Handwritten note left under my door by Jevonda in September:
This is Jevonda!
Believe it or not....
Email to Jevonda:
Dear Jevonda! I would so like to have been here yesterday!
When I first saw your note, I read it as saying
This is Jehovah!
Believe it or not....
and half expected the next words to be: "God exists!" and to discover that someone here was funning me. How relieved I was to make out instead, "I came to see Karrie and dropped by to see you too"!
Email from Jevonda yesterday:
I'm so embarrassed that I am just now responding to you! I forwarded your message from my work account to my personal account back in September and then totally forgot that I needed to respond. Please forgive.
It's funny how you interpreted my note to you. Perhaps God really is trying to send you a message!
Email to Jevonda:
Well, Jevonda, if you are embarrassed, I was afraid that my Jehovah misreading might have offended you. I'm relieved that apparently not. Thanks for your nice reply that "Perhaps God really is trying to send you a message!" Indeed, I agree to the extent that if "God" existed and did such things, then it might indeed have been such a message.
I've been reading around the edges of Karen Armstrong's new book, The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, and I was surprised to learn that her first few books (she says in the Introduction) were fairly "Dawkinsesque" (disbelieving; that's a reference to the currently perhaps best-known atheist, biologist Richard Dawkins). But she still denies the existence of God in the various primitive guises by which he is known through the Abrahamaic scriptures, thinking of "God," apparently, as literally "Nothing" in the sense that "God is not a thing."
I'm curiously prompted by what she writes to ask myself whether there is a role in my life for this sort of "God"? For religion? I suspect that "this sort of God" is just a tautological wisp from some such Paul Tillichian pronouncement as "God is whatever our ultimate concern is." That is, if I have an "ultimate concern"—which anyone would seem to have to have—then that is my "God." (I was fortunate to hear Tillich lecture at Yale, by the way, and also Reinhold Niebuhr; how exciting that was for this questing philosophy major!)
I'm not sure that acknowledging that I therefore "have God in my life" is going to make that much difference. At least, it might make me a little less of a burr under the saddles of others and render me more socially acceptable to the religious.
ah, but nothing short of "accepting Jesus as your persoanl saviour" is going to do the trick with your vanpool!! LOL
ReplyDeleteYou can do the trick with some of the people some of the time, but not with all of them all of the time?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, things having to do with "God" probably need to be left a matter between the individual and his or her respective "God," whether he/she/it be Yahweh, Jehovah, God the Father, Jesus, Allah, Nothing, or Ultimate-Concern-Whatever-It-Be.
I remember when I lived in Apex some baptists came up to am as I was working in my yard and asked me something like "how will you get into heaven" and I said something like "well assuming there is a heaven, living a good life should be enough" and they said something like, "oh that's nice, well actually you have to accept Jesus as your personal saviour" and I said something like, "oh that's nice but I'm an atheist so you can go away now." :) As I recall they actually gave up without much of a fight. Praise be to "whatever"!
ReplyDelete