Wrestling with Religion

American popular culture has a standard model of the afterlife in jokes, cartoons, and sentimental books such as The  Littlest Ange l. After death, the soul is an image of the living person, the same age and often in the usual clothes, that rises out of the body like a mist. This soul maintains the deceased’s name, memories, and other ego-traits and remains kin to souls gone before. “I’m going there to meet my mother." The first stop is a lectern on a puffy cloud in front of the Pearly Gates, where Peter consults a guest book. Souls whose names are written there (theories vary widely as to who qualifies) are issued white robes, halos, wings, and sometimes harps. The unlisted are dropped, sometimes through a trap door, to eternal torment by horned red devils with pitchforks in a fiery underground pit. Heaven is a walled city floating on clouds, with golden streets where the souls of the saved hang out forever in the presence of God and significant others, blissful renditions ...

    The years have taught us, on the rim of the unrailed pit of unknowing, to stare down at purest blank knowing the ledge we stand on is more, as we ourselves are, of that pit, floored with ignorance only, faith and consternation.                                Middle age returns us with a richer despair to that pubescent catastrophe (quaintly nineteenth-century) when our coats of knowing raveled us naked to winds of namelessness-- still without name.

Decades ago, after I turned forty and one of my sons left home for college, I suddenly felt old and found comfort (or cover at least) in the quip: “Growing old ain’t bad when you consider the alternative.” This assumes growing old to be better than dying, and most people would agree. Otherwise, seniors would be immune to death threats and impossible to hold at gunpoint.  I remember when I was a teenager, alive in the fresh horror of realizing that personal immortality was no Kalashnikov Truth--not a thing objectively verifiable or universally accepted--that for all I could ever know, death is oblivion. I was flying on my bike down a steep incline one afternoon and suddenly reflected that a blowout and crushed skull might instantly snuff out, not just Billy Green, past and present, but (as far as that Billy was concerned) the earth, sun, moon, and stars—and even the absence of these spheres. Not only light would vanish, but darkness. Not only existence, but nonexisence. Not ...

    As if my latest refusal To make sense called the bluff Of an intransigent demiurge, His dada clockwork. Well, My pout is hardly the first And not likely to make Mr. Big Punch skylights in his Platonic cave. Everything’s infinitely more likely To have been some other thing— Like you, who only last week  Were here alive, and here I am Sitting across a blue table From you, and you are again.

Imagine that you and I are in the living room of an American suburban neighborhood and you are by a front window looking out, but I am not. You report that a neighbor is walking her dog. I may not look even up from my book. I believe you because dog walking is common on our cul-de-sac. Your word is all the evidence I need. Now, let's suppose you tell me she is walking a greyhound, which is far less common but happens. A family two blocks away owned a rescue greyhound last year, but it apparently died. They have a short life expectancy. I may lower my book to look, but, unless you are a terrible liar, I'll take your word for it even if the dog is out of sight by the time I reach the window. The event is interesting but ordinary. Now, suppose that you say that a cowboy is riding a pony down the street. I have seen riders in rodeos and on country roads but never in the neighborhood. I don’t doubt that a cowboy is possible, but he is far less ordinary than a dog-walker, so I ...

At the risk of beating a dead Pascal, I want to challenge two assumptions in his argument that belief in God is infinitely more lucrative than unbelief. One is that the main motive for unbelief is the unbeliever’s concupiscence (often sexual desire but not limited to that). People disbelieve so they can be free to misbehave. Another is that unbelievers benefit in a finite way by liberating themselves to pursue to unbridled pleasure. Pascal himself contradicts these elsewhere when he says that Christian belief  makes a person “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a sincere, true friend" (418). Anything that deprives a person of this is hardly a benefit, even a finite one. I doubt, however, that these benefits actually proceed from belief, having read extensively in newspapers, autobiographies, and popular fiction from the 19th-century South, where the existence of God, sin, heaven, and hell were taken for granted. Belief in God was well-nigh universal am...

There was an Irish girl named Clara whose father sailed to America before the Great Famine. He left his family in Ireland, not wanting to expose them to the dangers of the “coffin ship” that was the only passage he could afford, but he promised to send for them soon.  Clara was barely three when her father sailed away and had no memory of him, but every night her mother talked about the man and how deeply he loved them. During the Great Famine, Clara never tired of hearing how clever her father was, how he was  certain to succeed and take her to a land of plenty. At night she talked to her father and imagined she could hear him answer. A few letters came from America, not written by the father himself, but by friends who had met him, and Clara memorized them, untroubled that they postponed again and again the day of his return. His final letter reported that he had staked a rich claim in a California goldfield.  After that, Clara and her mother heard noth...