An Atheist Story

My parents divorced in late 1971. It wasn't a long time after that my mother remarried. (My dad did not remarry for over a decade, although he was a busy little romantic bee during the interim.) My new stepfather was known as "Slim." We all called him that, even my mother. He stood 5'10" but weighed only 130 pounds in his prime. A rural boy from Fort Payne, Alabama, he was a character. Prematurely gray, he gave off the impression of being world wise although limited in formal education. And he was a great story teller. The stories he told of his rural upbringing would hold my little brother and me spellbound. He was from another place and time, when life was studied in perhaps a less critical way than now, but still rigorously explored for meaning. The people he knew from his youth became parables for us sometimes. He wasn't my stepfather for long as he died in 1979, after a brief but brutal battle with cancer.

I will relate now one of those stories he used to tell. I didn't make much of it the time and, to be frank with you, still don't today. There's no real moral to it, I believe, unless you attempt to force one upon it - which he always did. I don't doubt it was really based on his recollection of a man he knew in his community, just as he assured us it was. I also don't doubt that he may have "spiced it up" a bit, in his inimitable way. But anyway...

There was a man in Slim's community who was the typical village atheist - an outspoken unbeliever in a community of devout Christian believers. He told us that one of this fellow's shticks was to go out in summer thunderstorms with a metal rod and cry out to the sky that if God really exists and is there, then "strike me dead with a bolt of lightning." That village atheist was noted for doing this and for surviving time and time again.

But then one summer day as a storm formed in the summer sky over Alabama, this man grabbed an umbrella and performed for some folks as the rain fell, the lightning streaked across the sky and thunder shook the ground. After the brief deluge was spent he sat down on a porch with some friends and acquaintances to rest. A mosquito landed on his forearm and after smacking it into oblivion, the man suddenly toppled over, dead - taken out not by a display of God's mighty power, but rather by one of His smallest and least significant critters. 

As I said, this story didn't resonate with me either then or now, but I still think I would give a week's wages if I could return to our old front porch and listen to Slim tell it again. It was fun in a homey sort of way. And that poor fellow probably just died of a heart attack after getting himself all worked up. Hey, maybe there is a moral there: Let's not get ourselves too worked up arguing over God's existence or nonexistence.

The Essence Of Religion (For Me)

Religion is a feeling, an aspiration, an attitude, a spiritual temper; and in the attempt to define it exactly in creed or doctrine, its essence exhales and escapes. - Henry Wood (Businessman turned New Thought author.)

  

It was a long road back to "religion" for me. I used scare quotes there because the word religion is notoriously hard to define.

I was raised in particular strand of conservative, fundamentalist Christianity. Growing up I would have thought of that as religion and all the other flavors of Christianity perhaps as people "walking in all the light they see," as Mom used to put it, or maybe even as counterfeit religions in the case Judaism, Hinduism and so on.

In a story I've told more than once in my blogging, my faith was shattered by the divorce of my parents and then took a final blow when my marriage to my high school sweetheart collapsed. It was then, in all my pain and mental distress, that I really noticed the intellectual difficulties my belief system attempted to gloss over.  I moved to Deism, then to Atheism, then to Agnosticism, then back to Atheism, then ... well, you get the idea.

Through it all there was this deep, heartfelt sense inside me that life was something more than atoms swirling around aimlessly through space, purposelessly; that life might have something that for lack of a better word I could call purpose.

I guess that is the whole of my faith, the essence of my religion. So I have finally decided to allow my heart a place in my thinking. I may be mistaken, I admit. But then, I'm certain there are many things I'm probably mistaken about. That's what we humans do, after all, make mistakes while navigating our way through life.

The Myth Of The Sacred Goat Herders

I saved this item the other day while I was reading a newspaper from nearby Knoxville, Tennessee. It caught my attention and I thought it might make a good blog post. There was an ongoing letters-to-the-editor discussion about the question: Does God hear the prayers of non-Christians.

 

One fellow, while giving his thoughts, opined:

 

I am constantly amazed at the fact that people still believe in the myths, legends, and superstitions of a bunch of Bronze Age goat herders.

 

"Now, hold on there," I thought to myself.

 

I'm not superstitious (at least I don't think so), although I find the study of superstitions fascinating. But I have come to greatly appreciate what Joseph Campbell called "The Power of Myth." If you think of myth as mere silliness, I think you don't understand the subject very well.

 

And fables are a source of wisdom I have found useful my whole life. My personal opinion is that we are poorer as people because story telling has fallen out of fashion.

 

When I was in grammar school I had been given a book of Aesop's fables. How I loved that book! I read from it nearly everyday. Now that I think about it, at that particular period of my life, I read Aesop more than I read the Bible - and I got more out of it!

 

Our angry rationalist in his above letter may or may not be aware that the concept of a Bronze Age comes from a rather ancient book - which is dated back to a time during which parts of the Old Testament was being written and well before any of the New Testament was - which itself is steeped in mythology and legend, Hesiod's Ages of Man.

 

But that is probably a big never-mind for many because historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists have validated something like Hesiod's concept of a Bronze Age, minus the legendary elements, of course. The point is that practically nothing old can be truly useful, I suppose. These poor, ignorant ancients supposedly had such a poor understanding of life and human nature they could hardly give us any truly useful insights. That is the supposed point.

 

However, I would ask if it isn't a skeptical myth that the Bible was written by "a bunch of Bronze Age goat herders"?

 

Seriously, who really believes such a thing? Do the skeptics who spout that meme so frequently? Of course not. It is a myth in the sense that it is presented as a tale of how ignorant ancients lacked understanding about life in the Cosmos and so can be safely ignored. Yet many still find the ancient concept of a Bronze Age valid, and many other ancient ideas still have currency (think of how ancient the concept of biological evolution is).

 

So what's the real problem?

 

Of course knowledge is ever increasing. Should human life continue a few more millennia our present state of knowledge will appear primitive. However, I venture to say the beauty of our art and vitality of our spirit will live on. I also suspect the human quest for an understanding of a divine reality will continue, no doubt refined by better understanding of the Cosmos, but still vibrant as a part of the human psyche.  

 

The Seeming Unreality Of Death

The real person is so very real, so obviously living and different from what is left that one cannot believe something has turned into nothing. It is not faith, it is not reason–just a "feeling." "Feelings" are in the long run a pretty good match for what we call our beliefs. - C.S. Lewis

 

 

It was Sunday, June 19, 2005, Father's Day. I arrived at the funeral home to meet my mother, my younger brother, and my older brother's wife and children for the purpose of planning his funeral. My brother had died suddenly of a massive heart attack the night before .

 

He was to be cremated, but there was one more task after the arrangements were finalized which had to be performed: a brief viewing of my brother's remains. This was necessary because of my mother's insistence. She is one who has to actually see and handle the corpse of a loved one in order to assure herself that some horrible mistake has not been made. 

 

This was something I could have done without, I suppose. I passed on the opportunity to view my father's corpse before his cremation. I wanted to remember him the way he was in life, not as a lifeless "nothing" who had just recently been a living person. 

 

I asked my mother if she was sure this is what she wanted to do. Earl, after all, would not be enhanced the way funeral directors usually enhance a corpse before normal viewings. We would be looking at death in all its unadorned starkness. But she insisted.

 

We were led to a room where my brother's remains were laid out in a cardboard box - the box, in fact, which would be used during the cremation. Inside my brother lay wrapped in the hospital sheet he was pronounced dead upon a short while earlier, his arms awkwardly folded across his chest. He was cold and stiff from the freezer and was the most hideous shade of pale. Not a pretty sight. Yet my mom kissed him and loved him and cried the tears of a grieving mother. In fact, we all cried.

 

When it was my turn to spend a moment alone with my brother one last time, I took hold of his forearm and looked at his face - that face that had made me and those of us who knew him laugh so many times. His wit and ability to find something funny in just about every aspect of life were a main theme in the eulogies offered at his funeral. 

 

As I looked into his face I thought back to when we were teenagers and had listened to a promo for the old Tomorrow Show which host Tom Snyder announced was going to feature someone who "talked to the dead." My brother and I looked at each other and snickered. Of course, the show was about a medium. But my brother, who was reclining on his bed at the time, dutifully mimicked a corpse as I asked questions to this unresponsive "dead person."

 

Only now he wasn't playing, and there was no laughter to be had. 

 

My brother wore a neatly trimmed beard. But I noticed the newly emerged whiskers from around his trimming. Life had been going on as usual for him when the end came and no doubt he planned to shave that very day, his day off (he worked the day he died but left early because he felt bad). My brother was always careful about his appearance. But now he was no longer in a position to be.

 

It's odd the thoughts one has when looking upon the remains of a loved one. I didn't really discuss mine with the others. My mom's thoughts were obvious as she told us the very minute of the very day she gave birth to Earl and just what his birth weight had been. She was there to bring him into the world and now she was there to see him off. Then Earl's wife looked at his remains and then at me and tearfully said: "He promised me we were going to grow old together ... and now look what he's done."

 

Does something indeed turn into nothing? Human hearts have overwhelmingly answered "No!" down through the centuries of recorded history. Even so devout a rationalist as Robert Ingersoll observed:

 

The idea of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, with its countless waves of hope and fear, beating against the shores and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any book, nor of any creed, nor of any religion. It was born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of death. It is the rainbow – Hope shining upon the tears of grief.

 

I can't bring myself to douse that hope or ignore that rainbow, even as I stand face-to-face with doubt.