Frivology

When I first started to learn about natural selection in middle school, no one had to convince me that it existed.  I’d already heard some about evolution and had made the decision, based upon what I saw in the world around me, to believe that it was true.  In fact, at the time I still believed in God (as much as I ever have), and I still didn’t find that belief in God and belief in natural selection (so much as a scientific theory can be “believed”) were at odds.  I believed that Genesis was not literal and “7 days” could well have been 7 billion years or 70 billion years, or however long it would take to evolve humans. 

Evolution and natural selection seemed so obvious and clear that I had a hard time believing that anyone else would find them not obvious and clear, or even find them at odds with religion.  It became more difficult for me to understand this the older a got.  Thus, when my best friend (who isn’t even a Christian) told me that she couldn’t believe that we evolved from monkeys, I was shocked.  I was in my 20s, then, she in her 30s.  We spent a few nights with me trying to convince her and her just not listening to me, and then I dropped the subject.  That was ten years ago, and even though she and I have remained incredibly close friends who lean on each other for all kinds of support, evolution still remains a topic that’s forbidden. 

She went with me through a large chunk of my religious exploration.  Wicca, run-of-the-mill Paganism, Pantheism, then something sort of close to Pantheism, but more like Humanism in the form of watered-down Pantheism.  But, when I heard Julia Sweeney’s “Letting Go of God” and felt like Julia was very nearly describing my own journey with her experiences, and I completely let go of any form of “mystical being”, the journey together ceased.  I don’t remember how we got on the subject, as it was one I’d been avoiding, but she told me that she felt sad that I’d chosen this route.  It immediately raised my shackles - I don’t want to be pitied.  It was that sort of pity that had me stumbling in the dark for so many years, afraid to call myself an atheist for sure.  When I finally took the leap and embraced the fact that I don’t believe in God or Goddess or “The Great All” or any of that junk, I was sure I’d feel some sort of sense of being alone, of being orphaned… but, I didn’t.  Rather, I felt an extreme sense of relief.  I could suddenly be myself.  Yet here I was, sitting in my car, and my best friend, the one to whom I felt I could tell anything, was telling me that she felt “sad” for me because I no longer believed at all that anything would happen to me when I died other than just … dying. 

I tried to explain it to her, to tell her just that.  I don’t feel sad, so she shouldn’t feel sad, either.  I don’t feel lonely, orphaned, abandoned or left behind.  I don’t feel like my lack of belief has suddenly made my life less meaningful.  In fact, I explained, I feel the opposite.  I have one chance in my life to do the things I want to do.  One chance before it’s all over and I cease to exist… so damn it, I’m going to make that chance matter.  She got defensive within a few moments, then started to tune me out.  It was the same thing as happened when we talked about evolution.  I knew, then, that this would be a topic I just don’t bring up.  That conversation was partially why I decided I really needed to make Frivology.  I wanted somewhere that I could talk about these things without getting that questioning, raised-eyebrow look that made me feel as if I’d done or said something wrong. 

I bring all of this up because something happened with her yesterday that really put me on edge.  It isn’t something that just she did - lots of people do it - but it’s something that I think really does a disservice to all of humanity. 

I’m a web developer.  I do a lot of things that can easily get screwed up and broken.  Put a semicolon in the wrong place or add an extra parenthesis and suddenly you could cause the whole system to break down.  In my early days programming, I was terrified of doing this, but I’ve learned how to cope with human failures.  I make mistakes.  Lots of them.  I try to be pretty good about catching all of my mistakes, but I can never be 100% perfect, and I know this.  This is why I rely on a lot of people to help me out.  I can run ideas of mine by co-workers, see if they think of problems with my idea that I didn’t see, go to them for code reviews to make sure I didn’t miss anything, and send comprehensive notes to Quality Assurance to make sure that they can give an even more thorough test of what I’ve done.  When errors get through even all of that, I take it on the chin, fix it, and move on.  This is part of being human, and part of being good at what I do.  I learned a long time ago that good developers aren’t perfect - they just know how to take constructive criticism when it’s given to them and how to take responsibility for their own mistakes when they make them.  These things are given … but there’s another part.  A part that’s too often attributed to God or Allah or “The All”.  

We had just had a hellishly long night getting out some changes to the website.  It didn’t go at all well.  There were more mistakes than there usually are, and they all seemed to be piled on top of one another.  That very next day, we had to get out even more changes, and we all wanted it to go flawlessly so that we could go home.  It did.  Before I could catch myself, I found myself saying, “Thank God it all went well.”, but then I listened to what I said and thought better of it.  Before I could really say anything she said, “Well, I don’t believe in God, but we can thank that good thing that’s inside all of us.”  Having thought it over, I shook my head and said, “I don’t believe in that, either, so we’ll have to thank all of the engineers who made sure that this went smoothly this time around.”  

She laughed at that and shook her head, “I don’t think so.”, was all that she said before we clamped down on the covnersation, again entering the silence that occurs when we get into that territory where neither one of us - me especially - wants to tread.  In that moment, though, I realized something.  Not only was I, now, the one who was sad for her, but I was also very annoyed.  Why is it so hard, or unseemly, to thank the people who made something work out rather than thanking some supernatural entity?  When something goes wrong, people are quick to find reason to blame humanity.  Yet, when something goes right, God’s always the one who takes all the credit.  No wonder we’re a nation of people who get by through the grace of Zoloft, Paxil and Prozac.  We’ve spent so long in denial that we don’t just do shitty things in this world that we’ve thrown ourselves into a deep level of depression. 

It wasn’t God that made the code rollout go well.  It wasn’t karma, either, or “The Great All”, and it wasn’t that something good within us all that’s beyond us.  It was none of that crap.  It was because of a dozen or so engineers who were all on the ball and extra careful about the changes that they pushed in.  It was because a handful of testers took the time to thoroughly test what the engineers gave them, and it was because a group of trained IT professionals properly rolled out the code.  Yet, here I was standing there listening to someone tell me that those people didn’t deserve the credit at all - a freaking invisible pink unicorn did. 

As I drove home that evening, I kept thinking back to all the times I heard people fervently thanking God for what it was that they’d accomplished.  Sure, musicians and actors do it every time they get an award, and NASCAR drives particularly do it when they win races, but I’m talking about more mundane people.  The people, for instance, who I went to High School with and who were fundamentalist Christians (most of which still are).  The people who told me time and time again that God helped them get over drugs or alcohol or cutting themselves or whatever.  These are the people who REALLY need their own recognition… the people who’ve been beaten down so much by the fallibility of the human condition that they need to realize that they can and did do something amazing.  It wasn’t God who finally got the message to them that they needed to quit or they’d die - it was them.  God didn’t magically give them the willpower to kick the bad things, they had it all along within them.  Three of my friends in High School fit this bill, exactly.  They all dug themselves out of abusive family lives and their own struggles with addiction, and even though they had some amazing strength and courage, they were all on anti-depressants - at 16.  Why?  I’ll posit that it has something to do with taking the blame for the bad and passing on the recognition for the good. 

I wonder just how different the world would be today if we stopped thinking invisible pink unicorns and started thanking each other - even - dare I say, do the amazingly selfish thing of thanking ourselves when we get something right.  For right or for wrong, for failure or success, human beings are wonderful, amazing and fascinating creatures.  Yes, we should immediately take responsibility when we do something wrong, we’re human after all, but we should also immediately take responsibility when we do something right.

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