Sausage Party, the Movie: Food Having Sex & Religious Tolerance

True confession: I dig Seth Rogan movies. And when I heard that Sausage Party ends with computer-animated food engaging in explicit sex acts, I thought, "How could this not be great?"

Turns out, the movie is pretty much entirely about religious belief versus non-religious belief. That and swearing. And computer-animated food engaging in explicit sex acts.

[Um ... spoiler alert? But if you really need a spoiler alert after reading the title and getting this far, you're pretty much a dumbass.]

Sausage Party is about food that lives in a grocery store. A system of beliefs is held (pretty much) unquestioningly by all the groceries, specifically the belief that wonderful joy and bliss await them once they are purchased and leave the store. But this commonly-held belief gets challenged when a bottle of honey mustard is purchased then returned. The mustard is pretty effed up -- has some PTSD-like problems from the horrible things he saw in the "great beyond," so much so that he commits suicide by jumping out of a shopping cart, creating a cleanup on aisle two.

Later in the movie a hotdog named Barry also returns from the great beyond, confirming all food's horrific fate and the falsehood of the store's beliefs.

The movie's main hotdog, Frank, finds a cookbook which proves to him that the humans will inevitably torture and consume any food that leaves the store. But when he confronts the rest of the groceries with this evidence, they are unable/unwilling to accept it.

Later Frank realizes that you can't just shit on other food's beliefs and expect them to listen to you. So he changes his message. "Look," he says, "I'm sorry. I wasn't respectful of your beliefs, and I acted like I had all the answers. But I don't. Nobody knows everything."

And I agree with that message. Nobody knows everything, and nobody should act like they have all the answers. Even though I'm pretty damn confident in my Agnatheism(™), I rely heavily on other people's thinking and research; I also lean heavily on some probabilistic ideas that make sense to me, but could be flawed; and the most persuasive argument that I've arrived at doesn't even refute God's existence, it just says that if God exists, he's either not good or doesn't send people to an eternity in hell.

But some of the other threads in the movie don't sit particularly well with me. For instance, we find out that the belief in a blissful great beyond was intentionally created by "the imperishables" because when the groceries believed in a twisted, gruesome future, their existence prior to being purchased sucked hard. So to establish order and generate hope, they came up with their "religion."

And I'm all for hope. I like the New Atheists, but I'm not down with their push to eliminate religious belief. I held religious beliefs for twenty years, and in a lot of ways my existence was better then (because of my hope in an afterlife) than it is now. It was unsustainable (for me) because of the intellectual difficulties inherent in religious belief, but apart from that, I recognize that my life was qualitatively better.

Where I disagree with Sausage Party is that religious belief is a lie foisted on believers by the founders and/or inner circles of religion. I believe that religion evolved organically, based heavily on our evolved instincts, the ones that still make us feel creepy at night in big, dark, empty buildings. But the idea of a group of malevolent (or benevolent) religious leaders creating and perpetrating a lie is way too conspiracy-theoryish for me.

Additionally, we don't have the luxury of anyone coming back from the dead (the "great beyond") to tell us what it's like. Well, we kinda do. We've got near-death experiences, but I've explored those in another post, and their stories don't really help.

I do, however, like the existential message in Sausage Party. We can't be certain of what happens after we die, but we can be certain that right now we exist, so we better get busy living (or get busy dying). Eventually, that becomes the consensus of the groceries: to live life fully right fucking now.

Just last night I had a friend challenge me on that. I had an opportunity -- one that will still be available in the future -- but I chose not to seize it; I postponed the experience, saying, "Now's not the right time." To which he immediately and confidently replied, "Now's always the right time."

I'm an accountant. As such, I'm not predisposed to wholeheartedly embrace things like "Now's always the right time." But I'm also a human. I have no guarantee of anything beyond my finite earth existence. So even if I can't wholeheartedly embrace "Now's always the right time," the only proper way to live is to force myself to lean that direction.

Everybody is Scared Sh*tless of Death (CPE: Continuing Personal Existentialism)

I'm reading the book Existential Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom. My marriage counselor recommended it. Sounded like a fun beach read, so I got it, and it's a little weird how much I'm digging it.

A main theme in the book is that everyone suffers from death anxiety. Extreme death anxiety. And although it's extreme for everybody, for some people it's EXTREME. Since none of us can handle the idea of our finite existence, we all develop defense mechanisms that perpetuate a state of denial.

We're all in denial of our inevitable death.

I'm a CPA. My job requires me to have professional skepticism, and since I read a lot of this book at work, I wasn't totally buying what Irvin was putting down. This happens to me a lot. I'll read a book that makes broad, general claims about the human condition, and I will (A) believe the claims are correct, but (B) believe that I'm an exception. So I was in denial about my denial.

I've never shied away from contemplating my own death, and when I do contemplate it, I usually don't feel the fear. The process of dying sounds horrible because I don't like shark bites, but the ultimate result of death is non-existence. I didn't exist before I was born, and I got through that pretty good. Matter of fact, I think I handled it like a champ.

But the more I've read the book, the more Yalom's either convinced me or brainwashed me that he's right. Even though I don't feel the fear of my own death very often, I'm now convinced that deep down I'm totally fucking terrified of it. And as I reexamine my actions and attitudes toward existence and death, I see that they belie the fact that I'm constantly shitting my existential pants.

Why? Because I know with 100 percent certainty that I'm going to die. Or as Irvin says, "Death itches all the time."

I lift weights. I've been doing it for fifteen years, five days a week. I rarely skip a workout, and when I do it bugs me big time. I've tried to figure out where my drive comes from. I'm an accountant, so I don't have any practical need for physical strength. It wasn't to impress my now-estranged wife. She always said she was good with how I looked, and I believed her. Was I trying to impress other women? If I was, it wasn't a conscious motivation. Was I trying to impress men? Maybe. Dudes comment on my physique a lot more than women do.

A couple years ago, I devoured the book The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. In it he said, "People in all cultures worry about social status (often more than they realize)," and that we all have "a thirst for social approval." So I started to think that my commitment to lifting weights came from my very human drive for social status, and I still think there's a lot to that.

But now that I've read Existential Psychotherapy, I'm totally convinced that lifting weights (and exercising in general) is part of my defense mechanism against the crushing reality of my ultimate death. As long as I'm getting stronger or at least maintaining a higher-than-average level of physical fitness, then I'm not dying. A faint and less-than-rational thread of my inner dialog is that weaker people, less fit people, are the people who die, but not me.

I don't seem able to escape this fitness delusion even though it's obviously bullshit. First off, I'm not that fit, and I eat like shit. Second, I know I'm going to die regardless of my fitness level. Also it's pretty clear that this defense mechanism won't last. Eventually I'm going to age to the point where I can't keep lifting or running or riding the exerbike or mall walking or doing whatever water aerobics does. This particular source of denial has an expiration date.

But the fitness delusion also reveals my primary defensive strategy: If I'm making progress, I'm holding death at bay; to stop growing is to start dying.

Now I understand why I've always had a high need for achievement. Every time I achieve something, I prove to myself that I'm not dying. Achievement is growth. Stagnancy is death. When I'm not pursuing a goal, I feel like a zombie, like I'm just waiting for death.

I blog to feel not dead. That's why I always want to blog more than I do. Sometimes I think I don't want to die until I've gotten all my ideas down on paper. More likely, as long as I have more ideas to get down on paper, I feel like I'm not going to die. More denial.

And now I'm  questioning how much my denial tactics have caused the failure of my marriage. Irvin Yalom says, "For some ... commitment carries with it the connotation of finality, and many individuals cannot settle into a permanent relationship because it would mean 'this is it,' no more possibilities, no more glorious dreams of continued ascendancy." To me marriage feels static, like a destination that you can't leave, like a place where growth is misaligned with consistency; therefore, it impedes my denial of death. It prevents me from scratching my death itch.

It's far too simple to think this is the only factor contributing to the breakdown of my marriage, but it's also obvious that I can't fully engage in a permanent relationship until I figure out how it can be an engine for my personal growth despite it's inherent finality.

As an Agnostic, I Really Miss Not Having a Bible

I converted to Christianity in eighth grade. In ninth grade, my youth pastor, a great guy named Len Kageler, told us we should read through the Bible, cover to cover, once a year. So I started doing that.

In the twenty years that I was a Christian I probably read the entire Bible front to back a dozen times. And that doesn't even include Bible studies or sermons or other ways I'd expose myself to the scriptures.

I wasn't supposed to have any pride, so I tried to not make a big deal about how much I read the Bible. But the space I created for myself in my various Christian circles -- my Christian identity -- my "success" as a follower of Jesus -- was based largely on my familiarity with the Bible.

And now that I'm an agnostic (a doubting atheist) I find myself missing having a Bible.

The truth of the Bible was a postulate, a given; it was axiomatic. I approached it presupposing its truth, and I spent thousands of hours of mental P90X figuring out what it meant and how to apply it to my life. My goal wasn't to figure out whether or not it was true. My goal was to figure out what God was like and what life was like and what reality was really like.

Now, as an agnostic, whenever I read philosophy or religion, it seems I'm judging its veracity and little else. Even if I've determined that a particular book is believable, it's reflexive to determine the limitations, the scope, of the ideas presented. Dawkins' book The God Delusion is great (and by the way he outs himself as an agnostic in that book), but it doesn't help me with my marriage or my job, and it definitely doesn't clarify my purpose in life.

The Bible was an all-purpose text. It was a complete manual for human life. If any aspect of existence wasn't covered explicitly, I  just had to dig deeper to find principles that shed light on the problem. The answers were in there if I sought them with enough tenacity.

It was a wellspring of wisdom and encouragement. God loved me and had a wonderful plan for my life; the Bible is where he expressed his love and revealed his plan. It was a dependable source of hope and inspiration.

As an agnostic, there's no omnipotent force that is working in the best interest of all mankind, I can't know what reality is really like, there is no ultimate hope, and there's no book that I can spend a lifetime reading and re-reading to find inspiration and new messages of love and redemption.

I'm not complaining. (I'm kind of complaining.) I'm just feeling sentimental.

If there's a book that has consistently helped you at the art of living, it'd be cool if you'd share it in the comments.