if you died.”
I could’ve asked her what those “results” were. She probably would’ve answered me. But I didn’t want to know.
“Was it a punishment?” I asked.
She sounded appalled. “No! You were at your limit. I needed you to go past it, so I did something terrible to you. There was nothing you could have done to prevent that.”
Sometimes, even if we get answers, we don’t understand them or find them satisfying. Sometimes, our understanding of reality shatters, and we can only look at the shards in our hands and sit with them. Nothing lasts forever. Everything dies eventually, even worldviews.
Even gods.
No Gods, No Masters
Back in 2019, before we knew anything about the family god, the bony lady explained to Mori, “you’ve crossed a very petty god. We can make it sorry.” Mori didn’t understand or really believe a word of it, but she’s always up for murdering gods, so she hunted down the family god in our head, set it on fire, bawled it out, and she and the bony lady either killed it or sent it packing. Regardless, it is no longer in us—though its seeds are. We’re still working on those.
Mori would say that nothing is more atheistic than tracking down the god that damned you and setting it on fire. But at the same time, what could be a truer expression that a god existed to kill in the first place?
The bony lady still comes around sometimes. I light her candles every once in a while, even though I don’t have to. A couple times, I’ve prayed to her out of sheer desperation for friends in trouble who I could do no more for. I’d pray through tears of impotent rage, and she’d listen, even if there wasn’t much she could do either; she’s an entity of death, not mercy. I watch the pandemic rage, killing millions, and I question the entity that has taken an interest in me.
I have no church, no teachings, no community. Just a dead family god and a chain-smoking skeleton who gives me the willies, neither of whom may exist outside my cracked skull—and I dearly hope they don’t. The worldview of malevolent, parasitic gods and alien, cosmic-scale death entities doesn’t give me peace, comfort, or enlightenment. It’s just another damn thing to deal with.
In the end, all I can say is, I’m trying to get free of the god relationships in my head and in my life. And I can’t do that without engaging with them directly.
“Are you a god?” I asked the bony lady in 2019.
“That’s very anthropocentric of you,” she replied.
“No, but really,” I said.
At first she wouldn’t answer, but after some pestering, she sighed and said in a strained tone, “I am something that some people may have at some point considered a god. But I don’t want your worship and don’t call me that.”
So I don’t.
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Wright is what I always come back to when I talk about belief. There was a bent place in his thoughts, where no matter what he believed, he thought the only possible reason you could disagree with him was because you weren’t as smart as him and hadn’t read as many books. He simply switched from saying you hadn’t read or understood the atheist books to saying you hadn’t read or understood the Christian books. So maybe he wouldn’t have broken if he hadn’t bent first, or would have broken in a different way? But other times, I fear that it wouldn’t even matter, and the same brain damage would make me hateful in the same way.
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But I think that's also what's beautiful and powerful about being human: we can always change. (And we can always say no to our gods.)
Maybe one day Wright will get where he needs to be.
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That's the thing. I think he did. I think he spent his life looking for a book so big and powerful he could use it to ignore anyone he disagreed with, and he found it, and that fulfilled his psychological needs.
(I remember now that I did post about this before. I compared him to the author of Sinfest, who has this whole thing going where he's afraid that sexuality is inherently evil and corrupting. He became a TERF, then later a QAnon supporter, and I think that fulfilled his needs by giving him a way to fight back against his vision of evil sex.)
My need is probably to believe that there's no such thing as a thing that can't be killed. That's why my posts on the subject are so emotional and so undignified. If I ever end up like Wright, it will probably be a form of iconoclasm.
Then again, Tadeusz Borowski as described in The Captive Mind is someone who fulfilled his need. He wanted to live in a world where the Holocaust would never again be possible, and he convinced himself he'd created that path by becoming a Soviet propagandist. He broke out of that in the end, albeit in the worst, most despairing way possible.
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Rogan
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Rogan
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Also really appreciate the point that a god doesn't have to be benevolent. Our thought process with religion is that if a god wants to eternally torture us for not following them, then that's a god we want nothing to do with. Controlling people with fear isn't okay by us. We wouldn't put up with a human making that threat, so why should we tolerate a god with that policy? Particularly if there may be better alternatives.
Then again, we may not be the best to speak on this given that our personal god-entity-thing may or may not be using us. Still trying to figure that out and doubt isn't helping. You're right that you don't have to believe to engage, but disbelief gets in the way of taking it seriously for us.
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Rogan
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Her voice became sad and terrible.
“No. You won’t.”
And then she made it so I never could.
This...resonates in an interesting way and I'm not entirely sure why.
My mind is crazy and illogical, and I’ve never gotten anywhere trying to force it to work the way I think it should. My only successes come from engaging with it on its own terms.
This resonates and I'm exactly sure why and I find it beautiful.
I have no church, no teachings, no community.
Yyyyyyyyyep. All of my religion is based on the what-seems-right of the moment. It is lonely sometimes, but mostly just feels really right for me.
***
Thank you for writing this. It was fascinating to read.
~Sor
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--Rogan
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Congratulations on doing a difficult job?
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I don't know what else to say other than a heartfelt "theology can be terrifying, yes."
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--somebody?
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It is a weird and truly uncomfortable experience.