I Told You

by Benny Mattis

This is the entry I wrote (anonymously at first) and read aloud for the 2012 issue of the exceptional Gordon College publication, If I Told You.  It was a really great experience, and I'm glad they accepted my entry even though I was no longer attending the 'Gord.

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        One year ago, I was preparing myself to attend a secular school for the first time in more than ten years.   I did not know what to expect in the upcoming semester; I was raised in a conservative Christian household and educated in Christian private schools since fourth grade, and the way some of my friends and family talked about the public university, it sounded more like a temple of Satan than a respected educational institution.  Either way, I knew I needed to find a community that was not based entirely on ideas that I had come to disagree with; I left the church in my third semester of college, and had to leave Gordon as well.

            Socrates is cited as father of the famous maxim, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past year, however, it is that the examined life is worth living.  Too often in our society, skepticism is painted as the “shadow of doubt,” a maleficent state of mind which ought to be avoided like the plague; on the contrary, the ability to seek and accept the truth often precedes an ability to act in accordance with it.  Skepticism is not a shadow itself; it’s only the opening of one’s eyes to find that one is in the dark.  Once the eyes are open, a search for the light switch can begin.

            If you’ve just opened your eyes in the dark, you may feel a little nervous or lonely; you may expect your friends not to care about your thoughts, or worse.  True—talking about doubt and apostasy with your friends is never as safe a subject as, say, the weather of the past week.  But once again, at least for me, it was not nearly as bad as it could have been.  When I made my problems with Christianity known, I was told by someone that some acquaintances of mine had made fun of me behind my back for it—this was bothersome, but I only learned that those friends weren’t really worth my time.  The best of my friends understood me, and while a relationship is not the same without shared beliefs in the supernatural, one based on trust and honesty is vastly more authentic and meaningful than they would have been had I kept things to myself.  Despite transferring from Gordon, I feel like I’m closer to some of my Gordon friends than ever before.

            The same thing happened with my family, though that was a bit more difficult in the early stages.  I was actually worrying about whether they would kick me out of the house when I told them I was leaving the church—I value honesty pretty highly, though, so I decided not to misrepresent myself for temporary comfort.  My parents were upset; they took it a little personally, that I would reject the teachings they raised me with.  There were tears when I told them I left the church, and more tears a few months later, when I told them I had become an atheist.  They did not kick me out of the house, however, and while we can’t help but hurt each other emotionally sometimes, honesty really has been the best policy regarding relationships with friends and family.

            While honesty with others is really the only path to authentic relationships, it is also brings to light differences among your friends and family you may have preferred remaining unacquainted with.  I was shocked at the fact that some people simply don’t care about the truth or falsity of religion, and this difference of interests is something that every skeptic has to grapple with.  On all sides of the spectrum, you will have people telling you to silence yourself: Christians will be telling you to ignore your rationality, atheists will be telling you to ignore your gut feelings, and agnostics will be telling you to give up on the enterprise as a whole.  I suggest you ignore all of these requests—spiritual or rational suicide will only prevent you from reaching your full potential as a person.  It’s much more fulfilling to dive into reality with every fiber of your being, reconciled or otherwise, trying to make sense of it all.  As the famous agnostic Clarence Darrow once said, “Chase the truth like all hell and you’ll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails.”

            For all the grand narratives built around the search for truth, however, skepticism itself is not an idol worthy of religious devotion.  As the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume advised, “Be a philosopher, but amid all your philosophy be still a man” (or woman).  Remember your friends and family when God is nowhere to be found.  Remember your conscience when friends and family fall away as well.  Enjoy your life and live it to the fullest—I believe philosophy is necessary in this mission, but it is far from sufficient. 

-Alumnus, Class of 2013

Legos and the Meaning of Life

by Benny Mattis

This is another blog from my time at Gordon College.

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There are some kids who go to a preschool. "Good Bricks" are the new cool thing, and so these kids get some Good Bricks from their parents. The kids have difficulty deciphering and following the instructions for assembling these bricks, but they figure them out eventually. The kids who decipher the instructions make cool creations, and the kids who can't follow the directions correctly make crappy ones.

One of the kids wonders, "Hey, who made these instructions anyway?"

The rest of them reply, "The Good Bricks 'Master Builders' made these instructions, and they are obviously the source of all that is cool." The kids continue to follow the instructions, and get better and better sets to feed their imaginations.

Then, Good Bricks comes out with a new product line, called "Trionicle." Some of the kids say, "Wow, what will the Master Builders think of next? These toys are totally different!" But some kids say "No, the Good Bricks company has totally fleeced you with their advertising and feature films. These Trionicle toys are just shitty humanoid robot-looking things; they're not good bricks at all!" There is no longer a uniform view of what is "cool," and the kids split into two camps-- the Good Brickers and the Old Schoolers. The Old Schoolers no longer look to the instructions to determine what is cool; they differentiate between cool Good Bricks and uncool Good Bricks with their own sense of coolness. The Good Brickers say that all Good Bricks are cool, because Good Bricks epitomizes coolness.

Soon, the Old Schoolers become bored of the limited selection of cool Good Bricks. They say, hey, lets take our creations apart and try to make something ourselves. Some of their new creations are cool, and some of them are uncool.

The Good Brickers are astonished at this; if the Master Builders are the source of all coolness, how can these Old Schoolers make these cool new designs? The leader of the Good Brickers says that this is because the Old Schoolers are just copying what the Master Builders have already made. The Good Brickers breathe a sigh of relief, and continue to dissociate themselves from the Old Schoolers.

However, the Good Bricks company is going down the tubes. Its designs are becoming progressively more worthless, but the Old Schoolers are making creations more original and cool than anything the Masters ever built. Moreover, all the other students are getting GameStations, because the GameStation is advertised way more than Good Bricks. So, many of the Good Brickers join the Old Schoolers, admitting that the Master Builders are not the only source of coolness. Some Good Brickers hold their ground, but they can never find spots at the lunch tables.

Now, there is a solid group of Old Schoolers, and they realize that if there is not a major spike in demand for bricks, Good Bricks will go bankrupt, and they will never be able to buy more bricks. The rest of the school is convinced that GameStation is the sole source of coolness, and some kids are even saying things like "Nothing is cool, because it's all going to be in a landfill in 50 years anyway." The Old Schoolers, affected by this ignorance in their community and wishing to show how cool brick-assembly is, spread the coolness of Good Bricks until summer vacation.

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Meanwhile, the Good Bricks Master Builders and advertisers are asking the million dollar question, "What is coolness?"

They realize that in different countries and different eras, what is "cool" changes depending on a product's place in time and space. In the 1990s, dinosaur sets were very cool. In the 80s, the advent of personal computing made futuristic brick sets cool. Different circumstances produced different standards for what is cool.

However, there are certain criteria for coolness that remained constant through all of their records. It is cool, for example, to include a protagonist and an antagonist in the backstories of their brick sets. It is cool to make a set that can really stimulate a kid's imagination. It is cool to include some sort of romantic interest for the hero, as well.

Good Bricks went out of business. The designers broke into GameStation game-design companies. The companies that made games in accordance with the general norms of coolness thrived, but the designers who ignored these guides went bankrupt. The Master Designers were bound by the nature of coolness; they could not succeed unless their designs were in accordance with it. And as their designs conformed more and more to "natural coolness," more and more people thought that the Designers were in fact the epitome of all that is cool. Even though coolness can come from places other than the minds of the Master Designers, the ideas of "cool" and "Master Designer" became increasingly intertwined.

Eventually, it became nearly impossible to differentiate between the two. Only by looking back at the history of diverse attempts at coolness were people able to see that coolness comes not from the Master Designers, but out of the nature of a relationship between gamer, game and environment; the Master Designers simply study this relationship and use it to their advantage (and, ultimately, to the advantage of someone who buys their game).