If anyone in the world has seen the terrible side of human nature, it’s me. I’ve seen and personally experienced the worst that humanity can dish out.
No one can deny that evil exists in the world. Evil people are out there doing evil things right now. I have also seen the good in the world, especially the good in people. Good people are out there performing heroic and even angelic acts of goodness every day—far more than evil people are performing evil acts. Life wouldn’t work if evil outweighed good or even if they were equally powerful. We can all live in our houses, drive our cars, and raise our families because the vast majority of people do the right thing every day. Raising children is a perfect example of this. The vast majority of parents work extremely hard to do the right thing for their children. Parents do this every day at great sacrifice to themselves. The human race wouldn’t exist if bad parents balanced good parents in equal numbers. We wouldn’t be able to raise enough children to adulthood to keep our population going. Parents perform these microscopic, unseen acts of heroism every single day. These parents go unsung by everyone—everyone except their own children. It only takes the smallest twist of logic and perspective to see these acts of goodness. Any of us can make a choice at any moment of the day to see how good the world is. All we have to do is open our eyes. We are also making a choice when we turn a blind eye to these acts of goodness and fill our sight with nothing but evil. No one is making that choice for us. Let’s take a look at the poem, “Good Bones”, by Maggie Smith, and before you ask, no, this isn’t the same Dame Maggie Smith, the actress of Harry Potter fame. You can find both the poem and a photo of the poet here. I will reprint the poem here for any of you who don’t want to follow the link. Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. This poem presents several problems right from the outset, so let’s begin our critique with the very first line. First of all, we all know that life is short and ends in death. No one in the human race escapes this truth. There is absolutely no reason to keep this truth from our children. Keeping this from our children, glossing over it, or lying about it would be an extremely manipulative and harmful thing to do to a child. It would be tantamount to emotional abuse of the worst kind. Any child would be within their rights to despise a parent who did this. The statement that the world is at least fifty-percent terrible and this is a conservative estimate is also a bald-faced lie. If you actually believe this, if you’re so depressed that you actually think the world is such a terrible place and people are so terrible, if you actually can’t see all the good happening around you every single day, you better not be telling your children that. Better yet, don’t have children at all. It would be morally reprehensible for you to bring children into a world you think is so bad. If you actually believe your child has a fifty-percent chance of winding up murdered and bagged at the bottom of a lake, then you are the monster for bringing that child into such a world. It would also be incredibly wrong for a parent to keep from their children the fact that strangers might pose a danger to them. Every parent is responsible for teaching their children about these dangers and preparing the children to deal with the situation should it arise. None of this means there aren’t a lot of good people in the world. In fact, the majority of people your child will meet will be fundamentally good people. Sure, they will be flawed people, but we’re all flawed. That doesn’t make a person evil. It is also our responsibility as parents to teach our children to accept the good people that they do meet, to give people a chance to prove themselves, and to develop trust in the right people. That won’t happen if a child goes out into the world armored against everyone and thinking the world is a terrible place. The last part of the poem encapsulates the poet’s message. She’s trying to sell her children on a world she doesn’t think exists. She believes the world is a shithole. Seriously, if you really believe that, you shouldn’t be here at all. Show some gratitude for all the blessings in your life. Teach your children to be grateful for the blessings and goodness surrounding you. Teach them to appreciate the actions of so many good people that come together to create the comfortable life we all enjoy. The poet is advocating outright lying to our children. The world she’s selling them—the world she doesn’t think exists—is the good world, the beautiful world, the world where people care about each other, help each other, and love each other. This world exists right outside your window. In fact, it probably exists right inside your home right now. It exists all around you and even in you. This world only exists because all of us contribute to it and work for it. We are the ones who make it that way with all our love, care, and effort. This poem is a picture of depression. It’s a picture of someone so nihilistic, hopeless, and buried in negative thinking that they’re incapable of seeing the beauty and goodness around them. This is a picture of someone so narcissistically self-absorbed that they aren’t capable of seeing the horrific repercussions their own negative attitude can have on those around them. This is a picture of someone so mentally sick and lacking in real-world perspective that they think it’s okay to pass this negative attitude on to others. Ironically, the person who first shared this poem with me did think the poem was written by Dame Maggie Smith, the actress. That apparently gave the poem some credibility in this person’s mind. The person also suffers from severe, life-long depression. She shared me this poem because she resonated with it and presumably thought I would relate to it, too. If I had to tell my children one thing, it would be this. This poem is a lesson in how not to live your life. Take all the advice and worldview of this poem and do exactly the opposite. See the world as good and people as inherently good. Embrace all the beauty and goodness life has to offer. Fill your mind and your sight with nothing else. Do this and watch the evil of the world shrink away to a tiny pinprick on the horizon. That is how you build a happy, productive, good life that you and your children can look back on with pride. I hope this helps someone. God bless you all. ________________ All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.
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My father committed suicide when he was fifty-eight years old. My grandfather, my father’s father, also committed suicide when he was fifty-eight.
My father suffered from lifelong depression. He lived reclusively, avoided relationships of all kinds, and drank and smoked to excess. He developed widespread cancer in his fifties. When it progressed and made him weak, he shot himself in the head. I never knew my father. He and my mother divorced when I was an infant. He withdrew from my life and avoided relationships with me and his other daughter. He continued to avoid relationships with his own children right up until the day he died. I tried repeatedly in the last ten years of his life to establish an ongoing relationship with him. He always avoided it. When I heard that he was sick and in the hospital, I wanted to drive down to San Francisco to visit him. His mother, my grandmother, told me not to because he wouldn’t want that. I knew she was right, so I didn’t go. A few days later, I got the phone call that he was dead. I was in the middle of a painful period in my own life and struggling with mental health issues myself at the time. His death infuriated me. Suicide is the ultimate fuck-you to the survivors. It’s a strong, clear message that the person doesn’t give a shit who they hurt as long as they don’t have to deal with the fallout. I hear this story from the surviving relatives of suicides all the time. Suicide doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t make anything better. Suicide accomplishes only one thing. It dumps your problems onto the people left behind. As bad as you think your life is right now, you would be passing the buck to your surviving loved ones for them to solve those problems in your place. This is the lowest, most despicable, most cowardly thing any human being can do. In many cases, committing suicide makes the problem worse. That is the mess you are leaving for your loved ones to clean up while you escape out the backdoor with your tail between your legs. Most people who feel suicidal think to themselves, “I don’t want to live anymore.” Think about it. What you’re really saying is, “I don’t want to live like this anymore.” Things can change. Things can improve. Whatever your problems are, the resources exist somewhere in the world to solve these problems. There is no reason on God’s green Earth for you to believe that things will stay like this forever. Everything changes. That’s the one iron rule of Life 101. Nothing stays the same. You’re playing the victim card if you believe you’re trapped in this situation forever with no way out. You’re making an excuse so you don’t have to do the work, roll up your sleeves, and put in the effort to change your circumstances. Most likely, you’re a chronic complainer who focuses exclusively on the problem instead of the solution. You get your kicks out of bitching and moaning about how bad things are. In reality, you’re just a weak, pathetic coward who would rather complain than actually do the hard work to fix whatever it is you’re complaining about. If I sound like I’m ranting, you’re right. I’m the surviving daughter of a father who committed suicide. I’ve also spent many years suicidally depressed, so trust me, I know what I’m talking about. Suicide is the coward’s way out. My father could have spent the last years, weeks, and days of his life giving me something I never had from anyone else. He could have helped me. He could have told me that he loved me. He could have made me feel like I had a father instead of leaving me completely on my own. He did none of those things. People who commit suicide are the most selfish people on the planet. They are so self-obsessed and self-centered that it never once crosses their minds that they might gain some fulfillment from dedicating themselves to others. There will always be someone somewhere in the world who needs your help. You’re suicidal right now because you aren’t looking for these people. You aren’t thinking about what you could do for them and how you could help them. Your experience—the pain you’re going through right now—is the very thing that would help them. It is the one thing someone needs from you the most. The movie Me Before You offers us a perfect example of this. Will, the male lead of the movie, is paralyzed from the neck down, severely depressed, and decides to end his life. He makes a pact with his mother that he will stay alive for six months before he commits suicide. In that time, he develops a romance with Louisa. Their relationship brings new joy to his life, but in the end, he still chooses to end his life even knowing how much it will hurt her. This is such a classic example of suicidal mentality. Will is so consumed with his own imagined problems that he would deliberately hurt the woman he loves. He never considers that his pain might be worth the cost so he can give something to her, be there for her, and support her in developing her own life. He never considers that he might be the thing she most needs in the world. I can hear the howls of protest now. Some of you are probably already telling yourselves that I’m being insensitive to people who suffer from suicidal depression. You’re probably telling yourselves that this is the disease of depression—that it stops us from thinking outside ourselves and seeing the larger picture that might give us the hope to go on. Remember what I said earlier. I have been suicidally depressed. I spent years battling the urge to drive into town, buy a shotgun, and blow my brains out. This attitude is not a disease. The only disease is the disease of cowardice, selfishness, and an addiction to blaming everyone else for your problems. It’s a disease of weakness and refusal to take accountability for your life and solving your own problems. It’s a disease of kicking everyone else in the face to soothe your own pathetic ego. It’s a disease of always putting yourself first at the expense of everyone else, including your own children. If you have children, consider the message you would be sending to them if you committed suicide. Believe me, I speak from experience on this. You’re sending your children a message that they are worthless, that their own parents don’t give a shit about them, and that suicide is the example they should follow. I have two generations of people setting this example for me. When I spoke to my grandmother about my father’s suicide, she said, “It’s genetic.” My first thought was, “Well, where does that leave me?” Suicidal depression is not genetic. It isn’t a medical condition. It’s a choice—a selfish, cowardly choice that only weak, selfish, cowardly people make. Take this is a message from one of the loved ones you plan to leave behind—the loved ones you will leave holding the bag of all your problems along with all the additional problems they will have to face as a result of your despicable choice. Be the bigger person. Change your life if it’s so bad. No one can do it for you. Grow up and stop being such a whining, complaining quitter. That’s what you are if you commit suicide. You’re a quitter. Trust me when I tell you that many, many people have faced what you are facing now or circumstances far, far worse. These people rose up. They seized their problems by the horns. These people dug in and wrestled that problem into submission. These people are true heroes. They overcome. They become something a thousand times greater than they were. They don’t stop until they claim the happiness that is rightfully theirs. They build lives of promise, success, and fulfilment that bring joy and prosperity to everyone around them. That could be you. You could be the person everyone admires. You could be the person inspiring a generation with your story, your courage, and your service. You wouldn’t feel any desire to commit suicide if you did all that. Your life would be too rewarding, too meaningful, and too overflowing with love and happiness. There is only one thing standing between you and that life. You are the only person standing between you and that life. You can make that choice right now. You can start living that life right now. You can make the decision to get off this path and start following another path—a path that will give you all the happiness and interconnectedness you could ask for. You can start that right now. Nothing is stopping you. You can do it without even taking your eyes off this page. You just have to make a choice. You have no one to blame but yourself if you don’t. The people left behind will hate you for abandoning them and leaving them to solve your problems for you. Those people you claim to love so much will have every right to hate you. You will be proving them right, and once you’re gone, you won’t ever be able to take it back. Think about that before you consider committing suicide. Your life could actually mean something if you only wanted it to. You can decide that it does or you can decide that it doesn’t. No one does that for you. It’s your own fault if it doesn’t. The choice is always yours, so let’s not fool ourselves about this being a disease or any other ridiculous excuse. Do something about it. You don’t deserve of pity or support if you don’t do something about it. You deserve contempt. Your surviving loved ones are the people who deserve pity and support. That starts with you. Take care of them. That’s your job, so stop feeling sorry for yourself and go do it. ____________ All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. We constantly hear that religious belief is a matter of faith. In some circles, the word “faith” is used as another word for religious belief.
Ask anyone who believes in God why they follow a certain religion. You’ll inevitably hear the same answer. You just have to have faith. This is another way of saying we should suspend our rationality and accept the existence of something for which we have no empirical evidence. If you’ve read the Proof for the Existence of God, you already know what I think of this idea. I don’t take the existence of God on faith and no one else should, either. We see the same problem when certain religions want to use their own texts as evidence that God exists or that it behaves in a certain way to manifest itself in people’s lives. This simply does not work. If you want to convince someone that aliens exist, you’ll need to use something other than alien texts as proof. We need to see some concrete evidence or at least some logical reason that doesn’t completely conflict with our the evidence of our senses. Your religious texts have an inherent confirmation bias that rules them out as a credible source of evidence. Any sane person can understand this. The same is true of faith. You cannot tell someone who doesn’t believe in God that they have to have faith in order to believe in God. This is a circular argument. The person already doesn’t believe in God. The person already doesn’t believe because they don’t see the evidence. The person might be open-minded enough to question if God exists after all. The person might be willing to take that leap if you only offered some evidence that was compelling enough. Faith is not that evidence. Faith is the opposite of evidence. Faith is the wool unscrupulous people pull over our eyes to manipulate us into feeling guilty for demanding evidence. The worst part of this is that the evidence is there. People just need to be shown where it is and how to see it. But I digress. Most of you know I’m a giant Ed Mylett fan. He tells the story of an experience that changed his life when he was a young man. He got his start as a salesman selling insurance policies. He met with a young couple, husband and wife, and tried to sell them an insurance policy. The couple had two little daughters and this family was just starting out in life. The couple didn’t have much money. Ed made his pitch and the couple decided they needed to think about it before they made a decision on whether they were ready to invest that amount of money. They left the meeting, and that night, they got into a terrible car accident that killed both parents. The two little girls wound up living with a distant relative who was not the most ideal person to take care of them. Ed blamed himself for what happened to them. He believes that, if he had only been a better salesman and closed that deal, the girls would have gotten a better outcome in life. He believes he didn’t understand how to use the right language to overcome the parents’ objections. He didn’t know enough as a salesman to address their concerns and articulate why this insurance policy was so important. He didn’t connect the money these people would spend to the one thing that was most important to them—their children’s future. Now follow the same logic when our friendly neighborhood religious evangelist is trying to convince our hardened skeptic that God exists. No doubt you truly believe that following your religion is the best thing that could happen to anyone. You naturally believe that anyone adhering to your religion will incur incredible benefits to their life and their spiritual connection with God. If you really believed that, you would be morally obligated to convince the person to join your religion. You wouldn’t let yourself walk away and leave the person to burn in Hell. You only do let yourself walk away because you don’t really believe that’s what will happen. Compassionate people don’t do that. They don’t knowingly leave someone to suffer, especially not to suffer for all eternity in the fires of Hell. It simply doesn’t work for you to bombard the person with the need to have faith and then walk away blaming them for not listening to you. If you truly believed your own dogma, you would tailor your language to their needs. You would address THEIR concerns instead of using your own language—a language they already don’t speak. If the person spoke Swahili, you wouldn’t blame them for not understanding you when you are speaking English. You would go out of your way to use language they could clearly understand. Bill Rice is a pastor whose offers workshops, retreats, and meetings for the deaf population so they can hear the Christian message in their own language. He saw a need that the deaf community wasn’t being served by the mainstream Christian world. The same goes for someone who doesn’t believe in God. You can’t use the language of faith to convince these people. They already don’t believe. You have to use language they can understand. You have to address the core needs and concerns that your dogma is already failing to answer. The concept of faith has no place in any discussion of religion or philosophy. None of us should believe in something we can’t see or otherwise directly experience. That’s just ridiculous. The reality is that we DO experience a spiritual connection. We DO experience incredible benefits from adhering to our chosen belief system. We see the evidence playing out all around us in the beauty of nature, in the lives of others, in good deeds, and in the love of close relationships. This is the evidence. We don’t have to rely on faith at all—and if we’re honest, the truth is that we don’t rely on it. None of us does. We just fail to articulate exactly what the evidence is. The concept of faith is nothing but smoke and mirrors. It’s the collection of world religions telling us in so many words, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Faith is the opposite of belief. Faith is a word people use when they don’t believe in something, but they want desperately for everyone else in the world to believe that they do believe. If you truly believed in God, you would be able to point to something specific that convinced you it was real. Faith is the opposite of this. If God is so real, why can’t you point to this evidence? It should be right in front of you. You should be able to at least be able to point to the positive effect your belief has had on your life. You should at least be able to demonstrate that you were once lost and depressed and now you are energized, connected, and motivated by life. This is not faith. Highlighting and pointing out this evidence is the equivalent of a business putting positive customer testimonials on its website. In the business world, this is called social proof. It might not be as good as concrete empirical evidence of God’s existence, but it’s better than nothing—which is what faith is. Fortunately for all of us, this concrete empirical evidence actually does exist. It’s all around us every minute of the day. If you can’t see this evidence for yourself right now, head on over to the Proof for the Existence of God page where I explain it to you. Your life will improve a thousandfold as soon as you see this evidence. You never have to rely on faith ever again. ________________ All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. |