THE TRUTH ABOUT OLD MEN - Chapter 19

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Facing our maker, old men fall into two categories; those who don’t think it will ever happen and those who are getting ready for it.

As our time left on the planet becomes shorter and shorter men who have been coerced into compliance with Biblical edicts and assorted commandments throughout their lives, slowly begin to take their responsibilities more and more seriously. Inside they have a private little notion that, although God has had his eye on them from the beginning and knows their thoughts better than they do, whatever reservations they have had about his existence have been successfully suppressed and The Almighty has missed them. God missed these thoughts because the young man applied himself diligently to avoiding doubt on the question of God’s existence. The young man occasionally shows up in church to throw God off. He is careful to avoid giving voice to any doubt and studiously refuses to engage in debate on the subject just in case The Lord is listening and something incriminating might fall from the young man’s lips. He is hoping he can get close to the grave having a relatively clean record behind him. Secretly, he keeps near to him the information that God will forgive him for any doubt, so long as he manages to beat the clock and completely embrace God some time before his own expiration date.

Throughout their youth these men fully intend to make an adjustment in their “faith quotient” and surrender entirely to God some time AFTER they are too old to enjoy all the sin they will engage in while young and limber.

As they approach 60, these folks begin reading the Bible when they are in a room all alone, occasionally glancing skyward through one eye without lifting their heads from the reading position in hopes He is watching and will not realize the exercise has two ambitions -- one to suggest to a voyeuristic Lord that maturity has put them in touch with the reality of God and made them regret all their indiscretions, and, two, to gather as much knowledge as possible in case there is an entrance exam at the pearly gates.

Now and then arcing one eyebrow to have a look at the ceiling, they scrupulously outline with yellow highlighter meaningful passages in The Bible and, when they feel his all-seeing eye sizing up this activity, even move their lips as they read. They join charitable organizations and do volunteer work they never had time for when they were young as if there has been an explosion of awareness in their brain that eluded them in youth. They intentionally omit curse words from their spoken expressions. They comb the obits daily, looking for funerals they can attend, hoping the relatives of the deceased will remember their presence and show up at gravesite when their own time comes. The more people at the funeral, the greater recommendation to God that He should make allowances in their low score on the entrance exam.

The more creative among the late bloomers even invent problems that serve as an excuse to seek the council of pastor, priest or assigned emissary of The Lord, hoping The Almighty will observe they have accepted him as the answer to their earthly impasses.

The faithful who expect to walk the streets of gold after they expire are much easier to track and predict than the heathen. The non-believer also passes through a metamorphosis of thinking on the subject of God, but his does not lead him to the blissful embrace of a final surrender. Instead, the older the heathen becomes, the more pissed off he gets over the enormous mind-fuck that has clouded his brain on this subject from the first day it was introduced to him.

This angst might have begun when he protested the requirement of prayer at the beginning of his Cub Scout meetings. Here was the first indication he would be hustled to the side-lines and disallowed from participation in any human game until and unless he joined the flock and, at least, kept his mouth shut about his lack of confidence in the conviction that reality is the result of magic performed by a ghost in the sky.

Despite an intellectual disagreement with the persuasion that God exists, the heathen has been haunted throughout his youth by the enormity of Man’s devotion to the notion. “How could so many people have been so misled over such a distance of time?” he asks himself. “Could I be right and all of them wrong? Not likely. What am I missing?”

One day, the heathen notices the millions of children who swear by the conviction that Santa Clause exists, and, for the first time, it occurs to him that Man’s naiveté does not end with the onset of puberty -- that God may be merely Santa in saintly garb -- yes, it is possible the whole world is wrong and he is right. Later, he comes to believe he is not alone, and that the others who do not believe are invisible, because, like him, they learned at an early age to keep their mouths shut on the subject or suffer shunning. Here is where doubt begins its metamorphosis to anger.

During middle-age a heathen reaches a higher level of understanding at which he comes to regard belief in one sort of God or another as vital to the survival of civilization, whether it is based on fact or not, because religion is the sole repository of shame and guilt. Without these two human foibles organized groups of people would dissolve into anarchy. God may be a fairy tale, but he would not remove it from the human equation because of its utility. This is the belief guiding the heathen who grows to public office or high-profile notoriety and professes a belief in The Lord publicly while privately regarding it as a load of hooey. Like oatmeal and masturbation truth is only good for the individual -- it confounds the ambitions of a society.

Many men never reach the final stage of atheism. They die with a lie on their lips, devoted to a belief that the fairy tale of God is vital to the survival of civilization and they were right to avoid endangering it on the basis of nothing more than unnecessary, unprofitable candor about their personal opinions.

It is the final stage of atheism that only old men know which turns their anger, grown out of angst, to hatred and, in more and more cases, a crusade to educate the Godly on the simple principles of physics. This latter stage only came into existence in the late 40’s. Its defining event was the demolition of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in nuclear clouds.

The old man has always known that belief in God was without peer in its capacity to incite war. But through most of his life the heathen regarded war as nothing more than population pruning and a viable method of solving the argument about whose god is greater -- a small price to pay for maintaining an institution which makes civilization possible. But in this final stage of atheism the old man’s intellect has matured past being intimidated by the preponderance of opinion contrary to his own. He has progressed through a long time during which he kept his mouth shut believing it was gooood for them, and now he enters a time when he dwells on the end of days -- not just his own but the end of days for all Mankind.

Slowly, over the years the heathen begins to understand that sooner or later religious zealots will inherit nuclear capability. Sooner or later, the argument about whose god is greater will bring about the extinction of Mankind, unless he speaks up....unless he joins the growing ranks of other old men who have reached this understanding.

And just when the elderly atheist thinks his hatred for ignorance cannot become more intense, it occurs to him that his journey to the grave is not inevitable at all. The science that helped him reach his position on God has now passed through the completion of the Human Genome Project -- the aging gene is within our grasp. We are right on the edge of a time when nothing but misadventure can kill him. Immortality is just beyond the next breakthrough, and the only thing slowing it down is the widespread belief that Man has an obligation to die in a fiery explosion and be sorted out at the feet of God. The final blow to the old heathen’s sensibilities comes with the understanding that the death God was invented to deal with is only necessary because of the widespread belief in God.

He studies his vacant oatmeal bowl. Like his face the surface is crusted with imperfections that would not exist if he’d risen at the proper moment to wash it clean. If only he could have reached clarity on the need for sanitary, sensible behavior at a moment when his energies were vital and his voice was strong. His death will be needless. He collects a picture of his son from its resting place atop the TV. Sanity will, eventually overtake humanity, he tells himself. In time, primitive devotions to superstitious nonsense invented before hard answers to reality where possible will fall away and there will be no natural death. National borders will fall and humanity will come together as a single force in the Universe. Other worlds will be settled to solve the challenge of finite space. He and the young man in the picture may be among the last to die on the altar of ignorance. Nothing can stop it and only superstition stands in the way.

These generations of old men who die between the explosion on Hiroshima and the arrest of the aging gene perish as martyrs. Ironically, they are not martyr to the cause of sanity, not to the prospect of everlasting life on earth and not to the achievement of the old heathen’s dreams. They are martyrs to their own sealed lips. They die for lack of the courage to speak out. I will die needlessly alongside them, but let it not be said it was in silence or without protest.