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June 27, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:59
811 A Father's Funeral

A brave listener and a dead father...

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How's it going? Hey, doing okay.
How are you doing? Not too bad at all.
Not too bad at all. Definitely.
So, yeah.
I guess you read my post.
Yeah, what's the story with...
Was it your father-in-law? Yeah, it's my father-in-law.
My father-in-law, he passed away in April on the 10th.
Right. And, you know, Actually, me and him did get close after our marriage and after my wife's and our marriage.
We weren't very good friends before, but after we got married, he kind of opened up and he was a better guy, I think.
We got close in the three years that my wife and I have been married.
It was a pretty painful experience because it was really drawn out over about three or four months.
He was in the hospital for a very long period of time.
It was cancer, so it was a bad experience.
My wife really loved him.
She was a daddy's girl.
With dealing with atheism and coming to that conclusion, it really did kind of shake me when I didn't know how to respond to my wife's basic question.
As atheists, how do we really deal with this?
Other than kind of answering that we respect his life out of remembering him and the goodness that he did shed in ours and such.
I mean, that was really the only thing I could draw on.
That's why I'm confused and stuff.
Right, so her question was, how does an atheist deal with the problem of death?
Yeah. Well, the problem.
It's a big problem.
It's the end of all problems. Yeah, essentially.
Right. And she was close with her father.
Yeah. And I mean, I'm curious as to your...
To your thoughts on it, because from what I understand from the things I've heard from any new podcasts is you're not too big on family, I'm guessing.
Tell me what you mean? What's that?
Tell me what you mean, not too big on family.
That's what I'm wondering from you.
I didn't really listen to your arguments on the family scenario or the family model.
I've been reading on the forums that defooing, am I saying that correctly?
Yeah, defooing. What is that?
I'm totally oblivious to that.
Oh, foo is a psychological term.
If you're a psychologist and you're dealing with a patient, right?
So you're dealing with some patient who's 40 and he's got a wife and kids, right?
Okay. So, whenever you say, you're family, you have to figure out whether you're talking, like, you have to have a shorthand way of knowing whether or not you're talking about his family like his parents, or his family like his wife and kids.
Okay. Right, so there's a phrase which is used in the psychological profession, which is family of origin.
Ah, okay.
It could be, and you can't just say parents, because it could be like step-parents, it could be It could be foster care.
God knows why. It could have been raised by wolves.
There's a phrase called family of origin.
The acronym, of course, is FU. D-FU has nothing to do with family or non-family.
It's simply, as you know, one of the core things that I talk about is if you're going to live your values, then live your values.
If one of your values is to be treated well and to treat others well, which I think is a good value, Then you have to talk to the people who are treating you badly and tell them that you don't like how they're treating you and that you would like them to treat you differently.
And if they refuse to do that or treat you even worse after you do that, then you've got to get them out of your life.
So unfortunately for a lot of people, this is the family, right?
It's their family of origin. Okay.
I mean, Christina is my family, and I love her to death, so I'm very pro-family.
I just didn't know how you would go about, like, if your kids wanted to...
You know, once you have kids, I mean, are you, I don't know, like, really the structure other than, like, obviously teaching them freedom and that they have their own choices and they must live with their consequences, but I don't know, understand, like, okay, at 18, are they kind of cut off and they must, like, go and live in the world or whatever.
I mean, I kind of get off on it.
No, I don't know. I mean, it really depends on their circumstances.
It depends on their preferences.
I mean, if they want to go or if my kids want to go and be a doctor, then they may need some help from me financially or whatever.
But no, I mean, I don't think that...
I mean, there's nothing wrong with having lifelong relationships with your children.
I think it's a wonderful thing.
It's just that if you have abusive parents, then you should either get them to stop being abusive or you should get them out of your life.
I mean, that's... Right, but there's this huge barrier that people have mentally.
Like, it's just unthinkable.
For most people to say, well, I'm not going to...
We say a wife should get out of an abusive relationship, right?
If the husband is putting her down or beating on her or whatever, right?
Then we say, well, you should definitely try and fix the marriage, but pretty much it's not likely, and you should get out, right?
And I don't see why any different standards would apply with parents.
Okay, I see your point.
So, yeah, no, I mean, if your wife was close to her dad and he was a great guy, I mean, that's just a real tragedy when somebody dies.
Well, see, that's the thing.
He wasn't really a great guy.
Ah, well, then we're back in sort of the earlier category, so...
Again, without any details, because this may go out as a podcast.
With your permission, you'll get a chance to listen to it.
So don't put any details in, but if you could just give me a rough outline of the guy and his history with your wife.
Sure. Well, he believed in the state very much.
He was born in Mexico, and he was actually in the government in Mexico as a kind of border patrol on the Mexico side.
A bandito, I think, is the word you're looking for.
No, I'm just kidding. No, he didn't have a bandana or anything.
He was obviously very pro-state, and he was also, when it was convenient for him, religious.
I want to kind of state what I mean by that.
You mean he was Catholic, right?
Yeah, right. No, he was Seventh-day Adventist.
But he wouldn't go to church, and he only really brought that kind of thing up, any kind of religious topics up, if it would promote his points.
So, like, if you were to bring up the whole turn-the-other-cheek type thing to him, and it didn't pertain to his particular subject, he would dismiss it.
He'd say, an eye for an eye, right?
Yeah, essentially.
Because he wanted to turn the other cheek, and then he'd say, turn the other cheek.
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean...
I don't know. I mean, my wife has her way of dealing with the kind of personality he had.
She understood that he was a very controlling individual, and he was not good for...
I don't know.
I would never want him to raise any children of mine, honestly, but, I mean, whatever.
That time has passed, and she loved him nonetheless.
Even though she disagreed with him and she would never model her life after his, she really loved him.
So what did she love him?
I don't know, that's a good question.
It's kind of an important question, right?
Because, I mean, again, I'm not judging because I don't know, right?
But that's the first question that would pop into my mind if someone says, well, you know, and again, I'm oversimplifying, but if somebody says, yeah, this guy was hypocritical and this and that and he had these unpleasant characteristics and so on, Well, I'm sure that you could be, like, mean sometimes, right?
You could be the most pleasant of individuals, but people still like you for, you know, attraction purposes.
You know, you and Christina might get into, like, a little bit of a spat or something along those lines, and you might not really, I don't know, like each other in that particular point in time, but you know that you love each other, and you know that, you know, you'll be able to work certain things out and such, and it's beyond that just Just that particular instance which had gotten mad.
I'm not saying that these aren't certain things that would be lifelong problems, but my wife had the ability to love her father, love him for who he was, and when he was nice, really cherish those moments with him and really cherish that aspect with him because she wants to feel like she has come from a good person.
Is that not good to assume?
Well, I mean, I don't know what's good to assume other than what is real, right?
I mean, her desire to want to come from a good person doesn't I mean, that doesn't really have any effect on whether he is a good person, right?
I mean, we all want great parents, right?
I mean, we all want to believe that our family is great.
And that's, of course, what we have to believe when we're growing up, right?
So that can be quite a long-term hangover.
I know what you mean, of course.
Yeah, I mean, the best of us can be petty and mean at times, and I certainly do have that streak from time to time.
I think it's pretty rare now.
It certainly wasn't so when I was younger, but it's pretty rare now.
But the fact that, you know, good people have occasional lapses in judgment or, you know, good taste is not to say that there's not a continuum, right?
So, like, to take a metaphor that the purest water in the world has some impurities in it, but it's still not the same as seawater in terms of drinking it, right?
Okay. Yeah.
So the question is, right, was he potable?
I mean, as a whole, right?
So you don't have to be pure to be someone that other people can love.
But there's a certain amount of toxicity in a relationship, right?
You don't put a little marinade on a pile of shit and say, look, this tastes good now, right?
But at the same time, right, you can maybe brush a fly off your food and still enjoy it, so to speak, right?
Sure. That's the sort of continuum that I'm talking about.
Where would you place him on that continuum based on your knowledge of him?
Probably along the shit pile.
Okay, so 1 to 10, 10 being like a good guy with some bad habits and 10 being, I don't know, the second coming of Satan.
Where would you put it?
Um, I would, I would probably play some along, uh, along the six to seven area.
Okay, and as far as I, again, this is not scientific, but my knowledge is and my experience has been that it generally takes about 10 times the good times as for the bad times to sustain a relationship.
Human beings, just innately, we have our memories are formed much more strongly under times of stress, particularly negative stress, which is why you need that 10 to 1 ratio of good times to bad times, right?
The problem is anytime you kind of dip below 90% good behavior, it becomes pretty tough to sustain a really positive and mutually just joyful relationship.
I mean, that's why every time you do something that's bad, and I do from time to time too, You have to really work at not to because you've got like 10% of the time maximum you can do bad things.
So if sort of where you're at in talking about this guy and saying like, well 60 or 70% of the time he's doing bad things, then that's definitely not something that can be sustained.
Are you okay?
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Can I put you on hold for just one second?
Sure. At my office, one of my co-workers was taking off or whatever.
Back to not working.
I guess this is quite a big, complex issue.
Because, see, my wife and her sisters were all raised with the idea that blood is thicker than water.
And so, no matter what, stay faithful to your family, no matter how bad they are.
And I guess that's a bad starting point.
I mean, that's where she's coming from, that blood was thicker than water.
And no matter how bad her father really treated her, I mean, he didn't beat her, but he definitely was, I guess, psychologically wrong to her.
I mean, he would yell and...
And tell her that she wouldn't be able to do certain things.
Obviously dating me was one of those things she couldn't do, but she still did it anyway.
He was a very controlling individual.
She still did love him, and there's no really way of I guess, challenging that.
She loved him for her reasons because he was her father.
They shared a connection.
The way she puts it, they shared a connection where they would be able to talk about things that he wouldn't talk to even his wife about.
Her mother.
And so, I mean, there was some kind of Hello?
Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you now.
Okay, okay. Yeah, sorry.
So, yeah, she was raised with the idea that you...
You love and respect your parents, regardless of what.
The blood is thicker than water.
Obviously, we both came from a Christian background, so we're having to deal with that as well.
We haven't come out to her mother, whom is living with us, by the way.
She doesn't know that we're atheists.
Let me take a step back.
I'm an atheist. My wife is agnostic, leaning towards atheism, but she still has unanswered questions.
I don't know. I mean, she's going on her own path, so I can't really say she is an atheist.
She doesn't really believe in God, but she believes that there's some unexplained things in the universe and whatever.
She's kind of left it up to later decisions.
So, whatever. Regardless, she doesn't believe in the kind of bullshit that we heard in church or whatever.
So do you guys go to church?
Hell no. Well, so how do you keep it secret?
I mean, your mother-in-law goes to church, right?
Yeah, but we kind of like roll it off as, oh, okay, we're too tired today.
Isn't it kind of like the day of rest?
I want to rest at home. We just don't bring it up.
If she says something about, like, God or Jesus or whatever, I really kind of bite my tongue.
Yeah. I wasn't able to around her sister.
The situation is, since her father died, her sister's baby and mother-in-law have moved in with us.
Because they can't really afford to live on their own.
Wow. Are you living in a house?
Yes, we're living in a three-bedroom house.
Your mother-in-law, your sister-in-law, and your sister-in-law's kid have moved in with you?
Yes. And how old is your sister-in-law's kid?
Nine months. And is this a permanent situation?
No. No, they're planning...
By no, you mean, like, what's the move-out date?
Uh... I don't know.
Right, so you kind of know, but kind of...
I mean, this is what I'm getting, and I'm just trying to understand.
I mean, this is the culture, right?
So when you have blood that's thicker than water, when people move in, and there's no move-out date, then they're there for the duration, right?
Yeah, and I'm okay with that.
I mean, I really like them being around and stuff.
And, you know, it's perfectly fine.
They're planning on getting out sometime, and she...
My sister-in-law has found a prospective job that would be dealing with managing an apartment complex or something along those lines.
Oh, so she'd get a place there, right?
Right, right. And so she would be able to go there.
And my wife, knowing her mother, suspects that her mother would move in with her sister-in-law just so that they could be on their own.
Well, of course, and the easiest way to help that along is as soon as your sister-in-law gets the apartment, just come out as atheist.
Yeah, I guess so. Let us drag you down to hell with us.
Yeah, why not? So, anyway, back to the point that brought me into the whole thing that they were living with us is that we did come out with two sister-in-law, to the sister-in-law.
Right. And we kind of had a debate because You know, I gave her kind of my reasons being an atheist and giving her, you know, kind of the rundown of, okay, you know, you still believe in the Bible and you still think that it's, like, infallible and all this other BS. And so we got in kind of an argument over that.
But, you know, the end of that is that we just don't really talk about it.
So kind of one of those don't talk about politics or religion things So what can you talk about with these people that is meaningful to you?
Well, we can...
I don't want to say we don't always talk about it.
I just don't like to talk about my religious views because it kind of gets me heated.
Now that I'm on the other side of the fence, I see the frustration that was pointed towards me in the beginning.
And it's hard for me to go back and see my line of thinking from that other side.
I get heated, and so in order to control my outbursts, I just kind of limit what I say.
Right, and if people aren't going to go down that road, if they're not going to start examining their beliefs from a critical standpoint, then you're just beating your head against the wall and having unpleasant interactions for no real purpose, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, thank you.
Um, so, what we can talk about is, you know, our day-to-day life, We talk about the baby and we talk about educational viewpoints like how she plans to educate the baby.
We talk about our work life and what we're doing at work.
We talk about exercise and we talk about Economics, I guess.
Future hopes of what we plan to do, but religion doesn't really play too much of a role in the conversation.
Unless it's relating to violence, I'll bring it up religion, because I think that religion is kind of like the core of violence, or at least one of them.
So, your... Yeah, I mean, there's too much to say about your domestic situation.
I think that it's going to be tough for you in the long run to be around people that you can't be honest with.
I mean, that's just tough over the long run.
Yeah, it is. You have to self-manage all the time and you have to watch what you say.
But, you know, if she's going to get a place, I mean, I just...
That's not going to be good in the long run.
Of course, if you have kids, then it's going to come up again.
Baptism and so on. Right.
But that's not the major issue that's going on right now.
The issue is your wife and your father-in-law.
Do you want to tell me a bit more about where she's at with that?
Sure. Well, it's obviously pretty fresh.
It's only a few months.
I asked my wife how she's doing, and she says that she's really sad, and she misses her dad.
And I really don't really know how to respond to that, because I honestly miss him too.
I miss the good times that we had together.
But she misses him on a completely different level.
I lost my grandfather, and he was very close to me as well.
He was close to me as a father figure, so I kind of sort of understand what it was like, but not really on the same level.
I've never really loved somebody as much as she says that she loves her dad, you know, other than her.
Other than my wife, I've never really loved anybody.
Right, right. I don't mean to sound harsh, and this is just, right, I'm just exploring, right, so tell me if I'm saying anything completely inappropriate.
I'm guessing that the reason you have a tough time responding to her is that there's something missing, right, for you in what she's saying.
There's something that kind of makes your spider sense tingle or makes your alarm bells go off, is that fair to say?
Well, I want to comfort her.
You do? You do, of course.
I mean, that's what I want to do.
I want to be able to comfort her, and I feel impotent because I don't feel like I can.
And why can't you? Because I can't replace the loss that she has had.
But that's not comforting someone, right?
If you could, God forbid, bring him back from the dead or something, right?
I'm Jesus. That would be restitution, right?
So if I lose a hundred bucks and you decide to give me a hundred bucks, you're not comforting me.
You're just restoring the situation, right?
So comforting is when we can't provide restitution.
We can't solve the problem for someone, right?
Okay. Yeah, I see that.
But I mean, what I'm sort of trying to get at, and badly, but we'll give it a couple of shots, is that there's something about the way that you're interpreting or the way that your wife is communicating to you that is preventing your heart from opening up.
And being able to comfort her in a way.
There's something that's going on in the interaction that's making you feel a little cold or a little distant.
Does that sort of make sense?
Or is there something else? I don't know if I really am cold or distant, because whenever she speaks of it, I always want to be right next to her.
I want to hold her hand, essentially.
And I want to ask her, I tell her every time, Please talk to me about your feelings.
I don't know if that's helpful to her, because just saying, talk to me about your feelings, she's not feeling good.
But I don't really see that as comforting.
What is she telling herself, or telling you, about her father's death?
Can you rephrase that?
Sure, and I'm trying not to be too leading, but I might as well not, because I'm not very good at that.
I mean, if she believes, does she believe in the soul?
I don't think so.
So she does believe that he's gone, and that she's never going to see him again or meet up with him again in some other life?
Right. Yeah, she believes that.
She's not going to see him, she's not going to meet up with him.
I mean, it's... That part of her life is now gone.
And along with the culture of blood is thicker than water, often comes the cultural imperative called don't speak ill of the dead.
Is that also part of the situation?
No. I mean, we both realized that, you know, he did have bad qualities and we are able to talk about that.
And we have brought it up and we've talked, you know, there were bad times.
He wasn't a very good person when it came to, you know, when it came to morality.
Okay, so maybe I can ask you more directly.
And again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't miss him or anything, but just sort of help me to understand, when you think of him being gone, what do you miss?
I don't think I've really asked myself that question.
Well, this is a good time for it then, isn't it?
Yeah, I guess so. I miss interacting with him.
Even though I didn't agree with him, I'd rather have somebody there to disagree with me than not have anybody there to communicate with at all.
I'm not saying that he was obvious that he was my only communication, but he did give me a small window into my life's past, and he did give me kind of an older perspective on life.
He was 69, and so he lived through a lot of things that I wasn't able to live through, and even though I didn't Agree with his conclusions, I could see an older perspective that I wasn't able to see before communicating with him.
Does that make sense? Like history?
Like the wisdom of accumulated this, that and the other?
Is that what you mean? Yeah, yeah.
Wisdom of elderly individuals, I guess.
Can you think of a piece of advice that he gave you or a perspective he gave you that you can use in the present?
I don't know if that would really count, but I mean, we went bowling.
And no, that doesn't really count.
I don't know. No, I can't.
Off the top of my head, anyway.
Right. I mean, and again, there's no particular comparison, but I bet you you could, you know, some books that you had read that you had gotten some useful stuff out of, right?
And again, I'm not trying to sort of say this guy was the worst guy ever.
I'm just trying to understand what the gap is between...
Because if you and your wife were having the same experience, genuinely, then there wouldn't be any communication issues, right?
If you were both having the same experience, Of her dad and his passing, then there would be no awkwardness in comforting her.
But there's a mismatch between either both of your experience and reality, or one of your experience in reality, or the other experience in reality.
There's a mismatch, right?
And so what I'm trying to understand is, you know, you said that you missed him, you said that you valued him, so I'm trying to understand what it was, right?
Because a lot of people say stuff, and I'm not saying you're one of them, but a lot of people say stuff that they think sounds right.
You know, like, I love my father, I would do anything for my family, blood is thicker than water.
I always try to sort of say, okay, well, if we take the, sort of, to sound rough, hallmark sentimentality, and try and figure out what the facts are, Rather than the sentimentality of it, then it's a little easier for me to figure out what the real...
Because your true self, those platitudes, don't mean anything.
That's just stuff that we say.
If Christina were hit by a bus tomorrow and people said to me, what do you miss?
You wouldn't be able to stop me for three days.
I would just genuinely know there'd be no ambiguity.
I would miss everything about her.
I'd just be able to go on and on.
I guess my concern is, to be very blunt, my concern is that there's this sentimentality around the death of a father That is not emotionally resonant for you in your deepest core, like in your true self. See, I empathize with her, but I don't think I understand.
Well, I think that you do understand.
I think you understand very well.
I think that your understanding, though, is very different from her experience.
Could you explain that?
What do you mean by that?
I think that you have your own emotional experience with this guy.
Let's call him Bob.
His name is David.
I'd like to stay away from him.
That's a pretty generic name.
Well, let's call him Bob.
Actually, let's call him David.
Let's pretend that his name is David.
So you have an experience with David that is less cluttered, in a sense, than your wife's, right?
Because you weren't raised by him, you didn't have the infant attachment to him, you never thought of him as a living god, the way that little girls think of their fathers.
So you have A more objective perspective on him, right?
Right. And so your evaluation of his value is not as cluttered or as buried by sentimentality, by history, by the cultural imperatives of We must mourn our fathers and blah, blah, blah, right?
So you're... Is it wrong to think...
I mean, is it wrong of me to think that I believe the world might be a better place without an individual like that?
No, it's not wrong at all.
Look, I mean, you have to be honest with yourself.
I mean, there's... You have to...
We have to be honest with ourselves.
That doesn't mean that we go and blurt everything out in the world, right?
We have to be honest with... The only...
Yeah, I... I hear you.
I know we have to be honest.
Man... But, I mean, I think with me saying that, it makes me realize, you know, I don't want people to say that about me.
Sure, sure. I mean, this is what honesty, right?
The first step is always honesty.
And I'm not saying this is your first step.
I know that you're an honest guy, right?
I'm just, in this situation, you're facing a lot of cultural pressure.
And I know this because I had the same thing with Christina's parents, right?
They're not dead, but she came from the same culture.
Everything is about the family.
It's the Mediterranean. It's the same kind of Catholic thing.
It's in the Hispanic community and other communities.
The family is everything. Children are everything, and so on.
It's the Mafia. Basically, it's the Mafia with nice cakes.
And I got sucked in completely.
I'm probably way more than you.
I got sucked in completely, and when my mother would talk, sorry, when Christina would talk about her mother, there would be all of this stuff, or her dad, there'd be all of this stuff, right?
And I couldn't connect with it.
Like, emotionally, I'd listen to it, and I'd want to believe.
Like when I was a kid, and you'd be in the church, and it'd be like, God, it'd be great if this were true.
You know, like, I really couldn't believe it.
Because, of course, I had defood, right?
So for me, looking at my wife's family, it's like, great, you know, I came off a sinking ship, and now I can come onto another ship that's not sinking.
And that's good, because otherwise it just looks like a whole lot of ocean and treading water for the rest of time.
So I went, you know, very much in.
We'd go out there for Sundays, and we'd go, you know, they even dragged me into a church at Easter.
And so it was tough.
I mean, it was tough. And the toughest part about it was that I was trying to be there for my wife.
And yet I wasn't there for my wife.
I was actually just there for the fantasies of her parents.
Not there for her, right?
Being there for someone is always about telling the truth.
Now, the issue that you have is not to tell her the truth about her dad, because you can't, right?
Because she's got her own truth that she's got to work through, and it's very complex, I would imagine.
But I would say that the reason you're probably having trouble comforting her is because you don't mourn him, right?
But she says that she does, so what are you going to do?
Are you going to say, bah, the world might be better off without him?
I mean, good lord, that's pretty rough.
I like to stay married.
Right, right. I'm fully sensitive to that.
That's why we have to be honest with ourselves, but that doesn't mean we have to blurt everything out.
Well, it does for me with the podcast.
But for most people, not so much, right?
But the first thing that you have to do is recognize your own feelings with regards to the guy.
Like you say, he was a border guard, right?
Yeah. So he might have shot people.
Yeah, well, I know that he treated people bad.
I know that for a fact.
I knew that he actually took money as a bribe in order to get people over the border.
I know that people bribed him all the time and that he gave people a hard time just for kicks.
Well, I actually kind of agree with the bribing thing, because I don't agree that the borders are real, but, right, I mean, it's pretty corrupt, and it probably wasn't because he was an anarcho-capitalist that he was taking the bribes, right?
Right. I mean, he did it because, you know, he could provide better for his family if he did take the bribe.
Right. I mean, obviously the economy of Mexico is not that of Canada or the United States.
Right, and we can have... And that's why he came over here, so...
And we can have all the sympathy in the world that he just may never have been exposed to better ideas.
And, like, there's things that we can understand about someone like that.
And it is a kind of state of nature in Mexico, right?
I mean, it's not... I mean, it's real hard to be good in Mexico, right?
Yeah. Pretty rough country.
So, I mean, we can have sympathy for the way he was brought up and the way he was educated and so on.
But the fact of the matter is that he was kind of like a fascist, right?
I mean, kind of like...
Waving guns at people who just want to move from A to B. With all the due sympathy for his history and where he grew up, nonetheless, that still has a very strong effect on a human being's soul, right?
To be waving guns at people to be given that kind of power, to maybe have shot people, just taking money from them.
I mean, that's pretty bad, right?
I mean, even outside all of our moral judgments and so on and all that, I mean, just what that does to a human being's soul is not pretty.
That kind of power really corrupts people.
Completely. Right, so it's kind of hard, I would say, to mourn as a great loss to the human symphony, right, this gun-toting, border guard, vaguely fascistic kind of guy, And yet you face this impossible situation, right?
Because your wife says, I miss him so much, I love him so much.
And your experience is like, you know, I can see both sides here, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Definitely have it.
And that's tough. I mean, that's really, really, really tough.
You know, when Christina would say, I want to go and see my parents this weekend.
I knew deep down it was guilt.
Like, I knew it. I knew it deep down.
And boy, that's not the easiest thing in the world to talk about, though.
It really isn't.
And I don't have any advice on how to bring it up, because this is a very complex sort of issue.
But the first thing that you need to do, and this is a way of just helping you forgive yourself, right?
You can't comfort your wife because you don't miss him.
And the difference is not that you don't miss him because you didn't know him as long.
But you don't miss them because it sounds like, kind of objectively, it isn't a real loss to the world, right?
So you're not just having a different story.
I think your story or your experience is closer to reality.
There's less propaganda for you.
There's less my father, my father.
You know, this wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on.
These displays of grief, and I'm not putting your wife in this category, but you see this in the Mediterranean communities and some of the Hispanic communities.
People wailing and gnashing their teeth and rending their garments and so on.
Sometimes for people who were total assholes, I'm not saying this is true about your father-in-law, but it's like a public show of piety.
It's a public show of solidarity.
It's a public show of virtue.
To mourn, right? I mean, if your wife were to say to people, oh, your dad died, and she's like, yeah, you know, good riddance, right?
I mean, that would be...
That would be...
Because, of course, what would your mother-in-law say?
What would her mother say if your wife were to say, You know, I mean, yeah, he was a fun guy to have around, and he could play a mean game of Scrabble, but, you know, on the balance of things, I don't know that it's a huge loss.
That's really hard. That's a hard level of honesty to have, and it's very volatile within a family situation, if that makes sense.
Yeah. I... Yeah, it does make sense.
The only thing is, really, that the...
My mother-in-law would probably agree, because he wasn't very good to her either.
Well, but there needs to be a whole host of other issues come up, right?
A whole host of other issues come up, which is, you know, if he was a bad guy, then why did you stick with him when you had kids, right?
Or why did you have kids with him?
Like, there's all these other things that come up, right?
And this is why families are so naughty, right?
I mean, so complicated and dense, right?
Because when you start pulling these threads apart, You think, oh, there's a little thread on my sweater, and you pull it, and suddenly you've got no shirt.
Right. It's all pretty much intertwined, right?
So it's a very hard thing to go through.
You know, sorry, something just hit me.
What I think really bothers my wife and I is that we were there when he passed.
I mean, we were in the house, in the room.
We both saw it.
I mean, it was very graphic.
I've never seen something like that.
And it really did shake me to the core.
But what damn near infuriated me is the way that her family, because they're such a pious group, just played it off as, oh, he's in a bear place.
Right. And that was like the end of it.
And I just, I mean, I think that's what really, like, upset me.
And what continues to upset me is that there...
Is it this idea, okay, he's up in fucking heaven or wherever, and...
You know, he's not suffering anymore, and that's just, you know...
It's for the best. That's what you gotta, you know, it's all just better that way.
And, you know, I might agree that the world might have been here for a better place, but sitting there and making up fairy tales in order to, like, make yourself feel better about the situation, I don't agree with.
And so that's...
Sorry, as you can see, that's what really kind of yanks my chain.
Sorry, go ahead.
I think that's what...
I know that that bothered my wife as well in some way.
Well, I know it because she told me about it, but I don't think it bothers her as much as it bothers me.
And tell me what your emotional experience is when people...
How do you feel when people say that?
Frustrated. I feel frustrated and angry because I feel like Like it devalues life.
Does that make sense?
I don't know. It makes sense.
Give me the speech, right?
Like if you could get on top of the sermon and you could teach people, right?
Give me the speech that's boiling around in your innards about this phrase.
I feel like pretending that he's not here or pretending that he is still around I don't really have the words right now.
I don't feel like I've read enough to really explain what I want to say.
I mean, other than it really upsets me that people can just kind of go through life and not question certain things that the preacher told them or whatever and not And instead of being mournful, instead of, I don't know, instead of being sympathetic in a particular time where, I mean, it literally happened ten minutes before somebody had said that.
And, I mean, it just makes me mad because it makes me feel like, okay, they're already over the death of this individual.
They've already just made a conclusion in their mind that, you know, oh, well, even though his body stopped moving, life continues somewhere else.
And, you know, that's just the ultimate answer.
And so I don't have to ever, you know, face my own mortality.
I don't have to, you know, answer tough questions about life or anything.
I can just sit here and float around in this space we call life until I die.
And, you know, that's...
And we'll just dismiss it the same as I just dismissed somebody else's life.
Right, so it has real ramifications, this belief in the soul, this belief in the afterlife, it has real ramifications on how people live in the past.
You get to defer a lot of tough things, you get to defer a lot of tough conversations, you get to defer Yeah, that's what really kind of pisses me off, is you don't have to deal with it then.
You're not forced to deal with anything.
You're literally living in a candy-coated island of fondness at that time.
Right. And it hollows you out, right?
It hollows out your insides.
You don't get to have any rich or deep feelings, because you can just wish everything away, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
That's... I feel like that's exactly how it is.
There is no deep sincerity in their words.
There is no consoling words that they can say.
It's just, that's it.
He's in heaven. Right.
And that's not good enough for me.
Well, it's worse than not good enough.
Like, it's bad. Right, right.
I'll tell you, I mean, just a very sort of brief thing about the way that I see it, because I've seen this kind of stuff a number of times, and you can tell me if it sort of resonates with you, I mean, because I want to sort of stay about you, but...
Religion hollows people out.
Fantasy hollows people out.
You see this with people who get really engaged in conspiracy theories like JFK and 9-11.
It kind of hollows them out.
They no longer have really deep and genuine emotional experiences.
They also tend to not have a lot of courage when it comes to confrontation.
Of people in life, right?
Because, oh, judgment is up to God, right?
It's going to happen after they die, and so who am I to step in?
Or maybe it's the priest's job or something.
But, I mean, this guy, David, he got away with a lot of stuff, right?
People didn't confront him, right?
Because there's this afterlife, and then God loves him, and he can repent, and there's this heaven that he's going to go to.
So we don't have to lift as much of a finger in the real world to make things right, because that's going to be God's job in the long run.
But I think most importantly, the way that I view this idea of heaven and the afterlife and we'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when kind of thing, is it's sort of like if you know from the time that you're born that you're going to inherit a fortune when you're 25 or 30 or whatever, it's going to kind of blunt your ambition.
You're not going to work that hard.
You're just not going to work that hard if you're going to inherit this massive amount of money.
If you knew that you were going to live forever and could never be harmed, you wouldn't be careful.
You'd smoke or whatever, right?
You wouldn't be careful. And so the problem with the idea of the eternal paradise and heaven and this and that, it just makes people lazy.
It hollows them out and it makes them lazy.
If I thought that Christina and I were going to meet up again in heaven, I wouldn't necessarily feel that I had to have as rich a relationship as I could with her now.
Because we got forever.
Okay. But it's not true, right?
I mean, we don't get to meet up again.
When Christina dies, when I die, that's it.
We're never coming back.
We're never meeting again.
So I have to embrace the now, right?
Because there is no eternity.
There is no meet up again by the rivers of Babylon.
There's no fairy tale that we're going to fly up to after we're dead and live out our days.
It's now or never.
I see people who become religious, they get stuck.
Emotionally, it stops them from growing.
It stops them from challenging.
It stops because they just make up answers to whatever they want.
So because they're going to inherit this fantastic world in the future after they die, they no more work hard in the present to live richly and deeply and really make the world a better place than you expect some kid who's going to inherit a billion dollar trust fund to work hard at school.
It's like expecting Paris Hilton to buckle down and get good grades.
It's just not going to happen.
Yeah, I see your point.
It does resonate with me, and I think I've tried to say something to the effect of that without being as articulate by saying that I think that believing in that idea of forever devalues life, because I think the value of life is living it.
And embracing what we have right now.
Heaven is the ultimate procrastination.
Heaven is the ultimate procrastination.
As is God. You can almost put stuff off because you can put off whatever you want to do in life because you're just passing through.
I don't paint the walls of a bus shelter that I'm in.
Because I'm just there for a few minutes, right?
So it makes you feel everything is transient and everything's going to be later and there's not that much point here.
And people say, what's the point of life without God?
It's like, what the hell's the point of looking at life as a bus shelter you're going to get picked up from in a few minutes?
Exactly. And an atheist, at least for me, has a lot to do with trying to design and live a life without regret.
Without regret. Because I'm not going to get any makeup later.
Nobody's going to make everything better later.
I don't get any do-overs in life.
It's now or never, this life or never.
And so for me, because I don't get any do-overs, and I'm not going to live forever, and I'm never going to meet people in some afterlife, It really makes me focus on the now and on the good that I can achieve and the meaning that I can put into my life.
And it makes courage and honesty and integrity much more immediate.
Is that why you start podcasting?
Yeah, that had a lot to do with it.
Because the people who don't know the pre-podcasting history, I've been trying to I get published as a writer since my early 20s.
I've written tons of novels. I tried to communicate about things six different ways from Sunday, but I sort of realized that either I wasn't that good an artist, which I don't think is true, or there's a big philosophical barrier between my art and the world, right?
So then I started to work on philosophy, but yeah, no, it...
When you don't have all of these fairy tales that you can just imagine to make meaning for yourself, then you have the challenge of making meaning without embedding yourself in fantasy.
That's not easy, but that's where the real rewards are.
Yes. I would have to agree.
Sorry, I wish I was more of a debater or something.
Get into some more...
Well, I mean, I'm just trying to share some stuff that I've picked up over the years, right?
Because you're right in the middle of it right now, right?
So I have a little bit of perspective.
I mean, I went through this last year when one of my best friend's mothers died, right?
It is. It's horrible, right?
I mean, it's horrible, and you have to face that pain, right?
Everybody wants to wish that pain away.
There's this great scene in Fight Club, right, where he pours lye on the guy's hand, right?
And he's like, don't go to your happy place.
Face the pain. I'm saying the only real way to growth is facing the pain.
Now, as far as your wife goes, I mean, the only thing that I would suggest is that if you try and fake your way through it, it'll bite you in the ass.
I've tried this six different ways from Sunday in different relationships.
It never works, right?
It never works. If you feel, and you don't say anything about, you know, my suggestion, right?
This is just your feelings, right?
You say, I have mixed feelings.
I feel ambivalent.
I want to help you, and I want to comfort you, but at the same time, and I'm not saying these are your fantasies or your fairy tales, but I feel really ambivalent about this, right?
I mean, your relatives with this heaven stuff, it's sort of annoying, and this blood is thicker than water thing just sounds kind of culty.
You know, like, people get mad at me for being a culty guy, right?
That's like, I never say that FDR is thicker than blood is thicker than water, right?
I mean, the cult is different out there, right?
I mean, the family cult in particular.
So... I think if you're honest about your feelings with her, and she might get mad, and she might say, oh, you're being unsupportive or whatever, but I'm trying to be supportive by being honest, because I've got to be honest with you about how I'm feeling.
This may make me the worst guy in history.
I may be the most evil, cold-hearted, stone-hearted bastard in history, but this is where I am, and I have to be honest about that.
Yeah. I think you definitely have a...
Very good point when it comes to that.
And it's no demand on her.
She doesn't have to change anything.
But don't try to pat her on the back while being completely ambivalent.
She's going to pick up on that, consciously or unconsciously.
The great thing about marriage is...
I think you're right, because maybe that's why when she says something and I don't respond in a particular manner, it's kind of like the conversation ends.
Yeah, for sure, because she's picking up, right?
We think we can fool people, and we can never fool wives, right?
I mean, all the people in the world, we're never going to fool.
I mean, they've got like spider sense, radar, x-ray vision, night goggles at all times, right?
So this is why I was sort of saying at the beginning that you guys are having different experiences.
And that's not the problem.
The problem in marriage is not that you have different experiences.
The problem is that you're trying to do the right thing, the nice guy thing, the good thing, and comfort her.
But that's not what marriage is about, right?
Marriage is about being honest about your experiences with your partner.
Okay. Yeah.
I can see that.
Go ahead. Steph, you've been most helpful.
Dude, I hope so.
I mean, I hope that I, you know, I have a habit of talking too much, so I hope that this was helpful, but having just gone through relatively recently a very similar sort of thing with Christina Stifu as well as with, right, and this is nothing I'm suggesting, right, I'm just, this is just my experience, right, I just went through a little bit of this, and I kind of got a sense of where you might be, but, you know, for me, it's I can either ask you 500 questions and have you baffled and annoyed or, you know, just, this is what I think, let's see if it resonates.
Absolutely and I think it really did resonate because it really pointed out what I think the problem is and I wasn't able to identify it and that is that you know when When she does bring these things up to me, I do want to be there.
I do want to be the good guy.
One thing that I've really kind of founded my atheism on is the fact that I want to be a good individual.
I want to be a good man.
I want the world to think of Luke as a good guy.
I'm glad he was here.
Right. And with that kind of line of thinking, I want to be the good guy to my wife, obviously, and I want to be able to comfort her, and I want to be able to give her what she needs.
And I think that I correctly identified what the problem is in communication between us, because I don't think that I've been as honest as I need to be with her.
Right, and sometimes the people that we love, we need to help lead them out of illusion, which they can't find their way out of themselves, and that may be where she's at.
Right. Yeah.
Definitely. I've got to...
I've got to get home to go have a conversation.
Absolutely. Listen, I hope it goes well.
I'm sure it will. Just remember, just be honest, talk about your feelings, and nothing works better than the truth, right?
I mean, unless someone's got a gun to your head, right?
So do let me know how it goes, and I'm certainly glad that it was helpful.
I'll send you this as a podcast.
You can listen to it and let me know if you think it's okay to release.
I'm going to edit out just one name and also your name, which you mentioned at the end, but just let me know.
Okay. Thanks, man.
Hey, Steph, seriously, thank you very much for spending a few minutes.
You're most welcome, and give my best to your wife, of course.
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