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The Good and the True and the Beautiful

I know what religion was for me as a child.  It meant that we put on clean clothes and went to Sunday School in the morning--and quite probably to adult services later in the day--to a white wooden church with a wood stove.  It was a ragged experience. 

 Sometimes, early on, mostly in the summer, we met at another wooden church by an old cemetery.  Once a year, plus funerals.  There was a summer picnic.  Grandpa Jacobson boiled the coffee in a five-gallon can over a fire.  There was, always, a walk through the cemetery, to learn again where our relatives were buried. 

 "Church" was a know-nothing recitation of Bible stories.  It was miracles.  It was walking on water, feeding 5,000 people on a few fish, turning water into wine at Cana, and learning that drinking wine was sinful.  It was rising from the dead.  

 It was a kind of madness.  It was like trying to think 2,000 years ago.  

 I know what religion was for me in a church college.  It was getting New Testament Greek just right so that we could understand the secrets of life in the subjunctive.  It was learning how bright biologists skirted around evolution and went to required daily chapel to hear the College President or Chaplain describe how Jacob wrestled with God at the river Jabbok all night.  It was not dancing.  

 It was learning how to live in two different worldviews at the same time; one populated with angels and gods and demons, and the other with incomprehensible time and relativity.  

 In Berkeley, California, at the top of Marin Avenue, in grand old homes of a Protestant clergyman and a Catholic publisher, I learned how people much smarter and I held those two worlds together:  the Biblical worldview on one hand, and their graduate education on the other.  They never blinked.  Instead, they drew amazing diagnostic diagrams, or found inscrutable connections between the Exodus experience and psychology:  something.  They reviewed western European history with a monastic cadence.  

 Today, that looks like a kinder, more innocent world.  Today, religion is war and pressure cooker bombs.  Today it is a purer, harder, unyielding madness.  It isn't rising from death from natural causes.  It is killing the sons-of-bitches!  It is having the absolute truth.  It is dying and going to heaven at puberty together with sixty-nine other virgins as a prize for a suicidal psychopath, or almost worse, to sing "How Great Thou Art" in an angelic choir for a former TV evangelist.  It is being assigned a room in the heavenly mansion of your former parish priest.  

 It is no longer a struggle between Biblical and scientific worldviews.  Religion, today, is a demand for an ancient worldview.  It is know-nothing science.  It is believing that politicians should drive a Lexus and think like Moses or St. Paul or Muhammed.  It is believing that the universe is six or nine thousand years old, and that the Pope talks to God.  It is sexist, and racist, and demands that we affirm ignorance.  

 If you believe that there is someone, somewhere--perhaps up there, or out there, in there, or over there, someone who has the absolute truth--and if you believe that if you fold your hands just right, or hold your tongue just right, or read the right old book, that you can know the absolute truth, too, then you surely can understand why people whom you think are mad can make pressure cooker bombs in Boston:  they think they know the absolute truth, too. 

 There is great kindness,
and there is great savagery, too.
There is incomprehensible wealth,
and even more hunger and misery.
There were old saints, 
and there are innocent children.  

 The same religion--whatever the name of that religion--that told you that dancing was a sin, or that the earth is almost as old as a redwood tree, isn't going to have good advice about marriage or global climate change.  A religion that rewards suicide bombers with a stable of fifteen-year-old virgins isn't going to provide good family or sex counseling.

 If the world is going to end soon, why make long-range plans for anything?

Most of the people in those little white churches wanted me and my friends to become good people.  For that, they are to be thanked.  I wish they had taught me how to dance, or how lovely is math or physics.  I would have become a much better person.  They were not so concerned that I learn to use my head, that as Lincoln said, because as our case is new, that we must learn to think anew, and act anew.  

 It would be easier today, to give all those people in those little white churches the thanks they deserve, if they had not themselves learned to deny what it true in order to accomplish it.  That would have been beautiful!  

 The good, and the true, and the beautiful:  they belong together. 

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