Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (19 page)

“I listen to the ethical pronouncements of the leaders of the so-called religious revival going on in this country, including those of our President, and am able to distill only two firm commandments from them. The first commandment is this: ‘Stop thinking.’ The second commandment is this: ‘Obey.’ Only a person who has given up on the power of reason to improve life here on Earth, or a soldier in Basic Training could accept either commandment gladly: ‘Stop thinking’ and ‘Obey.’

“I was an Infantry Private during World War II and fought against the Germans in Europe. My religion as well as my blood type was stamped into my dogtags. The Army decided my religion was P, for ‘Protestant.’ There is no room on dogtags for footnotes and a bibliography. In retrospect, I think they should have put S on my dogtags, for ‘Saracen,’ since we were fighting Christians who were on some sort of utterly insane Crusade. They had crosses on their flags and uniforms and all over their killing machines, just like the soldiers of the first Christian Emperor Constantine. And they lost, of course, which has to be acknowledged as quite a setback for Christianity.

“Now what is it, do you think, that makes Christians so bloodthirsty?

“I will tell you what my theory is, and I will be glad to hear yours after I am through standing up here and going ‘Blah blah blah.’ I think the problem is linguistic, and might be repaired, if the evangelists would only allow it, with startling simplicity. The Christian preachers exhort their listeners to love one another and to love their neighbors and so on. Love is simply too strong a word to be of much use in ordinary, day-to-day relationships. Love is for Romeo and Juliet.

“I’m to love my neighbor? How can I do that when I’m not even speaking to my wife and kids today? My wife said to me the other day, after a knock-down-drag-out fight about interior decoration, ‘I don’t love you anymore.’ And I said to her, ‘So what else is new?’ She really didn’t love me then, which was perfectly normal. She will love me some other time—I think, I hope. It’s possible.

“If she had wanted to terminate the marriage, to carry it past the point of no return, she would have had to say, ‘I don’t
respect
you anymore.’ Now—that would be terminal.

“One of the many unnecessary American catastrophes going on right now, along with the religious revival and plutonium, is all the people who are getting divorced because they don’t love each other anymore. That is like trading in a car when the ashtrays are full. When you don’t
respect
your mate anymore—that’s when the transmission is shot and there’s a crack in the engine block.

“I like to think that Jesus said in Aramaic, ‘Ye shall
respect
one another.’ That would be a sign to me that He really wanted to help us here on Earth, and not just in the Afterlife. Then again, He had no way of knowing what ludicrously high standards Hollywood was going to set for love. How many people resemble Paul Newman or Meryl Streep?

“And look at the spectrum of emotions we think of automatically when we hear the word ‘love.’ If you can’t love your neighbor, then you can at least like him. If you can’t like him, you can at least not give a damn about him. If you can’t ignore him, then you have to hate him, right? You’ve exhausted all the other possibilities. That’s a quick trip to hate, isn’t it? And it starts with love. It is such a logical trip, like the one from ‘white-hot’ to ‘ice-cold,’ with ‘red-hot,’ ‘hot,’ ‘warm,’ ‘tepid,’ ‘room temperature,’ ‘cool,’ ‘chilly,’ and ‘freezing’ in between. The spectrum of emotions suggested by the word ‘love’ again: ‘love,’ and then ‘like,’ and then ‘don’t give a damn about,’ and then ‘hate.’

“That is my explanation of why hatred is so common in that part of the world dominated by Christianity. There are all these people who have been told to do their best at loving. They fail, most of them. And why wouldn’t they fail, since loving is extremely difficult? Most of these people are also failures as pole-vaulters and performers on the flying trapeze. And when they fail to love, day after day, year in and year out, come one, come all, the logic of the language leads them to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that they must hate instead. The step beyond hating, of course, is killing in imaginary self-defense.

“ ‘Ye shall respect one another.’ Now there is something almost anybody in reasonable mental health can do day after day, year in and year out, come one, come all, to everyone’s clear benefit. ‘Respect’ does not imply a spectrum of alternatives, some of them very dangerous. Respect is like a light switch. It is either on or off. And if we are no longer able to respect someone, we don’t feel like killing that person. Our response is restrained. We simply want to make him or her feel like something the cat drug in.

“Compare making somebody feel like something the cat drug in with Armageddon or World War III.

“So there you have my scheme for making Christianity, which has killed so many people so horribly, a little less homicidal: substituting the word ‘respect’ for the word ‘love.’ And as I said, I have been in actual battle with people who had crosses all over themselves. They were sure no fun.

“I have little hope that my simple reform will attract any appreciable support during my lifetime, anyway, or in the lifetimes of my children. The Christian quick trip from love to hate and murder is our principal entertainment. We might call it ‘Christianity Fails Again,’ and how satisfying so many of us have been trained to find it when it fails and fails.

“In America it takes the form of the cowboy story. A good-hearted, innocent young man rides into town, with friendly intentions toward one and all. Never mind that he happens to be wearing a loaded Colt .44 on either hip. The last thing he wants is trouble. But before he knows it, this loving man is face to face with another man, who is so unlovable that he has absolutely no choice but to shoot him. Christianity Fails Again.

“Very early British versions are tales of the quests of the Christian knights of King Arthur’s Camelot. Like Hermann Goring, they have crosses all over them. They ride out into the countryside to help the weak, an admirably Christian activity. They are certainly not looking for trouble. Never mind that they are iron Christmas trees decorated with the latest in weaponry. And before they know it, they are face to face with other knights so unlovable that they have absolutely no choice but to chop them up as though they were sides of beef in a butcher shop. Christianity Fails Again. What fun! And I point out to you that there was an implied promise that our own government would entertain us with failures of Christianity when John F. Kennedy allowed his brief Presidency to be called Camelot.

“And how does our present federal administration, which has become just one more big corporation fighting for our attention on television and in the newspapers, propose to maintain its popularity? With the same old tried and true story, which begins with friendly, open people, who say such things as ‘Nobody wants peace more than we do’ and ‘Nobody is slower to anger than we are’ and so on. And then, all of a sudden, ‘Ka-boom, ka-boom!’ Christianity Fails Again.

“The place where it failed most recently, incidentally, which is Libya, has a population less than that of greater Chicago, Illinois. And should any Christian be sorry that we killed Qaddafi’s baby daughter? Well—Jerry Falwell should speak to this issue, since he knows all the verses in the Bible which make murder acceptable. My own theory is that the little girl, by allowing herself to be adopted by a dark-skinned Muslim absolutely nobody watching American television could love, in effect committed suicide.

“Perhaps the CIA could find out if she had been despondent before cashing in.

“But I digress.

“I have come all the way to Rochester to speak to a congregation of persons of such deep faith that they dare to be skeptical about widely accepted pronouncements of what life is all about, who call themselves Unitarian Universalists. So I should surely offer an opinion as to the present condition of that relatively small denomination.

“I will say that you, in terms of numbers, power, and influence, and your spiritual differences with the general population, are analogous to the earliest Christians in the catacombs under Imperial Rome. I hasten to add that your hardships are not the same, nor are you in any danger. Nobody in the power structure thinks children of the Age of Reason amount to a hill of beans. That is the extent of your discomfort. That sure beats being crucified upside down or being fed to the carnivorous menagerie at the Circus Maximus.

“You are like the early Christians in yearning for an era of peace and plenty and justice, which may never come. They thought Jesus would bring that about. You think human beings should be able to create such an era through their own efforts.

“You are like them, as I have already said, in that you live in a time when killing is a leading entertainment form. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the average American child watches 18,000 TV murders before it graduates from high school. That kid has seen Christianity fail with pistols and rifles and shotguns and machine guns. It has seen Christianity fail with guillotines and gallows and electric chairs and gas chambers. That youngster has seen Christianity fail with fighter planes and bombers and tanks and battleships and submarines—with hatchets and clubs and chain saws and butcher knives. And afterward that boy or girl is supposed to feel grateful to the corporations, our Federal Government among them, which put on such shows.

“Romans as rich and powerful as modern corporations used to put on such shows, so we can say that all that has changed is the sponsorship.

“Like the early Christians, you are part of a society dominated by superstitions, by pure baloney. During Roman Imperial times, though, pure baloney was all that was available about the size of the planet, about its place in the cosmos, about the natures of its other inhabitants, about the probable origins of life, about the causes and cures of diseases, about chemistry, about physics, about biology, and on and on. Everybody, including the early Christians, had no choice but to be full of baloney. That is not the case today. And my goodness, do we ever have a lot of information now, and proven techniques for creating almost anything in abundance and for moderating all sorts of catastrophes.

“How tragic it is, then, that the major impulses in this and several other societies nowadays should be in the direction of the pure baloney and cruel entertainments of thousands of years ago, which almost inevitably lead to the antithesis of beauty and the good life and Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ, which is war.

“When I say that the Unitarian Universalists, the people who know pure baloney when they hear it, are something like the early Christians in the catacombs, am I suggesting that contempt for baloney will someday be as widespread as Christianity is today? Well—the example of Christianity is not encouraging, actually, since it was nothing but a poor people’s religion, a servant’s religion, a slave’s religion, a woman’s religion, a child’s religion, and would have remained such if it hadn’t stopped taking the Sermon on the Mount seriously and joined forces with the vain and rich and violent. I can’t imagine that you would want to do that, to give up everything you believe in order to play a bigger part in world history.

“You would need a logo—something you could put on T-shirts and flags to start with, and then maybe on the sides of tanks and airplanes and peacekeeping missiles later on. If you really want a logo, I recommend a circle with a baloney sausage in the middle, and with a bar across the sausage—meaning, in international sign language, ‘No baloney.’

“But then, in order to recruit a large and enthusiastic following, perhaps even a rabid following, you would have to repudiate that symbol—without saying so, of course. You would have to make up a lot of highly emotional baloney, which you surely don’t have now—all about what God wants and doesn’t want, whom He likes, whom He hates, what He eats for breakfast. The more complete picture of God you can cobble together, the better you’ll do.

“The more violent picture of Him you create, the better you’ll do. I say this as an expert, as a former advertising and publicity man. The President and I came out of the same division at General Electric. And there he is in the White House, and here I am speaking to some obscure religious sect in Rochester. But that’s another story. My point is that if you are going to succeed as a mass movement, you are going to do it on television and videocassettes or nowhere, and any God you invent is going to be up against
Miami Vice
and Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone. Stallone, incidentally, was a girls’ gym teacher in Switzerland during the Vietnam War. You look into those spaniel eyes of his, and you know just how hard he tried to love before he started killing socialist wogs and gooks.

“And stay clear of the Ten Commandments, as do the television evangelists. Those things are booby-trapped, because right in the middle of them is one commandment which would, if taken seriously, cripple modern religion as show business. It is this commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’

“I thank you for your attention.” (The end.)

I was preaching to the choir, so to speak. In more conventionally religious venues, my Freethinking has proved less digestible. So that after I spoke at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in October 1990, the Dean of the Chapel there, the Reverend Paul H. Jones, wrote a troubled letter to a mutual friend, from which I have his permission to quote in part. “Why am I so depressed as I read
Hocus Pocus
?” he asked. “Don’t I like the human condition as he portrays it via the characters, situations, educational system? The world is disintegrating. Does that accurately reflect life? Where am I in that world? With whom do I identify? Why don’t I like it?”

He goes on: “I want to ask Vonnegut about his religious persuasion. What is redemptive about his writings? Must they be? Are they intended to be? Am I imposing or asking too much? He deliberately mentioned Jesus and invoked religious images. What gives?”

My reply is the next-to-last thing in the Appendix.