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…)      

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.”    

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.”

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.    

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. 

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.

God: That is the question

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 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…)      

God the Superfluous

Attended services this morning, held on my back deck, of the Church of God the Superfluous.

God, I prayed, if you exist, forgive us for our careless, selfish and unworthy thoughts of you. We have looked upon you as a gift giver and a bribe taker, as a sentimental old fool (with a beard) to be flattered and cajoled. We have ascribed all of our mean and scurvy human qualities to you, and depicted you as cruel, vindictive, grasping, jealous, angry, petty, vainglorious. We have leached all the magnificence and splendor out of you in trying to understand you.

We have created you in our own image, in the belief that man is the measure of all things.

God, we have made you the repository of all our confused notions about good and evil. We have made you bear the intolerable burden of perfect goodness, and have cursed you in our hearts for not making us good.
We have made you the author of the universe, and held you accountable for the narrative, which we perceive but dimly.

In our immense self-concern we have demanded that you give meaning to all of our lives.

Forgive us, o Lord, we beseech Thee, for making Thee superfluous.

Nature, long in tooth and nail

Because our natural world is so pleasing to the human eye, it must be the handiwork of God. So the argument goes. It is usually put forth by those with little firsthand experience, apparently, of Nature.
Have you been out in the woods lately? Swarms of gnats, savage horseflies, blood-ravening mosquitoes, and homicidal spiders assault you at every step. A poem, addressed to God:

Why/The fly?/And at that/The gnat?

The spider strings its webs between low-hanging branches, in the air lanes of flying insects, and those that are trapped it often devours alive. All through the murmurous glade, creatures pursue and are pursued; the race is to the swift, and as for those that stumble and fall, seldom is the courtesy paid to let death descend before beginning the meal.

“What a book a devil’s chaplain might right on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature!” That was Charles Darwin, devout to begin, who gradually lost his faith through long observation of random and remorseless nature.

The woods offer a pretty prospect from my back deck. All art is deception.

Mr. God Takes a Vacation

It appears that our God in Heaven went away on vacation in or around the Year 1, shortly after the death and then the disappearance of his son. He left no forwarding address.
A source said that God was despondent over the loss of his only offspring, Jesus Christ, and worn out from the demands of the public. He was reportedly particularly exasperated by the continuing obtuseness of people in positions of trust. Having brought his son back from the dead, he was disappointed, the source reported, that the disciples still wanted proof that he was Jesus the Chosen One.
God’s mood went from depression to anger, those close to him said, to the extent that he considered another flood; friends and associates, however, talked him into taking some time off.
Apparently God left sketchy, at best, instructions for subordinates to carry on in his absence. The ship of state sailed on under its own momentum for some time, then began to founder during the so-called Dark Ages; it has continued to take on water ever since.
God’s place of retreat is entirely unknown to this day. His date of return is likewise a mystery, but concerned constituents should bear in mind that two thousand years is but the blink of the eye in eternal time. It may be that God is just now opening his beach bag and putting on sunscreen.

Happy Fourth!

(Picture: Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who both died July 4, 1826.)
On this day we’re reminded that our Founding Fathers consecrated “the pursuit of happiness” as one of our sacred blessings and inviolable rights, and vexed us ever afterward with the question: What is happiness?
Disregarding all those many whose notions of happiness are no more than those of a pig in a trough, what makes us happy? A placid existence, unruffled by care? Aside from the near-certainty that no one has ever experienced it, should that really stand as our ideal of happiness?
Wealth and fame? But don’t we all know by now of the tribulations of the rich and famous, which console us for being neither? And besides, should mere ambition and the grab for money represent and epitomize the pursuit of happiness?
How about a sense of purpose? This is probably what the Founders meant, more or less, by their vague phraseology. In the new world they were building they expected everyone to take part in the endeavor, to exercise his freedom to seek happiness in a way that would contribute to the common good. But when the sense of such a purpose is stifled or overwhelmed, or is nowhere to be found in an anonymous mass society, then people will look elsewhere, and the religious impulse may take hold. It bids us, in our pursuit of happiness, to worship the unseen, to believe in the unbelievable, to trust in a life to come in which wishes will be reality. So “happiness” becomes the idiotic mooning over something that never was and never will be.
Our Fathers decreed that we were endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, but they disagreed about the nature of that creator and whether it even concerned itself with the affairs of men. They saw that for us to be free we must be free of superstition and fear, and that for us to be happy we must find our own purpose in this life, the only one we can be sure of.

A novel enterprise

It’s been a year since I finished writing a novel. (Shameless self-promotion: It’s available at Amazon; title is The Misforgotten.)

There wasn’t any reason or logic, especially, behind this undertaking. I wrote my 340-page magnum opus to purge myself of accumulated random thoughts and a narrative that’s been nagging at me for years. It was an act, you could say, of pure self-indulgence. Beyond that, if there is a beyond that, it was an effort to make sense of things.

And, for better or worse, that’s what religion is. Dawkins and Hitchens and Maher and all the other shrill and strident atheists want everyone to come to their senses and start using their heads on the question of God. But if everyone used their heads all the time then no novels would get written (also for better or worse, people will argue), no music would get composed (except the sterile kind of music), no paintings would get painted (ditto on the last parentheses). Literature and music and art are what help a lot of us get through life, and the same goes for religion.

The utterances of Jesus are as beautiful and mysterious and startling as the works of Michelangelo or Bach or Keats, and to ask that we abandon our “belief” in any of them is to say we should close our hearts – while using our heads – to the ineffable.

Hell's bells

A megastar pastor and author of a best-selling book about hell was in Music City last week to deliver a sermon on his view of God and His fiery furnace.

Hell, says Rob Bell, whose Love Wins has won him fame and fortune (it’s second on the New York Times bestseller list), but also the wrath of the fire-and-brimstone set, may not be irrevocable. God can give people a second chance, in Bell’s eschatology, although He does fell the need to punish them for a spell, for purification’s sake.

But “a God who tortures people in hell forever can’t be trusted and is not good,” Bell says.

The argument raises some interesting and pressing questions: Can a part-time torturer be called “good”? What conduct should one strive for in hell, in order to earn a reprieve? If we can spring ourselves from hell, can we also fumble our way out of heaven? And, more to the point:

Has everyone lost their mind?

Here we are, a decade into the 21st century, and still the idiotic and monstrous notion of hell, which has made life a hell on earth for so many millions, has not relinquished its hold on our imaginations. Like babies, we conjure demons in our dreams and boogeymen under our beds, and then try to explicate such infantile fancies.

Our speculations about hell—its design, its curriculum—are as senseless as the visions of a lunatic. And our debates—so earnest, so learned—about just what species of ogre God is, must set the Almighty, if He’s listening, to either roaring with laughter or trembling with rage. Sometimes He must think that a really big bonfire wouldn’t be a bad idea.

We scratch God’s back…

Looking for Christ-inanity material in the local libes the other day, I picked up A Life God Rewards Devotional, published in 2002, a slim volume but chock-full of fodder for ridicule.

Author (he’s world-renowned!) Bruce Wilkinson kicks off with a preface, or “Invitation,” introducing his theme but mostly taking the opportunity to plug his other products. “I wrote A Life God Rewards to help people recapture the truth about the connection between what we do today and what God will do for us in eternity…If you haven’t read the book, I urge you to do so.”

The devotional I’m holding in my hands, he explains, is to take me further in my understanding and to live a life that will earn me “God’s ‘Well done!’” And toward this end, the world-renowned Mr. W. further urges me to “By all means pick up the companion tool, A Life God Rewards Journal…Also, be sure to take advantage of A Life God Rewards Bible Study and video seminar…”

“Join me on this joyful, life-changing journey today,” his Invitation concludes. (We’ll be wiser but poorer, after shelling out for all the necessary supplies.)

A real Introduction follows this, entitled “The Big Picture of Your Eternity,” and it turns out that this picture is so big that it requires three days to take it all in. (Day One: A Welcome Jolt; Day Two: The Keys That Unlock Forever; Day Three: Forever in Focus.)

The book’s body is divided into four weeks of seven days each—God rested on Sunday, but not our mentor, and neither does he advise us to. The short chapters have snappy titles: "Working in the Son", "Who Ate My Cheesecake?", "God’s Secret Service", "Hell Is No Party", etc.

On the subject of Hades, the author pulls no punches. “Hell is a place of torment without an exit,” he says. (I imagined a stalled elevator piping New-Age Gospel songs.) “People there are conscious, they can communicate, they feel pain and regret—and their condition will never change.” From this, he concludes “Life is short, but God is good.”

Merciful, too, because the little devotional ends a few pages after this, before I succumb to violent laughter and have to face the eternal flames prematurely.

God's Bodkins

How odd
That God
Would demand
A hand --
Applause,
Just because
He's on high
-- What a guy!

Who craves
Our raves?
The almighty!

Aphrodite,
That hussy,
Wasn't as fussy,
Nor
Was old Thor
Up in Norway!

Only Jahweh
Desires
Great choirs
Of praise --
Heavenly days!

Knowing God to death

When my daughter was about six or seven, she asked me if I believed in God. I told her no, and she asked me why.

I don't see any evidence, I told her.

"He's not a person, Dad," she told me. "He wouldn't come down and leave any evidence."

Why would he? Why would God want us to "know" him? Our knowledge of him would diminish him -- he would no longer be perfect.

And furthermore, can we say of a perfect being that it would "want"?

"The more we refine our concept of God to square with natural law, to explain what we know, the more pointless it seems." -- Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory.

God as designated knower

People have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what's worth knowing, said Oscar Wilde. "Newspapers provide that service."

I like to know things but there are many things I don't want to know, like what goes on in a slaughterhouse.

We make God in our image and require Him to know all the things we don't care to know, and to love them.