Smiling generously, he said, “Has anyone said it is a crime, Marcus? You display a fondness for dramatic exaggeration. It doesn’t serve you well and is a characteristic you might want to reflect upon. Now tell me, how do you get along with your family? Is everything all right at home between your mother and your father and you? I see from the form here, where you say you have no religious preference, that you also say you have no siblings. There’s the three of you at home, if I’m to take what you’ve written here to be accurate.”
“Why wouldn’t it be accurate, sir?” Shut up, I told myself. Shut up, and from here on out, stop marching on! Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t because the fondness for exaggeration wasn’t mine but the dean’s: this meeting was itself based on his giving a ridiculously exaggerated importance to where I chose to live. “I was accurate when I wrote that my father was a butcher,” I said. “He is a butcher. It isn’t I alone who would describe him as a butcher. He would describe himself as a butcher. It’s you who described him as a kosher butcher. Which is fine with me. But that’s not grounds for intimating that I’ve been in any way inaccurate in filling out my application form for Winesburg. It was not inaccurate for me to leave the religious-preference slot blank—”
“If I may interrupt, Marcus. How do you three get along, from your perspective? That’s the question I asked. You, your mother, and your father — how do you get along? A straight answer, please.”
“My mother and I get along perfectly well. We always have. So have my father and I gotten along perfectly well for most of my life. From my last year in grade school until I started at Robert Treat, I worked part time for him at the butcher shop. We were as close as a son and father could be. Of late there’s been some strain between us that’s made us both unhappy.”
“Strain over what, may I ask?”
“He’s been unnecessarily worried about my independence.”
“Unnecessarily because he has no reason to be?”
“None at all.”
“Is he worried, for instance, about your inability to adjust to your roommates here at Winesburg?”
“I haven’t told him about my roommates. I didn’t think it was that important. Nor is ‘inability to adjust’ a proper way to describe the difficulty, sir. I don’t want to be distracted from my studies by superfluous problems.”
“I wouldn’t consider your moving twice in less than two months a superfluous problem, and neither would your father, I’m sure, if he were apprised of the situation — as he has every right to be, by the way. I don’t think you would have bothered moving to begin with if you yourself saw it merely as a ‘superfluous problem.’ But be that as it may, Marcus, have you gone on any dates since you’ve been at Winesburg?”
I flushed. “Arise, ye who refuse—” “Yes,” I said.
“A few? Some? Many?”
“One.”
“Just one.”
Before he could dare to ask me with whom, before I had to speak her name and be pressed to answer a single question about what had transpired between the two of us, I rose from my chair. “Sir,” I said, “I object to being interrogated like this. I don’t see the purpose of it. I don’t see why I should be expected to answer questions about my relations with my roommates or my association with my religion or my appraisal of anyone else’s religion. Those are my own private affair, as is my social life and how I conduct it. I am breaking no laws, my behavior is causing no one any injury or harm, and in nothing that I’ve done have I impinged on anyone’s rights. If anyone’s rights are being impinged on, they are mine.”
“Sit down again, please, and explain yourself.”
I sat, and this time, on my own initiative, drank deeply from my glass of water. This was now beginning to be more than I could take, yet how could I capitulate when he was wrong and I was right? “I object to having to attend chapel forty times before I graduate in order to earn a degree, sir. I don’t see where the college has the right to force me to listen to a clergyman of whatever faith even once, or to listen to a Christian hymn invoking the Christian deity even once, given that I am an atheist who is, to be truthful, deeply offended by the practices and beliefs of organized religion.” Now I couldn’t stop myself, weakened as I felt. “I do not need the sermons of professional moralists to tell me how I should act. I certainly don’t need any God to tell me how. I am altogether capable of leading a moral existence without crediting beliefs that are impossible to substantiate and beyond credulity, that, to my mind, are nothing more than fairy tales for children held by adults, and with no more foundation in fact than a belief in Santa Claus. I take it you are familiar, Dean Caudwell, with the writings of Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell, the distinguished British mathematician and philosopher, was last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. One of the works of literature for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize is a widely read essay first delivered as a lecture in 1927 entitled, ‘Why I Am Not a Christian.’ Are you familiar with that essay, sir?”
“Please sit down again,” said the dean.
I did as he told me, but said, “I am asking if you are familiar with this very important essay by Bertrand Russell. I take it that the answer is no. Well, I am familiar with it because I set myself the task of memorizing large sections of it when I was captain of my high school debating team. I haven’t forgotten it yet, and I have promised myself that I never will. This essay and others like it contain Russell’s argument not only against the Christian conception of God but against the conceptions of God held by all the great religions of the world, every one of which Russell finds both untrue and harmful. If you were to read his essay, and in the interest of open-mindedness I would urge you to do so, you would find that Bertrand Russell, who is one of the world’s foremost logicians as well as a philosopher and a mathematician, undoes with logic that is beyond dispute the first-cause argument, the natural- law argument, the argument from design, the moral arguments for a deity, and the argument for the remedying of injustice. To give you two examples. First, as to why there cannot be any validity to the first-cause argument, he says, ‘If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God.’ Second, as to the argument from design, he says, ‘Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?’ He also discusses the defects in Christ’s teaching as Christ appears in the Gospels, while noting that historically it is quite doubtful that Christ ever existed. To him the most serious defect in Christ’s moral character is his belief in the existence of hell. Russell writes, ‘I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment,’ and he accuses Christ of a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to his preaching. He discusses with complete candor how the churches have retarded human progress and how, by their insistence on what they choose to call morality, they inflict on all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. Religion, he declares, is based primarily and mainly on fear — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, and fear of death. Fear, Bertrand Russell says, is the parent of cruelty, and it is therefore no wonder that cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries. Conquer the world by intelligence, Russell says, and not by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from living in it. The whole conception of God, he concludes, is a conception unworthy of free men. These are the thoughts of a Nobel Prize winner renowned for his contributions to philosophy and for his mastery of logic and the theory of knowledge, and I find myself in total agreement with them. Having studied them and having thought them through, I intend to live in accordance with them, as I’m sure you would have to admit, sir, I have every right to do.”
“Please sit down,” said the dean once more.
I did. I hadn’t realized I had again gotten up. But that’s what the exhortation “Arise!” stirringly repeated three successive times, can do to someone in a crisis.
“So you and Bertrand Russell don’t tolerate organized religion,” he told me, “or the clergy or even a belief in the divinity, any more than you, Marcus Messner, tolerate your roommates — as far as I can make out, any more than you tolerate a loving, hardworking father whose concern for the well-being of his son is of the highest importance to him. His financial burden in paying to send you away from home to college is not inconsiderable, I’m sure. Isn’t that so?”
“Why else would I be working at the New Willard House, sir? Yes, that’s so. I believe I told you that already.”
“Well, tell me now, and this time leaving out Bertrand Russell — do you tolerate
“I would think, sir, that the religious views that are more than likely intolerable to ninety-nine percent of the students and faculty and administration of Winesburg are mine.”
