Religion is a sin

Galen Strawson

• Saving God: Religion after Idolatry by Mark Johnston
  Surviving Death by Mark Johnston

Saving God and Surviving Death: Mark Johnston has gone for the double, and I’m tempted to think he has succeeded, on his own terms, many of which seem about as good as terms get in this strange part of the park. I don’t, however, agree with his reasons or share his motive for attempting to explain how we can survive death, and I doubt the necessity of some of the matériel in his admittedly fabulous argumentative armamentarium. I’ll be jiggered if I survive death on Johnston’s terms; I don’t know whether he holds out much hope for himself. And his success won’t please anyone who believes in anything supernatural. Any conception of God as essentially a supernatural being is idolatry in Johnston’s book. All regular adherents of the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Islam and Christianity – are therefore idolaters. And they go further: they want a ‘personal’ God, a ‘Cosmic Intervener who might confer special worldly advantages on his favourites’. They should be ashamed of themselves, at least if they’ve had any education; they’re moral babies.

Here Johnston seems close to Iris Murdoch, who asserted that there is no ‘responsive superthou’. It’s this kind of conception of God that moves Thomas Nagel to say: ‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God … It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’ In Murdoch and Nagel I think we find the genuine spiritual impulse or religious temperament, which never invests in supernatural entities. It finds that the natural is enough, and simply asks, in Nagel’s words: ‘How can one bring into one’s individual life a recognition of one’s relation to the universe as a whole, whatever that relation is? … Is there a way to live in harmony with the universe, and not just in it?’

Nagel says he’s ‘using the term “religious temperament” in a way that may seem illegitimate to those who are genuinely religious’, but it won’t seem illegitimate to those engaged in what Johnston calls the ‘truly religious … life’, only to most of those who are ordinarily thought of as religious, those who are counted as religious by sociologists and by themselves. You don’t have to go all that far in these matters, although you have to go farther than most sociological believers, to realise that it’s impossible – no exceptions – for the genuine spiritual or religious impulse to achieve full expression in religions that mandate belief in a supernatural personal God. There have been genuinely religious Abrahamists, but only because they’ve somehow maintained the forms of personal-God religions while having in fact abandoned any such belief. Some people think that men like St Paul and St Augustine are exemplary instances of what it is to possess the religious temperament. It’s easy enough to see why they have this reputation as long as we stick to the sociological understanding of religion: both were brilliant monsters of egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, is about self.

This connects to a phenomenon that at first glance seems curious. If we take the term ‘morally worse’ as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those who have had some non-negligible degree of education, we find that people who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than people who lack them. Are the religious worse because they’re religious, or are they religious because they’re worse? The first direction of causation is well known, but it’s the second that is more prominent in everyday life. The religious (sociologically speaking) tend to be religious because religious belief provides them with a framework in which they can handle certain unattractive elements in themselves. In converts – those who take up religion without having been brought up in it, or without having previously taken it seriously – the correlation between religious belief and relative moral badness in the strictly descriptive sense (which is not incompatible with charm) is particularly striking.

Johnston ticks off ‘undergraduate atheists’ like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have doubtless noticed this correlation, and scolds them for their errors about Spinoza, but I find Dawkins and Hitchens (and Sam Harris) companionable, as I find Johnston himself, and feel no resultant stress. Johnston gives ground to no one in his disdain for the idolaters – all ordinary believers – and there’s a great deal to be said from his perspective that can be read as complementing the ‘undergraduates’. He agrees with them on Lucretius’ point – the extraordinary power of the all too human institution of religion to lead people into evil (tantum religio potuit suadere malorum) – and to such external criticisms adds many ferocious internal ones.

Johnston has, in fact, the genuine spiritual impulse. The consequence is that Saving God and Surviving Death are a slap in the face for many who may be attracted by their titles: regular believers, supernaturalists, are likely to feel suckered rather than succoured. But really it’s the other way round. They’ve already been suckered; the question is whether they can be succoured. The titles aren’t false advertising, even if the books might also have been called Saving Death and Surviving God. In the present state of our knowledge, Johnston holds, a truly religious (hence non-whingeing) person who is properly aware of the options is bound to start from ‘ontological naturalism’, ‘the view that the domain of the natural sciences is complete on its own terms’; that ‘every causal transaction ultimately consists in some utterly natural process, for example, mass-energy transfer.’ Such a person should in any case hope that this naturalism – which has nothing to do with ‘scientism’ – is true, because it provides ‘a complete defence against the supernatural powers and principalities that could otherwise exploit our tendency to servile idolatry’. The natural is already extraordinary enough: read any issue of the New Scientist. The overall nature of the physical is little understood, in spite of all the achievements of physics. To appreciate this, consider how strange the truth about physical reality must be, given that consciousness is itself a wholly physical phenomenon.

Spinoza’s God is simply nature, i.e. the universe, and since the universe certainly exists, God certainly exists. Johnston has affinities with Spinoza (‘the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers’, as Russell said), but he rejects simple Spinozan pantheism, which identifies God with the universe, in favour of ‘panentheism’. Drawing on a familiar philosophical distinction between the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of constitution, he claims that God is not simply identical with, but is rather wholly constituted by, the natural realm. In Aristotelian or ‘hylomorphist’ mode, he takes nature to be the matter of which God is the form. In Hegelian mode, he finds the universe engaged in a process of increasingly adequate self-disclosure, of which a fundamental engine is the evolution by natural selection of creatures like ourselves. In Heideggerian mode, he characterises panentheism as ‘the outpouring of Being by way of its exemplification in ordinary existents for the sake of the self-disclosure of Being’. ‘I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known,’ as God says to the prophet David according to the Islamic hadith. Stitched in with these themes is a difficult doctrine of the nature of presence that is bound up with Johnston’s striking views on the nature of perception.

One thing that may weigh with Johnston, when he rejects Spinozan pantheism, is the idea that the simple identification of God with nature or the universe entails that the natural sciences can say everything there is to say about reality. But we can put this point aside by noting the fundamental sense in which physics, with its equations, only ever gives abstract structural descriptions of reality. It never tells us anything about the intrinsic nature of matter, in so far as its intrinsic nature is more than its structure. Eddington and then Russell developed this point well in the early 20th century: ‘Physics is mathematical,’ Russell wrote, ‘not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. For the rest, our knowledge is negative.’ He went further, observing that ‘as regards the world in general, both physical and mental, everything that we know of its intrinsic character is derived from the mental side’ and – again, many years later – that ‘we know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events except when these are mental events that we directly experience.’

This leads to a further point about the limits on science. For although conscious experience is wholly part of the natural order, basic principles of scientific method exclude the possibility that it can receive strict and comprehensive scientific treatment (it isn’t possible to satisfy the requirements of public observability and experimental repeatability). This doesn’t put any limit on naturalism, only on scientifically codifiable knowledge. But we can put this point aside, for even if the natural sciences could say everything there is to say about reality, a thoroughgoing comprehension of what that ‘everything’ amounted to, when considered as a whole, would remain something that couldn’t be codified in any way within the natural sciences. There would, for example, be the experience about which Wittgenstein said that ‘the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world.’ (Never mind that Wittgenstein went on to say that the italicised sentence was ‘nonsense’ – a word he greatly overused – and to give a bad reason for doing so.)

Does this point about comprehension answer Johnston’s worry when he says that if the natural realm were all that existed, ‘the natural sciences would reveal not only the ultimate constitution of the world but also its overarching form’? I’m not sure. I believe such comprehension lies in what Johnston calls ‘the realm of sense’, ‘the realm we need to explore in order to work our way inside a serious panentheism’, and which is distinct from the natural realm. But here I feel out of my depth, given that Johnston ties this realm to the notion of ‘modes of presentation’, the way things present themselves, and proposes that the Divine Mind may be construed as ‘the totality of fully adequate and complete modes of presentation of reality’.

I hope Johnston will write more about these ideas. For the moment, I’m inclined to hang on to the idea that Spinozan pantheism may not be in such bad shape, even if there are other good reasons for preferring panentheism. It’s arguable, furthermore, that pantheism and panentheism can fall in step, and the distinction between form and matter fade away, if no universe other than the existing one is possible, and if it couldn’t have failed to exist. Both these possibilities are, I think, very real. Perhaps ‘the cunning of reason’ is, at bottom, the cunning of matter – or the cunning of space-time, which some take to be an object, indeed the only object there is.

But why speak of God at all in this case, rather than just the universe? Spinoza was widely held to be an atheist (he inspired Shelley to write ‘The Necessity of Atheism’). To ask is probably to have misunderstood, but Johnston also has this answer: because the universe is a place in which it makes sense to speak of salvation or redemption. Surely the idea of personal salvation is specifically Christian, and also in any case childish? No to both questions. Johnston has a particular interest in Christianity, and regularly uses its distinctive idioms, but any religion that offers different final outcomes for the good and the bad operates with a notion of salvation, and that includes Islam and many versions of Judaism, in spite of the latter’s agreeable vagueness about the afterlife. Hinduism and Buddhism also have an account of salvation, a good final outcome for the good.

As for the second question, about whether the idea of salvation is childish, nothing could be further from the truth on Johnston’s wholly naturalistic and rigorously non-idolatrous terms. Salvation, in his book, is an extraordinarily difficult thing. It’s a matter of genuinely ‘overcoming the centripetal force of self-involvement, in order to orient one’s life around reality and the real needs of human beings as such’. It requires achieving a certain kind of radical selflessness, a state for which Johnston uses the Buddhist termanatta (‘no-self’). One needs to work one’s way to an understanding of the claim that there is no persisting self, a claim for which Johnston, in a controlled fusion of Buddhism, Christian morals (not dogma) and Socrates, produces a long and markedly original argument. He concludes that ‘the doctrine of anatta can be seen to pave the way for the command of agape … the command to love the arbitrary other as oneself.’

Isn’t this intolerably demanding? No, demandingness isn’t really an issue, because ‘the command of agape is extensionally equivalent to the command that we respond to the actual structure of the practical reasons that there are. In that sense it is reason’s own command.’ That is, we’re being asked to do only what we do in fact have most reason to do (and anyway, we can only ever be asked to do our best). Anatta-agape is, furthermore, the only way in which we can survive death, on Johnston’s terms. Survival doesn’t have anything to do with possessing an immortal and immaterial soul: that’s supernaturalism again, ethically irresponsible supernaturalism, religious defilement. ‘If there is a sin against life,’ Camus says, ‘it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.’ That sin, it may be said, is a religious sin – the sin of ordinary religion.

Actually, soul-supernaturalism isn’t as widespread as one might suppose, for although ordinary (sociological) believers ‘have no formal principles of infidelity, yet they are really infidels in their hearts’, as Hume observed, ‘and have nothing like what we can call a belief of the eternal duration of their souls … I ask, if these people really believe what is inculcated on them, and what they pretend to affirm; and the answer is obviously in the negative’ – because they couldn’t possibly act as they do if they really believed it. They themselves protest their belief, in the 21st century as in the 18th, but actions speak louder than words.

Which is all to the good, as far as it goes, for Camus’s reason if for no other. But it doesn’t undo the deep harm – the irreligiousness relative to true religion – of subscribing to belief in the immortal soul in one’s speech and everyday thought, while having no such belief in one’s heart. Nor, more importantly for Johnston (not to mention the ‘mortalist’ Milton), does it mitigate the offensiveness of any religion that demands belief in such an entity as a condition of faith. It is at best an empirical and unsettled question whether there are such things as non-material souls, and in demanding belief in their existence, Johnston says, religions ‘move illegitimately beyond faith; they make faith hostage to empirical (and philosophical) fortune, and in that sense they place a millstone around the neck of the faithful, especially those with a genuine intellectual curiosity.’

Here Johnston speaks from experience. A Catholic upbringing lay behind his decision to join the Columbans, having previously left school in his final year for a more taxing if more informal academy – Walter Lindrum’s Billiard Centre in Melbourne. His reasonable aim at that time was to become the world snooker champion, and he got as far as becoming the amateur champion of the state of Victoria before intellectual curiosity unmastered him, snookerwise, and propelled him into the Columban Mission in Ku-Ring-Gai Chase, Sydney – a group that he has described as the missionary equivalent of the Navy Seals. He was only 15 when he joined the Columbans, having skipped three grades in school before moving to Lindrum’s, but a growing sense of the millstone eventually forced him to move again. He left for Melbourne University, where he did degrees in philosophy and psychology simultaneously. From there he went to Princeton, where he teaches today.

So what are the genuinely religious to do? Stripped now of idolatry and millstone-free, alienated by conscience from any existing supernaturalist faith, they must face up to the ‘large-scale structural defects in human life’:

arbitrary and meaningless suffering, the decay of ageing, untimely death, our profound ignorance of our condition, the destructiveness produced by our tendency to demand premium treatment for ourselves, and the vulnerability of everything we cherish to chance and to the massed power of states and other institutions. A truly religious or redeemed life is one in which these large-scale defects are somehow finally healed or addressed or overcome or rendered irrelevant.

These defects are not overcome by theodicy, an unsurpassably disgusting practice which seeks to show that everything is ultimately for the best. Genuine belief in an omniscient, wholly benevolent and omnipotent God is, in my judgment, profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering. ‘There are things so horrible and tragic,’ Johnston says, ‘that nothing that subsequently happens can diminish the tragedy or the horror … the attempt to put an otherworldly frame around such things, so they seem not to be the tragedies or the horrors that they manifestly are, borders on the childish and the obscene.’ The large-scale structural defects are overcome, rather, by salvation:

Salvation is not making it all better; it is the grace of finding a way to live that keeps faith with the importance of goodness and love even in the face of everything that can happen to you … Salvation, understood as the goal of religious or spiritual life, is a new orientation that authentically addresses the large-scale defects of human life, and thereby provides a reservoir of energy otherwise dissipated in denial of, and resistance to, necessary suffering.

Faith in the importance of goodness is central. Here Johnston makes what is perhaps his most important move, arguing that faith in the importance of goodness requires the idea that the good – those who have or have acquired a ‘good will’ – may be rewarded in a life after their biological death. He has Socrates and Kant on his team. Socrates doesn’t just hope that ‘there is something for us in death,’ but also that there is ‘something better for the good than there is for the bad’. Kant argues (in Johnston’s words) that we are ‘as rational beings … obliged to hope for another life that makes moral sense of things’. What are we to do, otherwise, when we consider ‘the professional torturer who dies calmly in his sleep at a ripe old age surrounded by his adoring family, and the nurse who, for her whole adult life, cared for the dying only to herself die young and alone from a horribly painful and degrading illness’? If biological death is final, as it seems to be, ‘if the good and the bad alike go down into oblivion, if there is nothing about reality itself that shores up this basic moral difference between their lives, say by providing what the good deserve, then the distinction between the good and the bad is less important. So goodness is less important.’

To stave off this threat, Johnston needs a wholly naturalistic account of how a person can become good – acquire a good will – and survive death. The details of the account are finely complicated and involve three different tribes: the ‘Hibernators’, the ‘Teletransporters’ and the ‘Human Beings’. The root idea is simple, however, and it’s one on which Johnston finds ‘massive consensus, across the major religions’, which harbour correct ethical ideas in spite of their endemic idolatry. Acquiring a good will is a matter ofanatta as above – complete dissolution of the selfish local self. A good will is ‘a disposition to absorb the legitimate interests of anypresent or future individual personality into one’s present practical outlook, so that those interests count as much as one’s own’. If you do this, if you acquire a truly good will, you will live on in future people who have legitimate interests. You will live on in what John Stuart Mill called ‘the onward rush’ of humanity. It may be objected that really you’re expanding your self in this case, rather than dissolving it. But to do the former is to do the latter, given the practical human situation, and Johnston gives a central role to reason and argument. You make progress on this road by coming to see that there is no persisting local self worth caring about. We’re a long way from St Paul, for whom surviving death is personal payback for belief: ‘If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’ (1 Corinthians 15:32).

Russell thought the best way to overcome fear of death was to ‘make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.’ It’s an old idea. But Russell didn’t think that the outcome would be personal survival, only that the process would ease a man’s fear of death, ‘since the things he cares for will continue.’ Johnston runs it differently. It’s not just metaphorically true that you can live on, given his account of personal identity, it’s literally true. For, briefly, your actual, lived conception of what it is for you to survive determines what it is for you to survive. This being so, you, the very person that you are now, can live on – so long as you have come to conceive things in such a way that others’ legitimate interests have truly become your own. In this way the genuinely good, those who have a truly good will, survive death. The bad don’t, and that is their punishment. The afterlife may not be eternal, but it’s a very great deal better than nothing, and it meets at least some of the demands of justice. Those who get to be ‘good enough’ without being truly good won’t live on, but there are Russellian consolations for them, and more: they’re ‘better placed to face death down, to see through it to a pleasing future in which individual personalities flourish’. ‘For those who are good enough, death will appear differently. To the extent they are good they will find that death, although it obliterates their individual personalities, leaves much that is fundamentally important behind. In that case there remains, even in the face of death, something to rejoice in.’

Those like myself who can be classified as atheists relative to all non-Spinozan theistic religions may find it hard at times not to choke on the conventional religious – and in particular Christian – language in Saving God (Surviving Death is easier), but they shouldn’t be put off. There is a huge amount to learn in these two books. Philosophy for Johnston is a profoundly concrete, sensual activity; he’s someone for whom ideas seem tangible, with specific savours, emotional tones, curves, surfaces, insides, hidden places, dark passages, shining corners. Taken as a whole, his theory is quite a stretch; but it’s enormously suggestive, a mine, a fertile organism.

I don’t, however, agree that death threatens the importance of goodness. I don’t think we need the apparatus of an afterlife – not even Johnston’s naturalised version. The intrinsic importance of goodness survives the injustice of the torturer’s and the nurse’s fates, even when the injustice is eternal. It survives monstrous tragedy undiminished. That is itself a tragedy, perhaps. If so, it’s just one more tragedy that the importance of goodness survives undiminished. Reasons for doing the right thing remain untouched. If someone demands (not unreasonably) an external metaphysical account of how or why this is so, I think the best thing to say is that good acts, good states of mind, are part of the history of the universe for ever, whatever the nature of time, and that this is vastly important. Robert Frost comes a long way with Johnston, but is, in the end, even more strict: ‘There is no future life to defer to. I see all salvation limited to here and now.’

It makes the heart sink most strangely to consider those who do nothing but good in life, experience nothing but intolerable suffering – to the point that they are unable to have any sense of their value – and are then extinguished for eternity. This sinking feeling can seem like a proof: a proof that the importance of goodness is, as Johnston says, at risk from the insult of unmitigated death. Certainly many people who want there to be an afterlife care more about the idea that it will allow for justice to be done than they do for their own personal survival. Others simply want there to be a space where those who have suffered intolerably can know something else, and this is all too understandable. The fact remains that goodness isn’t a hostage to fortune; pay-offs and balancings are irrelevant. Goodness isn’t threatened by the fact that absence of hope can be appropriate, and hope a vice (Camus again: ‘L’espoir, au contraire de ce qu’on croit, équivaut à la résignation. Et vivre, c’est ne pas se résigner.’) Johnston may be right in his account of how we can survive death, but the bar is very high. It seems that few of those who have suffered intolerably will clear it. To that extent it’s fortunate that we don’t need such an account to keep faith with the importance of goodness. We are, however, left to face the fact that tragedy is absolute.

Letters

Vol. 33 No. 13 · 30 June 2011

‘We find that people who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than people who lack them,’ Galen Strawson writes in the LRB of 2 June. I thought this was fairly startling and looked forward to seeing letters in the next issue challenging Strawson and asking for some evidence. But no: for readers of the LRB, Professor Strawson’s view must be fairly uncontroversial, because there were no letters on the subject in the following issue. By a happy coincidence, I have been sent a complimentary copy of theNew Statesman in which Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi, quotes some American research which seems to show that religious people – defined as those who regularly attend a place of worship – are more likely to behave in virtuous ways than non-religious people. What, I wonder, would constitute evidence one way or the other? Some parts of Galen Strawson’s review seem to suggest that religious belief on the part of educated people is in itself evidence of moral deficiency. That looks suspiciously like rigging the scales.

Anthony Buckley
City College Coventry

From The New York Times
The Case for ‘Soft Atheism’
It is possible to reject all religious doctrines as false without dismissing religion itself.
http://nyti.ms/1lFskSK

It’s the 24^th of May  Weekend even though it is only May 18^th.  In Ontario it is the weekend  Cottage Owners of Toronto head North to central Ontario to open up for the summer.  The traffic is awful,  even as  the pickpocket vendors of  Muskoka begin their annual four month fleecing of the gullible, of whom I am one, albeit under protest.   But then again, I come up here all year round, so I usually use this time of year to pick up some winter bargains. Yesterday I had my eye on a 44 inch snow blower  attachment for my  little tractor.  You may be surprised to learn that I love mowing snow, but I really do.  Hidden deep in my soul lies a heavy equipment tractor operator just itching to come out. Alas, I have to confine myself to the ’dinky toy’ variety of machines, not  wanting to ripple the pond by showing up with a good John Deere front end loader.   I did however recently  treat myself to a new  Ford 150 XLT Pickup, ostensible a business vehicle for the Polish “do it all man” who works with us, but, well,  if you believe that, let me sell you a bridge………. The internal contradictions are surely indicative of a severe mental disorder, for one the one hand you have  a pretentious  egg head slowly [because I forget much of what I used to know] meandering his way through the legend that is  Eusebius’ HistoriaEcclesia in Greek, while at the same time bouncing around the back roads of Muskoka in his black pickup with the fancy wheels.   I absolutely love it in this part of Ontario, it is the closet I can come to feeling like I am  home; alas, the lakes are not  the ocean. They really have no moods at all, even though the locals pretend they do.  However the woods are magnificent this time of year. For a few brief weeks they are carpeted with the provincial flower of Ontario, the trillium., ground cover with a lovely white flower.  My  cave here does not face the lake, it faces the woods. Up here the back of the house is the front of the house, the front  always being lake fronting.  Right outside my window, and moving ever so slowly and with that peculiar gate, is a large Tom Turkey.  There seem to be more of them than usual this year, and even  more deer.  But then again that could because the sentimentalists here have spent a fortune on deer food.  Finally, and by the by, if ever you find yourself in this part of the world, consider you have an open invitation to visit our patch and catch a water view of where and how Goldie Kurt live, Lindros, Martin Short, Ted Rogers and a host of other of the notorious.

I have enclosed today’s’ opinionator  from “The Stone” for anyone who is intrigued by Dawkins and the late Chris Hitchens.  For myself I am still momentarily caught up in the first three hundred years CE, or like we used to say AD.  What we have now always wasn’t, and what we thought was there from the beginning was  a later development.  Yes, we could have been more Jewish than we are today, we could have been more gnostic, and yes we could have quite a different understanding of who JC really was.   What some called ‘heresy’ was once  orthodoxy; and most interestingly, some heresy came before orthodoxy.  [cf. Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy]  I have already recommended John Cornwell, “The Dark Box”, and now I recommend another by Bart Ehrman, “How Jesus Became God”, Had enough of me and all of this? Probably yes!

i have a great desire welling up inside me  to go back to Oxford and the UK for a year of research, study and writing. Have I come full circle? Is it folly or fantasy to think I can mutate from hyperactive capitalist to contemplative student?   Am i signaling to myself that it is past time for a fundamental “reset”.?   Who knows?  Let the angst begin again!  Do i not yet know what I want to be and do when I grow up? Seemingly not.   At the very least this admission should give comfort to other restless souls like myself who desire beyond desire, and whose entire life has been an exercise in deconstruction.

The winter of 2013-14 has been never ending and I may indeed be suffering from  affective light disorder; but then again I could just be depressed by having to face my own peculiar crisis of limits.  In the alternative  I may just need a stiff drink or a holiday.. And so  the stomach turns…….. 

The much maligned  “Baltimore Catechism” was the legal Constitution that governed my life from an early age, Its ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts more significant than any civil law or ordinance.  Serious sin after all condemned one to the fires of  hell, and there were lots of serious sins   .around. Hence we went to Confession every week to have our personal account settled;, we pushed in our ledger and out came absolution.  Satan was the ever present snake waiting to deceive and pounce, and God was a combination of  Archivist/Recorder, Magistrate and  Parole Officer.  My faith was elitist and defensive, after all I had the gift, and a lot of others did not.. All of this was wrapped in wonderful and mysterious ceremony and ritual, and one stood in wonder and awe,and celebrated belonging to the one  true faith. What a hoot!

With the arrival of adolescence, the waters became exceptionally troubled.  The 6th and 9th commandments took over, and if every thought, word or deed was sinful, and one was 14 plus, it was impossible to avoid  living in sin and hence condemnation.  In my time [14 to 16] we did not celebrate the awesomeness of human development, we did not embrace psycho sexual maturation and discovery, it was all serious sin. Masturbation was a mortal sin, and one had to go to Confession before  one could receive the Eucharist.

Inevitably this still existing obsession with human sexuality brought other ancillary  issues to the forefront.  At 16 , tired of being so sinful, I opted out and decided I was an atheist.  What would one expect from an intellectually precocious youngster, and how sad it was that he had to keep so much locked up unsaid inside.  I am writing this today  to convey how two different priests handled my struggle.  I said to one I no longer believed in the real presence in the Eucharist and much of the other magic speak I had inherited. plus a lot else.I was not a cannibal i said.  i ranted for a very long time and over several meetings.   The first little fellow, for he was both a little fellow physically and intellectually, was beside himself  that I would dare to blaspheme, and it did not end well. A fundamental break occurred.  Six months later and in another place, I ranted again in front of  Fred Lynch, S.J.. He laughed at and with me, told me it was ok to be an atheist, and then took me on a journey over a year and a half that brought me in the end   to a more mature faith.    He made me read the writings of some declared atheists and agnostics, and he opened my mind and heart to a God who was not Archivist, Magistrate or Parole Officer.  He talked to me about sacramental  sybolism and he made me read Edith Hamilton on mythology.  More significantly he introduced me to one Teilhard De Chardin and to Joseph Campbell.

One day before heading off to University I told him I did not think I was an atheist any longer, and we laughed.   Keep seeking he said, keep searching.  Four years later I entered the  Jesuit novitiate.

March 2014 is almost a century distant from August 1914, but one reorganizes some of  the same forces at play in the Crimea as  the Ukraine devolves, as one saw in August 1914. Admittedly, the world is totally different now, but it is also too much the same.  Pray God deliver us from a further decent into insanity.

I note with interest that I wrote ‘pray God’.  Bill Maher would have none of that, and one can already hear his stomach churning. But I do not step back. Scientific and atheistic materialism has its own history, and religion does not have a corner on human abuse and dysfunction.   Ok, so  who then is this God to whom I refer, and how does one recognize her.  I know with certainty that she has little interest in  who loves whom and how, in women priests and bishops, and I reject that she thinks we are inherently evil or care a lot about corporate structures.   When one meets her she might tell us  we were not grateful enough, we did not love enough, and we did not look after each other sufficiently, or feel  sufficiently responsible for our brother and sister human beings with less, but I doubt  she will want to talk about contraception, abortion,the doings at the Vatican Bank, whether Anglican should have woman bishops,  or whether Islam has more truth than Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism, or that Taoism or Sikhism is the more superior way. Hers is not a world of exclusion, buy of inclusion. . I admire those who tell me they live in the  continual presence of God, but I am not one of them.  I  believe in the personal spiritual realm and in a personal God, but I notice God’s movements  most often when I look back. Some of you might  argue therefore  that God is a construct I impose on my  reality, a fundamental heuristic, and I suppose you may be  somewhat correct.  Alas, it is a construct that gives meaning to all that I am and do.  I encounter God through prayer, but my prayer is  almost entirely a process of noticing and recognizing God in a thousand different ways every day, and most always after the fact.  I open myself to the presence of the wholly and transcendent other, but then recognize quiet movements in the mundane of everyday.  I crave some sort of community, but I am not an enthusiast, or a groupie, and am therefore left to catch only fleeting glimpses of the community I seek. Neither am I afraid to feel guilty about what I did or did not do, but guilt does not predominate it only instructs.It comes form my prayer and directs improvement.

You are not likely to find me raising my arms in ecstatic praise in any  Church, or prostrating myself in the direction of Mecca, or bobbing in prayer at the Wall; but you might find me contemplating the thoughts of Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, and yes even reading Rick Warren`s The Purpose Driven Life, all because I am driven to a endless search for the divine other.  What you might discover if you wait long enough and have patience is a restless soul who believes in the Ignatian Examine, a consciousness examination undertaken daily when one takes a moment to review and recognize how God passed quietly by.

With Bonhoeffer: “who am I, who men say I am, or who I know myself to be,” and does it really matter anyway?  I know I am moving beyond my origins, my education, my business successes and failures, my interpersonal delights and disasters, my public personae, my varied obsessions, and to a time when meta-realities and relationships  dominate.  My two families, Biological and Jesuit, and my personal friendships grow ever more significant.  I still love the great game that is business,and I have no intention of hanging up my skates, but I now see the game as just another pseudo athletic endeavor, and I have always been athletic in aspiration. Neither am I beyond my desire to acquire and transform another business. I am now just very grateful to be who I am and where I am.   I love post secondary education, and I am privileged to be allowed to play a small role at my beloved University of Toronto, and that has become increasingly more important as I contemplate four years hence and the  seventh inning stretch.  

Some of my friends are already well ensconced in retirement, and for some I can no longer even remember what they did. They have redefined themselves totally, and there  is a lesson there for those of us who have not.  But then, I have no desire not to do what i love doing, and it would be dishonest of me to suggest I am envious of those who have so redefined themselves It is simply not so!  I am just become more comfortably and peacefully driven and obsessed.

I have also become more aware of genetic inheritance. My oldest son, the aspiring screenwriter in LA, will receive a MBA at Christmas, a concession to his father who has forever preached the practical. He now tells me that while he will always be a writer, he intends  to attend  Law School in the Fall.  I want to say, about time, but then I recall my own many and varied career paths, and remember that I was older than him when I began Law School.  I see that genetic inheritance  even more in my second son, and I am grown so grateful to have these two men in my life. I walk my treadmill for sixty minutes every day because I really want to be around to be with them. We are never grateful enough, but I am so so grateful.

So perhaps I will not take that seventh inning stretch.  It seems  unnecessary. I just want to keep playing.