Wrestling with Religion

     There’s a temptation to backdate proud insights and imagine I matured earlier than I did, so maybe I was eight or nine, but I think I was six when critical thinking clicked in. It wasn’t mathematical. It was intuitive and analogical. On Christmas Day we traveled the 250 miles from Auburn, Alabama, up to Lauderdale County where Tom Green, my Grandfather, was still in good health. In any case, as with most watershed events, I remember sitting by the left window on the back seat as little country houses whizzed by and performing a thought experiment. I visualized Santa Claus flying over to a roof, landing his sleigh, sliding down the chimney, distributing toys, climbing back up, and proceeding to the roof of the next house.       It soon became obvious that, at the speed houses were passing even on a two-lane Alabama highway, even if only a quarter of the houses had children, Santa couldn’t possibly service them all in one night. Besides, there...

       My first memories are of the dogtrot log house that was my great grandfather’s before the Civil War. My mother grew up there, and I was there when my father was off in Europe fighting Nazis and my little brain began storing memories. The house stood in the now-dead community of Abercrombie in Bibb County, a few miles before the road ends in the Talladega National Forest--so deep in the country that my grandmother used to wonder whose car was passing at the bottom of the hill. Now, it sits on another rise, reassembled log-by-log in Tannehill Historical State Park. Tourists rent it by the night. But in 1945 the house was all family, and we spent long horsefly-swatting vacations there until my grandparents’ health failed late in the 1950s.      A dogtrot house is a pair of matched log cabins with a a dogtrot (what we’d call a breezeway) between them. The kitchen was a separate building behind one side, and there was little lean-to room o...

"Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches. I must make amends." Janis Joplin's blues song satirizes the worst aspects of petitionary prayer. A Christian remotely in the ballpark of loving neighbor as herself wouldn't be ashamed that her friends had pricier cars. Of all the types of prayers--prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of repentance, prayers of praise, and prayers of intercession--prayers of petition are the most instinctive and (except for prayers of imprecation, i.e. curses) the least reputable. They border on impiety, a hair's breadth away from prayers of protest: "Lord, I see what you're doing now, and I wish you'd stop it."      My last post ( https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/07/intercessory-prayer-how-can-that-even.html ) points out the contradiction in presuming to tell an all-knowing and benevolent God his business--asking him to revise the blueprint of the universe for your pr...

I've never understood intercessory prayer. The theory seems to be that if my friend (we’ll call her Ann) is ill and I say, “Lord, please let Ann recover” (or just think it), this will help Ann recover. It’s like a magic spell: the words cause the event. I don't have a problem if the words are code for, “I love you, Ann, and hope you recover.” In my model of the world, saying this, especially if I’m one of many well-wishers, may indeed have a performative effect. It may boost her immune system or motivate her to work in therapy, and it’s almost certain to make her feel better. It’s win-win, a spiritual placebo, especially if a we pray in her presence, maybe lay on hands—assuming that Ann isn't annoyed by all the commotion. Who doesn’t want to be loved?      Placebo shouldn't be confused with fake . Rather, a placebo effect is a spiritual effect as opposed to a chemical one. Placebos are, of course, pharmacologically inert substances given in place of active drugs...

       The most obvious meaning of eternity (if not the current pandemic) is one-damn-thing-after-another. I'll call this Eternity-1, one tick of an imperishable clock and then another ad infinitum. This makes sense in closeup, looking at moment such as death. But if we back off and keep on backing--and backing and backing up more and more--we begin to see why Aristotle doubted that actual infinities exist. Some concepts, of course, don't impose limits. The future, as far as we know, has no definite end-point, but time may not be endless. Infinite doesn't follow from indefinite .   Suppose we define A as the age of the universe in years--over 13 billion--and run a chain of calculations. Let the square of A equal B, the square of B equal C, and so forth. Keep calculating, using A' after you reach Z, A'' after you reach Z', and so forth. Fill a million libraries the size of the solar system with books of calculations (nearly all containing nothing...

     My wife noticed long ago that I get defensive in situations where “everybody else” knows the rules and I don’t. I have painful memories of being forced to play softball in school. Other boys’ fathers taught them how to swing and throw, but I struck out like clockwork and threw like a girl. As a naive, sheltered introvert, maybe with a whisper of Asperger’s (a syndrome one of my sons developed full-blown), I’ve often run into similar situations. This may explain my foredoomed continuing education program, a futile crusade to learn the Rules of Everything.      To rephrase Scarlet O’Hara, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be naive again.”      In the midst of writing the essay on shape-note hymns about Heaven, I read an essay by Bishop Steven Charleston as part of Education for Ministry, a light-weight equivalent of Episcopalian seminary, and hit another snag of not knowing the rules. I’d be slow to contradict a man with Charleston...