Gerry Grinch
I hate to admit it, but I think Gerry Spence is probably right. There is no Santa Claus. Furthermore, faith in his existence is arguably insidious:
I don’t know what they would do to us if we were teaching our children from the time of first thought that Santa Claus was a lying fiction that represented the degenerate corporate money structure and was created only so Americans would buy a lot of junk at Christmas for their kids in order to insure the profits of the corporate king.
And what would happen if you taught your kids that Jesus and Santa were in competition with each other—as a matter of fact, as it turns out, Christmas is not the celebration of the birth of Christ, but it’s the time when Santa comes and, if you are a kid from a poor family trying to scrape enough together to eat, it is obvious that Santa does not love you as much as he does the rich kid, because the rich kid got a new bike and you got nothing, which teaches that money and virtue are somehow related, and that being poor is the first sin.
But then Gerry goes on to conflate believing in Santa with believing in God:
I have no problem with the various religions or with Santa. The human species is born with that overriding instinct of all instincts – survival – the other side of which is the fear of death. So we invent whatever belief systems are necessary to cope with that omnipotent fear, and we are born Baptists or Catholics or Muslims depending on the parents we drew out of the big basket in the sky. Doesn’t seem like much of a basis to kill each other because of the parents, along with their beliefs, that we, and they, drew out of said big basket in the sky.
No honestly religious person can argue with the proposition that the propensity to kill, or even be angry with, each other over religion is one of the most diabolical temptations with which Satan has bedeviled the heart of man and besmirched the name of God. But it is awfully simplistic for Gerry to then dismiss religion itself as having been “invent[ed]” to “cope with” the “omnipotent” “fear of death.” I prescribe The Way to Divine Knowledge by William Law as an antidote to both Gerry’s confusion and the diabolical temptation he describes.
On a related note, Ryan at Absurd Results links to an extraordinary post by James Altucher titled “My Lawyer is Dead,” this excerpt from which “scares the crap” out of Ryan:
Tired starts when you can’t get up in the morning. When you can’t look your wife in the face and say good morning but there’s no way to avoid it day after day. When you have kids that you just don’t know how to support and you start losing the ability to care. When you have clients and you think, “ugh, not another f-ing one of these.” When you have to drive two hours to meet some shitty guy who you know is going to just get a free consultation out of you but you do it anyway.
Day after day. No day different. Maybe you had other dreams. but maybe you didn’t. Everyone told you that being a lawyer would make you a lot of money, would bring you safety. Safety that would protect you to death. But who are you going to make happy today? Your mother, because you are alive, her little baby? Your wife? Your kids? Your customers? The ones who appreciate your art? When will it finally matter?
Here’s how Altucher’s post ends:
And one day you wake up and everything feels light again. You don’t feel surprised about how happy you feel. It’s natural. There are no worries. No clients. No bank accounts. No bathroom stalls. You jump out of bed. The window is open and you fly out. You skim through the trees and laugh. You fly to the moon and back. You forget who your clients were. You forget what your name was. You forget the irregularities of the nuances in SEC law. You forget everything. You’ve shed your body a million years ago and you’re no longer tired.
You were a shitty lawyer. And now you’re not.
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