Friday, May 25, 2012

God Is Not Great

Sometimes I rest my brain, sometimes I exercise it.
Just finished a fluff novel, something I picked up for a buck in the Hannaford bin. There is good fiction, lousy fiction and fiction that is just barely readable. The book I just finished was in the third category.
It was a good story but not exceptionally well written. I can't even tell you the title. But my brain needed rest so I cruised through it.
Today I started reading God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens.
BOOM. Pushups.
An intellectual approach to proving how harmful religion has been to mankind and how disingenuous it all is.
Exceptionally tasty.
I felt my brain responding to his arguments and information hungrily like, yeah, I need to know this. I need assistance in my intellectual quest.
I tend towards not believing in God because there is too much cruelty in the world. Hitchins made the observation that if Jesus could cure a random blind man he came across in the road, why not eliminate all blindness? Which is in line with my eternal why do children get cancer question.
But I am 58. Death sits on my shoulder. When you have made it this far in life you are walking through a fatal illness minefield. Yeah you can die at 10, or 38 or 47, you can die anytime, but when you hit the fifties, catastrophic bombs are exploding all around you.
You are demographically doomed to worry about cancerheartattackstrokediabetes and 310 other diseases.
So I don't want to dismiss The Big Guy out of hand. I haven't done what I want to with this life. I want to believe I'll get another chance, or that through some bizarre clerical error I could wind up watching The PATS win another Super Bowl with Jesus and a bag of chips.
But intellectually I reject this notion. I am uncomfortable with it. It seems too bizarre to believe. The Jesus part, not The PATS.
Consider my strange dilemma. Yesterday I started digging into the Sermon on the Mount. Today I started reading God Is Not Great.
It would be an interesting study to plow through both simultaneously. I don't promise this because as Lewis Black has diagnosed, I have ADD.
Besides my brain would probably explode.
But the good thing is that my brain is getting a workout. This is the kind of book you read slowly. I am a fast reader but I slow things down when the material is this meaty. Understand as much as I can and allow the rest to seep into my pores for later evaluation.
That's it for today. No time.
You'll be hearing more from me.

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