And Some Designs Are More Intelligent Than Others

I seem to be thinking about religion a lot lately and I know I write about it a lot, especially in the sense of I don't believe it, any of it but I do know that a lot of really fine people do, like Jimmy Carter or the lady who works in the post office here who is Jehovah's Witness. The Witnesses do not believe in celebrating Easter or Christmas but Miss M. will call you on Christmas Eve if a package has come in that she knows you've been hoping would arrive before Christmas because she's just sweet that way.

She came to my house once with two beautiful grandchildren to witness, and because she's Miss M. and so sweet and I know her, I couldn't blow her off the way I usually do these people but I said, "You know, M., I've got my own very strong feelings about religion and spirituality and maybe you should spend time with someone else who might be more open to your message," and she said, "Oh Mary. I love that about you. That you're so honest."

And you know what? I think she meant that. I don't think she was being snarky or sarcastic or anything but truthful and I love her too. I know her heart and it is good.

She doesn't need me to bless it.

And that's what I wonder about- why do we need religion?

This brings up Anne Lamott, an author I really do love. Not her fiction so much, but her essays. I just finished reading her book entitled Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith and I loved it, even though she's sort of eat up with the Jesus thing. She truly admits that her faith in Jesus is so simple that the five and six-year olds she teaches in Sunday School get everything she believes about Jesus. The first thing I read by her was her book Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year which was so honest and so heartbreakingly true for anyone who's ever had a child that I just fell in love with her. She's a recovering alcoholic who admits to every sort of bad behavior and bad thoughts and bad everything but who is constantly trying to do better with the help of god and the person she occasionally calls "Uncle Jesus" which sort of cracks me up and sort of makes me want to hurl something at her.

But how can I hate anyone who writes things like, "I am the piece of shit the world revolves around" or who admits to having had abortions and who believes passionately that every woman has the right to choose and who not only believes in euthanasia but who actually helped a dying friend choose the time and manner of his own death? And then wrote about it?

I mean really.

This is not the sort of Jesus Freak I've known and if she believes that Jesus is helping her (and she does!) every step of the way, who am I to try and pull that rug out from beneath her?

Not my job.

But it reminds me of a group I used to go to of sexual abuse survivors and so many of the women gave god the glory for their ability to heal and go on with their lives, making sure that the chain of abuse had been broken in their families and I always wanted to shout at them, "Give yourself the credit! You're the one who did it! You're the one doing it! Not god. And by the way, where was god when you were a little child being abused?"

But again, I never did.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I wish with all my heart I had some sort of belief for when times get hard. I worry too much and I get anxious and I have problems and so do people I love. I wish I had a faith, not in what Anne Lamott calls God's Magic Wand (which she doesn't think he has) but in the sort of rightness of it all that she does believe in. That every bump in the road, every mistake we make, every wrong turn we take, every grief and hardship and sorrow will somehow lead us to a place of light if we just let go and trust in god.

As I've said before, I honestly think there's a gene that determines faith, whether in god, country, or even a team. And I don't have it.

What I do have is a belief that really, we all should try and help each other out as much as possible. That we should try and do the right thing because, well, I have no idea why. Probably because evolution has made me that way. Just as it has probably made it so that many people do have the gene to band together for many reasons because many are more powerful than an individual and all sorts of things can be accomplished if a lot of people come together for one purpose, whether it's to grow food or hunt or defend a territory or a gene pool.

That's what makes sense to me.

And to those people, like Anne Lamott, who protest that they alone without the grace of Jesus or Mohammad or Yahweh or whatever god it is they believe in, could never, ever have found the strength to pull themselves up and out of hate or addiction or affliction or whatever, I say, How do you know? How do you know it hasn't been you and your very own personal grace and strength and light all along? Because the fact of the matter is, no matter who you believe is running the show, you're the one up there saying the lines, you're the one up there doing the work. Not god. Not Jesus. You. You're the one who is acting in grace, making the choice to love and forgive and be strong. You.

Why is it so hard to take the credit for all the good you do when it's so easy to take the blame for all the bad?

I don't know. I have no answers and I'm not trying to be sarcastic or witty or a smart ass today. I'm being honestly bewildered.

I think I can be as amazed at the glories around me as any person of any faith and I don't need to praise a god to be so. On the other hand, I don't have to come up with excuses for that same god when things aren't so glorious, which is some small comfort, I guess.
I don't have to go to the Bible and pick out the parts I think are good and dismiss the parts I don't. I don't have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what god or Jesus REALLY meant when they said or did such-and-such.

And now I think I will go partake of the glory of the blackberries. And I will wonder why there are thorns and then I'll remember it's the way the plant has evolved to protect it from being picked by animals like me when birds, who are not bothered by the thorns, will spread its seeds so much farther and more efficiently.

Or at least that's my theory.

And I think it's as good as any and if you believe that god made those thorns on blackberries for us to prove our worthiness to eat them or something in that vein, well, that's not going to detract at all from the pleasure I get in eating the ones I've picked, all the while cursing the thorns but respecting the plant and the process of evolution, meanwhile slapping mosquitoes which, I have to say, are proof enough in my book that there is no such thing as intelligent design, but which are tasty indeed to the birds.