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.

  

Gone But Never Forgotten.

          

         

Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours--Yogi Berra

         None of us is immune to cancer. I mean this, not just in the obvious sense that this ugly disease could strike anyone at any moment, but from the perspective that we’ve all been touched by it.

          For many years, my awareness of cancer was somewhat abstract: a co-worker’s mother who fought off a medical death sentence for many years beyond the original prognosis; the eerie vision of Yul Brynner, an actor of vast talent and energy reminding us from beyond the grave; “Now that I’m gone, I tell you, don’t smoke”; my wife’s cousin succumbing to breast cancer.

All tragic, of course, but until I was in my forties, I hadn’t lost a close friend or family member to a malignancy.

          In 1996, Rick Olsen, one of my best friends from college, asked if he and his wife could stay with us while he was being treated for skin cancer at the veterans’ hospital in Portland. He did, and I saw first-hand the physical and emotional toll the disease took on this bright, athletic and relentlessly optimistic man and his wife. After several years of struggle and, unfortunately, a succession of scams that bled them financially while offering false hope, he passed away in Brookings, Oregon, the town where he grew up.

To this day, I have to fight off the urge to phone him and hear his unconventional greeting when picking up. “Hark,” he would always say.  You have to admit “hark” adds a whole new dimension to “hello”. It’s impossible to think of Rick and not smile. Losing him hammered in the final nail on the coffin of my own innocence.

          Dennis, a friend I made in the mid-70’s when our wives worked together, succumbed to colon cancer in the fall of 2002. I jokingly referred to him and his wife Pam as “the last of the old-time street hippies,” but that really didn’t do either of them justice. Dennis was a successful businessman, an inventor, and smart as hell. But he lived the best of the 60’s ideals: love for your fellow man, generosity, and love of loud and raucous San Francisco rock and roll. When I think of him, I can still hear Janis moaning “Down On Me.” I

          I had occasion to walk the beach at Florence with him just before he died and although I hadn’t touched marijuana in more than ten years, I broke my cannabis fast that day. How could I not? It was an essential ritual for us. His death closed yet another chapter in my life. Like it or not, I am now the establishment. Or perhaps I’m a plain-clothes hippie now.

          Lisa Breeden was my newswoman and morning show sidekick for four-plus years at KRKE radio in Albuquerque. Gallons of mega-toxic coffee, riffing on the news of the day, cross-zinging each other on a daily basis, and being called on the boss’ carpet for our on-air transgressions cemented a successful radio partnership and a life-long friendship. Our on-air synergy led to “Mike and Lisa” merging into one word in the minds of our listeners. She was smart, irrepressible and insanely generous. She loved Christmas and showered gifts on her friends and family, even when times were tight for her.

          After attending Left Coast Crime in Santa Fe a number of years before she passed, I saw Lisa for the last time. We ate carne adovada, giggled about our encroaching age, and waxed nostalgic about the old days. She seemed fine, upbeat and energetic. A friend of ours e-mailed us the day after she died early in December. Lung cancer. Literally, only days passed between diagnosis and her succumbing to the disease.

          I have air-checks from that era, the two of us goofing on whoever or whatever blipped on our radar. One day, when the grief has subsided, perhaps I’ll listen to them and drift back to that smoky studio in Albuquerque. Then I’ll crank up a Janis Joplin tune and think of Dennis. And, if someone should call when I’m lost in my reverie, I’ll answer the phone Rick-fashion. “Hark,” I’ll say. Hark, indeed.

A Hole in the Water

Carolyn J. Rose

 Every day that I can, I hit the pool for deep-water exercise. Sometimes I run and jog on my own. Sometimes I take a class. Sometimes I chat with others while we work out. Sometimes—usually when I’m stuck on a plot problem and want to concentrate—I paste on my I-want-to-be-alone face and attempt to avoid distractions.

Because I stick to a schedule, I run into the “usual suspects,” swimmers who are sticking to their schedules. Some come for the social aspects—generally they talk more than they exercise. Others are more concerned about the physical benefits—they work as hard as they’re able. Some are preparing for surgery or recovering from it, trying to improve or retain flexibility, or hoping to trim flab and build core muscles.

Sometimes I introduce myself. Sometimes they do. Almost always first names only. Sometimes we remain nameless. I think of them as the man with the fierce butterfly stroke, the woman who never stops talking, the man who rests after every lap, the woman who comes with her sister, the man who always has a tan, the woman who either hasn’t read or doesn’t care about the notice asking us to refrain from wearing perfume.

There are some swimmers whose routines have overlapped mine for a dozen years. There are some who come for only a few months as part of recommended physical therapy. There are others who get a new work schedule, move, or head south for the winter. There are even a few who want more than the public facility offers and leave to join a club.

And there are still others who don’t return because they can’t. Because their health has failed. Or worse.

Those are the ones who leave a hole in the water.

Those are the ones who make me painfully aware of mortality.

Those are the ones who make me wonder how many more days of swimming I’ll have before I leave a hole of my own.