"Don't you know there ain't no devil. There's just God when he's drunk.--Tom Waits, Heart Attack and Vine
I
am honoring Lent this year, which I have done for the last couple of years.
This despite leaving the
Catholic Church more than four decades ago. I have
been back only for weddings and funerals. In fact, my goal from a very early
age was to leave the Catholic Church. I could not wait to get out.
I cannot point to a specific tenet of the Catholic faith that drove me away. The lack of tolerance of other religions had a lot to do with it. Taking sexual advice from a celibate man struck me as counterproductive. It also bothered me that Catholics made it a sin not to go to church on Sunday. Any religion that had to get you in by putting a gun to your head raised questions in my mind.
Then came my great literary awakening, which included a lot of Mark Twain, followed by some college-level philosophy classes. I ultimately concluded that the best label for me is skeptic.
Why skeptic?
Philosophically,
being an agnostic is a wussy position. You are saying that you don’t see any
solid proof that there is a god, yet, there is no solid proof that there is not
a god, so you’re not committing yourself either way. Basically you are hedging
your bets, afraid to take a stand.
You could say you believe in god, that you are a theist, but when you look at it from a scientific perspective, it does not make any sense. Am I supposed to believe there is an alternative existence that is better than the one I have now, and goes on forever? Forever is a long time. This also opens the question of who is running things. I prefer to think I have some say in this.
This leaves us with atheism, which is a step that I am not completely comfortable with, either. There are too many unexplained things so say it all happens by chance.
I like the scene in the book M.A.S.H. in which Trapper John is having a crisis of conscience, having lost one too many patients. He’s talking to the unit chaplain Father Mulcahey, who asks Trapper if he believes in God. Trapper’s answer is something akin to, “From a scientific perspective, it doesn’t make any sense, but I can also tell you that things happen in surgery that I’m not good enough to do.”
So
I am a skeptic, which I define as someone who wants to believe, they are only
looking for the proof. They just haven’t found it yet.
For the last six or seven years I have been a member of a liberal Christian denomination. What I like about them is that one of their premises is, “Wherever you are in your faith journey, you are welcome here.” Sounds as if this was tailor-made for me.
Also, I’m thinking of the other Christian saying, “Act as if we have faith, and faith shall be given to you.”
Which gets us to the Lent thing. My denomination acknowledges Lent. My wife, the Amazing Leslie, has more faith than I do, so she chooses to recognize Lent. I do it to support her, and also because I am acting as if I have faith, in the hope that it will be given to me.
In past years I have given up cigars, which I only smoke when I golf. Right now I am not golfing much, which makes that an empty promise. So this year we are giving up meat and soda. At first we said ALL meat—beef, pork, chicken, fish, etc. We didn’t plan this well enough in advance though, and quickly found being a vegetarian is a lot of work. We had to back down and say just beef and pork. I’m still trying to keep the commitment at lunch, though. If I am home, it is peanut butter, and if I am out, then I order vegetarian. Subway makes a good veggie sandwich.
So as it turns out the meat thing is really not much of a problem. The ban on soda, however, is kicking my butt. I am a Diet Dr. Pepper guy, and I get a craving at least three or four times a day. But we are a week into Lent and so far, so good.
One philosophy behind fasting is that you limit the intake of foods that make you groggy and lethargic. You are then more apt to reach a level of clear mindedness where in you are susceptible to new ideas and higher levels of thought. That’s not a bad thing for writers.
Maybe lent is a good thing after all.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Steer photo by Stefan Stegeman
Steak photo by FotoosVanRobin from Netherlands (My Perfect Entrecote Uploaded by Partyzan_XXI) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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