Wrestling with Religion

After writing last week about Kris Kristofferson's inexplicable spiritual experience, the one that inspired his song "Why Me?" I was reminded of Jonathan Edwards 1741 sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a classic of American Literature.             Kristofferson asks, "What have I ever done to deserve even one of the pleasures I've known?" The implied answer is, of course, "Nothing." At least, nothing sufficient. In an absolute sense, as a cosmic universal, this seems undeniably true and only incidentally religious. No religious doctrine is necessary to realize that our very existence depends on something (if not God, something else) that preceded all of our past and future. All existence is gratuitous, given to me by something Not-Me. This jibes with Edward's trope of a spider dangled over a fiery pit, but without the image of an angry man: The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or som

  Kris Kristofferson In 1971, songwriter Kris Kristofferson had pushed the envelope with relatively explicit country songs about sex and drugs such as "For the Good Times," "Sunday Morning Coming Down," and "Help Me Make It Through the Night," all popularized by other singers. His breakout hit as a performer came the next year with "Why Me": Why me, Lord? What have I ever done To deserve even one of the pleasures I've known? Tell me, Lord? What did I ever do That was worth loving you and the kindness you've shown? Lord help me, Jesus. I've wasted it so. Help me, Jesus. I know what I am. But now that I know that I've needed you so, Help me, Jesus. My soul's in your hand. Kristofferson has repeatedly shared the origin of this song. He didn't normally attend church. Connie Smith persuaded him to attend a service at the Evangel Temple, a Nashville church pastored by Jimmie Rodgers Snow, Hank Snow'

Recent events, including the last week's post about Kierkegaard, have generated in me a queasy sense that the world I experience--besides, obviously, not being objective reality--may be fundamentally alien to worlds that many others experience. I don't mean simply in its details. That's obvious. I mean in its basic operational structures, its foundational criteria for reality.  The privacy of individual experience is, I think, undeniable. We have access only to what we have personally experienced, including secondary information from technology, books, and other people, processed in the context of hereditary human faculties. We are all, in a sense, under house arrest, knowing only what is visible outside our nearby windows. This suggests solipsism , the sense that nothing but private mental life exists, but there is too much evidence for external reality to justify that. Something is obviously out yonder, a life on the streets outside of my mental house, much more than I

                    Into this Universe, and Why not knowing, Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:       And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. I hold this truth to be self-evident, a fact of life. We wake, in terms of conscious memories at least, sometime after the age of three with no clue how we got there. Life comes with no instruction book. There have many attempts to write such a book--the scriptures and a sprawling self-help industry--but the very diversity of these efforts proves that no one is reliable. We choose among contradictories with no ultimate authority but the happenstances of history and our own free will (if any). We may have faith, but never knowledge. The key word in Robert Fitzgerald's translation from Omar Khayyam is knowing. We can assume, believe, suppose, understand, posit, love, assert, or commit to all manner of whys , but knowing why ( knowing what our sudden, mysterious existence mean

  In his groundbreaking study of social processes behind the emergence of Christianity in the Roman Empire, The Rise of Christianity (1996), Rodney Stark notes a consensus of scholars that "the world of antiquity was groping toward monotheism" (p. 201). Christianity ultimately dominated, but Judaism and monotheistic philosophy--including Neoplatonism and Stoicism--expanded at the same time. In keeping with his formal theory of religion (Stark and Bainbridge, 1987), Stark puts this as a formal proposition: "As societies become older, larger, and more cosmopolitan, they will worship fewer gods of greater scope " (1996, p. 201). The end product of this would seem to be monotheism, belief in one all-powerful god, a cosmic emperor, but trends need not imply that their extremes will be realized. Trends generally have natural limits. A single god of entirely unlimited scope becomes identical with What Is, which is called Monism. A Monist deity is beyond human comprehens