Ode to the Commode

Sitting on a commode in the morning, early morning, in the recovery ward.

A basic life skill is to recover from life’s injuries, this involves, at times, a hard cold plastic chair on wheels. It has a toilet seat affair and the entire business is on wheels to enable sliding over a toilet to enable ones ‘business’.

There is a door in this water closet as it is known here that leads to the neighboring room. From this I can hear the repetitive sounds of music similar to a music box from my youth, only digital, and the repetitive sounds of an Indian man repeating his morning prayers.

It occurs that the repitition is a technique to mitigate the anxiety caused by a religion, any religion, as all practitioners have been convinced that they can’t recover from life’s injuries without divine intervention. Then of course to tithe their hard earned money to pay for the church resident con-artists pretending to magically speak for and interperate some mystical magical force or energy.

So religious doctors and nurses have mitigated their programmed anxiety and boosted their resulting low self-esteem by seeing themselves as an instrument of the divine. The patients are seen as anxious low-lives that even the divine has abandoned.

This makes the religious medical folks arrogant and anxious full of the enevitable hostility. See The Case Against Religion — Albert Ellis. Here are the main characteristics of emotional health and well being according to Ellis the foremost psychologist of the last century.

Self-interest. The emotionally healthy individual should primarily be true to himself and not masochistically sacrifice himself for others. His kindness and consideration for others should be derived from the idea that he himself wants to enjoy freedom from unnecessary pain and restriction, and that he is only likely to do so by helping create a world in which the rights of others, as well as his own, are not needlessly curtailed.

Self-direction. He should assume responsibility for his own life, be able independently to work out his own problems, and while at times wanting or preferring the cooperation and help of others, not need their support for his effectiveness and well-being.

Tolerance. He should fully give other human beings the right to be wrong; and while disliking or abhorring some of their behaviour, still not blame them, as persons, for performing this dislikeable behaviour. He should accept the fact that all humans are remarkably fallible, never unrealistically expect them to be perfect, and refrain from despising or punishing them when they make inevitable mistakes and errors.

Acceptance of uncertainty. The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed — such a probabilistic, uncertain world is most conducive to free thought.

Flexibility. He should remain intellectually flexible, be open to change at all times, and unbigotedly view the infinitely varied people, ideas, and things in the world around him.

Scientific thinking. He should be objective, rational and scientific; and be able to apply the laws of logic and of scientific method not only to external people and events, but to himself and his interpersonal relationships.

Commitment. He should be vitally absorbed in something outside of himself, whether it be people, things, or ideas; and should preferably have at least one major creative interest, as well as some outstanding human involvement, which is highly important to him, and around which he structures a good part of his life.

Risk-taking. The emotionally sound person should be able to take risks, to ask himself what he really would like to do in life, and then to try to do this, even though he has to risk defeat or failure. He should be adventurous (though not necessarily foolhardy); be willing to try almost anything once, just to see how he likes it; and look forward to some breaks in his usual life routines.

Self-acceptance. He should normally be glad to be alive, and to like himself just because he is alive, because he exists, and because he (as a living being) invariably has some power to enjoy himself, to create happiness and joy. He should not equate his worth or value to himself on his extrinsic achievements, or on what others think of him, but on his personal existence; on his ability to think, feel, and act, and thereby to make some kind of an interesting, absorbed life for himself.

These, then, are the kind of personality traits which a psychotherapist is interested in helping his patients achieve and which he is also, prohylactically, interested in fostering in the lives of millions who will never be his patients.
Now, does religion — by which again, I mean faith unfounded on fact, or dependence on some supernatural deity — help human beings to achieve these healthy traits and thereby to avoid becoming anxious, depressed, and hostile?
The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t help at all; and in most respects it seriously sabotages mental health. For religion, first of all, is not self-interest; it is god-interest.
The religious person must, by virtual definition, be so concerned with whether or not his hypothesized god loves him, and whether he is doing the right thing to continue to keep in this god’s good graces, that he must, at very best, put himself second and must sacrifice some of his most cherished interests to appease this god. If, moreover, he is a member of any organized religion, then he must choose his god’s precepts first, those of this church and it’s clergy second, and his own views and preferences third.

So, sitting here on the commode getting ready to learn how to walk again after an unprovoked attack by a homeless man, thinking these thoughts that I am jotting down here, it occurs to me that life is not terrible but is sometimes an inconvenience to my plans, and that I have the skills to recover from inconvenience.

Sometimes I even enjoy it and see it as an accomplishment, a creative endeavor such as this AI bunny I just cooked up.