I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
– Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
It was my father's death that triggered the writing of this book. He lived to be almost eighty, but he might have lived to one hundred but for some bad luck.
During World War II, Dad and his buddy "Doug" (not his real name) got weekend leave from the US Army, and they jumped on Dad's big, powerful Indian motorcycle to head home (Doug was driving, Dad on the back). Coming down California's Central Valley, State Highway 33 is completely flat for hundreds of miles, from way up north in Yarmouth near the San Joaquin River, for 215 miles south until you get to McKittrick, just before Highway 33 heads into the Santa Ynez Mountains. Flat, that is, except for one hill, near the town of Westley. Just one. And for some reason on that fateful night, Doug decided to pass a slow-moving truck as they crested the only hill on that road.
As Doug pulled around the truck and crested the hill, another motorcycle appeared dead ahead, coming up the other side. For some crazy reason, Doug panicked and swerved to the left side of the oncoming motorcycle. Of course, the oncoming motorcyclist swerved the same way. Just before the collision, both drivers locked their rear wheels in a skid, and the two motorcycles slammed into each other at a combined speed of around one hundred miles per hour, crushing all three riders' right legs between the heavy machines.
A couple hours later, my Dad woke up, lying in a farmer's field. A hundred yards off, he could see an ambulance, tow truck, various police cars, and people milling about. He called out and yelled, and after a while someone noticed him. They were stunned – they'd found two motorcycles, and two motorcyclists, and thought that was it. Later when he returned to the site, he estimated that he must have flown clear over the telephone wires and the railroad track to have landed so far away. His leg was broken in seventeen places, his knee completely smashed, and he had various other broken ribs and injuries. But he was alive.
The accident sent him to the hospital for over year, and left him with a shattered knee, no kneecap, and a terrible and (at the time) incurable bone infection (osteomyelitis). He later had three full artificial knee replacements, none of which really worked well, which meant he never exercised at all. This, combined with fifty years of smoking and a diet high in salami, cheese on crackers, and fried chicken, meant that the natural robustness and longevity that runs in my family was truncated. He might have lived a full century, but instead became feeble and disabled in his early seventies and died six months short of his eightieth birthday.
Aunt Carolyn (my father's sister) has the same strong constitution as my father, but she is as robust as can be – she's just one year younger than my father, and at age seventy-eight, she was a volunteer who drove her own car to the very same retirement home where my father spent his last months, to play piano and sing for the "old folks."
Death is never easy, even when you're ready for it and know it will bring peace. Aunt Carolyn offered me a bed to sleep in and a shoulder to cry on during the last few difficult months of of my father's life, when I had to travel frequently to take care of him. Her calm, loving care and restful home were a refuge, but most of all, she knew when to just listen. After I'd unloaded my frustrations each evening, Aunt Carolyn and I had some wonderful late-night discussions about everything from politics, to the morality of family assisted suicide, to the existence of God.
You may recall from my story, Grandpa and the Sunset, that I come from a very religious family on my father's side, and that included Aunt Carolyn. So you can imagine my surprise and amazement to find that Aunt Carolyn, who had been Christian most of her life, had done a 180-degree turn late in life and become an atheist. I found this fascinating, but with my father's death shortly after this conversation, I had many things to take care of. I bid Aunt Carolyn farewell and headed home. That was in January.
July thirty-first would have been Dad's eightieth birthday, and I decided to call Aunt Carolyn to reconnect. We started talking about religion again, and I asked her about her "un-baptism" – her conversion from Christianity to something close to atheism. Her story might be described as "typical" except for the ending.
The first crack in her faith was during her teen years when she learned the horrors of Hitler and his genocide of the Jews and Gypsies. Aunt Carolyn couldn't understand how the loving god Jehovah could let such a thing happen. Her path continued in the usual way, with unanswered prayers, consternation over all the weird conflicts and inconsistencies in the Bible that nobody could explain to her satisfaction, and with her recognizing the staggering cruelty, horrifying natural disasters, and so forth, that are hard to explain if God is the kind and loving God she learned about in church. But she tried to keep her faith, although it was difficult, for several more decades.
In the 1970s, Aunt Carolyn decided she really, truly wanted to have her faith back, and she recommitted herself to Christianity and Jesus. In 1984, she joined the Episcopal Church, where she spent almost five years studying and trying to reconcile the church's teachings with the reality she found all around her. It almost worked.
Her faith in God ended utterly and completely in one single day. Aunt Carolyn had the opportunity to travel extensively in South and Central America as the wife of an American diplomat. She happened to be in Peru and Ecuador when a volcano erupted. Lava, mud and ashes cascaded down its slopes, killing and destroying everything in its path. One man became trapped in the mud, stuck up to his shoulders, unable to move. They couldn't free him.
Buried alive, but able to breath, he screamed for mercy, begging the Catholic priest to kill him, or let his friends or family do it. The priest, all the people in the village, and the man himself, knew with certainty that he was going to die. Yet the priest refused, for to kill the man would be a mortal sin. It was God's will, that this man had to die of "natural" causes, even if that meant days and days of insufferable torture. The man screamed and begged, but the villagers, all Catholics, would not go against the priest's command. The man finally died in pain and agony.
When Aunt Carolyn heard this story, her faith evaporated in a single day. In that moment, she finally realized that the answer to her long quest had been in front of her the whole time: There is no God.
The genesis of this book came during my late-night discussions with Aunt Carolyn before Dad died, when she asked me about my own beliefs. Having heard about her "un-baptism," I was encouraged to tell her my own theories. Somehow, in about five minutes, I gave Aunt Carolyn an unbelievably lucid and succinct explanation of these ideas. It was one of those moments that I wish I had recorded, because I'll probably never be that concise and clear again. But that moment inspired me – I realized that all these ideas had finally come together in my head, and it was time to write this book.
And here it is. Thanks, Aunt Carolyn, for taking care of me, thanks for asking about my beliefs, and thanks for listening while I talked nonstop for five minutes. I can't tell you how much your story has inspired me.
And thanks for taking me into your home and heart in my time of need.