I don’t believe I’ll disbelieve

   “Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.” – Wilhelm Stekel.

   Atheism certainly is a religion and, like any other religion, it is dogmatic and therefore subject to inconsistency, error and debate. Just as every religion has its doubters, atheism must also be open to doubt.

   “There is no God” is a bald and brash assertion which can no more be proven through our powers of perception than can the assertion “God exists.” If religions positing a god are to be held up to criticism, disbelief and derision, then atheism, which posits the non-existence of any god, must be, as well.

   The fallacies and absurdities of every religion likewise abound in atheism. “The existence of evil proves that there is no God,” for example, is a proposition that can be attacked from all angles: Maybe God allows evil; maybe God can’t prevent evil; maybe what we see as evil is only something else in disguise.

   In fact, EVERY proposition in support of atheism is contingent on atheism’s negation; that is, you can’t make a claim about “no-God” that doesn’t refer to some type of God. So we must always ask the atheist: What is it that you’re denying?

   Atheism, then, has nothing solid at its core: it is simply an aggregation of denials. And since it doesn’t affirm anything, as religions go it is especially threadbare, unsatisfying and baseless.

   The atheist sees that all of man’s religions – all of our attempts to account for the mysteries all about us – are inadequate, and so he puts forth a religion of his own that is just as inadequate.

   I propose the establishment of a new religion, one that, if followed closely, will always be robust and sane. It is based on Bertrand Russell’s observation that “the ignorant are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” I’d call it Paulism, but that name’s already taken. As a purely descriptive name, I’d use “okay-ism,” or “uh-huh-ism,” or “live-and-let-live-ism,” or maybe “whatever-ism” – anything to denote a bemused skepticism. It’s a religion to sustain us 24 hours a day, even through the dark night of the soul, because we don’t have to agonize to stay faithful to it.

   We can never go wrong by doubting everything. Doubt will never let us down.   

The question, part 2

A review of The Question of God, continued.

Chapter 2: The Creator; Is There an Intelligence Beyond the Universe?

Freud argued that as people became more educated they would forsake the “fairy tale of religion.” He wrote that the various religions “bear the imprint of the times in which they arose,” and that the notion that “the universe was created by a being resembling a man…reflects the gross ignorance of primitive people.”

As for Christianity, he wrote that the precepts of Jesus are “psychologically impossible and useless for our lives.” (Maybe that’s why few people have ever followed them.)

C. S. Lewis agreed with Freud up until, at about the age of 30, he underwent a radical conversion. He declared in the preface to his Mere Christianity that “There is one God…and Jesus Christ is His only Son.” He said that “God made the world…space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables…” and that there is “a Dark Power in the universe…created by God, and who was good when he was created, and went wrong.”

Oy vey! Where did I go wrong?

What went wrong with Lewis? The author of this book, Armand Nicholi, contends that Lewis was converted by the reading of certain authors and discussions with faculty members at Oxford, where he was teaching. You could just as well account for it by some sort of delusion or hallucination, for from this point on Lewis hardly ever made much sense, in my opinion.

Lewis often trotted out the heartwarming old story about free will, to explain why a good God could make a bad world. Because of our precious free will, which is, in Lewis’s words, “the only thing that makes possible any love or joy worth having,” we ourselves have botched things, but God, who “left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong,” wants us to put things back together.

It might occur to any reasonable person thinking on such matters: why didn’t God just make us—and the world—different from what we are? What’s so terrific and vital about free will? But no, Lewis turns out to be as blinkered a believer as he was an atheist.

Freud wrote, “It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and (is) a benevolent providence…but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.” In Civilization and Its Discontents, he wrote of “The derivation of (religion) from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father…”and in The Future of an Illusion he asserted that the believer creates a God for himself, “whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless trusts with his own protection.”

Lewis criticized Freud’s characterization of religion based on one’s ambivalence towards one’s parents, saying that the negative side of ambivalence would indicate a wish that God would not exist. But wishing that something didn’t exist isn’t the same as believing that it doesn’t.

Lewis, instead of acknowledging this, takes another tack. He says that wishing for something may be all the evidence we need for its existence. Because he had experienced throughout his life episodes of “longing” – brought on by gazing at some beautiful stretch of countryside, for example – he concludes that these “desires” were evidence of a Creator.

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists,” he wrote, ignoring the question of which came first, the desire or the object of it; he then proceeds willy-nilly to this conclusion: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation (italics mine) is that I was made for another world.”

Of course, an equally “probable” explanation of such indefinable feelings is that they are vague wishes brought on by boredom, dissatisfaction or despair, and cannot properly be called “longings,” as every desire, indeed, must have an object. But this is the Lewis method – the blithe and breezy assumption of highly dubious premises, as a scaffold for erecting a theology that must be true.

(To be continued…)

   

          

The question is moot

A review of The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr. 

Sigmund Freud, here fondling his cigar

   Sigmund Freud never met C. S. Lewis, but the author of this book imagines a debate between the two on the subject of God (and some corollary topics). He also teaches a course at Harvard contrasting the two men’s “worldviews.”

   Nicholi calls Freud “the atheist’s touchstone,” and refers to Lewis as “perhaps the twentieth century’s most popular proponent of faith based on reason.” Lewis himself was an atheist for the first half of his adulthood, and Freud, indeed, was one of his touchstones. When he became a Christian he often challenged the ideas of Freud’s that he had earlier embraced. Or as Nicholi puts it in his prologue: “In subsequent writings, he (Lewis) provides cogent responses to Freud’s arguments…”—thus indicating early on where his own sympathies lie.

     Freud called religion “the universal obsessional neurosis,” and was a lifelong atheist, although as the author suggests he may have wavered in his disbelief from time to time. (In a letter to a friend he wrote, “Science of all things seems to demand the existence of God…”) Freud thought that one’s early, ambivalent attitude toward one’s parents formed the basis for one’s “deep-seated wish for God.”

   Freud’s atheistic underpinnings came largely from his reading of Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher who, in his The Essence of Christianity, asserted that religion is just a projection of human need. “Divine wisdom is human wisdom…the secret of theology is anthropology…the absolute mind is the so-called finite subjective mind,” Feuerbach wrote.

   Lewis, like Freud, grew into an atheist as a teenager. His mother died horribly at home when he was 7, and Lewis recalled that his earliest “religious experience” was praying in vain for her life. He was sent to a miserable boarding school where, he said, he read his Bible, “lived in hope,” and “attempted to obey my conscience.” When the school closed he was sent to another, whose matron took him under her wing and shared her growing unbelief with him. Under her influence, and that of his reading in the classics, his faith began to collapse. Another teacher, William Kirkpatrick, helped drive the final nail in the coffin, although the corpse would be resurrected years later.

   (To be continued…)      

An old flame

Barbara Ehrenreich, you could say, is a reality-based writer. Her 2001 book, “Nickel and Dimed,” is a heartbreaking and sometimes harrowing account of her first-hand experiences of how the other half lives, and in 2009 she took on the cancer-survivor industry (as a cancer survivor), in the lively “Bright-Sided.” She is also a hard-core atheist.

Her unbelief is an inherited trait, she says. So it was “profoundly unsettling” to her when, at age 17 (this was in 1959), she had a mystical experience. She walked out into the street in Lone Pine, California, “sleep-deprived and probably hypoglycemic,” and “saw the world — the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings — suddenly flame into life.”

Says Ehrenreich: “It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of. It seemed to me that whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze.  

She said nothing to anyone, and chalked up the incident to a mental breakdown. It took her a long time to acknowledge that her experience was not all that uncommon, and need not bring her non-belief into question.

“Some surveys find that nearly half of Americans report having had a mystical experience,” she says. “Historically, the range of people reporting such experiences is wide — including saints, shamans and Old Testament prophets as well as acknowledged nonbelievers like Virginia Woolf and the contemporary atheist writer Sam Harris.”

All visions are not created equal: It is the descriptions of, and justifications for, these episodes that differentiate them. Ehrenreich characterizes her own as something akin to what the 20^th-century Protestant theologian Rudolph Otto concluded after studying the accounts of mostly Christian mystics, in that it was “beyond all question something quite other than the ‘good’.” 

“It was more like a ‘consuming fire,’ he wrote, and ‘must be gravely disturbing to those persons who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love and a sort of confidential intimacy’.”

As Ehrenreich says, the divine needn’t enter into it at all. She urges scientists not to dismiss mystical experiences out of hand, and to think about adding the search for the source of these experiences to their search for those other elusive substances that make up the universe.

“Without invoking anything supernatural, we may be ready to acknowledge that we are not, after all, alone in the universe, “she says. “There is no evidence for a God or gods, least of all caring ones, but our mystical experiences give us tantalizing glimpses of other forms of consciousness, which may be beings of some kind, ordinarily invisible to us and our instruments. Or it could be that the universe is itself pulsing with a kind of life, and capable of bursting into something that looks to us momentarily like the flame.”

Belief on the back burner

Can you deny that there are supernatural beings and not be an atheist?

The New York Times ran the transcript of an interview conducted for “The Stone” by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, with Howard Wettstein, his counterpart at the University of California. Wettstein is a practicing Jew who prays regularly, and he is proof, I suppose, that one can have a rich religious life without necessarily believing in God – or, in his words, taking “a theoretical stance on God’s existence.” As Wettstein sees it (I think), belief is irrelevant to faith, and even irrelevant altogether. To paraphrase another philosopher with a similar name (Wittgenstein), what we can’t put into words we must pass over in silence.

Wettstein takes an unhelpful detour at the beginning, comparing theorizing about God to theorizing about numbers. “Even an advanced and creative mathematician,” he says, “need not have views about, say, the metaphysical status of numbers.” He cites the physicist Richard Feynman, who was supposed to have said about himself that he “lived among the numbers,” but who was unconcerned with whether they “actually” existed. But when we think about numbers we are able to describe how they work, in the form of proofs.  No such thinking can be done about God to yield results that are anything but highly subjective and abstract.

Wettstein talks about a rabbi friend of his who held that “God’s reality went without saying,” but that “God’s reality as a supernatural being was quite another thing.” (Wettstein’s words.) To watch his friend praying was to be overwhelmed, he says, by the intimacy of the pray-er and the pray-ee: “God was almost tangible.”
Gutting asks, quite reasonably, how one can pray to something that doesn’t exist. Wettstein says that “’existence’ is, pro or con, the wrong idea for God.”    

“My relation to God has come to be a pillar of my life, in prayer, in experience of the wonders and the awfulness of our world,” Wettstein says. “And concepts like the supernatural and transcendence have application here. But (speaking in a theoretical mode) I understand such terms as directing attention to the sublime rather than referring to some nonphysical domain. To see God as existing in such a domain is to speak as if he had substance, just not a natural or physical substance. As if he were composed of the stuff of spirit, as are, perhaps, human souls. Such talk is unintelligible to me. I don’t get it.”

In other words, we can’t talk about whether God exists, we can only talk about what His existence means to us. An argument like this gives sophistry a good name.

“So what is the real question?” Gutting asks, a little wearily it seems.

“The real question is one’s relation to God, the role God plays in one’s life, the character of one’s spiritual life,” Wettstein answers. These aren’t questions, they are sidestepping the question.

        

Will save your soul for food

A story in the NY Times deals with another hard-hit group of victims of the recession: preachers. The number of available pastoring jobs has not kept pace with the numbers of individuals answering the “call” to set themselves up as custodians of souls.

Preaching has always struck me as a fairly cushy gig, consisting largely of comforting the afflicted with platitudes and parsing the word of God on Sunday – which may be why there’s such a glut of job seekers in this segment of the market. (The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches reports that there are more than 600,000 ministers in the U. S. but just 338,000 churches.)

My advice to these particular unemployed, short of counseling them to remember Jesus’s precept about tomorrow taking care of itself, would be to do what so many others do when they can’t find anyone to hire them: go into business for yourself.

Start on any street corner. “Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there am I.” (Jesus again.) Voila! You’re a church, and therefore tax-exempt. Pass the plate. If you take in anything, you’ve made money your very first day in business, and it all went into your pocket. How many entrepreneurs can say that?

Build on that rock, no matter how inconsequential. The key to success, as in any other business, is to give people what they want. Entertainment, in this case, with a little hellfire and damnation thrown in.  Work up some good stories, develop a sound delivery, and you’ll be on your way. If you’re good enough, you’ll be able to get people to let you sleep and eat in their homes.

Maybe you think I’m being facetious. But why should you expect someone to hire you if you can’t do the job on your own?

Russelling, part 2

Bertrand Russell’s 140^th birthday was yesterday. (See yesterday’s entry.)

   “I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue,” Russell wrote. “I think all the great religions of the world—Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam—both untrue and harmful.” 

   The problem with religion, Russell thought, was that it was based on faith instead of evidence. “A habit of basing convictions on evidence,” he wrote, “…would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering. But at present, in most countries, education aims at preventing the growth of such a habit…” (Are you listening, you purveyors of creation “science”?)

   In 1925, Russell published a small book called What I Believe. In it, he wrote that there were forces making for happiness and ones making for misery in the world, and he classed religion among the latter. He likened religion—religious dogma, that is--to a kind of armor that shielded its wearer against “the shafts of impartial evidence.”    

   “Fear is the basis of religious dogma,” he wrote. Fear of nature gave rise to religion, and the fear of death—and life—perpetuates it. “Religion, since it has its source in terror, has dignified certain kinds of fear and made people think them not disgraceful. In this it has done mankind a great disservice: all fear is bad.” Russell said that while he didn’t welcome death, he had no terror of it, even though he denied the possibility of immortality. “Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.”

   A major defect of religion as Russell saw it was its individualism; the defect, if it is one, is even more glaring today, when everyone claims to have a personal relationship with God. The dialogue, or duologue, between one’s soul and God was, Russell granted, at one time a thing devoutly to be wished, because to do the will of God, which led to virtue, was possible and even desirable in a society dominated by the state.

   “This individualism of the separate soul had its value at certain stages of history,” Russell insisted, “but in the modern world we need rather a social than an individual conception of welfare.”

   In short, Russell might have put it, ask not what God can do for you; ask what you can do for your God.
 

Russelling with religion

   Bertrand Russell, the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century, was born on May 18, 1872. He is best known for his works on logic, knowledge, and mathematics; his A History of Western Philosophy is an elegant and entertaining overview of the thoughts and thinkers of the Western world from pre-Socratic times down to his day. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

   In 1927 Russell gave a speech in London called “Why I Am Not a Christian.” He defined a Christian as one who a) believes in God and immortality, and b) believes, at the very least, that Jesus Christ was “if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men.”

   Addressing the first condition, Russell laid out some of the arguments for the existence of God. In short order he demolished:

·        The First-cause Argument. “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause,” Russell said. “If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God.”

·         The Argument from Design. (Everything in the world has been created so that we can live in it and appreciate it, and if it weren’t made just so, we could not live in it.) “It is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world…should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years,” Russell said.

·        The Moral Argument. (There would be no right or wrong unless God existed.) Russell pointed out that if God created both right and wrong, then there was no difference in quality or truth between the two, and therefore it became meaningless to say that God is good.

   Turning to the second condition, concerning the character of Christ, Russell first admitted that Jesus said some wonderful things, among them “Turn the other cheek,” “Judge not lest ye be judged,” and “Sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor.” But he noted that he was consistently less than wise, as he firmly believed that his second coming would happen within the lifetimes of those he was addressing. And because he believed in hell, and angrily condemned those who did not heed his warnings about eternal punishment, Russell judged Jesus to be far less than a paragon of virtue. In fact he placed Socrates and Buddha above him.

   “The Christian religion, as organized in its churches,” Russell concluded, “has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world…

   “When you hear people in church debasing themselves…it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings…"

And finally:

   
            “A good world needs knowledge, kindliness and courage; it does not need…a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”    

Doubt as an operating system

   An article in the New York Times some months ago noted that 12 percent of Americans define themselves as “Nones”—those adhering to no religion—and many of these “Nones,” to make a lame pun on the term, are throwing off the habit of organized worship but not necessarily their belief in God.

   The author, Eric Weiner, says that we need an entrepreneur, in the mold of Steve Jobs, to invent “not a new religion, but a new way of being religious.” This new “operating system,” as Weiner calls it, would, among other benefits, celebrate doubt and elevate humor to an exalted component of worship. No less a champion of the faith than G. K. Chesterton, Weiner points out, said that “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”

   Jesus himself was a doubter and a wag of the first order—well, waggish at least in relation to the comedic standards of the day. His parables about the plank in your own eye and the camel going through the eye of a needle were intended as knee-slappers, but to his constant chagrin his audiences were a somber lot—they needed to be roused from the dead, like Lazarus.

   We see the same over-seriousness as to religion today, Weiner says, perhaps due in part to its association with politics, a decidedly earnest business. Many people, he suggests, would hold on to their religion if the politics weren’t part of the package.

   As to doubt, Jesus was a steadfast practitioner—in particular, he fretted over his followers’ lack of faith and staying power—which enabled him to clearly identify the chief doubters in his midst. And then, of course, near the bitter end, he doubted his own fortitude for the ordeal to come, not to mention the necessity of it all.  One can imagine him in the garden, first praying to be let off the hook, and then going resignedly to his doom, with a smile--maybe even with the Aramaic equivalent of “Let’s do it!” on his lips. What can you do but laugh?

   Weiner notes that only seven percent of “Nones” call themselves atheists. That may be because we (I consider myself a “None”) doubt that the atheist knows the “truth” any more than does the True Believer, or it may be because, for one reason or another, as Weiner says: “We may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.” 

Our prayers are with her

About a year ago, a Nashville woman came up with an iPhone app for the prayerfully challenged, as reported in Nashville’s City Paper. Laura Landress’s Prayermaker is available at the Apple store – somehow appropriate to us Luddites, as it was a apple, you’ll recall, that led to our common downfall.

Prayermaker enables users of different faiths (so far, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, New Thought, and Protestant) to create personalized prayers to offer up to their deity of choice.

“It fills a need to help people find the words to pray when they need those words,” Landress said in a brief Q-and-A with the paper. “The idea came from a desire to help people have a prayer life that is easier to have on a regular basis.” If this is as eloquent as she gets, let’s pray that she’s not the one writing the prayers.

If we’d come up with the idea, here’s the interview we’d conduct with ourselves.

Why would anyone buy your Prayer Home Companion? Isn’t the idea of prayer is that it’s supposed to be heartfelt?

Why does anyone buy a greeting card? They’ve got a feeling in their heart, but they may have a problem putting it into words.

So you’ve got a prayer for every occasion?

We’ve got all the major ones covered. Prayers for success, prayers for health and well being, prayers for world peace or an end to poverty…

Then where does the personal part come in?

Well, within our framework of main categories, users can choose from hundreds of subcategories to custom design a prayer for their specific needs.

It sounds like a cookie-cutter approach to prayer.

Not at all. We provide our users with a whole multitude of ways to express their individuality.

Give us an example.

How about I show you one? Here’s our Home screen. Let’s create a prayer for our Uncle Joe, who’s got cancer. We touch the “Sickness” button here, then, from the pull-down menu we choose “Diseases,” then either “Fatal Diseases” or “Possibly Fatal Diseases,” then “Cancer.” If we wanted to specify the type of cancer, that’s an option.

Now we’re prompted to choose the prayee: “Self,” or “Other.” We select “Other,” and now we see our choices are “Relative,” “Friend,” or “Other.”

Can we look at the “Other” menu?

Ok. We’ll touch “Other,” and we see a long list of choices, like “Celebrities,” “Complete Strangers I Read About and Was Moved By,” and “General.”

“General?”

That’s where we would go to request a cure for cancer.

I see. Back to Uncle Joe.

All right. We’ll back out of this screen and choose “Relative.” Now we select “Uncle,” and it brings up a series of questions designed to create a profile of our Uncle Joe. Here’s where we encourage users to get creative. After they’ve filled in the basic info on Uncle Joe, they’ll see prompts like “Choose three of the following adjectives to describe your uncle,” and a long list of adjectives, plus the option to provide their own.

They can either answer these prompts or elect to skip them. So their prayer can be as simple or elaborate as they want to make it. In any event, with so many choices available, every prayer will be unique. The idea being to make sure that your prayer makes it through to God.

Makes it through?  

Just think of how many prayers your God – whoever He might be – has to listen to every day. The more professionally crafted the prayer, the more likely it is to catch His ear, wouldn’t you say?

Maybe so. We’re done now?

Just about. We touch “Create Prayer,” and wait a few seconds…and our custom-made prayer pops up for our review. Now we can Edit, Send, Save, or Cancel the prayer. If we select Send, the prayer is sent and we’re offered the option of sending this prayer again or another one at a specified date and time, of which our phone will remind us.

Where does the prayer get sent?    

Facebook.

Facebook?

Where else? Everybody’s on Facebook.

Thou shalt read this

   Faddish moderate unbeliever Alain de Botton, the author of Religion for Atheists, has published something called “Ten Commandments for Atheists.” They’re not exactly commandments—actually, they aren’t commandments at all. They are virtues, ones that de Botton considers worthwhile for every infidel to cultivate.

   Why he calls them commandments is a little puzzling—the idea of issuing commandments wouldn’t make sense to atheists, would it, since no one can be said to be in charge? Besides that, his list is rather lame, and doesn’t even address the atheist in particular. His virtues are the old standbys (empathy, patience, politeness) with a few amorphous ones, like “self-awareness” and “resilience,” thrown in.

   Still, it might be salutary for non-believers to contemplate some rules of conduct. The following are definitely not commandments, just a few suggestions.

   THOU SHOULD NOT imagine that thy nonbelief is something particularly original or daring. If you see bad things happen and can’t conceive of a good God that would allow it; if you see that the statement “God created everything” leads to the question “Who created God?” or if you consider that the alleged architect and designer of the universe might have done a lot better, keep in mind that millions of the devout have had such thoughts, and, far from ignoring them, have tried to make room for them in their faith.

   THOU SHOULD recognize that to believe “There can’t be a God” is as lazy as to avow “There must be a God.” No one has the facts; all the data isn’t in yet.

   THOU SHOULD allow for the possibility that we’re asking the wrong questions. To ask “Why would a good God permit evil?” or “How did the universe begin?” may be simply meaningless because it is beyond our power to find the answers, or to understand them if they exist. After all, everything doesn’t have to resolve around us, as Copernicus proved.

   THOU SHOULD not make thy unbelief a personal thing, or if you must, keep it to yourself. To be disappointed in God is as puerile as to be a cheerleader for Him.

   THOU SHOULD NOT, above all, kill the curiosity in thyself, or seek to kill it in anyone else. “To seek God is never in vain,” said St. Bernard, “even if you do not find Him.”

On a mission from God

   A rather incredible letter to the editor ran in our Podunk Press last week. The writer accepts the invitation of another lunatic “to collaborate with him in his effort to rid our schools of atheistic teachings.” The use of the verb “collaborate” sets the tone for the whole letter.

   The writer is honored by the invitation “from a man as well known in this area for his level-headed, plebian (sic) approach to issues.” The man is, indeed, well-known, as a demagogic wing-nut who has all but called President Obama, among other things, a terrorist sympathizer and a baby killer.

   The writer is sure that his collaborator-to-be has “amassed volumes of information on people” over the years, and he calls on him to send him a “list of the known atheist teachers in our schools.” He cautions him to avoid mere hearsay, as the ACLU frowns on “witch hunts.” (Quotation marks are his.) A few lines are worth citing:
   “I will need actual, documented statements from students who feel that their rights were violated by a teacher who told them there was no God, or possibly ridiculed them for holding a particular religious belief. It will be especially poignant if the teacher tried to lead the student in an atheist prayer of some kind. Even if they said nothing, but put atheistic symbols in their classrooms, or wore jewelry that indicated ‘There is no God’ or ‘Jesus is a myth’, will be helpful evidence.”

   The letter is so extravagantly paranoid and loony (for example, what might an “atheist prayer” sound like? And do they make atheist jewelry?) that one has to wonder if the writer is serious. Even if he is, laughter is still the best response, for now. So let’s strike up the band, sit back and enjoy it—two of our community’s stalwarts are, like the Blues Brothers, on a mission from God.

Praying, against all odds

In his book, “Mortality,” Christopher Hitchens, the famous latter-day atheist, devotes the better part of a chapter to a discussion of prayer. When many of his multitudes of friends found out that he had the cancer that would eventually kill him, Hitchens says they let him know they were praying for him even though it might offend him.

Hitchens is tempted to write these folks back: “Praying for what?” a good number of them, he knows, are as much, or more, concerned for his eternal salvation than for his actual recovery.

The effect of prayer on one’s fate in the afterlife cannot be determined, of course, as no one has ever reported back, but Hitchens cites a 2006 study—“the most comprehensive investigation of the subject ever conducted,” he calls it (see below)—that found no correlation between prayer and a patient’s improvement. It did, however, find a negative correlation, in that the person prayed for often felt worse, because he thought he had let his petitioners down. And if he should happen to get better, Hitchens muses, wouldn’t it convince the pious that their prayers had been answered? The thought depresses him even more. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Prayer, besides being possibly un-therapeutic, is also self-contradictory, as Hitchens notes. Presumably the devout regard their deity as all-powerful and all-knowing; if so, isn’t prayer blasphemous if it beseeches this being to change its mind?

And isn’t even a humble prayer, along the lines of “Let my wishes be Thine,” while maybe not negative in character, at least a little redundant? Why ask God to do something He’s going to do anyway? In this case we pray to God in order to praise Him, say the prayerful. But the God who needs constant admiration and thanks is one of the many gods he doesn’t believe in, Hitchens says.

What’s the big deal about praying, the reader might ask. What harm can it do? Hitchens’ answer:

“The emptiness of prayer is almost the least of it. Beyond that minor futility, the religion which treats its flock as a credulous plaything offers one of the cruelest spectacles that can be imagined: a human being in fear and doubt who is openly exploited to believe in the impossible.”

Or believe in the possible, the praying individual will undoubtedly say. But then you can’t argue with such a person—you can only pray for him.  

(The study Hitchens mentions is “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer.” Look online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16569567.

Shack Attack

Author William Paul Young was in town last week to sign copies of his new book. Young is the man responsible for The Shack, the runaway bestseller about a man who spends a weekend in the woods with the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Before Young hit it big, he cleaned toilets for a living, he told the local press. Always interesting, where writers get their inspiration.

In The Shack, God is a large black woman, Jesus is a laid-back white dude with a hooked nose (“I am Jewish,” he explains), the third member of the Bog Three is an Asian woman. The equal-opportunity casting offended many church people, but the real crime perpetrated by the novel is against good prose, dialogue, and plot.

The cover of my paperback copy of The Shack says that there are three million copies in print, but even in this the Land of the Fatuous, it’s hard to imagine that so many readers bought into the concept. God as Aunt Jemima? (“Sho ‘nuff,” she actually says at one point, and then a couple of pages later, “Them greens can give you the trots.”) When The Shack’s protagonist first meets this version of the Almighty, a little bird flies in the window of the kitchen where she is whipping up some vittles and begins to eat out of her hand. The hero and the Holy Trinity spend the weekend eating, laughing, bantering and explaining themselves, and he, the mortal among them, is simply amazed at how down-to-earth his hosts are.     

It all could be a Disney movie, except for the part about the slain daughter and the demented serial killer.

A bio-blurb on my The Shack reveals that Wm. Paul Young “suffered great loss as a child and young adult.” If The Shack was meant to be autobiographical, the title has one too many letters.

A letter in today’s local paper urges the teaching of creationism right along with the teaching of evolution. “We should present both views and let our children make their own decision,” the writer says.

Oh, by all means. Education should be a smorgasbord, from which kids can pick out their favorite dishes. The story about God creating everything in six days is bound to be a popular one, and it can prepare children for reading books like The Shack when they grow up.    

Don't asp

         Proud to be a Tennessean, Reason #692: A front-page story in the Sunday edition of our Great Metropolitan Newspaper is about snake-handling churches. The piece is not just a snippet but is a full five-page splash, with pictures of cretins fondling deadly serpents while yawping or praying and sometimes swooning from the sheer ecstasy of it. The reporter, with admirable journalistic integrity, refrains from editorializing in his in-depth coverage of the phenomenon.

   Readers are treated to the testimony of yokels as to the spiritually invigorating effects of playing with poisonous snakes, as well as the inspiration and justification for it. (Mark 16:17: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents…”) Though the cultists are violating state laws prohibiting snake handling and possessing poisonous snakes, they say it’s worth the risk of punishment to experience the power of the Lord coursing through them.

   The article quotes Wiley Cash, author of a “best-selling” book about a snake-handling church, who says that people want to believe they’ve been singled out by God, and “What better proof than to pick up a timber rattler and not have it bite or to survive a bite?” Can’t think of nary a one, but the good folks at the church in LaFollette can: drinking strychnine. (The passage in Mark continues: “If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”) The reporter did not get to witness this at the service he attended, as “All the poison was drunk at a previous service and they’ve not had time to get more.”

   He also noted that “Most serpent handlers think drinking poison is optional.”

   Women are discouraged from handling snakes, and they’re also not allowed to preach in Pentecostal Holiness churches. They must wear skirts or dresses, and are not allowed to wear earrings or cut their hair. Snake handlers themselves can’t drink (under the theory that alcohol might make them crazy?), curse or have sex outside of marriage. (They can have plenty inside marriage, though: the preacher profiled, age 21, has four kids.)

   The article reports that a pastor in West Virginia, the only state where snake handling is legal (thank God for small favors: at least we don’t live in West Virginia), died about a week ago from a rattlesnake bite. He was following in the hallowed footsteps of his father, who died at the hands (or jaws) of a rattler in 1983. The pastor of the church in LaFollette prayed that his congregation wouldn’t lose the faith.

   “The only thing I know to do,” he said, “is to encourage the people of God to keep on, keep doing the signs of God.”

   Maybe so; after all, life is always a hit-or-miss proposition.         

Atheist or Agnostic?

   No word sets atheists to foaming at the mouth more than agnostic—not evangelical, not born-again, not even Baptist. To the avowed atheist, the mere agnostic is a lily-livered, weak-kneed and spineless specimen of infuriating indecision.

   Besides a fundamental misunderstanding of what an agnostic is, and a possible ignorance of the fact that almost all their cherished and oft-quoted icons considered themselves agnostics and not atheists, self-proclaimed atheists may be confused on another point: Their attitude toward the non-nonbeliever.

   First, the misunderstanding:

   While an atheist rejects all religions, and denies the existence of God (and so flaunts the same certitude as the devoutly religious), the agnostic admits that he does not know.

   There might not be a God: Science alone can explain the universe, for example, all except for how something can arise out of nothing, and if we need an explanation for that, why bring in God?—why not say that if something always had to exist, it might as well be the universe as God?

   There might not be a God, which might explain the random nature of life and death, the prevalence of misery and suffering, the apparent predominance of evil.

   Yet again, there might be a God, which might account for our intimations of something greater than ourselves, for our apperception of mystery and beauty in the universe, for our love and fellow-feeling, for our sense of individual and collective purpose and destiny.

   There may be a God we can apprehend and explain, but none of the world’s religions have yet apprehended and explained Him to the atheist’s satisfaction. The agnostic doubts all the explanations, but admits that he can’t be certain they’re all fallacious. It may be highly unlikely that a God of love will one day roast me like a peanut forever and ever for dancing on Sunday, but the agnostic, while doubting it, admits that it is not impossible.

   Atheism is a belief; agnosticism is based on knowledge (or, rather, the lack of it). 

   Now, for the attitude:

   Many an atheist is put out by the agnostic’s “gutlessness,” and his scorn implies that he himself is genuinely gutsy. Why is the agnostic gutless?-For not avowing something he’s not sure of? And why should the atheist see himself as courageous?—just for avowing something that most people don’t agree with, even if it’s unprovable?

   The atheist proclaims that there is no God, standing up to ridicule and censure from those people whose judgments he doesn’t value in the first place. The agnostic says he doesn’t know, incurring no one’s wrath but everyone’s pity.

   The atheist basks in the novelty and daring of his opinion, while the agnostic cowers in the corner with his uncertainty.

   The atheist forms his conclusions based on the puerile or pathetic beliefs of the religious; the agnostic concedes the value and sometimes the power of belief. 

   The atheist insists that his certainties are more certain than the believer’s; the agnostic suggests that there are no certainties.

   The atheist scoffs, openly or to himself, at the religious impulse, seeing it as weak-minded or deluded. The agnostic is confounded by the fact that so many people—including people far more intelligent than he—are religious. 

Christ-inanity explained

   Christianity would be OK if it weren’t for the Christians.

   A “Christian” woman of my acquaintance, for example – let’s call her Grace – tells me often that she’s praying for me: She knows that I drink, and that I never keep the Sabbath. When I point out to her that Jesus himself preferred the company of wine bibbers and whores and Sabbath breakers to that of respectable people, she frowns.

   That’s because the real personage of Jesus is an inconvenience to her.

   Jesus was impatient with those who stood on formality – those who designated a day as particularly holy, for instance, or who wanted to forbid certain activities and mandate others.  All the rules and regulations, he said – all the fever to formalize and legislate plain love and respect for one another – obscured the simple truth of what he taught.

   And what he taught was as stark and uncompromising as could be. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Turn the other cheek,” and “Give up everything and follow me” are injunctions lovely and splendid as theory, but impossibly daunting in practice. Even Jesus had trouble with them from time to time, what with everyone pulling him in a different direction, doubting him, fearing him and finally forsaking him. He was sometimes out of sorts with even those closest to him, his disciples (“Ye of little faith”).

   After Jesus was gone, of course, he became a cult figure, and the imbecilities began to pile up, embellishing and encrusting his austere and beautiful creed and sometimes, down through the years, rendering it almost totally unrecognizable. Jesus would weep anew to know that such thundering absurdities as the virgin birth or the doctrine of eternal damnation or the wiping away of sins by Atonement have been, and are being, inculcated in his name.

   The Christians beginning with Saint Paul set out to fashion a Jesus who would be popular and palatable to their recruitment base – a Jesus whose warning, “I come not with peace, but with a sword,” would be modified or ignored, and whose assertion that we must be like children would come to justify the utmost credulity and the most infantile beliefs, instead of a rallying cry for what Jesus meant: That we must cast off worldly desires and become like a child again, full of wonder. 

   I call this perversion of Jesus’s teachings and the subversion of his spirit and character: Christ-inanity.            

Simply nonsense

   There is no end to the number of books analyzing what Jesus meant or represented, and to plow through them all would require the time and leisure that the Christian eternity promises. One recent one, called Simply Jesus, asserts that Jesus was God’s agent and spokesperson here on Earth, which indicates that the Almighty had bigger fish to fry elsewhere.

   The Tennessean’s excellent religion columnist, Ray Waddle, wrote a review of Simply Jesus in last Saturday’s paper. Waddle calls the book’s author, N. T. (wonder if they call him New Testament?) Wright, “a leading British interpreter of Christian faith, a successor to C. S. Lewis.” And to judge from some of the excerpts Waddle includes, I see the resemblance: Wright seems to, as Lewis did, specialize in the tenuous argument presented as unassailable fact.

   “Jesus has all sorts of projects up his sleeve,” Wright declares. (Jesus, I presume, wears long sleeves to hide the nail marks.) First and foremost he’ll be getting around to, at long last, implementing the tenets he laid out in the Sermon on the Mount. “The meek will be taking over the earth, so gently that the powerful won’t notice it until it’s too late,” Wright says. But once the meek are in charge, how will anything get done? There’ll have to be someone un-meek enough to make a decision, won’t there? And if power inevitably corrupts, won’t the meek become the bold, engendering a new crop of meeks ready to supplant them in power – and on and on in a Marxian cycle?

   “The peacemakers will be putting the arms manufacturers out of business,” Wright writes. “Those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice will be analyzing government policy and legal rulings and speaking up on behalf of those at the bottom of the pile.” The passage is uncannily Lewisian: Fatuous speculation put forth as gospel.

   But Lewis, at least, was always lucid. When Wright says, “Heaven is God’s space, God’s dimension of present reality, it’s hard to either criticize or commend the statement, because it’s – simply meaningless.

  

Pray for us

     A Nashville woman has come up with an iPhone app for the prayerfully challenged, Nashville’s City Paper reported last week. 
     Laura Landress’s Prayermaker is available at the Apple store – somehow appropriate to us Luddites, as it was a apple, you’ll recall, that led to our common downfall.

     Prayermaker enables users of different faiths (so far, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, New Thought, and Protestant) to create personalized prayers to offer up to their deity of choice.

     “It fills a need to help people find the words to pray when they need those words,” Landress said in a brief Q-and-A with the paper. “The idea came from a desire to help people have a prayer life that is easier to have on a regular basis.” If this is as eloquent as she gets, let’s pray that she’s not the one writing the prayers.

     If we’d come up with the idea, here’s the interview we’d conduct with ourselves.

Why would anyone buy your Prayer Home Companion? Isn’t the idea of prayer is that it’s supposed to be heartfelt?

Why does anyone buy a greeting card? They’ve got a feeling in their heart, but they may have a problem putting it into words.

So you’ve got a prayer for every occasion?

We’ve got all the major ones covered. Prayers for success, prayers for health and well being, prayers for world peace or an end to poverty…

Then where does the personal part come in?

Well, within our framework of main categories, users can choose from hundreds of subcategories to custom design a prayer for their specific needs.

It sounds like a cookie-cutter approach to prayer.

Not at all. We provide our users with a whole multitude of ways to express their individuality.

Give us an example.

How about I show you one? Here’s our Home screen. Let’s create a prayer for our Uncle Joe, who’s got cancer. We touch the “Sickness” button here, then, from the pull-down menu we choose “Diseases,” then either “Fatal Diseases” or “Possibly Fatal Diseases,” then “Cancer.” If we wanted to specify the type of cancer, that’s an option.

   Now we’re prompted to choose the prayee: “Self,” or “Other.” We select “Other,” and now we see our choices are “Relative,” “Friend,” or “Other.”

Can we look at the “Other” menu?

Ok. We’ll touch “Other,” and we see a long list of choices, like “Celebrities,” “Complete Strangers I Read About and Was Moved By,” and “General.”

“General?”

That’s where we would go to request a cure for cancer.

I see. Back to Uncle Joe.

All right. We’ll back out of this screen and choose “Relative.” Now we select “Uncle,” and it brings up a series of questions designed to create a profile of our Uncle Joe. Here’s where we encourage users to get creative. After they’ve filled in the basic info on Uncle Joe, they’ll see prompts like “Choose three of the following adjectives to describe your uncle,” and a long list of adjectives, plus the option to provide their own.

   They can either answer these prompts or elect to skip them. So their prayer can be as simple or elaborate as they want to make it. In any event, with so many choices available, every prayer will be unique. The idea being to make sure that your prayer makes it through to God.

Makes it through?  

Just think of how many prayers your God – whoever He might be – has to listen to every day. The more professionally crafted the prayer, the more likely it is to catch His ear, wouldn’t you say?

Maybe so. We’re done now?

Just about. We touch “Create Prayer,” and wait a few seconds…and our custom-made prayer pops up for our review. Now we can Edit, Send, Save, or Cancel the prayer. If we select Send, the prayer is sent and we’re offered the option of sending this prayer again or another one at a specified date and time, of which our phone will remind us.

Where does the prayer get sent?    

Facebook.

Facebook?

Where else? Everybody’s on Facebook.

Mother of myths

“The mother cult is something that will set future generations roaring with laughter.” – Gustave Flaubert.

   Those generations haven’t arrived yet, obviously, and the cult of the mother, which holds its signal celebration on this day, still flourishes.

   Mother-worship is as old as mankind itself. The Earth Mother was probably civilized man’s first deity – the goddess of crops. The Virgin Mary was a much later version. The most famous mother in Western history has her hordes of ardent devotees even down to this day.

   What would Jesus have made of the idea of people venerating His mother? For that matter, what would He have thought of Jesus-worship? The New Testament provides no clear-cut evidence that He regarded Himself as divine. As for his mom’s awareness of it, consider the episode in Matthew in which she urges her son to go with her to John the Baptist and be baptized, in order to wash away His sins.

   Indeed, it appears, at least to this skeptic from his reading of the Gospels, that Jesus had no inkling of His divine duty until He met John the Baptist and was inspired to start preaching himself. Even then, he delayed matters for 40 days and nights, pondering on it. If He’d been convinced of his supposed mission, would he have waited?

   As for the Virgin Birth, did Jesus ever hear of it? It’s never mentioned in Mark (the oldest Gospel) or John, and the details of it differ in Matthew and Luke. Again, the notion of virgin birth was an age-old one and very common in Jesus’s part of the world in those days, particularly in Egypt.

   Just sayin’. Happy Mother’s Day.