It’s been—um—well let’s just say a
lot of years since I was in the 4th grade but I still very
distinctively remember “Lacey Stackman,” this girl in my class who always
reminded me of a diminutive bouffant-haired Barney Fife. One day when we were
coming in from morning recess Lacey, who was in front of me in line, whirled
around and with an accusatory voice inquired if I had ever been saved. “Saved from what?” I asked, not understanding
the question at all. “Has Jesus ever
saved your soul?” I had no idea what she was talking about and after I admitted
this she triumphantly proclaimed that I was a sinner and that I was going
straight to hell. I was mortified. What had I done to deserve such a fate? I
was nine years old but I wasn’t stupid. I had watched Mod Squad and Hawaii
Five-O, plus I rode a public school bus twice a day with high school kids, so I
felt pretty well educated to the faces of evil. I didn’t think I fit the
criteria. It wasn’t like I was shooting up heroin on the playground or dancing
in a cage at Paul Gray’s Playlate Club. And besides, God and I had never had a problem
before. I hadn’t really been “raised in church,” still, I had from my earliest
memory somehow been aware of my creator and we spoke frequently. So what was
the deal with God sending Lacey to be the hatchet man? Why didn’t he just tell
me himself? I thought we were good.
It was ages before I realized that
what Lacey and I had experienced was a “failya to communycate.” Lacey’s intentions were actually good though somewhat
misguided, but I didn’t speak Southern Baptist. I had no idea what her
terminology meant. I wasn’t educated in doctrine or dogma, I just knew what I
knew internally, innately, instinctively.
I was like Helen Keller who just knew there was a God even before anybody
else mentioned it. As I relate this I am
reminded that my eldest daughter doesn’t believe in Helen Keller. Jacki believes that Helen was made up as an
inspirational tool to shame school children into living up to their potential
without excuse. If you try to convince
her otherwise, Jacki will roll her eyes and tell you that she has never SEEN
Helen Keller, therefore she does not exist. If you insist that there are
witnesses who knew her, my child will insist right back that it’s all lies. Photos
are fake. Anne Sullivan was a resume
padder. No amount of evidence will ever persuade her. But I guess really nobody
likes to look like a slacker and next to Helen Keller, who doesn’t look like a
slacker?
Anyway, over the years, I must say,
that rather than resenting the Lacey Stackman interrogation of 1972, I am
grateful for it. If it weren’t for Lacey
literally scaring the hell out of me I might not have ever cared enough to
think about what I believe and why I believe it. I also learned that you shouldn’t be
obnoxious with your faith. I faired
pretty well with this experience but I’ve always been the kind of person who
sorts things out analytically so I decided to do a little research. Other
people swear off religion for the rest of their lives after being traumatized
by such an encounter. Oh, but there’s that word. Religion.
It has taken on a whole new meaning.
You can look up the old meaning in the dictionary and it will greatly
differ from the new meaning of “Over the top-Westboro Baptist Church-hate
spewing- judgmental-hypocritical-homophobic-misogynistic-King James Bible
thumpers.” “Step away from the word
religion,” blasts the megaphone voice inside my head. No one wants to be
associated with that word anymore. The new word is ‘spiritual.’ It’s okay to be spiritual because nobody knows
what the devil that means. It’s kind of like “sending good thoughts.” It’s not en vogue to pray anymore. . You send
people “good thoughts,” a concept I cannot distinguish from prayer except maybe
there’s no middle man? But I’m genuinely confused because what good is a ‘good
thought’ if there’s no power or magic or some sort of cosmic energy or working
force behind it? In reality doesn’t this just mean that you think this person
is screwed and the only thing you can really do is to actively feel sorry for
them? Or maybe I’m just an old fool who
doesn’t understand anything anymore. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
At any rate, as the years have flown
by, I have met my share of Laceys and anti-Laceys as well, and being a student
of human nature I always wonder what path brought them to the belief system
they have today. We are all products of a great combination of things:
genetics, culture, home-life, education, relationships, and way too much
television—just to name a scant few. On the opposite end of the spectrum from
the Lacy camp is the camp of Antitheological Scientism, a belief that the
universe isn’t big enough for both God and science, who in their own way are
just like Lacy. Instead of trying to save my soul though, they strive to save
my intellect from the fires of the ignorance of my belief in the
“illogical.” They can’t iron out the
creases between Science and God although God and even Darwin don’t seem to
suffer from similar issues. In chapter 6
of Origin, Darwin asks, “Have we any
right to assume that the creator works by intellectual powers like those of
man?” And in Isaiah 55:8 God tells the
prophet, "my
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”
The constant bickering between the
two sides of Antitheological Scientism
and Antiscientific Creationism reminds me of two of my favorite sisters—we will
just call them Marlene and Miana to protect their true identities. When we were
kids the two of them could not be in the same room without a war breaking out.
It would start in the morning when they got out of bed. Miana would look at
Marlene and sneer and Marlene would say “What are you looking at?” And then Miana would say, “I don’t know WHAT
IT IS!” And then our older sister
Melinda, who was in charge of getting us all ready for school and on the bus
without anybody killing anybody, would come down from her room and say: “You
know, the things we despise in other people are just the things we despise
about ourselves but feel helpless to change.” And then in unison they would look
up at her with identical brown eyes and deny being anything alike. My baby
sister, Denise and I would just roll our eyes and shake our heads at the whole
thing. Denise and I were the
non-confrontational type, avoiding controversy like the plague and therefore
separating ourselves from it.
I haven’t changed much since then. I
am a peace loving chick and I’m confused and upset by drama. I want no part of
it and because of this I frequently fail to speak up for that which I believe.
I am guilty of trying to set up housekeeping in a whale’s belly while
pretending that Nineveh doesn’t even exist. But the things I see and hear
lately baffle me and worry me, so rather than curl up in the fetal position and
hide I will speak up.
The Internet is overflowing with
information and some of it is true. But let’s face it, everything is posted for
a reason. Everyone has an agenda and that agenda is to make you sympathetic to
the writer’s cause, the truth be damned.
There’s a lot that has been ‘documented’ in the name of Christianity
that isn’t Christian at all and there are several reasons for that including: 1)
people who are radical nuts and just masquerading as Christians; 2) people who
inherited their religion but actually haven’t bothered to learn anything about
it; 3) and the perpetuation of big fat lies. BFLs, like all good lies, take a
tiny bit of the truth to lend credibility to a story and then distort it into
something more like a Picasso than a Norman Rockwell. But let me say this to both sides of the
fence: ruthlessly bashing someone for not thinking as you do is like setting
yourself up as the measuring stick for all of humanity. You might want to check
your internal agenda before you speak.
Do you really want to sway opinions or do you just enjoy the sport of
tossing up other people’s world views and shooting them down like clay
pigeons? And do you seriously want to be
friends with someone whose world view is so shallow that it can be changed by a
meme on Facebook?
If you know me then you know that I
am not a homophobe, I have never bombed an abortion clinic and I believe that
God is the great scientist-creator. (I rather like the way my daughter, Julie,
the science teacher, refers to The Big Bang as God’s Play Dough.) Faith is not the antithesis of intelligence.
Science requires a lot of faith too. I accept what scientists tell us as truth
but honestly, they could be lying and I’d never know since I don’t own the Ginsu
Home Atom Splitting Kit or a Ronco Carbon Dater.
And as understanding of the universe
increases, proven theories are disproven and discarded for more logical
theories. (Feel free to Google this). I think that it takes more faith to
believe that the intricacies of the human body, photosynthesis, gravity, and the
vocal stylings of Al Greene are all just happy accidents than it does to
believe in an intelligent creator. I have no problem marrying my Christianity
and my science. The places where the two appear to contradict or show a
disconnect are simply the places where we currently lack proper knowledge. I’m
confused by how someone can make the argument that the universe is infinite—without
beginning or end, but they cannot extend that same logic to an infinite
creator. Where did God come from? Where did the catalyst for the Big Bang come
from?
As for the Christian faith—well, that is an
umbrella term. The different sects are too numerous to count and they are
divided by the very issues used to lump them all back together by those who either
don’t know the difference or just want to stir up a stink to further their own
agenda. I am a Christian but I’m not a Lacey Stackman Christian. I am not a fan
of TV preachers who beg for money or
others who are loud and obnoxious with their beliefs. I once scolded that guy
with the cross downtown for telling people they were going to hell for
listening to music at Riverbend. And if I have a political disagreement with
someone, it doesn’t mean that I hate them, it just means that I feel as
passionately as they do about the topic. And sometimes it’s hard to let go of
an argument when it feels like the world is spinning out of control and you
only want to fix it.
I don’t believe that our thoughts
and feelings and motivators are just random neurological occurrences. If that’s
the case then I can’t even take credit for writing this and likewise, l would
never have to take the blame for any of my actions. I believe that each of us has a soul that is
like a cosmic fingerprint. It’s who we are inside the human shell. Civilized
cultures require that we get along with each other’s shells but lately the war
has turned to attacking the inner person. Is this civilized? Is it intelligent?
Is it beneficial? Laws can be made that affect your human shell but no external
force can govern your internal being. My plea here is that we stop assuming the
worst of each other—stop assuming things that we can’t possibly know. Lacy
assumed through an error of semantics that I was a heathen. My nerdy friends
assume that I cannot believe in God AND science. The guy dragging around the
cross that day assumed that his personal convictions against music applied to
me as well. I can’t recall a time when
hatefulness, negativity and petulance were the skills needed to win a
persuasive argument, so why go there?
My personal belief is that we are
all born with a homing device deep within us that draws us back to the Creator,
kind of like V-ger in that Star Trek movie. Through personal experience I have determined that there is someone out there who is way more intelligent than the
human race that decided that asbestos was safe and that Fen-Phen, Agent Orange
and Thalidomide were great ideas…someone who knows the truth about whether
Pluto is really a planet or not. I HAVE to believe that there is someone out
there smarter than I am who is watching out for me as I am pretty much a train
wreck that miraculously keeps moving down the track. The point I’m struggling
to make here is that there is most definitely a lot of bad out there that goes
on in the name of religion, but we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath
water. It would be really nice if we could all keep in mind that every single
one of us is a flawed human being just trying to figure out life as it hurls
events at us relentlessly. Maybe we could cut each other some slack. And what
would it hurt if we traded mean spirited jabs for civilized discourse?
So, that’s it, Nineveh, my love
letter to you—my attempt to convey in words that which exceeds words. I could
write a book because I have so much more to say but this will have to do for
the time being.
.
