I should get back to Luther, I suppose, if only to have a bit of discipline in my writing, if not my life. But another man’s madness (and Luther was just a bit off, if I may say, as well as being a horrible anti-Semite) holds little interest for me, since my own madness is closer to hand. And I’m busy trying to shake this annoying atheist—Britt Hartley—from my brain.
She’s annoying because she’s right, of course. She got me involved in a Mormon woman who apparently fell into full religious psychosis and killed her family. The rationale was completely nutso. Anybody could see that, but there was a little problem…
…it was also in The Book of Mormon.
The woman, whose name I still don’t know, was convicted by a jury of her peers in Idaho (I think—anyways, it was a place where her peers were likely to be Mormon, and to have read the same book). The jury knew she was nuts and knew she belonged in prison. She had almost literally reenacted the story of Nephi (or someone who didn’t exist except to the Mormons) or the sons of Nephi or the enemies of the sons of Nephi. So they threw her in jail, breathed a sigh of relief, and then went to their temple on Sunday morning to hear the story of…
…I know you’re expecting this...
…the sons of the tribes of Nephi.
It’s easy to laugh at religion, as long as it’s not my own. I freely admit that I think the story of Mohammed flying on a winged horse to the moon and back all in one night is crazy. I will admit (if circumstances permit) that the story of a virgin impregnated by an angel bearing the word of God is…
…circumstances don’t permit.
Hartley makes the gentle point that, despite what we say, none of us really believe in our religion. I have thought this often, since I sit in rooms where people talk tirelessly about God. Very early in my eight years of sitting in the rooms, I began asking the people talking most passionately about God, ‘well, what are you doing here? If God is central to your life, and if this life is but a tiny sliver of your eternal life with Christ—you shouldn’t be in an AA meeting before you go to work to make a living to buy shit at Marshalls. You should be praying or working with lepers or preaching the second coming in a Burger King parking lot.’
I take her inventory—another atheist habit. I call it “engaging in critical thinking” which I refuse to leave at the door. Until they shout FUCK YOU at me.
Hartley, being a true critical thinker, doesn’t operate on this personal and petty (though pleasurable) scale. She makes the point that what makes us call a person a religious-crazy is not that the person is saying crazy stuff. They’re just quoting scripture. What makes a religious-crazy crazy is that the other persons who believe-but-not-quite-believe-to-the-point-of-action say that the person is crazy.
We need the pots to call the kettle black, in other words.
It settles the question of why I really, really want my god to enter my world via the Village vicar, who rides his black Raleigh three-speed out of a BBC historical series and into my cottage, where we discuss the weather and the church fund and walking tours of Ireland next summer, perhaps, but never God. The vicar toddles off to the next cottage, the chaffinch sings in the bough, and morning has broken.
I do not want the vicar to tell me about the sinning sons of the tribe of Nephi, or the sinning tribe of the sons of Nephi, or anyone else. The dew is on the rose, the vicar has just left, and I really don’t want to have to get out the AK-45 to go slay the iniquitous this morning.
But how do I know that’s not what God wants me to do?
It’s a curious thing—suppose a true believer acted according to his beliefs, and committed that most foul of sins, as described in Leviticus:
It couldn’t be clearer, and the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Did the store manager of Chick-fil-A go running around the restaurant in the parking lot of Plaza del Sol and pay all his workers each day before sunset?
Didn’t God make it perfectly clear?
You can make the case—weakly—that this is normal behavior. This is what adolescence was all about, for me, which was to stand around and criticize with perfect logic what my parents were doing.
They were doing the absolute right thing, despite professing exactly the opposite. They were saving money, perhaps, instead of distributing loaves and fishes to the poor. They were going to work but never considering the lilies of the field.
We call this “nuanced thinking,” and we smile tolerantly (after seething a few hours beforehand) at the teenager.
Britt comes clean about her own motivations, more than most of us can. She’s really, really trying to find that baby there in the bathwater. So am I, which is why it’s hard for me to admit this.
God—that sneaky bastard—is out there and he’s got his eye on me. He’s also smarter than me, which means that he’s not going to get to me through words, or through my thoughts (which are the words I tell myself).
God is gonna get me through a sunset, through a smile from a stranger, or through a young guitarist playing Biber. He could get me through the vicar on his Raleigh, if any were about. But at the moment, he’s just got Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber .
That’s good enough.
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