Newsletter for
alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.
Caracas,
15 of March 2021 No.1006 mar B
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Dear
Friends,
Make sure that you receive your personal issue, it is
the ides of March.
Remember that there have been changes after issue No.
1000.
The Circular need funds to keep going because of the
dire situation here in Venezuela.
See the way you can help at the end of this issue.
This article by Don Mitchell was
reserved to be sent after the last regular period.
Interesting way of seeing the religion.
I have not gone so far but I agree with
Don,
In my case I made my own religion based
on what I learned at school and at the University through normal classes by
Jesuit priests, and by looking into my mother’s religion, Calvinist. Also, by my studies and curiosity, into
Mormons, Baptists, Taoism, local Santerism and others in a lesser manner.
The need of a “religion” is essential in
the way of life, even if it is the god of the rain.
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https://donmitchellcbeqc.blogspot.com/2021/01/on-god_6.html
On God
I was brought up to be a good Roman Catholic. I
was baptised and confirmed. I was a
dedicated church goer as a child. I
never missed church on Sunday unless serious illness or some other similar
circumstance made attendance impossible.
I was taught that only Roman
Catholics would go to heaven when they died. All other Christian churches were heretical,
and their followers were condemned by early Popes to eternal damnation when
they died. And the Pope was infallible. All other religions, Muslim, Hindoo, and
Buddhist were false religions whose followers were similarly condemned to
hellfire and incapable of ever enjoying salvation.
I felt I was privileged to be a
member of one of the oldest and most powerful of the Christian churches. We called the modern American ones such as the
Seventh Day Adventists, the Southern Baptists, and the Mormons “Sideways
Churches.” It felt wonderful to be so
superior and one of the elite believers.
I never attended any religious
service in one of the heretical churches, save very rarely for one of the
ceremonial ones of weddings and funerals. I certainly never risked my eternal salvation
by crossing the threshold of a mosque or temple. No amount of soap or water would have washed
off the dirtiness, I was sure.
I completed my primary and some
of my secondary schooling at the Abbey School, Mount Saint Benedict, in
Tunapuna in Trinidad and Tobago between 1955, when I was nine years old, and
1964. I was an indifferent student,
always in the bottom half of my class. I
hated sports and any organised school activity. My main interest was in running wild in the
forests surrounding the school, and in the library.
In my first year, I informed Bro
Vincent, the Sports Master, after my first cricket match, that I would never
again play the game. My introduction to
it had been miserable. He told me that
he would ban me from the swimming pool if I did not play the next weekend. When I was banned from the pool, I announced
that I would no longer play football for my House. I was banned from the Saturday matinee movies.
In retaliation, I made myself a
long bow and cut reed arrows. I spent
many a happy Saturday afternoon in concealment on the hilltop above the cricket
field firing arrows at the fielders below. For this I was ordered to attend the
Headmaster to receive six strokes of the rod on my backside. This happened nearly every Monday for at least
five years. When I complained to Fr
Bernard that I had never been caught doing anything wrong to deserve the
flogging, he replied, “Then, take the strokes, Don, for all the things you
have done that you never got caught doing.”
I taught myself early to speed
read. I learned the name of the skill
only after President JF Kennedy was inaugurated, and his ability to get through
hundreds of pages of briefings before breakfast was described. By the age of twelve I was assisting in the
school library. By about the age of
fifteen, when Fr Augustine was the official Librarian, he made me his Assistant
and gave me my own key. I was free to
let myself in and out as I chose, within school rules. By this time, I was relieved of any obligation
to join in school sports.
With such access, I read nearly
every one of the tens of thousands of books on the shelves. I devoured the forbidden books in a locked
cabinet behind the curtain on a top shelf, such as the unexpurgated
Canterbury’s Tales. I got most of the
way through the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I remember I started on this when I needed to
learn about sex. I began with the
relevant article in the “P” volume and moved on to “V”. Each article ended in a list of
cross-references. I made notes of them
and read them too. I was particularly
taken by the multi-layered transparencies that illustrated the scientific
articles. By the time I left the school
at seventeen, I had read much of each of the many volumes. have
always preferred to master the theory before I try the practical.
My early experience of church and
religion was without complaint. The High
School was run by Benedictine Monks. The
many cruelties we experienced from them were not excessive. Few if any of us were permanently scarred by
them.
We were not, so far as I know,
sexually abused by the Monks. The only
homosexual practices we heard of were between a very few of the boys. Supposedly, these were always foreign boys,
never West Indian ones.
The physical punishments the
Monks imposed on us, making us spend a half hour on our bare knees, on the
yard’s gravelled surface, in the blazing sun, for some minor infraction of
discipline, for example, did not scar us so much as prepare us for life’s
injustices.
We knew or imagined stories about
the life histories of the Monks. They
were mainly European Dutch survivors of the Nazi Holocaust of the Second World
War, in which most of our fathers had served in one army or the other. There were stories circulating that some of
them had been slave labourers in the factories of the Ruhr Valley in Germany. Their guilt at surviving when most of their
family members had been murdered by the Nazis was the cause, we told each
other, of their reputed self-torture. Some
of our parents had been Prisoners of War who survived brutal internment in
camps in France, Belgium, and other countries.
On one occasion, when a Monk
teacher stretched to reach a high point on the blackboard, specks of red
appeared on the back of his white cassock. There were gasps of horror. We agreed it was blood from his self-flagellation
with a barbed wire whip the night before. Only years later did we learn that it was red
ink from a pen flicked by a boy in the front row. Such incidents heightened our awareness of the
horrors some of them had endured to survive and come out to teach us in
Trinidad.
My first loss of faith occurred
when I was seven years old. It was
shortly before Christmas. I was arguing
with my little friends whether Santa Claus existed. I was horrified to learn that they did not
believe in Santa. They insisted that our
parents bought the presents. I
indignantly rose in defence of Santa. I
resisted all attempts to convince me he was imaginary.
When I got confirmation later
that day that Santa was not real, I was devastated. My whole world view was hollowed out. I had never experienced such betrayal before. I immediately knew that I would never again
believe anything my mother told me. It
seemed obvious to me that she could not be trusted to be truthful about
anything important. These instantaneous
judgments have followed me all my life, much to my loss.
This stage of my religious career
lasted I suppose until I was about nineteen years of age. At the age of eighteen I became a student in
the United Kingdom. I arrived there to
study law in the summer of 1964. First,
I completed my O-Levels and A-Levels before enrolling as a student barrister at
the Inner Temple.
I spent my first four years in
the UK boarding at an international student hostel at 23 Lansdown Road in
Notting Hill Gate, owned and run by the Pushkin Society. There were always
between thirty and forty students of all ages and genders boarding there. For the first time, I was exposed to persons
of different religions, nationalities, and backgrounds. The hostel was a hotbed of animated discussion
on every topic among the young and not so young occupants.
I came to live at this hostel as
a callow, uneducated, religious believer, who had never in my 18 years in
Trinidad had an intellectual conversation. To be able to join in the discussions, I read
everything I could put my hands on. I
gobbled up books on sociology, psychology, philosophy, ancient history,
comparative religion, archaeology, economics, zoology, botany, genetics, and
any other subject that came to hand. I
sucked it all up.
At that time in Notting Hill, one
could purchase a Penguin Classic paperback for six pence in one of the many
second-hand bookshops. One could also
exchange two books for one at no extra charge. A Penguin paperback seldom took more than a
day to devour. I recall it was not
unusual for me to acquire a dozen books at a time. A bottle of Algerian red wine cost less than a
shilling. A pound of ground coffee cost
about the same.
During all this time, and for
about the first six months, I attended a Roman Catholic Church every Sunday in
Notting Hill. The diversity at the
hostel began to make me aware that people of other religions could be good
people. Could it be that contrary to the
teaching of my church, their souls might arrive in heaven?
There was an older student, Aziz
Baluche, who was a native of Baluchistan. He was a Sufi Muslim of about seventy years,
who had earned his doctorate in classical Spanish guitar at a university in
Cadiz before the Spanish Civil War. He
was an accomplished Sitar player and an impressive scholar. Curiously, he earned his living reading
astrological charts and playing the Sitar professionally.
Aziz was also a law student, a
member of my Inn. He taught that we were
all different, with our own cultures and beliefs, none more superior than the
other. I came to consider him as near to
a saint as anyone could get. I used to
say that he was the most truly Christian person I had ever known.
For the first two or three years
at the student hostel, one of the residents was a Professor Douglas Kennedy. He was originally a US national from Detroit
who had fallen in love with Paris during his march from the beaches of Normandy
to Germany as a young man in 1944. After
the War, he went to university in the US. He got his first degree in geology on the GI
Bill and completed his education in France. He became in time a noted archaeologist,
specializing in Hittite in cuneiform. By
the time we younger students became acquainted with him, he was a professor at
the Sorbonne University in Paris. We
were all impressed that while his English was that of the gutters of Detroit
his French was pure and elegant.
Douglas Kennedy was at the time
supposedly one of only four English-speaking persons fluent in Hittite. He spent his summers in London where he
conducted research in the British Museum on the clay tablets that various
archaeologists had brought back to Britain from the Middle East. Every night, he sat at a small round table in
his relatively spacious room at the hostel, pouring over photographs of the
cuneiform inscriptions on the tablets that he was studying. He told us he was writing a book on
transportation by means of the donkey across the Arabian Peninsula three
thousand years before the current era. We
were impressed. He taught us to enjoy
French press coffee. This he drank all
night long, pausing only for an occasional glass of red wine. The coffee and wine were like honey to bees
for us young students.
We students spent many a long
evening in his room discussing what interests all young people: sex, religion, and politics. We learned that you could order your own blend
of coffee by the pound at the neighbourhood coffee shop. Kenyan beans were the cheapest at the time,
while Columbian and Jamaican beans were the most expensive. We learned to distinguish the flavours of the
preferred Arabica blend from the more boring Robusta. Now, I only use Haitian, Costa Rican, or
Dominican Republic ground coffee.
I learned to prefer cheap red
wine over cheap white wine. I learned to
tease the French girls by turning a bottle of red wine in front of the gas
heater, explaining when asked that I was trying to bring it up to Algerian room
temperature. Besides the wine, coffee,
and the girls, one reason for hanging out in Douglas’ room was that he could
afford to insert a fresh shilling in the gas meter all night long whenever the
gas ran out. Our rooms were small, dark,
and cold by comparison, particularly on the long winter nights.
At night, we young students sat
about arguing on his floor, smoking cheap tobacco, and drinking wine and
coffee. Kennedy, as an older person, a
noted academic, and a huge intellect, occasionally lifted his head from his
photographs and notes to settle a heated discussion. He was intensely sceptical about everything,
especially on politics, economics, and other social issues. The student life in the Notting Hill of the
late 1960s was intoxicating. We
youngsters took away from these early years of academic and intellectual
stimulation life-long attitudes that we would never lose.
There came a point when I walked
out of the church. And I never went
back. The immediate cause was the sight
of a fat, slovenly, red-nosed, Irish priest preaching hell and damnation. The hypocrisy of his evidently gluttonous
lifestyle, and its contradiction with the subject of his sermon turned my
stomach. I could not help it. It was an instantaneous reaction. And, permanent.
This happened before my
nineteenth birthday in the summer of 1965. It struck me that everything I had so
confidently previously believed about faith and religion was a total fiction. The shock and hurt of the realization drove me
to frantic depression. It was the loss
of Santa Clause all over again, but worse. Only the wine, three packets of cigarettes a
day, and the arms and the guitar-playing of a wonderful French lady, a student
of industrial arts living at the hostel, kept me sane.
In addition to the reading and
arguing, we foreign students explored the Natural Science Museum and the
National Portrait Gallery. We bought the
cheapest tickets to be allowed to sit on the steps and in the passageways of
the theatres. We saw the plays of
Sophocles and of Shakespeare. We walked
all the way to the West End instead of taking the public transport we could as
students hardly afford. I read
everything anthropological I could lay my hands on, from The Descent of Man to
The Naked Ape. I read the biographies of
Galileo, and Copernicus. I learned how
the Christians persecuted the early astronomers, demanding belief on pain of
death that the Earth was flat, and the Sun orbited the Earth, not the other way
round.
For my A-Level studies in English
History, I chose the Reformation. Newly
liberated from any notion of the truth of Christian teaching, I was
particularly interested in the period. It
was this course of study that first exposed me to the long history of cruelty
and murder visited by the Christians and other religions on each other. I learned how over the centuries one
denomination massacred another in the name of faith.
I was appalled at the stories of
the Christians and Muslims killing each other over religion. I learned how the Muslims spread from their
heartland of Arabia through North Africa and southern Europe, killing off the
pagans they met along the way. It seems
they sometimes preserved the Jews and the Christians as fellow “people of the
Book”. What a revolting book! My disgust with everything to do with faith
and religion grew, until I became nauseous whenever I recalled my previous
religious beliefs and practices.
My abhorrence of everything to do
with faith in God grew as I learned of the sheer ignorance of the early church,
the cruelties of the Inquisition, and the mass murder of the Amerindians. Religious faith is the main cause, over the
length of human history, of war, torture, murder, and mayhem. I concluded that the root of all evil is
religion. I resolved for the rest of my
life to do everything I could to oppose this evil dominion over the human mind
and spirit. In my early twenties I
became what I still am, a militant atheist.
I did not know it at the time,
but my personality type is apparently obsessive-compulsive. I suppose I am additionally on the autistic
spectrum, certainly on the Asperger’s Syndrome scale. I learned I was an obsessive-compulsive in a
psychological course for judges organised by the Eastern Caribbean Supreme
Court in about the year 1999. As part of
this course, we had to fill out a questionnaire concerning our preferences and
predilections. At the end, we scored
ourselves.
The advice given us judges by the
two lady professors from the University conducting the course was ominous. The one personality-type you did not want to
be if you were to be a good judge was the obsessive-compulsive type. Apparently, the tendency for these sufferers
is to make up your mind about the case you were trying when you are only
half-way through the trial and have not yet heard all the evidence.
The professors explained that
obsessive-compulsives have one advantage. Coming to a decision is never a problem. We do not spend days struggling to make our
minds up. We make our decision and act
on it. It is the perfect personality for
a general of the army who must send men into battle to die.
I recall the Chief Justice
sitting next to me peeping at the score I gave myself and whispering that I was
not to worry at the results, as he was even higher on the obsessive-compulsive
scale than I was. He did not show me his
score, so he may only have been trying to reassure me.
In the years that followed my
adolescent conversion to atheism, my confidence in the truth of this conviction
only grew. The more I read of the
horrors inflicted by Christian leaders on their flocks, the more opposed to
Christianity, and by extension to all faiths, grew.
It became apparent to me that the
principal reason most men join any priesthood is their demented need to get
into the pants of their young charges. Men,
I concluded, are driven by one or more of only three forces. There is the need for sexual release, perhaps
more powerful even than hunger. There is
the need to acquire wealth, a motive that has helped church leaders by tithing
and donations to become rich as Croesus. Then, there is the need for power. With total control over the minds of their
flocks, ministers of religion can extract cash, impose their sexual urges on
the credulous boys and girls in their custody, and exercise unlimited power
over their lives and fortunes. Most
popes, bishops, priests, pastors, reverends, mullahs, muftis, pundits, and
Buddhist monks are predators. Jim Jones
was a perfectly developed example of a true man of faith.
It is not only male clerics who
are monsters. Reading of the evils of
the Magdalene Sisters towards the girls of the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland
during a period of two and a half centuries is stomach churning. Women may enjoy a nurturing character not
shared generally by men. But faith can
twist them into evil beings in the same way as men.
God, I am sure, has reserved the
deepest and hottest part of Hell for members of the clergy of every faith and
denomination. The Christian variety,
guilty of inflicting more harm, suffering, and pain than any of the others, I
consign to spend all eternity in the deepest frozen pit of the Ninth Circle of
Dante’s Inferno.
And, what if, I am sometimes
asked, when I die, I should come to judgment and meet God? What will I do? First, I will ask Him to explain what He was
thinking of. If He is indeed so
all-powerful, all-seeing, all-pervasive, and all-merciful, what did He mean by
allowing polio, smallpox, leprosy, measles, HIV, dengue, and the other
haemorrhagic fevers, from bringing untold suffering, misery, and death to us
humans over tens of thousands of years? What
kind of a loving and merciful god is He, that to gain His favour we must
prostrate ourselves on the ground and grovel before Him?
I still do not understand what
abject ignorance causes so many of the credulous among us, in the middle of a
pandemic and a hurricane, to praise His mercy and love with excessive
religiosity even as our families and friends fall victim to acts of god.
I tell you that if I ever meet
this evil, sadistic, and megalomaniac god, I plan on giving Him a good slapping
up.
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EDITED by Ladislao Kertesz, kertesz11@yahoo.com, if you would like to subscribe for
a whole year and be in the circular’s mailing list or if you would like to
mention any old boy that you would like to include, write to me.
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Photos:
20LK4758FBNIGHTVIEW, Night view from the
school 2021
17DM0002DMIWFE, Don Mitchell and Maggie
57LK3262FBADE, Alan Deveaux
52BP5563BPE, Bruce Peters
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