Religion: a license to say or believe anything

Let's face it--contentiousintrovert is not exactly google or yahoo; it's not even the Huffington Post. (Heck--it's not even the Soybean Farmers Weekly.) But if I happen to write about religion, someone often responds. And the responders are often strangers from out-of-state. Lord knows how they find this little teeny niche in cyberspace. But, it's motivating to get a response. So here I go again.

In a general sense, perhaps my biggest complaint about religious discourse in the world is that religion is regarded as a "personal" issue, which in this case means: a person can say just about anything they want about religion, and since religion is a personal issue, no one has any right to criticize. In short, talking about religion is often a free pass to say anything, no matter how stupid, ignorant, or nonsensical it happens to be, and very few people will be compelled to call you out on it. It's just not polite to do so.

Do I believe that there are actually 100 gods, not just one? That's OK, because it's religion we're talking about. Do I believe that God can read my mind right now? You can't make fun of that, because it's religion. Do I think that God has a personal career plan for me? It may be silly, but I can believe that and nobody will blink an eye. Do I think that God sits on a velvet throne with a book listing all of those who are "saved"? It's OK, because it's religion, you know--personal, and not capable of being verified. (A woman I took to prom in high school believes that there is such a book, by the way, and her name is in it, just so you know.)

Such a "hands-off" mindset enables all sorts of people--many of whom I see on cable from time to time--to say the most outrageous things, and nobody is up in arms about it. The latest kook: this 89-year-old minister who predicated The Rapture on May 21. (Oops! Now, we discover, it's actually going to be October 21.) Why does the press even give him the time of day? He's a bleeping idiot, plain and simple.

Until religious claim-makers are held to the same standards as the rest of us--providing things like evidence and coherent reasoning--I see no reason to even listen. And if we do listen, and they say things that are total rubbish, we need to get in their face and tell them so. Otherwise, people will continue to say things that are utterly ridiculous.

But I will confess to some hypocrisy here. I've sat through my share of church services, and I've never had the nerve to stand up and say, "That's baloney!" I'm not one to make such waves. But maybe some of you are courageous enough to tell a few religious emperors that they are not wearing any clothes.

108 billion people at the whim of the Lord?

This month's National Geographic poses a question I have often asked myself: how many humans have lived at some time or another on the planet Earth?

The answer, it turns out, going back to the dawn of human history, is somewhere in the vicinity of 108 billion. Of those 108 billion, something like 6 or 7 percent are living today. That means that billions of people are part of past generations, and those past generations go way back--centuries and millennia before Jesus Christ, including Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Alexander the Great, etc. etc. So the question becomes, if the acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Savior is an indispensable pre-condition for the afterlife, whatever became of the ancients, who, quite bluntly, didn't know Jesus from a hole in the wall?

This may seem like an obvious question, but in my view, a rather important one. All of those billions of people who lived "Before the Common Era" were real human beings with thoughts and feelings and relationships and behaviors--but because they lived before the arrival of Jesus, what was their fate? Were they destined to go to hell? Given special dispensation and a free pass to heaven? Or did they simply "die" with nothing to show for it?

It seems to me that this question poses some very sticky problems for those who see God as infinitely wise and just--especially for those (possibly) poor souls who passed on just a day or two or a year or two before our Lord and Savior made his arrival. It is yet another reason why I struggle to make sense out of Christian dogma. There simply has to be a better way to explain and understand all this than to trot out the Bible and claim that it has all the answers. It flat-out just doesn't.

20,000 miles and counting

I have to own up to the fact that I like things to count. This, for example, is my 94th Contentious Introvert posting.

Yesterday, my counting compulsion was evident as I reached a new running milestone (pun intended): 20,000 recorded running miles. 20,000--I must confess to feeling very satisfied by that number. Obviously, it has involved hundreds and hundreds of runs over the years, with record-keeping going back to 1975.

Some of those years are pretty lean--1986, for example, when our son was born, I was teaching at 5 different schools and working on my dissertation: 58 total miles for that entire year! On the other hand, 1500 miles in 2007 means that I had to average over 4 miles per day, and I'm not sure I'll ever get back to that number. At any rate, suffice it to say that I've done my share of running--in the dark, in blazing sunshine, in 15-below weather, when it's 98 and humid, in a thunderstorm/hailstorm (I was laughing so hard I almost couldn't continue), up north (where I once encountered a timberwolf), in our local nature center (where I encounter many deer), on the California beach, in Malaysia, etc. etc. etc. And it has involved 77 different races (there's that counting again!), including 6 marathons, 6 25Ks, and 26 half-marathons.

I have to think that running has saved my life in many ways--it's my Jesus. This past Saturday was the 41st anniversary of my dad's death; he died at 58 in the middle of bypass surgery. Although I could still keel over and die tomorrow (or even today!), I've passed that number, and even more important, I've felt good doing it. Physically (and in many ways psychologically and spiritually), nothing makes me feel better than a good run. I'm happy to have had a little quantity (not the time to list all my friends and acquaintances who have already passed on), but even better has been the quality of my life, and running has made that possible. I am still haunted by the many years during which dad experienced chest pains; several of those later years were more miserable than I could have possibly realized at the time. Up until dad died, I pretty much figured that anyone close to you lived forever, or at least into their 70s or 80s.

Anyway, the next goal is quite obvious to anyone looking at that number of 20,000. Yes, 24,901--the circumference of the planet. I'm now out to (sort of literally) run around the world. Hope to be there in just a few years--lord willing, as they say. And to go back to the opening sentence here: why do I like to count things? Although it may seem cold and clinical, for me, doing so helps to make them count.

God: way worse than Hitler?

The cover story in this week's Time features the question, "What if there's no hell?" Seems that minister Rob Bell, a rising star in parts of the Christian world, is proposing that there really may not be such a place--that is, a place where God, presumably, punishes those who do not believeth in Him. And to his credit, Pastor Bell has enough intellectual integrity to say what frankly anyone should believe: "When we get to what happens when we die, we don't have any video footage. So let's at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are."

That said, Bell's speculation is that a loving God would not and could not condone a place like Hell. And to that, I say, hell yes. The proposed existence of hell is untenable--if one believes that God is a loving being. Indeed, if God is perfectly comfortable with hell, then I'd go so far as to say that He's more nasty and vicious than Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot combined--and by a long shot. Why? Let me count the ways.

First, there's the massive scale involved. Even Hitler, at his "best," could only exterminate 6 million people. If God sends all non-believers to hell, that number would be easily in the BILLIONS. Entire nations--Japan, for example, or China, or more than half of Europe, certainly--would be decimated.

Second, there's the fact that the punishment involves suffering, not death or the termination of existence. At least Stalin only killed people and in the process, we hope, put them out of their misery. But the God which some worship gets his kicks out of making people continue to suffer, literally in lord-knows-what ways. You just don't "die again."

Third and finally--and probably most important--the jail term in hell appears to be ETERNITY. Do you have any idea of how long eternity is? It's now 2011--think BEYOND the year 200,556,994,228,001,669, because that's only the START of eternity. Anyone who would punish anybody for eternity is so patently un-loving that I hardly know how to discuss this matter with a "fire and brimstone" person.

Bottom line: no God is an "awesome" God who would willingly make billions of people suffer for eternity. I simply cannot and will not entertain that thoroughly ridiculous notion. And anyone who does (sorry, I can't resist this closing) can go to hell!

Call me an idiot

I suppose I should be thankful, although I think someone should paint the word "IDIOT" on my forehead in large red letters.

On Sunday morning I was doing my best to eliminate any possible "ice dam" problems on our roof at home. I leaned an extension ladder from the flat roof of the garage against the edge of the roof on our sunroom--another 9 or 10 feet above the garage roof. I noticed that the garage roof, covered with a rubber membrane, was a little wet and slippery, but that didn't stop THE IDIOT from climbing up the ladder. Near the top--again, 9 or 10 feet up in the air--the extension ladder quickly slid downward from its perch on the edge of the sunroom; the little feet of the ladder simply would not hold on that wet, slippery garage roof. I went down with the ladder and rammed my right side into the metal rungs when it hit bottom.

The wind was knocked out of me, and my right side already hurt. I saw a teeny bit of blood on my clothes. I rolled around in agony for a bit, gasping and groaning, and feeling a little in shock. But I eventually got up, leaned the extension ladder against the gutter of the garage, and climbed down to the ground.

Initially I was just sore and a little panicked. So I took a hot bath. And then, in the next hour or so, my right thigh started to swell up, big time. I applied ice, but it still looked about twice as thick as my left thigh. A blood clot? A broken leg? It was time to head to urgent care.

Thankfully, x-rays revealed that I didn't have a broken femur, or a broken anything. But I have sore ribs and a black and blue area on my right leg that's the size of Cleveland. And I'm hobbling around with continuous doses of ibuprofin.

We only get so many chances. Many years ago, our neighbor Bruce took one dive into a body of water that was too shallow, and he's been in a wheelchair ever since. As sore as I am, I need to count my blessings. But the contententious introvert gave new meaning this past weekend to the term idiot--I'd kick myself even more, but it's too hard to bend my leg!

Sins of commission and omission

Leave it to a heathen like me to think about "sinning."

I certainly don't accept the traditional Christian view that people are by nature wicked and sinful, or that there is such a thing as "original sin." Having said that, I also know that people are certainly capable of doing things which are not nice--that would be my preferred down-to-earth post-modern reading of the gospel.

When it comes to sinning, there are sins of commission--something that you did do--and sins of omission--something that you didn't. Like anyone else, I have my sins of commission--something I overtly did that I look back on with regret. You know, the mean-spirited remark, the ill-chosen word, the hostile action. The best I can say is that I have a limited number of those types of unpleasant memories. In 21st century terms, I could put most of my life on youTube and be OK with it.

That's the good news. The bad news is that I am haunted by all of those times when I had an opportunity to do or say the right thing but did not. I deal with a vast array of sins of omission--moments when I had the chance to do something good but reacted with indifference. In those situations--way too numerous to mention--I have let others down, and let myself down as well. Sometimes it is just too tempting to retreat into one's own reality and ignore everything and everyone else. To some extent, such retreating is a way to preserve one's sanity, but it also reminds you of what could have or should have been done. Yes, my sins have been more sins of omission, but that doesn't really wash away the feeling of regret.

Some people set the bar pretty low--as long as they haven't killed anyone or robbed a liquor store, they regard themselves as virtuous. But once sins of omission are introduced, the bar gets a whole lot higher--and, sadly, virtually impossible to reach.

Tucson as a symptom of our sickness

With the recent bloodbath in Tucson, we are left to consider once again how coarse and offensive much of our political rhetoric has become. We must consider the climate that has been created by people in this culture--some of them, unfortunately, political office holders themselves.

In recent years, I've become much more cynical about the role (or lack thereof) of reasoned discourse in our society. It's all about looking good and giving people a certain feeling. Since Obama was elected, those feelings have certainly included irrational anger, directed toward our Muslim, Nazi, Socialist President. The whole effort has been disgusting, and, in my view, more toxic than anything we've heard in the last few decades. Although there is not a direct causal link between this toxic discourse and the Tucson shootings, all of us have a responsibility to do what we can to create a climate in which people do not succumb to demagoguery and act out their perverse beliefs. (Shootings at abortion clinics are another sad example.)

Mario Cuomo's most famous statement is "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose." Mr. Obama seems to have taken that idea to heart, perhaps to a fault. Now more than ever, we need a poet who can govern--someone who can, with his or her passionate and inspiring rhetoric--take us to a new place, with a new understanding of what public service is all about, what it means to be fully human, and what our highest ideals should be. Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to be that person, and I hope that he can summon his considerable rhetorical skills to make this a nation of which we can all be proud. Unfortunately, however, this week is going to be a national week of mourning. Tucson is a symptom of our collective sickness.