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.

        

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beasts of pray

It sounded like a novel form of animal abuse, worshippers taking their dogs to church with them, but then I read that the four-legged friends get treats and beds and aren’t required to hear a sermon or attend Sunday school.
The Covenant Presbyterian Church in California has instituted a weekly service for dogs, our town’s daily dog-bed liner has reported. The pastor takes canine prayer requests from his flock for the infirm and afflicted and the dearly departed denizens of dogdom, and then intones the Lord’s Prayer. Wouldn’t the 23rd Psalm be more appropriate (“The Lord is my Shepherd…”)?
The idea, in part, is to accommodate slackers who are more devoted to their pets than to their faith. And don’t all preachers fervently pray for a congregation that will sit up and take notice?
Wonder if, at some point during the services, attendees turn backwards and offer up a hymn to doG?
Do dogs have souls in need of redemption? The Bible is vague on the question, except to say that man was meant to have dominion over the beasts, who are too dumb, presumably, to apprehend the weighty subjects of death and original sin and grace and eternal life. But plenty of simple God-fearing Christians fully expect to be reunited with their beloved bow-wows in heaven. And, if our pooches can’t be as immortal as us, how to account for Cerberus, the hound who guards the gates of Hell?

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!