The Divine Pest

   For no particular reason, these ideas are on my mind lately. Few are original with me, but I like them anyway:
    I have several friends who are atheists. They are thoughtful people and good human beings. They care about fundamentals of right and wrong.  They are serious about principled behavior.
    But as I like to tease them  -- and I do like to tease them -- their creed is not above the contortions, contradictions and logical embarrassments that afflict other forms of belief.
     For starters, if we define atheism as an affirmative rejection of the existence of God, then atheism is ironically focused on the concept of deity. God is, so to speak, fiendishly hard to avoid.
    And moving on: Without God, atheism would be an entirely man-made thing. In that respect, if we reason strictly, it would not be wildly different from organizing one's value system around a totem pole or a stone figurine.  On the other hand, if there is a God, then our capacity to conceive of atheism is God-given. The Old Pest has his own taste for irony.
      When my atheist friends tease me -- and they do like to tease me -- they quite accurately point out that similar comments could be aimed in my direction. I am a Christian.  (But not today's right-wing kind. I am not under the impression that my political opinions are divinely inspired.)
    As an entirely man-made thing, the Christian story would not be a very clever job. The several versions of it don't always jibe. If I'm going to put faith in a tale, my atheist friends  tell me, I should search for one whose authors have not left so many seams showing.
      If, on the other hand, the Christian God is really up there and watching, God tolerates in events and behavior a good deal that God is said to abhor.  As value systems, theism and Christianity are not reliably systematic. 
    My atheist friends do not persuade me.  Neither do I persuade them, if only because I don't try.  I never proselytize. 
    For me, it would be a messy undertaking.  The necessary disclaimers alone would leave time for little else. One does not want to be confused with the quacks and slickers who will save your soul for only a modest donation. Nor am I in tune with the churches whose God wants them to build a larger gymnasium.
    And I respect the view that religious faith is a private and personal thing usually better left to private and personal resolution.  For all these reasons I long ago concluded that God could soldier on without my help in recruiting.
    Thus I do not advertise my faith. Neither do I go to lengths to hide it.  The G-word occasionally slips out of me.  In our aggressively secular culture, reactions are an interesting study.  From friends and family I usually get loving forbearance.  Double-takes from others hint that I might  as well have claimed aliens put transmitters in my molars.
     But some people take the G-word as a cue for engagement, even though I never mean to use it in that way. Often I find these people are looking for a reality check on honest doubts.  We've all had them, if we are awake and alert.
     There are so many faiths, they say, and so many varieties of outlook even within a given faith. How can you reconcile a belief in one God with this crazy quilt?
    (In what follows I have no aim to persuade, only to avoid the vanity of embroidering my views with phony reservations.)
    The proposition does not trouble me. I see no reason why God should not choose to speak to different people in different ways. I am less interested in the differences than in the single thread that runs through them all:  Belief in a higher order.  Societies world-wide include faith-based value systems.
    And so the religious impulse is -- whatever else -- not an artifact of secular culture. It is everywhere, in cultures as different from each other as Earth from Mars. It appears to be inborn. Hence we can usefully wonder: How could it happen, in a Godless universe, that people of all kinds would be born with religious sensibilities?
    OK, my doubting questioners say, but what about your Christianity?  What about history's litany of ghastly cruelties perpetrated for -- and by -- the church?  What about the outright charlatans through the ages, from dissolute popes to television bunco artists?  How do you reconcile the Christian message with all that?
    Well, I don't.  The first question to ask about the Christian story is not whether it can be claimed by fools and scoundrels.  The first question to ask -- to belly up and face -- is this one: Is it true? The central assertion of  Jesus' death and resurrection. Is it true?
    For purposes of argument I will rule out equivocation. A duly informed answer is possible.  For many years my answer has been,  Yes, the story is true.  Those things actually did happen. 
    Here, we moderns reflexively think, Show me.  Prove it, or at least give me good evidence.
    If we simply must indulge the notion of measuring infinity with finite concepts, we may consider history:  We know as much about the historicity of Jesus as about other ancient figures whose stories we accept.
    Also science:  (I like this one.  My schooling is in mathematics.)  The pure scientific odds against a chance emergence of earthly life are astronomical.
    But in the end there is no Open Sesame, no Rosetta Stone. We will be handed no lens through which, with only a look,  we could at last clearly see divine footprints.  If we confront it forthrightly, the mystery of faith requires of us what it has required of everyone in human history: We must strive for our own discernment. 
    From my work at that, the simplest formulation I can offer is the punch line from an old and often-quoted story:  I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that our capacities for love and beauty are produced by the molecular chemistry of meat.
    In my experience, people who can't bring themselves to embrace religion are balked by hierarchical silliness, power-mongering and greed in religious institutions; or by other forms of  rampant hypocrisy among the so-called faithful; or simply by the random cruelty of nature.
   Heaven knows -- to choose a phrase  -- they see clearly.  But, just as organized religion does not create God, attitudes of unbelief cannot erase God or neutralize grace.  In fact,  I wonder if the Almighty gets a wry smile out of seeing that antipathy toward religion is so often a product of scrupulous conscience.