Wrestling with Religion

Our son took my wife and me on a camping trip in Oregon. We enjoyed the unearthly beauty of Crater Lake, a night in an old-growth forest, and a concert in the shadow of Mount Hood. But between these spectacles were hours in the bumpy back seat of his Subaru Outback with a skinny hound while he, in the front with his wife and the other dog, hunted music on the radio. In over-lumbered wastelands and raw country towns, that replicant of the Deep South that is back-country Oregon, Aaron complained: "Nothing but country and religious stations!" I grew up in Alabama, a culture divided between saints and sinners. Alcohol was a Red Sea between them. "He drinks" was enough to explain wasteful and self-destructive behavior, even though the Bible takes moderate drinking for granted. Jesus made wine (John 2:1-11), consumed enough of it to be called a "drunkard" (Luke 7:34, Matthew 11:19), and even called it his blood. Paul advises Timothy to drink wine (1 Timothy 5...

A cryptic passage in Genesis bonded with the idea that Satan is an enemy of God in the world, a fallen angel assisted by legions of demons. As I've discussed earlier, originally disconnected verses combined to make this story: the snake in Eden, the Book of Job, and a satiric song about the king of Babylon. And five verses in Genesis gave rise to an explicit demonology in two apocryphal scriptures.   GENESIS            According to Genesis, immediately before Noah's flood, an unspecified group of God's "sons" marry "daughters of humans," causing him to limit human lifespan. A group called Nephilim are ancient mighty heroes "on the earth" at that time: When people began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, "My spirit shall not abide in humanity forever, since they are flesh, their da...

  As I've discussed in previous sections, The God of the Old Testament was beyond good and evil. He included the Devil. Satan was his servant or one of his sons. Yahweh dictated moral law for people, but he was not bound by it. Richard Nixon is supposed to have said, "If the President does it, it's not against the law." This applies in spades to Yahweh.           There can be no more unambiguous evil than the deliberate murder of   a child. I don't refer to abortion. A fetus doesn't engage guilt as unambiguously as a screaming three-year-old. It takes a special kind of monster to slaughter children, and yet that is what Yahweh commanded Joshua and his soldiers to do as they invaded Canaan, to massacre everyone in conquered towns solely because of their ethnicity. Maybe this should be no surprise . The Flood drowned every child but Noah's, and an angel slaughtered the firstborn of Egypt after God hardened the Pharaoh's heart to make this inevitable. Thi...

  Fort Morgan, Mobile Bay I was raised in Sandfort Community, a smudge of ancient ocean beach that surfaces inland in east Alabama where farmers plough up fossil shells. General Floyd's men shoveled up a fort of sand against the Creeks there, sand walls and trenches reinforced with perishable timber. In seventy years, the work of men has melted like a sandcastle until the fort where I played as a boy is now a soft inland dune unnatural only in its great O shape. There are many communities like Sandfort: a log store that had been a trading post and barns and houses scattered like daffodils in a field, along a muddy highway and under yard trees on scrub-hedged lanes. And there are many men like me--born on the bottom end of the planter class, educated before Fort Sumpter in county academies, lieutenants under Lee in Virginia, returning home to farm scraps of inherited land spared by tax collectors. At cotton-picking time, black children fill my fields. I never married. Neighbors s...