On Faith

God don't hate the Muslims

God don't hate the Jews

God don't hate the Christians

But we all give God the blues ¹

I've been trying to get a fix on how I feel about religion.  And faith.  Especially faith. 

Despite the best efforts of my namesake² and other kindred philosophers, you can’t reason your way to belief in the Abrahamic God.  Too many paradoxes and contradictions.  The suffering of children.  His capricious cruelty.  His jealousy.  His demands for total obedience.  Do we have free will or not?  Are the odds stacked against us no matter what we do?  Reason can’t handle it.  You gotta have faith.

I’ve never been able to get there.  The questions won’t leave me.  I imagine the feeling of faith as giving one’s self up, accepting that those questions that feel impenetrable to me are so unanswerable they no longer even need to be asked.  Faith humbles you and hands you the unquestionable truth.  And with faith you know it’s true for everybody, whether or not they believe it.  I can see why so many would find this soothing.  Doubt is hard.

So why does the embrace of faith seem so unnecessary for me?  That the universe is accidental and meaningless doesn’t bother me at all, even though I know that for many (most?) people it’s too terrifying to accept.  It’s not that I’m puzzled that people need to believe many of the things they believe – that there’s a purpose to everything, that there’s a higher power making sense of it all.  What puzzles me is that I don’t. 

I think of the many people who look at the biological complexities of life on earth and feel that it is self-evident that this couldn’t possibly have all occurred by chance.  It’s so complex!  So many tiny details and chemical interactions that have had to occur within so many narrow windows of possibility.  Surely there is a cosmic intelligence setting it all in motion.  It seems so clear to them.  But why?  Isn’t this precisely how random chance works?  The odds against throwing heads fifty times in a row are vast, but clearly it’s not impossible, since each throw has exactly the same odds as the last one, or the next.  The prospect of a thousand monkeys randomly typing out War and Peace.

Similar in approach, and even more absurd to my mind is the metaphor of the divine watchmaker, most popular a few centuries back.  That a human being is such a fabulously intricate mechanism it must exemplify the brilliance of the designer.  Well, let me tell you, I’ve got some consumer feedback for that divine designer!!  My fabulously intricate mechanism keeps breaking down and we’ve only got the crudest of tools to try to keep it running.  Mostly guesswork and nothing as effective as we’d like.  The Christian explanation for all this pain and frailty is a bitter bit of misogynistic victim shaming.  We’d’ve been fine if it hadn’t been for the curiosity of the wench tempting us to want to know all about good and evil.  Ignorant obedience would’ve been bliss, but we sinned and in retribution our loving and merciful god condemns us to suffering.  All of us.  Regardless of our actual behavior.  Unbaptized infants spending eternity in limbo.  Whole cultures consigned to hell because they never got the Word.  What a story.  It takes a lot of faith to swallow that act of your gentle and loving God.

As mystic metaphor, the Bible is a fine example of human creativity, one of our greatest works.  But if it actually is the inerrant word of God, then it reveals God to be capricious and cruel.  In the early days of Christianity there were some fringe sects that concluded the Creator must be insane.  Those always appealed to me. 

Nonetheless, there is surely something in our natures that craves meaning, even requires it.  For so many people, the belief that everything has a purpose is an essential bulwark against the despair that comes when you look in the face of death.  But the universe is too vast and mysterious for me to find meaning there.  I look inward for it rather than out.

It’s not that I believe in a strictly material universe.  But a comparative religion class in my sophomore year of high school persuaded me that there were too many versions of dogma across the planet for any one of them to be The Truth. 

Later I read James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.  It was a revelation to me to consider the validity of someone’s experience separated from their interpretation of the meaning of that experience.  Visions are real things.  Where they come from and what they mean is the mystery.  Can you convince me that your explanation is truer than mine?

Pascal wagers that you’re better off believing than not.  If there is no supreme being, what has your belief cost you in the afterlife?  But if you choose not to believe and it turns out the dove and the carpenter are waiting at the gates, with Dad of the long beard glowering ferociously behind them, you’re gonna be in a world of hurt.

But what does it mean to “believe” in Jesus?  To adopt him as your personal savior?  To be born again?  How is this something that you can choose to do?  Jonathan Edwards, America’s original fire and brimstone preacher, railed against those who sat piously in the pews but hadn’t let Jesus into their hearts.  God would know and God would judge and they would suffer horribly for it forever.  I imagine some of them sitting there in fear, knowing that everything Pastor Edwards is saying is true, but unable to find the key to faith in their own hearts, and knowing they’d be doomed for that failure.

The belief certainly doesn’t seem to lead most often to tolerance and kindness.  Oh, sure, there are plenty of examples where a Jesus-led life helps one draw upon their better natures.  But more often organized religion leads to self-righteousness and a justification to punish and even kill in the name of the Lord.  That seems to me to be a grotesque perversion of the message of Jesus Christ, but I’m not a Christian, so who am I to say?  Even Jesus himself is pretty clear that you can’t achieve salvation except through him.  Or so it is written.

Surely it’s undeniable that throughout history religious belief has been used as the justification for the worst excesses of human cruelty.  (Although one could argue that some of the worst of the worst occurred under Nazism and Stalinism, Pol Pot and Mao’s Cultural Revolution – only the first of which had any religious trimmings).  But then you have to consider exemplary human beings like Jimmy Carter and MLK, who clearly derived great strength from their Baptist faith.³  Religion doesn’t have to lead to intolerance.

I listen to Odetta singing “Glory, Glory” and I’m embarrassed at my arrogant ignorance.  I believe myself to be unusually empathetic to the struggles that people go through in trying to live a life.  It’s incredibly hard and I believe that most people are trying their best.  And then I’m perplexed at the need to believe there is something good at the end of all that struggle?  At the need to believe that there is a purpose to all of it, that somehow it makes sense?  How could a slave endure if they believed they were a victim of nothing but random chance and there was no hope for salvation ever?  Most peoples’ life struggles are much, much harder than mine.  For many it is their faith that sustains them.  Through Him all things are possible – even an end to the bitterest suffering.  Call it a crutch, but who am I to belittle anybody else’s choice of assistive devices.

It’s the story of Job, now inverted in my modernity.  The devil argues with God.  Strip away all of the good things in his life and Job will abandon his faith.⁴  That “there are no atheists in foxholes” implies that if all of the good things I savor are taken away, I will abandon my lack of faith.  Not a chance, I’d say, to which the person of faith smiles gently, “You haven’t been tested enough.” 

Which is not to say I haven’t been tested.  The eruption in my spinal cord (over ten years ago now) took from me so many of the things I most loved doing – no more long walks in strange cities, no more delicate finger-picking or ecstatic strumming on the guitar.  Retired on disability because I could no longer do the job.  Where my body had been a delight, it’s now a painful burden, every bit of movement requiring all the energy and effort I can muster, not a step possible without cane or walker or wheelchair.   There’s plenty of cursing.  And still, when I think of the losses, my immediate emotional response is gratitude for all the experiences I’ve been able to have, gratitude for all that I’m still able to do.  It mystifies me.

But if the truth is that I haven’t been tested enough, have no fear!  There’s plenty of testing yet to come.  The depredations of aging, the brain slowing, forgetfulness increasing.  I know that I know how to spell that word!  What was it again?  People with my spinal cord condition often undergo what’s called “accelerated aging”.  Insult piled on insult, galloping towards the exit.  There hasn’t been a day since my teens that I haven’t prepared myself for the possibility of the sudden and unexpected deaths of my loved ones.  Now it becomes common.  And not just those we hold personally close, family, friends, and lovers, but also the artists and heroes who we looked to for guidance in how to shape our selves.  As time goes on there are fewer to worry about, more to mourn.  Lucinda Williams sings, “Even your thoughts are dust”.  In the New Yorker interview I turn back to again and again, Jessica Lange looks forward to reprising her role in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, fifteen years after playing it the first time, “…at this point in my life, there’s so much more loss that I just knew that, if I came back to Mary, there would be much more resonance.” We battle despair by using it to fuel our art.  But as the end approaches, inevitably, we lose everything.  Will my sense of gratitude sustain me then?

I remember my father’s response, when in the late stages of his Parkinson’s Disease, someone would attempt to commiserate by saying, “It just isn’t fair.”  “And lucky for me, because if it was fair, I’d be a lot worse off.”  The things he loved about his life were always greater than the losses he sustained.  But although he left the church when Mom did, I don’t know if he ever abandoned his faith.

A while back I read an interview in which the cosmic being colloquially known as Sonny Rollins said, “...there are divine moments in this world. ... This world is just a place to pay off our karma. That’s all.”  Maybe it was just the particular evening mood I was in, but the image pierced me, lifted me.

Think of your path as a highway through the multiverse. Uncountable realities, the essence that you are shifting from one being into another, lives that occupy moments or centuries.  This particular instantiation of reality is like one of those travel plazas spanning the hither and yon lanes of the turnpike.  In each of your existences you travel, learning, reaching, trying to settle the aches, trying to do good or gain power or retreat into solipsism or self-abnegation.  Through it all you’re leaving your mark on all the other beings hurtling along – not just humans but all things that emanate from the oversoul⁵, i.e., all things.  You do good, you do damage.  You build up grit from your mistakes, sludge from your inevitable bad decisions.  The scars you carry from those you hurt, treated unfairly or carelessly, are slowing you down.  Time for a break so you pull off into this particular plain where you get something between three minutes and eighty years to work through some of the accumulated karma.  Somewhat refreshed you dive back into the stream, determined to give it another shot.  Existence doesn’t need to provide reasons.

Do I believe that?  I can’t say.  Maybe I just like it.  I’ve always felt that I was an old soul, again without quite being willing to say I believe it.  But I’ve always felt a weight and a depth to my being that seemed to stretch back through ages.  When I’ve talked about this with people who know me well, they’re inclined to agree.  Reincarnation could account for that.

But there I’m stuck with the old problem of personal identity, the duality of mind and body.  In what sense is there a “me” abstracted from the body that is so much a part of what makes me, me?

Perhaps we remember so little of our past incarnations because memory is so intertwined, so embedded in our bodies that what remains when the body is gone doesn’t have enough substance left to encode memory.  That essence that remains (something like what Christians think of as the soul) is the repository of the good and ill that we’ve done. 

I was fifteen when I took that comparative religions class.  My mother had pulled us out of Catholic grade school a few years earlier, having become both disillusioned by the fact of local prelates making up dogma, and concerned about the interest the nuns and priests were taking in me as possible priestly material.  So I was already unhooked from my Catholic upbringing.  And now I discovered that billions of people believed completely different things from what the nuns and priests had been trying to teach me!  How was I supposed to make sense of that?

I’d been an altar boy, Catholic School from 2^nd grade to 7^th, Mass every morning, dreamily gazing at the statue of the Virgin Mary, imagining that if I prayed hard enough she might speak to me.  Dad had been a lay deacon and Mom taught religion classes for Catholic kids who went to the public schools.  Local priests were frequent guests at our house.  But by the time Mom took me out of St. Mary’s and moved me to the public school named for Electa Quinney, I was no longer a believer either.  The Christian Nationalists are right – give kids the opportunity to read widely and there’s no telling what they’ll end up believing.  Or rejecting.

Van Morrison sings, “And if you get it right this time / you don’t have to come back”.  But what if I want to?  Does the very fact of my wanting to go around again establish that I still haven’t done it right?

No worries.  I’m not close to done.  The facts of my failures are clear, strewn before me, undeniable.  Even if I’d started with a clean slate I’d still have more karma to work through than I’ve got time enough left.  And I don’t even know what I started with!  How much did I enter this life already needing to make up for?  How much damage did whatever the me was in the last incarnation do to those I encountered?  And then there’s making up for all the failures of this life.  It’d be easy to feel you were trying your best and still get to the end bearing an even greater karmic debt than you started off with!

But I think I’m a little better than even so far for this life.  Using my mother’s metaphor of trying to make each person’s encounters with me something that goes into the positive side of the balance rather than the negative, I believe I’ve done more good than harm.  How much?  Impossible to tell.

My quasi-belief in this life as a karmic travel plaza sits more easily in my psyche than the quest for Christian faith.  I don’t need that level of certainty, illusory or not.  I believe in the power of good and evil, the necessity of kindness.  The path of the Lakota, the Way of the Taoist, a sprinkling of Zen humor – that seems to be enough for me.  That each life is one more opportunity to do better by the people around me, that whatever I didn’t have the strength or courage to address this time, I’ll get another chance – that’s a cosmic garment that nestles comfortably around this frame.  I don’t need to know if it’s true.

1. Thanks for this, Shawn Mullins. Great video.

2. Actually, Mom seemed to waffle between my patron saint being Aquinas the theologian or Thomas the Apostle.  Clearly I have aspects of both, the philosopher trying to reason his way to the truth, and the skeptic unwilling to believe that Jesus was risen until he could put his hand in the wound in Jesus’ side.  But I think she preferred Aquinas.

3. Bearing in mind that Carter took the personally painful step to leave the Southern Baptist Convention when its intransigent misogyny became too much for him to tolerate.

4. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t.

5. Don’t confuse the oversoul with the Abrahamic god. In my conception the oversoul has no intelligence of its own.