Faith and Religion
When you get to be my age, you don’t know if it’s autumn and your leaves are drying and turning colors, or if it’s the shortened days of winter.
Through the lens of time, a lot has changed and my adult mind processes things differently.
My faith is sometimes shaken but never lost. Questioning God is not a sin, not against the law, not yet, but opens a world of understanding and is the water for the roots of life that sprouts flowers. I still had faith in angry moments when nothing was going right and when feeling alone and unloved. Maybe it was all the unexplained blessings in my life I never passed off as just living. I recall the stupid things I did, and lived through, or wasn’t humiliated by or jailed, and still look to the heavens and thank God.
From the time I was a little boy, I had questions about religion. What were my sins I kept asking? I looked at my friend’s father’s Playboy magazines, was that a sin? Flipping through the television channels, evangelists still tell me I am a sinner. “Repent now if you want to go to heaven,” I am admonished by messages that stream on the television screen, “Save your soul and donate by calling the number below.”
Lying is a sin and over 150 verses in the Bible refer to it. My accountant says, “Everybody lies.” I think it is the number one industry in the world with a multitude of kissing cousins like stealing, cheating, sexual abuse, scams, fraud, blackmail, and extortion, hostage-taking (physical and social) all complementary industries. I can’t remember ever hearing a sermon about lying.
Today, lying is a political art form, media and business, yet organized religion is silent on the subject and the consequences of lying are disproportionate or nonexistent. The consequences of lying, or for that matter all manner of related abuses by the more elite and powerful is not apparent. People get rich and powerful through the lies they tell. A well-known popular television news personality and serial sexual abuser was fired from his lofty position and today has a net worth of 85 million dollars. Old soldiers go to their graves while the disgraced rich and famous buy homes on tropical islands and live out their days
Faith is important to me, buttressed by past sublime transcendent moments in the
the warmth of God’s loving arms. To firm up my faith I’ve tried to call up those past magical feelings by reading the Bible. Throughout history, the Bible has been a most holy book for Christians and an important source of faith for millions of people but reading and understanding it is difficult. The Bible, the most often quoted, most widely printed, and distributed of books, presents the rules of living, genealogy, and historical record of the miracles of God’s creation but is also the most puzzling, most difficult to read, and most enigmatic. I guess we are to rely on scholars to tell us what it all means. Are they ever wrong? Have the interpretations changed through the ages?
Reading the Old Testament is challenging and raises more questions than provides comfort. By contemporary views, some of the biblical capital punishment crimes in the Old Testament do not rise to misdemeanor status today. The New Testament calls for a better way—not destroy non-believers but love and forgiveness. Did God have a change of heart by preaching stories of forgiveness and redemption as a hopeful contrast to anger and destruction.
Today the world teeters back and forth between the Old Testament kill your enemies’ strategies and the New Testament love your neighbor. Did God have empathy for the destruction of cities, families, men women, and children? God directed destruction of nations and cities by fires, wiping out humanity and innocent animals in flood and plagues on Egypt to punish an entire population for worshiping a wide variety of nature-gods. I don’t think empathy for the doomed is mentioned in the Old Testament. The Old Testament lives on today. In the past 3,400 years, only 268 have been without war.
Across the world, mass atrocities occur and countries invade other countries and kill innocent people Old Testament-style, in the name of Jesus or Allah. The Old Testament is filled with existential stories and burnt offerings, the Greek word for which is holocaust. True to the Old Testament, today we still resort to violence, and at the same time it’s also a prime form of entertainment, and the Mideast seems to have only moved mere inches from its past while technology advances at light speed.
To make sense of life’s conflicts and contradictions many turn to the bible, and heed the message of sermons that draw on a smattering of familiar passages to a congregation of followers who haven’t read it. Has organized religion lost its way or has it yielded to human flaws that require delivering what the customer wants, not needs? I’ve lost the church of my boyhood—I changed and the church never did (I still love to go to churches and always feel God is in the room and not wearing a watch). Outside of organized religion, in polite society discussing the Bible and faith is about as off-limits as talking about politics.
We depend on faith in our daily lives, not just faith in God, but our safety, the love of our spouses, that people will drive on the correct side of the road, faith that when the doctor says he is going to cut through my sternum, disconnect my heart and pull it out of my chest to repair it, that he is qualified and has done enough of them to be expert, and did not have had a bad night.
More than my in-built faith, I want to believe in God and hope Heaven will someday answer my long list of unanswerable questions. I have a list of questions to ask. I’d like to know more about my father’s life. I wanted to ask about his war experiences when he was alive but I worried he wouldn’t want to discuss it. Mom’s life too. Deeper wonderings about heaven’s answers come randomly. Why aren’t blackmail and extortion one of the deadly sins? Of course, I want to know all the answers to all the questions. Is there predestination? Does man have free will exclusively?
Atheists and religious zealots both argue on an emotional icy precipice that God is unprovable. Science is unreliable in arguing Godless points of view or disproving miracles while faith doesn’t try to prove anything. Science is more like government and faith is more like gravity.
I am cursed or blessed with disintegrations of thoughts around the need to understand. There is so much to understand. Is there anything that can travel faster than light? Einstein says no but now quantum physics experiments suggest other ways in which the speed of light might be surpassed. What is consciousness? I’d love to know if humans survive and how long. Life on other planets, are they like us?
As time passed, I came to understand fleeting facts can be convenient to where we live and the times. Most famously, Galileo Galilei’s proof the Earth evolved around the sun was shunned not just by the Church but also by other scientists of the day. Scientists wouldn’t even look through the telescope to see the proof. He was tried by the Inquisition and forced to recant or face the gallows. Scientists today don’t face the gallows for their claims but the face the near corporal punishment of lack of funding, careers, censorship, and isolation from peers and journals.
Throughout history, scientists haven’t always followed principles of dynamic not static, open to hypothesis, testing, debate, and criticism. Throughout most of recorded history religion controlled scientific thought. Even though the Gutenberg press revolutionized printing in the fifth century (probably invented in the 5th century in China) it wasn’t allowed in Egypt until 1925 because printers feared hog’s hair brushes used to clean type might touch the word Allah.
Science still strays from scientific principles as money, standing and politics hold sway. Scientists have even been ostracized and persecuted for strictly adhering to those principles. Today group think can rule of principals of science.
As my life advanced, blessings mounted and my faith strengthened, I became more and more thankful but also sensitive to the big arguments of atheists who claimed the bible couldn’t be right about the age of the earth—biblically estimated to be 6,000 years, and the whole story of God creating heaven and earth in seven days or saving all the animals on a big boat.
On the other hand, did life, and the beauty of our existence just happen? We can’t assemble something as relatively simple as a Boing 747 without a blueprint so did all of the miracles of life just happen without any help? A simple Readers Digest article I read as a young man entitled, Ten Reasons Scientists Believe in God, left a lasting impression on me and prompted me to dig deeper. It left me with the impression that He was a great scientist, and as Einstein famously said, “God doesn’t play with dice.” It left me believing life didn’t happen randomly, accidentally, or after a big bang.
The Oxford mathematician and physicist, Roger Penrose, Nobel Laureate in Physics and Professor of Mathematics, calculated the probability of chance creation of a universe like ours, with so many unique requirements for life, is one part in 1010123. The little number has so many zeroes if each zero was a centimeter wide, the full number would stretch across the entire visible universe trillions of times over, “and even then, would only just barely be getting started.”
I don’t know if the miracle of the cell was included in Roger Penrose’s analysis, but out-of-the-world miracles of the body calculations—eyesight, hearing, consciousness, instantaneous abilities to calculate, oxygen exchange, white blood cells, on and on, and most importantly that we all have about a hundred personal DNA mutations—stretches of genetic instructions that don’t quite match any of the genes given to us by either of our parents but are ours alone. How all this works is still largely a mystery.
We think we know so much but know so little. Only two percent of the human genome codes for proteins, which is to say only 2 percent does anything practical. It is a collection of inert components, the same stuff you find in dirt—that is the miracle of life. The Body, by Bill Bryson, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, is a source for information on the miracles of life.
Our DNA is extremely stable. It can last tens of thousands of years with the single-minded purpose of keeping our line of existence going. How mind-boggling that three billion years since life began, our God-given personal line of descent hasn’t been broken. The more I studied the immensity of time, space, and the miracles of life, I came to appreciate that my time on Earth is but a puff of smoke.
While human existence is a miracle and God is good, not all of man’s creations are good. In the human race toward self-annihilation, U-235 was discovered, a handful of which could fuel a ship across the ocean and a small amount could blow up a city. So, the question arises why did God create evil? Einstein had the answer to that, too. God didn’t create evil. He created good and evil is the absence of good, like dark is the absence of light.
So much discovery, so much more to discover, and science is left in the hands of a few politicians who gain their power under less-than-trustworthy means and are overseen by Presidents that Emory University research has shown can be psychopaths. Given the chaotic state of human behavior in a ME world, driven by the desire to consume and win, what is the game, what are the stakes? We give power over to a few glib wealthy elites, politicians, and generals who play chess with human pawns, invade countries, and try to control our minds, oblivious and uncaring—and in checkmate is there really a winner. When someone wins, a new game is played again.
