Wrestling with Religion

  Back when I was in my sixties, the twenty-year-old son of a friend was shot to death. The shooting wasn't justified, shooter convicted of aggravated manslaughter, but the young man took risks I wouldn't have, even at his age, rushing into a confrontation over a woman. He was, compared to my milquetoast youth, an impulsive and erratic quester on the edges of conformity. In mythological terms, he was a would-be hero killed by his dragon when the maiden betrayed him. I shouldn't have been surprised that notebooks shared at his memorial service indicated that he had been, in his own words, searching for the "meaning of life." My reaction to this (of course, not shared with anyone at the service) was sardonic laughter tinged with wonder. I'm not sure if a quest for "the meaning of life" would have made sense to me even at age twenty, but I long ago abandoned it as a fool's errand, a snipe hunt. In its naive sense at least, the question What does ...

In his second inaugural address near the end of the deadliest war in America. Abraham Lincoln observed that both sides "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." While tempering judgement "with malice toward none," Lincoln wondered (as most of us would today) how anybody could pray to a just God to preserve slavery.  Apologists for race-based slavery pointed to Biblical slavery (a very different institution) and described Africans as perpetual children in the economic family, blaming its cruelties on cruel masters, not a bad institution. But the brutality of American slavery was obvious to any who dared to look. Slaves could be whipped, starved, raped, and worked to death with impunity--protected only by a master's profit motive or benevolence. Although murder was llegal, white killers of slaves were seldom punished. Blacks, on the other hand, were lynched or legally executed merely for insults to whites--certai...

Ruthie Hurt, 1934           There was a slop jar under the bed in the front room where him and Mama slept, but Papa wouldn't use it even when he got on in years and had to go at night. By then I was the only one at home, folks wondering if I'd be an old maid, but I didn't care. I liked the old place.             Him and Mama kept the front room with the fire, and I slept in the room across the dogtrot where I run and duck under the featherbeds on winter nights, but it ain't bad most of the year. Except when Papa comes out out in his old boots to do his business. His loud old boots. Not to the outhouse in the dark. He wasn't touched, just didn't think fitting indoors or in the clean back yard. So he'd go through the gate out to the chicken yard, aggravating them too, I reckon, but they was used to it. And then I'd wait for him to come clomping back to bed. So I was listening when he hollered. It was cold, liable to frost, so...

My last two essays wrestled with the ancient fable of six blind men describing an elephant and suggested that, in words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, "No generalization is worth a damn, including this one."   Oliver Wendell Holmes contemplates a generalization.           Generalizations, obviously, aren't useless. They convey useful information, but the fable of the elephant--indeed, the sum of all open-minded experience--argues that they aren't unconditionally true. A generalization true in one aspect is false in another, so much so that I doubt if universals exist; if any non-tautological string of words is true in all circumstances. Referential truth depends on contexts that recede from view like images in facing mirrors. Generalizations depend on clouds of cultural, ideological, and personal contexts impossible to make explicit because underneath each statement of context is another cloud of unstated contexts.  We interpret generalizations using com...

         A traveling salesman lost on a backroad saw a country store ahead. He pulled his car up beside an old man and a dog on a bench in front and, just to be safe, asked, "Does your dog bite?"           "Nope," said the old man. When the salesman got out, the dog lunged, tearing off half his pants leg as he jumped back and slammed the car door. "I thought you said your dog didn't bite." "Ain't my dog," said the old man. This is a variation on the ancient parable of the blind men who describe an elephant in contradictory but accurate terms because they are touching different parts. Truth depends on context. The old man's answers are perfectly true--even more true, logically speaking, if he never owned a dog. In that case, he can say with complete certainty that no dog he owns bites. Your dog is an empty set, incapable of bites.              Of course, a more considerate old man might have...