Film star Frances Farmer (1913-1970) was a senior at West Seattle High School in April 1931 when she wrote this essay, titled "God Dies." The essay won first place and a prize of $100 in a contest sponsored by The Scholastic, a magazine for high school students. Here is her essay, as published in The Scholastic on May 2, 1931.
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"God Dies"
No one ever came to me and said, "You're a fool. There isn't such a thing as God. Somebody's been stuffing you." It wasn't a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn't any more, it didn't shock me. It seemed natural and right.
Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion. I went to Sunday school and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.
Religion was too vague. God was different. He was something real, something I could feel. But there were only certain times when I could feel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. "I am clean, now. I've never been as clean. I'll never be cleaner." And somehow, it was God. I wasn't sure that it was … just something cool and dark and clean.
That wasn't religion, though. There was too much of the physical about it. I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof-tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, "God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children." That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, "I am clean. I am sleepy." And then I went to sleep. It didn't keep me from enjoying the cleanness any less. I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.
Sometimes I found he was useful to remember; especially when I lost things that were important. After slamming through the house, panicky and breathless from searching, I could stop in the middle of a room and shut my eyes. "Please God, let me find my red hat with the blue trimmings." It usually worked. God became a super-father that couldn't spank me. But if I wanted a thing badly enough, he arranged it.
That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always? I began to see that he didn't have much to do about hats, people dying or anything. They happened whether he wanted them to or not, and he stayed in heaven and pretended not to notice. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was…nothingness.
I felt rather proud to think that I had found the truth myself, without help from any one. It puzzled me that other people hadn't found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn’t they see it? It still puzzles me.
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Self Help Cults & Their Leaders Ruining My Day
Today, I watched a rerun of an ABC 20/20 episode from 2010, called Deadly Devotion, about self-help guru / cult leader, James Arthur Ray. He is a proponent of the so-called "Law of Attraction" from the oh-so-deceitful book, The Secret, which says that, if you want whatever it is you want hard enough, and visualize it, you'll get it. And if bad things happen to you, it's because you didn't visualize a good life hard enough. He was featured on Oprah's talk show - she's also an advocate for this way of thinking.
Colleen Conaway, James Shore, Kirby Brown, and Liz Neuman are all dead because of their devotion to Ray's philosophy. Conaway jumped off a roof during an exercise where she was supposed to pretend to be homeless - she'd been directed to pretend this by Ray, as part of a seminar she was attending, and paid a substantial sum to attend. The other three were killed during a sweat lodge exercise lead by Ray. This article from The Verge chronicles these deaths and the activities and methods of this dangerous man.
When you read articles and see clips of Ray talking, you will read about and see methods you've heard before, by Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite, Joseph Di Mambro, and the Church of Scientology: intense physical experiences, extreme fasting, isolation, and other exercises that can alter a person's mental state and make them more pliable by a charismatic leader. You will see delivery in the style of Tony Robbins and Joel Osteen, and it's really easy to draw parallels between the philosophy promoted by The Secret and the Christian prosperity theology. Just want something badly enough, just visualize it, and follow the rules set out for you by Mr. Successful, and you, too, can achieve all you desire.
When you hear people that follow, or followed, Ray, you hear from people who are, or were, vulnerable in some way psychologically or emotionally - and with a lot of money. They are looking for something - they often aren't even sure what - and they think they can find it in a seminar or video or magic book. They paid, or are still paying, hundreds, even thousands of dollars to Ray - he's not doing anything charitable. These people are intelligent, often with university degrees, but they are also emotionally-hungry, even damaged, people who get caught up in this scam, this cult, and some, even after the deaths of Conaway, Shore, Brown and Neuman, still follow him. Arthur Deikman, a San Francisco psychiatrist, wrote The Wrong Way Home, and in it, he says, as quoted on this page: “I began to see that cults form and thrive not because people are crazy, but because people have two kinds of wishes. They want a meaningful life, to serve God or humanity, and they want to be taken care of, to feel protected and secure, to find a home.”
I guess the reason this piece on Ray is really bothering me in particular is because I've recently been coaching a dear friend who regularly attends spiritual retreats lead by various folks, and who became involved with a group in Costa Rica I'm convinced is scam at best and a cult in the making at worst. He lost a few thousand dollars to the two leaders of this "retreat," and I fear he could have lost much more had he stayed - and fear it's only a matter of time that more people do. These two retreat leaders frame their oh-so-remote location as a place to volunteer, to interact with local people, to work and live simply, in nature, to get back in touch with simplicity, and blah blah blah blah blah. In truth, they are just like Ray: they take some ceremonial practices by Native Americans and twist them into activities that may leave participants feeling fulfilled or weakened and even more vulnerable - either way, perfect prey for exploitation. They isolate. They push people to engage in hard physical labor and then berate them for not doing the activity "correctly." They probe deeply into a person's past, asking lots of incredibly intimate questions. They lash out at those who question, and if a person leaves the retreat in anger, they paint that person as negative, as someone that needed to leave before he or she brought the others down.
My friend is a warm, giving, talented, intelligent person, but he's also fragile in some ways and is looking to come to terms with some horrific events in his past, to heal emotionally. I have to be careful how I coach him through this - I can't shake him and say "Stop this nonsense!" I can't make him feel stupid. I have to be gentle in my encouragement of him - I encourage him to ask questions, to never assume someone's goodness just because they have a fancy web page or a book, to look to medical professionals to address the dark spots in his soul, to look for all of the many happy people around him who don't follow any gurus, and to believe that honest inspiration doesn't come with an expensive retreat or subscription to something. There are healthy ways to cultivate friendships, to create your own identity, to feel secure, and to be a part of something larger than yourself that don't require you to humiliate yourself, to learn a special language or to adhere to some creed filled with lots of psycho babble. It's a tough assignment - he'd be offended that I just called what he believed in psycho babble.
There was one bright spot in all this: this episode of 20/20, renamed "Deadly Devotion", was shown on Oprah's network, OWN. So, there's that, at least.
I look around me and I see dozens of ways to cultivate friendships, create an identity or definition for myself, to feel secure, and to feel a part of something large than myself: nonprofits with events I can attend and with volunteering opportunities in which I can participate, a community theatre company with productions I could audition for or just work behind the scenes or in the front of hour on event night, a citizens academy run twice yearly by the local police, all sorts of civic groups (Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, etc.), a farmer's market that would welcome me in any way I wanted to help each week, events at the library, a jazzercise class, a karaoke night, and on and on. I invite my neighbors over for a cookout and corn hole. I walk my dog through the neighborhood and say howdy to anyone I pass. It feels good, real, authentic. It brings beautiful people into my life. And I never have to use my credit card for any of it.
If someone you know is reading books or watching videos by James Arthur Ray - yes, after being let out of prison, he's back in business - show them this blog. Show them this article from The Verge. Such people are reckless at best and deviant at worst.
Colleen Conaway, James Shore, Kirby Brown, and Liz Neuman are all dead because of their devotion to Ray's philosophy. Conaway jumped off a roof during an exercise where she was supposed to pretend to be homeless - she'd been directed to pretend this by Ray, as part of a seminar she was attending, and paid a substantial sum to attend. The other three were killed during a sweat lodge exercise lead by Ray. This article from The Verge chronicles these deaths and the activities and methods of this dangerous man.
When you read articles and see clips of Ray talking, you will read about and see methods you've heard before, by Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite, Joseph Di Mambro, and the Church of Scientology: intense physical experiences, extreme fasting, isolation, and other exercises that can alter a person's mental state and make them more pliable by a charismatic leader. You will see delivery in the style of Tony Robbins and Joel Osteen, and it's really easy to draw parallels between the philosophy promoted by The Secret and the Christian prosperity theology. Just want something badly enough, just visualize it, and follow the rules set out for you by Mr. Successful, and you, too, can achieve all you desire.
When you hear people that follow, or followed, Ray, you hear from people who are, or were, vulnerable in some way psychologically or emotionally - and with a lot of money. They are looking for something - they often aren't even sure what - and they think they can find it in a seminar or video or magic book. They paid, or are still paying, hundreds, even thousands of dollars to Ray - he's not doing anything charitable. These people are intelligent, often with university degrees, but they are also emotionally-hungry, even damaged, people who get caught up in this scam, this cult, and some, even after the deaths of Conaway, Shore, Brown and Neuman, still follow him. Arthur Deikman, a San Francisco psychiatrist, wrote The Wrong Way Home, and in it, he says, as quoted on this page: “I began to see that cults form and thrive not because people are crazy, but because people have two kinds of wishes. They want a meaningful life, to serve God or humanity, and they want to be taken care of, to feel protected and secure, to find a home.”
I guess the reason this piece on Ray is really bothering me in particular is because I've recently been coaching a dear friend who regularly attends spiritual retreats lead by various folks, and who became involved with a group in Costa Rica I'm convinced is scam at best and a cult in the making at worst. He lost a few thousand dollars to the two leaders of this "retreat," and I fear he could have lost much more had he stayed - and fear it's only a matter of time that more people do. These two retreat leaders frame their oh-so-remote location as a place to volunteer, to interact with local people, to work and live simply, in nature, to get back in touch with simplicity, and blah blah blah blah blah. In truth, they are just like Ray: they take some ceremonial practices by Native Americans and twist them into activities that may leave participants feeling fulfilled or weakened and even more vulnerable - either way, perfect prey for exploitation. They isolate. They push people to engage in hard physical labor and then berate them for not doing the activity "correctly." They probe deeply into a person's past, asking lots of incredibly intimate questions. They lash out at those who question, and if a person leaves the retreat in anger, they paint that person as negative, as someone that needed to leave before he or she brought the others down.
My friend is a warm, giving, talented, intelligent person, but he's also fragile in some ways and is looking to come to terms with some horrific events in his past, to heal emotionally. I have to be careful how I coach him through this - I can't shake him and say "Stop this nonsense!" I can't make him feel stupid. I have to be gentle in my encouragement of him - I encourage him to ask questions, to never assume someone's goodness just because they have a fancy web page or a book, to look to medical professionals to address the dark spots in his soul, to look for all of the many happy people around him who don't follow any gurus, and to believe that honest inspiration doesn't come with an expensive retreat or subscription to something. There are healthy ways to cultivate friendships, to create your own identity, to feel secure, and to be a part of something larger than yourself that don't require you to humiliate yourself, to learn a special language or to adhere to some creed filled with lots of psycho babble. It's a tough assignment - he'd be offended that I just called what he believed in psycho babble.
There was one bright spot in all this: this episode of 20/20, renamed "Deadly Devotion", was shown on Oprah's network, OWN. So, there's that, at least.
I look around me and I see dozens of ways to cultivate friendships, create an identity or definition for myself, to feel secure, and to feel a part of something large than myself: nonprofits with events I can attend and with volunteering opportunities in which I can participate, a community theatre company with productions I could audition for or just work behind the scenes or in the front of hour on event night, a citizens academy run twice yearly by the local police, all sorts of civic groups (Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, etc.), a farmer's market that would welcome me in any way I wanted to help each week, events at the library, a jazzercise class, a karaoke night, and on and on. I invite my neighbors over for a cookout and corn hole. I walk my dog through the neighborhood and say howdy to anyone I pass. It feels good, real, authentic. It brings beautiful people into my life. And I never have to use my credit card for any of it.
If someone you know is reading books or watching videos by James Arthur Ray - yes, after being let out of prison, he's back in business - show them this blog. Show them this article from The Verge. Such people are reckless at best and deviant at worst.
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