A Taste of Things to Come?

"The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained."
Sam Harris -- The End of Faith

I sometimes feel a mild degree of shame for being a Midwestern man whose worldview came unraveled after 9-11. I did not live in New York or D.C., and at the time I had not even visited either of them. But I look at my family, my career, my faith – they all changed on 9-11.

I woke up on that Tuesday as I did on any other day. On Tuesdays my girlfriend and I shared a class together, and I was waiting for her to come fetch me for breakfast. As she came in the door one of our floormates rushed down the hall, flying into my neighbor’s room, and screeching that they get out of bed. As they struggled to wake she ran back towards her room, where my girlfriend grabbed her by the arm to ask what the drama was all about. I overheard bits and pieces about “The Towers” as I packed up my backpack. Somebody had bombed The Towers.

The student housing at Southern Illinois University is divided into two communities. The first, Thompson Point, where I lived, sat on a lake in the main part of the campus. The other sat down the hill by the recreation center. We called them The Towers. I rushed to the television expecting to see the dorms across campus in flames. Instead, I turned to NBC just as the first tower fell, along with the hearts of every American.

My girlfriend dragged me to breakfast, though I agonized through each second I was not in front of the television. My girlfriend seemed irritatingly uninterested, even calm, about what was going on out East. She packed up after our meal and went to class. I went home.

The events of 9-11 seemed so impossibly irrational at the time that it made it difficult for even the most grounded American to prevent Chicken Little hysteria. I have a penchant for irrationally creative thinking, so on 9-11 I took paranoia to a whole new level. I remember walking back from the cafeteria and looking up into the sky. Every jet trail, every sparkle of an airliner carried a sense of dread with it. And the uncertainty of that day made it impossible to reign in my fear.

I’ve only had one fear that ever bordered on becoming a phobia. When I was eight, on my first trip to visit my Uncle Joel in Florida, my family got trapped in an enormous line of thunderstorms. At the start, I lay on the floor, rolled up in my E.T. sleeping bag, as tornado warnings cut into the radio broadcasts. As things got more serious and my parents began to whisper covertly in the front seat, I sat up and looked out on a black mass of swirling clouds. Despite a flurry of intense lightning and blinding rain, we made it through the tempest without incident, but not without damage to my psyche.

For the next several years, every time I saw black clouds rolling over the horizon, whether at a Little League game or a boating trip on the Mississippi, I became impossible to deal with. Eventually, I got over my fear through education. I sought out all the information I could find on storms. When ominous skies foreshadowed a mean summer tempest, I sat myself in front of the Weather Channel to fully understand the threat posed to me. Fifteen years later, I raced down to Florida so I could be there when Hurricane Frances made landfall. And the entire credit goes to my insatiable need for information.

On September 11th, information was very hard to come by. Speculation was rampant. Paranoia abounded. Generally, it was not the best environment to keep my wits about me. So, I stared wide-eyed at the television for nearly twelve hours through rumors about the nuclear weapon on the Hudson, through the bomb threat at the Empire State Building, through the Where in the World is W saga. Much of the following continued in this vein.

After three years, it is hard to comprehend, with a more rational mind, just how terrifying that day was. I find it especially difficult because I have considered it on an intellectual level nearly every day since it happened.

My first line of attack for understanding was to write about it. The next month I began my senior thesis which turned into a fantasy screenplay examining the influences that led to 9-11. It started off with not a hint of nuance. The villains’ motivations were unapologetically evil – based purely on ignorance and envy. The heroes were merely trying to do their best, and were horrified, horrified, that somebody could do something so heinous. Three years later, that single screenplay has morphed into a series of novels that examine an epic struggle between two distinct societies – just like the conflict we find ourselves embroiled in. Though 9-11 was the impetus for my story, its influence has become more of an echo now – much like the day itself. Not a day goes by that I do not consider this story, so in a way, not a day goes by when I do not consider my own dire view of our world.

That dire view has put a strain on my search for an acceptable faith. After dismissing theistic religion as a source for my greater world view, I sought out other avenues through which to build my faith. A natural step after dismissing the heavenly is to turn to the worldly. I don’t mean worldly in a hedonistic way. I mean worldly in a humanitarian sense.

I never felt the love of God; the only undeniable love I ever encountered came from my family. Therefore, I came to believe that something greater than myself, greater than all of us, ran through the bonds of kin. I could not think poorly of humanity when such ties exist. Clearly, something greater was at work here. Before September 11th, I felt fairly confident in this general thesis.

However, watching such a ruthless attack paralyze a city and kill thousands of civilians required me to fiercely reevaluate my new faith. Clearly faith in humanity was as problematic as a faith in God. In the years since the attacks on New York and Washington, I have found many philosophical tangents breaking off from one central question:

Is the nature of man evil or good? It is an impossible question to answer, a difficult one to even consider, but no question is more essential to my future than that one.

Also on 9-11, my tolerance for religion began its slow but inevitable corrosion. Through most of my college life, partially because I was trying to steady the waters of my relationship with a born-again Christian, I was an apologist for faith. I used the usual mantras of those who have low opinions of religion but cannot bring themselves to offend friends and family.

I’ve proceeded to debunk the majority of those platitudes over the years. Nobody can defend religion by saying it does a lot of good for people, because there is nothing to say that this good cannot be had outside the purview of religion. For every person who needs religion to get by with the daily grind there is another person who uses religion as a narcotic, rising to magnificent heights of religious euphoria and crashing to nihilistic lows when their faith is tested. I used to view religion as harmless, but September 11th is proof that religion, and the type of thinking it espouses, is not.

On my drive to work on November 3rd of this year, the Wednesday after the election, I heard a startling statistic on the radio. Upon leaving the polls, Bush voters were asked what the determining factor in their vote was. 23%, almost one quarter, said moral values. The subject that received the least votes, at 2%, was education. I felt horribly alienated that morning; I lived in a country that elected their president based on gay marriage, abortion, and a naïve and uneducated understanding of stem cell research. The following day a school district in Georgia went to court to mandate that Intelligent Design (the new buzzword for Creationism) be taught in science classes. Based on the last place finisher in said poll, it is no surprise that a complex issue like stem cell research can be completely bastardized in the minds of the public and that a scientific clusterfuck like Intelligent Design can sit on equal footing with evolution.

Never in the course of my religious understanding did I ever feel that faith allowed for the advancement of the human race. Best case scenario, it allows us to tread water. In most cases, it hinders our knowledge and growth – as in the case of stem cell research. Stem cell research has the potential to cure a myriad of the most devastating diseases of our times like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as well as physical maladies like spinal cord injuries. Because of the foggy argument of when life begins, we are allowing tens of thousands of cells to sit in a freezer where they will never become a human life, instead of using them to enhance the lives of the people we already have. Despite the hype, stem cell research is not comparable to abortion. It is not even close. And once again, a little education on the topic would do this country wonders.

But clearly, education is not one of this country’s major concerns.