America is not a godless nation

...despite the ravings of the wild ayatollahs.

"Strange Tastes," runs the headline of an article in the religion section of this morning's Burlington Times-News.
    Since time unremembered, God is whomever animals are sacrificed to.
    I was in the kitchen when my wife gasped from the dining room.
    "What?" I said.
    "Something disgusting."
    "Donald Trump in the news again?"
    "Worse than that."
    "Muslim terrorists?"
    She read me the caption from the photo: "Chef prepares Rocky Mountain Oysters for deep-frying in advance of festival held Thursday."

Men used to sacrifice animals to God. The Jews still do. At least, in Israel. Jews here, having feasted long in a heathen nation, have given it up.
    And Arab Muslims, of course, sacrifice humans to their God.

Theologian Paul Tillich said that God was "our ultimate concern."
    Okay. In America, where the ultimate concern of most is to feed their trivial tastes, those tastes have become God.
    America remains devoutly religious.

With respect to reflective belief

The second verse of Genesis puts being "in the same boat" in a mythically dramatic context; we're all "Afloat on the face of the deep."
    But I like to distinguish between people who come to believe in God in order to feel better about suffering and injustice (or to lessen their anxiety about dying¹) and people who believe but don't think much about it, believing simply because they have been indoctrinated to do so (even possibly by rote, as in the case of Muslims as portrayed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali²).
    Most people who "believe" may do so from indoctrination. Remember, as Bertrand Russell pointed out in one of the essays in Why I Am Not a Christian, most people who are religious, are religious because they were taught to be so as children, and Muslims who as children could have been raised to be Christians instead would now be Christians rather than Muslims, and vice versa. (The few exceptions might be those who reflect. And some of those become atheists rather than switch religions.)

If I'm in the same boat as believers, I want it to be with believers who are aware of, and troubled by, suffering and injustice, not with people whose "belief" is essentially merely sentimental and unreflective. I can't say that I feel much compassion for the latter folks, or even much respect.
    And of course I condemn those among them who, in the face of reason and morality, take their "holy books" at their word and out gay people, murder physicians who perform abortions, say "bring it on" to Armageddon, behead unbelievers, stone to death women branded immoral for having been raped, murder daughters for "dishonoring" their families, beat "disobedient" wives, rape sexually unwilling ones³, go into marketplaces with a bomb strapped about their chest, fly airplanes into buildings, etc.
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1. I'm thinking of Tillich's characterization of existential anxiety as a person's awareness of his possible non-being.
2. From Nomad, p. 20:

   Sahra [her half-sister who has lived in England for years but still wears "the jilbab, a long black robe that covers your hair and all your body past your ankles and wrists, but not your face"] may choose to enroll Sagal in a Muslim school, where she will be isolated from the values that underlie success in Britain. Most of her fellow students will come from homes where English is a second language. Some of her teachers will have been selected more for their piety than their ability as educators, others for their willingness to cooperate with the norms of the Muslim school. Some teachers will have applied out of a strong sense of idealism; others will have been motivated by a combination of some or all of these factors. Education will be by rote learning and submission, not inquiry and an open mind. [emphasis mine]

3. All of these Islamic crimes against women are documented in Hirsi Ali's 2006 book, The Caged Virgin.

Afloat on the face of the deep

Writing yesterday's essay led me to the realization that, in a fundamental sense, believer and non-believer are in the same boat, their only essential difference being the paddle they use to stay afloat.
    "The long, distant cry" didn't initially end with "In my own way, I too am troubled by all this suffering. Its mewing and keening continually haunt my hearing." I added that paragraph (and continued to revise it) after realizing that my continual awareness of suffering and its profound unfairness seems to amount to my being one of those "troubled people" my friend referred to. I have to admit that for some time I have been aware of a sense of underlying existential pathos. A dissonant chord continually troubles the melodic line of my life and disturbs its harmony.
    And who can say that Castaneda was free of existential anxiety¹ even when that "normal" photograph² was made?

One person's response to suffering and injustice is to believe that God exists and will put it all right. And he prays continually that it be so. Amen, he says.
    Put it all right. That is, something is wrong for the believer too. For him too it's a dog eat dog world. He feels the world's suffering and is appalled and unsettled by it. He seeks an antidote for it (or for the fact of his own future annihilation) through believing that suffering (or his coming annihilation) is just an illusion or, if not an illusion, will nevertheless be righted in the hereafter.
    Yes, something is wrong, and the believer too is troubled and suffers, however able he usually is to plug his ears against the tragic discord that would otherwise trouble the harmony of his life too.

I want to remember this. I want to remember compassion for those who stoutly resist giving up the palliative paddle labeled "God." For I seem to have been clutching a sort of paddle myself. Rather than pray and shout amen, I beat the waters and decry. And my song lately has only repeated slight variations of the same lament.
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1. From Wikipedia's entry on existential anxiety:

   The theologian Paul Tillich characterized existential anxiety as "the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing" and he listed three categories for the nonbeing and resulting anxiety: ontic (fate and death), moral (guilt and condemnation), and spiritual (emptiness and meaninglessness). According to Tillich, the last of these three types of existential anxiety, i.e. spiritual anxiety, is predominant in modern times while the others were predominant in earlier periods. Tillich argues that this anxiety can be accepted as part of the human condition or it can be resisted but with negative consequences. In its pathological form, spiritual anxiety may tend to "drive the person toward the creation of certitude in systems of meaning which are supported by tradition and authority" even though such "undoubted certitude is not built on the rock of reality."

2. My friend who read my paper on mentoring had said, "Carlos Castaneda's picture looks normal. Why did Thom Green say that he looked troubled?"

Message from Jehovah

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.