An Agnostic Talks To God

By Michael Nettleton

I’ve always been a skeptic. I was that kid in Sunday school whose parent were most likely to get a call saying “It would be a good idea if you came and took Michael home.” 

Not that I went out of my way to be disruptive. It’s just that I tended to blurt out questions that made the Sunday school teacher get that “deer in the headlights” look and raise his eyes to heaven for help. Questions like “Adam and Eve were the first and only people on earth. They had sons. Where did the sons’ wives come from?” and “Noah put two of every living thing in the ark and they stayed there for forty days and forty nights. Didn’t it really smell in there?” The “God works in mysterious ways” answer never quite cut it with the 9 year-old me.

Maybe it’s the imminent threat of the Corona virus or just my advancing age, but lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about God and Pascal’s wager.

Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth century philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. He proposed that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell). This was the Christian God Pascal had in mind, but other religions advance similar propositions.

All righty then. Simple enough. Except . . . To tell yourself you believe in God is to suspend the disbelief that comes with being a rational, logical, thinking human being. Who, if you believe, God created the brain that helps you reason things out.  And if you profess to believe in God, when deep down you don’t, and it turns out he does indeed sit on a golden throne with a flowing white beard and a retinue of angels, won’t he take points off for insincerity? Only one person (is a deity a person?) to pose this question to and that’s the big Kahuna himself. Or possibly herself.  And, to be honest, I feel funny about praying to either gender, when I can’t find any definitive proof of their presence up in the clouds somewhere. After all, God didn’t answer any of my prayers when I was nine. Ronnie Flanagan, the neighborhood bully never got hit by a bolt of lightning. My parents never came into a gazillion dollars so my mom could quit working her fingers to the bone. My dog Panda never quit chasing cars, even after getting hit and almost killed by one.

Perhaps God will read this blog and leave answers in the comments section. I’ll just pose the rest of this as a series of questions.

1.      Why did you let the election of 2016 come out the way it did? Could this guy actually be your representative on earth like some people believe? On which day of creation did you come up with liquid tanning products? Aren’t the things he says and does supposed to send you straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200?

2.      If I’ve been a sinner (and we all are) and I don’t worship you during my entire life until the final 10 seconds before I pass into the next world, but if I profess to be a believer at the end, will I ascend to the same heaven as Jim Baker, who spent a lifetime fleecing his followers in your name and is now hawking a bogus Corona virus cure to make money to fuel his limo?

3.      Do you really take sides for fans of one team or the other in NFL football games? How about hockey?

4.      Are you really that easily flattered? Do the people who constantly sing your praises and drop your name into every conversation really have an inside line to your Kingdom?

5.      Of all of the hundreds (or is it thousands) of religions that exist worldwide, could it be possible that only one of them is on the money? And what are the chances that it’s only one narrow interpretation of that religion?

6.      Where did Adam and Eve’s sons find wives? (This one’s bothered me since I was frog-marched out of Sunday school so many years ago.) A tip. The “God works in mysterious ways” still doesn’t track with me.

Well I’ll post this now and wait to read your feedback in the comments section. If you respond, perhaps I’ll take Pascal’s wager and start believing. Then I could start praying again. After all Ronnie Flanagan’s probably still out there beating up people and stealing their lunch money.

  

Losing my Religion

By Michael Nettleton 

While shelving videos at my library-subbing job, I happened to spot The Life of Brian the Monty Python sendup of the story of the central figure of Christendom. I first saw it back in the early eighties when it was newish. On a whim, I took it home to watch again. It’s still laugh-out-loud funny and thought-provoking movie. Unless you’re a Bible literalist. In that case it’s high heresy, anti-Christian, and perhaps the spawn of Satan. Or perhaps you take yourself too seriously. 

Whatever.

It started me thinking. (This is the point where my wife Carolyn jumps in and says “Uh-oh.”)

I feel the need for music to accompany this next part. How about REM?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwtdhWltSIg

 

I am a fervid agnostic. Which is like saying I’m a well-organized anarchist. An agnostic is a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God. Fervid might be the wrong modifier. We don’t proselytize much. 

To paraphrase former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, who was trying to defend the lack of proof that Iraq was involved in 911: “There are known knowns, there are things we think we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know.” Now there's some state-of-the-art gibberish, yes?

Maybe I’m a born skeptic. I was the kid in Sunday school who asked questions like, “Why did Adam have a navel?” and “Adam and Eve had sons. Where did they find wives?” I was sent home with a lot of notes for my parents to read. I’m not sure what they said. I’m guessing the word “heathen” might have been included.

So, what led to me losing my religion? If indeed I ever had one. A couple of incidents come to mind. One of the teachers of my small town Sunday School class, a pillar of the local community, banged his bible and ranted about the “wages of sin,” and “burning eternally in hell,” for our transgressions. Because of him, I learned how to pee without touching myself. A bit messy, but apparently necessary. Until . . .

One day my friend Donny and I were standing on a corner in a nearby larger town waiting for my mother to pick us up from a movie. Suddenly, the doors of a local saloon banged open and our smug, self-righteous Sunday school teacher tottered out, arm in arm with a busty lady wearing a heavy layer of war paint. They staggered toward a motel with a flashing VACANCY sign. 

From that moment forward my bathroom habits became much tidier.

Later in life, I was a disc jockey in another small town. My immediate boss, the program director, had been a drug-taking hippy until he was “saved” and “born again.” Rod (not his real name) and his wife made it a habit of dropping by the apartment I shared with my future former wife and “testifying” to us and trying to get us to see the light. We began spending evenings with all the lights out and ignoring the knocking on our door. Rod’s most annoying habit was attributing anything good that happened to him as “God’s will.” This included a last minute touchdown that won a football game for his favorite team. Anything negative that happened, even if he had instigated it, was “The work of Satan.”

Rod was also a certifiable paranoic. He was convinced the big boss had it in for him and was poised to fire him. He began picking up the general managers private phone line on the production room console at the same time the boss did and listening in to the conversations.

One day, I got called into the GM’s office. My stomach roiled. This couldn’t be a good thing. “Mike,” he began. “I have some bad news.” Now, my stomach is flip-flopping like Simone Biles halfway through her floor exercise. “I’ve had to let Rod go. I thought he was doing a really good job, but I found out he was listening in on my telephone conversations. I couldn’t have that.”

That sizzling sound you hear is Satan rubbing his hands together in glee.

Following Facebook, I see a lot of people using their religion as a bludgeon: Quoting scripture (or what they claim is scripture) to castigate those who practice a different religion are of a different race, of a different sexuality, possess different political beliefs or, face it, have different anything.

Many of the people I work with, do community theater with, sing in choirs with or have chance encounters with are devout Christians. None of them try to convert me or express scorn that I don’t share their convictions. It seems to me they are living in the spirit of the savior they believe in. Them I like.

And I, it appears will remain an agnostic until my last breath. I won’t let fear of death prod me into believing something I can’t prove. 

I enjoyed my rewatching of The Life of Brian. It made me laugh and think about man’s need to explain the unfathomable. The film is not about ridiculing people’s religious beliefs. Instead, it uses satire to point out the absurdity of listening to people who claim to be prophets or speak directly to God. It is a counterpoint to those who use the Bible to reinforce their prejudices or repay petty grudges. 

A closing note to those people. I am not the spawn of Satan. Honest.