The God Question, Part 2

After twenty-five years as a true believer in God and the Bible, agnosticism began to creep into my life. It didn’t happen in a mad rush or because of some calamitous event in my personal life. Agnosticism reared its confusing head because religion is a strange mixture of blind faith and cultural theocracies. Cracks began to appear in my armor as I pondered the probabilities of anything (heaven or hell) lasting forever and the multitude of unanswered Biblical questions that began to eat at me when I looked at them in basic terms of black and white.

“and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”

Truth be told, the words eternal and forever really started to freak me out. I had absolutely no concept of the terms and their relationship to time. I wasn’t going to live forever. My house was not going to stand forever. The earth was not going to last eternally. I loved to play with my kids and cuddle with my wife, but I wouldn’t want to do it forever. Of course, the alternative, post-life promise of an eternity in Dante’s Inferno- was even more disturbing. Instead of worrying about going to heaven or hell, I found myself worrying about going to either place, forever.

Another problem with my perception of God that nagged at me for years was the patriarchal designs of religion, especially in my professed faith of Catholicism. Like bread and water, men and women had to exist as biological equals for humankind to flourish. Put into a historical context, ancient societies were predominantly patriarchal, hence if God’s existence was fictional, one would expect a religious epiphany or hysteria to be witnessed and scribed in primarily masculine terms. One of the main reasons for my skepticism in Catholicism was the fact that this branch of Christianity had a gruesome history of not only marginalizing women, but burning them at the stakes as heretics.

It was also during this time of incertitude that I became more aware of what the people around me were saying about God. Now that I had tuned out the clergy, I found myself having revealing conversations with friends and neighbors about their religious beliefs. What I discovered was that if I asked twenty people about their concept of Christianity, no two answers were ever completely alike (even between spouses). The only spiritual theme I heard on a consistent basis was the term: “God has a plan for all of us.” This really bothered me because these true believers suggested that human beings were nothing more than pawns on an earth-sized version of the Game of Life. What was the purpose of existence without free will? Why bother to live, love and laugh if a great puppet master was out there pulling our strings?

Johnny didn’t die in the car accident because God had planned the where and why of his death from the moment of conception. Johnny died in the car accident because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was nothing more than nonsensical, bad luck. To believe otherwise was pure and unadulterated simplicity, a mythical dogma fobbed about our theocracy because people were afraid of the truth. Afraid perhaps that we were all alone- and that God didn't really exist...

The God Question, Part One

Plucked from my mother’s womb, I was thrust into a world of religious ceremony and true belief. From an early age, I witnessed the solemnity of Sunday services, rosary beads on bedroom dressers, and wooden crosses on barren walls. I believed in God because the Bible said he had created the heavens and the earth. I believed in God because my parents told me he was watching down on me from the heavens. I believed in God because I didn’t want to get a movie-of-the week disease and die at the age of seven. I believed in God’s higher power because men who stood behind wooden pulpits told me in stern voices that indifference would be followed by an eternity in a fiery hell.

My God lived in the fluffy cumulus clouds that filled the atmosphere on humid July days. My God had a Disneyland in the sky for deceased children and a floating park filled with flowers and hungry ducks for the elderly. My God had the resonant voice of James Earl Jones and the handsome, bearded face of Charlton Heston. My God hated the Viet Cong because they were blood-thirsty Communists and loved America because it was a Christian democracy. My God cured me when I was sick and made me suffer when I misbehaved. My God granted me small miracles from time to time (like not letting my parents divorce when I was eleven) and punished me with sleepless nights of remorseful fear for the salvation of my mortal soul.

When I entered my teens, my belief in God forced me to lie about who I was and what was ruminating in my adolescent mind. This was the Catholic phase of my life and I believed that priests were walking, talking, human versions of the Holy Creator. My limited understanding of the Bible led me to believe that nearly everything short of breathing and prayer was a sin. God had more rules and bylaws than the Boy Scouts and the United States Senate, combined. Sitting in the darkened confessional box, palms sweating, as I tried so very hard to remember the exact script, I felt lost because I just couldn’t bring myself to tell the priest all of my true sins. Instead of feeling relieved after reciting my contrition, my young mind was often filled with agony over the eternal ramifications of not being honest with God’s chosen proxy.

After high school and into my college years, organized religion and God ceased to be a reflective part of my every day life. I stopped going to church, primarily because I realized that I had quit listening to the priests and ministers years ago, and also because my Sundays had devolved into a day for sleeping in, watching football, and thinking about how much I hated Mondays. But despite my slippery decline from daily devotions and sometime’s worship, I had still not shaken my fear of eternal damnation. It was too hard, too ingrained in my DNA. I had been packaged out of the womb as a God-loving, jaundiced newborn, because this was America. Believing in God was like taking your medicine. You either faithfully took the pill three times a day or your body withered and died. Because of my indoctrination, I still prayed every night without fail, rationalizing that a quick rendition of Our Father and the 23rd Psalm would somehow save me when and if I reached the pearly gates of heaven.

God was out there, wasn’t he?

Thoughts on the Inauguration

A supporter waves as US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle walk along Pennsylvania Ave during a parade following Obama's inauguration as the 44th US president in Washington, DC. With tears and cheers and hope for a better future, more than two million people filled the streets of Washington in a joyous celebration of the inauguration(AFP/Robyn Beck)

Wow! What an incredible day for America. The first racially inclusive presidential inauguration in history was a grand sight to behold. President Barack Obama delivered a stellar address to the crowds gathered on the mall and promised that he would make us proud to be Americans again. The guy just exudes coolness and competency. After eight years of George Bush, it was refreshing to see that we finally have a leader with the intelligence, communication skills and human decency, to get the country back on track.

On NPR, several African-Americans were interviewed who had made long journeys to experience first-hand the joy of this homogeneous occasion. Traveling by car, bus or plane, these individuals, many of them elderly men and women who had experienced the hardships and horrors of segregation and the civil rights movement, treated this event as if it were almost biblical in nature. It was extraordinary to hear the enthusiasm and hope in their weathered voices as they were witnessing this glorious event, something most of them never expected to see in their lifetimes.

With the ascendance of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land, we stopped being a melting pot, and on one cold January day in 2009, became a brilliant rainbow of colors that include all the many tones of flesh that walk this nation. With much gratitude- here’s to you, Mr. President.

Don't Wish Your Life Away

Seven years ago, I used to work with an older woman named Penny, who was our office coordinator at the manufactured housing community where I still hang my sales shingle to this day. She was quiet and somewhat reserved. We worked together for almost two years and maintained a friendly, but somewhat aloof relationship. She reminded me of a librarian or a school teacher, someone who gave their all at work, but kept their personal life very close to their vest (or blouse).

Often, in the course of our polite conversations at midweek, I would tell her in a fit of excitement that I was tired of work, and couldn’t wait for the weekend or some other event in the not-so-distant future. Leaning in closely, as if we were dining in a noisy restaurant and not sitting in an empty office, a solemn look would overcome her bespectacled face. In a soft, measured voice, she would smile back at me and say the same thing every time.

“Don’t wish your life away.”

This went on for almost two years. At first I thought her admonishments were just a silly way of reminding me of our differences in age, but as our days passed and the seasons came and went, I began to realize that she was right. Penny was telling me a simple truth. I needed to appreciate the preciousness of time and how very quickly we grow old and die. Life is not an infinite journey. My children were growing up right before my eyes and changing every single day. The bitter truth was that everything and everyone that I loved- could be gone tomorrow.

The simplicity and wisdom of Penny’s words have reverberated in my mind nearly every single day since she left the company. The times of our lives are not the holidays, weddings or vacations that fill our scrapbooks and photo albums, it is in the here and now. If we all had a fast-forward button and could zoom past the doldrums of work and the boredom of living, what would we have left? Bits and pieces of laughter, love, and good times… a sixty-second commercial.

Wisdom can be gleaned from anyone at anytime, and thanks to Penny, I’ve stopped wishing my life away.

Sleepers

We are few in numbers, but if you pay close attention the next time you’re at the local strip mall or driving through a busy industrial park in the middle of the day, you might notice one of us. At first glance, our cars or trucks appear empty, but if you come close enough, you might see the top of a balding head or the silhouette of an open mouth and tilted nose.

We are sleepers. We are the people who don’t get enough nocturnal rest during the work week, and thus must revive our brains every day with a quick nap in a local parking lot. I know this because I’ve been one of them for the last nine years. Being a sleeper is tricky business. You don’t want anyone in your office to know what you do every day at lunch time. It would be extremely uncomfortable if your co-workers knew that you crashed and burned five days a week.

I have a rotation of three parking lots that I use, all within five minutes of my office. There is nothing scientific about choosing locations. First, you look for privacy, because the worst thing for a sleeper is to be awakened every five minutes by someone slamming their car door or pushing a squeaky shopping cart past your resting place. Second, you look for shade. Even with your air conditioning on full blast in the dog days of summer, it’s almost impossible to get a fitful forty-five minute nap with the sun beating down on your head and face. The final key is safety. It’s very hard to enjoy your nap if you have a nagging suspicion that you’re going to be carjacked, or about to have the Son of Sam put a 44-caliber slug in your head.

My favorite place to snooze is in the parking lot of a local shopping plaza. Because of the slumping economy and high rent, the plaza is three-quarters empty and the parking lot offers the perfect opportunity to catch a quick nap without distractions. After I’ve pulled into the preferred spot, my routine for my daily siesta includes determining if the sun is going to be a factor, quickly scanning the area for any annoying distractions (construction equipment, teenagers with skateboards, lawn mowing crews, just to name a few) and most importantly, putting my car's gearshift in park.

When I first started my journey of lunchtime snoozing, I was amazed to notice that there were other people parking in the fringe-areas of the asphalt lots. Initially, I thought the handful of people that were edging in on my turf were just making a cell phone call or eating their lunch, but after time, I realized that I was wrong.

They were sleepers, too.

At first this freaked me out just a tad bit (almost as if I thought I had become a unique, single subspecies of the human race), but over time I came to accept these tired people as my compatriots. I had no clue who these people were, what they did for a living, or why they didn’t get enough sleep every night to get through their day without a nap. But they seemed like normal people, and most importantly, they never parked closer then two spaces from my car.

After several months we even began to acknowledge one another with a slight wave of the hand or a quick smile. My most consistent companion was a balding gentleman in his mid-fifties who drove an enormous Dodge pickup truck. Another regular that I saw on a weekly basis was a forty-something guy who always wore sun glasses (even on cloudy, stormy days). My partners in slumber were joined on occasion by several other men over the years, however, they tended to show up infrequently, and we regulars looked upon them with suspicion because of their lack of consistency.

It wasn’t until early 2005 that we had a female member join our little group. She just started showing up one day in February (I remember the month because we were forced to park in a smaller area because their was so much damn snow piled up in the lot). She was a pretty brunette, maybe in her early thirties, and she drove a blue Camry. For the first couple of months she was aloof, parking in an adjacent lot that used to be home to an ice cream shop, but after she got used to seeing us several times a week, she eventually took the plunge and joined us in our parking lot neverland.

With the slumping economy shuttering almost every factory in the area that makes anything, we are back to just me and the balding pick-up driver. Mr. Sunglasses stopped napping in the lot last spring and I haven’t seen Miss Camry since September. I assume that they got laid off, or even better, hit the lottery jackpot and are snoozing on some sandy beach in a tropical paradise. As for me, I’m still napping three days a week in the parking lot, my heater turned on high, my mind briefly shutting down and recharging before heading back to the grind of trying to make a living…

The Death Penalty and Mental Illness

Once again the dismal state of Texas has proven why it should still be a part of Mexico, or even better, Saudi Arabia- where you can be executed for renouncing Islam (apostasy). Since 1976, Texas has executed 423 people, despite the fact that the death penalty discriminates against people of color, the poor, and the mentally ill. If the people of Texas could read, analyze data, and had any morals whatsoever, they would understand that every legitimate, academic study has proven that state-sanctioned killing does not reduce the homicide rate.

Now, the morally-challenged Texans are anxiously awaiting the opportunity to execute another mentally ill prisoner, Andre Thomas. In 2004, Mr. Thomas was found competent to stand trial by a Texas court for the heinous murders of his estranged wife, young son and her 13-month-old daughter. Mr. Thomas had a history of mental problems prior to his arrest for the murders, and as if to prove his point, pulled his own eyeball out of the socket and ate it before going to trial. If that’s not a sign of serious mental problems, then my name is Elvis, and I’d like to invite you down to the jungle room tonight to play Pong.

Apparently, Mr. Thomas’s predilection for eating himself was not enough to save him from an indeterminate stay on death row, and on December 9th, 2008, he ripped his other eyeball out the socket and ate it, too. This bizarre, erratic behavior, has still not convinced the Texas appeal courts that Mr. Thomas is insane. If the Texas courts had any common sense or human decency, this man would spend the rest of his life in a mental institution.

Wake up, Texas! It’s time for you to join the rest of the civilized world and abolish the death penalty, or at the very least stop executing the mentally ill who cannot comprehend their actions.

http://www.ncadp.org/

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/state/

History Repeats Itself

How can it be that a scant two years ago the economy was rolling along at a fair pace, and has now collapsed into a morass that economists have to go back to the early eighties to find corresponding numbers of unemployment and financial instability? Forget the high gas prices and the mind-boggling trade treaties that have shipped half of our manufacturing sector overseas. Plain and simple, it was the explosion of the housing bubble, spectacularly flaming down at our feet like the Hindenburg in 1937. Unlike the static spark that might have brought down the behemoth zeppelin, we have a more obvious culprit to our man-made disaster- the greedy, corrupt, mortgage industry.

Thanks in large part to deregulation, a cause championed by the conservative establishment (because it makes them rich), the mortgage industry has been allowed to run amok. This industry has become so greedy and shortsighted in the last decade that we could fill several foreclosed subdivisions with these shysters, and still have need to build more. Net income running a little flat for stockholders? Just come up with a new mortgage ‘product’ that’s adjustable, requires no income verification, and… greatly inflates the value of Joe Schmo’s eighty year-old tin shack.

The horrific irony of our predicament is that just a few years ago the manufactured housing industry was destroyed by the same nefarious game plan. Dozens of mortgage lenders did the exact same thing, and lent money on homes to people they knew would never be able to repay their loans. The result, is a once-thriving industry that provided hard-working Americans with affordable housing, has been driven to its collective knees. Finding a mortgage lender these days for a manufactured home is harder than finding a liberal Democrat in Utah.

Say what you want about the consumer’s culpability in buying in to the American Dream, but these predatory lenders knew that these loans were going to go belly-up. They cared only about one thing, profits, and they wanted their gold and silver right now.

Above the Falls

Side by side, we walk together
in the early morning mist.
He has outgrown my hand,
striding evenly and clear-eyed
up the twisting mountain path.

Beneath his ball cap, red hair,
wild from a short night’s rest,
springs vine-like over ears burned
red by the Tennessee sun.

We walk in humbled silence,
upward past sweet birch and
mimosa, patiently awaiting
that first delicious cascade
of fleeing water.

One last bend along a narrow,
entombed artery, and we stand
on the rocky crown, softly embracing

the cavernous mosaic

of heaven and earth.

Breathing in the fragrance of rushing
water that dies proudly on the rocks
below, he reaches for me, smiling broadly
in the fingers of sunlight
that dance at our feet.

The Best and Worst of 2008

The Best

1. Barack Obama is elected President of the United States.

The first African-American ascends to the highest office in the land, and it only took 219 years! Racism still permeates many layers of our society, but lets hope that Obama’s election sends the ultra conservatives, white supremacy groups, and the morons who fly Confederate flags, to a big comfy igloo at the North Pole. You want everything white? The Arctic has ten gazillion little fluffy white particles that will make you go blind faster than pointing a telescope directly on the sun.

2. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann & Rachel Maddow take on Faux News.

After years of Fox creating “news” and spinning all things to the right, MSNBC finally got their act together and put together a great line-up to battle the least honorable news network of all time. Helped greatly by the universal interest in the competitive Democratic primaries, MSNBC gave independents and liberals an entertaining summer and fall, bashing Bush, McCain/Palin, and the “Worst Persons in the World,” Bill O’Reilly and Rupert Murdoch.

3. Americans finally came to their senses & declared that Bush sucks.

It only took eight years and string of failures that made Neville Chaimberlin look like Nostradamus, but Americans finally woke up and said "Honey, George Bush is the dumbest asshole on the entire planet!" It's to bad the voting public didn't have enough common sense eight years ago to send this yahoo packing back home to Daddy 41 and the brush piles of Crawford, Tx.

4. Watching Tina Fey impersonate Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live.

Thanks to the never-ending election cycle, SNL reconnected with its audience again, in large part because of the brilliance of Tina Fey and the incredible ineptitude of Sara Palin. Fey’s hilarious quip “I can see Russia from my house!” will stay with me until the day I die.

5. Fewer of those stupid Homeland Security “Threat” warnings.

Color-coded, so President Bush could understand that red is “bad” and green is "good," Americans didn’t have to listen so often to Michael Chertoff’s made-up litany of possible terrorist threats. In years past, every time a Muslim cleric in New York City had a bowel movement, the NSA, CIA, and FBI, would run up and down the streets crying “Code Red…Code Red!”

The Worst

1. The collapse of the American economy.

While George Bush slept and Dick Cheney plotted his course for world domination, the economy stumbled, sputtered, and then dropped dead. The house of cards collapsed in large part because of deregulation (which is what happens when lobbyists in Washington write our laws), and while Wall Street cheated working class Americans out of their investments and pension funds, the Bush administration was busy building up the military industrial complex and torturing taxi drivers at Guantanamo Bay.

2. The 2008 Beijing Olympics.

China pollutes the earth at an astronomical pace. China doesn’t allow freedom of speech or any form of dissent. China supplies the capitalist societies from the west with sweatshop labor. China props up the government of Sudan, which commits genocide in Darfur. China occupies Tibet, a sovereign nation founded in the seventh century, B.C., and holds the nation hostage.

China is awarded the honor of hosting the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

3. The return of the pirates.

In a perfect example of why countries need functioning governments, Somalia reintroduced the world to pirates in speedboats and motorized skiffs. Wielding rocket-propelled grenades and small arms, these enterprising crooks have commandeered everything from oil tankers to private yachts, turning the Gulf of Aden into a bad “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.

4. George Bush, Robert Mugabe, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-il.

Bush- The worst President in the history of the United States, and one of the dumbest creatures to ever walk upright. Mugabe- The president/dictator of Zimbabwe. A man who has destroyed nearly everything in this beautiful country in southern Africa. Putin- A man who makes Leonid Brezhnev look like a hippy. Jong-il - Funky, chunky, bug-like dictator, who never grew up and hopes Santa will put a nuclear warhead in his stocking next Christmas.

5. The Middle East.

Will the eternal conflict in the Middle East ever cease, or at least take a little thousand year hiatus? If Jesus was still hanging out in the hills of Palestine and Israel, he would have to wear a flak-jacket and live in a concrete bunker just to hang out with the Disciples.

What a crappy year for mankind. 2009 had better be an improvement or we are all going to be living in caves or the decaying bowels of the world's mega-cities. Happy New Year!