Goines On: Heavenly Productions, Ltd.

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The psychology of “faith the substance of things hoped for” wouldn’t let go of Goines. He wondered about scientists who believe in the divinity of Jesus. Do they accept Christianity’s doctrine of salvation out of a deep need to know things beyond science’s reach, things they can then expect God to reveal to them someday?
    Remembering his college logic studies, Goines thought of another thing the writer of the letter to the Hebrews in Jerusalem could have been doing with the “faith is evidence” maneuver – establishing an axiom to throw in whenever he couldn’t prove something any other way.

Goines On: Evidence of things not seen

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Goines’ notion the day before, that faith itself could somehow seem to amount to evidence, kept nagging at him. He now remembered a Bible verse to that effect, the opening verse of Chapter 11 of a letter to the Hebrews in Jerusalem, thought to have been composed about 30 years after Jesus’ crucifixion: “...faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” – as though faith, or true-belief alone could transform a thing believed into a fact. The resurrection of Jesus, for example, which the letter writer seemed to think lacked other evidence. Otherwise, why the need for faith?

Be Happy

It’s your choice

By Sharon Stoner

[Editor’s Note: Readers need to know where Sharon is coming from, in order to understand that her advice was hard won and does not come from a place of comfort and ease. Sharon has experienced much pain and suffering. I asked her three days ago how her hands and kidneys were doing.

Today today

This moment

By Moristotle

To a friend’s confession yesterday that as a boy he had wished that dogs could go to heaven, I said, “I can assure you most reliably that dogs do go to heaven.” (Of course, I could “reliably” do no such thing, but my friend was free to be assured, or not, as he wished.)

The sadness of glad

I was surprised and more than simply glad to receive this morning an email from a close relative nearly my age, for I don't receive too many commendations. The email said:

I completely agree with what I have read so far [on your blog] and find your stuff delightful and inspiring. Don't tell my..., who would be sure to say I'm going to go to Hell. I...have been a liberal Democrat for many years. So glad I have found you! [altered to try to keep my relative's...from finding out]

    But it's sad to think that the writer and I were both in our thirties the last time we saw each other and haven't been in touch for more years than either of us has left on this green Earth. (And sad to think there are people who believe that reading my blog is sufficient reason for someone to go to Hell. Or is it being a liberal Democrat?)

My wife and I (and Siegfried) had to go over to Chapel Hill later in the morning. I was glad that Carolina's home game wouldn't start until evening. The streets of the town were still passable. Sadly, to quote a headline in the sports section of a local newspaper this morning, "It's that time of the year again." I.e., football. Intercollegiate athletics. Caravans of flag-fluttering automobiles on weekends. In fact, we saw a car with a little dark blue flag on either side on the interstate—Duke? At least it was headed for Durham and not Chapel Hill.

On the drive over, my wife told me about Cameron Todd Willingham. We're glad to know that he was an honorable man. He said he wouldn't plead guilty to avoid the death sentence because he was innocent of the fire that burned down his house in Corsicana, Texas on December 23, 1991¹ and killed his three young children. So the great State of Texas executed him.
    Sadly, they killed an innocent man. From an August 26 Associated Press account of the inquiry that exonerated Willingham:

Willingham's stepmother, Eugenia Willingham, called the [fire investigation] report another step in the "long, drawn-out process" of clearing his name.
    "He lived 12 years on death row," she said. "He went through hell, I'm telling you. It was probably worse than hell."
    She said her husband died in 2005, the year after his son's execution, of prostate cancer and "a broken heart."

_______________

1. The fatal fire occurred five days before the murder at the CBS Lounge in Phoenix for which Ray Krone was wrongfully convicted and spent three years on death row before being wrongfully convicted a second time and sentenced to "life" in Arizona prisons.

More theological loopholes (or half-gainers)

My recent discovery that a man celebrated as one of the foremost intellectuals of the twentieth century—William F. Buckley, Jr. [1925-2008]—devoted a considerable portion of his brain power to theology (the invention of loopholes to avoid certain problems of religious belief) has inspired me to revisit my March 30 post, "Definition of theology," and add a few more examples of theological concoction:

Problem to Avoid: It is unendurably sad to contemplate that after a loved one or I myself die, we shall never again see one another.
Loophole: We don't really die! We will be resurrected (so long as we believe the prescribed things) and will enjoy each other throughout eternity.

Problem to Avoid: But I can't stand many of the people I might have to spend eternity with.
Loophole: When people are resurrected, only their pure parts are revived. If they were personally insufferable and hideously ugly in real life, they will in heaven be exceedingly nice and gloriously beautiful to look upon.

Problem to Avoid: The good die young and even those who are not so terribly bad often die before their time.
Loophole: Whoever dies before his or her time (and believes the things prescribed to get into heaven) will be proportionally recompensed in heaven so that by the time eternity has elapsed, it will all have evened out and everyone will have gotten his or her precise due.
    ...And those who live beyond their time (perhaps because of having been put on life support against their DNR order) will be proportionally penalized, etc. As I said, it'll all have evened out by the time eternity has elapsed.

Problem to Avoid: But eternity will never elapse! In fact, heaven could become terribly boring at some point.
Loophole: The Director of Heavenly Amusements already has (and has always had, throughout preceding eternity) a continuously diverting program planned. No one will ever, ever get bored. For one thing, we will sit around a lot and play theology.

The half-gainer concocted by Buckley in his son's book (not that it was original with Buckley) isn't any more convincing than the ones above, now, is it? All such concoctions down through the ages (since those recorded in the Israelites' ancient literature) have similarly been in the service of trying to demolish unpleasant, inconvenient facts or beliefs about the world in which we live. It is ironic that some such concoctions (starting at least with the Israelites' attributing jealousy to their god in order to avoid the problem of his vengeful destruction of people who offended him) have been accorded special authority as "revelations of God": the author of Exodus 20:5 had his god "reveal" the attribute in his own voice: "...for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God." Revelation of God is the reverse 3½ somersaults of theology, and the writer in question was undoubtedly one of our earliest theological geniuses.

Standing in the rain arguing

The evolution-creation question is settled. Man evolved and was not created. To argue the question with a creationist would be like standing in a driving rain and letting him try to convince you that it wasn't raining. Or vice versa. No mileage there. Forget it.

Same thing as regards arguing with jehovahs, evangelical Christians, Islamists, or other fantasists whether heaven exists or some other superstition is true. Especially Muslims with dynamite strapped around their torsos.

Putting that out there for you is my gift to myself and to you for my birthday today. Happy my birthday to you too.

Later the same day

Shortly after publishing those paragraphs, a birthday card arrived from one of my sisters. She appealed to me to read the Billy Graham clips she'd enclosed. There are three of them, apparently from a Q&A column of Dr. Graham's titled "On Christianity."

Question 1:

DEAR REV. GRAHAM: Do you think Christ will come again and the world will end in 2009? I get very discouraged when I see the way the world is going—the economic situation, terrorism, crime, warfare, etc.—and I wonder how much longer God is going to let this continue.

Do you get even more discouraged when you realize that there is no heaven and your body isn't going to be restored to its young sexiness?

Question 2:

DEAR REV. GRAHAM: My friend (who doesn't believe in God or religion) tells me that if I really believe the Bible, then why don't I follow all the laws in the Old Testament? I do believe the Bible is God's Word, but am I doing something wrong by not following these laws?

No, dear, and neither would the ancient Israelites have been wrong to ignore them, except that the religious elders would have banished them from the community.

Question 3:

DEAR REV. GRAHAM: If God is real, then why are there so many religions in the world? They can't all be right, can they?

They sure can't all be right, now, can they? Lots of people (who still want to believe in heaven) think that it almost doesn't matter what you believe. In Charles M. Blow's December 27 op-ed piece in The New York Times ("Heaven for the Godless?"), he reports on the June publication of

the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life['s] controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.
    This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: "I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." But the survey suggested that Americans just weren't buying that....
    And they didn't stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven—dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt—and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

I hope that puts my sister's mind at ease.

I dream of heaven

Though I'm rarely aware of dreaming anymore, I probably still dream most nights. I did last night. It might have been more than one dream, for there were scenes involving my parents, scenes set in a sort of Harry Potter version of Yale, and a scene involving a lost Wally (our poodle, who was bitten on a hind foot a week ago today by a copperhead snake—he's healing nicely, thank you, and even recovering his confidence, I think, for going out into the yard, where the copperhead may have a nest...).

Anyway. My parents are both dead, my father for over twenty-seven years (at ten years older than my present age), my mother for—what?, two now? In the dream about them, we all seemed to be on some sort of vacation together. I was in this place, which I guess was wherever we were staying or visiting, and they were returning from a short outing somewhere. There was something about my packing up some belongings to put in the trunk of their car to be moved, as though I were once again their adolescent boy. And I kept delaying the getting ready to pack. Perhaps I was trying to forestall the separation. I don't know. At any rate, it seemed a straightforward dream of nostalgia, or loss, an attempt to reclaim what is no longer.

Maybe the dream of Yale was the same. I've had numerous similar dreams over the years. Back on the Yale campus, if not always recognizable as the Yale campus—certainly the campus last night seemed more like a cinematic set—I was trying to locate my dorm room. I went into the wrong one by mistake, only to be greeted by three surly undergraduates who berated me for my lack of sense. Sort of doesn't seem to be an attempt to reclaim the past somehow. But maybe it is. Let's assume so. That suits my theme better. Keep reading.

The Wally dream seemed to be the anticipation of loss, for Wally is still with us. And we are still with Wally. I occasionally ruminate on the possibility that one or both of us will predecease him. I try to imagine what his loss of us would feel like to him. But given the exigencies of dog life relative to human life, I suppose that we are the ones who are going to have to deal with the loss of him. The dream last night involving Wally had us too on some sort of vacation. We weren't at home anyway. Wally went missing. I happened into this sort of kennel—on the hotel premises, I think—and as I was looking around at the grooming tables and seeing nothing but miniature or toy poodles—but all white, or cream, like Wally—I felt the actual Wally rubbing against a leg and jumping with the joy of finding me again. I knelt down as always to hug and love him, and as always the people around us oohed and ahhed at the display of affection. Wally home again.

My theme is: Did such dreams as these lead men to conceive of heaven and to construct theologies designed to explain how it could be obtained? Such posits are facile, for, as Hermione Granger says in one or another of the Harry Potter books:

I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist.

Thanks to Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, for quoting Hermione in his review of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review.

Ladies and gentlemen

N'est pas un interlude

In David Lodge's novel about Henry James (Author, Author!), the author recounts an anecdote told by James's friend George Du Maurier:

It was a fine but very cold Sunday just before Christmas, and Henry had made the effort to walk up to Hampstead and take Du Maurier for his constitutional on the Heath, according to custom. They were alone, apart from the terrier Don, who nosed about on the frost-hardened ground looking frustrated at the scarcity of interesting smells. It was too cold to sit on their favorite bench—cold enough for people to be skating on the ponds. Watching them, Du Maurier recalled an occasion long ago when a dog fell through the ice on the Whitestone Pond and got into difficulties, and he had plunged into the icy water to rescue the creature. "The grateful owner tried to tip me half-a-crown, upon which I'm afraid I was rather short with him. 'I beg your pardon,' he said, 'I didn't realize you were a gentleman.'" [pp. 143-144]

Men and women—gentlemen and ladies in their God-blessed freedom—should not require the promise of heaven (or the hope of avoiding hell) to do what is right.

Alice James on meeting family members after death

Alice James was the invalid sister of the American philosopher William James and the "Anglo-American" writer Henry James. Apropos my post on the belief that we might be reunited with our relatives in the sweet by and by, Alice is represented in Colm Tóibín's novel about Henry, The Master, as having reservations about such a reunion:

[Henry] remembered a scene when Alice must have been sixteen. It was one of those long dinners with one or two guests, he remembered, and someone was talking about life after death, and meeting members of their family after death, or hoping to, or believing they might. Then one of the guests, or Aunt Kate, had suggested praying to meet the loved ones in the next life, when suddenly Alice's voice rose above all the others and everyone stopped and looked at her.

"One need pray for nothing," she said. "Reference to those whom we should meet again makes me shiver. It is an invasion of their sanctity. it is the sort of personal claim to which I am deeply opposed." [p. 49, Scribner edition, 2004]

A dogmatic believer's lament

One day we will meet and ride on a bike,
Eat at the same table, and take a long hike—
    My relatives and I,
    In the sweet by-and-by—
Even those I met once and didn't much like.

"A benefit of being born into a family," someone has said, "is that you get a chance to meet people you'd otherwise never have chosen to associate with."

That may be a bit cynical, but most of us do have some one or more relatives we don't like or at least don't care to see. And some traumatically abused people have good reason to abhor their parents and would rather not have been born, or at least not to those particular parents. But while many of us might not have chosen our parents, we nevertheless love them and basically have no regrets about having been born to them.

Yet we do have one or a few relatives we would never have chosen to associate with. Would we be comfortable believing, as some people dogmatically do, that we'll be reunited with them "in heaven"?