From: Jasper
Date: 5/8/03
Time: 1:03:21 AM
Remote User:
Charlie,
I don’t think that it’s possible to choose to believe. Your either do or you don’t.
When an engineer at Ford named Frank Horenkamp expressed that thought to a fellow worker it came as a shock – not because I hadn’t heard it before, but because I hadn’t heard it from anyone’s lips but mine. The difference was Frank stated it as a fact while I held it as my opinion. His exact words were, “You can’t choose your beliefs. In your heart of hearts you either believe or you don’t.”
Frank was the kind of genius that could do square roots in his head. It took him about fifteen seconds to explain to me how he did it. I understood it because he made it so simple for anyone to understand but I couldn’t do it because I could never hold abstract numbers in my head worth a damn. I should have written it down.
Frank was an ardent student of the Bible. In his late sixties he got a degree in Philosophy from a Catholic College. He was born and raised a Catholic but he simply couldn’t force himself to believe what he was taught. He went to a Unitarian Church and he loved “dangerous” ideas as much as I did. He drove the nuns at Madonna College nuts with his well-reasoned challenges to their beliefs. He drove his fellow parishioners at his church nuts with his well-reasoned challenges to their beliefs. He believed in God but he did not believe in an afterlife. He was far from a hypocrite because he also believed that he could be wrong. He never stopped looking for the truth.
Frank’s line about the impossibility of making a decision to believe one thing or another started a close friendship between us that lasted until his death and beyond.
I say, “beyond” because sometimes I could swear that I hear him talking to me. Maybe it’s just some brain cells firing up memories of his character in certain situations and telling me what he would say if he were by my side. Perhaps “just” doesn’t belong in that sentence. How do we know the mechanism by which the dead talk to the living?
In a very real sense all of us “die” every seven years. That’s how long it takes for every cell in our bodies to be replaced. The seven-year-old boy that I was in 1953 is dead. The fourteen-year-old teenager I was in 1960 is dead. The fifty-six-year-old man I was last year is dead. I have the illusion that he is till alive because I have a similar body and a continuity of consciousness stretching back as far as I can remember. Even that is an illusion. Every twenty-four hours I go into a state of sleep so deep that all continuity of consciousness ends.
We have a finite time to do everything we can possibly do. Then we move on. Where to? I don’t know. I believe that something else is out there for us to do and that only our character survives to do it. I known that when a guy at work told me that he hears my voice when he realizes he is being an “asshole” he’s talking about the words of a dead man. –Jasper