A Matter Of Faith

Harold Sidney Brewster

What with all the religion weighing down my family tree, it's a wonder none of it slid onto me. I've got one ancestor that felt so strongly about his faith that he talked all those people into sailing on the Mayflower. I've got a great-grandfather so pious that he sent Mark Twain over the edge when they did a lecture tour together. My grandfather was an Episcopalian minister. My dad quoted the King James Bible all the time, although I'm not sure he meant anything by it. But here I am, bereft of faith.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't rebelling. By the time I was introduced to religion, it was a very inoffensive sort, just like my mom, who was responsible for the introduction. There's nothing to push against with Lutherans. It's just a bunch of nice people and weak coffee and singing in four-part harmony. No brimstone, no damnation. The word on God was that he was love. I expect I bought most of the stories at first. The whole manger scene was easy to imagine, and things didn't get real sketchy until later, but I suppose I bought that too, even though it involved coming back from the dead and floating into the sky, and other things generally accepted to be unlikely in the normal course of events.

No, the first time I questioned anything, it was that line in Mark: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." Wait--what? How could that possibly be fair? Are they just making this all up? (This was an intriguing possibility that had not yet occurred to me.) I guess I was willing to go along with the believing part. That seemed like a sound requirement if you're planning to join a club, and of course there are going to be rules: don't swear, remember the Sabbath, no girlz allowed. But throwing in that other makes no sense at all. Why not "he that believeth and performs the chicken dance at midnight on the second Sunday in June shall be saved?"

There are so many ways to go wrong,  once you start larding on these random rituals. So many ways to separate your fortunate self from the less-than-true believers. Take baptism: do you go full dunk or delicate sprinkle? Do you need to douse your infant before she has a chance to go to hell, or can it wait?

I guess there was some sort of Baptism before John the Baptist but he's the one with the marketing. Every good cult needs a gimmick. The word comes from the Greek and means something like "dip" and the general idea is you're getting washed clean and starting over, but I'd be careful where this is coming from. Dipping and washing is one thing, but at least one derivation of baptize gives its primary meaning as "plunge," with helpful examples including plunging a sword into a throat or an embryo, which leads me to believe the simple sprinkle will not suffice, and a sacrifice might be in order. Which, traditionally, is not outside the bounds of religion.

I personally have an aversion to being dipped, plunged, or sprinkled with water that is not coming hot out of a showerhead, and for this and other reasons, I am taking my chances with the heathens. Maybe I'm just not much of a joiner. I think if Jesus had had a different cousin named John the Chicken Dancer, I'd have stuck around a little longer, though.

The Well-Blown Mind

So in the last post, I mentioned the conundrum presented to me by the neighbor man--the one about the tree falling in the forest when no one is there to hear it. You know the one. The neighbor man preferred to think of it as unanswerable. We want to think we know that the tree made a sound, but how would we know for sure if we weren't there? How do we know that anything at all exists outside of our range of hearing? Say--absent major explosions--a mile away? Well, I guess we're guessing, but we're on pretty solid ground to say it does. I realize now that it is another of the tales we tell to consider the nature of Faith. If there is a God, the story goes, He exists even though we can't see him or hear him, in the same manner that the very lonely tree does make a sound. That's faith. I think you could make the same case for science. Which is why I'm pretty confident that you can't stop global warming by calling it a hoax.

I also heard an analogy for Eternity when I was little. First we are invited to think about eternity, which, ironically enough, you can only do for so long. And then, if the grownups believe you are insufficiently awed, they say: "A huge boulder rests on an island, and every thousand years, a bird flies to the boulder and rubs its beak against it, taking away a tenth of a grain of sand. And when the boulder is reduced to nothing, a single day has passed in Eternity."

This struck me at the time as a lousy advertisement for eternal life, but I suppose if you throw in the wild card of Hell, it makes more of an impression.  Still, the whole thing rang false for me. It cheapened eternity. If eternity is supposed to have any significance at all, it shouldn't have ANY days. Eventually, given enough boulders and parakeets, you'd have yourself a month of eternity. You'd be making progress. But the point of eternity is there is never any progress.

It's probably a good idea to attempt to blow your own mind every now and then by contemplating the whole universe, but it's a waste of days (yours, which really are numbered) to do it all the time, when you could be burying your nose in a magnolia blossom. It's unfathomable. I did try to think about it the other day, and I discovered something interesting: it is exactly as weird to think about the existence of the universe as it is to think about it not existing. It feels exactly the same. Maybe the two conditions are identical.

Maybe the universe both exists and doesn't exist at the same time. I hope, in that case, it gets to have a cat. You know whose.