C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

The very best years of my education were the last two years of high school-- the years in public education. In particular, an astronomy teacher named Mr. Toll made a significant difference for the better, on my life and on who I am as a person.

I spent my Junior and Senior years at Roseville High because my parents could no longer afford religious private schooling for all of their children. Rather than put me back into home-schooling, they allowed me, their eldest, to complete my education in the public school system. Perhaps it was financial desperation, or perhaps it was in the hopes that the church brainwashing had sufficiently set in to resist the exposure to other influences. It had set in enough that I went on from Roseville High to attend an insane cult compound named Pensacola Christian College, but two years at Roseville High were a crucial break in the program of church-run education which carefully conditions the perceptions and world-view of students to be mindless Christian soldiers.

During that break, my mind was expanded and I was exposed to better role models. (By the way, the excellent science fiction in the Roseville High School library didn't hurt either when it came to expanding my mind.)

I was shocked, at first, when Mr. Toll admitted with no shame that he was a member of CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims Of the Paranormal. Yet despite this, to me he clearly wasn't a bad person. To the contrary, when compared to members of the church, his motivations were more honest, his vision of the universe and our evolutionary place in it was more beautiful, his friendship with students was more inclusive, his hope for this life (rather than the afterlife) was more inspiring.

By demonstrating a passionate interest in finding a happy and moral place in the universe as it truly is, he served as a role model it make it seem like a viable alternative for me to give up insisting by faith that the cosmos is as we wish it to be. The seeds which Mr. Toll planted of scientific honesty, and of a humanism which I can only clumsily term "anti-misanthropy", took several years to finish bearing fruit. Nevertheless I could never quite fit in religious fundamentalism after I took his astronomy class, and through many subsequent influences and experiences eventually became a well-adjusted and happy secularist.

The first time I instant-messaged was around 1986, when I was about twelve or so. My grandfather frequently took me and my siblings to Impression 5 Science Center in the eighties. It was great. One time I got a compliment from an employee there because I was the only one remaining in the film room all the way to the end of Dr. Seuss' environmentalist cartoon The Lorax, because everybody else had got up and left and she felt that was impolite. There already existed totally automated museum videos at that time, so I don't think they even knew she was there.

One of their exhibits was two computer terminals set up across a room from each other. I typed into one of them, walked over and typed a response, and conversed with myself a few times in this way. I loved it. My dad had done it with my uncle with their Commodore 64s for a few minutes, but it seemed stratospherically high-tech, and this connection was faster, more stable, and free.

As I sat at one of the terminals, someone came and sat down at the other one. It was a girl. She just sat there and read the screen, at first. I typed encouraging messages instructing how to use it. We chatted for a while over the connection. Eventually I got up the nerve to communicate that I was the boy sitting on the other side of the room, and we waved and smiled.

She thought I was quite smart, and funny. I was twelve and this was possibly the first friendly conversation I had with a girl or other socially desirable person, so I didn't know at the time how I was supposed to respond to such a statement. I still wish I'd gotten her contact info or something, but I never saw her again. It's been a few years since the memory of this event was recalled, and I like it, so I'm glad to be writing it down.

I bought the autobiographical graphic novel Blankets by Craig Thompson after a discussion on the PCCboard forum. At 592 pages it's the longest graphic novel published in the U.S. I enjoyed it! If anybody wants to borrow it let me know. Pastor Garry (who some of you may know from his comments to this livejournal) is an occasional reader of comic books (and one of the closet Fen in my opinion) so he had read it. Or, skimmed it perhaps. He thought the author was saying "Christianity is bad 'cuz it wouldn't let me sleep with my girlfriend."

I was pleased that it's not at all what the Reverend suggests. The book is not about religion, it's about obsessive infatuation, represented by the blanket of snow that covers the land. This symbolizes the way it seems to the protagonist like the world is all of one piece -- as if it is all about one thing over which he obsesses, like so many teens do. The book chronicles his experiences of growing out of his two main interests, a girl and a religion.

He does not leave his religion because of the bible telling him he can't have sex. On the contrary, that conflict resolves itself with religiosity stronger than ever: at that point you can see how his two obsessions are starting to become one and the same thing in his psychology, as his sex drive seems to him like a sanctified act of worship for god's creation. His break with religion is not sudden and doesn't take place in a crisis of bad events. His relationship with the girl has been long ago resolved by that time. As the snow melts and reveals the world to be composed of many interesting and worthy things that no longer revolve around the girl, he begins to see how she was not as all-important as he had thought. So then he realizes (through visual metaphor, without the book having to state it in words) that the same is true of his religion. People just don't see the flaws in that which they are infatuated with, and they continue not to see it when it's pointed out. But one day the protagonist seems to come to the end of his teenage years and enter a calm, un-infatuated condition. So after this, there only need to be a few pages of critique for his actual doctrines. This part of the story briefly critiquing Christianity is part of the denoument rather than the climax of the book, because to the protagonist, it's no longer important.