Carlin’s Catechetics

Hemant Mehta spots this passage from the just-released Conversations with Carlin, in which the late comedian looks back at the childhood religious experiences that helped lead him to atheism:

When you’re seven years old and preparing for your first communion, they tell you a lot of things about how the host is gonna be in your mouth, and it’s the body of Jesus, the body of God, and this will sanctify you, and you’ll feel different. You’ll feel the presence of God. Well, I did my first communion, and I went back to my pew, and I didn’t notice any of that. I noticed this wafer and I’m trying to be reverent, but it wasn’t transformative. So I noticed that. I think in retrospect, it began to make me a little less willing to just jump on everything they said and take the ride. I think I thought that there was an awful lot of exaggeration going on — an awful lot of fanciful talk and magic that they were trying to evoke. And they were always talking about pain and punishment and penance and suffering, and to me, that just didn’t fit. Somehow – and I said this on an early album — they were pushing for pain, and I was pulling for pleasure.

There were times when I still did what some people do who don’t believe well. You find some comfort in it. I would pray for something I wanted, and I would pray if I was scared, because it was a reflex. It was something I had learned, and it made me feel better. I think what that is when we do that is, we’re praying to ourselves — to our better selves. Some call it a higher self. I think the universe is all of us, and when we externalize this thing and call it God, it’s really a way of projecting ourselves onto another identity — onto our better, higher selves that pretty much know everything they need to know, and everything that’s good. So I think praying is all about finding that part of yourself. They call it God. It’s easier to organize people politically, and get them to believe a lot of other things, if you have them believing in an invisible man.