Truth or Consequences: a personal testimony
William Messer
I grew up in a Reform Jewish household into which I had been adopted as an infant still in an incubator. My birth mother was Appalachian and grew up in a holler somewhere in eastern Kentucky, so it’s likely I was not Jewish by birth (child of a Jewish parent). Of course, that wouldn’t have deterred the Nazis, who’d have killed me anyway.
One formative experience occurred one summer when I was 12 or 13 and enrolled in a typing class at a large public high school. There were at least a hundred of us gathered in a large room with a diagram of a query keyboard on the blackboard at the front behind the teacher. I was surrounded by girls my age, which was interesting to me. They turned out all to be Catholic, which was even more interesting, and I engaged them in what passed for me as philosophical discussions, wanting to know what they thought and believed. Ultimately these conversations were disappointing, as they all said exactly the same things, using the same words; I even thought I could hear a kind of rhythmic structure to what they said. I wanted to know what they thought but received only rote recitation. It was a bit scary. Ultimately, I learned they thought, politely, that I had “interesting opinions;” but they had the Truth. One, caringly and sadly, informed me that I was going to Hell.
It was my first shock awakening regarding religious thinking, or non-thinking, about belief instead of thought or knowledge.
In religious conformation class at my temple, when I was around 15, I questioned how I could confirm my faith in a religion about which I knew so little (to my mind), conceding I knew even less about all the other religions. – it was not an informed choice.
The teacher was a young rabbi-in-training from Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College. He told me “Don’t be so selfish. What, you think this is just about you?” He explained it was additionally something to be done for my family, the congregation and community. It didn’t bind me to anything. I didn’t face excommunication if I changed my mind later, and wouldn’t go to hell. I was free to covert to something else the same day, should I chose.
But he also told me Reform Judaism was a big tent, that there was even an atheist Reform congregation in Detroit. That last bit of information was like getting hit in the head with a brick – how could they be Jewish when the “watchword of our faith” was the announcement that there is but one god, our god? – but it further opened a doorway in my mind about freethought.
Over the years I did explore other religions, and eventually returned to Judaism to try help continue the process of “reform” by writing new liturgy and services which were less patriarchal and paternalistic, less theocratic, less sexist, and more poetic. It was a big task, which I entered enthusiastically, but not always well received by congregational hierarchy. Eventually I gave up on trying to reform Reform Judaism and accepted myself as a Jewish atheist. I sought community in freethought and secular humanist groups, and still do.
I lived in Europe most of my adult life until a severe brain injury brought me back to Cincinnati where I witnessed the religious politicalization of the US as Carl Rove helped George II (George W. Bush) first become governor of Texas then move into the White House by activating the formerly, largely apolitical Religious Right “Silent Majority,” which brought religious “thinking” into American political life as a virtual voting block, capable of almost anything. The unease I felt in my 1960 typing class became a tangible fear. We had jumped the wall of separation the mostly Diest founders of the nation had placed into our secular Constitution’s Bill of Rights, as well as the New Testament's biblical injunction Jesus reportedly uttered, to keep separate that which is Caesar’s from that which is God’s. It announced a potential political tsunami which would be difficult to hold back with dams of just rationality and fact.
Authoritarian “leaders” have always known that the path to power requires making facts irrelevant, destroying fact-based truth, so as to establish their own truth, based on belief in them alone and their pronouncements. It’s a critical key to disabling democracy. Our current political situation has just such an individual in power, with a religious-backed agenda for establishing theocratic power and himself as the Anointed One. It’s extremely dangerous, this marriage of religious mentality with authoritarian power, and must be opposed and thwarted.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation understands this danger. Its very name reflects the first freedom articulated in the first clause of the Bill of Rights, that the State “shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.” This proclaimed separation of government and religion was perhaps the new nation’s greatest gift to the world. It’s up to us to reassert the idea and the ideal, even as others try to destroy it. Trump has been catalytic to the destruction of truth, but it also was inevitable with the emergence of photoshop and AI – seeing is no longer believing. As a society we will have to find new meanings for “truth" and new forms of trust; but in the preceding limbo of confusion and uncertainty, religion will seize its opportunity, as Christian Nationalism is currently doing. FFRF intends to be an important guardian against the worst of the coming excesses.
WM, Vice President, FFRFCMC