Part I
Doubtful Origins
Chapter 1
Divorce from Santa Claus
Learning that the Cambrian explosion of disparate life-forms occurred some 580 million years ago did not advance my belief in God.
But it was the Bible’s patent absurdity, including its bizarre depictions of characters living more than nine hundred years, that cemented more doubt than even the combined contributions of Aristophanes, Bernoulli, Chaucer, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, Galileo, Hegel, Ibsen, Jefferson, Kepler, Lessing , Mendel, Nietzsche, Occam, Pasteur, Queen Elizabeth, Rand, Socrates, Twain, uranium half-life dating, Voltaire, Wittgenstein, Xenophon, Yeats, and zoology.
At my high school graduation, I made perhaps the first and only act of public religious hypocrisy in my life. Returning home from summer school at the University of Texas, which began a week before high school graduation, I welcomed the day but predicted it would be underwhelming. Having already tasted the relevant freedoms of college life—keg parties, coed dorms, and late-night bull sessions—I was eager to return to Austin and put provincial South Garland High School in my rearview mirror.
Like the three or four ceremonies that different schools would pack into Southern Methodist University’s Moody Coliseum that Saturday every three hours like a Las Vegas chapel minting weddings, the graduation for the class of ’88 seniors was expected to be a banal, statistically average occurrence replete with the never-ending line of some 540-odd Andersons, Bennetts, Grays, Joneses, and Smiths and the predictably quaint valedictory.
Pat Savarese changed all of that, though. An all-American cutup, Savarese was our class vice president. Tradition held that the vice president gave the closing prayer, so Pat got charged with that assignment. Things would have been uneventful, at least for me, had Pat not performed a most memorable antic.
As the senior class treasurer, I sat on the high platform where the principals shook students’ hands, handed out diplomas, and herded teens offstage. My seat gave me a close view of what happened when the speaker called Pat’s full name. Rising from a chair near me, he removed his mortarboard and meticulously put it in his mouth, and then did a four-point cartwheel that set off light cheers and laughter in the echoing coliseum.
When Savarese came to his feet, we soon learned that Principal Charlie White didn’t share the crowd’s amusement. A tall graying Southern bull, White was a big man and confident authoritarian who annually gave his popular “spring has sprung” speech over the PA system, where his twang enjoined students from fighting, bare midriffs, Frisbees, and public displays of “UH-fection.” With a glowering contorted face, Principal White had no compunction about grabbing the amateur gymnast by the arm and jerking him off the platform before a crowd of more than two thousand graduates and family members. After multitudes booed briefly, the remaining class officers began to wonder how the show would end. After a Southern-fried tongue lashing, would administrators let Pat back on the stage to close out the ceremony? Or would they name another designee?
A counselor’s muffled shout offstage soon answered our question.
“Geoff,” the bespectacled counselor exclaimed. “Geoff, can you do the benediction?”
Looking down behind some six to ten feet below me, I shrugged, saying, “I am not really good with prayers, but I can give a speech.”
As luck would have it, this Bible Belt public school chose one of its only declared agnostics to give the closing prayer. Humored to get in the last word of high school, I recited the benediction that Pat composed and gave him the credit in a dig against the administration that went largely unnoticed. What else no one likely perceived was that the speaker had no conviction in the prayer that would conclude our high school days.
Though not guilty like Jimmy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Bob Tilton, or any of a number of evangelical frauds who have ever jammed the airwaves with blushless pleas for cash, checks, or money orders, I later felt hypocritical. Indeed, I wrote a paper for my college freshman English class, penitently asserting, like a self-loathing Huckleberry Finn, that my fraud somehow dishonored God, or perhaps his people. So I vowed never to be ornery again and repeat the offense.
In truth, my own failing that day was not trusting my own conviction and instinctive doubts, or realizing that playing along with the routine was no greater a social fraud than humoring an old or ugly woman with flattering terms of endearment.
But at the time of this penance, threats of Southern social stigma backed by centuries of coercive hellfire mythology gave me greater pause than at present. By the time that I gave that public prayer in a god I had once tried to worship, I had already drawn a number of conclusions about Christianity as well as about any definable creator. I had profound doubts that would briefly recede for a few years, but would later expand and congeal into a firm atheism after decades of reading, living, and lawyering.
The genesis of my early doubt came from multiple sources, from the unruly influence of older brothers to a single mother who let her son read her assigned reading for humanities classes during her return to complete her bachelor’s degree decades after she postponed her university education to become a dutiful naval wife. A mild Missourian, my mother encouraged me to read anything. As a child, that meant Greek and Roman mythologies or the C. S. Lewis Christian allegories about Narnia. By high school, that would include Freud and Sartre. And as a die-hard believer in American capitalism, I likewise later felt it important to learn about its nemesis, Marx. Because my mother worked feverishly selling TVs and other home appliances to support me and my three siblings following her divorce in 1971, I was left unsupervised frequently; thus when not reading or working, I was likely getting into trouble. I was the kid who went to school telling my whole first-grade class that “there is no such ‘thing’ as Santa Claus” and the senior who wrote about godless Albert Camus.
The framework discrediting Santa Claus proved transferable. How could flying reindeer reach every home in the world in one night? How could God create the universe in just six days? How could a fat man negotiate narrow chimneys, mobile homes, and locked doors but never get shot as a burglar? How could a virgin get pregnant? How could woodshop elves make die-cast metal toys from China? How could Jesus turn water into wine? How come there are so many different Santa Clauses? How come there are so many different churches? An appreciation for causation would soon provide the same answer for all of these questions.