Category: God

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Belief Bible Study God Job Old Testament Ruth Tanakh

“Your God Shall Be My God”: The Book of Ruth

In many ways, The Book of Ruth is a gentle echo of The Book of Job. In Job, we witness a righteous man destroyed for a wager who remains unwavering in his faith right up until he asks, “But why?”

(They patch things up in the end, God and Job, and he gets a new family with new children. What’s interesting — and I wish I had thought to write about this when I wrote about Job earlier — is that we don’t know anything about Job’s wife. She has one line: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” And after her big speech, that’s the last we see/hear of her. Is she the mother of the new family? Why was she — or, even better, was she — saved from the wager? Did she die too? Did she leave Job? Ocean so full of questions.)

The Book of Ruth is also about a life interrupted by Divine Intervention. It’s Job with a happier ending, but the same unsettling questions about how we interact with God, and how God can interact with us.

(It’s also often used by feminist, queer, and queer-friendly theologians as an example of a loving same-sex relationship, or, at least, Women Getting Strength from Women. I am not going to focus so much on the lesbianism in this story, if there is any, which I’m not entirely sold on, but boy do I recognize and feel deeply that hunger for representation, especially in a text that is so often used to call me, and people like me, an abomination worthy of destruction. Your reading of Ruth as a queer text is valid. Your reading of Ruth as a feminist text is valid. I see you and love you. Misquoting Jesus: “We were not made for the Bible, but the Bible was made for us.” Do with it whatever brings you comfort, including ignoring it.)

(My theology is best represented by this piece attributed to the Sufi mystic Rumi:
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer,
worshiper,
lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come.
Come yet again.
Come.)

Ruth is a Jewish text. Written for Jews, by Jews. At its heart, one of its central questions is: who gets to be a Jew, and how? (Christians are interested in the Book of Ruth because it’s used as proof of Jesus’s lineage through King David. In general, Christians are only interested in the parts of the Hebrew Bible that confirm the Jesus Event. That’s also a gross overstatement on my part and I will no doubt be taken to task for that position but heavy is the head that speaks the truth.)

Ruth 1:1 starts out with, “In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons.”

Two questions immediately sprang up for rabbis in the first millennium CE:

1) Why would God strike the Jews with a famine?

2) Why would “a certain man” (who we’ll later learn is named Elimelech) flee to live in Moab?

The Ruth Rabbah (רות רבה) is a midrashic interpretation of the events of the Book of Ruth. And for midrash, we can essentially think of it as a way of filling in the gaps. Rabbis would read the Tanakh, and when they came to a “why” question not answered in the text, they would reason themselves to an answer. (It’s how any of us tell a story, anyway, isn’t it? When we get to a why we can’t answer, we will sometimes just make shit up. We’re a storytelling people, more than a logical people.)

The Ruth Rabbah tells us this quick story to answer Question 1: “At that time God said: ‘My children are stubborn. To destroy them is impossible. To return them to Egypt is impossible. I cannot exchange them for another nation. What, then can I do? I must make them suffer and cleanse them with famine.'”

It’s the astonishingly frank reasoning of a sociopath. “I can’t kill them all. I can’t give them back. I didn’t keep the receipt, and it’s not like I can get a new people. I’ll starve them.”

The Ruth Rabbah also tells us why “a certain man” (Elimelech) would flee: “Elimelech was among the great scholars and patrons of the nation, and when the years of famine came, he said: ‘Now all of Israel will come to my door, each with his box (to collect money).’ He stood up and ran away from them.”

So, Elimelech, his wife, Naomi, and his two sons, go to Moab.

Moab is an interesting place for these Jews to go. From yesterday, when we talked about Lot and his daughters, we learned that the eldest daughter bore her father, Lot, a son named Moab, who founds the city of Moab. The younger daughter bore her father a son named Amon. And if we jump to Deuteronomy 23:4-5 for a sec, we learn this: “They should not come into the congregation of God, neither Moabite nor Amonite, even the tenth generation should not enter into the congregation of God, forever, because they did not greet you with bread and water on the way when you left Egypt.”

Once upon a time, Moses and God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. They wandered in the desert for 40 years. They didn’t make a lot of friends. (They did make a golden calf and boy did that really chap God’s hide but I digress.) And it’s a lovely bit of irony that the Moabites and Amonites would be inhospitable to the Israelites. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, in part, because of the cries to heaven of a young woman burned to death (or stung to death — the stories vary) for feeding a starving man. Moab and Amon are born because Lot and his daughters flee Sodom. Time is a flat circle.

Elimelech, Naomi, and their sons Mahlon and Chilion, are now in Moab, and Elimelech promptly dies, leaving Ruth with the kids. The boys took Moabite wives, Mahlon marrying a woman named Ruth; Chilion marrying a woman, Ruth’s sister, Orpah. (By the way, you guys know that Oprah’s actual given first name is Orpah? But so many people pronounced it wrong that she just decided, “Fuck it, I’m Oprah now.”)

The boys then die, too. So Naomi is left a widow with no children, and her daughters-in-law are left widowed, also with no children.

In Job, Job is punished as part of a wager. He has done nothing wrong. In the Ruth story, Elimelech dies probably as punishment for abandoning his people in their time of need. And the sons, Mahlon and Chilion, died because they took Moabite women as wives. (By the way, Ruth and Orpah aren’t just any Moabite women; they’re the daughters of Eglon, king of Moab.) But death isn’t much of a punishment for the dead person. They’re dead. (Oh boy, is someone going to ask me about death and resurrection?) Naomi seems to be the one suffering the brunt here. She is alone, unprotected in a strange and hostile city, with two daughters, now, to care for.

Naomi learns that the famine in Judah has passed. She wants to go home. She tells her daughters-in-law to return to their own homes, and wishes them new husbands and children, adding, “May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me.” Naomi says that “the hand of the Lord has turned against me.”

And still, in one of the most beautiful passages in the Hebrew Bible, Ruth says:

“Do not press me to leave you
or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die—
there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!”

Ruth converts, in that moment, if not ceremonially, and not ritualistically, (God spends a LOT of time with the Israelites explaining exactly how everything needs to be done, like a fussy gay wedding planner*) at least emotionally, to Judaism, and to Naomi. She will worship Naomi’s God. She will be of Naomi’s people.

(* Like, for serious, God gets in the weeds about incense in the Book of Exodus. “I like this smell, and this smell, and I will smite you dead if you even think about bringing in THIS smell.” And as a lover of candles and incense, I’m #TeamGod on this.)

It’s curious/interesting that Ruth’s husband, Mahlon, didn’t seek to convert his wife. As a Moabite, Ruth would not have worship YHWH, the God of the Israelites; her chief diety would be Chemosh*, possibly a fish god. (There are a LOT of fish gods in the ancient past.) While YHWH claims to be the only god, there were p l e n t y of Mesopotamian deities with cults and followers. And in this moment of love, and maybe desperation, Ruth says, “I choose your life.”

(* One of the things we know about King Solomon, world’s biggest non-genius — splitting a baby in half? That’s your solution? — is he had MANY wives. Many wives from many regions who all brought their own religious traditions with them, and their own gods and rituals and rites. The worship of Chemosh was part of Solomon’s kingdom until Josiah comes along and abolishes this religious plurality.)

And this conversion is, for me, the heart of this story. It’s a suggestion of acceptance at a time when the Jews were still very insular. And, read from a Christian point of view, it also speaks to the universal nature of God — that anyone, even a Moabite, can be welcomed.

But a question for me, also at the heart of this story, is about Naomi, who feels that God has turned against her. Who will later change her name to Mara, which means “bitter” (Naomi, by the way, means “pleasant”). Who will tell others that “the Lord has dealt harshly with me, and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me.” Did God actually turn his hand against her, or does she feel, in the middle of all this tragedy and chaos, as if that is what is happening? Is she blaming herself for something that is not her fault, which is something women have been taught to do since literally the invention of humans.

It’s the same question we leave with after the Book of Job, too: has God forsaken me, or am I only a pawn? (A rabbi I talked to about Naomi said, “G-d does not forsake anyone.” Which is comforting, if untrue, because we see in Deuteronomy 31:17 that God actually does forsake people because he tells us he will forsake them: “My anger will be kindled against them in that day. I will forsake them and hide my face from them; they will become easy prey, and many terrible troubles will come upon them. In that day they will say, ‘Have not these troubles come upon us because our God is not in our midst?'” When people tell you who they are, believe them. FROM OPRAH. Everything is connected.)

What’s powerful in this story is that even though Naomi is forsaken by God, Ruth does not leave her side. “Where you go, I will go.”

Categories
Belief Bible Study Genesis God Old Testament Seeking

Evil

Roxanne asked about evil. I’ll tell you now, at the beginning, to save you time if you thought I was going to be able to answer this question: I don’t know how to answer this question. I don’t know what to do about evil.

I’ll start with this poem by Duane Michals, “I Am Much Nicer Than God.”

“It was last Thursday, when I heard that Dennis had finally died, that I realized I was much nicer than God. I would never have let him suffer all those months as he did. I would never have invented cancer in the first place. Nor would I permit children to fall asleep hungry, or old people to cry alone. But if it is true, that I with my petty vanity and selfishness are much nicer than God, then I am in despair. I do not have enough compassion and love to protect. Somewhere there must be more love.”

Evil really isn’t that difficult of a concept to wrap your arms around. We innately know what evil is. Evil is something terrible that happens that leaves you powerless. Of course, sometimes it’s something like an earthquake, or a brushfire, and the earthquake and the brushfire themselves aren’t evil. Sometimes it’s an illness like cancer, or HIV/AIDS, but cancer and AIDS themselves aren’t evil. Evil is cruelty and violence, and it is sometimes disguised as caring and love. We experience the effects of evil; maybe evil is like wind: unseen but felt, always around us and we only notice when we’re blown off course.

God, however, of course, created earthquakes. And brushfires. And cancer. And AIDS. And humans, who exacerbate the problems while also being the victim.

Are people evil? We sure want them to be. We want an explanation for bad behavior, that an evil person did an evil thing because evil is in the world. And sometimes, I guess, that’s true. The problem is, the more we learn about the brain, the more we start to see how little control we actually have over our actions. Where I am with evil: there is a lot of bad in the world, most of it caused by humans, and evil is a way of labeling it, but it’s not a useful designation, because we use it like packing peanuts to couch our discomfort. Calling something evil and then blaming God for not fixing it has not worked as an effective counter to evil or as a deterrent to belief in the Divine.

But why does God allow evil? That’s a question any religion that claims a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity has to answer. That seems to be an especially Christian p.o.v. God has faults and makes mistakes in the Hebrew Bible ::all the time::, and it doesn’t undercut his standing as the chosen god of the Israelites. (Though there is an interesting development, characterwise, with God in the Hebrew Bible: there seems to be some room for polytheism at the beginning; God references other deities*. He then becomes the most powerful of all the deities. And ::then:: he becomes the ONLY deity. Christianity works some polytheism back into the mix with the trinity concept, which may not have been Christianity’s smartest move, but it was in part to create an answer to the question: Is Noah/Abraham/Moses saved, not having had a Christ-experience? John gives us the answer: yes, because “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I have been chastened by my pastor for my current thoughts on John so I’ll say no more until I’ve read this book of commentary on it.) Christianity wants a benevolent God to have all the Os — omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence — but also wants there to be sin. And we get the sin problem because now we have to introduce the concept of Free Will. That makes evil ::our:: problem, not God’s problem, and is a really shitty way to think about evil and God if you ask me.

(* Genesis 1:16 is an interesting place to talk real quick-like about translation and editorializing. It’s a curious little passage; here it is in the NRSV edition: “God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.” It’s identical in the King James, and essentially identical in the earlier 1599 Geneva translation. The Hebrew translation is also very straight-forward — we don’t have any contextual issues where a Hebrew word has been poorly translated. But the phrasing. “The greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night.” Why not just say “The sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night.” And it’s because the names for the sun and the moon at the time this text is written down were also the names of Mesopotamian deities. If you’re world-building as a solo entity, you can’t very well say that God created Utu (sun deity) and Nanna (moon deity), so we’re left with this awkward Hebrew work-around that has stayed with us through the current day.)

(Me again: there is an arm of evangelical Christianity that sees the “lesser light” as referring to Satan and I either have a lot to say about this or nothing to say about this we’ll see.)

Theologically speaking, God is at least aware that evil is a force in the world, whether he created evil or not. In Genesis 2:9, we learn that God has created both a tree of life (which grants immortality), and a tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And that good/evil tree is created ::before:: God has created Adam. So man didn’t bring evil into the world, because evil must already exist if it can be detected via fruit.

Later, God worries about the new state of the humans he’s created. Gen. 3:22: “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” The Gnostics will argue that the serpent doesn’t lie to Eve, but that God does. Because Eve and Adam do not die after eating the fruit. Certain Christian sects will say, “They died spiritually in that moment,” or “They lost the chance at immortality.” But immortality doesn’t seem to be part of God’s initial plan for humanity, anyway, since he’s also forbidden eating from the fruit of the tree of life. So evil exists — maybe even independently of God — and God sees knowing the difference between the two to be a terrible burden that he hopes to protect his new humans from.

(It’s also useful to consider that the Jewish tradition of creation is not “out of nothing” or “ex nihilo.” God brings order to chaos, not creation out of nothing, in Genesis 1. Christianity — specifically the early Church fathers — is the one arguing for Creation Ex Nihilo because I guess no one had anything better to do in the early 100s?)

But I do think evil is ::our:: problem. And I think God — the full complement of whatever that experience is — is such a profound mystery that as humans we may never understand the point of any of what we are doing here. We’re born, we live our days as best we can, sometimes doing good, sometimes doing evil, sometimes happy, sometimes broken entirely, and we die, and: [something even if it’s nothing happens]. I love this Tolstoy quote from War & Peace: “You will die and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything or cease asking.”

I don’t think there will ever be a human definition of evil that will make sense — and certainly, and ironically, religion can’t answer the question because we don’t understand the question, fully, even though I said evil itself isn’t all that difficult of a concept to wrap one’s arms around. Since we know that evil isn’t something God is willing/able/allowed to fix, we’re left on our own. Evil exists because humans exist, and our job that we should assign to ourselves is to bear witness to evil and call it out when we see it, and to do what we can for those who are suffering.

(Donald Trump is absolutely evil. As are his children, even Tiffany, and Mitch McConnell. Ellen is evil. Dick Cheney, too. George W. Bush is evil but we have decided he’s cute because Michelle Obama hugged him once. Capitalism is evil. Orthodoxy that seeks to control/gatekeep is evil. Obviously Hitler.)

Categories
1 Thessalonians Baptist Belief God New Testament Seeking

The Good Parts: 1 Thessalonians

1 Thessalonians in the Bible

But we were gentle among you.

1 Thess 2:7

For you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another; and indeed you do love all the brothers and sisters throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, beloved, to do so more and more.

1 Thess 4:9-10

So then let us not die as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.

1 Thess 5:6

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus.

1 Thess 5:16

Test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.

1 Thess 5:21

May the God of Peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless.

1 Thess 5:23
Categories
Baptist Belief God Seeking

God’s Love as My Love for My Cat

One way I wrap my head around the idea of God’s infinite and unconditional love (as I think of it — you may have an entire different relationship with God that is so personal you only whisper about it to each other and you may also just not have an interest in God even a little and you’re thinking, “Oof. JonBenet Mike was pretty rough; do I want to deal with God Mike too?” And you may not. And I love you anyway) is I think about my cat, Little Baby Fosco, and how it’s impossible he can understand the true depths of my love for him. He just can’t. He’s a cat. I’m a human. For you it may be a dog. My love for Fosco is literally unconditional and all-consuming. I hope to God your love isn’t a lizard.

(Btw, we all wanna say we love our partners with perfect unconditional love, but that’s a metaphor and we all know it. There are always some conditions there.)

There’s nothing that will ever make me stop loving Fosco. L i t e r a l l y nothing. He has pooped on the bathroom floor on ::more:: than one occasion, often out of spite, and Zach would only get maybe TWO accidents like that. See: conditions.

He is my world, this cat. I am MAYBE in his top 20. I don’t care. I love him with no reservations, no agendas, no emotional baggage. Oh, and by the way, there are two other cats in this house here and I love those fuckers equally as much too (except Peter, who I love, but…all of have sinned and fallen short and yadda yadda yadda).

Anyway, all that gushing about my cat is like God and me. I cannot comprehend something like God, or God’s love. I think I feel it, and I’m sure that’s real, and it’s also nowhere near to what God is thinking/feeling about me at any given moment. And God only ::sometimes:: makes it into my Top 50. (I could love God a lot more than I do. We’re still in the “Oh, you load the dishwasher ::that:: way” phase.)

AND GOD DOESN’T CARE. God isn’t holding emotional grudges. What’s being offered to me, to you, (unless you ::really:: don’t want it/don’t believe/are doing good on your own/gave at the office), to all of us is this exceptionally uncomplicated love.

Categories
Belief Finding Gnostics God Mental Health Seeking, Finding

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

John David:

I’m going to start with the easy stuff before it all falls apart.

These are 10 important books to me:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I think her exploration of power, and its intersection with personal animus, is thrilling. Will she ever finish the trilogy? She is my generation’s George R.R. Martin. (I also appreciate her portrait of Henry, who too often is a caricature of a horny monster. Antonia Fraiser, who has written a lot about Henry and his wives, made the great point that while we know Henry is going to marry six women — and kill two of them — Henry doesn’t know this about himself. Each marriage was the answer in his head.)

Independent People by Haldor Laxness. It’s grim, and Icelandic, and is so achingly human about despair and disappointment. Zach recommended it to me when I was looking for non-English novels to assign to my group.

The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Painfully, achingly human and blackly funny. It’s a grim Jane Austen novel with more diarrhea. It’s set in Japan right before World War II, and explores modernity in a country on the brink of being decimated by atomic bombs.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas. He’s looking at 15h and 16th systems of magic, and then how that is incorporated into traditional religious belief. Thomas doesn’t question people’s vocation. If someone identified as a necromancer, he calls them a necromancer and then doesn’t feel the need to whisper to us in the next sentence, “Of course necromancers do not exist.” He trusts his readers enough. I read a book about Madame Blavatsky and the guy writing it was so mean about her weight, and personal appearance, and sneered at everything Blavatsky did. I am not attempting, in a list of beloved books, to rehabilitate the life and career of Blavatsky. But I don’t need that guy in my ear being a jerk.

The Complete Flannery O’Connor by Flannery O’Connor. Her religious world view is singular and fierce and very Old Testament. (A mentally handicapped boy is drowned in a pond as a kind of baptism and that’s considered a happy ending for that kid.) My personal bible is engraved with this quote from O’Connor: “Grace changes us and the change is painful.”

The Complete Gerard Manley Hopkins by Gerard Manley Hopkins. His descriptions of nature — “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow”, “my heart in hiding stirred for a bird”, “Goldengrove unleaving” — feel essential to me. My friend Steve gets so mad about Hopkins seemingly giving up his poetry for his life as a Jesuit, so anytime we talk about Hopkins, we talk about that. But I’d rather discuss the poems.

Dickens: A Biography by Peter Ackroyd. It is as long as two Dickens novel, and there are several sections where Ackroyd imagines conversations with Dickens and his comrades that can get a little smurfy. But for someone like me, with a fascination with the 19th century (my lectures tend to focus on Victorian society, culture, literature, morality), it’s such a densely rich package of information. And you can’t understand England in the 19th century without understanding Dickens.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. About 20 years ago, I picked up a copy of The Woman in White at a used bookstore and was hooked from the opening line. (“This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.”) After finishing it (oh! One of my favorite reading moments in my life is being on the Metro to work and reading a scene in the novel where you find out that someone wicked has read someone else’s diary and how that is revealed was so shocking to me that I honestly gasped and put the book down and the woman sitting next to me asked if I was okay. “No, I am not,” I said. “Something scandalous happened in my book”) I wanted to learn more about Wilkie Collins, a man I’d never heard of until that moment. So I got a bio of him and that’s when I started to unravel a lot of bad, received wisdom about the 19th century. The Victorians are used as a strawman for prudery and repression, but reading the lived lives of those 19th century denizens really solidified my belief in Performed Morality (what we profess publicly so others will think we’re good) and Actual Morality (what we do in the shadows), and that we in the 21st century are not much different from our Victorian cousins except we dress for comfort and don’t die from cholera as often.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The first chapter book I remember falling in love with. I’ve read it countless times. I think it’s what defines me as a reader. When I taught it several years ago (I keep using the word “teach” and it occurs to me that I need to clear some stuff up and I’ll do that after this list), and really thought about the book and my relationship to it, I was surprised to realize that when I read it as a boy in, what? The 1980s? I had no idea it was an Old Book. Alice dressed differently than I did in the illustrations, but there was no sense that we were separated by 100 or so years.

Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen. It’s a spiritual book that didn’t make me feel cringey while reading it.

Now. More About Mike.

I am a college drop-out. I never finished. I tried, but I was both Too Poor and Too Mentally Ill in my late teens and early 20s. What I know, I know from self-teaching and listening to people smarter than I am. My day job is in financial regulatory compliance (I explain laws and regulations to people in the debt industry to make sure they’re on the right side of consumer law in their acts and practices), and I’ve cobbled together a side-gig as a teacher for adult continuing education. I didn’t want to leave you with the impression that I am something — a college graduate or some other sort of papered smart person — that I am not.

Now, to our Darker Purpose. I want to start by saying that I am about five steps behind you in all of this. I think you are incredibly well-educated in the language of rhetoric and philosophy, and I’m just very handsome and Trying My Best. This isn’t me asserting false modesty, or looking for some affirmations in return. I just want to be honest about where I am able to meet you w/r/t this conversation.

1) “we’re probably approaching the question of religion with two completely different paradigmatic approaches – mine seems to be more coldly philosophical, and yours seems more intent on finding meaning and happiness.”

I think, embarrassingly, this could also be described as, “You, John David, have given this all much more thought than I have; I’m just making my way through by feeling.” Because I don’t feel the pressing need to proselytize or convert, I also don’t feel the need to defend my faith from anything other than gross simplifications and lazy talking points. (This is ironic, of course, because I just got finished suggesting that I am a lazy, unthinking believer. We’ll just have to embrace this mystery!)

I approach religion as something I want to live with (and you will say, “No, I get it, but why?”), and you approach it as something you want to make sense of. You bring up Kierkegaard at some point and I raised both hands above my head in the universal sign for “this child needs help” and Zach kind of explained it to me, but I guess what I’m saying is, “Meet your new best friend Mike Bevel who takes Leaps of Faith all the time!”

2) “if you’ll grant me the liberty, I wanted to ask some deep and probing questions about what you said in your last e-mail. As I hope you know, absolutely nothing has the purpose of offending you. I’ve been really delighted to share in this correspondence with someone so kind and thoughtful, so I’m genuinely interesting in learning something about how you might approach these questions other than what you might consider to be my cool, objective, distant approach.”

I have only been delighted with every interaction we’ve had, and at no point do I feel you’ve been offensive. You can ask, and argue, and push back, and even express frustration. You are at 100% trust right now.

3) “I’m assuming that you’ve heard the saying that ‘anecdotes do not constitute data.'”

I didn’t list this with the other books (I don’t think the whole book is as strong as its thesis), but have you read Wendy Kaminer’s Sleeping with Extraterrestrials? She argues that, somewhere along the way, this deformed sense of propriety infected discourse and we have stopped asking follow-up questions to extraordinary claims. If someone says “I was taken aboard an alien spacecraft” or “Jesus appeared in my room last night” we (the universal “we”) worry that we’re rude if we say, “I don’t know if I believe that.” Kaminer wants us to ask more questions.

4) “What about your mystical experiences, if anything, led to you in the direction of a different conclusion – keeping in mind of course, that when someone tells you they were abducted by aliens, you would be likely to question their sanity, not engage them in rational discussion…”

Because I wanted it to be God. I think that’s probably a frustrating answer. I’m not using rationalism — and I think you are much more developed along that line. Because it felt like what I had always imagined God would feel like. (Have you seen Russian Doll on Netflix? One character attempts to bring up morality as a cause for the time loop they’re in, and another says, “The universe is moral and just happens to have your ideas about morality?”) But there isn’t anything rational about the experience.

Language fails me a little when we get here. I don’t believe that God is a person. I don’t believe that there is a place we go after this life that matches the artistic ideals of Heaven. I think God wants us to live this life here, and live it as well as we can, doing as little harm to those around us and trying as much as we can to love everyone, or at least to respect the belovedness in them. I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t believe intercessory prayer works. I think there’s a force in the universe that is good, and I want to align myself with that goodness in the universe.

(But man would I love an afterlife. It’s my narcissism. I think that I am so important that of course I should continue to live, just as I am, for all of eternity. I know it’s not true, but I want it to be true.)

5) “You said in your last email that the connection ‘with what I’ve decided to experience as God … has encouraged me to continue as a believer. Specifically, I’d like to ask this. What about that experience led you to believe that it was God?”

This is question 4 again, and I remain just as unable to describe it to you. I always get anxious in these situations because I don’t want to give the impression that my not being able to answer it means that it’s unanswerable. (It might very well be unanswerable.) It just means I am not yet smart enough to explain it. (And I may reach a point where I am smart enough and then the answer will be, “Oh, you did all this for nothing.”) And maybe that’s why faith is: the belief that you’ll eventually be able to explain the unexplainable.

“But why do you love carrot cake so much?” you could also ask, and I could only answer, “Because it tastes incredibly delicious and I am not a monster.” Why do I think it was God? Because it checked all my boxes for what God would feel like. The experience felt large and ineffable, but also suffused with love. I’d never experienced it before.

I’ll show a chink in my Armor of Faith: There are times where, especially when I dip into a depressive state, and I don’t feel that experience of God, where I begin to doubt, well, a lot of things. I doubt God. I doubt myself as a believer. I doubt the experience itself. I don’t know if I’ll ever live a comprehensive life of untroubled belief. That doesn’t worry me.

6) “If it was really a God, why doesn’t It/He/She want everyone to know that It exists, and why does It so readily reveal itself to some people and hide itself from others?”

I have two answers for this.

Mike Bevel: Christian — God reveals himself* to everyone, all the time, and is always talking to us and making himself known. We just don’t listen. God is love, and that gets in the way of our selfishness. There was a parody ad Y E A R S ago, with a woman on screen, showing a face of distress, with an anvil on her head. She says to the camera, “The pressure is unbearable. I feel it here, and here, and here. I struggle with how to deal with this pain.” And an off-camera voice says, “Have you ever thought about taking the anvil off your head?” And she says, “No, I hadn’t. But I’m willing to try anything.” There’s a screen-wipe to show the passing of time, and the woman is back on screen, this time looking calm and happy, and with no anvil on her head. She says, “It’s gone. The pressure’s gone. The agonizing pain. All of it. Gone.” And the off-camera voice says, “Would you try taking the anvil off your head again?” And she says, hopefully, “Yes! Yes I would take the anvil off my head.” It’s a parable, John David.

[* I am not great at un-gendering my language around God. I don’t believe that God has a gender of any kind; but I think of him in male terms because that’s what I grew up believing and hearing. It’s not great.]

Mike Bevel: Doubting Thomas — Yeah. I don’t know. That’s a good question. God is a Chatty Cathy throughout so much of the Old Testament*, and now we seem to have more silence than anything. It can feel devastating.

[* I am a Baptist. But I have a LOT of affinity for the Gnostics. And I’m more Marcion in my reading of the Bible than not.]

7) “You’ve said something that I’m afraid not many Christians are willing to admit: ‘I believe God exists not for any tangible reason.’ Is there any other arena of decision-making or thought aside from the spiritual/theological where this assertion would not be scoffed at?”

I guess I’d ask back how do you handle personal preferences in your worldview? Because that seems to be an irrational exception rationalists make. Here, for instance, is a list of foods I hate:

  • Cantaloupe
  • Eggplant
  • Celery
  • Cooked Celery
  • Cooked Carrots
  • Hominy
  • Green Peppers
  • Any Cooked Peppers
  • Chocolate
  • Unidentifiable Chunks of Things That Cause the Texture of a Dish to be Upsetting

8) “Your assertion that ‘I believe evolution is wrong not for any tangible reason’ is going to be met with utter bewilderment by scientists.”

I was VERY worried that at some point I expressed some creationist sympathies. I think you’re making a hypothetical point here. And I just want to go on the record to you, friend to friend: I 100% believe in evolution.

But.

I don’t understand at all how it works. I accept it on faith. I accept that smarter people than I am have a handle on it. I think we’re refining our ideas about it all the time because our science gets better and better. (We can’t really say that about religion, though, can we? Religion more often than not wants to firmly entrench itself in dogmatism and doesn’t take kindly to, “Well, here’s some new information you may want to incorporate.”)

I sometimes find myself deeply depressed and embarrassed that so much of how the world works is as much an article of faith for me as my belief in religion. I am not saying that religion and science themselves are two sides of the same coin; I’m just saying that in my thieves’ pouch, they are. (I will watch the fuck out of a science documentary, btw.)

9) “I think you have said perhaps one thing that is incorrect, and I want to see what you have to say in response. You said, ‘I’m making choices toward belief because my years of disbelief left me sad and depressed and empty.’ I’m certainly glad that you’re no longer experiencing those emotions anymore. However, in the very sentence before that, you said ‘God may or may not exist.’ Do you think that your psychological state was so vastly improved by the existence of something you haven’t even convinced yourself of? If you’d had said ‘God exists, I know him, and I can feel him,’ then I would be much more convinced of that feeling being responsible for your (what I hope is now non-existent) sadness and depression. However, how can that sadness and depression be conclusively gone if you haven’t even fully convinced yourself that the cause of your happiness even exists?”

This is a complicated question. They’re all complicated, actually, as far as I am concerned. But this one. Whoo-boy.

I am mentally ill. I am mentally ill and treated, right now, and it’s going great, thank you for asking. I am prone to:

  • Depression
  • Anxiety
  • Intrusive violent thoughts
  • Obsessive-compulsive ideation

Some of that might be genetic. Some of it might be nurture. (My childhood Wasn’t Great.) And it’s so easy (whether it’s correct or not) to write off my experiences as “Ohhhhhh. [makes spiral gesture around ear] Got it.” God didn’t take any of that away — that was all Western medicine and talk therapy. (Psychiatry, by the way. I mean, talk about taking things on faith. “Let’s just see what happens when this medication originally developed for avian diabetes gets into your brain” is as nutty as any religious belief.)

When I say that God may or may not exist, I think what I’m trying to do is provide a space for the other person to feel safe in their disbelief. I don’t want to convert someone through conversation. So, I believe God exists, but I am not troubled at all being fully in communion (heh) with someone who doesn’t believe in God at all. Like, for instance, Zach. He’s an atheistic Buddhist. He does not share any of my religious beliefs. I love that guy so fucking much.

My sadness and depression may never truly be gone, because I may just not have a brain that makes the typical amount of whatever, we’ve established I’m no scientist. But what I’m getting better at, both with my belief in God, and just through trusting myself, is not blaming myself for my feelings. That’s a fun game I run: Oh, I am sad, must be because I did something super shitty and this is the way the world works. Why I’m not a Calvinist I don’t know. If I ever start talking like a Calvinist, that should be your cue that I’m on the road to Self Harm.

John David: I love these emails with you so much. Thank you for your kindness, patience, curiosity, and deep intelligence. This continues to be such a pleasure. I’m so glad we met.