Thanks for the question. What did I get from Ron? An insight into, in my mind, the nature of religions and deification of normal people. What people do to fill the "God sized hole" that some religions teach, perhaps correctly, that we all have. How crazy it was that numerous people could all see the same thing, draw the same conclusion, but refuse to voice it to one another. After all, they didn't want to be the odd man out. Everyone else says it... so it must be true.
I spent thousands of hours with him, most of them alone. I saw him strong and scathing, and as frail as a cat, needing help getting out of bed and going to the restroom. I saw him so weak he couldn't speak above a whisper, forced to use a bed pan, unable to remember every day details about conversations or things he had written only weeks earlier. I saw the myth people imagined, contrasted with the reality of the aging, largely demented man I saw almost daily.
I also saw moments of insight. Brilliance. I learned how to communicate. How to shoulder responsibility greater than that most people had at my age. My vocabulary grew. I learned how to live in an adult world, as a teenager. I learned from others the dedication that normal people could have, the sacrifices that they could make, in their desire to make the world a better place. I learned of all the human characteristics, those good, and those not, played out in the soap opera of his life.
I learned apologetics, how to foster belief, skirting lying, but not giving all the truth to those who followed his every word. How to twist facts to avoid uncomfortable truths.
I learned who was not the creator of Scn, but of a man who had learned how to delegate, wield a whip, place the carrot in front of people (OT), and the stick of expulsion, or eternal damnation.
I learned how myths were created, which gave me a tremendous insight to human nature and the rendition of historic events and what might have actually been the truth of those historic events.
I saw selflessness, a true inspiration to me, of those around him.
I saw children with adult like determination, who gladly donated their childhood. And I saw other children crying, shells of what a child should be, craving attention from their parents who couldn't be with them because they were busy trying to save the world.
I felt comradry. The bliss of being in a unit striving to make a difference. While blinded for years that the goal didn't mesh with the reality. Is this, I wondered, how the followers of Hitler might have been blinded to, or justify the heinous actions of their group? How could children disconnect from their parents who had raised them? How could a husband watch a wife in rags in the RPF? Tolerate weekly time with their children measured in minutes?
I learned the definition of the blind following the blind.
I understood how it was that people, and whole groups, could use the end to justify the means, whatever harm might be caused by the means.
I learned what it was to be human. To live life in the now.
Now, as I've spoken outside of this forum to a few who were in the trenches with me, I feel like a survivor of Aushwitz, or one of the few surviving soldiers of an epic battle, knowing, as we look at one another, that there is truly no way to communicate to those who were not there exactly what we experienced.
And most of all, I learned to hold up every philosophy, every tenet, polictics, every conclusion, to the cold, clear light of unbiased reason, rather than blind faith.
I saw the aged die, for lack of medical care. The elite of Scn with teeth rotting in their mouths for lack of money to receive dental care. I saw people gap toothed but smiling, proud of yanking their own teeth.
I saw the frailty of those who had dedicated their lives to a false dream reach the realization that the dream was false, but they could not extricate themselves, for they had nothing. No social security. No resume. No health insurance. Lives that were largely unimaginable to the vast majority of people outside the church.
I saw modern slavery.
It is difficult to try to explain the emotions that I still experience as I recall these things.