Catching the America Bug

Allow us to redirect you...

...to my other blog, the Great American Faith, here, to address matters of faith and reason. 

Also, please have another bookmark for here, the L.A. Daily News' opinion blog, where I post regularly on political and cultural issues.

See you at the other sites! 

Supercuts Theology

It was just a matter of time before the Internet solved life's most pressing questions:

Subject: Why God allows pain and suffering This is one of the best explanations of why God allows pain and suffering that I have seen. It's an explanation other people will understand... A man went to a barbershop to have his hair cut and his beard trimmed. As the barber began to work, they talked about so many things and various subjects. When they eventually touched on the subject of God, the barber said: "I don't believe that God exists." "Why do you say that?" asked the customer. "Well, you just have to go out in the street to realize that God doesn't exist. Tell me, if God exists, would there be so many sick people? Would there be abandoned children? If God existed, there would be neither suffering nor pain. I can't imagine loving a God who would allow all of these things." The customer thought for a moment, but didn't respond because he didn't want to start an argument. The barber finished his job and the customer left the shop. Just after he left the barbershop, he saw a man in the street with long, stringy, dirty hair and an untrimmed beard. He looked dirty and un-kept. The customer turned back and entered the barber shop again and he said to the barber: "You know what? Barbers don't exist." "How can you say that?" asked the surprised barber. "I am here, and I am a barber. And I just worked on you!" "No!" the customer exclaimed. "Barbers don't exist because if they did, there would be no people with dirty long hair and untrimmed beards, like that man outside." "Ah, but barbers DO exist! What happens is, people do not come to me." "Exactly!" affirmed the customer. "That's the point! God, too, DOES exist! What happens is, peopl e don't go to Him and do not look for Him. That's why there's so much pain and suffering in the world." If you KNOW God exists, send this to other people -- If you think God doesn't exist, then just delete it! BE BLESSED & BE A BLESSING! "Do not ask the Lord to guide your footsteps if you're not willing to move your feet."

That's just brilliant. And then, after we all come to realize that there is a God who means well but can't reach these sick and abandoned people who are too damned stubborn to come to him, we'll start fighting over which religious book accurately captures this God, and over how he's more interested in American marriage law than serving these same sick and abandoned people, and over how your belief in God is pure faith while my belief in God is diabolical heresy, and over how it's a damned communist conspiracy for barbers and doctors to have to provide quality healthcare and grooming to any unemployed bum who shows up.  Yep, that's a message worth forwarding. 

Re-Run

Let's do a "Best of" post today.   I came across this one from a year ago and liked how I was able to articulate some of my evolving beliefs here:

Everybody wants me to be what they want me to be.
I'm not happy when I try to fake it.  No.
Oh, that's why I'm easy.  I'm easy like Sunday morning
   -- The Commodores

So much of our lives involves a delicate and volatile mix of things we believe and things we believe we are supposed to say.  I felt this when I was a good little Muslim boy who was attempting to adjust my worldview to what my parents expected me to do.  I felt this when I was an evangelical who was attempting to balance my fascination with Jesus with various doctrines that seemed difficult or implausible.  About the only time I felt liberated to believe what I truly believed was when I didn't much feel the need to believe in much.

Some would argue that the ability to tailor our beliefs to our community's prevailing myths is what makes us a civilized animal.  They say that, even if no one religion is the only way, it's good for people to act accordingly, as this orders their society and stifles individual male impulses to rape and pillage.  That's certainly true, although Deuteronomy is one example of how religion can justify certain forms of raping and pillaging (as in the killing of the Canaanites and God's giving over virgin conquests to the Israelites to do as they pleased).

Yet, if religous doctrine is something that "merely" organizes a society, and if many people are just winking at the notion of a single, absolute truth, I'm not the sort of person who could keep up the facade of a true believer.  I took religion as far as I could take it as a true believer, although even then I was hardly the sort of "black and white" believer that many people were.  Some friends hope and believe and predict I will be religious again one day, although in a less zealous way.  I'm not sure how to respond.   I seem to vacillate between a general atheism and a unitarian, Taoist, "all roads are one" inclusiveness.

People are funny.  Most people are black and white.  They want you to be a true believer in their cause.  If you can't muster that, they'll settle for your half-hearted commitment.  "Be reasonable," they'll suddenly say.  "You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater."  But heaven forfend that you actively contradict their beliefs.  At that point they'll see you as a fanatic.

A small number of people used to feel that I was more black-and-white than they.  They never mustered even as much of a true-believer approach as I did, and they also saw my turning away as just another sign of my being more black-and-white, more all-or-nothing than they.

What were my motivations in finding and losing faith, then finding and losing it again?  Various accidents and designs of life intersected -- various aspects of my personality, various persons I ran into, various events that transpired.  They allowed me to find what I believed, in fits and spurts and false starts.

I was a peacenik at heart.  Yet I was also a contrarian, irritating and contentious at times.  I was a lover of America's gentle suburban spirit.  I wanted to fit in, but I wanted to be myself.

Kind words

Very nice to hear my friend Chris Weinkopf offer these gracious words. 

The new blog party

I'm still over here today, and will be mainly here for a while.  Come visit!

Another blog

My first post at the Daily News blog.

Shall we take this conversation elsewhere?

I've been invited to become a part of this blog for the L.A. Daily News, which has been my steadfast friend over the years. 

An Aussie-moron

Here's a dumb question:  Why is Australia's main conservative party called "the Liberal Party"...?

Modern Art & the Art of Prayer: What's the Diff?

Talk about a couple of pieces of crap.  And I mean it literally.  These look like dung piles.  But no, they're supposed to be women at rest, or something.  And they're being displayed as wondrous works of art.

I've often felt that modern art and prayer are similar, in that they don't require skill on the part of the creative deity as much as they require an overactive imagination on the part of the true believer  It's the ability to look at something ordinary, or even something crummy, and say, "Wow, now that's powerful stuff!" 

In the long game of life, I suspect that ability is a real asset.

Still the same, as Bob Seger would say.

One of my best friends, whom I'd lost touch with, recently managed to find me through Google.  I knew him since high school, and we later were roommates after college, and we all lived in a cool house in Manhattan Beach till one shiftless bastard moved out and forced the rest of us to scatter to the four winds.  Anyway, this friend had mentioned early on that he figured my evangelical shift would be a phase, not a final destination.  That'd been on my mind recently, when I realized how right he had been.  When he wrote to me, he mentioned that his quick look at my blog revealed "clearly the same old conflicted, thoughtful, wise-beyond his years nerdy kid I've known for so long... though hopefully/probably wiser for the experience of roads traveled." Funny how people sometimes know us better than we're willing to know ourselves.