Wrestling with Religion

The Burning Bush by Marc Chagall Of course, God isn’t God’s name. It’s a proper noun, but no more the divine name than Elizabeth II’s name is Queen . Speak it aloud or start a sentence with it, and you have a tossup or an interpretation from context. The English word derives from an old Germanic one that referred to Thor, Frey, and Odin and appears in texts of living religions as a translation of deus in Latin, theos in Greek, el in Hebrew, and deva in Sanskrit. All have been used by polytheists and adapted to mean a supreme god such as Zeus. Even Allah , revered from pre-Islamic times as the high god (if not the only god back then), is a Semitic term meaning “the god.” In the Vedantic tradition (which predates the Hebrew Bible by 500 years), ultimate reality (often called Brahman) is a single being expressed by many names and images, human and nonhuman, but transcending all possible names or representations. In contrast, the god of Moses has a true name, one dictated from ...

Everything is political. Everything is psychological. Everything is theological.     Everything is digital. Everything is economic. Everything is body/mind. Everything is semiotic. Everything is—                       that’s right, buddy, nothing more than what you will admit to. Yes, and if you believe that,                            everything, reduced by the quality of belief to belief’s quality,              is red-tagged. Reason: shopworn.

I have been dead forever--or for 13.8 billion years if you count time from the Big Bang. I am alive now, of course, but I was dead less than a century ago, and don’t miss all of those oblivious eons. According to actuarial tables, I can expect to be dead forever again in about ten years. My longest reasonable expectation is a bit more than double that, and it overlaps with likely dementia and disability. At most, my life expectancy is one billionth the time I've  already spent comfortably dead, so why I should take health and safety precautions for a reward so trivial: a fifth of a lifetime and an infinitely smaller proportion of my inevitable death-time? Healthy behaviors are a game of diminishing returns, especially since many risky indulgences tend to kill or disable us slowly. It may take years, even decades, for fat to clog arteries, smoking to kill lung tissue, alcohol to destroy the liver, or speeding to kill. Most people die from only one of these (if not from someth...

Shortly before my fiftieth birthday, my father announced that he had inoperable lung cancer. I see this moment as a snapshot. He’s sitting on the sofa in my son’s apartment, my mother beside him. After a long pause, I ask, “What are you going to do?” He answers in one word: “Live.” And live he did for two more months, hospitalized the last few days for palliative care. On the final night, they sent Daddy home with an oxygen tank. Another snapshot: he’s smiling in his recliner in the family room as we run a slideshow of family pictures, his life in review. We drove back to Phenix City before bedtime, and the next morning my brother called to say Daddy had died that night. Daddy never shared his afterlife expectations, and they may not matter. Whatever waits after the heart stops and the body decomposes, I doubt that expectation changes anything. His religion did guide him well through life. He said he was a Christian because his father was the best man he knew. Even if I can...

   "How do I know? The Bible tells me so!” This old song claims that the anthology finally edited in the third century of the Common Era is the word of God. If not dictated (like the Quran) it is divinely inspired with authority transcending human reason and experience. Many Protestants call the book “inerrant” and Catholicism's softer view declares it reliable in matters of faith and morals. Thus, if proof texts align, the Lord has spoken. Case closed. “How firm a foundation you saints of the Lord, / is laid for your faith in his excellent Word!” This authoritarianism averts its eyes from the fact that many different books and collections claim like authority: The Pentateuch alone, The Book of Mormon , the Quran , the Bhagavad Gita , the Upanishads , the sutras of the Buddha, the Tao Te Ching , the teachings of Confucius, and many more. The Marcionites, for instance, accepted only a revised gospel of Luke plus some of Paul’s letters, and the Cathars accepted o...

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.